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. Be Kind Rewind
    In its sweet, lackadaisical way, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind illuminates the pleasures and paradoxes of movie love.
  2. The Counterfeiters
    The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.
  3. Vantage Point
    This is competent if completely impersonal filmmaking of a familiar type that finds the usual allotment of famous, or at least famous enough, actors.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Witless Protection
    The slapstick and action set pieces are lame, and its performances range from competent to annoying.
  5. The Duchess of Langeais
    Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art -- beautiful, true, profound.
  6. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    When the material is condensed, nearly everything that made the first two-thirds of the television series distinctive _ — the deliberate pace, the wry humor, the subtle (for anime) characterizations — is lost. “Evangelion” becomes just another giant-robot story.
  7. Diary of the Dead
    The body has its needs, and one of the problems with Diary of the Dead is that it doesn’t get into your body; it doesn’t shake you up, jolt you, make you shiver and squeak. It’s clever, or at least clever enough to keep you going and interested from start to finish. It just isn’t scary.
  8. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    The performances are charming and convincing, and Mr. Joelsas does a good job of conveying Mauro’s loneliness and confusion as well as his playfulness. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation may not be terribly fresh or original, but its warm, sweet, nostalgic tone is hard to dislike.
  9. Definitely, Maybe
    A nimble and winning little romance
  10. Jumper
    A barely coherent genre mishmash.
  11. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Instead of the kind of inspired imaginative synergy that distinguished the “Lord of the Rings” and later “Harry Potter” pictures, this movie, directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”), feels more like a sloppy, secondhand pander.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Step Up 2: The Streets
    An earnest sequel to the 2006 cornball musical drama “Step Up,” mixing new characters into the original’s setting.
  13. Ezra
    The movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making Ezra even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English. Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting.
  14. The Band's Visit
    Mr. Kolirin, it emerges, is wrenching comedy out of intense melancholia.
  15. Fool's Gold
    Will Finn and Tess find the treasure before the bad guys? Will they put aside their differences and rekindle their love? Yes to both questions! I haven’t spoiled anything, by the way. But perhaps I’ve saved you some trouble.
  16. The Hottie & the Nottie
    Custom designed for its smirking star (who is also an executive producer), this tasteless train wreck asks only that she preen and prance on cue.
  17. In Bruges
    Mr. Gleeson, Mr. Farrell and especially the late-arriving and welcome Mr. Fiennes have great fun rummaging around inside Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks.
  18. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    Though it includes some moderately funny snippets of actual performances, Wild West Comedy Show is not a concert film. We never see a complete performance or even a quarter of one.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    It’s a cut above other films of its type because every scene is packed with details like those pliers -- touches that suggest that the film’s writer and director, Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man”), is working overtime to smuggle life into formula.
  20. London to Brighton
    A slice of social realism, a wedge of naturalism, a symbolically freighted fairy tale -- at times, London to Brighton feels like all of these combined, which, before it all turns to mush, gives the film the aspect of a fascinating and ambitious pastiche. There’s something provocative about Mr. Williams’s attempt to join together so many conflicting, contradictory influences, even if in the end they manage only to cancel one another out.
    • 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.
  22. Caramel
    You are likely to remember this charming film, directed by Nadine Labaki, less for its gently comic, mildly melodramatic plot than for its friendly and inviting atmosphere.
  23. The Eye
    Louder and more literal than its inspiration, The Eye benefits from a spiky performance by Alessandro Nivola as Sydney’s rehabilitation counselor. “Your eyes are not the problem,” he tells her at one point. He is so, so right.
  24. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
    What you do see are diverting 3-D effects and lots of playing to the camera by Ms. Cyrus, who performs as both herself and as her television alter ego, Hannah Montana. To her credit her attire isn’t tawdry, and it appears that she can sing.
  25. Over Her Dead Body
    For what it is -- a romantic comedy about the rivalry between a jealous ghost and a flaky psychic for the love of a veterinarian -- Over Her Dead Body is not bad.
  26. Praying with Lior
    Patiently and delicately, Ms. Trachtman teases out the tricky dynamics of a family dealing with a disabled child.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    What rankles isn’t the gross-out humor or the verbal non sequiturs, which are expected, even welcome, in this sort of movie. It’s the smug sense of entitlement -- that of intoxicated dweebs tittering endlessly and obnoxiously at their own supposed cleverness. “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” is the gold standard in this genre. Strange Wilderness is a counterfeit bill.
  28. The Witnesses
    The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned. But in the director’s farsighted vision of life, the ground under our feet is always shifting. As time pulls us forward, the shocks of the past are absorbed and the pain recedes. In its light-handed way, The Witnesses is profound.
  29. The Silence Before Bach
    The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie.
