The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,304 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: 9,394 out of 20304
  2. Mixed: 8,445 out of 20304
  3. Negative: 2,465 out of 20304
20304 movie reviews
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  1. Brand Upon the Brain!
    Delirious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching film.
  2. Away from Her
    I can't remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.
  3. Spider-Man 3
    The bittersweet paradox of this franchise is that while the stories have grown progressively less interesting the special effects have improved tremendously, becoming at once more plausible -- when Spider-Man swings through the urban canyons he finally looks almost real -- and more spectacular.
  4. Lucky You
    Even though it is sometimes dull and generally thin, there is something winning about the movie's genial lack of ambition.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Civic Duty
    Initially promising, ultimately irritating psychological thriller.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L'iceberg
    Its simultaneously silly and grave tone finds humor in the characters' delusions and obsessions while celebrating their uniqueness.
  7. Paris, je t'aime
    A cinematic tasting menu consisting entirely of amuse-bouches. After two hours of such tidbits the palate is sated. But if there is no need for a main course, you still leave feeling vaguely disappointed at not being served one.
  8. The Treatment
    A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated.
  9. Waitress
    Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress who plays her.
  10. Missing Victor Pellerin
    An enigmatic and utterly compelling story of incinerated art, unbridled egos and exotic plants.
  11. Jindabyne
    The real flaw is that the movie's best features -- the aching clarity of its central performances -- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.
  12. The Condemned
    Tailor-made for those who like their violence multifaceted and their women monosyllabic.
  13. The Invisible
    This latest recycling of foreign-grown frights shows less interest in horror than in healing.
  14. Kickin It Old Skool
    A romantic subplot is formulaic, and, most disappointing, the break-dance sequences don't sizzle, though the film's director, Harvey Glazer, is known for his music videos. Keep an eye out, however, for some nutty cameos.
  15. Next
    In Next, a crummy action and speculative-fiction hybrid, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see into the future two minutes at a time. It's too bad that Mr. Cage couldn't tap into those same powers of divination to save himself from making yet another inexplicably bad choice in roles.
  16. Snow Cake
    Like "I Am Sam," it is a film that tests your cynicism.
  17. Election
    By the end, Mr. To has proven himself to be a genre hack of uncommon intelligence and soul: a first-rate entertainer who can thrill you into thinking.
  18. Les amitiés maléfiques
    As a group portrait of apprentice intellectuals the film has an almost documentary accuracy. It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.
  19. The Wedding Weekend
    Fortunately, there is Molly Shannon as the money manager's disgruntled wife, giving a selfless, robust performance. Bracingly astringent in an unlikable role, she almost turns a potential liability into the film's salvation.
  20. Wind Chill
    A moody, spooky tale, rendered with laudable economy.
  21. Diggers
    A quintessential American independent movie, Diggers isn't going to change the history of cinema. But it has integrity. It feels like life.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
    Although Ms. Specogna's film fleshes out his life to the extent that it can -- leaning heavily on still photographs and interviewing loved ones, social workers and fellow Marines -- the portrait remains frustratingly incomplete.
  23. Disappearances
    The movie, though lovingly handmade by Mr. Craven, has a frustratingly disjunctive rhythm.
  24. Ta Ra Rum Pum
    May take place entirely in New York, but that doesn't stop it from being a classic example of Bollywood family values.
  25. Zoo
    Paradoxically, it is precisely because Mr. Devor refuses to acknowledge the murkiness that clings to every frame in his film, because he refuses to engage with the world beyond that of the zoophiles, that they seem like creatures from some never-ending night.
  26. Triad Election
    More elegantly plotted and streamlined than the first film.
  27. Hot Fuzz
    Since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies, they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as "The Full Monty" blown to smithereens.
  28. Vacancy
    This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel.
  29. Fracture
    The screenwriters, Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers, hit the customary thriller notes with a touch of humor, and the director, Gregory Hoblit (who worked similar terrain in "Primal Fear"), arranges those notes into a catchy, insistent rhythm.
  30. In the Land of Women
    The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    It achieves the documentary format’s basic goal of illuminating history while also demonstrating, through filmmaking choices, how an artist’s style reveals his or her personality.
  32. The Valet
    If you love to hate the superrich, The Valet, a delectable comedy in which the great French actor Daniel Auteuil portrays a piggy billionaire industrialist facing his comeuppance, is a sinfully delicious bonbon.
  33. Stephanie Daley
    Without standing on a soapbox Stephanie Daley suggests a tragic gender gap between men who judge and women who feel.
  34. Downtown: A Street Tale
    Rehashing characters and plots from the "Law & Order" playbook, the director, Rafal Zielinski, supplements his material with religious iconography and more gauzy close-ups than a Barbra Streisand marathon.
  35. Syndromes and a Century
    Syndromes and a Century, like its curious title, has the logic of a dream, a piece of music or perhaps a John Ashbery poem. Its coherence is evident; it is too lovely and lucid to be frustrating or dull. But it takes place just on the other side of conscious apprehension.
