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. Only Human
    A vigorously paced modern screwball comedy written and directed by the husband-and-wife team Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegrí, explores family values, and Leni and Rafi's mismatched cultural backgrounds, with a refreshingly light touch.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wordplay
    Whatever the documentary's flaws, the filmmakers should be saluted for giving us a rare glimpse of life in these trenches.
  3. Going Under
    The director, Eric Werthman, a practicing psychotherapist, presents Peter and Suzanne's dilemma like a case study from his own files rather than a real, flesh-and-blood-and-handcuffs relationship.
  4. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Tells the depressing, often ridiculous and generally enraging story of how and why Mr. Chong, an extremely laid-back and genial camera presence, ended up doing time in the minimum-security Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.
  5. Cars
    Both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney.
  6. A Prairie Home Companion
    It's not a perfect movie, and it does not aspire to be a great one. It's just wonderful.
  7. Agnes and His Brothers
    Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.
  8. Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    This new film feels like something of a gift, as if the director had decided to burn some of his favorite songs for his newfound friends, the world-cinema audience.
  9. Bombón: El Perro
    That El Perro is so unassuming is part of what makes its humane, sympathetic story so satisfying.
  10. The Heart of the Game
    [Mr. Resler] turns out to be not only the heart of this particular game, but also its brains, lungs and unforgettably endearing mug.
  11. Autumn
    As they scheme to secure a mysterious silver briefcase, secrets are revealed, agendas come to light and not a single plausible line of dialogue is uttered.
  12. Slow Jam King
    Mallorca tries hard and sometimes manages to make up for what is lacking in the technical department with spirited characters and high levels of comic energy.
  13. Psychopathia Sexualis
    Whether in the whorehouse or the sanitarium, Psychopathia Sexualis is an exercise in unrelenting dullness.
  14. Animals and More Animals
    What emerges is less the celebration of an institution than a picture of man's relationship to nature that is every bit as beguiling as a Rousseau.
  15. The Omen
    Terminally glum and waterlogged.
  16. The Break-Up
    The script (by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) strains hard after a few easy jokes, and the whole movie feels dull and trivial.
  17. District B13
    With backing from the film's producer and co-writer, Luc Besson, the director, Pierre Morel, mounts a breakneck B movie inspired by Hong Kong action extravaganzas, the gritty genre classics of John Carpenter and the Thai neo-kung fu parable "Ong Bak." He hasn't reinvented this particular wheel, but he gets it spinning with delirious savoir-faire.
  18. The War Tapes
    Whatever your opinion of the war - and however it has changed over the years - this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?
  19. The Puffy Chair
    Its fidelity to its characters’ view of the world -- although they are presumably college graduates, they seem never to have read a book or expressed an opinion -- is more a liability than a virtue. The Puffy Chair is as modest as their ambitions and as narrow as their curiosity about the world beyond themselves.
  20. Typhoon
    Typhoon aims high but misses the emotional mark in most instances, resulting in some awkward melodramatics. Even so, it flourishes during its well-executed action sequences and commands attention almost instantaneously, though, in the end, it will be forgotten just as quickly.
  21. The Cult of the Suicide Bomber
    Like so many political films of this type made for British television, this documentary contains more information than analysis, not to mention predictably spooky music.
  22. Peaceful Warrior
    For all its manifest corniness, this is an achingly sincere and supremely unembarrassed effort to transform an audience for the good. Its heart is very much in the right place - a place that movies all but ignore - but its mind is a mush.
  23. La tropical
    Crammed with comments from patrons and performers, La Tropical is a sensual celebration of people for whom dancing is the "most important nonreligious ritual."
  24. Coastlines
    A larger problem is the film's attempt to piece together a hard-boiled crime drama with a soft-boiled soap opera, ultimately giving precedence to the suds and adding a sickly lemon scent.
  25. X-Men: The Last Stand
    Mostly, as so often with these types of empty entertainments, you are left to wonder why companies that hire so many fine actors to run around under latex and foam and have the best technological wizardry money can buy seem to spend so little attention to the screenplay.
  26. Shem
    By the time the frustratingly silly ending arrives, it's confirmed that Shem, which translates to "name" in Hebrew, is just as confused as its protagonist. Daniel's looks may charm everyone who crosses his path, but he is like the movie: most of the depth that does exist remains buried beneath the surface.
  27. Cavite
    A textbook example of seat-of-the-pants guerrilla filmmaking.
  28. The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress
    As much fun as that is for the choir being preached to, it would have been even more persuasive with a little less hammering and a little more historical perspective.
  29. Fanaa
    The epic Bollywood extravaganza Fanaa goes so far over the top that it reinvents itself halfway and launches on a brand new trajectory of the absurd.
