The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Kill the Poor
    There's potential here for an incendiary riff on gentrification and its discontents, but the result is only lukewarm. While the ensemble is as pungent as its assorted clichés will permit, the cruddy video photography and haphazard organization of plot blunt the wry thrust of the material.
  2. 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.
  3. Grace
    Mr. Solet does not possess anything close to Mr. Polanski’s storytelling or image-making skills, but with the help of his sound crew (four people are given sound design or editing credits), he keeps you on the edge of your seat, or perhaps the edge of fleeing the theater.
  4. A Love Divided
    Although the film is well acted from top to bottom, its dramatic spark plug is Mr. Doyle's terrifying portrayal of Father Stafford.
  5. Tokyo Eyes
    The portrayals by the fetching Ms. Yoshikawa and Mr. Takeda are consistently absorbing, and Mr. Limosin's plotting, though essentially gimmicky and manipulative, packs mystery and tension.
  6. Bounce
    Bounce may be far from a great film, but its pleasures are consistent enough to remind you of how few movies nowadays come anywhere close to matching it in intelligence and emotional balance.
  7. Charlie's Angels
    It never pretends that it's anything more than trashy, cheesy fun. But even trash -- especially trash this expensive -- should at least be well made. Sure, it's easy on the eyes, but would a little brains be too much to ask?
  8. Barenaked in America
    May not be dispassionate filmmaking, but it is certainly entertaining.
  9. The First Basket
    The First Basket, a functional (if narrowly interesting) history lesson by the filmmaker David Vyorst, recollects the rich history of Jewish participation in basketball.
  10. One Day on Earth
    One Day on Earth shows, there's a fine line between coherence and chaos.
  11. The Manzanar Fishing Club
    The time with these survivors is appreciated, as who knows how much longer we'll have access to this living history. But I'd rather have heard them describe something other than bait, or how their fishing rods advanced from willow to bamboo to items from the Sears catalog.
  12. Snowman's Land
    Despite on-point performances (especially from the hilarious Mr. Wodianka), the story (by Tomasz Thomson, who also directs) is too pitted with holes and loose ends to permit the film a bump from meh to marvelous.
  13. Six Million and One
    It is an emotional journey for these grown children, now in their 40s and 50s, who engage in sometimes heated conversations, several taking place on the actual sites where Joseph and other prisoners endured unimaginable suffering.
  14. In the Name Of
    Encouraging sensitive performances that mitigate the film’s sluggish pace and fuzzy narrative, Ms. Szumowska juxtaposes two-person scenes of wordless intimacy with group expressions of casual violence.
  15. 5 to 7
    The city doesn’t need to be real in a romantic movie, but the feelings must be. Although Mr. Levin tends to embrace clichés and overstatement (Brian’s parents, Arlene and Sam, played by Glenn Close and Frank Langella, are straight out of Yiddish vaudeville), he can also surprise you with delicate touches, a pained look, a wince of recognition.
  16. Lost and Love
    Lost and Love (“Lost Orphan” in the original Chinese title) confronts serious problems but is too busy reaching for epic sweep and soaring moments to nail the fine detail of main characters’ fraught give-and-take.
  17. Snowtime!
    It is aimed at younger children and includes pretty songs, but it doesn’t soft-pedal anything. Its low-key story is about friendship, but it’s also about loss, which should leave pint-size viewers with plenty to think about.
  18. Kaleidoscope
    Or maybe not: Committing completely to Carl’s wobbly perceptions, the filmmakers mire us in a hackneyed swamp of narrative uncertainty.
  19. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is as aimless as its dimly seen characters, who talk a lot of dreadful, cute-tough dialogue but are never recognizable except as the actors who play them. Even that factor isn't much help in enjoying the film.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lawman
    A potent but curiously exasperating Western.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Unfortunately, Mr. Wayne's first film trip to London doesn't appear to have been necessary. He and his busy company only serve to make Brannigan a commonplace crime caper.
  22. Black Friday
    Andy Greskoviak’s script lampoons corporate apathy and retail-work ennui with the same swiftness as his voracious zombies. Unfortunately, Black Friday also tries to make viewers root for its characters, who are mostly delightful because they are such wildly mediocre people.
