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. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.
  2. Roman de gare
    A thriller, a murder mystery and a somewhat self-conscious literary puzzle. All of that is entertaining enough, if a bit preposterous and overdone, but the twists and convolutions of the film’s beginning and end enable a middle that is dizzying domestic comedy.
  3. Standard Operating Procedure
    A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.
  4. Then She Found Me
    Then She Found Me, a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment.
  5. Up the Yangtze
    An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.
  6. 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.
  7. Tashan
    Vijay Krishna Acharya, an accomplished screenwriter making his directing debut, seems eager to show that he can deliver a movie in the high style -- bright, pop and technically sophisticated -- to which Bollywood has become accustomed.
  8. Stuff and Dough
    The brilliance of Stuff and Dough is that it wraps this powerful, disturbing drama in an anecdote from ordinary life. As is often the case in recent Romanian movies, the acting is so accomplished as to be invisible.
  9. 88 Minutes
    Although it's often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, 88 Minutes is mostly just a slog.
  10. The Forbidden Kingdom
    A faithful and disarmingly earnest attempt to honor some venerable and popular Chinese cinematic traditions.
  11. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Does not entirely play by the established conventions of its genre. Its willingness to explore states of feeling and modes of behavior that tamer romantic comedies never go near is decidedly a virtue, though this same sense of daring and candor also exposes its limitations.
  12. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.”
  13. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    The facetiousness of this project is charming at first -- as is the conceit of depicting the hunt for Mr. bin Laden using video-game animation -- but the charm wears off pretty quickly.
  14. Zombie Strippers!
    Strewn with some surprisingly decent effects, this unevenly paced film delivers, if nothing else, on the promise of its title: lots of surgically enhanced nude dead women strutting their stuff.
  15. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    Expelled is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike.
  16. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Much like its subject: affable, quotable and emotionally guarded in the extreme.
  17. Anamorph
    Mr. Miller and his co-writer, Tom Phelan, manage to get under your skin largely with borrowed implements, though they receive solid support from Willem Dafoe and the resourceful veteran cinematographer Fred Murphy.
  18. The First Saturday in May
    There are a lot of horses but absolutely no sense in The First Saturday in May, a glib, lazy documentary about six trainers on the proverbial road to the 2006 Kentucky Derby.
  19. Dark Matter
    Dark Matter, with its view of cutthroat politics and competing egos inside a university, is also laudable in its refusal to soft-pedal the viciously petty side of the academic fishbowl.
  20. Prom Night
    The movie offers less gore than the average Band-Aid commercial and fewer scares than the elimination episodes of "Dancing With the Stars."
  21. Street Kings
    It’s easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end.
  22. The Visitor
    The curious thing about The Visitor is that even as it goes more or less where you think it will, it still manages to surprise you along the way.
  23. Chaos Theory
    A predictable romantic dramedy that isn’t particularly tender, moving or amusing, Chaos Theory suffers first and foremost from featuring the least engaging couple to headline a movie in some time.
  24. The Take
    Occasionally the visuals seem overly stylized, but Mr. Furman knows enough to showcase his stars’ unvarnished performances.
  25. 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.
  26. Smart People
    The great virtue of Smart People, attributable to Noam Murro’s easygoing direction as well as to Mr. Poirier’s wandering screenplay, lies in its general preference for small insights over grand revelations.
  27. Remember the Daze
    A generally entertaining but half-baked variation on Richard Linklater’s high school period piece, “Dazed and Confused” (made in 1993, set in 1976), Remember the Daze (set in 1999) takes its cue from the earlier film in an excess of ways.
  28. Body of War
    There is another body of war at issue here, however, and it’s this body that throws the documentary off kilter and eventually off course: Congress.
  29. Young@Heart
    The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor.
  30. Flight of the Red Balloon
    In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.
  31. Meduzot
    The film’s spirit is refreshingly playful and sweet.
  32. Leatherheads
    What is harder to comprehend is how Mr. Clooney turned out such a sloppy, haphazard and tonally incoherent piece of work. Leatherheads lurches hectically between Coen brothers-style pastiche and John Saylesian didacticism, while Mr. Clooney works his brow and his jaw and waits in vain for his charm to kick in and save the day.
  33. Meet Bill
    Harnessing mostly fine actors to a wholly asinine script, the directors, Melisa Wallack and Bernie Goldmann, have created a movie as spineless and dithering as its benighted namesake.
  34. My Blueberry Nights
    After 90 minutes of My Blueberry Nights, which pass pleasantly enough, with swirly, mood-saturated colors; lovely faces; and nice music, you may feel a bit logy yourself -- filled up, sugar-addled, but not really satisfied.
