The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. 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.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midnight Eagle
    Izuru Narushima’s film is a personal and political melodrama with perfunctory gunplay and explosions.
  3. August Rush
    To describe August Rush as a piece of shameless hokum doesn’t quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this contemporary fairy tale.
  4. Enchanted
    The film works its magic largely by sending up, at times with a wink, at times with a hard nudge, some of the very stereotypes that have long been this company’s profitable stock in trade.
  5. Hitman
    Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah -- action movies for bored dummies.
  6. I'm Not There.
    Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.
  7. 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.
  8. This Christmas
    Boisterous and bittersweet, the film is not dull, but it does feel hopelessly overstuffed, with scant time to devote to any one story line.
  9. Nina's Heavenly Delights
    A lesbian-foodie fairy tale that keeps its appetites well under control. The title may hint at naughty pleasures, but the director, Pratibha Parmar, is more interested in pappadams than passion.
  10. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    The film is by turns cranky, funny, wistful and resolute.
  11. 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.
  12. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.
  13. Margot at the Wedding
    Frequently brilliant, finally baffling film.
  14. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    If the concept is ingenious, its execution is erratic.
  15. Redacted
    Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    Despite its laid-back script, “Smiley Face” is as prankishly political as Mr. Araki’s “Doom Generation,” evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape.
  17. What Would Jesus Buy?
    At the very least, the documentary What Would Jesus Buy? might make a viewer think twice about that next purchase at the Gap.
  18. Southland Tales
    Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.
  19. No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. P2
    Swift and stealthy P2 is a canny exploitation of one of the urban woman’s greatest fears: the after-hours parking garage. Throw in a car that won’t start, a creepy security guard and a filmmaking team with perfect synchronicity, and the result is a minimalist nightmare.
  23. Saawariya
    The experience is visually enchanting, cloyingly sweet, at once utterly chaste and insanely erotic, and finally exhausting. Aficionados will not settle for less.
  24. War Dance
    War/Dance, in spite of its slickness, is an honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance in an African tribal culture.
  25. Holly
    There’s a riveting story lurking inside Holly, a documentary-fiction hybrid about sex trafficking in Cambodia. It’s just not the one the filmmakers want to tell.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Life of Reilly
    Built around “Save It for the Stage,” a one-man stage show by Charles Nelson Reilly, a showbiz gadfly and Tony Award-winning theater director.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Steal a Pencil for Me
    What makes Ms. Ohayon’s movie special is its recognition that epic horrors don’t erase private dramas.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Named after one of his albums and built around snippets of audio interviews with Mr. Ayler, it attempts and often achieves a fresh, playful style that’s equally informed by jazz traditions and Mr. Ayler’s urge to shatter them.
  29. Fat Girls
    Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film.
  30. American Gangster
    Greatness hovers just outside American Gangster, knocking, angling to be let in.
  31. Bee Movie
    The real fun is the insect shtick.
  32. Darfur Now
    What Darfur Now offers is a collective vision of actions, small and large, taken on many fronts, to end the crisis. The movie is a quiet, methodical call to action.
  33. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    The film is much more than a biography of the Clash’s guitarist and lead singer: It’s history, criticism, philosophy and politics, played fast and loud.
  34. Martian Child
    100 percent goo.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sharkwater
    Mr. Stewart dilutes the movie’s urgency by framing the subject within a “personal journey” format and selling himself as a hunky, sensitive martyr.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Shoemaker
    A triptych of short films set on and immediately after 9/11, A Broken Sole is based on a stage production by its screenwriter and co-producer, Susan Charlotte. One hopes the material played onstage, because it dies on screen.
  37. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    Curiously exhilarating. Some of this comes from the simple thrill of witnessing something, or rather everything, done well.
  38. Bella
    If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.
  39. Dan in Real Life
    Dan in Real Life is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant.
  40. 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.
  42. Rails & Ties
    Everything looks professional if undistinguished.
  43. Saw IV
    Saw IV is bloody proof that Jigsaw may be dead, but his well of corporeal abuses has yet to run dry.
  44. 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.
  45. Lynch
    It’s precisely the worshipful feel of Lynch -- including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr. Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog -- that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing. It’s like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly.
  46. Mr. Untouchable
    There is some acknowledgment of the terrible effects of the drug trade on residents of Harlem and other poor New York neighborhoods, but for the most part Mr. Untouchable clings to the standard hip-hop mythology of the pusher as entrepreneur, rebel, celebrity and folk hero.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    30 Days of Night
    The performers have little to do besides spill and drink blood in this tedious, inconsequential B picture. The sun doesn’t rise nearly fast enough.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Comebacks
    The movie’s low aspirations are depressing because its best gags are agreeably demented.
  49. Gone Baby Gone
    One of the graces of Gone Baby Gone is its sensitivity to real struggle, to the lived-in spaces and worn-out consciences that can come when despair turns into nihilism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out of the Blue
    The director confronts horror without wallowing in it, a strategy befitting a film that’s not about how people die, but how they live.
