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. Fatal Promises
    It lacks focus and adds little to the awareness of the subject that even a casual follower of the news has already acquired.
  2. Fuel
    If you can resist the urge to run for the exit, you may leave the theater feeling a lot more hopeful than when you went in.
  3. Harmony and Me
    Despite the film’s sketchy aesthetic and barely animate lead, its tone is carefully contrived: I’ll wager no one in your circle is as dryly funny or spontaneously surreal as Harmony’s nonsupport group.
  4. Chelsea on the Rocks
    An enraptured fantasia of high times at the hotel, the film is so intoxicated with the Chelsea’s bohemian mystique it virtually consumes itself.
  5. Adventures of Power
    Sprinkled with moderately amusing comic moments, but basically your enjoyment of this film will be proportional to your tolerance for the one-joke phenomenon of air drumming.
  6. Peter and Vandy
    More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.
  7. Bam gua nat
    Korean director Hong Sang-soo unleashes yet another emotionally stunted antihero in Night and Day, a rambling study of male arrested development.
  8. Killing Kasztner
    The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.
  9. Skin
    Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.
  10. Turning Green
    Ends up stranded in the wilderness between comedy and rushed, halfhearted melodrama.
  11. Oh My God
    The film, which Mr. Rodger directed, wrote, produced and photographed on location in nearly two dozen countries, is the documentary equivalent of a spiritually angled coffee-table book of world travels
  12. Mammoth
    Mr. Moodysson has never met a pleasure he didn’t want to punish.
  13. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    While watching Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done you might be tempted to murmur, “My Werner, My Werner, What Have Ye Done.”
  14. Ricky
    The deeper Ricky plunges into allegory, the shakier its grasp of the material.
  15. Tano da morire
    An inexplicable multiple award winner, To Die for Tano left me more perplexed than pleased. But then I don’t really get Roberto Benigni either.
  16. Blood Done Sign My Name
    A curious, somewhat ungainly movie. But it is also rich and fascinating. At times you think you are watching a clumsy stage pageant superimposed on a documentary; it’s so stiff, and yet at the same time so real.
  17. Kimjongilia
    These harrowing tales are reason enough to see the movie. But Ms. Heikin wants to provide a total experience, so she adds in propaganda films, her own animated presentation of Korean history and, most noticeably, a pair of female dancers… It’s as bad an idea as it sounds.
  18. Dancing Across Borders
    Offered only hints of life away from the barre or of Sy’s relationship with his coolly poised benefactress, viewers will see either a very fortunate young man or a beautiful protégé, dancing as fast as he can to please everyone but himself.
  19. The Thorn in the Heart
    You might think that the small-scale, straightforward style and intimate connections of The Thorn in the Heart would result in something more emotionally resonant than we’re accustomed to from Mr. Gondry, but you’d be disappointed.
  20. Why Did I Get Married Too?
    Mr. Perry himself plays Terry, the most reserved and mature of the group. At the risk of being condescending, it has to be said that if he had put on his dress and wig and shown up as Madea the movie might have been funnier.
  21. La mission
    The distinguished cinematographer Hiro Narita (“Never Cry Wolf”) captures the hard San Francisco light and the burnished glow of the beautifully painted cars. Unfortunately, this care is lavished on an overwrought, predictable story of an angry ethnic father.
  22. Letters to God
    Mr. Johnson and Ms. Lively are both pretty good, and with a more nuanced approach could have made this a powerful film.
  23. The Cartel
    Purports to be a documentary about the American public school system. In reality, however, it’s a bludgeoning rant against a single state — New Jersey — which it presents as a closed loop of Mercedes-owning administrators, obstructive teachers’ unions and corrupt school boards.
  24. Ramchand Pakistani
    For all the trials its characters endure, you might almost describe Ramchand Pakistani as a happy movie: too happy to be entirely believed.
  25. Mercy
    Had John Cassavetes directed “Love Story,” it might have turned out looking and sounding something like Mercy, a portrait of a sub-Mailer-like literary pugilist and the woman (named Mercy) who wins his heart. Odd as that juxtaposition may seem, it’s not a bad mix.
