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. Spork
    As uplifting stories of tolerance and self-discovery go, Spork has a messy appeal, but it's no "Hairspray."
  2. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    The widescreen canvas is an improvement over television's limited expanse. But if you're not among the indoctrinated, don't bother.
  3. Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
    Documenting the vigorous strategies employed by the Dole Food Company to block the release of his 2009 film "Bananas!" - about a lawsuit brought by Nicaraguan workers who suspected the company's use of dangerous pesticides - the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten gains traction by taking the high road.
  4. Mulberry Child
    The film's subject matter is epochal, its delivery less so.
  5. Flex Is Kings
    Because of the rote and typical way of organizing a dance movie around a contest, the pace and interest lag even though the images and characters are fascinating. Yet the film is worth watching because of the strong cinematography and the glimpses of strange beauty in the dance moves.
  6. Awake: The Life of Yogananda
    The film’s storytelling is straightforward, almost standard-issue, but the story itself is compelling, as is the testimony of devotees.
  7. Closer to God
    Having painted Victor as a transgressive offender, Mr. Senese backpedals furiously with a coda asserting the potential rewards of genetic manipulation. It isn’t convincing.
  8. The Wrong Light
    In the end, The Wrong Light is an engrossing cautionary tale teaching one of philanthropy’s oldest lessons: Caveat emptor.
  9. Blame
    Blame is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it’s overdetermined and often overplayed.
  10. Allure
    The filmmakers seem less concerned with telling a story than in convincing the audience (and maybe themselves) that they can handle this provocative and potentially exploitive material they’ve contrived with what’s conventionally considered “appropriate” sensitivity.
  11. Strangers on the Earth
    The sensations that Strangers on the Earth means to evoke are not well suited to the cinematic medium, at least not to a documentary that barely runs more than an hour and a half.
  12. The Little Drummer Girl
    What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.
  13. The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia
    Kristy McNichol and Dennis Quaid, as a mutually devoted sister and brother, are personable but idle in this largely uneventful tale.
  14. Bedtime Story
    Mark this one down as good, crisp fun.
  15. Suddenly, Last Summer
    Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.
  16. Giants Being Lonely
    Nothing concrete emerges from this haze of oblique editing and barely written scenes, acted by cast members who are not up to making the dialogue sound convincing or filling the voids left in place of their characters.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
    This "Computer" isn't I.B.M.'s kind but it's homey, lovable, as exciting as porridge and as antiseptic and predictable as any homey, half-hour TV family show.
  18. The Policeman's Lineage
    The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured.
  19. Giving Birth to a Butterfly
    The forced profundity of the “Butterfly” script undermines the film’s enthralling sense of atmosphere, which drips with melancholy, menace and wonder.
  20. Knox Goes Away
    Knox Goes Away” is, like its antihero, smart, unconventional and almost obsessively careful. Its unhurried pacing and mood of quiet deliberation won’t be for everyone; but this low-key thriller resolves its shockingly high stakes with a twisty intelligence.
  21. Everything's Going to Be Great
    By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.
  22. Assault on Precinct 13
    The main thing this "Assault" lacks is a point. Mr. Carpenter's film still resonates with the political paranoia and social unease of the era. Mr. Carpenter's cynical refusal to distinguish clearly between good guys and bad guys feels freshly unsettling, while Mr. Richet's "modernization" looks like something we've seen a hundred times before.
  23. The Signal
    William Eubank’s The Signal demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel.
  24. Because of Winn-Dixie
    A harmless, pleasant comic drama, but elements that may have seemed delightfully eccentric on the page take on unfortunate new tones when translated to film.
  25. Penguin Bloom
    Gamely navigating a script that ushers her from seaside despair to hilltop elation, Watts gives a touching and blessedly understated performance, assisted by Sam Chiplin’s warmly expansive cinematography. As for the bundle of scene-stealing magpies (patiently trained by Paul Mander) who collectively bring Penguin to life, they’re a delight.
  26. *batteries not included
    Children may enjoy this, but their adult escorts will have a harder time...It's been well made and, especially in Miss Tandy's case, acted with a sense of fun. But the time for this brand of fantasy may have come and gone.
  27. Vacancy
    This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel.
  28. Terminator: Dark Fate
    There are a number of reasons to like Terminator: Dark Fate — Linda Hamilton’s scowl, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stubble, MacKenzie Davis’s athleticism — but my favorite thing about this late addition to a weary franchise is how little it cares about timeline continuity.
  29. Felt
    This vague, arty horror film from Jason Banker (“Toad Road”), who shares a story credit with his star, Amy Everson, is at once underwritten and overconceptualized.
  30. Black and Blue
    Its pulpy pop-cultural credibility is inseparable from its honest, brutal assessment of the state of the world. Its ideas about the nature and limits of heroism — about just how hard and terrifying the resistance to evil can be — are spelled out in vivid black and white.
