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. Free Radicals
    Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.
  2. L'autre monde
    Working in broad, often melodramatic strokes, Mr. Allouache paints a deeply pessimistic portrait of his native country.
  3. Babymother
    Would much rather wallow in music than develop the strands of a story.
  4. Venus and Mars
    Lopes along amiably enough, offering a few smiles and the standard bromides about the importance of being yourself and pursuing your dreams. It's tolerable but forgettable.
  5. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Never finds a comfortable fit between its biographies and its theorizing.
  6. Persons of Interest
    Before the film hits its halfway mark, the presentation feels like a frustrating day at an immigration legal clinic where you can never look at the dossier or get to the bottom of the case.
  7. A Letter to True
    It all makes for a poignant mix, the boy inside the man, pressing his nose against the glass, longing for the journalistic authenticity of someone like Burrows while still believing in Lassie and the unconditional love of True.
  8. The Private Archives of Pablo Escovar
    There is always something inherently interesting about the combination of wealth and evil, and even more intriguing about people who claim to have seen a monster's humanity.
  9. In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    A cinematic canonization that presents the 40th president as the 20th century's godsend.
  10. 800 Bullets
    Entirely too well-behaved.
  11. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    Openly polemical but also sobering documentary.
  12. Santa Smokes
    Ms. Hulslander is often charming, but Mr. Schauder's Johnny is one of those narcissistic characters whom, inexplicably, everybody in the movie adores.
  13. Magnifico
    Modest but engaging Filipino tear-jerker.
  14. Army of One
    Puts a bitterly ironic spin on the Army's best-known recruiting slogan, "Be all that you can be."
  15. Freak Weather
    Like its heroine, Freak Weather is courageous but disorganized; its loopy, screwball tone feels at odds with the gravity of the scenes of chaos and violence it depicts.
  16. Unscrewed
    If Ms. Smith's and Mr. Hoffman's mopey, sheepish performances are quite convincing and ultimately sad, the movie constructed around them doesn't really know what it wants to say or how to say it.
  17. The Other Side of the Street
    Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles The Other Side of the Street, an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station."
  18. 16 Years of Alcohol
    The tedium of this antidrinking hoodlum's tale inspires the wrong kind of longing entirely.
  19. Beyond the Sea
    These tales of upward mobility seem at odds with Mr. Pérez-Rey's choice to include a clip from the 1983 remake of "Scarface," in which Al Pacino, playing a Marielito thug, introduces a machine gun as his "little friend."
  20. Odessa... Odessa!
    As it observes these people, most of them well over 60, it conjures a melancholy definition of exile as a haunted state of mind.
  21. In Satmar Custody
    Modest, disturbing documentary.
  22. Stalin's Wife
    A dense biographical collage.
  23. Or
    This well-meaning but irritatingly naïve feature delves into the horrors of prostitution, or more accurately, the filmmaker's horror about the subject.
  24. La visa loca
    There are certainly deeper issues simmering below the deceptively lightweight film's surface, but its full impact will most likely be lost on non-Filipino audiences.
  25. Naked in Ashes
    Ms. Fouce has gained unprecedented access to her subjects, but her own admiration for them makes this documentary more heartfelt than it is rigorous.
  26. The Time We Killed
    The Time We Killed has the raw intimacy of a filmed diary, but as with reading a stranger's journal, it eventually gets dull.
  27. little man
    Weighing in at almost exactly one pound and unable to breathe or eat on his own, Nicholas James Baba-Conn seemed doomed to a very short life; his chance for survival was calculated at close to zero.
  28. El carro
    A huge hit at home, El Carro here plays for mild laughs and gentle pathos, though it arrives a little lost in translation.
  29. Cowboy del Amor
    Directed by Michèle Ohayon with a light touch and an attentive ear for the regressive attitudes beneath the humor, Cowboy del Amor follows the fortunes of Rick, an easygoing truck driver who thinks most American women are "too hard to please."
  30. Desert Wind
    Though it generates its share of unintentional giggles, Desert Wind does manage to take us to a seldom-visited place: the hidden corners of the straight male mind.
  31. The Outsider
    A tragically missed opportunity to illuminate one of the more unusual cinematic talents working today.
  32. Stolen
    Rife with conspiracy and colorful characters, this globe-trotting intrigue has the makings of a splendid thriller, but Ms. Dreyfus has fashioned only a middling documentary, failing to locate a compelling structure or rhythm in the material.
  33. Light from the East
    Mostly the film is a testament to the egomania of the theater: despite what's going on around them, these actors can't see just how minor their modest project really is.
  34. The Groomsmen
    The biggest hole in a movie that falls sadly short of being another "Diner" or "Trees Lounge" is Mr. Burns's failure to make his alter-ego character anything other than the best-looking and most affluent member of the pack, standing there and discreetly gloating.
  35. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna
    For something so silly and so long, however, the film is surprisingly engaging, thanks largely to its very watchable actors; it's easy to see why they are international stars in the world of Hindi films.