  26. Iron Man 2
    You’re left wanting more, but not quite the “more” Iron Man 2 works so hard to supply.
  27. Letters to Juliet
    Letters to Juliet represents an interesting paradox: it is a movie that is very nearly perfect without being especially good.
  28. Road, Movie
    Rambles along amiably and predictably enough, stopping now and again to glory in the “magic of cinema.” But the film falters at dramatic moments.
  29. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
    Its flashes of style are sometimes lively but more often seem, like the slavish period décor, to be desperate attempts to overcome the built-in inertia of the genre.
  30. Casino Jack and the United States of Money
    A liability of Casino Jack is the relative absence of its subject.
  31. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    Mr. Dujardin, a skilled comedian, deftly embodies the spy's combination of cluelessness and condescension, but it's an act that eventually wears thin.
  32. The Living Wake
    Audiences will be either captivated or irritated, depending on their tolerance for high-concept whimsy and high-energy theatrics. By the end of the wake itself, they may be wishing Binew’s illness were running ahead of schedule.
  33. Metropia
    Technically innovative but narratively moribund, Metropia is all stasis and shadows. Perhaps Mr. Saleh could have listened to a lighter voice.
  34. John Rabe
    John Rabe, has its visceral moments. But it is also burdened by manipulative clichés of a screenplay in which exposition outweighs character development. Inspired by Rabe’s diaries, from which short excerpts are read, it tells the story almost exclusively from a Western point of view.
  35. Perrier's Bounty
    A poor man’s “In Bruges” that frantically chases itself in circles.
  36. Princess Kaiulani
    Over all, though, Princess Kaiulani plays like an old-fashioned, stiff but plushly upholstered costume drama, swaddled in gauzy cinematography and swelling strings.
  37. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    While Mr. Molina and Mr. Cage supply a measure of well-compensated eccentricity, their labors ultimately serve to emphasize the grinding mediocrity of the enterprise.
  38. The Juche Idea
    The Juche Idea is meant to be a comedy, one that cuts two ways: mocking the strictures placed on moviemakers in both Communist and capitalist systems. Viewers who don’t share the radical-nostalgist sensibility of Mr. Finn, who teaches at Emerson College in Boston, may find the humor both too rarefied and too obvious.
  39. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema.
  40. Raajneeti
    Raajneeti, with its large cast of characters and wealth of subplots, is often a mess, but an interesting one.
  41. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead
    A toothless satire whose targets include vampire mania, low-rent theater, indie romantic comedies, Scorsese, Shakespeare and “Law & Order,” it plays like a Web series expanded to feature length, or an adaptation of one of the Naked Angels’ staged serial soap operas.
  42. Burzynski
    Clogged with court transcripts, medical records and repetitive (if moving) patient testimony, Burzynski tickles the mind only at the cost of trampling the eyes.
  43. Convention
    Some of this is awfully pedestrian, but there are moments of both high comedy and high drama.
  44. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    Never regains that initial blast of energy and the final scenes wobble toward a wishy-washy ending.
  45. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    Legend of the Guardians may be a hoot, but for all its pyrotechnics, it fails to soar.
  46. Never Let Me Go
    Alas, what's missing is the spark of life, the jolt of the unexpected - something beyond tears - to puncture the falseness of a film world, which, by its insistence on its own beauty, obscures the tragedy that the three characters, by their nature, cannot express.
  47. Jack Goes Boating
    As is so often the case in modest, aimless little movies like this one, it is the acting that saves Jack Goes Boating from triviality or worse.
  48. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    The highly emotional documentary is narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter for “Milk,” who, like Mr. Cowan, is gay and grew up in a Mormon household.
  49. Dogtooth
    Dogtooth supplies no such explanation and at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it.
  50. Great Directors
    As an interrogator Ms. Ismailos is no Torquemada; she lobs softballs that her subjects genially accept.