  31. Copycat
    The screenplay for Copycat, by Ann Biderman and Jay Presson Allen from a story by David Madsen, is otherwise so crackling good that character development threatens to eclipse the actual crimes.
  32. Swim Little Fish Swim
    Mumbly dialogue, relentlessly jittery camerawork, a star who is also co-director and co-writer: Yes, it’s time for another movie that mistakes the claustrophobic world of young New York artsy types for something interesting.
  33. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    Inner child? Open road? No, this film is actually about Mr. O'Nan and his wan, scruffy innocence.
  34. The Dream Team
    There's nothing dreadfully wrong with The Dream Team, Howard Zieff's new comedy, except that it's not funny too much of the time. On those occasions when it is funny, the humor less often prompts laughter than mute appreciation of the talents of the principal performers - Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Boyle.
  35. The Empire
    This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience.
  36. Explicit Ills
    It's a beautiful message: surely there's no arguing with "Hey, hey, ho, ho, poverty has got to go!" But there is much to argue with, and much to regret, about a film whose director thinks he needs to drop an anvil on our heads when art would suffice.
  37. Some Velvet Morning
    While there’s much to admire in how Mr. Tucci and Ms. Eve perform Mr. LaBute’s artful, apocalyptic duet, this is one seriously out-of-date tune.
  38. Empire of Light
    A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.
  39. Good Dick
    Good Dick surmounts its indie-movie quirkiness with exceptional acting and a sincere belief in the salvation of its wounded characters.
  40. Shock to the System
    A sly, refreshingly grown-up gay entertainment, though rather less satisfying as a thriller.
  41. Jandek on Corwood
    A canny look at both sides of a musical experiment. Jandek plucks out his atonal efforts, and the record-store obsessives speculate about every subtlety.
  42. Now, Forager
    This uneven, slow-brewed film begins by observing a brittle relationship about to crumble, but it is better at portraying how the exacting standards of food professionals can lead to personal grief.
  43. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    The scenes of Dracula befuddled by a mobile phone were familiar; those in which the vampire’s garlic “intolerance” preludes a flatulence joke predictable. Returning a third time as director, Genndy Tartakovsky lends his usual graphic savvy, providing a not-quite-saving grace.
  44. The Notebook
    The scenes between the young lovers confronting adult authority have the same seething tension and lurking hysteria that the young Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood brought more than 40 years ago to their roles in "Splendor in the Grass."
  45. Jet Lag
    A peppy romantic trifle from France that rises above the mundane on the strength of its beautifully detailed lead performances.
  46. People I Know
    Would like to think of itself as a film on the edge, a contemporary descendant of "Sweet Smell of Success." But as it dawdles along, it fails to find contemporary corollaries to the super-charged language and caffeine-fueled pace of that grimy 1957 masterpiece.
  47. The Hunting of the President
    In a misguided attempt to break up the monotonous flow of talking heads, the filmmakers have inserted oddly chosen clips from newsreels and public-domain features, meant to illustrate abstract concepts (like eavesdropping or government) while generating some low-level laughs.
  48. Mau Mau Sex Sex
    The fun is contagious.
  49. Human Traffic
    Mostly it's exhilarating.
  50. The Fighting Temptations
    This movie feels phony and slick, as if it were cooked up by Darrin's cynical ad agency, rather than at his aunt's stove down in Montecarlo.
  51. A Time to Kill
    If the film doesn't add up to a cogent legal argument, neither does it have trouble delivering 2 hours and 20 minutes' worth of sturdy, highly charged drama.
  52. Silent Night
    This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.
  53. A Single Shot
    Mr. Rosenthal puts the story’s parts into play well enough, but once everyone and everything is in position that’s more or less where they stay as this slow story downshifts to a crawl.
  54. Paranormal Activity 2
    Frozen camera setups and blurry night-vision images raise goose bumps without the assistance of eerie music or showy effects, though the strain of stretching the gimmick to a second movie is palpable.
  55. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    More of a poem or a city symphony than a documentary, it drifts freely, sometimes frustratingly between captured and fictionalized moments.
  56. 2010
    A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'
  57. The Dead Don't Die
    This is an end-of-the-world party with an appealing guest list and inviting, eccentric décor.
  58. Adopt a Highway
    Like a spare short story, this little indie nurtures a few simple emotions, then hopes its audience will stick around to share in them. I’m glad I did.
  59. Shorts
    Soon becomes tiresome, but it’s emblematic of a film that is dancing as fast as it can to entertain.
  60. In Satmar Custody
    Modest, disturbing documentary.
  61. Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema
    Between Mr. Ziman's music-video skills and his close approximation of the kinetic style of Michael Mann (a scene from Mr. Mann's "Heat" has a key role in the plot), it's easy to overlook the formulas and just enjoy the ride.
  62. Red Dawn
    Red Dawn may be rabidly inflammatory, but it isn't dull. Mr. Milius does know how to keep a story moving. He might well have turned this into a genuinely stirring war film, if he had not also made it so incorrigibly gung-ho. But the effectiveness of its chilling premise, from a story by Kevin Reynolds, is dissipated by wildly excessive directorial fervor at every turn.
