The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. No Man's Land
    Strangled by good intentions and teachable-moment clichés, Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land turns the border between Texas and Mexico into a gateway to racial empathy.
  2. The East
    The details may be novel — even eye-opening for some — but this story of white guilt and brutality feels mighty old.
  3. The Monuments Men
    It can be nice to spend time with these actors even when you don’t believe their characters for a single second, and there’s no denying this movie’s easy pleasures... Yet because Mr. Clooney can’t figure out what kind of story this is, he too often slips into pandering mode.
  4. The International
    So undistinguished that the moments you remember best are those that you wish another, more original director had tackled.
  5. Betsy's Wedding
    Julie Bovasso as Mr. Alda's Italian mother and Joe Pesci as his sleazy brother-in-law infuse their roles with as much life as possible, but they can't overcome the dullness of Mr. Alda's wedding.
  6. Marmalade
    In essence, Marmalade pretends to be more dunderheaded than it is, then acts as if it’s been smart all along, in a shift that takes it from insulting to incoherent.
  7. Rudderless
    Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.
  8. The Producers
    Ms. Thurman is the one bit of genuine radiance in this aggressively and pointlessly shiny, noisy spectacle.
  9. Felony
    the Australian drama Felony proves only that skilled actors and slick photography can tart up even the most problematic script.
  10. Critters
    It's commercially calculated to have something for everyone - suspense, humor, even a bounty hunter from the krites' planet who poses as a rock star. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have the humor or the budget to match any of these goals.
  11. Malmkrog
    Imagine a Chekhov play without drama, an Oscar Wilde farce without humor, a Visconti film without desire, or a very long party at the home of a distant acquaintance, and you will have some idea of Malmkrog, Cristi Puiu’s latest film.
  12. On the Come Up
    The predictable narrative arc, the happenstance lighting from scene-to-scene and Lathan’s minimalist take on the material all adds up to something you might watch once and promptly forget about.
  13. Nacho Libre
    Endearingly ridiculous.
  14. Beckett
    Washington is a likable actor and easy on the eyes, but the character is unproductively one-dimensional and so is the performance, which remains reactive and opaque. Here, at least, he can’t turn an underconceptualized character into one whom you either care about or want to watch gasping and grimacing for several hours.
  15. Rich and Famous
    The movie can't make up its mind whether it's about a tumultuously difficult but rewarding friendship or whether it's a sendup of the contemporary literary scene. It fails as both.
  16. Triple 9
    Mr. Hillcoat wears his nihilism easily and persuasively (his films include “The Road”), so his weird bids at mordant comedy feel as forced as they are ill-considered.
  17. The Second Chance
    Startlingly direct if unavoidably preachy, The Second Chance takes aim at Christianity's racial divide and the corporatization of faith. Its message is simple: being a Christian requires more than just dropping a check in the collection plate every Sunday morning.
  18. Everything, Everything
    With a pair of irresistible leads and a straightforward love-overcomes-adversity story, Everything, Everything scores a direct hit on the teenage-girl market. Others might find it pretty enjoyable as well.
  19. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    In a scene puzzlingly late in the film, Mr. Blahnik, who apparently still makes samples by hand, walks through his factory and finesses a sensuous heel out of a stump of wood. More of that would have made this confection about a radiant man into something sturdier.
  20. The Object of My Affection
    Easier to watch than it is to believe.
  21. Epic
    As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.
  22. Bloody Hell
    It’s a buffet of only sour dishes, a rank fete of foulness.
  23. Shirley Valentine
    Banality is precisely the problem with Shirley Valentine, the one-woman stage play that has been turned into a misguided, fully cast film.
  24. Romeo Must Die
    Sadly, if this movie was a fight, they'd have stopped it.
  25. Rat Race
    It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit.
  26. Snake Eyes
    A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.
  27. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    A 1950's movie magazine fantasy dressed up just enough to pass for contemporary.
  28. Rick
    The belated sentimentality of the movie is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
  29. Blow
    Depp's witty, spare performance gives the picture a poignancy -- a depth of feeling, if you'll allow the pun -- that Mr. Demme's hectic direction and the hurried script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes don't quite earn.
  30. Under the Tuscan Sun
    The story of self-discovery through which the writer and director Audrey Wells leads Frances is eminently superficial, although Ms. Wells keeps the movie going with a steady, commanding hand and casts it with an actress who can deftly downshift from serene to sodden.
  31. À cause d'un garçon
    Well-meaning and hopelessly bland, You'll Get Over It, instantly drops into the tone of didactic realism that rules most television fiction, drawing easy moral lessons from a scrubbed-up simulacrum of everyday, middle-class life.
  32. 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.
  33. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The Last Thing Mary Saw is as surprising as it is frustrating.
  34. The Frighteners
    The actors can't keep the film's mood from verging on hysteria as the story roams all over the map.
  35. Safe House
    Essentially and very effectively a rollicking smash-and-crash chase movie that happens to be surprisingly well acted.
  36. Janie Jones
    It feels mostly authentic until a contrived ending that leaves a saccharine taste.