  51. Despicable Me
    Despicable Me cannot be faulted for lack of trying. If anything, it tries much too hard, stuffing great gobs of second-rate action, secondhand humor and warmed-over sentiment into every nook and cranny of its relentlessly busy 3-D frames.
  52. The Other Guys
    Raises expectations that it has no real inclination to fulfill. The movie's best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity.
  53. Ramona and Beezus
    Parents may also be happy to see a movie for children that doesn't involve wizards, vampires or action figures that can be bought in the food court. They should be warned, though, that the price of contemporary realism is a story that includes layoffs, bickering and unpaid bills.
  54. Only When I Dance
    The lack of information about the school, or about any aspect of the two dancers’ lives that doesn’t involve training for and competing in international competitions, can be startling. When another Centro de Dança student, a petite woman, is a winner at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne, we’re stunned. We didn’t even know she was there.
  55. Valhalla Rising
    Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the "Pusher" films and "Bronson" ), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.
  56. About Baghdad
    The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is distracting. Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.
  57. The Extra Man
    For all its flighty charms, The Extra Man never really lands. It hovers like a hummingbird madly beating its wings to stay aloft.
  58. What's the Matter with Kansas?
    The specific roots of a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement are barely described, as are strategies for liberals seeking to reclaim the state. What's the Matter With Kansas? depicts a groundswell of anger but largely ignores the external forces that helped shape it.
  59. Tales from Earthsea
    Feels a little like a science-fiction Sunday school pageant.
  60. Nanny McPhee Returns
    Neither the dangers of the plot - a dissolute uncle who wants to sell the farm, a father missing in action - nor the forbidding Nanny McPhee herself are as fearsome as they were the first time around.
  61. The Switch
    The first third of The Switch, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is so bizarre that it leads you to wonder if, through some miraculous lack of oversight, the movie will blaze an unpredictable path. No such luck.
  62. RED
    It is possible to have a good time at RED, but it is not a very good movie.
  63. Paranormal Activity 2
    Frozen camera setups and blurry night-vision images raise goose bumps without the assistance of eerie music or showy effects, though the strain of stretching the gimmick to a second movie is palpable.
  64. Down Terrace
    However persuasively acted, this mélange of cinéma vérité, slapstick and murder - whose story has a lot in common with the recent Australian gangster film "Animal Kingdom" - has too many narrative gaps for its pieces to cohere satisfactorily.
  65. Hiding Divya
    While the movie has its heart in the right place, the first-time writer-director Rehana Mirza doesn't yet have the skills to shape the narrative into something moving or revealing.
  66. Daniel and Ana
    This stylistic restraint may help deflect accusations of exploitation (though the film's two pivotal sex scenes both feel uncomfortably extended, the initial crime lasting a squirm-inducing six minutes), but it also impedes our connection with the victims.
  67. The Milk of Sorrow
    The Milk of Sorrow is constrained by a rarefied screenplay and a near-mute central performance.
  68. Bran Nue Dae
    The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.
  69. Devil
    A serviceable burst of high-end hokum, Devil classes up a flimsy, religion-themed plot (by M. Night Shyamalan) with the kind of limber cinematography only someone like Tak Fujimoto can deliver.
  70. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.
  71. Life as We Know It
    It's enough to say that the bland romantic comedy Life as We Know It, in which there is not a single deviation from formula, is well made for its corporate type.
  72. Nowhere Boy
    It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.
  73. Stone
    The results prove disappointing, simultaneously over the top and underwhelming.
  74. Conviction
    It would be easy to dismiss Conviction on the ground that it plays like a made-for-television movie, but the truth is that, as often as not, movies made for the small screen are better than this: braver, darker, more willing to explore odd corners of feeling.
  75. Jackass 3-D
    It just might be that America's favorite jackasses, having played around with sharks in their last big-screen effort ("Jackass Number Two" of course), have this time actually jumped one, and in 3-D no less.
  76. Welcome to the Rileys
    What keeps the film's fragile realism intact are actors who can make even small moments count.
  77. Faster
    Faster, a turgid, ultraviolent parable of revenge and forgiveness, is as muscle-bound as its monosyllabic antihero.