  30. Rambo
    The movie does have its own kind of blockheaded poetry.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How She Move
    There’s nary a twist you don’t see coming. But the film’s strong acting, spectacular dance routines and culturally specific details turn clichés into catharsis. It’s the sort of film that sends you home with a spring in your step.
  32. Meet the Spartans
    Overkill is what Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer do best: as the uncontested titans of the parody genre (with fingers in everything from the “Scary Movie” franchise to the more recent “Epic Movie”) they continue to prove that ridiculing other movies is much easier than making your own.
  33. Untraceable
    You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn.
  34. Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    Like a feature-length version of the television sitcom “My Name Is Earl,” only Canadian -- and not funny.
  35. The Air I Breathe
    An ingenious contraption that holds your attention for as long as it whirs and clicks like a mechanized Rubik’s Cube. After it’s over, however, you may find yourself scratching your head and wondering if there was any purpose to this sleek little gizmo.
  36. Lost in Beijing
    In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power.
  37. Alice's House
    Chico Teixeira’s languid, libidinous Alice’s House is the best argument against marriage and motherhood to appear in many a year.
  38. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    U2 3D
    Not merely a technical landmark -- shot entirely in digital 3D -- but also an aesthetic one, in that it’s the first Imax movie that deserves to be called a work of art.
  40. Summer Palace
    In Summer Palace Lou nonetheless succeeds in finding a cinematic language that does more than summarize the important events of a confusing decade. He distills the inner confusion -- the swirl of moods, whims and needs -- that is the lived and living essence of history.
  41. Teeth
    Teenage horror-movie spoof, John Waters parody, No Nukes protest movie, twisted sex-education film, quasi-feminist fable, outrageous stunt: Mitchell Lichtenstein’s clever, crude comedy, Teeth, is all these and more.
  42. Cassandra's Dream
    Woody Allen’s latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all.
  43. Cloverfield
    Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.
  44. Mad Money
    In the breezy, amoral heist comedy Mad Money, “Fun With Dick and Jane” meets “9 to 5” on the way to recession.
  45. 27 Dresses
    As the director, Anne Fletcher, methodically cuts back and forth between two weddings, she makes the reasonably insightful, moderately funny point that modern American weddings, however they may strain for individuality and specialness, are all pretty much alike. The problem is that much the same could be said about modern American romantic comedies.
  46. Taxi to the Dark Side
    If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.
  47. Day Zero
    Its view of the near future may be vaguely plausible and its performances persuasive, but its formulaic construction, internal inconsistencies and fuzzy ending undermine its integrity. It has nothing to say about the big issues -- manhood, war and friendship -- that hasn’t been explored with more depth and honesty in a hundred other movies.
  48. Still Life
    A modern master of postmodern discontent, Jia Zhang-ke is among the most strikingly gifted filmmakers working today whom you have probably never heard of.
  49. First Sunday
    First Sunday sometimes feels more like a script read-through than like an actual movie, but its warmth is likely to carry you through the stretches of cliché and tedium.
  50. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    An awkward “Lord of the Rings” knockoff, it features both elaborate battles and bumbling humor, though it’s never quite clear when you should be laughing.
  51. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    It’s a boilerplate plot like one you might find in any morning cartoon.
  52. The Business of Being Born
    A passionate ground-level examination of home childbirth.
  53. Woman on the Beach
    Wry and tender and delicately melancholic, Woman on the Beach shows a newly confident filmmaker again working near the top of his form after the disappointing “Tale of Cinema” (2005), even if the new film unfolds straightforwardly, with none of the narrative ellipses and puzzle-box complications, the flashbacks and parallel story lines of his earlier work.
  54. One Missed Call
    A poker-faced puzzle whose biggest shock is the absence of Sarah Michelle Gellar.
  55. The Killing of John Lennon
    Shot in a quasi-documentary style at the actual locations where the events took place, including the sidewalk outside the Dakota, the movie is extremely uncomfortable to watch.
  56. Honeydripper
    Honeydripper is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When the first falls flat, it turns into the other and becomes a cliché.
  57. The Orphanage
    The Orphanage, a diverting, overwrought ghost story from Spain, relies on basic and durable horror movie techniques.
  58. There Will Be Blood
    The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.
  59. AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    It may not be classic sci-fi like the original “Alien,” which it has in its DNA, but it’s a perfectly respectable next step in the series.
  60. Persepolis
    Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.
  61. The Bucket List
    Fails its stars in fundamental ways. Mr. Nicholson has played wealthy rogues before (most recently in “Something’s Gotta Give”), but this particular bon vivant is unsalvageably repellent.
  62. The Great Debaters
    The wonder is that The Great Debaters transcends its own simplifying and manipulative ploys; it radiates nobility of spirit.