  36. Red Road
    In the arresting Red Road, the dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has evolved from a grim fantasy of totalitarianism into a banal fact of life.
  37. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Strictly for cultists, and even they might find less than 90 bongless minutes hard to sit through.
  38. Pathfinder
    The director, Marcus Nispel, takes his butchery very seriously. (He was the lead vivisectionist for the remake of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.") He may not be able to make this movie move, but, man, can he make an eyeball fly.
  39. Perfect Stranger
    The director, as he showed in movies like "After Dark, My Sweet," and "Fear," specializes in conjuring conspiratorial atmospheres in which anxiety and sexual menace hang in the air like a heavy, bitter perfume. Long after you've dismissed the movie's ridiculous, convoluted story, traces of that scent may linger.
  40. Redline
    This film is about surfaces, for young men with testosterone to burn, and the racing passages snap.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreaming Lhasa
    A fine example of how feature films can be used to deliver urgent political messages, but as drama, it doesn’t quite work.
  42. Lonely Hearts
    As fictional characters in a movie that is fetishistic in its attention to period detail, Mr. Leto and Ms. Hayek work well together as an unsavory couple two rungs down the social ladder from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity."
  43. Year of the Dog
    It's funny ha-ha but firmly in touch with its downer side, which means it's also funny in a kind of existential way.
  44. Slow Burn
    A wooden police thriller that is as dull as it is impenetrable and ultimately beyond ludicrous.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Modern Man
    If you go to movies expecting certain familiar elements -- plot, dialogue, relationships and so forth -- you'll want to throw popcorn at the screen. But if you tune into this film's rhythms, you'll leave the theater seeing the world with fresh eyes.
  46. Private Fears in Public Places
    The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.
  47. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
    Apparently started out as just another soft-core item, or what the Japanese call a pink film, but evolved into something more ambitious, sort of. Certainly it doesn’t look or play out like the typical American pay-TV fodder.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    Ms. Jordan lets a few subjects contradict the image of Mr. Smith as martyr, but the overall tone is worshipful verging on reductive. You come away impressed by Smith's charisma, versatility and integrity, while also wondering if a man so abrasively self-important could have made such playful art.
  49. Rock the Bells
    A fascinating glimpse of a dreamer and a music culture that has always depended on dreams.
  50. Disturbia
    There are no big surprises, but the jumps and jolts are well timed and the overall mood is at once grisly and good-natured -- more diverting than disturbing.
  51. Grindhouse
    The obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives Grindhouse its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.
  52. The Hoax
    It is for the most part a jumpy, suspenseful caper, full of narrow escapes, improbable reversals and complicated intrigue. But it has a sinister, shadowy undertow, an intimation of dread that lingers after Irving's game is up.
  53. Ping Pong
    Stylistically stunning and completely nuts, Ping Pong is nevertheless perceptive about male social hierarchies and the benefits of knowing your place.
  54. The TV Set
    At times The TV Set seems to unfold almost entirely without exaggeration.
  55. Whole New Thing
    This movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society.
  56. Daratt
    The film has the feel of a gift. Particularly noteworthy are Mr. Haroun's eloquent silences, visual and aural.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Los Muertos
    Like a slowed-down, more realistic and psychologically penetrating cousin of a Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick film, Los Muertos is primarily concerned with the rhythms and textures of life.
  58. The Reaping
    The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market.
  59. Are We Done Yet?
    An ill-advised sequel to "Are We There Yet?" and a feeble fable of better parenting through home improvement.
  60. Firehouse Dog
    Working with four interchangeable Deweys, the filmmakers create a sufficient number of lively stunts to keep the kiddies amused, though the film's wittiest moment -- a canine parody of Dudley Moore's first glimpse of Bo Derek in "10" -- will be appreciated only by their parents. In trying to straddle both age groups, however, Firehouse Dog proves decidedly less nimble than its furry star.
  61. Black Book
    Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to "true events" notwithstanding.
  62. Killer of Sheep
    The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.
  63. Blades of Glory
    Fast, light, frequently funny comedy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lookout
    Mr. Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout was long considered one of Hollywood's great unproduced scripts. The end product doesn't justify that buildup...Still, there's a lot to like here, and the film's bleak setting and empathetic tone add interest to what could have been a by-the-numbers affair.
  65. Meet the Robinsons
    Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.
  66. After the Wedding
    A fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work.
  67. The Hawk Is Dying
    Set in North Florida and based on a book by Harry Crews, The Hawk Is Dying is a dreary study of male angst groaning beneath the weight of its own symbolism.
  68. Race You to the Bottom
    Self-consciously edgy and romantically limp.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sacco and Vanzetti
    The movie's meat-and-potatoes style seems less a failure of imagination than a means of putting in the foreground its intriguing subject matter.