  36. King Leopold's Ghost
    Ms. Scott's outrage is palpable, but she has bitten off enough here for a 10-hour television series.
  37. Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Limited almost exclusively to tourist attractions, this documentary glimpse at the sights and sounds of occupied Tibet amounts to a rhetorically inflated vacation video.
  38. Broken Sky
    Mr. Hernández doesn't always grab what he's reaching for -- his talent soars untethered by discipline -- but the thrust of his effort lights up the sky.
  39. Hair High
    The terrain is so familiar that it has a slightly stifling effect, even in Mr. Plympton’s demented hands. We long ago loved these characters to death.
  40. Justice
    Over all, though, the hands-off approach leaves the viewer to draw his own conclusions, but without providing enough information.
  41. Exit: The Right to Die
    Despite the humanity and courage exhibited by the members of Exit, the film is inescapably grim.
  42. Highway Courtesans
    Nine years in the making and timeless in its observations, Highway Courtesans is an intimate look at some of the youngest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.
  43. The Empire in Africa
    A forest of talking heads and pointing fingers, The Empire in Africa is a noble but failed attempt to explicate the tragedy of the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone.
  44. I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal
    Dismayingly, bad filmmaking isn't really to blame for the lack of punch in Ever Again. Perhaps it's the familiarity of it all.
  45. Forgiveness
    Everyone’s sorry about something in Forgiveness, a glum drama about the way repentance can do more damage than the sin that precedes it.
  46. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    Alison Chernick's film skims the surface of a strange and celebrated career. After a meager 72 minutes, the man who once stretched an obsession with testicles into a five-film cycle remains as unknowable as ever.
  47. The Ex
    The best jokes in this scattershot screwball satire of job insecurity, upward mobility, political correctness and yuppie marital tensions have claws that leave scratches.
  48. Invisible
    Though each character is living a distinctly personal tragedy, the filmmaker's antipathy to context or coherence effectively bars us from all but the most fleeting emotional involvement.
  49. Invisible
    A moody thriller with more emphasis on mood than thrills.
  50. 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.
    • 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.
  52. Disappearances
    The movie, though lovingly handmade by Mr. Craven, has a frustratingly disjunctive rhythm.
  53. 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.
  54. Day Night Day Night
    Maddeningly, purposefully evasive.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Changeling
    Much like watching a straightforward theatrical production of any play hailing from any century: you have to imagine a more detailed world beyond the bare-bones visuals.
  56. 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.
  57. The Wendell Baker Story
    The appeal of The Wendell Baker Story depends on how charming you find the Wilson brothers, with their chipmunk grins and hip smart-aleck attitude. For my taste, a little goes a long way.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Orange Winter
    Orange Winter is more than a mere history lesson. Like Norman Mailer's nonfiction novel "The Armies of the Night," about the 1967 antiwar march on Washington, this movie characterizes a body politic as a living thing, and charts its internal changes as if it were the protagonist in a drama.
  59. Drama/Mex
    Drama/Mex means to say something about its country of origin, though it’s hard to know exactly what.
  60. El cantante
    It may be best to approach El Cantante less as a movie than as a two-hour promotional video for a must-have soundtrack album.
  61. The Hottest State
    At around the halfway point, its characters’ haranguing voices begin to grate on you. People in their early 20s, even pretty people, lose their appeal when they dwell this obsessively on their own inchoate turmoil.
  62. Self Medicated
    Though buoyed by Anthony Marinelli’s moody score and Denis Maloney’s gutsy cinematography, Self-Medicated suffers from severe dramatic droop.
  63. Milarepa
    There are stunning locales but not much subtlety on display in Milarepa, a straight-as-an-arrow mythical-historical telling of a mystic’s early life.
  64. Nina's Heavenly Delights
    A lesbian-foodie fairy tale that keeps its appetites well under control. The title may hint at naughty pleasures, but the director, Pratibha Parmar, is more interested in pappadams than passion.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Khadak
    A trippy spectacle. It boldly tries to find visuals to describe complex metaphysical and political concepts. But the results often suggest aestheticized eye candy, along the lines of Ken Russell’s “Altered States” or Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” and its sequels.
  66. Aaja Nachle
    Ms. Dixit has been gone from the screen for five years, long enough for a new crop of stars to emerge and for Aaja Nachle, her modest new film, to be a comeback vehicle.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Badland
    This overlong, mawkish yet weirdly mesmerizing film doesn’t just invite identification with its tragically unhinged character; it compels it, by piling on biblically horrible misfortunes, weepy confessions and editorializing music.
  68. Ezra
    The movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making Ezra even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English. Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting.
  69. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.
  70. Remember the Daze
    A generally entertaining but half-baked variation on Richard Linklater’s high school period piece, “Dazed and Confused” (made in 1993, set in 1976), Remember the Daze (set in 1999) takes its cue from the earlier film in an excess of ways.