  35. Nim's Island
    Sweet but ho-hum adaptation of Wendy Orr’s novel, a comedy-adventure that never quite finds its tone.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Ruins
    More disgusting than scary, The Ruins is the latest in a long line of horror films about upper-middle-class travelers being terrorized in unfamiliar environments.
  37. Sex and Death 101
    The appealing Mr. Baker never manages to find the right tone for the material, partly because he’s been seriously miscast (he radiates too much decency and intelligence for the role), though more because Mr. Waters never establishes a coherent tone for either the character or his situation.
  38. Shine a Light
    As the director of the documentary Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese is a besotted rock ’n’ roll fan who wholeheartedly embraces its mythology.
  39. Water Lilies
    Water Lilies is a nice, watchable, attractive, minor work. What it lacks is a sense of purpose, a commitment not just to its characters but also to its own reason for being.
  40. Tuya's Marriage
    Mr. Wang and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (“Farewell My Concubine”), portray a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being and the same demons — greed, lust, jealousy and despair -- that drive everybody.
  41. Flawless
    A mildly diverting period heist movie.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Run, Fatboy, Run
    The kind of movie that’s apt to be dismissed a goofy lark. It is that. But it’s also a rare comedy that believes in its own message, and that could inspire the depressed and the demoralized to grit their teeth and keep running.
  43. 21
    Greed is good and comes without a hint of conscience in 21, a feature-length bore about some smarty-pants who take Vegas for a ride.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chapter 27
    Except for Judah Friedlander’s earthy, funny work as a paparazzo, most of the performances are vague and dull, including Lindsay Lohan’s supporting turn as a fictional Beatles fan who befriends Mr. Chapman.
  45. The Cool School
    The Cool School, is, well, cool, but it’s also fairly parochial.
  46. My Brother Is an Only Child
    A lively minor addendum to the grand tradition of Italian fraternal cinema.
  47. Priceless
    The movie is an amusing ball of fluff that refuses to judge its characters’ amoral high jinks. Winking at the vanity of wealthy voluptuaries and hustlers playing games of tainted love, it heaves a sigh and says welcome to the human comedy.
  48. Stop-Loss
    Ms. Peirce’s movie, which she wrote with Mark Richard, is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions.
  49. Superhero Movie
    No real mockery is intended by this harmless, mindless grab bag of slightly used gags, which lampoons some of the conventions of recent comic-book epics and adds the expected staples of juvenile humor: urine, vomit and intestinal gas.
  50. Hats Off
    Ten years in the making, Hats Off is a documentary tribute to the 93-year-old actress Mimi Weddell, one of those people for whom the word “individual” seems especially apt.
  51. Alexandra
    A film of startling originality and beauty -- feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shotgun Stories
    The film is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Drillbit Taylor
    So ploddingly directed (by Steven Brill) and lazily written that it adds up to little more than a diffuse collection of second-hand gags and jokes, few of them funny.
  54. The Grand
    The actors certainly look as if they’re having a good time, and if you’re in the right mood, you might too.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hammer
    Rambling and disorganized. At the same time, though, The Hammer also has dry wit and unforced working-class swagger, and hits some surprising emotional notes.
  56. Shelter
    Coming out has rarely looked so pretty.
  57. Meet the Browns
    What he serves up -- a mixture of moralism and forgiveness, semibawdy humor and cautionary drama, mockery and affection -- may sometimes lack coherence, but never integrity.
  58. Shutter
    The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from “Psycho,” and draws unease from Jane’s disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie’s most fascinating player.
  59. Boarding Gate
    Even in Boarding Gate, a modestly scaled, self-consciously tawdry exercise in genre appropriation, Mr. Assayas manages to say more about what it is to be human -- to desire, to fear, to be alone -- than most filmmakers say in a lifetime.
  60. Love Songs
    The girl-boy-girl threesome, which turns out to be short-lived, is perhaps the most straightforward emotional configuration in this odd, witty, touching film.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    From moment to moment, Planet B-Boy is fun, sometimes thrilling and packed with illuminating details and striking personalities.
  62. Irina Palm
    Irina Palm is, for the most part, a phony trifle, but at its heart, somehow, is a real and fascinating person.
  63. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    This is screenwriting by numbers. Unlike, say, Ken Loach’s marvelous “Bread and Roses,” Under the Same Moon is too busy sanctifying its protagonists and prodding our tear ducts to say anything remotely novel about immigration policies or their helpless victims.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Doomsday
    In terms of story, “The Descent” and Doomsday are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, Doomsday is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.
  65. Horton Hears a Who!
    There are aspects of “Horton,”... that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian.
  66. Never Back Down
    The movie speeds up and slows down as though controlled by a director in the grip of competing medications. For those who make it to the final beatdown, however, the only pill worth taking is the one that makes you forget.
