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. Eagle vs Shark
    Intermittently charming, sometimes tiresome celebration of quirkiness.
  2. Evan Almighty
    A movie far less interesting than its premise. It is also slightly less interesting than its hugely popular predecessor, "Bruce Almighty."
  3. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    In spite of occasional gestures in the direction of political or sociological context -- interviews with anti-Aristide activists, news images of battles beyond Cité Soleil -- Mr. Leth is not, in the end, much concerned with offering an analysis of the Haitian situation. Like Lele, he'd rather have a party with the thugs.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One to Another
    The notion that French cinema consists mainly of pretentious soft-core pornography is an ignorant cliché, but One to Another does little to disprove it.
  5. Klimt
    The shortened version is lovely to look at, but the stilted dialogue and crude overdubbing in scenes where English is not spoken often make it an impenetrable hodgepodge.
  6. Transformers
    A movie of epically assaultive noise and nonsense.
  7. Introducing the Dwights
    A funny-sad, icky-sweet comedy of family dysfunction.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    An unwieldy mix of political satire and lavish period soap opera.
  9. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    Sporadically funny, casually sexist, blithely racist and about as visually sophisticated as a parking-garage surveillance video.
  10. Molière
    Less forgivably, the movie is dull.
  11. The Ten
    A “Decalogue” for special-ed students, The Ten leans too often toward the bizarre and the bewildering. And though rough sex is a recurring motif, the movie’s overall tone is less blasphemous than raunchy.
  12. Becoming Jane
    The screenplay’s pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Less notable for its story than for what the movie itself represents: an evolutionary entry in the so-called Do It Yourself (or D.I.Y.) independent film movement.
  15. Dedication
    A movie that reveals its toxic intentions only gradually. Until it does, there is much to enjoy in the prickly odd-couple relationship of Henry (Billy Crudup) and Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), successful writing partners and longtime friends.
  16. The Nanny Diaries
    Because The Nanny Diaries is essentially a two-character story whose supporting players are wooden props, it would help if the actors playing the two were evenly matched. But Ms. Johansson’s Annie, who narrates the movie in a glum, plodding voice, is a leaden screen presence, devoid of charm and humor.
  17. Right at Your Door
    The film, especially in its resolution, feels a bit like a “Twilight Zone” episode and might have been better at that length, but the acting’s pretty good, and the cinematography keeps things lively.
  18. The Invasion
    Whatever the case, The Invasion lurches and drags and teeters on the brink of death from scene to scene; it plays as if it had been made by someone in a trance, though not a cool one.
  19. The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
    Despite some pretty seasonal photography and evocative scenes of the nuns’ rigorous daily rituals, which involve many hours of prayer, The Monastery is a flighty, disorganized film with a blurry timeline and a wandering attention span.
  20. Freshman Orientation
    On one level, a stereotypical mash of Greek cruelty, queer poetry slams and rabid activist rhetoric. But beneath the tired crudeness and college-romp clichés, the movie is gently perceptive about the malleable nature of sexuality and the barriers we construct to hide our confusion.
  21. The Nines
    Think of it as a kind of “Twilight Zone 2007” in which the paranoia endemic to an industry that runs on illusion, hype and extravagant grandiosity comes home to roost.
  22. Hatchet
    Horror without suspense is like sex without love: you can appreciate the technicalities, but ultimately there’s no reason to care.
  23. Dragon Wars: D-War
    It is such a breathless, delirious stew, it’s impossible not to be entertained, provided -- this is crucial -- you have a sense of humor.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mr. Woodcock
    It’s “The Great Santini” remade as a sitcom.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Halloween (2007)
    The new Halloween has sympathy for the Devil, but not enough.
  26. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.
  27. The Man of My Life
    The Man of My Life is a sumptuously illustrated but shallow fable of the grass-is-greener conflict between freedom and commitment.
  28. Feel the Noise
    It’s the subtexts -- about minority kinship and Hispanic self-actualization -- that resound. If only its fable (and leading man) didn’t keep getting in the way.
  29. My Kid Could Paint That
    Mr. Bar-Lev has made an excellent documentary, but it would have been better if he had not made it at all.
  30. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Feels passé and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.
  31. Rendition
    A well-meaning, honorable movie. Which is not to say that it is a very good one.
  32. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    Man From Plains isn’t about engagement; it’s about disengagement from Mr. Carter’s critics and his more provocative beliefs. It’s also about legacy building.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music Within
    A bad movie with a good heart.
  34. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    It’s intentionally playful and an inadvertent giggle, an overripe melodrama that’s by turns a bodice-ripper, a cloak-and-dagger thriller and a serious-minded historical drama with dubious contemporary overtones.
  35. Lars and the Real Girl
    It’s part comedy, part tragedy and 100 percent pure calculation, designed to wring fat tears and coax big laughs and leave us drying our damp, smiling faces as we savor the touching vision of American magnanimity. It holds a flattering mirror up to us that erases every distortion.