  71. Vice
    Raul Sanchez Inglis directed, but Mr. Tarantino's influence prevails, in the cinematography by Andrzej Sekula of "Dogs"; in the abundant epithets and expletives; and in the climactic "Dogs"-style standoff. The film is also dedicated to Chris Penn, Sean's brother, who was in "Dogs" and died in 2006. But missing, regrettably, is that movie's inventiveness, clarity and wit.
  72. Elsa y Fred
    Best enjoyed as a sampling of Ms. Zorrilla's combustible energy and still dazzling screen presence.
  73. Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
    Has a buoyancy and optimism that trump the predictability of its story.
  74. Diminished Capacity
    Touches earnestly on heart-heavy issues of loss: loss of memory, of love and, perhaps because of the local angle, of (or rather by) the Chicago Cubs. But Mr. Kinney, a founder of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and a familiar face from film and television, never gives his movie a sustained pulse.
  75. The Doorman
    The Doorman, is simply too distracted to hit the comedic bull's-eye. Whatever the case, his movie gets a chuckle or two but mostly will tickle insiders.
  76. Sixty Six
    Charts a sentimental struggle toward manhood with period-appropriate charm.
  77. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    Has some delicious moments, but you never quite shake the feeling that it’s documenting a tempest in a teapot.
  78. What We Do Is Secret
    The movie offers too little of Crash's justly revered lyricism and too much of his self-mutilation and manufactured chaos.
  79. Bachna Ae Haseeno
    An amiable romantic comedy.
  80. Last Stop for Paul
    An overall sense that the movie was infinitely more fun to make than it is to watch.
  81. My Mexican Shivah
    Any comedy that can combine death, abortion, Jewish ritual and a mariachi band without curdling into complete lunacy deserves a modicum of respect. In the case of My Mexican Shivah, more would be pushing it.
  82. August Evening
    A film of noble intentions that eventually wears out its welcome.
  83. Johnny Got His Gun
    As his character battles to grasp his newly fractured sense of time, audiences may also find themselves more aware of the time, which seems to creep along at an alarmingly slow rate.
  84. Humboldt County
    These characters are fully alive. But the movie attaches them to a conventional, not to say creaky, hip-meets-square drama.
  85. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    The title doesn't lie. These guys know how to tell a joke, often at the expense of their customs, religious holidays, families and themselves.
  86. Choose Connor
    What makes the journey compelling is the relaxed chemistry between the young actors and an insistently apprehensive tone that pervades even the most prosaic exchanges.
  87. Roadside Romeo
    Perhaps Bollywood’s most ingratiating quality is how hard the actors work to entertain you: they dance, they cry, they risk appearing silly. The animated dogs in "Romeo" aren't particularly appealing.
  88. 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.
  89. How About You ...
    Appeal[s] to the delicate palates of an audience that craves the movie equivalent of tea and biscuits: stiff upper lips conceal hearts of gold, and all psychological conflicts are resolved with tearful confessions of vulnerability.
  90. Delhi-6
    Delhi-6 can be maddeningly vague, which robs its ending -- a finale as joltingly (melo)dramatic as any in Bollywood -- of the impact it intends.
  91. Explicit Ills
    It's a beautiful message: surely there's no arguing with "Hey, hey, ho, ho, poverty has got to go!" But there is much to argue with, and much to regret, about a film whose director thinks he needs to drop an anvil on our heads when art would suffice.
  92. Lifelines
    Starts promisingly, with a sharp comedic bite and genuine compassion for this fraught family dynamic, but soon gives way to the kind of compressed, schematic psychodrama endemic to (if no more welcome on) the stage.
  93. Offshore
    Though not without its charms -- the scenes in Mumbai are comically chaotic -- Offshore might have raised more chuckles when it was made, in 2006, than in the economic chill of 2009. And not only in Michigan.
  94. Unmistaken Child
    The beauty of the landscape and the monk’s sweetness, humility and good humor evoke a plane of existence, at once elevated and austere, that is humbling to contemplate. That said, Unmistaken Child offers no scholarly perspective on Tibetan Buddhism and leaves fundamental questions unanswered.
  95. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Perhaps because the music is so good, with its purity of tone and dazzling rhythmic precision, the flaws of the surrounding movie become all the more obvious.
  96. Off Jackson Avenue
    The lives of Olivia, Tomo, Milot and Joey converge in a climactic chase sequence as frantic as a Keystone Cops movie. By this time, grim realism has curdled into bleakly absurdist farce.
  97. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
    It’s disappointing, though, to see that his work, while it’s become more polished, has remained essentially self-indulgent and superficial despite the big themes of racism and identity that it takes on.
  98. Casi divas
    As the film picks up speed it also accrues a socially progressive agenda. If only this were half as well developed as the female leads.
  99. Tickling Leo
    The film’s rich performances, in which every shade of every character’s emotions registers, can go only so far to camouflage the glaring lapses in a drama that often confuses hints and allusions with coherent storytelling.
  100. The Painter Sam Francis
    It’s a well-meaning mishmash that wouldn’t pass muster as an episode of “American Masters.”
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