  37. Peeples
    Revelations unfold predictably, but the subplots cohere and the assured pacing offers a stark contrast with the often disjointed tempos of Mr. Perry’s mosaics.
  38. Hit So Hard
    Hit So Hard is the touching story of how and why Ms. Schemel ended up in her own private hell and how and why she made her way out again into the world of sunshine, sobriety and puppy dogs.
  39. Labor Day
    The movie’s principal saving grace is Ms. Winslet’s convincing portrayal of Adele, a despairing woman of low self-esteem just a twitch away from a nervous breakdown. In almost every other respect, this overbaked romantic hokum is preposterous.
  40. The Hunger
    What makes The Hunger so much fun is its knowing stylishness, which Mr. Scott, who makes his theatrical film debut here, has brought to movies from a career in commercials and documentaries.
  41. One Chance
    The appealing Mr. Corden manages the not insignificant task of maintaining interest in a story whose climax has already been passed around on YouTube.
  42. We the People: The Market Basket Effect
    The tale, ripped from the headlines, is stirring, even if the repeated rally scenes and aerial views of the region grow stale.
  43. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.
  44. Slingshot
    The paranoia sets in all too quickly in this awkwardly paced thriller, and it’s among a handful of defects in a film whose creative process seemed to begin and end with its final twist in mind, haphazardly and unconvincingly working backward to construct what’s necessary to build up to i
  45. The Interview
    The Interview is pretty much what everyone thought it would be before all the trouble started: a goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce, propelled not by any particular political ideas but by the usual spectacle of male sexual, emotional and existential confusion.
  46. RoboCop
    A nicely cast, respectable remake.
  47. Saint Laurent
    The film is a compulsively detailed swirl of moods and impressions, intent on capturing the contradictions of the man and his times. Observations of Saint Laurent at work and in love give way to panoramic, intricate surveys of the world of commerce and culture in which he suffered and flourished.
  48. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    While the movie sustains levity, its lack of subtlety — and a lack of stakes, save for sweepstakes — make for an altogether bland bonanza.
  49. Touching Home
    Suffused with a glow of apple-cheeked nostalgia that often clings to baseball movies. The movie may be set in the present, but its likable clean-cut twins exude more than a whiff of gee-whiz 1950s innocence.
  50. Boris Without Béatrice
    Denis Côté’s Boris Without Beatrice appears to have something to say about the hubris of the modern business tycoon, but it never coalesces into more than a self-amused goof.
  51. The Colony
    Though it centers on one woman, anything we might stand to learn about her own developing values is quickly swallowed by overcomplicated narratives about secondary characters, corrupt colonizers and family secrets.
  52. Linsanity
    Unfortunately, Linsanity, following the conventions of the sports bio genre, ends at its peak, with only a brief nod to these events. Lin raised his game’s possibilities; you just wish that Mr. Leong had raised his.
  53. Beautiful Creatures
    There’s not much new under the moon here, which makes what the writer and director Richard LaGravenese does with the story all the more notable.
  54. I Am Secretly an Important Man
    While I Am Secretly an Important Man skims the surface of Mr. Bernstein's life, it's a surface with more than enough texture to keep you interested.
  55. Someone Marry Barry
    There’s nothing sophisticated or groundbreaking here, but the movie is a moderately good entry in the bro-grows-up genre.
  56. The Main Event
    The Main Event is a light comedy that takes the joys of a real WWE match — the escapism, the performance — and gives them a kid-centric spin. Karas balances the movie’s clowning with a human story, while showing empathy for childhood growing pains.
  57. Chantilly Lace
    It is a quirky, ambitious, praiseworthy project that somehow becomes a victim of all the cliches it was invented to avoid.
  58. Cockneys vs Zombies
    As subtle as its title, Cockneys vs. Zombies is mildly funny and easily likable.
  59. Passenger
    A demon won’t take no for an answer in Andre Ovredal’s tense but confounding supernatural thriller.
  60. Rebels with a Cause
    (Garvy) has helped advance our understanding of a difficult and exhilarating time.
  61. Haiku Tunnel
    Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.
  62. Seeing Other People
    There is enough discomfort on display to reinforce the cynical adage that sex is God's joke.
  63. 800 Bullets
    Entirely too well-behaved.
  64. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Pitting good against evil with striking intelligence and a near-operatic commitment to extreme suffering, Ms. Gebbe neither mocks nor celebrates Tore’s love for his God. Neither does she give any hint that it’s reciprocated.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We're No Angels
    Generally a slow, talky affair of elephantine roguishness and a few genuine chuckles.
  66. The Intern
    Mr. De Niro owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth, and is staring into the camera and right at you.
  67. The Getaway
    Their appeal as a couple of gorgeous outlaws is the main reason to see this sleek, entertaining remake of Sam Peckinpah's 1972 action film.
  68. Dangerous Beauty
    No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.
  69. Doing Time for Patsy Cline
    The saving graces of the film, written and directed by Chris Kennedy, are its performances, especially Mr. Roxburgh's portrayal of a floundering lost soul with little to show for an itinerant life, and Ms. Otto's ditsy, mercurial and ultimately touching country singer.
