The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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  1. Looking for Palladin
    A semicoherent, overacted mélange of travelogue, farce and suds.
  2. Skin
    Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.
  3. This Is It
    The on-screen results are weird and watchable, by turns frustrating and entertaining, and predictably a little morbid.
  4. Antichrist
    The scandal of Antichrist is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.
  5. Amelia
    Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.
  6. Astro Boy
    And so he zips and zags, keeping aloft in a movie that can’t always do the same.
  7. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    This movie incites curiosity tinged with confusion and irritation. It bristles with interesting ideas — about friendship and freakishness, honesty and anger — and intriguing characters, all of which may blossom in later episodes.
  8. Saw VI
    Warm feelings are inspired by the reappearance of old friends, even those who had their faces ripped off or their intestines ejected several films ago.
  9. (Untitled)
    If “(Untitled)” shrewdly hedges its bets about the value of it all, it is ultimately on the side of experimental music and art and their champions, no matter how eccentric. For that alone this brave little movie deserves an audience.
  10. Motherhood
    Has shockingly little to say.
  11. Ong Bak 2
    It’s really all about the fighting, carried out in a variety of Asian styles, including one Mr. Jaa invented for the film. Aficionados may find this thrilling. The rest of us will sink lower in our seats.
  12. The Wedding Song
    A seductively fluid and tactile drama from the writer and director Karin Albou, explores love and identity through the prism of the female body and the rights of its owner.
  13. Bam gua nat
    Korean director Hong Sang-soo unleashes yet another emotionally stunted antihero in Night and Day, a rambling study of male arrested development.
  14. Eulogy for a Vampire
    Someone really needs to take away Patrick McGuinn’s camera equipment. A few years ago he made a spectacularly bad gay-sex movie called “Sun Kissed,” and now he has made another, Eulogy for a Vampire.
  15. Killing Kasztner
    The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.
  16. Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!
    Generally absorbing if sometimes fog-inducing.
  17. Where the Wild Things Are
    With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.
  18. Law Abiding Citizen
    Wears its preposterousness with a certain pride. It’s about the cat-and-mouse game between two very smart guys, and it’s perfectly happy to be as dumb as it wants.
  19. New York, I Love You
    The pieces of New York, I Love You make up a parallel city that no one would want to live in, much less visit.
  20. Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
    Takes a pragmatic, health-based approach, buttressed by frightening statistics about cancer rates among children, that’s a refreshing change from the moral and high-cultural preening that sometimes enter this debate in America.
  21. The Stepfather
    A clumsy remake of the 1987 cult thriller.
  22. The Little Traitor
    A muddled morality tale more interested in coming of age than getting of wisdom.
  23. The Maid
    It takes Mr. Silva a while to finish his story, but the ending of The Maid is so intelligently handled and so generously and honestly conceived, it proves well worth the wait.
  24. Adela
    A gem of contemporary neo-realism, the movie offers a ground-level view of a poor but vital community where many residents survive by scavenging bits of recyclable steel and plastic.
  25. An Education
    If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.
  26. The Damned United
    The rare sports movie that deals with -- indeed positively relishes -- humiliation and disappointment.
  27. Couples Retreat
    An R-rated version of this mess would be only more gratingly dishonest as it tried to hide its weak sentimentality behind a fig leaf of vulgarity.
  28. Bronson
    Bronson invites you to admire its protagonist as a pure, muscular embodiment of anarchy. And perhaps you will, but you may also be glad that he’s still behind bars.
  29. Good Hair
    Spirited, probing and frequently hilarious, it coasts on the fearless charm of its front man and the eye-opening candor of its interviewees, most of them women.
  30. Trucker
    Trucker sometimes feels like a performance in search of a movie.
  31. Visual Acoustics
    It’s about lovely photographs of graceful buildings and those who can afford the real estate. But it does pay proper respect to a deserving artist.
  32. Eating Out: All You Can Eat
    The sex (of which there isn’t much) isn’t sexy, and the humor isn’t funny.
  33. Adventures of Power
    Sprinkled with moderately amusing comic moments, but basically your enjoyment of this film will be proportional to your tolerance for the one-joke phenomenon of air drumming.
  34. Peter and Vandy
    More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.
  35. The Heretics
    Gives a joyful sense of what it was like to be a feminist in the 1970s, a time when “everything seemed possible.”
  36. The Yes Men Fix the World
    If the Yes Men’s antics have a lot in common with the stunts of Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Moore, they are executed more in the spirit of dry amusement than as showboating, gotcha moments.