  51. Rendition
    A well-meaning, honorable movie. Which is not to say that it is a very good one.
  52. Reservation Road
    This is one of those sadistic exercises that puts its characters through the wringer without saying anything true or meaningful.
  53. Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour
    The film is sunk by a pervasive stasis, the byproduct not of mood but of the filmmakers’ amateurish abilities. If there’s one thing Nick and Disney know, it’s that youthful entertainment needs to keep moving.
  54. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Although neither Ms. Berry nor Mr. Del Toro can be faulted in their scenery-chewing moments, these star turns make you uncomfortably aware that they are Oscar-conscious auditions for the Big Prize. Their naked ambition subtly contaminates a movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.
  55. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    Has an offbeat, absurdist charm that turns a potentially creepy conceit into an odd, touching adventure.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meeting Resistance
    Many interviewees concede that the resistance is both disorganized and decentralized, and imply that some of the fighters are ethnic partisans jockeying for a slice of what will remain should the United States pull out.
  57. O Jerusalem
    Whether on a Middle Eastern battlefield or the streets of New York, characters converse in stilted, expository mouthfuls that smother emotion.
  58. Canvas
    A movie that rings emotionally true, despite structural contrivances and dim, washed-out color.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Sleuth
    The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable.
  62. Terror's Advocate
    It is one of the most engaging, morally unsettling political thrillers in quite some time, with the extra advantage of being true.
  63. Why Did I Get Married?
    More than anything, a Tyler Perry movie is an interactive experience, and Why Did I Get Married? is no exception. At the screening I attended, it was often difficult to hear the dialogue between bouts of enthusiastic applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”
  64. 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.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Khadak
    A trippy spectacle. It boldly tries to find visuals to describe complex metaphysical and political concepts. But the results often suggest aestheticized eye candy, along the lines of Ken Russell’s “Altered States” or Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” and its sequels.
  67. Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey of a Woman
    A fascinating blend of musical, melodrama and feminist fairy tale, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag shows Bollywood’s moral universe in transition.
  68. Control
    You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.
  69. Golda's Balcony
    Inert yet strangely compelling film.
  70. 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.
  71. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    A faux documentary grounded in ethnicity and mired in absurdity, Finishing the Game is a terrific idea still waiting to be fashioned into a real movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For the Bible Tells Me So
    There is no denying that the film, however inelegant, fills a need. The inevitable DVD should be packaged in a plain cardboard sleeve, so that viewers can carry it in their pockets and, if confronted by a homophobe, hand it over and say, “Watch this, then get back to me.”
  73. The Good Night
    The comedy of male midlife angst dates back at least to “The Seven-Year Itch,” when it was sweet and innocent. Each time it is recycled, it gets more sour and joyless.
  74. The Heartbreak Kid
    Lame, long, ugly joke of a movie.
  75. Michael Clayton
    Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal. It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame.
  76. 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.
  77. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Feels passé and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.
  78. Strange Culture
    Somewhere between documentary and dramatization, fact and impression, Strange Culture molds one man’s tragedy into an engrossing narrative experiment that defies categorization.
  79. The Girl Next Door
    Gregory M. Wilson, the film’s director, has made the kind of movie that makes you wish you could rinse your brain in bleach, to wash all traces of it from your memory.
  80. Lake of Fire
    One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough.
  81. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity Kurt Cobain About a Son, but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it.
  82. The Darjeeling Limited
    The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.
  83. Trade
    An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film’s near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.
  84. Feast of Love
    A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    The movie is so likable that it glides over its many plot holes... The film’s direction, by Andy Fickman, is raucous but never crass, and the affable Mr. Johnson is committed to every moment.
    • The New York Times
  86. The Kingdom
    The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down.
  87. Lust, Caution
    Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.
  88. The Price of Sugar
    Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power.
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    In its modest way, Outsourced may be unique: a charming culture-clash romance that could be taught in business schools.
    • The New York Times
  90. Into the Wild
    Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.
  91. The Last Winter
    Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film The Last Winter, crawling through the hallways and howling into the dread night.
  92. Good Luck Chuck
    The main audience for this dim little sex comedy has no particular interest in seeing Ms. Alba act. They want to see her in her underwear and also to confront one of the central cultural questions of our time: will she take her top off?
  93. Sydney White
    Ms. Bynes, with her cherubic face, expressive eyes and comic timing, helps create a positive, pleasing diversion that caters to the geek in all of us.
  94. 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.
  95. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.
  96. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beauty Remains
    The story seems to be occurring in a China of the imagination, an airless place at once sensually ripe and icily formal. Like “Far From Heaven,” it denies its characters and viewers the ecstatic release they crave.
  98. Across the Universe
    Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.
  99. December Boys
    A coming-of-age tale so treacly it doesn’t just tug your heartstrings, it attempts to glue them to your ribs.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »