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. Rashevski's Tango
    In the end, though, Mr. Garbarski makes no judgments, which leaves this film feeling sweet but light: we already knew that Judaism, like most other religions, is an ever-evolving collage.
  2. Tickling Leo
    The film’s rich performances, in which every shade of every character’s emotions registers, can go only so far to camouflage the glaring lapses in a drama that often confuses hints and allusions with coherent storytelling.
  3. American Casino
    The lesson of this story: if enough money is involved, greed trumps morality.
  4. Unmade Beds
    An agonizingly familiar refrain, but one that the young Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos relates with such tenderness and with so much ethereal beauty that it feels like something fresh.
  5. The Final Destination
    There used to be entertainment in the dodging and wit in the scripts; now there’s 3-D.
  6. Mystery Team
    The results are hit-and-miss. Some bits fall thuddingly flat, and the characters are rarely more than stick figures.
  7. The September Issue
    This entertaining, glib movie is about the maintenance of a brand that Ms. Wintour has brilliantly cultivated since she assumed her place at the top of the editorial masthead in 1988 and which the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, has helped polish with a take so flattering he might as well work there.
  8. We Live in Public
    From the ample evidence, Mr. Harris’s own life in public was a bust. Ms. Timoner sees him as a cautionary tale as well as a visionary.
  9. St. Trinian's
    A stunningly witless revival of the infamous British film series about a girls’ boarding school.
  10. At the Edge of the World
    This strikingly humane film may function as a prequel to Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars” but is light years ahead in visual clarity and narrative ambition.
  11. Big Fan
    A spasmodically funny and bleak film about the love that speaks its name.
  12. Wolke Neun
    All the more disappointing, then, when what has been a celebration of last-ditch passion slides abruptly into a cautionary tale. Until that point the movie's refreshingly unbiased tone allows us to make our own moral judgments, teasing us with the possibility that, occasionally, the scarlet woman can escape unbranded. I, for one, was rooting for her.
  13. Halloween II (2009)
    Halloween II is full of in jokes and references but nearly devoid of wit.
  14. Taking Woodstock
    This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event.
  15. Inglourious Basterds
    Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.
  16. World's Greatest Dad
    With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media's cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death.
  17. Post Grad
    Ms. Bledel works her “Gilmore Girls” charm to the hilt, but no amount of cerulean-eyed sparkle can transcend this level of thudding mediocrity.
  18. Shorts
    Soon becomes tiresome, but it’s emblematic of a film that is dancing as fast as it can to entertain.
  19. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.
  20. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A streamlined, adrenalized thriller that is not as deep as it would like to appear, treads a retrospective political tightrope.
  21. Five Minutes of Heaven
    A feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, the appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot.
  22. Art & Copy
    The world may be going “Mad Men,” but Doug Pray’s documentary Art & Copy,”which is being released just five days after the season premiere of that acclaimed television series, presents a very different picture of the advertising industry.
  23. My One and Only
    A good-natured screwball road film.
  24. Passing Strange
    A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.
  25. Sikandar
    This odd, unsuccessful movie, written and directed by Piyush Jha, is too rigged to have any broader implications about the bloody standoff in Kashmir between militants and the Indian Army.
  26. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
    It’s disappointing, though, to see that his work, while it’s become more polished, has remained essentially self-indulgent and superficial despite the big themes of racism and identity that it takes on.
  27. Casi divas
    As the film picks up speed it also accrues a socially progressive agenda. If only this were half as well developed as the female leads.
  28. Still Walking
    This is life as it’s lived, not dreamed. And this is a family bound not only by sorrow, but also by a shared history that emerges in 114 calibrated minutes and ends with a wallop.
  29. The Headless Woman
    Brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie.
  30. District 9
    In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).
  31. Ponyo
    The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.
  32. The Time Traveler's Wife
    Often ridiculous, awkward, unsatisfying and dour melodramatic adaptation.
  33. Bandslam
    Buoyant, gratifying and, yes, rocking.
  34. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
    A comedy without a shred of obvious filmmaking and an endless stream of good, bad, sometimes terrible, often absurd jokes.
  35. Earth Days
    A sedate chronicle of the highs and lows of the environmental movement, Earth Days is less a rousing call to action than a bittersweet stroll down memory lane.
