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. Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    Although Maxed Out would like to be this year’s "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," it doesn’t measure up. "Enron" was a stronger film because its focus was specific, the personalities under its microscope were outsize, and its story had a beginning, middle and end. Maxed Out, which has no narrator, gathers facts, opinions and impressions and tosses them into a blender. And its story is still unfinished.
  2. The Namesake
    The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s popular novel, conveys a palpable sense of people as living, breathing creatures who are far more complex than their words might indicate.
  3. The Ultimate Gift
    Reeking of self-righteousness and moral reprimand, Michael O. Sajbel’s Ultimate Gift”is a hairball of good-for-you filmmaking.
  4. The Exterminating Angels
    One of Mr. Brisseau's subjects is the volatility of desire, the way the path of erotic curiosity can swerve from satisfaction into recrimination and confusion. A porno-philosopher in the venerable French tradition, he blends a frank appeal to the audience's nether regions with some teasing attention to its mind.
  5. The Border Post
    Border Post is notable for representing all of Yugoslavia's former member republics among its producers and for a tone that juggles humor and harshness without sacrificing either.
  6. Zodiac
    Rarely has a film with so much blood on its hands seemed so insistently alive.
  7. Wild Hogs
    Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Allen, who have never aspired very far beyond their affable television-comedy personas, are easier to watch than Mr. Travolta or Mr. Macy, who both undertake what can only be called acting. This is more than the picture deserves, but then again, so is Ray Liotta, as the chieftain of the bad bikers, and so is Ms. Tomei.
  8. The Cats of Mirikitani
    The result is a movie that evolves naturally from the filmmaker's compassion for her subject; as much as possible, she remains off camera, and her immense act of charity is never permitted to become the film's focus. Instead this remarkable documentary offers a brief but satisfying look at a defiantly self-sufficient life.
  9. 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.
  10. Into Great Silence
    I hesitate, given the early date and the project's modesty, to call Into Great Silence one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.
  11. Wild Tigers I Have Known
    Like "Twelve and Holding," another film from last year's New Directors series, Wild Tigers achingly sympathizes with the desperate lengths an obsessed adolescent will go to in pursuit of love. As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of "Tea and Sympathy," the future teachers of Logan's life lessons will "be kind."
  12. The Astronaut Farmer
    The opening shots, of Farmer on horseback in his space suit, hint at a strangeness that the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, but it does have a visual freshness that makes the bromides and clichés palatable.
  13. Reno 911!: Miami
    What feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air.
  14. The Abandoned
    After a while, Mr. Cerdà exhausts his repertory of spooky effects -- too many dark hallways and illogical, foreboding point-of-view shots -- and you begin to hunger for exposition, always a bad sign in a horror film. Even worse is that, by the time the explanations arrive, you no longer care.
  15. Amazing Grace
    The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance.
  16. Gray Matters
    Compared to Gray Matters, even a Nora Ephron bonbon has the weight of urban neo-realism.
  17. Starter for 10
    Starter for Ten offsets its rite-of-passage clichés with relaxed performances and an extremely likable lead.
  18. The Taste of Tea
    A bit of patience is required to get through The Taste of Tea, but patience is often rewarded, and it certainly is by this droll and oddly touching film.
  19. The Wayward Cloud
    It feels willed, aggressive and unconvincing -- clammy rather than cool -- in a way that suggests artistic frustration rather than discovery. The water shortage may be a metaphor for the director’s creative desiccation, which his admirers can only hope is temporary.
  20. Cocaine Angel
    Harnessing the twin virtues of drollness and economy, Mr. Tully keeps scenes brief and melodrama on the margins.
  21. Breach
    One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world.
  22. Bridge to Terabithia
    Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.
  23. Ghost Rider
    This dissociation leaves the supporting cast to its own devices, with no one suffering more than the appealing Eva Mendes as Johnny's true love, Roxanne. If Ms. Mendes ever finds a director willing to allow her to perform with her shirts fully buttoned, there will be no stopping her.
  24. Antibodies
    As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason.
  25. Avenue Montaigne
    Avenue Montaigne is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.
  26. Close to Home
    The movie, written and directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager, is really a study of people coping with excruciating boredom and the absurd aspects of military life.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Boy Who Cried Bitch: The Adolescent Years
    The film is so clumsily written and directed, and the performances so one-note, that any potential for enlightenment is suffocated.
  28. Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
    Throughout Grbavica the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads. At Sara’s school the psychological wounds of the war are being handed down to her generation through the separation of heroes and nonheroes. Fathers pass their weapons down to their sons. Even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.
  29. Eklavya: The Royal Guard
    The main tribute in Guard, however, is to Mr. Bachchan, an aging Bollywood monument (and father of the rising actor Abhishek Bachchan), whose sunken, heavy-lidded eyes, grizzled countenance and noble bearing indisputably convey the presence of a seasoned star.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Daddy's Little Girls
    As a director, Mr. Perry has his strong points, including a genuine interest in showing the resilience of African-American life and traditions (including church sermons and blues music, which are accorded equal significance here). But those aspects get lost in this turgid and ungainly film.
