The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Majestyk
    Except for some dutiful splattering of gore, it ticks along rather steadily, under Richard Fleischer's unruffled direction. There is a take-it-or-leave-it air that snugly suits the star's performance, or vice versa.
  2. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    The Hundred-Foot Journey is likely neither to pique your appetite nor to sate it, leaving you in a dyspeptic limbo, stuffed with false sentiment and forced whimsy and starved for real delight.
  3. Darshan: The Embrace
    Filling our heads with pretty pictures and not much else, Darshan: The Embrace is likely to leave audiences enchanted but unenlightened.
  4. Aquaman
    It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.
  5. Arkansas
    Less a mob thriller than a ruminative drama about a life built around orders and betrayals, the movie takes an unusual perspective on a familiar genre but is weighed down by its dull, uneven pace.
  6. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Much like its subject: affable, quotable and emotionally guarded in the extreme.
  7. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Mr. Laue is an intriguing subject, smart, affable and with a dry wit.
  8. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    As it wobbles from one episode to the next, The Pick of Destiny is a garish mess, and some of it feels padded. But it has enough jokes to keep you smiling, and the spirit Mr. Black brings to it is a fervent (and touching) affection for the music he spoofs but obviously adores.
  9. Violent Night
    Adding insult to bodily injury, the director, Tommy Wirkola (“The Trip,” “Dead Snow”), and the screenwriters, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, can’t even muster any decent set pieces. Instead, the movie unfurls as a tedious series of bloody deaths and witless dialogue.
  10. Falling in Love
    Falling in Love is not a bad movie by any means. It's not stupid or gross or cheap. It's been done with taste, but it's the sort of production that, even when it works, which it frequently does, seems too small and trite to have had so much care taken on it.
  11. Irina Palm
    Irina Palm is, for the most part, a phony trifle, but at its heart, somehow, is a real and fascinating person.
  12. Love Actually
    A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.
  13. 3
    In this quintessentially Germanic film, Berlin - where they live, work, and create and voraciously consume culture - is as much a character as any person. The collective sensibility on display is determinedly forward looking; you might even say avant-garde.
  14. Reality
    Each narrative fissure further thwarts meaning. The most you can ask from a movie as nullifying as this one is that it offer wit and visual panache, which it does.
  15. Viktoria
    As more and more perfect shots drift by, the reality of the characters and their relationships dissipates, and we’re left with just picturesque moods.
  16. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    What “NOW” does well is explain why these actors love the place- and time-bound quality of live theater, most evident in the troupe’s stop at the ancient Greek theater of Epidaurus.
  17. The Command
    The fine cast keeps us engaged, even if the film sometimes loses the narrative thread.
  18. The Gambler
    Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.
  19. Brooklyn Lobster
    An unusually pure example of American kitchen-sink realism.
  20. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    There’s a bittersweetness to Craig and Harrigan’s friendship and good chemistry between the leads.
  21. Bustin' Loose
    Bustin' Loose is not unbearable, though a soft-hearted Richard Pryor is not a terribly funny Richard Pryor.
  22. The Four Seasons
    Mr. Alda's direction is particularly strong for bringing out his actors' humanity, and for developing a comic timing that helps unite the cast.
  23. Clown in a Cornfield
    A lackluster horror movie gets points if the leading villain is a real bugaboo. But the Frendos, alas, look like poser versions of Pennywise, Art the Clown and other, scarier horror bozos.
  24. Clementine
    Although the camera’s attention to faces and gazes, coupled with an eerie soundtrack, conjures a vague mood of suspense and seduction, the plot fizzles out quickly without any real provocations.
  25. The Flash
    I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.
  26. Bulgarian Lovers
    Superbly acted, without a trace of coyness and with considerable heat.
  27. Great Expectations
    Largely because Mr. Cuaron is such a voluptuous visual stylist, this Great Expectations is capable of wonder even when its wilder ideas misfire.
  28. The Acid House
    With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.
  29. Casa de los babys
    Some of the pieces in its jigsaw puzzle are too fragmentary, and there's a sense of racing against time to fill in the blanks. Yet the movie's even-handed portrayal of two cultures uneasily transacting the most personal business resonates with truth.
  30. Starsky & Hutch
    The movie's advertising tagline ("Starsky & Hutch — they're the Man") needs to be amended. The film belongs, completely and utterly, to Snoop Dogg.
  31. Summer of Blood
    It’s all mellowly funny rather than creepy, something like a stand-up conceit elaborated into scenes.
  32. The World of Kanako
    Mr. Nakashima, it must be said, does have a knack for composition. But the torrential, if glossy, violence — he adores juxtaposing innocuous pop ditties with gruesome set pieces — grows tiresome.
  33. Rainbow Time
    Much of this is funny and even perceptive about the nooks and crannies of adult sexual relationships. It’s also very well acted.... But something feels off.