  36. Grace
    Mr. Solet does not possess anything close to Mr. Polanski’s storytelling or image-making skills, but with the help of his sound crew (four people are given sound design or editing credits), he keeps you on the edge of your seat, or perhaps the edge of fleeing the theater.
  37. It Might Get Loud
    For rock geeks of any age or taste, the lore in this documentary will be catnip.
  38. Spread
    More skin is shown in Spread than in most Hollywood movies. But despite twitches of insight into its characters and their world, Spread refuses go more than skin deep.
  39. Taxidermia
    Belongs to a school of Central European surrealism that marries nightmarish horror with formal beauty.
  40. The Way We Get By
    Unfailingly modest and profoundly humane, The Way We Get By profiles three people over 70 whose lives have been changed by a simple act of service.
  41. A Perfect Getaway
    A B-movie-style throwback that’s consistently diverting and blissfully free of morals and messages, A Perfect Getaway is just the thing for the summertime movie blahs: it’s a genuinely satisfying cheap thrill.
  42. Julie & Julia
    Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity -- is easy to miss.
  43. Cold Souls
    In this attractive, smart-enough, finally un-brave movie Ms. Barthes peeks at the dark comedy of the soul only to beat a quick, pre-emptive retreat.
  44. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    This pricey, juiceless pulp could never have been killed by critics, simply because it was already dead.
  45. Beeswax
    Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie.
  46. Bliss
    This consistently gripping, visually intoxicating film stands as a landmark of contemporary Turkish cinema.
  47. I Sell the Dead
    The jokes do wear thin, and the setup does too, but it’s nonetheless worth noting what a couple of crafty thieves can do with elbow grease, some spare change and the kind of deep movie love that never dies.
  48. Paper Heart
    Your enjoyment of Paper Heart will hinge almost entirely on your receptiveness to Ms. Yi and the extreme iteration of social awkwardness she represents.
  49. Funny People
    There’s something irritatingly self-satisfied about Funny People, which explains why, though it glances on the perils of fame, it mostly affirms its pleasures.
  50. The Cove
    Like the director's cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits.
  51. Thirst
    Unfortunately, it is also less than the sum of its parts -- overly long, lacking in narrative momentum and too often choosing sensation over coherence.
  52. Aliens in the Attic
    Robert Hoffman as the boyfriend, who spends most of his time under the marionettelike control of either the aliens or the human children, provides the film's occasional funny moments.
  53. The Collector
    Offers agony in a vacuum, a villain without a motive and a hero with more personal problems than lines of dialogue.
  54. Lorna's Silence
    Lorna's Silence is engrossing and powerful, which may be just another way of saying it's a film by the Dardenne brothers. If it falls a bit short of the standards of their best work, that is only because it is not quite a masterpiece.
  55. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    An affectionate, rollicking guide to the drive-in classics of Australian filmmaking from the 1970s and ’80s.
  56. Flame and Citron
    What Flame & Citron has are decent men taking down Nazis (always a crowd pleaser) and some appealing actors — notably Mr. Lindhardt, Mr. Mikkelsen and Christian Berkel as the head of the Copenhagen Gestapo.
  57. Gotta Dance
    The dancers are prone to feel-good sound bites, but Ms. Berinstein also takes the time to draw out their back stories, making for a sweet group portrait of ordinary folks who found a late splash of fame.
  58. Adam
    The humor is delicate, and the performances sweet and sure; the script (by the director, Max Mayer) is not entirely predictable, and the Manhattan locations (lovingly photographed by Seamus Tierney) have a starry-eyed glaze.
  59. You, the Living
    The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.
  60. In the Loop
    A sharply written, fast-talking, almost dementedly articulate satire on modern statecraft.
  61. Orphan
    There’s something creepy, and not pleasurably so, about watching children pantomime so much malice and fear.
  62. The Ugly Truth
    A cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy that is interesting on several levels, none having to do with cinema.
  63. G-Force
    Manages to be fairly entertaining in that exhausting, rackety, late-summer-kiddie-movie way.
  64. The Answer Man
    Never shows enough passion to be interestingly bad.
  65. Shrink
    These characters are mostly too sketchy and their connections too contrived for Shrink to jell as an incisive ensemble piece.
  66. (500) Days of Summer
    Slight, charming and refreshingly candid little picture.
  67. A Woman in Berlin
    That the film manages to be understated, calm and intelligent in spite of its wrenching subject matter is perhaps its most impressive accomplishment. In avoiding sensationalism, it feels very close to the truth.