  70. The Age of Adaline
    The director Lee Toland Krieger is good with actors, especially in the expression of a low-key, unforced intimacy.
  71. 96 Minutes
    The talented Mr. Ross makes Dre's panic and adrenaline-fueled behavior all too believable. You watch as he sees his horizons dim. What could be sadder?
  72. The Grass Is Greener
    Miss Kerr and Miss Simmons look attractive and Mr. Grant and Mr. Mitchum try hard to create the illusion of being moved by love and passion. But they both appear mechanical and bored. [24 Dec 1960, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  73. Girls of the Sun
    Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.
  74. Final Cut
    Final Cut puts its predecessor’s ingredients through an unflattering Instagram filter. The shoot’s intentional shoddiness — authentically kitschy in the original — rings false, with Hazanavicius spelling out the crew’s missteps in such a way that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.
  75. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable.
  76. Hello, Dolly!
    Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.
  77. Love, Marilyn
    The intelligence and dynamism of Ms. Garbus's approach could hardly fail to make you appreciate Monroe's growth as an actor.
  78. Woman Walks Ahead
    It’s all ridiculously romanticized and self-serving. But the performances are so good (Mr. Greyeyes, in particular, is a miracle of intelligence and dignity) and Michael Eley’s vistas, shimmeringly shot in New Mexico, are so stunning, it feels churlish to resist.
  79. Uncle Buck
    Sometimes funny and, in the way of small-screen entertainment, so perfectly predictable that one could mail in the laughs.
  80. The Golden Compass
    Has many of the virtues of a faithful screen adaptation and many of the predictable flaws.
  81. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Though the new Robin Hood observes all of the classic confrontations that keep the tale alive, the film winds up as a mixture of listless adventure, wispy comedy and what is meant to pass for social realism.
  82. Skateland
    Though leaning too heavily on period tunes and the templates of Mr. Linklater and John Hughes (to whom the film is dedicated), Mr. Burns has a distinctly spacious style that gives female characters room to breathe.
  83. A Walk in the Woods
    It is unexpectedly moving and occasionally delightful to spend time with these titans of cinema as they walk and sometimes wobble, delivering words that become meaningful because they’re lucky enough to be spoken by Mr. Redford and Mr. Nolte.
  84. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    “Fallen Kingdom,” directed by J. A. Bayona, is in most respects a dumber, less ambitious movie than its immediate predecessor, and also, for just that reason, a little bit more fun. Some of its high jinks have a hokey, silly, old-fashioned mad-scientist feeling to them, especially when the dinosaurs are chasing people or vice versa. Which is reasonably often.
  85. Poetic Justice
    Although its aspirations are high, the film works only fitfully when Mr. Singleton exercises his gift for vernacular speech, for finding the comic undertow in otherwise tragic situations, and even for parody.
  86. First Descent
    The Alaskan runs are often spectacular, resembling nothing so much as a controlled plummet down an avalanche. All of which is worth the price of admission if "stoked" is a regular part of your vocabulary.
  87. You're Cordially Invited
    There is something off about You’re Cordially Invited, some sense that the whole thing never clicks into place.
  88. Zizek!
    Entertaining without being especially illuminating. If you must see only one documentary about a Slovene philosopher this year, it might be better to read his books.
  89. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
    Though there's no doubt that Mr. Stone is as serious as a heart attack when it comes to creating an air of authenticity -- hence the sloppily butchered chickens and authorial defecation -- he never settles on a coherent tone for the movie.
  90. An American Rhapsody
    Ms. Gardos is not a particularly flavorful filmmaker, but she is an honest one.
  91. Windtalkers
    We can only view Windtalkers with the same shaken detachment that characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been given its true dramatic import.
  92. Cherish
    As a poky little character comedy, Cherish is enchanting in a small-scale way. But when Mr. Taylor tries to turn it into a genre thriller, Cherish deteriorates so quickly that it's unsettling -- but probably not in the way Mr. Taylor intended.
  93. Pretty Woman
    Something special.
  94. Losin' It
    Losin' It isn't without its likable moments, but it isn't overloaded with them, either.
  95. Quiet Chaos
    Thankfully, Mr. Grimaldi and the screenwriters have no great lessons to impart or messages to deliver, and the film, while uneven -- sometimes too on the nose, sometimes anecdotal and diffuse -- is generally absorbing, thanks mostly to the quality of the acting.
  96. Mammoth
    Mr. Moodysson has never met a pleasure he didn’t want to punish.
  97. La Soga (The Butcher's Son)
    La Soga moves with a crazed energy that denies moral nuance. But the banal narrative (based on events in Mr. Perez's life) is elbowed aside by Josh Crook's eccentric direction and images that the cinematographer, Zeus Morand, brands with near-poetic intensity.
  98. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    Mr. Goldberger's words are among the more substantive in a film that at times seems ready to levitate from the screen on puffy clouds of praise.
  99. Sassy Pants
    Once the film softens, it starts to come unglued.
  100. The Sheik and I
    Poking the bear of repression has consequences beyond Mr. Zahedi's immediate artistic goals, as this layered, intermittently fascinating documentary makes abundantly clear.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »