The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,312 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: 9,400 out of 20312
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20312
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20312
20312 movie reviews
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  1. Chloe
    Mr. Egoyan has shown off these etchings before -- a solemn young woman in lingerie, a handsome older man in the throes of erotic distress -- and the artistry he brings to the display feels tired and thin this time around. Chloe works hard at seduction, but its heart isn’t really in the game.
  2. The Eclipse
    A moody little number, The Eclipse makes good on its name by sometimes obscuring its themes and even point, which can have its charms though also severe drawbacks.
  3. Ultimate X: The Movie
    This compilation of blisteringly tight stunts plays like the world's longest Mountain Dew commercial.
  4. The Brothers
    Darts nervously between soap opera and sitcom, rarely blending them in a way that lets the two genres enhance each other.
  5. Armageddon
    The actors mark time, and the gung-ho heroics on display are embarrassingly hollow.
  6. That's the Way I Like It
    Amounts to recycling rather than reinvention.
  7. They
    Sensation, not sense, is the point of this exercise, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in effective if cheap moments of fright and dread.
  8. Skins
    Might have been better off as a documentary, with less of Mr. Eyre's uninspired dramatics and more of his sense of observation and outrage.
  9. The In-Laws
    It's as if the director, Andrew Fleming, and the screenwriters, Nat Mauldin and Ed Solomon, set out to make a movie that would be mediocre in every respect. If so, they have completely succeeded.
  10. Titan A.E.
    Despite some gorgeous sequences. . . Titan A.E. is bland.
  11. En kærlighedshistorie
    A disturbing, somewhat repellent portrait of a depressed middle-class woman's struggle to live comfortably in the world.
  12. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    Flailing and pummeling the air, with body language that's part prizefighter, part baggy-pants clown, Reno is famous for her bluntness.
  13. Hell House
    As a director, Mr. Ratliff wisely rejects the temptation to make fun of his subjects, most of whom seem to believe sincerely that they are doing the work of God.
  14. Plunkett & Macleane
    None of it adds up to terribly much beyond a rip-roaring adventure that shows off Carlyle and Miller as cynical British city cousins of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
  15. Just Visiting
    Over all, the humor has been sanitized a bit compared with the darker, more grotesque comedy of the French original.
  16. That's My Face
    This is fundamentally a recruiting film whose intent is to interest other African-Americans in exploring their spiritual traditions. It displays no real curiosity about its subject except to insist that it is the true path to enlightenment. Mr. Harris's stylistic gifts are quite evident; his reportorial instincts are a bit more muffled.
  17. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    The animation is competent, and some of the gags are quite funny, but Jonah never shakes the oppressive, morally superior good-for-you quality that almost automatically accompanies didactic entertainment.
  18. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Bland but harmless.
  19. Rebels with a Cause
    (Garvy) has helped advance our understanding of a difficult and exhilarating time.
  20. X
    Has the sleepy feel of an urban fairy tale, but getting there is a long trip.
  21. Simon Magus
    May be reasonably diverting, but the story never matches the movie's fantastic visual imagination.
  22. Biandan, guniang
    Like Lou Ye's "Suzhou River," a Hitchcock homage similarly set in Shanghai's demimonde, So Close to Paradise offers an intriguing and sometimes self-canceling mixture of emotion and style.
  23. American Desi
    Most of it has to do with the ways younger Indian-Americans keep their culture alive in the United States and the ways they don't.
  24. The Charcoal People
    Bluntly downbeat.
  25. The Forsaken
    Had it exhibited a modicum of restraint, The Forsaken could have been twice as scary.
  26. Auggie Rose
    A minor-key diversion, might play relatively well on television, where you're listening with one ear while keeping the other cocked to the phone.
  27. Waiting
    Doesn't have many fresh ideas to contribute to the genre, though it is reasonably good-natured and delivers a handful of solid laughs.
  28. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    Extremely well acted. But as frequently as The Farewell touches on politics, it is essentially an excoriating (and sometimes grimly amusing) domestic drama of a latter-day king and his concubines.
  29. Space Station 3D
    If nothing else, Space Station 3-D is a film that agoraphobics and claustrophobics can agree on. Members of both groups should stay home.
  30. Circuit
    There is a real subject here, and it is handled with intelligence and care.
  31. Splendor
    Almost a textbook example of what can go wrong when an artistic bad boy decides to be good.
  32. Blue Moon
    Although the odds are against them, Mr. Gazzara and Ms. Moreno succeed in cutting through the forced sitcom banter to create a credible and touching portrait of a marriage of two proud individuals who respect each other even in moments of strife.