  31. Music and Lyrics
    While there is not much chemistry between Mr. Grant and Ms. Barrymore, they are professional enough to work with the movie's conceit while sending flickers of idiosyncratic charm off the screen.
  32. Bamako
    Bamako is something different: a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.
  33. Hannibal Rising
    Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris's screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.
  34. Norbit
    Not exactly uproarious. But Mr. Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on "Saturday Night Live," has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Sin Eater
    Handsomely produced, earnestly performed and 100 percent irony-free, The Last Sin Eater is religious art for mainstream consumption.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Friday
    Epic and raw, Black Friday is cut from the same bloody cloth as "Salvador" and "Munich."
  37. Notes on Marie Menken
    Notes on Marie Menken shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
  38. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burning Annie
    A thoroughly professional comedy, well paced, attractively photographed and smartly acted.
  40. The Decomposition of the Soul
    This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination.
  41. Because I Said So
    A mild exercise in deliberate mediocrity, with chuckles and heartwarming moments distributed as carefully as nuts in a factory-made brownie. The movie's lack of ambition is hardly surprising, but both Ms. Moore and Ms. Keaton, who can wring flustered comedy out of the mildest provocation, deserve better.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Messengers
    Like too many horror pictures, The Messengers becomes more boringly prosaic as it goes along, and there's an 11th-hour plot twist so dumb and poorly articulated that it destroys the movie. That's a shame, because shot for shot, the Pangs might be the most terrifying filmmakers alive.
  43. The Situation
    Exploitation cinema of the most narcoleptic kind.
  44. Fired!
    Feels like a desperate attempt to stretch a flimsy half-hour made-for-cable concept into a feature film.
  45. Puccini for Beginners
    It all looks easy when it's carried off this smoothly. But as any number of stilted duds can attest, applying a Philip Barry or Woody Allen sensibility to 21st-century New Yorkers in their 30s is as delicate a craft as diamond cutting.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Constellation
    If earnestness equaled skill, Constellation would be a classic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    East of Havana
    So much of American pop thrives on a bratty facsimile of courage that when you see the real deal, it's a revelation. East of Havana is the real deal.
  48. In the Pit
    With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tazza: The High Rollers
    Bet on Tazza to entertain; you can't lose.
  50. An Unreasonable Man
    Its ideological leanings are evident and unsurprising, but more screen time for Mr. Nader's pre-2000 (or pre-post-2000) adversaries would have made a richer film.
  51. Room 314
    Like most films of this type, Room 314 demands a great deal from its performers, not all of whom withstand the intense scrutiny. Fortunately, the action is bookended by four of the best.
  52. Blood and Chocolate
    Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition.
  53. Catch and Release
    Although I find the term "chick flick" odious, I imagine that Columbia Pictures regards Catch and Release as exactly that, although there are signs that Ms. Grant was reaching for something more layered and subtle than the usual fairy-tale formula
  54. Epic Movie
    The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class.
  55. Smokin' Aces
    A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.
  56. Seraphim Falls
    Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shockproof
    While Shockproof”will inspire more groans than gasps, it's essential viewing for fans of Mr. Fuller and Mr. Sirk.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    G.I. Jesus
    May be a mixed bag, but it is so impressive in so many ways that it demands to be taken seriously. It's a black comedy about a returning Iraq war veteran named Jesús (Joe Arquette) that aims for an absurd, satirical tone (think "Dr. Strangelove" by way of "Coming Home") but rarely hits the mark.
  59. From Other Worlds
    A limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous.
  60. China Blue
    A heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China.
  61. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    If it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, "a typical German story," the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hitcher
    The movie genuflects toward pop depth in a scene where Grace sprawls on a motel bed watching Alfred Hitchcock’s "Birds," another thriller about implacable, undefined evil, but there’s a difference between refusing to give viewers the answers and having nothing to say. For all its death-metal vigor, The Hitcher falls into the latter camp.
  63. The Italian
    There is something slightly magical about the lighting, almost as if this were a fantasy land from which Vanya might actually make an escape. This sense of unreality, of magical thinking and wishing, carries the story and Vanya through a remarkable journey.
  64. Mafioso [re-release]
    The movie is at once a giddy mixture of farce, satire and opera buffa and a closely observed drama of social dislocation and cultural confusion.
  65. Regular Lovers
    While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alone with Her
    In the end, the characters seem less archetypal than vague, and aside from its sophisticated presentation, Alone With Her doesn't differ all that much from its template: the late-’80s and early-’90s Fill-In-the-Blanks-From-Hell movies that followed in the wake of "Fatal Attraction," many of whose elements (including the heroine’s inquisitive, doomed best friend) Mr. Nicholas revives almost verbatim.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Mr. Jacobs's approach is descended from a long line of minimalist filmmakers, from Jacques Tati ("Monsieur Hulot's Holiday") up through Jim Jarmusch ("Mystery Train"), but The GoodTimesKid dances, like Diaz, in its own sweet style. It doesn't get to the point because getting there is the point.
