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. Forever Strong
    A mawkish drama hobbled by a thoroughly unpleasant and uncharismatic lead performance.
  2. Miracle at St. Anna
    It is in the fragile bonds that form between the black soldiers and the Italian villagers that Miracle at St. Anna breaks free of its own grandiosity and tells a grounded, moving, human story. Not a miracle by any means, but an earthy inquiry into death, duty, friendship and honor. What we’ve always wanted from war movies.
  3. Choke
    It adds up to an entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado.
  4. Nights in Rodanthe
    It's no wonder the faithful continue to forsake the movies, given junky embarrassments like Nights in Rodanthe.
  5. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    It's like being trapped in a roomful of teenage girls for 80 minutes.
  6. Humboldt County
    These characters are fully alive. But the movie attaches them to a conventional, not to say creaky, hip-meets-square drama.
  7. Obscene
    A warm, entertaining compendium of counterculture voices and literary landmarks.
  8. Shoot on Sight
    The movie's lack of subtlety is countered by an unswerving commitment to impartiality.
  9. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Generous in spirit and nimble in technique, this riveting documentary about the Republican operative (who died of a brain tumor in 1991) reveals a scrappy genius rife with contradictions.
  10. Elite Squad
    A relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil.
  11. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    A gentle, pleasantly unrushed piece of moviemaking. There’s a tonic simplicity to how it gets the job done, and if the film comes off as fairly conventional stuff, it nevertheless succeeds on its own modest, middlebrow terms.
  12. Appaloosa
    The movie's tolerant, good-humored view of its characters drains it of some dramatic intensity, but Mr. Harris seems more interested in piquant, offhand moments than in big, straining confrontations.
  13. Battle in Seattle
    A drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.
  14. The Duchess
    An overstuffed, intellectually underbaked portrait of a poor little rich girl.
  15. Hounddog
    Hounddog is never more than a sluggish dawdle from shack to swimmin' hole and back again.
  16. Lakeview Terrace
    A passable piece of hackwork, with some adequately suspenseful passages and a few mild shocks near the end. But the psychological dimensions of the story are so risible, and its supposed insights into race and class so wrongheaded and ugly, that irritation trumps enjoyment.
  17. Ghost Town
    A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy Ghost Town, they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory.
  18. Igor
    An animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life.
  19. My Best Friend's Girl
    A date not entirely to be skipped. It's a movie tailor-made for those who think it's a turn-on to passionately kiss someone to whom they've just said, "I hate you."
  20. All of Us
    This powerful, conceptually sure film is relevant beyond the concerns of the moment as both a model of documentary method and compassionate social filmmaking.
  21. Fraulein
    An intimate, elusive drama about the boundaries of friendship and nationality, Fräulein presents immigrant lives with significantly more empathy than detail. For some, though, the movie’s narrative shorthand will be enough.
  22. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency.
  23. Burn After Reading
    The clubby, predictably self-amused comedy from Joel and Ethan Coen, has a tricky plot, visual style, er, to burn, but so little heart as to warrant a Jarvik 8.
  24. Christmas on Mars
    Forget plot. It’s all about textures.
  25. Flow: For Love of Water
    Irena Salina's astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests.
  26. Moving Midway
    May not advance any grand new thesis about the South and its history, but it turns an old house into a rich and strange repository of local knowledge.
  27. Towelhead
    A crude but scathing portrait of suburban life.
  28. The Family That Preys
    The suds that cascade through Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys more than equal the cubic footage from nighttime soaps like "Dallas," "Dynasty" and their offspring.
  29. Righteous Kill
    A clutter of recycled cop-movie and serial-killer film clichés.
  30. The Women
    A witless, straining mess.
  31. Forgiveness
    The message may be clear -- suppress the past at your peril -- but the execution is a mess. As for the line-dancing soldiers, your guess is as good as mine.
  32. Everybody Wants to Be Italian
    Features annoying characters navigating unbelievable situations.