  36. We Own the Night
    The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. “I feel light as a feather,” Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.
  37. Fred Claus
    Neither here nor there, the film is “Elf” without the goofy jokes, Will Ferrell or heart, “Bad Santa” without the smut, Billy Bob Thornton or spleen.
  38. Lions for Lambs
    It tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders. Mostly it tells us that Mr. Redford feels really bad about the state of things. Welcome to the club.
  39. Saw IV
    Saw IV is bloody proof that Jigsaw may be dead, but his well of corporeal abuses has yet to run dry.
  40. Slipstream
    For an actor like Mr. Hopkins, disappearing into another character, especially a historical figure, must be a far more unsettling deconstruction of reality than for the casual moviegoer observing the transformation. That is a notion Slipstream might have explored more fruitfully, had it focused its wandering attention span, kept its camera steadier and figured out what it wanted to say.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    King Corn
    Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ellis are so pleasantly nondescript that they make no particular impression. As a result, all the time spent on autobiographical detail and personal banter hampers the film’s urgency, and plays like an awkward attempt to justify a format that the filmmakers are too self-effacing to exploit.
  42. Beowulf
    The 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of Beowulf doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes.
  43. The Mist
    Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he’s saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie, The Mist isn’t half bad.
  44. 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.
  45. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    If the concept is ingenious, its execution is erratic.
  46. 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.
  47. The Golden Compass
    Has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revolver
    By turns clever, impassioned, incoherent and silly.
  49. 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Look
    An unsettling, rudely funny but not entirely credible feature.
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. Mad Money
    In the breezy, amoral heist comedy Mad Money, “Fun With Dick and Jane” meets “9 to 5” on the way to recession.
  54. 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.
  55. 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.
  56. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    It’s a boilerplate plot like one you might find in any morning cartoon.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
    • 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.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
    • 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.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. 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.
  70. Nim's Island
    Sweet but ho-hum adaptation of Wendy Orr’s novel, a comedy-adventure that never quite finds its tone.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. 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.
  74. Baby Mama
    The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing. But, much like the prickly, talented Ms. Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean.
  75. Made of Honor
    Made of Honor retains enough sweetness to satisfy the cotton-candy addicts. For true believers in fairy tales, no romantic fantasy is too extravagant if the heroine is a sweetheart. The rest of us can sit there and roll our eyes.
  76. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    Not that Cairo, Nest of Spies is meant to be a thriller, but even as a self-consciously anachronistic knockabout farce it rarely rises to the level of wit, either verbal or physical.
  77. The Incredible Hulk
    A middling superhero movie! I wish I could say that was incredible.
  78. 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.
  79. Wanted
    Things happen in Wanted, but no one cares. You could call that nihilism, but even nihilism requires commitment of a kind and this, by contrast, is a movie built on indifference.
  80. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    If this movie is not a ride, then what is it? One thing it may not be, quite, is a movie.
  81. Meet Dave
    Though mildly amusing, Murphy's two characters in Meet Dave -- a wee captain and a humanoid spaceship -- neither tax nor stretch him.
  82. Dreams with Sharp Teeth
    Directed by Erik Nelson, Dreams recalls the career of a runty young geek who evolved into a world-famous artist -- and ladies' man.
  83. Quid Pro Quo
    After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters' feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.
  84. 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.
  85. Tropic Thunder
    A flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry.
  86. Das wilde Leben
    Like most flower-power nostalgia trips, Eight Miles High has the irksome effect of reminding the audience -- whether too young or too square -- that it missed out on the grooviest moment in history, man. But as these things go, this one goes with flair.
  87. Garden Party
    Whatever else it may accomplish, Garden Party, which is clumsily structured but well acted, with pungently realistic dialogue, puts you in a world without a center in which you can't tell upside down from right-side up.
  88. Quantum of Solace
    The violence in his (Craig's) first outing, "Casino Royale," was notably intense, and while Quantum of Solace is not quite as brutal, the mood is if anything even more grim and downcast.
  89. Swing Vote
    A mainstream, eager-to-please, relatively generic endeavor, not an auteurist showcase.
  90. 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.
  91. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Observed through emotional gauze, its four likable women are symbolic cheerleaders for personal loyalty and wholesome living.
  92. 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.
  93. Religulous
    Much of Mr. Maher's film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers -- at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith -- may even be amused. But most will not.
  94. The Rocker
    Most disappointingly, the music is tepid, mediocre pop pastiche.
  95. The Longshots
    What makes this one different? Absolutely nothing. (Sure, it's based on a true story, but I mean come on, whatever.)
  96. Hamlet 2
    It all adds up to the kind of bad family entertainment likely to raise only a few eyebrows.
  97. Mirrors
    A minor chiller and major downer from the talented Alexandre Aja.
  98. 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.
  99. 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.
  100. Christmas on Mars
    Forget plot. It’s all about textures.
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