The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    This convulsively funny movie takes an up-close and sometimes queasy-personal approach to its motormouth subject, who, when she's not making you howl with laughter (or freeze up in horror), brandishes her deeply held hurts, fears, prejudices, poor judgment and bad taste as if they were stigmata.
  2. All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    So good it leaves you starved for more.
  3. Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    Essential viewing for anyone who desires a sense of the finer human grain of a war that now commands the attention of the world as never before.
  4. War and Peace
    Mr. Patwardhan has located so much information and found so many willing interview subjects that his War and Peace has a riveting intelligence all its own and earns its epic title.
  5. Fighter
    In juxtaposing two extraordinary personal histories, it ponders in a refreshingly original way unanswerable questions about memory, imagination, history and that elusive thing we call truth.
  6. Set Me Free
    Propelled by a captivating, wrenching performance by Karine Vanasse as Hanna, a 13-year-old girl adrift in a sea of powerful emotions in Montreal in 1963.
  7. Valley of Tears
    Dense, contradictory and distressingly honest, Valley of Tears is that rarity among political documentaries: a genuinely thought-provoking film.
  8. Sunset Story
    One of the strengths of Sunset Story is that it introduces us to a pair of extraordinary women who have kept their dignity and independence in a world that conspires against them having either. The story of Lucille and Irja may break your heart, but it will also make your day.
  9. SubUrbia
    Mr. Bogosian's venomously funny play, which he adapted himself for the screen, is given warmth and generosity by Mr. Linklater, whose elegantly fluid direction and great skill with actors are accentuated by the play's spareness.
  10. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    The film is a requiem for the living as well as for the dead.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Walk to Beautiful
    A complex and quietly devastating indictment of chauvinist societies that see women as lovers, mothers and servants, and treat anyone who can’t fulfill those roles as a nonperson.
  12. The Last Mistress
    What’s explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It's terribly French.
  13. The Girl Cut in Two
    An erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.
  14. Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
    How was this careless, self-destructive human rhythm machine able to outlast almost all her peers? Maybe the vitality of the jazz she made kept her alive. She was one tough lady.
  15. Momma's Man
    Mr. Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition.
  16. The Pool
    In the manner of a Satyajit Ray film, The Pool avoids melodrama, the better to capture the texture of Venkatesh's vagabond life.
  17. Theater of War
    Because this is also a document of an actress actually at work, much of the movie's pleasure comes from watching another brilliant performance take shape as Ms. Streep tries out different line readings, gestures and poses in her search for Mother Courage.
  18. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.
  19. Forbidden Lie$
    Cool-headed, lighthearted and outrageously entertaining.
  20. 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.
  21. Passing Strange
    A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.
  22. 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.
  23. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    It makes for continuously riveting, visceral entertainment that evokes a Gallic "Scarface" without the drugs.
  24. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    The story is deepened with a distinctively European political subtext as the increasingly grandiose Mesrine engages in a running dialogue with various characters about the differences between gangsters and revolutionaries.
  25. 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.
  26. Ajami
    One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond.
  27. Terribly Happy
    Not a horror movie but a witty, expertly constructed psychological thriller.
  28. Eyes Wide Open
    Its scrupulous, humane sympathy gives this small, sorrowful film a glow of insight and a pulse of genuine, openhearted curiosity.
  29. Toe to Toe
    Ms. Abt provides an unusually honest, compassionate and challenging view of contemporary youth, neither sugarcoated nor prurient.
  30. Neil Young Trunk Show
    As concert documentaries go, both “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” (2006) and the new Neil Young Trunk Show are luxury goods.
  31. Vincere
    A sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film.
  32. Blue Beard
    Ms. Breillat narrates the fairy tale three ways: in the period story, through the little girls and, finally, through the overall film. None are fully satisfying, but together they offer a sharp, knowing gloss on how our stories define who we were and who we become.
  33. Warlords
    Epic in scope but intimate in theme, The Warlordsheaves with spectacular battles and the relentless sway of self-interest over conscience.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Teza
    Has all the hallmarks of a career summation -- and early on it seems fated to collapse beneath the weight of its ambitions. Instead, it soars, thanks to Mr. Gerima’s bracingly direct storytelling.
  35. Everyone Else
    A sun-kissed German film about a young couple in love and in doubt, might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close.
  36. The Square
    By the time the final measure of rough cosmic justice is meted out, The Square has completed a tour of moral squalor that is suspenseful, invigorating and sometimes harshly funny.
  37. See What I'm Saying: The Deaf Entertainers Documentary
    Educates without lecturing and engages without effort.
  38. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    Exit could be a new subgenre: the prankumentary. Audiences, however, would be advised simply to enjoy the film on its face -- even if that face is a carefully contrived mask.