  30. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    This pleasant if inconsequential romantic comedy from the Croatian director Hrvoje Hribar is distinguished by its good-natured sensibility and rowdy, slightly fabulous tone: a kind of Eastern European magic realism, without the magic.
  31. An Inconvenient Truth
    As unsettling as it can be, it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study.
  32. La Moustache
    No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.
  33. Stagedoor
    Stagedoor is like leafing through a collection of snapshots assembled with few captions and no text.
  34. The Da Vinci Code
    I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
  35. Over the Hedge
    There is no poetry here and little thought.
  36. See No Evil
    See No Evil devolves into an increasingly bloody and creative string of butcherings and impalings.
  37. The King
    Fitfully engaging, finally exasperating.
  38. Lemming
    The second half of the movie squanders suspense and momentum, solving its riddles by deflating them.
  39. Mouth to Mouth
    The upbeat ending can't erase the lingering aura of being trapped in an insane asylum with the Manson family.
  40. Twelve and Holding
    This is the exceedingly rare film that understands how lonely, insecure preadolescent children can become so consumed by their feelings that they lose sight of ordinary boundaries and unconsciously act out their parents' darkest fantasies of passion and revenge.
  41. Poseidon
    Pretty much pure boilerplate: a reasonably well-executed throwaway that, when you finally get around to seeing it in its proper setting, will make you glad you decided to travel by air instead of by sea.
  42. Just My Luck
    Just My Luck is a bit of lukewarm cappuccino froth confected to float Ms. Lohan to the next stage of her career.
  43. Goal! The Dream Begins
    As the clichés mount, Danny Cannon directs as if he's the one on trial, teasing tension out of every pass and dribble. Most irritating of all is his determination to paint British soccer as a gentleman's game, a notion United's real fans would no doubt treat with the scorn it deserves.
  44. Dead Man's Shoes
    The always fantastic Paddy Considine evokes both sensitivity and explosiveness.
  45. Giuliani Time
    In general, and in spite of its deft use of archival video clips and interviews, Giuliani Time offers a superficial reading of recent New York history, zeroing in on the headlines while often missing the context.
  46. Keeping Up with the Steins
    Keeping Up With the Steins would have been a much better film if it had waited twice as long before retracting its fangs.
  47. Saving Shiloh
    Touching, intelligent and admirably thoughtful, but more action-packed than its predecessors, thanks to escaped convicts, a local murder and a truly suspenseful finale, with lives at stake.
  48. Wah-Wah
    Yet for all its studied snobbery and brittle entitlement, the film is never mean-spirited: even Ralph's monstrous parents are treated with more compassion than they deserve. Clearly, Mr. Grant's memories are more fond than bitter - even if the same probably can't be said of the Swazis.
  49. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    This absorbing documentary, the first directed by Sydney Pollack, is a modest undertaking, offering glimpses of the architect and his work rather than a full-scale portrait or catalogue raisonné.
  50. Mendy
    Ms. Dias gives the role an understated allure, and Mr. Sandomire is as good as his character's inconsistencies allow. Their performances and Mr. Vardy's ability to be reverent when he wants to be are the film's strengths.
  51. 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.
  52. Russian Dolls
    The shallowness of this idealized depiction of European cultural homogeneity is largely camouflaged by the comfortable fit of its director's sensibility with the actors' likable, lived-in performances. An apt alternative title for Russian Dolls might be "Lovers Without Borders."
  53. Crazy Like a Fox
    Written and directed by Richard Squires, Crazy Like a Fox provides Mr. Rees with the daftest role of a long and varied career.
  54. Mission: Impossible III
    Mr. Hoffman enlivens Mission: Impossible III, which otherwise droops, done in both by the maudlin romance and by Mr. Abrams's inability to adapt his small-screen talent -- evident in his capacity as the television auteur behind "Alias" and "Lost" -- to a larger canvas.
  55. Art School Confidential
    In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility.
  56. An American Haunting
    An American Haunting purports to be based on a documented event, although most of its inspiration has been drawn from the empty well of "The Exorcist" and its progeny.
  57. Hoot
    This sweet-natured but plodding adaptation of a young-adult novel by Carl Hiaasen could have used a little less broad satire of corporate greed and a few more, well, owls.
  58. Down in the Valley
    Begins semirealistically, then veers off course, hurtling into the wild blue yonder of myth and allegory. On the way to a climactic shootout that begins on the set of a Hollywood western and ends on a foggy hillside, it makes several screeching, hairpin turns.
  59. The Proposition
    The cast of The Proposition is reason enough to see the film.