  23. Alone Together
    Its simplicity and lack of cinematic fancy strikes a tone of surprising relief.
  24. Tomorrow Never Dies
    Despite Mr. Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.
  25. Submission
    The satire is cautious and the emotions restrained, so that what should be a swirl of lust, ambition, recrimination and bureaucratic absurdity rises only to genteel, nervous laughter and mild discomfort.
  26. White House Down
    As demented and entertaining as promised, and a little less idiotic than feared.
  27. Man of Tai Chi
    The fight is the thing in Man of Tai Chi, Keanu Reeves’s down-and-dirty and generally diverting directing debut.
  28. A Mouthful of Air
    Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, A Mouthful of Air aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege.
  29. The Nativity Story
    At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.
  30. American Chaos
    It was a prescient plan. Mr. Stern, a longtime Democrat, vowed to listen closely, and he seems to have kept his word. Though he doesn’t mask his expressions — usually astounded, though never mocking — he’s a genial interviewer, empathic, he says, even if he can’t be sympathetic.
  31. The Penguin Lessons
    While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much.
  32. Anger Management
    Undercooked, although it feels enough like a comedy for you to swallow it if you have to.
  33. Like Father
    Directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, it’s a predictable comedy of reconciliation. But it boasts substantial pleasures, largely on account of the performers.
  34. Stonehearst Asylum
    This shockingly flabby effort from Mr. Anderson — who, in features like “The Machinist” (2004) and “Session 9” (2001), showed a much surer hand with oppressive atmospheres and troubled psyches — feels as nutty as its characters.
  35. Absolute Power
    Eastwood directs a sensible-looking genre film with smooth expertise, but its plot is quietly berserk.
  36. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    While you don’t require familiarity with the dozen or so earlier titles to enjoy this one, you do require a sense of humor that’s easily triggered and a gag reflex that isn’t.
  37. Formosa Betrayed
    Mr. Van Der Beek, manlier than in his “Dawson Creek” days, gives an able performance in a movie whose Asian actors tend to overplay the intrigue in an exaggerated 1940s style, exchanging sinister meaningful looks and, in general, hamming it up.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ferrante Fever
    It’s an anodyne fan flick that casts only furtive glances in Ferrante’s direction, as if the filmmaker, Giacomo Durzi, were a reverential subject who doesn’t dare to make eye contact with the queen.
  39. The Protector
    The Protector supersizes the formula of "Ong Bak."
  40. The Keeper
    It’s contrary to the movie’s spirit to judge Bert, but the evasive treatment of his wartime experiences plays like a dodge: His past exists as a kind of amorphous trauma, reduced to shorthand in shamelessly placed flashbacks.
  41. Front Cover
    Though too slight to be memorable, the gay romance Front Cover takes a gentle, thoughtful look at the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality.
  42. Iceman
    Randau’s script, though, is an implacable plod from one bashing to another.
  43. Zorro: The Gay Blade
    Zorro, the Gay Blade, which was directed by Peter Medak (''The Ruling Class'' and ''The Changeling'') and written by Hal Dresner, has some of the slapdash bounce of Bob Hope's long-ago Paramount comedies. Though it doesn't have the authoritative timing and leering presence of Mr. Hope, it has its own careless charm and an appealing tolerance for jokes that aren't wildly funny.[24 July 1981, p.16]
    • The New York Times
  44. Radium Girls
    The script, by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, tends to be overtly formulaic, but the emotional resonance of the two leads carries this movie.
  45. 2073
    Kapadia is a gifted storyteller in both modes, yet one wishes for a version of “2073” in which the veil between them was more permeable. As the film makes clear, they may soon be one and the same.
  46. The Ordeal
    Calvaire is pompous, but not without talent or shivers.
  47. LUV
    It does not entirely succeed, but at its best Luv shows the kind of heart and intelligence that is always welcome - and often missing - in American movies.
  48. My Old Lady
    As the truth tumbles out, the dialogue and the carefully timed revelations make My Old Lady seem increasingly stagy. But the performances go a long way toward camouflaging the screenplay’s clunky mechanics.