  39. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    The film is careful to avoid explicit political statement, but its reticence makes its critique of the Iranian regime all the more devastating.
  40. The Secret in Their Eyes
    An attractive, messy drama riddled with violence and edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics and three resonant, deeply appealing performances.
  41. Racing Dreams
    One of the rare documentaries you leave wishing it was a little bit longer.
  42. Solitary Man
    A sharp, small-scale comedy of male misbehavior that turns out to be one of this dreary spring’s pleasant cinematic surprises.
  43. The Adjustment Bureau
    One reason filmmakers like Mr. Nolfi seem attracted to Philip K. Dick's work, beyond the brilliance of its ideas, is that his unembellished writing style leaves them room to make the stories visually their own.
  44. Two in the Wave
    Two in the Wave honors that collaboration by carefully recounting its details and arguing for its significance. The films of Truffaut and Mr. Godard stand or fall by themselves, but together they made history.
  45. Father of My Children
    A tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!). Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.
  46. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    The movie is an entirely absorbing, occasionally revelatory portrait of a brilliant talent driven to greatness by an inner chorus of demons and angels.
  47. Winter's Bone
    The film's realism is a point of entry rather than the whole point of the exercise. Its setting is finally subordinate to the main character, as memorable and vivid a heroine as you are likely to see on screen this season.
  48. I Am Love
    Often soaringly beautiful melodrama.
  49. Let It Rain
    Needlessly complicated, life already has more than enough petty dramas. Let It Rain may not be funny in a ha-ha sense, but it gave me an amused open-mouthed appreciation of life’s absurdities, including unanticipated nuisances like bad weather.
  50. 45365
    Remarkable patchwork of unremarkable lives.
  51. Stonewall Uprising
    Methodically ticks off the forms of oppression visited on gays and lesbians in the days before the gay rights movement.
  52. Restrepo
    As the war in Afghanistan returns to the front pages and the national debate, we owe the men in Restrepo, at the very least, 90 minutes or so of our attention. If nothing else, this film, in showing how much they care about one another, demands the same of us.
  53. Wild Grass
    Like its would-be lovers, Wild Grass chases itself in circles as it scrambles genres, examining seeing, thinking, remembering and imagining with a zany awareness. In Georges's words: "After the cinema nothing surprises you. Everything is possible."
  54. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    At under 90 minutes, Around a Small Mountain is, by Mr. Rivette’s standards, a small vignette. It could have been —--and perhaps was -- part of something longer and more complex, but it stands as perfectly on its own as Pic St.-Loup, marvelous to contemplate and changing slightly every time you see it.
  55. Life During Wartime
    It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest.
  56. Spoken Word
    Strongly acted and beautifully photographed (by Virgil Mirano), Spoken Word is a quietly resonant family drama about the tug of old habits and the difficulties of escaping the past.
  57. Animal Kingdom
    The film's depiction of the raw fear lurking below the brothers' braggadocio is the most pronounced emotion in a movie whose focus on the personalities of its criminals suggests an Australian answer to "Goodfellas," minus the wise-guy humor.
  58. They Came to Play
    Mr. Rotaru paces the film perfectly, mixing performance footage with scenes of the competitors talking about their lives and the role music plays for them.
  59. A Film Unfinished
    Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach.
  60. The Tillman Story
    This devastating film persuasively portrays them (Tillman family) as finer, more morally sturdy people than the cynical chain of command that lied to them and used their son as a propaganda tool.
  61. The Social Network
    When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.
  62. Brotherhood
    If you compared the two main characters with the cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," they would be ignoble versions of Ennis del Mar (Jimmy) and Jack Twist (Lars). Like their American counterparts, they barely know what to do with their passion.
  63. Patrik Age 1.5
    Sweet, generous and tonally sure, Patrik, Age 1.5 has a nostalgic feel, and not just because of a soundtrack skewed toward last-millennium tunes and a hyperreal suburban setting lifted straight from "Pleasantville."
  64. Soul Kitchen
    Its insistent zaniness makes Soul Kitchen very different in spirit from Mr. Akin's two previous films, "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," which established him as a major European filmmaker. Seriously silly, it evokes the same high-spirited, pan-European multiculturalism in which people of all ages and backgrounds blithely traverse national borders as they aggressively pursue their destinies.
  65. Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
    These are vivid, flawed, even introspective characters. And they're classic American strivers. With rodeo, but not just that, they hope to go beyond where they have been.
  66. Let Me In
    The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.
  67. The Company Men
    The movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you're no longer doing it?
  68. Trust Us, This Is All Made Up
    A creative tour de force, an intellectual high-wire act as astonishing as it is entertaining.