  33. Mister Foe
    If the extremity of Hallam's temperament tests the limits of our sympathy as well as our credulity, Mr. Bell's ability to seem by turns sweet and scary prevents us from losing interest entirely.
  34. Ping Pong Playa
    A bright, nimble diversion, a quick-witted picture that's fast on its feet.
  35. Save Me
    Never quite shakes off its aura of second-rate made-for-TV movie, Save Me has a lot of heart but little nerve and no surprise.
  36. Bangkok Dangerous
    Of all the shoddy, insipid qualities of Bangkok Dangerous, the most egregious is the most fundamental: The film is simply dreadful to look at.
  37. A Secret
    Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.
  38. August Evening
    A film of noble intentions that eventually wears out its welcome.
  39. 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.
  40. Babylon A.D.
    Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity."
  41. I Served the King of England
    The performance of Mr. Barnev, who has the poker face and agility of a silent clown, defines the style of a film whose timing and physical comedy look back to 1920s slapstick.
  42. 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.
  43. College
    Strains to sell itself as one crazy ride (raging parties! hot lesbian sex! bare breasts!), and chances are it won't disappoint those looking solely for unadulterated raunch.
  44. Disaster Movie
    Does little more than congratulate its audience on recognizing the source of its riffs. "High School Musical" -- ha ha ha!
  45. My Mexican Shivah
    Any comedy that can combine death, abortion, Jewish ritual and a mariachi band without curdling into complete lunacy deserves a modicum of respect. In the case of My Mexican Shivah, more would be pushing it.
  46. Year of the Fish
    Packs more sadness than the familiar fairy tale but offers its own fantastical delights. Ye Xian's party dress, made of teardrops, suits her -- and her story -- perfectly.
  47. Traitor
    A somber, absorbing and only moderately preposterous new thriller.
  48. Death Race
    The movie is legitimately greasy, authentically nasty, with a good old-fashioned sense of laying waste to everything in sight -- including the shallow philosophizing and computer-generated fakery that have overrun the summer blockbuster.
  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. The Longshots
    What makes this one different? Absolutely nothing. (Sure, it's based on a true story, but I mean come on, whatever.)
  51. Hamlet 2
    It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows.
  52. Trouble the Water
    They have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts’s visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama.
  53. I.O.U.S.A.
    Equal parts enlightening and alarming.
  54. 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.
  55. The Rocker
    Most disappointingly, the music is tepid, mediocre pop pastiche.
  56. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
    As a mechanical thrill ride, The Clone Wars has an uncluttered look and furious pace that make it more or less as satisfying as its wildly overdesigned predecessors.
  57. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Although Vicky Cristina trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its locations and stars -- and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply -- it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss.
  58. Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    One of the most undermotivated plots in many a moon, the zero-wit, zero-gravity misadventures of Nat, I.Q. and Scooter are embarked on merely because they're bored on their garbage dump.
  59. Mirrors
    A minor chiller and major downer from the talented Alexandre Aja.
  60. Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer
    Harks back to the drive-in classics of yesteryear with unapologetic nostalgia and undisguised affection.
  61. Henry Poole Is Here
    The film's spiritual deck is stacked. In the mawkish tradition of movies like "Simon Birch," "Wide Awake," "August Rush" and "Hearts in Atlantis," Henry Poole Is Here is insufferable hokum that takes itself very, very seriously.
  62. The Girl Cut in Two
    An erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.
  63. 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.
  64. Bachna Ae Haseeno
    An amiable romantic comedy.
  65. Tropic Thunder
    A flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry.
  66. Elegy
    The problem with Elegy has nothing to do with faithfulness and everything to do with interpretation. The film is an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel.
  67. Beautiful Losers
    Though Mr. Rose can't be blamed for waxing nostalgic, he can't much expect us to care about so fawning and self-serving a document.
  68. Hell Ride
    It's depressingly self-conscious and turgid, and a cast that includes Dennis Hopper, David Carradine, Michael Madsen and Eric Balfour can't drag Hell Ride out of the mire.