  49. Wild Side
    Too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.
  50. Reptile
    The trouble with Reptile is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.
  51. The Devil's Own
    Mr. Pitt moves through this unexpectedly solid thriller with dazzling confidence, showing off all the star power that he usually works overtime to hide.
  52. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    Working ostensibly from the viewpoint of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Liz Kendall (an excellent Lily Collins), [Director] Berlinger never fully commits. Instead, he appears as seduced by Bundy as virtually everyone else in the movie.
  53. Reckless
    Contrived and cliched as it turns out to be, Reckless has enough vitality to carry it for a while, although it never stops recalling other films.
  54. Malice
    Though light of weight, it hugs the road around every hairpin curve in its cruel and twisty narrative.
  55. Orfeu
    Finds a sprawling, vivid middle ground somewhere between documentary and myth.
  56. XX/XY
    A sour portrait of Gen X yuppies who settle for adult lives that appear at once soulless and overprivileged.
  57. The Wood
    Famuyiwa's dialogue is easygoing and witty, and the warmhearted comic performances mesh beautifully.
  58. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    A loose- jointed, not especially memorable comic caper with some lovely moments of humorous invention, many patches of clumsy writing and a few game performances.
  59. Down with Love
    Works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's "Lover Come Back," the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.
  60. Don't Tell
    Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel.
  61. Outlaw Posse
    In direct conversation with cinema’s many spaghetti westerns, Van Peebles’s shaggy script relies on winking nods and plentiful shootouts in lieu of production value. Outlaw Posse may not be innovative, but its regard for family affairs is worth treasuring.
  62. Hollywood Dreams
    Knowing but never jaded, Hollywood Dreams is driven by Ms. Frederick's no-boundaries commitment to her broken character, a performance that's as startling as it is touching. In Mr. Jaglom's maverick hands, the appeal of illusion over reality is both fatal and irresistible.
  63. Sexy Baby
    This scattershot investigation of the effects of Internet pornography on female behavior only ruffles the surface of a complex issue, one that demands a much larger sample than three white, educated women.
  64. Jumpin' Jack Flash
    The idea is funnier than the execution. Miss Goldberg is only funny when she is being foul-mouthed, which seems rude since no one else is allowed to respond in kind or degree.
  65. The Holiday
    Ms. Meyers, whose ambitions are telegraphed by her film's title, which directly invokes George Cukor's lovely 1938 romp "Holiday," has created a cumbersome vehicle by saddling Iris with a flamboyantly glamorous Los Angeles double, Amanda. As played by Cameron Diaz with oodles of charm and not an ounce of persuasion, Amanda doesn’t as much mirror Iris's love troubles as throw them into wincing relief.
  66. Happy Gilmore 2
    The early and largely easy fun begins to curdle into inanity that simply drags (there is, oddly enough, way too much actual golf in this movie), before devolving into an overextended fever dream of celebrity cameos.
  67. Four Good Days
    As a relationship movie, not just for the pair but those around them, Four Good Days is more complex than its outward trappings and preachier scenes — like an anguished Molly addressing a high school class — suggest.
  68. The 4:30 Movie
    Effort goes only so far, and The 4:30 Movie doesn’t surpass Smith’s usual limitations.
  69. Agnes of God
    The material itself, thoroughly unsurprising on the stage, is if anything even more so on the screen.
  70. Parthenope
    Parthenope, like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive.
  71. Black Snake Moan
    In spite of Amelia Vincent's toothsome cinematography and the down-home locations, the movie often has the lumbering, literal-minded rhythms of a second-rate stage play -- not a moan or a howl, but a slow, anxious groan.
  72. The Good Doctor
    Ultimately, even after momentarily falling apart in a fit of paranoia, Martin remains a cipher in a movie that never fulfills its potential as melodrama. If The Good Doctor isn't a bad movie, it tells only half the story.
  73. The Magic Gloves
    A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    As the film cuts back and forth between the present day and a historical survey of gay culture, its tone wavers between dutifully somber and irrepressibly funny.
