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. Moon
    The film's ideas are interesting, but don't feel entirely worked out, and Mr. Rockwell's intriguingly strange performance (or performances) is left suspended, without the context that would give Sam's plight its full emotional and philosophical impact. The smallness of this movie is decidedly a virtue, but also, in the end, something of a limitation.
  2. Food, Inc.
    Time and again the movie stops short before it really gets started, as with the debates over the big business of organic food.
  3. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Even at a distance from each other (Washington/Travolta), they conduct a tag-team master class in old-style movie star technique, barreling through every cliché and nugget of corn the script has to offer with verve and conviction. Even when you don't really believe them, they're always a lot of fun to watch.
  4. Sex Positive
    The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.
  5. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Perhaps because the music is so good, with its purity of tone and dazzling rhythmic precision, the flaws of the surrounding movie become all the more obvious.
  6. Tetro
    As with "Youth Without Youth," this new movie feels like a transitional work but also an inspired one, the creation of a director who, having recently turned 70, has set off on a new adventure that requires more from his audiences than some might be willing to give. Which is itself a sign of vigorous artistic renewal.
  7. The Hangover
    But true to its title, The Hangover goes down smoothly enough and then kicks you in the head later on, when you start to examine the sources of your laughter.
  8. Séraphine
    The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.
  9. Away We Go
    Does it sound as if I hate this movie? Don't be silly. But don't be fooled. This movie does not like you.
  10. Land of the Lost
    The only marginally interesting, if unsurprising, thing about the pricey movie spinoff of the junky children's television show Land of the Lost is that a lot of money has been spent on yet another cultural throwaway.
  11. My Life in Ruins
    Not likely to spur much tourism to Greece. The sights, though impressive, are not photographed interestingly, and the citizens of the host country are less than welcoming.
  12. Downloading Nancy
    A nasty exploitation flick tarted up with art-house actors and psychobabble.
  13. Tennessee
    It isn't saying much, but at least her (Carey) work here is more substantial than in the catastrophic "Glitter."
  14. 24 City
    The actors in 24 City bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances. In the end, the deep emotions they stir up -- the actress Lv Liping delivers a harrowing story about a lost child -- constitute another kind of monument to the workers of Factory 420.
  15. Herb & Dorothy
    Interviews with artists whom they collected testify to their sharp eye and good spirits, while the Vogels themselves, sitting in their same old apartment, overflowing as ever, make for charming company.
  16. Unmistaken Child
    The beauty of the landscape and the monk’s sweetness, humility and good humor evoke a plane of existence, at once elevated and austere, that is humbling to contemplate. That said, Unmistaken Child offers no scholarly perspective on Tibetan Buddhism and leaves fundamental questions unanswered.
  17. Up
    Passages of glorious imagination are invariably matched by stock characters and banal story choices.
  18. Drag Me to Hell
    Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.
  19. Departures
    Overlong, predictable in its plotting and utterly banal in its blending of comic whimsy and melodramatic pathos.
  20. Pontypool
    A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.
  21. What Goes Up
    Even when Mr. Coogan can't make his scenes work, his prickly presence keeps you watching, as does the eerie scenes of winter that Mr. Glatzer captures with the camera.
  22. Offshore
    Though not without its charms -- the scenes in Mumbai are comically chaotic -- Offshore might have raised more chuckles when it was made, in 2006, than in the economic chill of 2009. And not only in Michigan.
  23. Munyurangabo
    What is most impressive is the care with which Mr. Chung manages this risky undertaking. He seems to have made this film above all by listening and looking.
  24. Pressure Cooker
    Pressure Cooker belongs to the honorable if overpopulated genre of inspirational films (both documentaries and features) dedicated to the proposition that one committed, passionate teacher can make all the difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.
  25. The Girlfriend Experience
    When the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the 10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around, this strange, numb cinematic experience may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.
  26. O'Horten
    O'Horten is about frustration, patience, kindness and the wildness that lurks in even the calmest hearts. What's odd about that?
  27. Easy Virtue
    In its cold-eyed assessment of the English aristocracy Easy Virtue has none of the lurking Anglophilia found in Merchant-Ivory movies.
  28. New World Order
    An unrelentingly tedious documentary.
  29. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    Shallow and harmlessly diverting picture.
  30. Dance Flick
    Its belly laughs leave you feeling liberated and not guilty; I repeat, not guilty.
  31. The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
    Comprehensive, fulfilling film.
  32. Terminator Salvation
    It parades neither the egghead aspirations of "Star Trek" nor the thick-skulled pretensions of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," but instead feels both comfortable with its limitations and justly proud of its accomplishments.
  33. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    A rich, thought-provoking film.
  34. Summer Hours
    In spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.
  35. The Brothers Bloom
    As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.
  36. Angels & Demons
    This movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than "Da Vinci."
  37. Big Man Japan
    The most impressive special effect here is Mr. Matsumoto's hilariously restrained performance, a tour de force of comedic concision in a movie bloated by increasingly surreal developments.