  67. Sleepwalking
    As Mr. Maher, in his feature directing debut, brings in surreal touches and puts on literary airs, the film’s grip loosens, and its vernacular turns increasingly wooden.
  68. Heartbeat Detector
    The rather lost-looking Mr. Amalric, most recently seen on screens giving his left eyeball a furious workout in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” maintains a suitably funereal mien throughout.
  69. City with No Mercy
    Flash Point”attaches coldly professional visuals to a narrative so baffling that it’s rarely clear who is pounding on whom or why.
  70. Funny Games (2008)
    The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sputnik Mania
    The movie lets parallels between that time and the post-9/11 era emerge organically, in the manner of a fable that subtly illuminates your own life.
  72. Hacia la oscuridad
    Antonio Negret's sloppily executed film plays like a car commercial and a military-recruitment promo.
  73. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.
  74. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    Crammed with colorful interviews, digital animation and live performances, this frisky and forthright film by Dean Budnick chronicles a vision of financing social progress with really great tunes.
  75. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain is a reminder that art sometimes keeps the truth alive far better than the news.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise
    In Search of Paradise portrays Meat Loaf as an obsessive, self-punishing performer, striving in vain to put on a live show that matches the visions in his head.
  77. 10,000 BC
    The big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage, is decent action-movie fun. And as a history lesson, 10,000 BC has its value. It explains just how we came to be the tolerant, peace-loving farmers we are today, and why the pyramids were never finished.
  78. The Bank Job
    The workmanlike title The Bank Job is a nice fit for this wham-bam caper flick.
  79. College Road Trip
    Eyes popping and mouths agape, Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symoné mug their way through College Road Trip as if it were a silent movie -- which, come to think of it, would have been a lot less irritating.
  80. Married Life
    This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
  81. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    How light is this movie? So buoyant that even an air raid warning, signaling that this whole world is about to crumble under the blitz, can’t dampen its giddy spirits.
  82. Paranoid Park
    A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.
  83. Snow Angels
    For a film full of murder, jealousy and fatalism, Snow Angels feels curiously small and anecdotal, and its impact diminishes as it nears its terrible conclusion.
  84. CJ7
    A devilishly entertaining curveball thrown at unsuspecting family audiences.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fighting for Life
    Some of the most upsetting images are from a century and a half ago: Mathew Brady photos of the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War, the conflict that gave birth to modern battlefield surgery.
  86. Girls Rock!
    A jubilant documentary about a place where power chords and empowerment go hand in hand.
  87. Blindsight
    Featuring exceptional people doing extraordinary things, Blindsight is one of those documentaries with the power to make you re-examine your entire life -- or at least get off the couch.
  88. City of Men
    City of Men has a more humane, you might say bleeding-heart, perspective on this anarchic culture than “City of God.”
  89. Vivere
    Almost holding things together is the marvelous Ms. Elsner: there’s more depth in her weary gaze and disappointed mouth than in any line of dialogue. Not since Bette Davis lit and flicked has smoking been so evocative, or so heartbreaking.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bonneville
    Except for Ms. Lange’s silent, expressive close-ups, which render flashbacks unnecessary, the women’s journey is aesthetically and dramatically unremarkable.
  91. Chicago 10
    Brett Morgen’s semi-animated, semi-documentary attempt to make the ’60s cool for a new generation of kids, does the opposite. It is a narrow, glib dollop of canned history, an affirmation of received thinking rather than a challenge to it.
  92. The Other Boleyn Girl
    Forced to compete for kingly favors, the women were soon rivals, a contest that, in its few meagerly entertaining moments, recalls the sisterly love in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
  93. Penelope
    A hopeless jumble of visual and linguistic styles.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Semi-Pro
    Semi-Pro finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody, and hammers it for 90 diverting minutes.
  95. The Unforeseen
    There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Redford and his love of nature. But there’s something irritatingly softheaded about the generic, nostalgia-tinged blandishments that the film finally resorts to -- a Wendell Berry poem, a grizzled old farmer wielding a sickle -- in place of truly hard questions and solutions that may effect meaningful change. With the polar ice caps melting, I want more than poetry and blame. I want a plan.
  96. Jar City
    Jar City is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality.
  97. Chop Shop
    There is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.
  98. Charlie Bartlett
    If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn’t wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne’s “Election.” But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Signal
    Part 1, directed by David Bruckner is superb, with affecting performances, a sense of dread reminiscent of John Carpenter’s “Prince of Darkness” and many striking images. Part 2, directed by Dan Bush aims for George Romero-style ghastly humor, but it’s more grating than funny. Part 3, directed by Jacob Gentry adds a splash of tragic love, but its preference for gore over feeling becomes monotonous.
  100. Cover
    The sledgehammer message is clear: Best friends can help when you need a McMansion, but only God can help when your husband needs a man.
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