  69. Vengeance
    Both newcomers to Mr. To and longtime admirers should be prepared for a master class in directing.
  70. Enter the Void
    With beauty, mild and sharp jolts, and mesmerizing camerawork, he (Gaspar Noe) tries to open the doors of perception.
  71. Waiting for 'Superman'
    By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.
  72. My Dog Tulip
    One of the most sophisticated dog movies ever created.
  73. Fair Game
    Things worked out between Joe and Valerie, and for their real-life models, who are now the subjects of a terrifically entertaining movie. But that does not mean that justice was done, or that truth prevailed.
  74. Marwencol
    Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.
  75. Carlos
    Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.
  76. Hereafter
    One of the reasons that Hereafter works as well as it does - it has the power to haunt the skeptical, to mystify the credulous and to fascinate everyone in between.
  77. For Colored Girls
    As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.
  78. Making the Boys
    Captivating documentary about the creation of, and reaction to, the breakthrough play "The Boys in the Band."
  79. The Fighter
    With solid bodywork, clever feints and tremendous heart, it scores at least a TKO, by which I mean both that it falls just short of overpowering greatness - I can't quite exclaim, "It's a knockout!" - and that the most impressive thing about it is technique.
  80. Boxing Gym
    Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.
  81. The Kids Grow Up
    You are not Doug Block, of course. Except to the extent - measured by the depth of your absorption in this remarkable film - that you are.
  82. Waste Land
    "We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials," Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker's inspiring documentary Waste Land.
  83. Four Lions
    A shockingly hilarious, stiletto-sharp satire directed by Chris Morris and written by a squad of British wits.
  84. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Visually distinctive and aurally delightful, "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench" has style to burn. A soulful black-and-white commentary on love, art and their competing demands, this Boston-based musical from Damien Chazelle floats on a wave of spontaneity and charm.
  85. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    The focus of this bizarre Finnish fairy tale - as black as anything the Brothers Grimm could have dreamed up - is a sinister old codger who chews off ears and whose demon minion kidnaps innocent children. Ho ho no!
  86. Red Hill
    Like the best westerns, Red Hill is a stripped-down morality tale; like the best horror movies, its true monsters remain cloaked until the final reel.
  87. A Small Act
    The film couldn't be more heartening - yes, individual actions do make a difference. But it's bittersweet as well. You can't help wondering about all the children who don't get tapped on the shoulder by the hand of fate.
  88. Family Affair
    The filmmaking is rough and rather clumsy, but by ceding the floor to his open, highly articulate sisters, Mr. Colvard has created a fascinatingly raw study of ferociously wielded male power.
  89. And Everything Is Going Fine
    This sense of intimacy makes And Everything Is Going Fine both vibrant - what amazing company this man was! - and terribly sad.
  90. Hadewijch
    If Hadewijch is Mr. Dumont's most overtly religious film, it is not pro-faith in any specific way, although the director clearly respects the religious impulse.
  91. Nénette
    Beautiful in its minimalism, Nénette is no antizoo rant but a melancholy meditation on captivity.
  92. The Woodmans
    Family dynamics examined through the prism of art: The Woodmans, C. Scott Willis's compelling documentary study of an artistic clan whose comfortable life was shattered by the suicide of its youngest member, asks profound questions to which there really are no answers.
  93. 13 Assassins
    A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood.
  94. Cold Weather
    With no grand speeches or oversized gestures, Mr. Katz creates a specific world that gracefully enlarges with universal meaning.
  95. Strongman
    Though filming his hulking hero off and on for nine long years, he (Levy) has created a work that feels remarkably out of time, a snapshot of a man - and a relationship - running in circles.
  96. Cedar Rapids
    Tim isn't super anything (though he proves heroic), and what makes Cedar Rapids a low-wattage pleasure is its insistence that his ordinariness - with his decency and sense of wonder - is pretty extraordinary.
  97. Putty Hill
    Putty Hill doesn't strive for overt social commentary. It drops you into a world that the director, who grew up in the area, knows firsthand: a suburban fringe of stasis, downward mobility and lowered expectations.
  98. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    Childhood ends, this time forever, with tears and howls, swirls of smoke, the shock of mortality and bittersweet smiles in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the grave, deeply satisfying final movie in the series.
  99. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    Splendidly panoramic. The scenes of Columbus's arrival and of his imperialist and religious sloganeering, and of the carnage he wreaks, have a grandeur and a force reminiscent of Terrence Malick films. The segments about the chaotic water riots have a documentary immediacy.
  100. Warrior
    It is appropriately blunt, powerful and relentless, a study of male bodies in sweaty motion and masculine emotions in teary turmoil.
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