  38. The Big Shot-Caller
    The characters' quirks lend The Big Shot-Caller a certain authenticity, and it is easy to empathize with Mr. Rhein's Lonely Guy in the City. But this minuscule indie variation of "Saturday Night Fever" moves only in fits and starts. When it ends on a cautiously upbeat note, you feel that you have seen just the stumbling first act of an unfinished drama.
  39. Jerichow
    No one in Jerichow is entirely deserving of sympathy, which gives the film a detached, clinical feeling underlined by the director’s habit of observing emotions rather than evoking them.
  40. Management
    Mike may be a bumbling sad sack, but Mr. Zahn gives him just enough spunky appeal to lend this unlikely fly-by-afternoon coupling and its consequences a shred of credibility.
  41. Adoration
    A profound and provocative exploration of cultural inheritance, communications technology and the roots and morality of terrorism, the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan nimbly wades into an ideological minefield without detonating an explosion.
  42. Julia
    Ms. Swinton demands to be seen even when her character is on a self-annihilating bender so real that you can almost smell the stink rising off her. So I sat in my seat, cursed the screen and was grateful to watch an actress at the height of her expressive power claw toward greatness.
  43. Little Ashes
    A painfully sincere study in creative passion, sexual ardor and political zeal that embalms a mad and exuberant historical moment within the talky, balky conventions of period-costumed highbrow soap opera.
  44. Next Day Air
    With a script that snaps, characters that pop, a blaze of streetwise attitude and enough firepower to pulverize a significant chunk of South Philadelphia, Next Day Air nears neo-blaxploitation perfection. Good things come in strange packages.
  45. Outrage
    Mr. Dick, whose previous documentaries have examined sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, the inner workings of the movie ratings system and the life and work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a cerebral muckraker. While his techniques are not as nakedly tendentious as Michael Moore’s (and his movies, as a consequence, are not as much fun), he hardly pretends to be a detached or unbiased observer.
  46. Rudo y Cursi
    While the film is lively and engaging, it also, in the end, feels a little thin, largely because it is unsure of how earnestly to treat its own lessons about fate, ambition and brotherly love.
  47. Star Trek
    Isn't just a pleasurable rethink of your geek uncle's favorite science-fiction series. It's also a testament to television's power as mythmaker, as a source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves, who we are and where we came from.
  48. The Limits of Control
    A nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event.
  49. Revanche
    The characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment.
  50. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    X-Men Origins: Wolverine will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue.
  51. A Wink and a Smile
    It's all good clean fun; the movie is well intentioned to a blandly feminist fault. Just as burlesque loses most of its oomph when put on video -- no art is more dependent on the intimacy of live performance -- self-esteem trips are less compelling to hear about than to experience firsthand.
  52. Battle for Terra
    The movie's messages are delivered with a heavy hand, but some of the scenes are eye-popping, especially -- sorry, peace-loving Terrians -- the battle sequences.
  53. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    A junky-looking romantic comedy that’s neither remotely romantic nor passably comic.
  54. The Merry Gentleman
    The film’s title, needless to say, has an ironic bite. One of the pleasures of The Merry Gentleman is Mr. Keaton's commitment to that bite, which never registers as cruel or gratuitous, just honest, weary, sad.
  55. Three Monkeys
    Good pulp depends, above all, on a ruthless sense of economy, and Three Monkeys is just a bit too profligate, too fancy, to be entirely convincing.
  56. Home
    For all its honesty, Home has only the most tentative narrative coherence. It's a collection of beautifully acted fragments that leave you longing for a story to connect them. The pretty but rather shallow poetry doesn't begin to do the job.
  57. The Skeptic
    The Skeptic turns into a cut-and-dried Freudian melodrama that gives repressed memory a supernatural dimension. I'll take a bunch of teenagers terrorized by chain-saw-wielding zombies any day.
  58. The Informers
    Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke.
  59. Obsessed
    The movie’s most disturbing aspect, of which the filmmakers could not have been unaware, is the physical resemblance between Mr. Elba and Ms. Larter to O. J. and Nicole Brown Simpson. It lends Obsessed a distasteful taint of exploitation.
  60. Fighting
    Not everything that happens in Fighting entirely makes sense -- it’s a fable, after all, and a fable doesn't necessarily have to -- but it breathes with a rough, exuberant realism that you rarely see in movies of its kind.
  61. Il Divo
    As operatic cinema, it ranks alongside the best of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
  62. The Soloist
    The film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving.
  63. Throw Down Your Heart
    The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument.
  64. Tyson
    Mr. Toback's film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson's point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.
  65. Empty Nest
    The film dithers along with Leonardo, whose self-involved tedium -- and the movie's -- is occasionally interrupted by fantasy sequences.
  66. Earth
    This is nature defanged and declawed for kiddie consumption, so the emphasis is on awwww-filled moments.