  63. Streetwalkin'
    Streetwalkin' isn't exactly full of surprises. But it certainly moves.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music Within
    A bad movie with a good heart.
  65. Creation Stories
    “Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair.
  66. Sinister
    A twitchy Mr. Hawke builds a persuasive portrait of desperation with little help from the script and despite playing a character who makes so many mistakes he might as well be on a suicide mission.
  67. The Tale of Despereaux
    A pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale.
  68. Alice in Wonderland
    Busy, garish and periodically amusing.
  69. Munich: The Edge of War
    A plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up.
  70. A Wrinkle in Time
    A Wrinkle in Time, faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre.
  71. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
    Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.
  72. Conan the Destroyer
    The special effects aren't bad, and there are fewer decapitations than in Conan the Barbarian. Mr. Fleischer seems to want this film to be funnier than was the first one, directed by John Milius, but Mr. Schwarzenegger, a body builder who can lift freight trains, can't easily get his tongue into his cheek.
  73. The Beekeeper
    Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama.
  74. The Big Year
    Like birding itself, The Big Year rewards patience. It respects both the integrity and the eccentricity of the avian obsession, and it communicates something of the fascinating abundance and weirdness of the animals themselves.
  75. It Ends with Us
    Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.
  76. Book Club
    These women — Ms. Fonda, Ms. Keaton, Ms. Steenburgen and Ms. Bergen, that is — have nothing to prove. Each one brings enough credibility and charisma to Book Club to render its weaknesses largely irrelevant.
  77. Blackbird
    The characters are so flimsy, and so wearyingly familiar . . . that Michell is incapable of giving their conflicts life.
  78. Beowulf & Grendel
    With all the mystery and meaning sucked from the story, the filmmakers do what filmmakers often do when faced with their own lack of imagination: they toss a little sex in with the violence.
  79. Mary, Queen of Scots
    Because both Miss Redgrave and Miss. Jackson possess identifiable intelligence, Mary, Queen of Scots is not as difficult to sit through as some bad movies I can think of. It's just solemn, well-groomed and dumb.
  80. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story
    While the documentary successfully champions stunt women’s dignity in the workplace, it lacks finesse — failing to showcase their talents in a way that would be exciting for an audience outside the industry.
  81. The Artist's Wife
    The best, perhaps the only reason to see The Artist’s Wife is Lena Olin, an actor incapable of giving a so-so performance.
  82. Alpha Dog
    The cretins rule in Alpha Dog, which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism.
  83. Next of Kin
    An appreciably better-than-average revenge drama.
  84. Anemone
    There is, of course, enormous pleasure in watching Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of extraordinary sensitivity whose ability to convey a character’s interiority — the delicacy and the violence — can seem almost mystical. The problem is that as Anemone continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.
  85. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history.
  86. Mister Lonely
    Mister Lonely, self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it's also more than that: it's a small, imperfect world.
  87. Ha-Hesder
    Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.
  88. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Far from the first movie in which a fearless woman coaxes the inner tiger crouched inside a mild-mannered milquetoast to spring into action, but it is one of the most charming.
  89. Bandits
    Its winning cast, spirited music and mordant view of establishment figures, from the police to cocaine-sniffing record industry executives, make Bandits a stylish, buoyant entertainment.
  90. George of the Jungle
    The kind of silly summer fun that gives family entertainment a good name.
  91. Save the Last Dance
    Bland but poised.
  92. Ella Enchanted
    The messages blend seamlessly into the fantasy and comedy in what is surely one of the best films for older children in quite some time.
  93. Chop Suey
    Though undoubtedly a vanity project -- the music clearances alone must have cost much more than the film could ever hope to gross -- it functions pleasantly enough as an exercise in free association.
  94. Rookie of the Year
    Rookie of the Year, which was directed by Daniel Stern from a script by Sam Harper, has an appealing central performance by Mr. Nicholas, who manages to be cocky without seeming obnoxious. As a summer diversion, the film has about as much substance as cotton candy.
  95. Big Business
    Big Business, which, though it never quite delivers the boffo payoff, is a most cheerful, very breezy summer farce, played to the hilt by two splendidly comic performers.
  96. I’ll Be Your Mirror
    There’s an implication that repressed emotions are simmering beneath the mundane, but that doesn’t always come across.
  97. The Blind Side
    The film, not unsurprisingly for a holiday- (and football-) season release from a major Hollywood studio, plays this story straight down the middle, shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift.
  98. The Program
    The Program, much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort.
  99. Soul Surfer
    As a portrait of a spirited, resilient athlete, the movie succeeds best, unafraid to face its heroine's daunting challenges directly.
  100. Ava's Possessions
    Though at times pleasingly quirky, the story is too slackly written and insipidly photographed to entertain.
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