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. Eastern Promises
    The rigor of Mr. Cronenberg’s direction sometimes seems at odds with the humanism of Mr. Knight’s script, but more often the director’s ruthless formal command rescues the story from its maudlin impulses. Mr. Knight aims earnestly for your heartstrings, but Mr. Cronenberg insists on getting under your skin. The result is a movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time.
  2. In the Valley of Elah
    However you judge the movie’s politics, and whatever its flaws, there is something inarguable, something irreducibly honest and right, about Mr. Jones’s performance.
  3. Ira & Abby
    Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.
  4. King of California
    King of California may look and feel realistic, but it is really a Don Quixote-like fable about nonconformity and pursuing your impossible dream to the very end.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mr. Woodcock
    It’s “The Great Santini” remade as a sitcom.
  6. Silk
    Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.
  7. The Brave One
    Don’t be fooled. The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.
  8. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    As the latest tribute -- Jim Brown’s loving documentary, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song -- makes clear, he’s still busy, still angry, still hopeful, still singing.
  9. Great World of Sound
    I found Mr. Zobel’s film touching and amusing, but it also left me a bit queasy.
  10. 3:10 to Yuma
    More likely to be recalled as a moderately satisfying entertainment than remembered as a classic.
  11. Fierce People
    When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich “are different from you and me,” he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.
  12. Hatchet
    Horror without suspense is like sex without love: you can appreciate the technicalities, but ultimately there’s no reason to care.
  13. In the Shadow of the Moon
    In the Shadow of the Moon is such a morale booster. The power of its archival images hasn’t diminished with familiarity.
  14. Romance & Cigarettes
    There is more raw vitality pumping through Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro’s passionate ode to the sensual pulse of life in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, than in a dozen perky high school musicals. This is a movie in which a dirty mind is a good thing. Call it “The Singing Id.” Prudes, be forewarned.
  15. Shoot 'Em Up
    A worthless piece of garbage.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Brothers Solomon
    A deranged, sometimes desperate parody of an inspirational losers-make-good comedy. Three gags miss for every one that hits.
  17. The Bubble
    Mr. Fox may be a romantic, but he understands that love is rarely all you need.
  18. The Hunting Party
    A misfired, misguided would-be satire.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Inner Life of Martin Frost
    A late appearance by a supporting character -- a pushy plumber and aspiring writer named Jim Fortunato (Michael Imperioli), who offers his mentally damaged young ward (played by Mr. Auster’s own daughter, Sophie) as a servant and possible concubine -- pushes the movie from bland pretension into distastefulness.
  20. Milarepa
    There are stunning locales but not much subtlety on display in Milarepa, a straight-as-an-arrow mythical-historical telling of a mystic’s early life.
  21. The Unknown Soldier
    The reckoning with the past, which has occupied West German society since the 1960s, has been painful and divisive, which makes the calm, empirical spirit of this film all the more impressive.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    Laid back and affectionate, “Cheese” is the movie version of a dear friend you could spend all day with.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Death Sentence
    Aside from a stunning three-minute tracking shot as the gang pursues Nick through a parking garage, and Mr. Bacon’s hauntingly pale, dark-eyed visage, Mr. Wan’s film is a tedious, pandering time-waster.
  24. 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.
  25. Ladrón que roba a ladrón
    An effervescent comedy coasting on the charisma of its stars.
  26. 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Halloween (2007)
    The new Halloween has sympathy for the Devil, but not enough.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Exiled
    The movie is consistently engrossing and sometimes touching, thanks to its hard yet subtle characterizations and Mr. To’s refusal to condescend.
  29. Self Medicated
    Though buoyed by Anthony Marinelli’s moody score and Denis Maloney’s gutsy cinematography, Self-Medicated suffers from severe dramatic droop.
  30. Balls of Fury
    Raunchier and somewhat more imaginative than “Hot Rod.”
  31. 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.
  32. 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.
  33. Deep Water
    Again and again you want to shout at the screen: “Turn back. All will be forgiven.” This tale of risk, though, ends not with man conquering nature but in calamitous failure.
  34. Illegal Tender
    Luridly earnest and laughably immoral, Illegal Tender is an old genre movie with a new look. Call it Hispanixploitation.