  67. Treeless Mountain
    The problem is that while the children are lovely because they are children, there is nothing inherently interesting about them or their lives.
  68. State of Play
    A superficially clever, self-important and finally incoherent thriller.
  69. 17 Again
    The director, Burr Steers, whose other credits include “Igby Goes Down” and stints directing TV shows, keeps people and things moving fast enough so that you don’t have time to worry about the details, like the inanity of the story.
  70. American Violet
    The movie's staunchly liberal point of view extends to the 2000 presidential election, which is shown unfolding in the background. Al Gore's concession speech is used to suggest that the systemic racism in Melody is a symptom of a broader climate of injustice.
  71. Crank: High Voltage
    Boorish, bigoted and borderline pornographic.
  72. Every Little Step
    The premise of Every Little Step is no less inspired for seeming so simple and obvious, and it pays tribute to the durability and continued relevance of “A Chorus Line,” which first opened in New York in 1975, before many of the performers in the movie were born.
  73. Is Anybody There?
    What balances the movie is Mr. Caine's exceptional portrayal of old age as the accumulation of a lifetime's experience. In his performance the child, the youthful rogue and the forgetful codger all live at once.
  74. Lemon Tree
    A wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one.
  75. Sleep Dealer
    The plot of Sleep Dealer is a bit thin, and the performances are earnest and dutiful. But there is sufficient ingenuity in the film’s main ideas to hold your attention, and the political implications of the allegorical story are at once obvious and subtle.
  76. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kudlow may not quite merit full-metal glory, but they don't deserve oblivion either, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil makes both a case and a place for their band.
  77. Dragonball: Evolution
    May or may not appeal to fans of the Japanese fantasy franchise it is based on, but aficionados of apocalyptic teenybopper kung fu extravaganzas are in for a real treat.
  78. Hannah Montana: The Movie
    It's just as awesome as the tv show only bigger and prettier.
  79. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
    A clumsy and confused adaptation of Michael Chabon's 1988 novel.
  80. Observe and Report
    If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report, a potentially brilliant conceptual comedy that fizzles because its writer and director, Jody Hill, doesn't have the guts to go with his spleen.
  81. Lymelife
    Despite such floundering, Lymelife keeps you hooked, mostly through Mr. Hutton, Mr. Baldwin and Kieran Culkin as Scott's older brother, Jimmy.
  82. Adventureland
    Somehow the story of a young man's coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.
  83. Sugar
    It is both sad and hopeful, but the film's sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.
  84. Alien Trespass
    A charmingly sentimental but ultimately pointless hommage to the sci-fi classics of yesteryear, Alien Trespass proves only that while styles and technology have moved on, the affection for corn is everlasting.
  85. Bart Got a Room
    The movie imprisons its talented cast (including Alia Shawkat as Danny’s overlooked soul mate and Brandon Hardesty as his worldly best friend) in roles that leave little room for anything but caricature.
  86. The Escapist
    Shapes a standard prison-break drama into a metaphysical study of freedom and reparation.
  87. Fast & Furious
    Inoffensive if uninspired.
  88. Gigantic
    With its off-center dialogue and upscale industrial settings, Gigantic strains to be original. But beneath its indie affectations it is really another contemplation of generational misunderstanding.
  89. Paris 36
    So shameless in its pandering, sentimental vision of Frenchness as to constitute something of a national embarrassment.
  90. The Song of Sparrows
    Although The Song of Sparrows has some of the trappings of a naturalistic drama, it is really a series of strict moral lessons pieced together into an austere Islamic sermon.
  91. Forbidden Lie$
    Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.
  92. Lifelines
    Starts promisingly, with a sharp comedic bite and genuine compassion for this fraught family dynamic, but soon gives way to the kind of compressed, schematic psychodrama endemic to (if no more welcome on) the stage.
  93. Tulpan
    Might be described as an epic landscape film, a sweetly comic coming-of-age story or a lyrical work of social realism. But the setting -- a windswept, sparely populated steppe in southern Kazakhstan -- gives the movie a mood that sometimes feels closer to that of science fiction.
  94. Goodbye Solo
    Grace is also what defines Mr. Bahrani's filmmaking. I can't think of anything else to call the quality of exquisite attention, wry humor and wide-awake intelligence that informs every frame of this almost perfect film.
  95. Monsters vs Aliens
    The movie is curiously unmemorable, partly because nearly all of its humor depends on your having seen something like it before, even if you haven't.
  96. Spinning Into Butter
    Less a movie than an essay.
  97. The Education of Charlie Banks
    Probes class consciousness with rather more sensitivity than originality.
  98. 12 Rounds
    There are, as you may have guessed, 12 rounds of this arbitrary nonsense. Annoying as the conceit may be, it neatly functions as a means to gauge how much is left to endure.
  99. American Swing
    It leaves you feeling queasy.
  100. The Haunting in Connecticut
    Gives you the creeps, the giggles and the groans in almost equal measure.
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