  33. Secret Society
    Has the scruffy charm you expect from this kind of picture, and some admirable feminist pluck. But the story is -- forgive me -- a little thin, and the filmmaking clumsy and rushed.
  34. Bobby G. Can't Swim
    Whenever the picture tries to be about something bigger, it turns predictable or maudlin or, in a few sad instances, both simultaneously.
  35. Cleopatra's Second Husband
    Well acted, but it doesn't enrich its metaphor beyond giving an old story a sour contemporary resonance.
  36. The Minus Man
    Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.
  37. The Specials
    Terminally whimsical, it generates a steady current of humor, much of it off-color.
  38. Catfish in Black Bean Sauce
    Isn't quite as much fun as it could be.
  39. Evelyn
    Slight and dogged; its surprises are likable but minor.
  40. Murder by Numbers
    The real surprise, given the secondhand material, is that not everything proceeds by rote in Murder by Numbers.
  41. Restless
    For all its demureness, Restless captures some of the excitement of youthful romance in which the partners aren't just separate individuals but the products of divergent cultures.
  42. Grizzly Falls
    Combines old-fashioned boys' adventure with a heavy-handed modern lecture on parenthood. The film possesses a decent heart but suffers from a simple mind.
  43. Mauvais Sang
    While the screen flashes and flickers, little else is happening.
  44. Southpaw
    What the film resembles more than anything else is one of the miniature human-interest profiles that the networks have taken to inserting between the events in their Olympic coverage.
  45. One Week
    Holds together in spite of its flaws.
  46. Novocaine
    Nothing is particularly believable here, but there are still a few moments of silly, sinister fun.
  47. Flawless
    So awful it just might put an end to Hollywood's hypocritical infatuation with men in drag as symbols of its own supposedly liberated sexual attitudes.
  48. CyberWorld
    Unabashed, and often quite diverting, technological overkill.
  49. The Triumph of Love
    Triumph of Love, Marivaux's 270-year-old romantic comedy, is a beguiling trifle, a gauzy, teasing inquiry into the fungibility of emotions.
  50. The Road to El Dorado
    Little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teeny bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.
  51. Me Myself I
    A sugarcoated romantic comedy that is just clever enough to make you wish it were three times as smart and only a third as sweet.
  52. Bicentennial Man
    Except for Williams, the sitcom-meets-sci-fi acting throughout the movie is strictly of television caliber.
  53. Romeo Must Die
    Sadly, if this movie was a fight, they'd have stopped it.
  54. Pipe Dream
    It's clear that this is a farce about ambition that is not ambitious enough, right down to its cutesy, punning title.
  55. Zus & zo
    To attempt a culinary metaphor, Ms. van der Oest manages a yolky, runny sitcom omelet rather than the airy soufflé of farce.
  56. Don't Ask Don't Tell
    Finds a few chuckles.
  57. Cet amour-là
    Ms. Moreau, still an imperious presence at age 75, makes no effort to look or sound like Duras -- this is one sacred monster stepping in for another.
  58. Eureka
    Eureka never comes to life. -- In pursuing its aesthetic agenda so single-mindedly, the movie leaves the characters behind in the muck.
  59. The Invisible Circus
    Unfortunately, The Invisible Circus, which follows Phoebe as she retraces her dead sibling's steps from Paris to Berlin to the coast of Portugal, doesn't so much illuminate Phoebe's confusion as share it.
  60. Deterrence
    Probably serves some useful purpose, despite its ham-fisted preachiness and mediocre acting.
  61. Rules of Engagement
    There's not much going on here, and there is little suspense.
  62. Simpatico
    Far from being a typical Hollywood desecration of a difficult play, it stays true to the work's quirky, renegade spirit.
  63. Out of Season
    Serious, competent and unsurprising debut film.
  64. One Night at McCool's
    Packs a lot into one night, but it's wearying. It's like a kid determined to show you every toy in his room, and there's nowhere to escape.
  65. Everybody's Famous!
    With its likable blue-collar characters and its unpretentious exuberance, Everybody's Famous is reminiscent of recent British comedies like "Brassed Off" and "The Full Monty."
  66. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Has occasional moments of heat, but not much warmth. And while it is pretty enough to look at, real beauty eludes it.
  67. Circus
    If an Olympic competition for overplotted movie is ever held, Circus seems a likely contender for the gold.
  68. The Last Man
    Feels more like a thought experiment than a fully developed story.