  35. Mr. Bean's Vacation
    The kids at my screening loved it. Besides, at its heart, Mr. Atkinson’s movie, a huge hit overseas, speaks in an international language.
  36. 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.
  37. Resurrecting the Champ
    For Mr. Lurie, who specializes in political subjects, Resurrecting the Champ is an encouraging return to film following the rise and fall of his television series "Commander in Chief."
  38. 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.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    September Dawn
    The maudlin, grotesque western September Dawn, about the massacre on Sept. 11, 1857, of about 120 settlers by Mormons (and their Paiute Indian mercenaries), apes "Schindler’s List" in hopes of creating a Christian Holocaust picture.
  40. War
    Most regrettably, War squanders the considerable merits of its leads.
  41. Closing Escrow
    Even naysayers of reality TV’s simplistic structure, which the film openly borrows, may find themselves rooting for a couple of choice -- and having fun in the process. The real-estate game can actually be a laughing matter when you’re not a contestant.
  42. The Hottest State
    At around the halfway point, its characters’ haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil.
    • 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.
  44. Superbad
    Horny is as horny does in the sweetly absurd high school comedy Superbad.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death at a Funeral
    There’s no dearth of rude humor on screens right now, but Death at a Funeral stands apart because its characters -- mostly reserved upper-middle-class British folk who have gathered to bury a patriarch -- are determined to keep a stiff upper lip no matter what.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Them
    The movie is scarier if you know nothing about it going in. It has no larger agenda. It’s not an allegory, a satire or a commentary. It’s just a modestly relentless suspense picture that propels its characters through a series of dreamscapes.
  47. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    Instead of seriously investigating corruption, money laundering and the buying of politicians, Manda Bala would rather spend its time showing slimy brown frogs slithering over one another as they are dumped from one container into another.
  48. The 11th Hour
    An unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing.
  49. 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    The movie’s “Rocky” formula proves irresistible anyway; unsurprisingly, New Line has commissioned Mr. Gordon to remake this story with actors.
  51. The Last Legion
    This might have made a good children’s film.
  52. Sunflower
    Like Douglas Sirk without the throw pillows, Sunflower is a shamelessly old-fashioned melodrama performed with such sincerity that resistance is futile.
  53. Primo Levi's Journey
    Vividly impressionistic and delightfully curious.
  54. Delirious
    Tom DiCillo’s angry comedy Delirious subjects modern celebrity culture to a microscopic examination that shows the toxic virus of fame squirming and multiplying under its lens.
  55. Zebraman
    Driven less by civic duty than by the need to escape his dreary life, Zebraman is a tragic, touching figure too often obscured by Kankurou Kudo’s hyperactive screenplay and a special-effects team drunk on alien slime.
  56. Love for Sale
    Not half as exotic or as compelling as Mr. Aïnouz’s 2002 film, “Madame Satã,” which examined the fantastic life of a transvestite prostitute and underground entertainer in 1930s and ’40s Rio de Janeiro. But it shares the earlier film’s deep sympathy with sexual free spirits in a rigid macho society.
  57. Skinwalkers
    Yawningly directed by Jim Isaac, Skinwalkers is a slavering mess that buries its clunky addiction metaphor beneath a welter of genre clichés, all delivered in extra-slow motion.
  58. 2 Days in Paris
    Audacious as it is, the movie is also a little scary.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Descent
    Hard to watch but essential to see, Descent is at once realistic and rhetorical, and driven throughout by righteous anger that comes from an honest place.
  60. Rocket Science
    The surest sign of the movie’s integrity is that it resists any temptation to build the story to a climactic debate.
  61. Rush Hour 3
    The junky, clunky, grimly unfunny follow-up to the marginally better “Rush Hour 2” and the significantly finer “Rush Hour,” isn’t the worst movie of the summer. But it’s an enervating bummer nonetheless, largely because it shows so little respect for its two likable stars and its audience.
  62. Stardust
    Michelle Pfeiffer is Lamia, as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crossing the Line
    So fascinating that Crossing the Line is riveting.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Daddy Day Camp
    A recruiting poster for kids, insisting that there’s no domestic problem that military values can’t solve.
  65. In Paris
    Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.
  66. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.
  67. 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.
  68. Becoming Jane
    The screenplay’s pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film.
  69. La faute à Fidel!
    Julie Gavras’s wonderful film, Blame It on Fidel, views its ideological conflicts through the eyes of a smart, willful child.
  70. Bratz
    Arriving as inevitably as puberty, Bratz introduces the swollen-headed, fashion-addicted dolls of the title to a live-action movie.
  71. Hot Rod
    Hot Rod might be called the poor man’s “Eagle vs. Shark” if “Eagle vs. Shark” were not already the poor man’s “Napoleon Dynamite.” It certainly lacks the conceptual purity and aesthetic integrity of the “Jackass” movies. In any case poor certainly describes the quality of the filmmaking.
  72. If I Didn't Care
    The movie itself is a shell. The characters, especially the unstable Hadley, barely exist. And even by the loose standards of film noir, the mechanics of the murder plot, and the story’s jolts and twists toward its abrupt surprise ending, are unconvincing.
  73. Underdog
    Underdog may have been originally created to sell cereal for General Mills, but this latest incarnation couldn't sell Frisbees at a dog park.
  74. The Willow Tree
    The Iranian director Majid Majidi’s sad, soulful film The Willow Tree is his second movie to explore blindness and sight on multiple levels.
  75. El cantante
    It may be best to approach El Cantante less as a movie than as a two-hour promotional video for a must-have soundtrack album.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Laura Smiles
    Part domestic drama, part thriller, the microbudget shot-on-video feature Laura Smiles is so ambitious that its ultimate failure is more depressing than anything in its dark script.
  77. Cash
    How many helicopters, armored vehicles and burglars suspended from ceilings can you take? Cash, for all its flash, leaves you hungry. But not for more.
  78. No End in Sight
    It’s a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Camden 28
    Scene for scene, The Camden 28 is a brilliant merger of political outrage and filmmaking chops, and the most suspenseful movie in theaters right now.
  80. I Know Who Killed Me
    Pretentious and inane.
  81. Molière
    Less forgivably, the movie is dull.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Reservations
    The emotional details of Kate, Nick and Zoe’s journey are surprising, honest and life-size, and the film’s determination to present their predicament sympathetically, without appealing to retrograde ideals of femininity and motherhood, makes it notable, and in some ways unique.
  83. The Simpsons Movie
    The Simpsons Movie, in the end, is as good as an average episode of "The Simpsons." In other words, I’d be willing to watch it only -- excuse me while I crunch some numbers here -- 20 or 30 more times.
  84. This Is England
    A modest, near-flawless gem, This Is England is the fifth feature by the young British director Shane Meadows, doing his best work since he first hit the festival scene in the mid-1990s with his hilarious, raw-hewn shorts “Small Time.”
  85. Who's Your Caddy?
    There’s probably more wit and pointed social commentary in the average four-minute OutKast song than in the entirety of Who’s Your Caddy?
  86. Arctic Tale
    The movie’s stunning underwater photography (fearlessly captured by Mr. Ravetch) effectively dilutes the saccharine tone.
  87. The Devil Came on Horseback
    Brutal, urgent, devastating -- the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible.
  88. The Sugar Curtain
    A pensive valentine to literacy programs and childhood idealism left in the ashes of broken families and an economically bifurcated society.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cashback
    Cashback suggests a “Malcolm in the Middle” episode directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The hero’s pained, hilarious childhood flashbacks deserve a much better movie.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    An unwieldy mix of political satire and lavish period soap opera.
  91. Hairspray
    The overall mood of Hairspray is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it.
  92. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    Sporadically funny, casually sexist, blithely racist and about as visually sophisticated as a parking-garage surveillance video.
  93. Sunshine
    A first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer, Mr. Boyle always sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears. He’s wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion.
  94. Live-In Maid
    Modest in scope, but it feels complete, fully inhabited, in a way that more overtly ambitious movies rarely do.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hula Girls
    You’ve seen this film many times. It always works.
  96. Interview
    Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones.
  97. My Best Friend
    A comforting, sentimental tale of a kind that would be insufferably maudlin if made in Hollywood and unbearably affectless if it showed up at Sundance. Somehow it’s easier to take in French.
  98. Talk to Me
    The result is a movie that offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes.
  99. Tekkonkinkreet
    Demands to be seen, if only for its beauty.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time
    Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.
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