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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  1. Batman Forever
    As for the actual movie, it's the empty-calorie equivalent of a Happy Meal (another Batman tie-in), so clearly a product that the question of its cinematic merit is strictly an afterthought.
  2. Milan Hlavsa a Plastic People of the Universe
    In short, here is a VH1 "Behind the Music" special that has something a little more special behind it: music that didn't sell many records but helped change a nation.
  3. Crying Ladies
    Its most winning attribute is a kind of sloppy, unassuming friendliness, a likability aptly reflected in its characters.
  4. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
    Your last day - or, as it happens, the whole planet's last day - will be just like every other one. Mr. Ferrara makes this point with ingenuity and characteristic thrift by using found news footage to provide images of apocalypse.
  5. He's Way More Famous Than You
    This frenetic movie has moments of wit, and Ms. Feiffer, a seasoned screen and Broadway performer, has range, stamina and charisma.
  6. Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen
    In its allegiance to detail, the film is too long and perhaps overstates its case in claiming that later generations have lost an understanding of common courage, as depicted by these two artists. Their work endures, and so does what they stood for.
  7. 12-12-12
    12-12-12 is not really a concert movie so much as it is a densely compacted scrapbook of moments onstage and off.
  8. A Will for the Woods
    It’s possible to admire the four directors’ unflinching depiction of the dying process, but the film is mostly unilluminating and grim — not least because almost all of the deaths discussed are untimely.
  9. Going Away
    It’s a quietly compelling story.
  10. Love Beats Rhymes
    The script by Nicole Jefferson Asher toggles between sharp observations about wordcraft and some “Dynasty”- or Tyler Perry-level soap operatics. RZA’s direction lacks visual personality, but he keeps the narrative moving and elicits strong performances from his cast.
  11. Free to Run
    Free to Run prefers nothing more than an easy jog down memory lane.
  12. The Paris Opera
    The Paris Opera feels at once sprawling and insufficiently patient.
  13. Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    In retrospect, the sheer amount of gush in the movie, all the praise and feverish shouts of bravo, underscores the limits of affirmational documentaries. It is also a reminder that a movie’s meaning is made (and remade) by its viewers, not just its content.
  14. F.I.S.T.
    F.I.S.T. is a big movie that benefits more from the accumulation of small, ordinary detail than from any particular wit or inspiration of vision. It's also played with great conviction by its huge cast.
  15. Fritz the Cat
    A low, bawdy cartoon feature that hasn't forgotten that there still can be something uniquely funny in animated films that exaggerate human actions and emotions (in this case, love, rage, compassion and, especially, lust) to the extraordinary extents available only in cartoons.
  16. Fade to Black
    The trouble with Fade to Black is that it's supposed to be a thriller. It's much more amusing than it is scary, although the killings are gory enough to be borderline vile. [17 Oct 1980, p.C5]
    • The New York Times
  17. Blessed Child
    Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The House of the Seven Gables
    Dreary and slightly stale fare.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Evil of Frankenstein
    With the pace held in smooth rein by the director, Freddie Francis, the picture begins to say something about superstition and hypocrisy. Then it simply goes hog-wild (monster gets drunk) and heads for the ash heap, along with Mr. Gushing and his barbecued menace. 
  20. The Brady Bunch Movie
    The movie manages to be painless and pointless in equal measure.
  21. All Is Bright
    A sardonic, smart screwball comedy.
  22. Pontypool
    A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.
  23. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    “The War of the Rohirrim” is worth a watch for the Tolkien faithful, especially as a fresh way to adapt the author’s work.
  24. Trespass
    With the exception of a running gag about the gangsters' use of cellular telephones, the film is singularly humorless. Though full of the kind of simulated violence achieved by special-effects artists, it's not too heavy on suspense. Everything in the screenplay seems arbitrary, including the firefighting jobs assigned to the two would-be treasure-seekers.
  25. Art School Confidential
    In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility.
  26. Ricki and the Flash
    Ricki’s attitudes, and their place in the family and the society she inhabits, are the most interesting part of the movie, or at least they would be if Ms. Cody and Mr. Demme were not so weirdly conflict-averse.
  27. Life Stinks
    Even more dispiriting than the film's silly moments are its pious ones. Only at rare moments does Life Stinks offer much in the way of surprise or grace.
  28. So I Married an Axe Murderer
    It comes as a welcome surprise that "So I Married an Axe Murderer," which might have been nothing more than a by-the-numbers star vehicle, surrounds Mr. Myers with amusing cameos and gives him a chance to do more than just coast.
  29. Save the Date
    The reunion of Ms. Caplan and Mr. Starr, cast mates on Starz network's "Party Down," seemed intriguing. That series, though, with all the fizz and social comedy that this movie lacks, was a better showcase for them.
  30. Sparkle
    In many ways Sparkle is a bumpy ride. The editing is haphazard, the cinematography too dark, and there are holes in the story. If the new songs on the soundtrack are effective Motown pastiches, most of them pale beside their prototypes. But diluted Motown is better than none.
  31. The Devil's Rejects
    The Devil's Rejects is a trompe l'oeil experiment in deliberately retro filmmaking. It looks sensational, but there is a curious emptiness at its core.
  32. The Name of the Rose
    The movie is full of the kind of atmosphere that can be created by elaborate sets, dim lighting and misty landscapes, though it has no singular character or dominant mood.
  33. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    It’s hard to score big laughs with hidden-camera material these days because there has been so much of it since the “Jackass” TV show, but Mr. Knoxville and his young sidekick still land a few jaw-droppers.
  34. 10 Items or Less
    This is a picture with nothing to prove, and not all that much to say, but its modesty and good humor make it hard to resist.
  35. Hands of Stone
    Hands of Stone...is absolutely a boxing movie. A corny and sometimes clumsy one, it scatters pleasures here and there, Mr. De Niro’s alert performance among them.
  36. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    Erratically paced and with a pitch-black heart, the movie manipulates at every turn.
  37. A Walk in the Clouds
    Here, instead, is Keanu Reeves in one of his off roles, sleepwalking dutifully but seeming to share the audience's bewilderment over how he wound up in this awkward, slow-moving story.
  38. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Content to be yet another great-man biopic, the movie would rather sanitize than probe.
  39. Stockholm
    Drowsy in feel and muted in color, Stockholm is lightly amusing and watchable — mostly thanks to Hawke — but never makes the case that this is a story that needed to be told, with or without laughs.
  40. 12 Strong
    For devotees of cinematic blowouts and dedicated students of screen masculinity (like me), 12 Strong is premium, Grade A catnip. Directed by the newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig, it is generally watchable, if unsurprisingly easier on the eyes than on the ears or brain.
  41. Melinda and Melinda
    As he (Allen) interweaves two versions of the Melinda story, one meant to be bathed in pathos, the other sprinkled with whimsy, it becomes apparent that his notions of comedy and tragedy do not quite correspond either to scholarly dogma or to everyday usage.
  42. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.
  43. Friday
    Friday may touch its young target audience. For everyone else, it is more intriguing as a social problem than a movie.
  44. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    The two stars are attractive, and Emily Ting, who wrote and directed, makes the city look great, but during their endless strolling Ruby and Josh never get much beyond shallow banter.
  45. Too Late
    Mr. Hauck’s affection is apparent in every frame, yet outside of an occasionally clunky line or show-offy moment (O.K., sometimes it’s more occasional than just occasionally), he rarely allows it to alter his aim. That aim is to make a modern noir. That aim is true.
  46. Nice Dreams
    If marijuana has a way of heightening the hilarious aspects of things that might not otherwise be funny, then this is very much a marijuana movie. But Nice Dreams also has a more general appeal than that. These are high spirits that don't have to do with being high.
  47. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
    The film strains to inject even a modicum of drama.
  48. The Treatment
    A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated.
  49. All the Wilderness
    Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.
  50. No Mercy
    No Mercy is a passionate film noir that depends heavily upon Mr. Gere to give it credence, and Mr. Gere delivers.
  51. Love Etc.
    That things tend not to end, or bode, well doesn't detract from the overall Hallmark vibe.
  52. Everything's Cool
    Just below the movie’s attitude of pep-rally cheer is a mood that approaches despair. Mr. Gelbspan has probably amassed as much hard evidence of climate change as anyone alive.