  75. The Girl from Monaco
    If in the end the film is neither a cogent psychological thriller nor an effervescent sex comedy, it does at least have an interesting sense of place.
  76. Elsa y Fred
    Best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms. Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence.
  77. Hot Summer Days (Chuen sing yit luen - yit lat lat)
    Do they have date movies in China? Probably, and Hot Summer Days, an enjoyable concoction of loosely intertwined stories of love and obsession, is just right for that purpose.
  78. Vulgaria
    The film's kinky energy eventually wanes, the pileup of profanities losing its initial zing.
  79. Mr. Right
    Ms. Kendrick — whether playing daffy, amorous, insightful or indignant — carries the movie. And her surprising shades of grit don’t hurt, either.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Le Mans
    Dramatically, the picture is a bore. And neither the oblique approach to these time-out sequences nor a ripe score by Michel Legrand manages to juice things up.
  81. Paradise
    Paradise is a strikingly shot Holocaust drama that ultimately seems confused about whose story it’s telling or to what end.
  82. Love Me
    The Zucheros bring a great deal of imagination to the task, and the sheer audacity of the movie is enough to make it worth watching, even if, at times, the gadgets’ sentimental education starts to feel repetitive.
  83. Blackhat
    Michael Mann’s thriller Blackhat, a story about the intersection of bodies and machines, is a spectacular work of unhinged moviemaking. By turns brutal and sentimental, lovely and lurid, as serious as the grave and blissfully preposterous, it combines a truckload of plot with many of the obsessions, tropes, sights and sounds that distinguish his other movies.
  84. Comet
    The visions (a meteor shower, Paris) are romantic and lovely, and there’s a sense of commitment to the enterprise that pretty much overcomes the near bathos and proves involving.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joe Kidd
    For perhaps its first half-hour, John Sturges's new Western, Joe Kidd, looks surprisingly good. It seems restrained, relaxed, unfashionably out of the current mode in its commitment to people and horses rather than to sadistic monsters and machines. Nothing remarkable, but modestly decent—a feeling that persists, with continually diminishing assurance, almost until the climax, when everything is thrown away in a flash of false theatrics, foolish symbolism and what I suspect is sloppy editing.
  86. Three Days of Rain
    A quiet, thoughtful film about isolation and separation.
  87. Yardie
    John Conroy’s cinematography hustles and heaves, straining to inject a vitality that the story too often lacks. Yet whether in the kaleidoscopic warmth of Jamaica or the gray chill of London, Yardie’s sunlight-filled songs will make your toes twitch.
  88. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    Berman can’t quite juggle it all.
  89. Dorian Blues
    With some gentle humor that will delight the "Napoleon Dynamite" set, Dorian Blues lights a natural little footpath between two ways of living.
  90. The City of Your Final Destination
    Besides Ms. Linney’s excellent performance and Mr. Hopkins’s good one, the best things about the movie are its sensuous cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe (“Talk to Her,” “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and a gorgeous soundtrack.
  91. Remember
    Christopher Plummer puts on a master class in acting, and his director, Atom Egoyan, delivers one in audience manipulation in Remember.
  92. Fay Grim
    Too light-headed to qualify as satire, too poker-faced to register as comedy, Fay Grim belongs in its own stylistic niche: the Hal Hartley film.
  93. 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.
  94. Greendale
    There is really no other way to categorize this splendid, crotchety artifact.
  95. The Independent
    It strings along its joke just long enough to keep from wearing out its welcome.
  96. Get Over It
    Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.
  97. Blade II
    Because of the movie's wonderful shamelessness, its mordantly funny chills and fights are huge turn-ons. A B picture in love with the zest of its comic-book origins, it embodies that medium's pulse-pounding spiritedness and silliness.
  98. Made-Up
    Its warm, occasionally off-putting individuality is more like what you look for in a friend than in a movie, and like a friend it invites you to see the unique beauty that lies under its superficial flaws.
  99. Which Brings Me to You
    Which Brings Me to You is cleverly structured but often feels too crowded with the ghosts of lovers past.
  100. Gone in the Night
    Twists galore follow, the torque of which surprises again and again.
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