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. Country Strong
    Though seriously miscast as an unreformed alcoholic, the bronzed Ms. Paltrow gets by with a thin, serviceable voice (she sings her own songs) and an actor's confidence.
  2. 3 Billion and Counting
    The guy's not much of a filmmaker, but he certainly gets your attention.
  3. Gerrymandering
    An illustrated civics lesson that strains to make its complicated, shadowy subject - electoral redistricting - a political hot topic.
  4. Outside the Law
    As powerful and well made as it is, Outside the Law is too schematic and single-minded to lodge itself in your mind as a fully realized cinematic epic. Its few female characters are sketchy at best. It is all politics, all the time.
  5. Walkaway
    Walkaway is a pleasant enough time-pass, as they say in India, but stays too near the surface to be memorable.
  6. Amer
    What does it all mean? Less than meets the eye. Amer is a voluptuous wallow in recycled psychosexual kitsch.
  7. Queen of the Lot
    There is something cozy and a little claustrophobic about Henry Jaglom's indulgent Hollywood satires.
  8. The Dilemma
    Ms. Ryder, playing the least sympathetic character with unflinching dignity and candor, is in many ways the reason The Dilemma works as well as it does.
  9. From Prada to Nada
    Angel Gracia, whose career has been in European music videos and commercials, imbues his feature directing debut with a televisionlike crispness and disposability.
  10. Restless
    It is hard to say, though, if this film, directed by Gus Van Sant from a script by Jason Lew, is an argument for denial or a treatise on acceptance. Curiously, and in a way that is sometimes touching and sometimes icky, it does not seem to perceive much of a difference.
  11. Drive Angry 3D
    Apart from some half-cartoonish digital effects and the whole 3-D thing, Drive Angry could almost be mistaken for a raunchy, cheesy exploitation programmer of the same vintage as some of its cars.
  12. The Legend of Pale Male
    A sugary, aggressively anthropomorphized story of one avian interloper and a whole bunch of human obsessives.
  13. Mars
    The plot of Mars owes at least as much to bodily fluids as it does to science fiction.
  14. Applause
    When an actress gives herself as wholly as Ms. Steen does here, a filmmaker should return the favor with a comparable level of craft and commitment, which is largely absent from this movie.
  15. Frankie & Alice
    Ms. Berry does a decent job with the role, and the film treats its subject matter respectfully, but the overall package doesn’t rise above ordinariness.
  16. Plastic Planet
    Does little but raise an alarm, then leave it jangling.
  17. Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)
    Ms. Rao gives the city an immediacy it doesn't usually have in films. But she has more feel for mood than for storytelling.
  18. Let the Bullets Fly
    At least 30 minutes and several scams too long, the plot passes from amusing to confounding long before the final double-cross.
  19. Sacrifice
    It's tough to care about characters who spend most of their lives obsessing over the violent deaths of others.
  20. Just Go with It
    There is some cheap homophobia at the end, and a lot of the kind of misogyny that treats the existence of nonthin, nonrich, nonwhite women as a joke in itself.
  21. In a Better World
    Everything about In a Better World feels just a little too easy: a better movie might have let in more of the messiness of the world as it is. This one falls into cheap manipulation, winding up the audience with foreboding music and the spectacle of blond children in peril.
  22. Jumping the Broom
    Instead of being a wild mixture of tones, it has very little tone at all, and moments of dramatic or comic intensity erupt awkwardly and then fizzle out.
  23. Thor
    The absolute and unbroken mediocrity of Thor is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad. And THAT is depressing. A howling turkey is at least something to laugh at, and maybe even something to see. But Thor is an example of the programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination.
  24. Gabi on the Roof in July
    Their characters are instantly recognizable; how you respond to the film may depend largely on whether you find any of them in the least likable and whether you think that matters.
  25. Paul
    While Paul seems great conceptually, he's not particularly interesting or surprising.
  26. Hall Pass
    Whatever the case, it's dispiriting that the draggiest, soppiest scenes in Hall Pass, as well as the most disgusting gag, involve women.