  69. Red
    Once Avery's mission assumes a Freudian dimension, the allegory loses its moral force and changes from a meditation on justice, power and inequality into a gory melodrama.
  70. What We Do Is Secret
    The movie offers too little of Crash's justly revered lyricism and too much of his self-mutilation and manufactured chaos.
  71. Last Stop for Paul
    An overall sense that the movie was infinitely more fun to make than it is to watch.
  72. Pineapple Express
    It's an unshowy, generous performance [by Franco] and it greatly humanizes a movie that, as it shifts genre gears and cranks up the noise, becomes disappointingly sober and self-serious.
  73. Bottle Shock
    Bottle Shock is unable to figure out what kind of movie it wants to be, and flops around between madcap comedy and rousing drama. To borrow a wine-snob term of art, it lacks structure.
  74. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Observed through emotional gauze, its four likable women are symbolic cheerleaders for personal loyalty and wholesome living.
  75. Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    A lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.
  76. Frozen River
    Ms. Hunt's eye for detail has the precision of a short story writer's. She misses nothing.
  77. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    The kindest thing to be said for this frantic, cluttered mess of cheesy computer-generated action-adventure clichés is that at least you can see how the estimated $175 million budget was spent.
  78. Swing Vote
    A mainstream, eager-to-please, relatively generic endeavor, not an auteurist showcase.
  79. Sixty Six
    Charts a sentimental struggle toward manhood with period-appropriate charm.
  80. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    In Search of a Midnight Kiss has its derivative moments along with awkward patches -- the inelegantly shaped climax tries to force uninteresting parallels between the two central couples -- it manages the difficult task of creating a sustained, plausible and inviting world.
  81. America the Beautiful
    Clueless, directionless and altogether pointless.
  82. Man on Wire
    Thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary.
  83. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show’s first feature-film incarnation, "The X-Files."
  84. Step Brothers
    They're losers that only a mother, an entertainment manager or a gang of self-satisfied comedy insiders could love.
  85. Baghead
    The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass.
  86. Brideshead Revisited
    Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons.
  87. Bustin' Down the Door
    The darker side of the story -- how the advent of pro surfing was taken as an act of cultural colonialism by some of the locals -- adds gravity to this otherwise lightweight, if amiable summer diversion.
  88. No Regret
    It is perverse that a movie concerned with objectification would reduce its hero to an object.
  89. The Order of Myths
    Eschewing voice-over or any obvious trace of an on-screen or off-screen presence, she (Brown) lets her images, a little text and other people do the talking for her. Her quiet has its own force.
  90. American Teen
    This is the kind of movie the people in it might have made, which means that its revelatory power as an investigation of teenage life in America is limited.
  91. Canary
    In images veering from literal to cryptic to surreal, the movie presents a society where the weak are exploited and the vulnerable unprotected.
  92. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    Has some delicious moments, but you never quite shake the feeling that it’s documenting a tempest in a teapot.
  93. Boy A
    Mr. Garfield's performance makes Jack so endearing and vulnerable that as he takes his first wobbly steps, like a baby bird shoved from its nest, your instincts are protective.
  94. The Dark Knight
    Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind.
  95. Mamma Mia!
    You can have a perfectly nice time watching this spirited adaptation of the popular stage musical and, once the hangover wears off, acknowledge just how bad it is.
  96. Space Chimps
    If "Wall-E" pushes the boundaries of what can be done in an animated movie, Space Chimps proves that the old formula is still pretty effective when executed well.
  97. A Very British Gangster
    Plays less like a documentary than an E! exposé of lowlife skulduggery.
  98. Felon
    Mr. Dorff’s hot-wired portrayal of a prisoner under physical and psychic siege gives Felon its emotional through line as Wade’s attitude metamorphoses from stunned disbelief, to terror, to despair, to fury and finally to hope.
  99. Berlin
    As a cautionary tale Lou Reed’s Berlin is an 85-minute public-service announcement that preaches "Just say no." The force of the music, however, lends this tawdry melodrama a tragic stature.
  100. Take
    Subjective or not, the movie is a bore and an eyesore.
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