  34. 52 Pick-Up
    ELMORE LEONARD'S thrillers leap so easily to the screen that it's astounding so few of them have gotten there. Even with the kind of slapdash, unsightly production that's been given 52 Pick-Up, Mr. Leonard's stories make terrific, unself-conscious B-movies of the sort that are more and more rare.
  35. Spirited
    The combination of this fine-tuned spectacle with the ineffectual vocals of the main duo — and distractingly uncanny visuals and special effects — transforms Spirited into a disjointed movie musical with all the superficial trappings of a Broadway flop.
  36. Beloved
    Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.
  37. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Zombieland: Double Tap sets the bar low and steps easily over it, which makes it better than a lot of recent big-screen comedies. It doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely brain-dead either.
  38. Promised Land
    An earnest attempt, sometimes effective, sometimes clumsy, to dramatize the central arguments about fracking and its impact.
  39. Agora
    A bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.
  40. Military Wives
    The title Military Wives is plain to the point of blandness. This good-hearted comedy-drama, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, deserves a little better.
  41. The Croods
    The movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes. Whether the kiddies will appreciate that is unclear, but they’ll certainly like the voice work done by Emma Stone as Eep.
  42. Lion Ark
    Lion Ark, a spunky account of a perilous rescue mission, has a ragtag rhythm that befits the mercurial behavior of its hulking furry stars.
  43. The Man Who Saved the World
    I was just at the right place at the right time,” Mr. Petrov says, a simple truth that becomes shocking when considering the alternative. For that alone, this account of a Cold War near miss deserves a wide audience.
  44. Jack of the Red Hearts
    Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.
  45. Walk with Me
    Sometimes dreamy but mostly dissatisfying, “Walk With Me” offers no clarity for the curious. We can enjoy the meditative mood, but understanding its underpinnings would require more than this idyll of silence and stillness provides.
  46. The Mean Season
    Philip Borsos, who directed ''The Grey Fox,'' builds the suspense of The Mean Season slowly and, for the most part, very effectively.
  47. Kitty Foyle
    The sharpness and contemporary significance of Mr. Morley's commentary are missing.
  48. I Heart Huckabees
    The film is a snort-out-loud-funny master class of controlled chaos.
  49. The House Bunny
    This particular wheel hasn't been reinvented, but at least it gets a nice fresh coat of bubblegum-pink paint and a star to pilot it with aplomb.
  50. Rendition
    A well-meaning, honorable movie. Which is not to say that it is a very good one.
  51. Trolls
    Exuberant, busy and sometimes funny, DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls is determined to amuse.
  52. The Sandlot
    Nothing about his modest coming-of-age comedy demands anything like this awestruck approach.
  53. The Tobacconist
    This is a pretty movie to be sure, with attractive cinematography, period costume and production design. But the film has no political or philosophical weight, and it is ultimately a movie that is as hard to take seriously as its somewhat dunderheaded protagonist.
  54. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    The new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects.
  55. Perfect Sense
    The love story doesn't quite work. Mr. McGregor and Ms. Green make an attractive couple. But the movie's notion of two self-centered people ill suited to each other, shedding their defenses and clinging together, feels forced and sentimental.
  56. Sergio
    This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.
  57. Rob Roy
    Rob Roy is best watched for local color and for its hearty, hot-blooded stars.
  58. Ice Princess
    You can feel this niche-marketed tweener fantasy of athletic glory frantically trying to balance a decent sense of values against a market-savvy awareness.
  59. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Employing bursts of Bach and English-language narration, this lulling, informative documentary never fully grapples with its topic’s complexity.
  60. Torn Curtain
    In these times, with James Bonds cutting capers and pallid spies coming in out of the cold, Mr. Hitchcock will have to give us something a good bit brighter to keep us amused.
  61. Pocket Money
    A fragmented, far from‐great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice.
  62. Flatliners
    Flatliners is a stylish, eerie psychological horror film laced with wit, a movie that thrives on its characters' guilty secrets and succeeds on the strength of the director Joel Schumacher's flair for just this sort of smart, unpretentious entertainment.
  63. Bingo Hell
    Despite the generally humorous vibe, Bingo Hell quietly accumulates an unignorable pathos.
  64. Bra Boys
    This crude, rowdy movie is also unexpectedly touching in its embrace of surfing as an escape from the stigma of poverty and broken homes. Escape from Russell Crowe’s droning narration, however, is impossible.
  65. Hobo with a Shotgun
    Only for those with a truly bottomless appetite for gore and fan-boy humor.
  66. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    [A] glossy, fawning valentine to conspicuous consumption.
  67. Caveman
    The movie is nicely whimsical, and elaborate in a way that no fantasy film this side of outer space has lately been. It's dopey, but it's also lots of fun.
  68. The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie
    The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.
  69. Butcher's Crossing
    It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character.
  70. Love and Other Drugs
    A sometimes intoxicating, sometimes headache-inducing cocktail: a sweet, libidinous love story; a candid comedy of bedroom and workplace manners; and, most bravely, if also most jarringly, a medical melodrama involving a chronic and very serious disease.