  70. Summer in Berlin
    The low-key realism is so meticulously maintained that Summer in Berlin feels somewhat trivial. There is nothing larger here than meets the eye. It is "Sex and the City" on a stringent budget with fewer characters.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    Mr. Hazlewood’s strategy also draws attention to the lack of psychological detail in the central love triangle, which isn’t good. But the music still pierces, the blood still flows, and the overall conception is so original that even when the movie falters in the moment, it dazzles in the memory.
  72. Shooter
    This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Mr. Fuqua, who happens to be surprisingly good with actors, does have a knack for chaos.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    The film is brazenly indebted to old cowboys-and-Indians movies and to James Cameron’s "Aliens." Gleefully sensationalistic and paced like an adults-only shoot-'em-up video game, it's ultimately less interested in subversion and subtext than in making viewers squirm, shriek and throw up into their popcorn bags.
  74. The Last Mimzy
    Despite leaden direction and a story crammed with pseudoscientific flotsam -- including palm reading, levitation, time travel and telepathy -- The Last Mimzy is a wholesome, eager entertainment that doesn't talk down.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pride
    The movie serves up the expected ratio of setbacks to triumphs and closes with video footage of the real Jim Ellis. But when sinewy young idealists glide through water to the tune of "I'll Take You There," the heart still leaps.
  76. Reign Over Me
    Reign Over Me uses the rhythms and moods of comedy to explore, and also to contain, overpowering feelings of loss, anger and hurt. And like that earlier movie ("The Upside of Anger"), this one is maddeningly uneven.
  77. TMNT
    The turtles themselves may look prettier, but are no smarter; torn irreparably from their countercultural roots, our superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    The movie's wild performances and droll humor are tough to resist.
  79. Boy Culture
    A slick and absorbing drama.
  80. Cobra Verde
    Connoisseurs of craziness need wait no longer. Cobra Verde opens today in all its feral, baffling glory. Along with "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo," Cobra Verde completes a trilogy of mayhem and megalomania in hot climates.
  81. Color Me Kubrick
    Even if it doesn't add up to more than a fitfully amusing collection of comic sketches, Color Me Kubrick is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame.
  82. First Snow
    A noirish thriller that revels in ominous visual moods, deepened by Cliff Martinez's spare, shivering guitar score, this heartland "Appointment in Samarra" is a mind-teaser that speaks the flat, evasive language of its seedy characters.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Journey from the Fall
    The film depicts one family's endurance in sturdy, old-movie style, with sweeping camerawork, a monumental and occasionally intrusive orchestral score, gorgeous yet forbidding natural vistas and enough shocking tragedies, brazen escapes and crowd-pleasing acts of defiance to fuel several action-adventure pictures.
  84. Offside
    While the gist of Offside is the same (as "The Circle"), its tone is more insouciant, as it celebrates the guile and toughness of its heroines while casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing their jailers.
  85. The Page Turner
    A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol.
  86. Memory
    Memory is an inane, sluggish mess.
  87. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    It is a depressing story, certainly, as well as moving, confusing and, at a fast 72 minutes, at once undercooked and overpadded.
  88. Iluminados por el fuego
    Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    The director, James Wan, and the writer, Leigh Whannell (the team behind the controversially brutal "Saw" series), deliver the mandatory shocks and gross-outs, backed by dissonant bursts of music and made almost elegant by the cinematographer John R. Leonetti's desaturated images.
  90. I Think I Love My Wife
    Mr. Rock has not only done his best work as a director and screenwriter but has also made an unusually insightful and funny mainstream American movie about the predicaments of modern marriage.
  91. Premonition
    The sloppy, absent-minded Premonition is a giant step backward for Ms. Bullock.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Brother
    The movie's strongest element is the chemistry between the reflective Mr. Kearse and Mr. Scott (who really has Down syndrome). Improving on its obvious antecedent in "Dominick and Eugene," their relationship feels real, not like a movie contrivance.
  93. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    The history presented in The Wind That Shakes the Barley hardly feels like a closed book or a museum display. It is as alive and as troubling as anything on the evening news, though far more thoughtful and beautiful.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adam's Apples
    Smart-aleck comedy and spirituality aren't incompatible, but in Adam's Apples they cancel each other out.
  95. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it's absorbing in a sick way.
  96. Blockade
    It all has a ghostly feel, like eerie murmurs during a séance: the static of history heard on a short-wave radio.
  97. The Go Master
    Gorgeously shot, moving through the decades in a gentle adagio, it is less a chronicle than a tribute -- and also, to non-initiates in the game of go, a bit of a puzzle.
  98. 300
    Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become.
  99. The Host
    The Host is a cautionary environmental tale about the domination of nature and the costs of human folly, and it may send chills up your spine. But only one will tickle your fancy and make you cry encore, not just uncle.
  100. Beyond the Gates
    Though less reassuring and not as dramatically coherent as "Hotel Rwanda," it still packs a hard punch.
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