  53. Down the Shore
    The director, Harold Guskin, and writer, Sandra Jennings, show admirable patience in letting the story unspool, and the actors reward them.
  54. Toad Road
    Mr. Banker teases us with a dizzy, dislocating shooting style that throws up a succession of eerily arresting images. Even so, his film never overcomes the fact that watching drugged-out wastrels is rarely interesting — unless, of course, you’re one of them.
  55. Kid Cannabis
    The film’s main distraction, oddly, is the voice-over through which Nate annotates the action. A voice-over is standard procedure for the wistful-look-back genre, but here it’s forced and unfunny. This wild story sells itself, no narration needed.
  56. The Falling Star
    The Falling Star offers little in the way of dramatic tension or intrigue, and its comedy, mildly clever at first, starts to feel repetitive. The word “tedious” popped into my mind a few times, perhaps because the world of the film is so small that it starts to feel airless and lacking in surprise.
  57. No Exit
    No Exit drops an arsenal of twists and rug-pulls at a machine gun’s pace, though Power, the director, doesn’t quite know how to milk the tension, and the perfunctory script (written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari) tries and fails to give the events a greater resonance.
  58. Arthur the King
    Wahlberg and company manage to hold your attention, and not just because there’s a cute dog in the frame.
  59. How to Be a Latin Lover
    The whole enterprise is so fundamentally good-natured and fluffy that it’s sometimes hard to stay annoyed by it.
  60. Song of the South
    Apparently the Disney wonder-workers are just a lot of conventional hacks when it comes to telling a story with actors instead of cartoons.
  61. Hamlet 2
    It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows.
  62. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    The film is more a patched-together collection of anecdotes than a coherent story, and some of Greg's tribulations, like fear over a high dive and an amusement-park ride, don't seem age-appropriate for a boy who has just finished seventh grade.
  63. Brighton Beach Memoirs
    Neil Simon is hardly Norman Rockwell, but his Brighton Beach Memoirs has a warmly nostalgic quality, something that has traveled very nicely to the screen...A film of surprisingly gentle charms. Mr. Simon's humor is much in evidence, but it is not the film's strongest selling point. Even more effective are the sense of a place and a way of life long vanished and the care and affection with which they have been summoned up.
  64. Gardens of Stone
    Though a seriously conceived film about the American experience in Vietnam, Gardens of Stone has somehow wound up having the consistency and the kick of melted vanilla ice cream.
  65. Yanks
    Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.
  66. 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.
  67. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    This violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny.
  68. The Tracey Fragments
    In the hands of a more literal-minded filmmaker The Tracey Fragments might well have been dreary and unbearable, a chronicle of florid self-pity justified by arbitrary cruelty. Instead it is fierce, enigmatic and affecting.
  69. When Animals Dream
    When Animals Dream is a beguiling parable of cruelty and the resistance to it. Its special effects are pretty minimal, its scope is modest, and it is, in the end, more touching than terrifying, intent on jolting its audience not with dread but with compassion.
  70. Uncle Kent 2
    Uncle Kent 2, directed (for the most part) by Todd Rohal from Mr. Osborne’s script, is a funnier and more imaginative film than its predecessor, but it’s still what you might call a niche proposition.
  71. House of Darkness
    Here is House of Darkness anyway, a talky, allegorical horror film that delivers plenty of LaBute’s typically sharp irony and observations but little raison d’être. It is sometimes insightful, just not about women, who outnumber the men three to one.
  72. Nr. 10
    What the film ultimately becomes — a sci-fi mystery, a smirking satire of religion — doesn’t possess enough actual narrative meat, formal style, or wit to justify its structural gambit.
  73. Strays
    Over the next 90-plus minutes, the canines drop as many F-bombs as Pacino did in “Scarface.” Then there are the scatological jokes, each one more outlandish than the last, none bearing the slightest tinge of wit or joy.
  74. Puccini for Beginners
    It all looks easy when it's carried off this smoothly. But as any number of stilted duds can attest, applying a Philip Barry or Woody Allen sensibility to 21st-century New Yorkers in their 30s is as delicate a craft as diamond cutting.
  75. Get Smart
    It flounders whenever it tries to weave the real world into its fantasia, partly because it isn't really about anything other than making money, partly because the spy-versus-spy battle doesn't entertain the way it once did.