  71. London to Brighton
    A slice of social realism, a wedge of naturalism, a symbolically freighted fairy tale -- at times, London to Brighton feels like all of these combined, which, before it all turns to mush, gives the film the aspect of a fascinating and ambitious pastiche. There’s something provocative about Mr. Williams’s attempt to join together so many conflicting, contradictory influences, even if in the end they manage only to cancel one another out.
  72. Without the King
    The film, fluidly shot by James Adolphus, remains deeply sensitive to the complexities of a culture whose attachment to monarchy contravenes its best interests. This dilemma is gradually becoming clear to Princess Sikhanyiso, the oldest of the king's 22 children and a student in California. Intelligent, articulate, caring and strong-willed, she could be her country's best hope.
  73. Grandview, U.S.A.
    Grandview, U.S.A. is slight, but it has a good enough cast to keep it watchable.
  74. Playing by Heart
    For all its artificiality, Playing by Heart percolates with an earnest charm.
  75. Take the Lead
    Take the Lead, despite its nifty concept and fiery leading man, feels sloppy and rushed.
  76. Young Goethe in Love
    Mr. Fehling, tumbling from puppy dog eagerness into weepy, inky self-pity, never quite rises to the requirements of the role, which may be hopelessly incoherent in any case.
  77. Clandestine Childhood
    When a filmmaker proves as reluctant as Mr. Ávila to speak up about the past, to engage with its full complexity, it can be hard to hear what he's saying.
  78. Sky
    This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.
  79. Zoom
    Mr. Morelli mixes live-action and animated scenes to good effect. He doesn’t have time to give his characters depth, but there’s pleasure in figuring out how they connect and pondering the movie’s modest themes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born to Win
    Too theatrically phony and too predictably conventional, and the comedy — though in a few cases genuinely funny — is too mechanical for its function.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    This time, Mr. Disney, true to himself in his own fashion, has constructed a garden of dreams to delight every child, with the aid of a few of the noted Herbert melodies, a spate of new ones, a cast of photogenic kids and willing grown-ups and sets as stylized as those of any Disney cartoon.
  82. The Black Scorpion
    The back-lot boys working for producers Frank Melford and Jack Dietz have, for the most part, performed an adequate job. As for the human side of the plot, written by David Duncan and Robert Blees, just forget it.
  83. David
    It can be a preachy and po-faced movie, to be sure, but a handsome one.
  84. Party Girl
    Party Girl aspires to be a mid-90's answer to the Susan Seidelman movies "Smithereens" and "Desperately Seeking Susan." Although it has some of the same frothy energy, it has no real story to tell.
  85. Sukiyaki Western Django
    More often there is a frantic, compulsive quality to the action. Fanboy intoxication with the idea of formal ingenuity too often stands in for the thing itself.
  86. When You're Strange
    Muddled, pretentious assemblage of film clips of the band shot between 1966 and 1971.
  87. The Girl Is in Trouble
    A modern-day noir weighed down by redundant narration and a forced plot, The Girl Is in Trouble feels like a tug of war between the actors, who understand the need for lightness, and dialogue that emerges in expository clots.
  88. A Perfect Pairing
    It’s all so anodyne that the also-obligatory girl-gets-mad-at-hunk plot turn before the love-conquers-all finale feels like being shaken awake during a dream of drowning in butterscotch sunsets.
  89. Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
    This too-chummy documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse sensation of having 90 minutes of your life taken from you. By the time it’s over, you will be older, a progression that if anything the movie feels like it hastens.
  90. Rocky V
    Rocky V takes him out of his gilded cage and back to the director (John G. Avildsen), the settings and the underdog's outlook that made him famous in the first place. It's a smart move. There's life in the old boy yet.
  91. Bride & Prejudice
    As high concept and rife with cliché as anything ever churned out by Hollywood, but with worse production values and a load of sanctimonious political correctness.
  92. Little Pink House
    Palely photographed and anchored by a quiet, rather weary performance from Ms. Keener, Little Pink House is a peculiarly enervated affair. The structure is choppy, and there are odd moments of tonal dissonance.
  93. Agnes Browne
    Has an episodic rhythm and little dramatic tension.
  94. 'R Xmas
    Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.
  95. Forsaken
    A starry father-son pairing is largely squandered in Forsaken, an old-school western that is a little too old school for its own good.
  96. The Current War: Director's Cut
    As its energetic early scenes give way to a sluggish second half, you start to sense how much better this good-enough movie might have been.
  97. Bitch
    As she did in her gentler but equally original “Good Dick” in 2008, Ms. Palka carves a black and biting niche between a man and a woman, a space where chaos and psychological unease demand to be reckoned with.
  98. Someone to Watch Over Me
    Howard Franklin's screenplay plays less like a feature film than like the pilot for a failed television series about New York policemen.
  99. Wildcat
    Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.
  100. Clouds
    While Clouds is as doe-eyed and puppyish as an acoustic serenade, Baldoni is wise to recognize that attention must be paid to Zach’s survivors.
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