  27. Arthur
    The star does his patented shtick, supported by a handful of blue-chip supporting performers, as the story lurches through contrived, seminaughty comic set pieces toward a sentimental ending.
  28. Hop
    Hop is innocuous, though occasionally annoying and also, less expectedly, occasionally funny. Both types of occasions are mostly provided by Russell Brand, who specializes in collapsing the distinction between the exasperatingly silly and the charmingly naughty.
  29. Insidious
    The strongest analogue for the second half of Insidious is one that the filmmakers probably weren't trying for: it feels like a less poetic version of an M. Night Shyamalan fairy tale.
  30. African Cats
    At one point the lions make a meal of a lovely young zebra they've just killed. That spelled the end for the little boy sitting next to me. "I'm too scared," he said, and he dragged his mom out of the theater. Sorry, kid, it's a jungle out there, even in Disneynature.
  31. Haywire
    Once the talking stops and the action begins, her professionalism is very much in evidence and exciting to watch. And yet, somehow, it cannot quite relieve the tedium of a movie that is too cool even to pretend that there is anything worth fighting about.
  32. Friends with Kids
    The result is a talky, predictable, less-audacious-than-it-thinks romantic comedy.
  33. The Other Woman
    In spite of its air of seriousness and sophistication, The Other Woman feels oddly shapeless and pokey.
  34. The Eagle
    Lumbering along for a bit less than two hours, which passes like three, it feels more like a chore than like an adventure.
  35. The Chaperone
    A lightweight comedy aimed, presumably, at tweeners and fans of World Wrestling Entertainment.
  36. The Beaver
    Nasty, brutish and as cuddly as a crusty old sock fished out of a sewer, the beaver or the beav, as I like to think of him, owns the film.
  37. The Smurfs
    Sure, Smurfs are blue, but who knew that they actually work blue?
  38. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching "Cold Case" or "Criminal Minds," but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques.
  39. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    There is a plot, but no real intrigue, mystery or suspense, and no inkling of anything at stake beyond a childish and belligerent idea of fun.
  40. The Adventures of Tintin
    Like the screen Tintin, the movie proves less than inviting because it's been so wildly overworked: there is hardly a moment of downtime, a chance to catch your breath or contemplate the tension between the animated Expressionism and the photo-realist flourishes.
  41. Take Me Home Tonight
    What keeps the movie, directed by Michael Dowse, on a more or less even keel is its steady pacing and emotional kinship to John Hughes comedies like "Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club."
  42. Red Riding Hood
    My, what sharp teeth Ms. Hardwicke doesn't have: working from David Leslie Johnson's screenplay she takes on the story's grown-up themes of sex and death directly but weakly.
  43. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    About the most you can say for it is that it's inoffensive.
  44. Cars 2
    It is not entirely without charm or wit. Directed by John Lasseter (with Brad Lewis credited as co-director) from a script by Ben Queen, Cars 2 lavishes scrupulous imaginative attention on its cosmopolitan settings.
  45. The Sitter
    Some of it, though, is absurdly comic, like the shot of a guy on a Segway that exists for no reason other than that someone here thought the movie could use a small laugh right then. It did. It could use more.
  46. Conan the Barbarian
    Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling. Thankfully, he also shows glints of self-awareness that can make hypermasculine blowouts like these more watchable and were largely missing from Mr. Schwarzenegger's wide-eyed turn in the first "Conan the Barbarian" (1982).
  47. Colombiana
    The overall effect is distancing; there are some early comic moments that have you laughing along with the movie, but eventually the clashing tones and preposterousness just have you laughing.
  48. Drive
    The virtuosity on display is also the director's, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of Drive, the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough.
  49. The Ides of March
    Somehow, the film is missing both adrenaline and gravity, notwithstanding some frantic early moments and a late swerve toward tragedy. It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk.
  50. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    No swear words here; just harmless fun.
  51. Footloose
    Somehow Footloose never finds its rhythm. The maudlin scenes drag on, and the livelier moments pass by too quickly. It only works when it settles down and lets the characters (and the audience) hang out and have a little fun.