  76. Firebrand
    Law (and his director, Karim Aïnouz) might be laying it on thick, but his grotesque tyrant is the only thing lifting this dreary, ahistoric drama out of its narrative doldrums.
  77. Dear Mr. Watterson
    But viewers looking to learn more about Mr. Watterson and his creation than what’s contained in his Wikipedia entry may come away as hopped-up with impatience as Calvin when confronted by parental indifference.
  78. Memories of Me
    A film that assumes it's up to the job of dealing with life and death and love, but is not even up to dealing with lobsters.
  79. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    Has some delicious moments, but you never quite shake the feeling that it’s documenting a tempest in a teapot.
  80. Nutcrackers
    The film gets better whenever Stiller recedes into the background, but the movie’s insistence on Michael’s redemption story as the main narrative thread hurts it. It’s impossible to care too much about this pompous, uptight, strangely boring guy. Especially because we know how his story will end.
  81. The Château
    Here is one performer (Testud) whose features -- small sad eyes, sharp nose, wide rueful smile -- can sustain a feature by themselves.
  82. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    Flailing and pummeling the air, with body language that's part prizefighter, part baggy-pants clown, Reno is famous for her bluntness.
  83. Julien Donkey-Boy
    The territory where the circus sideshow meets the avant-garde...visually arresting, dramatically blurry.
  84. Return to Me
    Weightless and polite when it means to be magical and gentle, Return to Me is a piece of fruit gone soft from being off the vine too long.
  85. Chuen jik sat sau
    Perhaps the directors are under the delusion that the dodging and leaping can make up for an ending that leaves the cast members of "Killer" adrift and nearly scratching their heads in puzzlement.
  86. From Hell
    So beautifully realized as a mood piece that it takes a while for a slight disappointment to register.
  87. Let's Get Frank
    Has no interest in exploring Mr. Frank's family background or love life. This frustrating lack of context leaves you wanting a lot more in the way of texture.
  88. The Bread, My Sweet
    Pretty much of a mess, full of narrative gaps and characters who arbitrarily appear and disappear. But it is at least a sweet, good-natured mess, with none of the overcalculation and condescending cynicism the same material would almost certainly bring out in a Hollywood production.
  89. Johnny Dangerously
    Johnny Dangerously winds down as it moves along, eventually descending to a lowest common denominator of dopey adolescent gags that overpower the parody. Still, even at its thinnest, it remains good-humored and intermittently entertaining.
  90. LBJ
    Directed by Rob Reiner from Joey Hartstone’s script, LBJ is a frustratingly underdeveloped vehicle for Mr. Harrelson’s talents as well as an unfortunate missed opportunity.
  91. Whole New Thing
    This movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society.
  92. The First Purge
    Even the most ardent fan could find its bluntness uncomfortably timely: In our build-that-wall moment, a story about a government-sponsored plan to cull poor minorities feels less like political satire than current-affairs commentary.
  93. Blue Chips
    Only late in the game do they make an unforgivable mistake. Blue Chips falls apart when the film makers, figuratively speaking, haul their soapbox right onto the court. Most of the time, Blue Chips is too energetic to sound self-righteous.
  94. Fierce People
    When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich “are different from you and me,” he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.
  95. Cymbeline
    Cymbeline has been branded a tragedy, a tragicomedy and a romance, and Mr. Almereyda embraces all three categories. The movie is by turns grim, grimly amusing and romantic, sometimes at once.
  96. Night of the Living Dead
    [A] witty, entertaining remake.
  97. The Walrus and the Whistleblower
    Frustratingly, the documentary declines to probe Demers’s evolving relationship to his activism and newfound fame.
  98. The Road Dance
    Shifting between stagy sincerity and startling realism (the labor scene is particularly colorful), The Road Dance is a vividly rendered, if ultimately schematic portrait of feminine resilience.
  99. Wingwomen
    The Frenchwomen twist on the supersquad action movie has its charms, but it’s not enough to eclipse the script’s uninspired angles.
  100. The Misfortunates
    They drink at the pub, they drink at home. They drink until they pass out and then, after they have had a good vomit, they drink again. If that sounds too disgusting to watch, it almost is.
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