  37. Araya
    Whatever visual poetry the film possesses is overwhelmed by the thuddingly bad and nearly ceaseless narration, written by Ms. Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers.
  38. After the Storm
    Directed by Hilla Medalia with exactly the right balance of musical theater and personal drama, After the Storm presents a touching affirmation of the healing power of right-brain stimulation.
  39. A Serious Man
    The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.)
  40. Whip It
    You might, nonetheless, want to see this movie, even -- or maybe especially -- if you have seen “Billy Elliot” or “Bend It Like Beckham.” Familiarity is not always a bad thing, and if the script, by Shauna Cross, piles sports movie and coming-of-age touchstones into a veritable cairn of clichés, the cast shows enough agility and conviction to make them seem almost fresh.
  41. Zombieland
    A minor diversion dripping in splatter and groaning with self-amusement.
  42. The Invention of Lying
    While the movie is a conceptual pip filled with quotable laughs and gentle pokes at religious faith at its most literal, it also looks so shoddy that you yearn for the camerawork, lighting and polish of his shows.
  43. More Than a Game
    The art is lacking, but the material is remarkable enough to make up for pedestrian filmmaking.
  44. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Art executed under the most excruciating conditions deserves a far more searching study than this too short film, which has the structure of a hurried checklist. Even so, a lot of the art shown in the documentary, often side-by-side with photographs of the same places and events, is compelling.
  45. A Beautiful Life
    This laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders.
  46. Afterschool
    In truth there isn’t much story here, or much insight either; the kind of alienated teenagers wandering through this film exist in movies far out of proportion to their number in real life.
  47. Chelsea on the Rocks
    An enraptured fantasia of high times at the hotel, the film is so intoxicated with the Chelsea’s bohemian mystique it virtually consumes itself.
  48. Do Knot Disturb
    Vulgar, noisy and excessive, Do Knot Disturb is a Bollywood sex farce with almost no sex, and comedy pitched so low you’re more likely to groan than giggle.
  49. L'ennemi intime
    The movie goes flat, though, when Mr. Siri and his co-writer, Patrick Rotman, shift their attention from the action to the moral math of guerrilla warfare.
  50. Where Is Where?
    Anyone looking for some idiosyncratic, visually stimulating entertainment this week could do worse than Where Is Where?, an intriguing narrative experiment by the Finnish artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
  51. The Horse Boy
    The film is not a primer on this heartbreaking condition. Instead it recounts a deeply personal, highly subjective and inarguably thought-provoking story of one family’s quest for a certain kind of peace.
  52. Surrogates
    In this kind of industrial entertainment, particularly one that seems to be missing some connective narrative tissue, it’s hard to know if the writers or the director can be credited or blamed for what’s left on screen.
  53. Paranormal Activity
    A crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year.
  54. Pandorum
    According to the press notes, pandorum means “Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome”; whatever that is, by the end of the movie I was convinced I had caught it.
  55. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    A mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope.
  56. Coco Before Chanel
    The blossoming of her ambition, as much as her love life, drives the story forward, and turns Coco Before Chanel into a costume drama worthy of the name.
  57. The Boys Are Back
    Has a burnished, high-quality look and a heart swollen with maudlin self-regard.
  58. Fame
    While the movie suffers from a surfeit of flash, it nonetheless offers the undeniable power of young performers pursuing art at peak dexterity.
  59. Blind Date
    The self-consciousness of the premise and the playlike structure of Blind Date clash with the naturalism of Mr. Tucci and Ms. Clarkson’s acting styles, and the film never lifts itself above its origin as a well-meaning, underdeveloped exercise.
  60. The Blue Tooth Virgin
    Starts out feeling a little too “inside Hollywood” and only grows more so as it rolls along. By the end, this small film about scriptwriters ends up being mostly for scriptwriters, despite appealing performances from the two leads.
  61. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening.
  62. The Providence Effect
    More an infomercial than a movie, Rollin Binzer’s awed documentary is, at best, a well-earned tribute to one man’s unwavering vision and unrelenting hard work.
  63. Paradise
    Essentially a series of home movies, but home movies of a very high order.
  64. Capitalism: A Love Story
    Like most of his movies, Capitalism is a tragedy disguised as a comedy; it’s also an entertainment.
  65. Irene in Time
    Smothering insightful moments in verbal and musical treacle (courtesy of Harriet Schock’s sticky songs), Mr. Jaglom displays an endearing lack of cynicism but an equal lack of discipline.
  66. In Search of Beethoven
    The best thing about In Search of Beethoven, Phil Grabsky’s biography of the composer, is the company he brings along on the hunt.