  52. Happy Feet Two
    An amiable sequel with not much on its mind other than funny and creaky jokes, and waves of understated beauty.
  53. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    This kind of movie is all about the special effects. They start out great - cool helicopter crash, very convincing giant lizard - but grow more amateurish as the film goes along, with a flight sequence on giant bees proving particularly clunky.
  54. Straw Dogs
    Mr. Lurie's movie does not quite succeed on its own, though it is pulpy and brutal and at times grotesquely comical. The story does not cohere, and the performances are uneven. But as a piece of film criticism - as a conversation with, and interpretation of, an earlier film - it is intriguing.
  55. The Cabin in the Woods
    Novelty and genre traditionalism often fight to a draw. Too much overt cleverness has a way of spoiling dumb, reliable thrills. And despite the evident ingenuity and strenuous labor that went into it, The Cabin in the Woods does not quite work.
  56. Red State
    For all its boisterous profanity and splattery violence, the film is more of a weary sigh than a sputtering volley of indignation.
  57. Real Steel
    An underdog drama with clanging metal-on-metal action, Real Steel feels scientifically programmed to claw at your heart while its battling robots, which have a semblance of human personality, drum up your adrenaline. That said, I'm not sure that the movie itself has more than a semblance of a heart.
  58. Anonymous
    Anonymous is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it's not bad.
  59. Texas Killing Fields
    Ms. Mann (Michael's daughter) does stage a bracing car chase, and Mr. Morgan makes an impression despite a story that's sometimes hard to follow.
  60. Butter
    Well acted and sporadically amusing - especially when Olivia Wilde's profanity-spewing stripper is around - Butter alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values.
  61. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    The ending is also a test of the audience's openness to the kind of fantasy mocked, at the outset, by everyone in Jeff's life, including the filmmakers. They want to make us believe in something, though it's also possible that they are only fooling.
  62. This Means War
    Perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you're doing housework.
  63. Tower Heist
    Tower Heist could and should have been much more. Mr. Ratner goes for the safe bet and the easy score.
  64. Wanderlust
    For every few jokes that hit in this story about a recession-battered New York couple finding themselves on a Georgia commune, one sputters and dies.
  65. 50/50
    A feel-good and slightly bad comedy-drama about a young man's fight against cancer, aims to put a tear in your eye and a sob in your throat, if not for long.
  66. My Week with Marilyn
    Ms. Williams tries her best, and sometimes that's almost enough.
  67. Ceremony
    In its mixture of the quirky and the downbeat, Ceremony aspires to be a hybrid of Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" and Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" but falls far short.
  68. Life of Pi
    The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes - or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all.
  69. Monogamy
    With modest resources, some nice digital camerawork and an appealing cast - the likable Ms. Jones draws you in easily - Mr. Shapiro keeps you engaged even when his story falters.
  70. White Irish Drinkers
    Because Mr. Thurston and Mr. Wigdor lack the hard shells necessary to make their characters credible, White Irish Drinkers feels synthetic. Mr. Lang and the older cast members fare better, but they can't save a movie that runs on clichés.
  71. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    It's generally fun to watch Mr. Yen move and not much fun to watch him act, and Legend of the Fist is no exception.
  72. Beautiful Boy
    A kind of apocalyptic 21st-century "Ordinary People," Beautiful Boy, directed by Shawn Ku from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Armbruster, is so high-mindedly determined to avoid sensationalism that it sidesteps critical dramatic content and sabotages its own ambitions.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Courageous
    For now, though, Mr. Kendrick will have to settle for being a good enough filmmaker, content to preach to the choir.
  74. One Day
    Her (Ms. Scherfig) eccentric eye and offbeat rhythm sustain One Day through its stretches of banality and mitigate some of its flaws.
  75. Loveless
    An aimless film about an aimless fellow, but it's not without its charms. It may be without a point, but hey, you can't have everything in a no-budget film like this.
  76. Zero Bridge
    Handicapped by Mr. Tapa's sometimes sketchy screenplay and the limitations of his nonprofessional cast. (His clumsy staging of their dialogue scenes doesn't help.)