  68. Death in Love
    Death in Love hasn't a drop of humor or hope. Its dull, smudged look makes every environment appear joyless and claustrophobic.
  69. Homecoming
    Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.
  70. Off Jackson Avenue
    The lives of Olivia, Tomo, Milot and Joey converge in a climactic chase sequence as frantic as a Keystone Cops movie. By this time, grim realism has curdled into bleakly absurdist farce.
  71. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    Much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, the film has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience.
  72. Somers Town
    An agreeable if slight, vaguely sketched character study times two.
  73. Bruno
    In spite of Mr. Baron Cohen and Mr. Charles’s high-level skills and keen low-comic instincts, Brüno is a lazy piece of work that panders more than it provokes.
  74. Humpday
    The movie’s unblinking observation of a friendship put to the test is amused, queasy making, kindhearted and unfailingly truthful.
  75. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Suffers from abusive close-ups, repetitive fight sequences and uninspired demon design.
  76. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Drab and incoherent teen comedy.
  77. Soul Power
    Soul Power, as aptly and succinctly titled a movie as I have ever seen, takes you to a place where the discipline that produces great popular art is indistinguishable from the ecstasy that art creates.
  78. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    The film could be described as Exhibit A in a study of media celebrity and collective forgetfulness in the age of information overload.
  79. Lake Tahoe
    Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan’s journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.
  80. I Hate Valentine's Day
    You might blame Nora Ephron, whose screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” established the formula that I Hate Valentine’s Day runs into the ground. Compared with this, Ms. Ephron is Chekhov.
  81. The Girl from Monaco
    If in the end the film is neither a cogent psychological thriller nor an effervescent sex comedy, it does at least have an interesting sense of place.
  82. Tony Manero
    More than an indelible portrait of a sociopath with the soul of a zombie, Tony Manero is an extremely dark meditation on borrowed cultural identity.
  83. The Beaches of Agnès
    The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time).
  84. Public Enemies
    A grave and beautiful work of art.
  85. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    Couldn't the creative minds at the 20th Century Fox animation studios, hoping to wring a few hundred million dollars more out of their prized family-animation franchise, have come up with something more original?
  86. The Hurt Locker
    The best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq.
  87. My Sister's Keeper
    My Sister’s Keeper takes on a very tough subject -- and has, in Anna and Kate, two pretty tough characters played by strong young actresses -- but ultimately it is too soft, too easy, and it dissolves like a tear-soaked tissue.
  88. Afghan Star
    The movie uses the talent show Afghan Star as a prism through which to examine the fragmented tribal culture of Afghanistan as reflected in the backgrounds of four finalists (two of them women) and the public responses to their performances.
  89. Chéri
    There's something poignant about the image of this actress (Pfeiffer) sitting in a pool of sunlight without a smile or trace of visible makeup. But she's trying to reach a character that her director seems intent to keep from her grasp.
  90. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.
  91. Surveillance
    It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.
  92. Quiet Chaos
    Thankfully, Mr. Grimaldi and the screenwriters have no great lessons to impart or messages to deliver, and the film, while uneven -- sometimes too on the nose, sometimes anecdotal and diffuse -- is generally absorbing, thanks mostly to the quality of the acting.
  93. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    The man (Bay) just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.
  94. Whatever Works
    None of it works. Or it works too hard. Whatever.
  95. The Proposal
    Ms. Bullock, who excels at playing spunky, is as appealing as usual, but the role proves as awkward as those heels.
  96. Year One
    A thoroughly, sometimes gaggingly broad and sly conceptual laugh-in.
  97. $9.99
    Though $9.99 manages to be quirky and enigmatic, it is in the end too self-conscious, too satisfied in its eccentricity, to achieve the full mysteriousness toward which it seems to aspire. It is odd, curious, intermittently intriguing but ultimately more interesting for its artifice than for its art.
  98. Dead Snow
    As is often the case with movies of this type, the real stars are the special-effects team, which does some admirably disgusting work.
  99. The End of the Line
    Well-researched and generally evenhanded in its delivery of information (Ted Danson provides the narration), the movie more than makes its points without needing to resort to a montage of adorable fish being bashed on the head.
  100. Under Our Skin
    Scary enough to make the faint of heart decide never to venture into the woods or to lie on the grass again without protective covering.
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