  67. The Informant!
    It is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling.
  68. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    If the filmmakers opt to make only light statements about junk food, obesity and solid waste, they at least leave the audience sated on a single serving of inspired lunacy.
  69. Love Happens
    The vital signs in Love Happens, a movie that feels likes a laboriously padded outline, are faint.
  70. Jennifer's Body
    The movie deserves -- and is likely to win -- a devoted cult following, despite its flaws.
  71. Paris
    There are enough intersecting characters from different classes and backgrounds in Paris to evoke the city as a complex, healthy organism, whose parts are all connected. If it is too lighthearted to show the actual political and economic machinery behind it, its celebration of how well that machinery works produces a pleasant afterglow.
  72. The Burning Plain
    Like his scripts for “21 Grams” and “Babel,” this one makes heavy use of happenstance and temporal displacement, and like them, too, it depends on ideas about human behavior that can only be called preposterous.
  73. Disgrace
    Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.
  74. Fatal Promises
    It lacks focus and adds little to the awareness of the subject that even a casual follower of the news has already acquired.
  75. Fuel
    If you can resist the urge to run for the exit, you may leave the theater feeling a lot more hopeful than when you went in.
  76. If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
    It’s like choking down 72 minutes of a stranger’s unedited home videos, only without the occasional cute kiddie or pet to lighten the tedium.
  77. Harmony and Me
    Despite the film’s sketchy aesthetic and barely animate lead, its tone is carefully contrived: I’ll wager no one in your circle is as dryly funny or spontaneously surreal as Harmony’s nonsupport group.
  78. Bright Star
    Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.
  79. 35 Shots of Rum
    In its modest scope and mellow tone, 35 Shots of Rum resembles Olivier Assayas’s "Summer Hours," another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.
  80. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    On the spectrum from heroic patriot to craven traitor, this detailed, clearly told and persuasive film, directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, is firmly on the side of heroic.
  81. I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    Mr. Perry has his moviemaking machine running smoothly, which is to say somewhat predictably.
  82. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
    Despite excellent stunt work and a too-brief appearance by Orlando Jones as an unflappable cop, the movie -- unlike Mr. Douglas’s hairdo -- never rises above mediocrity.
  83. Not Forgotten
    A lurid yet plodding thriller, bobs to the surface in theaters, most likely to the chagrin of the now very hot Simon Baker.
  84. No Impact Man: The Documentary
    I can’t, in the end (all appearances to the contrary), judge Mr. Beavan or this film too severely. Making an impact is easy. Making a difference is hard.
  85. Sorority Row
    An interminable mess of a film that juggles more characters and undeveloped subplots than it can handle and even manages to bungle the setup.
  86. Donne-moi la main
    Some viewers may enjoy Give Me Your Hand simply as an excuse to gaze at the Carril brothers.
  87. The Other Man
    Muddled little dud of a melodrama.
  88. White on Rice
    Bland and only occasionally funny.
  89. Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    Choppy, high-energy documentary.
  90. The Painter Sam Francis
    It’s a well-meaning mishmash that wouldn’t pass muster as an episode of “American Masters.”
  91. Skiptracers
    Mr. Mendheim wants Skiptracers to be more than jokey. When the shaggy-dog tales flag, he cranks up the soulful country-rock. But the score, much of it by Langhorne Slim & the War Eagles, can’t change the "Dukes of Hazzard" mood. If Mr. Mendheim wanted heart, he should have provided it the old-fashioned way: in his storytelling.
  92. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
    The movie develops, as far as it does, through repeated visual motifs, jokes and symbols.
  93. 9
    Every effort to expand the range of feature-length animation beyond the confines of cautious family fare is to be welcomed, and budding techno and fantasy geeks are likely to be intrigued and enthralled.
  94. Crude
    Ahead of us lie many more documentaries similar in tone and spirit to this one. We can hope that at least a few of them are as intelligently and artfully made.
  95. Walt & El Grupo
    What’s really missing here is a story of artistic regeneration: by the time we encounter a dazzling excerpt from the studio’s post-trip film, “Aquarela do Brasil,” we are only reminded of what might have been.
  96. Gamer
    A futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets.
  97. All About Steve
    The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.
  98. Black Dynamite
    As a five-minute clip on YouTube, this spoof might be a small masterpiece. As a feature film, it’s both too much and not nearly enough.
  99. Extract
    What’s most striking about Extract, beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy.
  100. Amreeka
    One of the most accomplished recent films about a non-European immigrant coming to the United States.
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