  77. The Human Resources Manager
    A disappointingly shallow story in which only the dead are named, and the living are reduced to stereotypes.
  78. Battleship
    Has a plot as unambitious as a macaroni dinner, familiar and easy to eat and not particularly nutritious.
  79. Henry's Crime
    Its mood is so muffled and point so submerged, it's difficult to see why Mr. Reeves and the rest of the cast pooled their talents to make a movie about a nowhere man going no place in particular in Buffalo.
  80. Lord of the Dance in 3D
    The excitement factor only intermittently carries from the arena to the screen.
  81. Illegal
    One problem is that while Mr. Masset-Depasse frames Tania's status in vague political terms, he doesn't make an argument. Instead he creates heroes and villains in what is, by turns, a prison flick, a psychological thriller and a maternal melodrama.
  82. Mia and the Migoo
    Trying to parse meaning in "Mia" is secondary to its main point, which is its look, created with 500,000 hand-drawn frames. That's impressive in an age in which most mainstream animation is done with computers.
  83. Rock of Ages
    It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.
  84. Jack the Giant Slayer
    If it drifts with increasing frequency it’s because, well, this finally is just a digitally souped-up, one-dimensional take on Jack and the Beanstalk.
  85. The Bang Bang Club
    Why, then, do we care not one bit when Pulitzers are won and bullets unsuccessfully dodged? The answer lies partly in Mr. Silver's refusal to elucidate the racial politics or engage with the world outside the film's incoherently chaotic bubble.
  86. Here Comes the Boom
    If you can choke down the implausible notion that the doughy Kevin James would last more than five seconds in a mixed martial arts ring, Here Comes the Boom is a moderately enjoyable, nontaxing sort of comedy.
  87. Wrecked
    Information leaks into the film via the radio and a few flashbacks, but Wrecked is mostly free of dialogue - and, unfortunately, suspense.
  88. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead
    Fat, Sick may be no great shakes as a movie, but as an ad for Mr. Cross's wellness program its now-healthy heart is in the right place.
  89. Mirror Mirror
    Consistently watchable, even when it drifts into dullness because Mr. Singh always gives you something to look at,
  90. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    The fine-boned, delicate-looking Ms. Casadesus, now 97, is a pleasure to watch. And the not-delicate-looking Mr. Depardieu does his usual excellent job. But their scenes together, if sweet enough, aren't particularly convincing or moving.
  91. Wrath of the Titans
    At least it doesn't take itself too seriously. There are also soldiers, fireballs, smoke and sand. But not much to think about when the dust clears.
  92. Dumbstruck
    The writer and director, Mark Goffman, sticks to a no-frills style that makes the film feel longer than its 1 hour 24 minutes.
  93. The Expendables 2
    Mr. Norris arrives just as the blood baths and leaden dialogue are beginning to grow tedious, and his deadpan self-parody is pretty darn funny. More important, it gives you permission to laugh at the rest of this mindless movie, which is the only way to choke it down.
  94. Phillip the Fossil
    That the movie remains consistently watchable is largely a tribute to Brian Hasenfus, a Needham, Mass., contractor making his acting debut as Phillip.
  95. The First Grader
    This ambition - to provoke thought while tugging at heartstrings - makes The First Grader fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure.
  96. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    There are enough decent moments in "Snow Flower" that you can at times see the remains of a better movie amid the jolting transitions between past and present, but these eras never really speak to each other, much less to you.
  97. When Harry Tries to Marry
    Producing smarm at the high level of When Harry Met Sally requires special talent, and when you fall short all you're left with is garden-variety smarm.
  98. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Patrick periodically criticizes his disciples, including Martha, for failing to be open enough with him, and that is also a shortcoming of Martha Marcy May Marlene, which is a bit too coy, too clever and too diffident to believe in.
  99. Like Crazy
    Largely a conventional, wan affair, despite its art-cinema flourishes.
  100. Lucky
    Pitching uncertainly between cute and creepy, engaging and weird, this farcical story draws energy from a wickedly eccentric Ann-Margret, having a high old time as Ben's doting mother.
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