  63. The Water Horse
    Ffamily-friendly escapist fare that should enthrall, without insult, fantasy-minded viewers of any age.
  64. P.S. I Love You
    The film is not a beautiful object or a memorable cultural one, and yet it charms, however awkwardly. Ms. Swank’s ardent sincerity and naked emotionalism dovetail nicely with Mr. LaGravenese’s melodramatic excesses.
  65. Charlie Wilson's War
    More of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    Like its predecessor, “National Treasure,” this sequel amounts to a bunch of crossword puzzle answers stitched together with explosions, chases and displays of intuitive reasoning that the “Twin Peaks” F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper would reject as too right-brained.
  67. Steep
    An undeniably impressive visual spectacle that follows the sport of extreme skiing.
  68. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme -- I am tempted to say evil -- genius.
  69. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    The film is more funny ha-ha than LOL; it’s a smarty-pants satire that mocks and embraces almost every cliché in the biography playbook.
  70. Flakes
    A business course on cutthroat capitalism disguised as a slacker comedy: That’s the kindest way to describe Michael Lehmann’s Flakes.
  71. Alvin and the Chipmunks
    Despite its shout-outs to the holiday season, this is essentially airplane fodder, not a perennial. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the sequel.
  72. I Am Legend
    There is something graceful and effortless about this performance (Mr. Smith's), which not only shows what it might feel like to be the last man on earth, but also demonstrates what it is to be a movie star.
  73. The Kite Runner
    Mr. Forster, who previously directed “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” has been soundly defeated by The Kite Runner. Despite the film’s far-flung locations (it was shot primarily in China), there is remarkably little of visual interest here; the setups are banal, and the scenes lack tension, which no amount of editing can provide.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Look
    An unsettling, rudely funny but not entirely credible feature.
  75. Youth Without Youth
    In this film Mr. Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he’s just waking up.
  76. Half Moon
    Fateful and funny, haunting and magical.
  77. The Perfect Holiday
    Watching the movie is like reaching into a Christmas stocking and pulling out handfuls of cheap plastic toys that are broken.
  78. Nanking
    What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.
  79. Atonement
    Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dirty Laundry
    Mr. Jamal’s direction ranges from clumsy to competent, and the film’s overwhelming desire to be loved blunts any edge it might have had.
  81. The Golden Compass
    Has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws.
  82. Grace Is Gone
    Mr. Cusack demonstrates once again that he is Hollywood’s second-most-reliable nice guy, after Tom Hanks. Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revolver
    By turns clever, impassioned, incoherent and silly.
  84. The Walker
    By the end of The Walker a movie that begins as a dazzling round of charades has deteriorated into a plodding game of Clue.
  85. 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
    Part tribute, part musical mystery, ’Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris shines an overdue spotlight on a great who got away.
  86. Man in the Chair
    Man in the Chair has few surprises. Once its machinery is humming, it settles into a soothing fable of a last hurrah.
  87. Juno
    Juno respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule.
  88. Billy the Kid
    Presenting neither an argument for medication nor its rejection, Billy the Kid is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man.
  89. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.
  90. Awake
    The writer and director, Joby Harold, claims to have been inspired to write the film while suffering from a particularly painful kidney stone. Watching it may be for some a comparable experience.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oswald's Ghost
    The documentary Oswald’s Ghost initially plays as yet another primer on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the vilification of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  92. The Sasquatch Gang
    There’s precious little to laugh at in The Sasquatch Gang, a sad attempt to board the loser-nerd comedy bandwagon.
  93. Maurice Richard
    After a while the humorless solemnity of The Rocket stifles any interesting sense of Maurice Richard as a character. The hockey sequences are nicely done, though, and give a reasonably good sense of what a great player he was.
  94. Aaja Nachle
    Ms. Dixit has been gone from the screen for five years, long enough for a new crop of stars to emerge and for Aaja Nachle, her modest new film, to be a comeback vehicle.
  95. Protagonist
    Jessica Yu’s enthralling documentary exploration of people with obsessive needs for control and self-mastery.
  96. He Was a Quiet Man
    By the time it reaches a weak, ambiguous conclusion, the movie has gone everywhere and nowhere, much like its psychotic main character, Bob Maconel (Christian Slater).
  97. Tony N' Tina's Wedding
    The film version is now being granted a limited release. Exactly how limited will depend on your tolerance for tasteless behavior, extravagant overacting and a decibel level to rival the unveiling of Oprah’s Favorite Things.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Badland
    This overlong, mawkish yet weirdly mesmerizing film doesn’t just invite identification with its tragically unhinged character; it compels it, by piling on biblically horrible misfortunes, weepy confessions and editorializing music.
  99. The Savages
    Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, is a beautifully nuanced tragicomedy about two floundering souls.
  100. Starting Out in the Evening
    What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.
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