  69. Big Bad Love
    Beneath its stylistic and structural quirks, Big Bad Love -- is a self-indulgent celebration of self-indulgence.
  70. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    What results is a candy-colored broad comedy with noteworthy performances.
  71. The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland
    The somewhat complicated plot may disappoint or confuse some tiny Elmo fans.
  72. ZigZag
    Might have been richer and more observant if it were less densely plotted. The characters would resonate more if there were fewer of them, and if they were not pushed through so many contrived dramatic incidents.
  73. Secret Ballot
    A very minor contribution to the great corpus of Iranian cinema that has emerged in the last 20 years.
  74. Trapped
    Pointless little kidnapping thriller.
  75. Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
    Sheds heat but insufficient light.
  76. Miss Julie
    The dialogue may be crisply idiomatic, but there's finally nothing realistic about the speed with which the characters hurtle through their mood swings and power plays.
  77. This Thing of Ours
    For all of his personal familiarity with the material, Mr. Provenzano has turned out a movie that largely owes its tone and style to other movies.
  78. Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    The cinematic equivalent of sampling goodies from a spartan tastings menu in which the entrees, desserts and appetizers are confusingly jumbled together.
  79. Sasayaki
    There's a little more sex than you'll see on WB, but mostly there's an atmosphere of brooding psychodrama and erotic cruelty that falls somewhere between "Cries and Whispers" and "Say Anything."
  80. The Mothman Prophecies
    About as threatening as the real-life insect the apparition resembles; its large, mossy wings may scare some people, but the bug can only damage your woolens. The movie flirts with more damage than it can actually cause.
  81. The Astronaut's Wife
    Depp moves through the film suavely and imperturbably, never letting the particulars bog him down.
  82. Random Hearts
    The film confines them to an affair that is the sexual equivalent of Easy Listening.
  83. The Event
    A dawdling affair that never finds its own rhythm. Early on, it gets lost in its own earnestness and never finds its way back.
  84. Dust
    A potent, assured and ambitious piece of filmmaking brought down by weighted dialogue and, playing Americans, the British actors Adrian Lester and Joseph Fiennes and the Australian David Wenham.
  85. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The movie keeps you at a distance; it is visually sweeping, and the history is fascinating, but the drama is rarely stirring.
  86. Vatel
    The movie wants desperately to function as a romantic tragedy, with passions glancing off the thoughtless pursuit of satisfaction. But Vatel can't really define the differences between the two; it settles into a period funk, as shallow as the court popinjays it seeks to expose.
  87. The Cell
    Mr. Singh may have an artist's temperament, and he shows signs of being a director
  88. Fever Pitch
    Just because a first-person analysis of a sociocultural phenomenon is fascinating in print, it should not necessarily be turned into a movie.
  89. Assassination Tango
    If Mr. Duvall's finely textured performance is a testament to the power of good screen acting to lift a film above the mundane, the movie's many irritating tics demonstrate that he is much more at home in front of the camera than behind it.
  90. Big Fat Liar
    If Ms. Bynes keeps going in this direction, she can conceivably develop a gallery of characters as rich and varied as Tracey Ullman's.
  91. B. Monkey
    The best part of B. Monkey is reveling in the dark side of Rupert Everett.
  92. The Country Bears
    Sandwiched between the musical numbers are an eclectic assorment of cameos, including Willie Nelson, Queen Latifa and Elton John. The funniest one comes during the closing credits, when the rapper Xzibit testifies that the Country Bears were a formative influence on hip-hop, certainly something the Eagles could never claim.
  93. Maid in Manhattan
    Blandly charming.
  94. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
    It is billed as a "restored version," though the sound is still fuzzy and the image only occasionally rises to the level of murk.
  95. Confusion of Genders
    Quickly turns into an earnest talkfest (spiced with flashes of nudity and sexually explicit dialogue) that feels stiffly programmatic and ultimately false.
  96. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
    Emerges as just one more formulaic action film as the title character bounces around the globe in a deadly treasure hunt.
  97. Cinemania
    It is left for Mr. Heidbreder to offer the fanciest rationalization for their addiction. Asked whether the movies are a substitute for life, he rejects the suggestion that their behavior is pathological and declares that film itself "is a form of living."
  98. Ishtar
    The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired.
  99. Finding Forrester
    The screenplay by Mike Rich is so far-fetched and riddled with holes that Mr. Van Sant's urban realist touches only underscore the falseness of what's on the screen.
  100. Fantasia 2000
    Not especially innovative in its look or subject matter.
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