  78. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    A strong filmmaking voice was clearly not called for in an entertainment that has been carefully calibrated for maximum blandness. Mr. Apted is aboard to keep the franchise sailing along or at least afloat, which he does.
  79. The Green Hornet
    Quite a bit less than the sum of its appealing parts.
  80. Blue Valentine
    Cindy and Dean remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings. Mr. Cianfrance's ingenious chronological gimmick, coupled with his anxious, clumsy plotting, leaves them without enough oxygen to burst into breathing, loving life.
  81. Heartbreaker
    Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.
  82. The Romantics
    The other alumni, played by Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Rebecca Lawrence, are given such short shrift that they come across more as sarcastic commentators than as characters.
  83. Ondine
    Mr. Farrell and Mr. Doyle continue to hold your gaze, even as Mr. Jordan's screenplay sets your mind to wandering. There is, as noted, a wisp of a tale tucked into this film, one that, as the story wears on, becomes ponderously weighed down with melodramatic filler and even some halfhearted genre action.
  84. Freakonomics
    The jocular screen adaptation of the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is a shallow but diverting alternative to the book.
  85. Tamara Drewe
    There is something shallow and cautious about this film, which strains to maintain a glib, cheery demeanor that is not always appropriate to the details of the story.
  86. The Afterlight
    A minimalist mood poem to loss and alienation.
  87. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    None of Mr. del Toro's classy fiddling, however, can improve on the original's marvelously economical scares. But if you've always wondered what the tooth fairies want with all those teeth - or if you just need proof that a terrified Katie Holmes looks not that different from the everyday version - this is the movie for you.
  88. Modus Operandi
    You can admire the craftsmanship and enjoy the retro soundtrack, supplied by a roster of Milwaukee musicians, but it seems likely that Modus Operandi was more amusing to make than it is to watch.
  89. The Happy Poet
    The consistent comic tone of those earlier scenes - a gentle squirm - makes The Happy Poet a promising debut.
  90. Casino Jack
    The plot has so many moving parts - so many envelopes of money, dropped names, half-explained schemes and hasty flights - that it quickly becomes more frustrating than illuminating.
  91. Ip Man
    Over all, the film is a prime exhibit in the relentless and regrettable shift away from a natural, allusive, romantic Hong Kong style and toward a mainland studio aesthetic that is stagebound, literal, overstuffed and sentimental - like the big-budget Hollywood weepies of the '60s or the '80s.
  92. Leaving
    Here, a contemporary French white woman who yearns for liberté, égalité and fraternité is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as women were once upon a time and still are in some cultures, though truly it's all the clichés in this film that make her a captive.
  93. Today's Special
    An immigrant-family comedy that hits all the sentimental clichés of the genre as if they were stops on the No. 7 train.
  94. Wild Target
    The considerable wit, style, and skill that Mr. Nighy and Ms. Blunt bring to the project are squandered.
  95. Race to Nowhere
    Spurred by the medical and emotional problems of her own three children, Ms. Abeles embarked on a deeply personal inquiry into the insanely hectic lives of too many of our offspring.
  96. Helena from the Wedding
    Helena From the Wedding has a little more to offer than many films of its type.
  97. You Won't Miss Me
    For all its many irritations, You Wont Miss Me has undeniable punch, a frayed energy that feels janglingly unstable. Is Shelly crazy or just a pain in the neck? We're not really sure, and neither is she.
  98. Miral
    To say that Mr. Schnabel's film is innocuous is not to say that it's any good. Like so many other well-intentioned movies about politically contentious issues, it is hobbled by its own sincerity and undone by a confused aesthetic agenda.
  99. The Tourist
    Jolie never ignites, and neither does the movie. Mr. Depp doesn't fare better with a role that forces him to play meek and disappointingly mild, despite a few screenwriter-supplied tics.
  100. Gulliver's Travels
    For myself, I was but seldom inspired to peals of true laughter, though I did relish that part when Mr. Black, confronting a fire raging in the Palace of Lilliput, douses the blaze through heroic use of such means as Nature has provided him.
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