  68. Alpha Dog
    The cretins rule in Alpha Dog, which has much the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo or reading the latest issue of Star magazine. Of course a little of that nasty stuff may land on you, but such are the perils of voyeurism.
  69. Primeval
    The screenplay, by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, tosses out a few chewy bits of B-movie wit, most of them supplied by Mr. Jones, who expresses the ambivalence of an African-American visiting the motherland through a series of bitter jokes.
  70. Stomp the Yard
    A strange and at times strangely compelling mix of black fraternity recruitment video and inspirational tale about a hip-hop boy in a stepping world.
  71. God Grew Tired of Us
    Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn't leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.
  72. Tears of the Black Tiger
    The intoxicating madness of Tears of the Black Tiger is in the end too willed, too deliberate, to be entirely divine.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    The filmmakers have loftier goals, though, and in the end their existential tabloid style justifies itself. Abduction isn't about what happened, but about the painful introspection that is sparked by not knowing.
  74. Guru
    Given a rich, multidimensional role, Mr. Bachchan ably seizes on its abundant opportunities.
  75. Ever Since the World Ended
    Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, Ever Since the World Ended features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones.
  76. Comedy of Power
    As ever, Mr. Chabrol’s style is delicate and precise. Comedy of Power is not his deepest or most ambitious film, and its stance of knowing resignation in the face of corruption can feel a little glib. But Ms. Huppert's ferocity compensates for the director's detachment; no French actress is as riveting to watch once the gloves come off.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Happily N'Ever After
    This is another tired kidsploitation product.
  78. Freedom Writers
    In Freedom Writers Hilary Swank uses neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation.
  79. Code Name: The Cleaner
    Cedric the Entertainer's artless performance deadens what could have been a much funnier comedy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sacrifice
    Nonfiction doesn't quite describe what Ms. Bruno does. Her work takes risks with form to imply that individual suffering and transcendence are but particles in a river of spiritual energy that dwarfs geography and time.
  81. I Love You
    An unusually perceptive scrutiny of absence and emptiness.
  82. Pan's Labyrinth
    A swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects.
  83. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.
  84. Miss Potter
    This much sweetness and light in a movie is all very well. But there's a reason that recipes for cake and cookies call for a pinch of salt. In Miss Potter, there is only a grain or two -- not enough to dilute the sugary overload. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing.
  85. The Dead Girl
    Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage.
  86. Factory Girl
    The kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative precision.
  87. The Flying Scotsman
    A conventional underdog sports movie that should have been much more gripping.
  88. Unconscious
    If Unconscious consistently overplays its hand, its fusion of a Sherlock Holmes-style detective story (Alma is the master sleuth, and Salvador her Dr. Watson) with a delirious bedroom farce in the spirit of early Pedro Almodóvar is frequently very funny.
  89. Arthur and the Invisibles
    The computer-generated world is visually rich, but short on the droll humor that makes good children's films bearable for adults.
  90. The Tiger and the Snow
    A scorching affront to Italians, Iraqis and the intelligence of movie audiences everywhere.
  91. Notes on a Scandal
    The actors in Notes on a Scandal are equally distinguished: Ms. Dench and Ms. Blanchett are among the finest on the market today, and each can deliver expert performances, even when, as is the case here, their roles are false and hollow. The performers sell the goods, but the goods are cheap.
  92. Children of Men
    Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.
  93. Black Christmas
    With a peephole-riddled set and a flashback-heavy screenplay, Black Christmas smothers terror beneath a blanket of unnecessary information, revealing too much and teasing too little.
  94. The Good Shepherd
    The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.
  95. Night at the Museum
    This season's answer to "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it's an overstuffed grab bag in which lumps of coal are glued together with melted candy.
  96. We Are Marshall
    A movie like We Are Marshall stands or falls on its ability to make you feel the pain and loss of individuals in a place where community pride and football are one and the same. As the film, directed by McG (the "Charlie's Angels" movies) from a wooden screenplay by Jamie Linden, follows a handful of Huntington residents during the months after the accident, not one of them comes fully to life.
  97. Venus
    Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.
  98. Curse of the Golden Flower
    Since his debut in 1987 with "Red Sorghum" Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that's more fun. With Curse of the Golden Flower he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.
  99. Letters from Iwo Jima
    A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to "Flags of Our Fathers." While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films -- by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect -- the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness.
  100. The Painted Veil
    Whether through craft or constitution, Mr. Norton invests Walter with a petty cruelty that makes his character’s emotional thaw and Kitty’s predicament all the more poignant.
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