  60. One Last Thing...
    Shrewdly divided against itself. What begins as a small, cleareyed drama about a teenager with terminal cancer morphs into a gauzy tear-jerker.
  61. Kiss Me Again
    The movie is so earnest that it's embarrassing.
  62. The Mistress of Spices
    This is a one-dimensional, sometimes illogical film, but it's certainly good-looking.
  63. How I Killed a Saint
    Successfully conveys the pervasive anxiety of a country on the brink of civil war.
  64. United 93
    Its focus is purposely narrow. But that narrow focus, along with the lack of fully realized characters, and the absence of any historical or political context, raises the question of why, notwithstanding the usual (if shaky) commercial imperative, this particular movie was made.
  65. Stick It
    A spry teenage comedy that gets everything right, Stick It takes the usual batch of underdogs, dirt bags, mean girls and bimbos and sends them somersaulting through happy clichés and unexpected invention.
  66. Akeelah and the Bee
    The innate suspense and charm of the spelling bee, along with a trio of crack performances, turn what is in essence a formulaic sports picture into something more satisfying: an underdog tale that manages to inspire without being sappy.
  67. RV
    Nowadays no family movie is complete without a values-oriented agenda and a bountiful supply of fecal matter, and RV supplies both.
  68. Guys and Balls
    The climactic game provides an opportunity for some of the most sustained - and literal - gay bashing in movie history, even if the outcome is no more surprising than that of any other underdog comedy.
  69. The Lost City
    In its groggy way The Lost City holds your attention. Incoherent, but splendidly panoramic and drenched in wonderful Cuban music, it has the texture of a vivid, intoxicating dream that seems to mean something until you wake up and feel it slipping away. All that remains are feelings and impressions connected by a mood.
  70. Water
    An exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief.
  71. The Whore's Son
    The film fearlessly plumbs the depths of this intense mother-son relationship, and also explores the ways in which role models affect children's lives.
  72. Revoloution
    Not even a grumpy cameo by Burt Young and some lovely shots of the Brooklyn Bridge can save a movie as punch-drunk as its benighted protagonist.
  73. Lady Vengeance
    A convoluted hodge-podge of time frames, subplots and bit player back stories.
  74. Army of Shadows
    This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.
  75. Havana Suite
    An elusive but intermittently beautiful tone poem.
  76. Police Beat
    A delicately funny tale about everyday surrealism.
  77. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    A thorny masterpiece.
  78. Three Times
    Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's hypnotically beautiful cinematic trilogy Three Times doesn't just illuminate faces and objects; it seems to fill them up, as if they were lighted from within.
  79. American Dreamz
    The jokes don't just fizzle into insignificance; they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout.
  80. The Sentinel
    The question is why. Why would a star of Michael Douglas's stature and intelligence attach himself to a Washington thriller as deeply ridiculous, suspense-free and potentially career-damaging as The Sentinel?
  81. Silent Hill
    From first frame to last, not a second of the film has a grip on reality. Structured around a series of blackouts and gross-outs, it is one long free fall through icky surrealism and underlighted nightmares. It takes us to the sort of world where hell is round the corner, secret doors abound and faux-blond policewomen outfit themselves in skin-tight leather.
  82. Somersault
    Somersault, which the Australian Film Institute garlanded with 13 awards, including best film, director, actor and actress (for Ms. Cornish's astonishing performance), is a movie about the looks on people's faces and the disparity between the surface and the roiling chaos beneath.
  83. Mongolian Ping Pong
    Although its leisurely pace might be a bit tough going for restless Westerners, Mongolian Ping Pong is the kind of film that should rightly be seen by children, not just adventurous adults.
  84. Repulsion (re-release)
    An absolute knockout of a movie in the psychological horror line has been accomplished by Roman Polanski in his first English-language film. (Review of Original Release)
  85. The Celestine Prophecy
    This delectable fusion of New Age babble and luridly bad filmmaking may not "open" you up, to borrow one of the film's favorite verbs, but it might leave your jaw slack and your belly sore from laughter.
  86. In Her Line of Fire
    In Her Line of Fire -- produced to be shown on the gay cable network Here! -- flaunts its Sapphic subplot (all five minutes of it) like a pesky contractual obligation, and otherwise plays like straight-to-video gun pornography from the heyday of Chuck Norris.
  87. Standing Still
    Yet another movie dedicated to privileged self-involvement; just once, it would be nice to observe the early-adulthood traumas of, say, some plumbers or pipe fitters. Surely they have friends, too.
  88. 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.
  89. Scary Movie 4
    The fun of Scary Movie 4 is that it isn't a movie at all. Organized on the principle of parody, not plot, driven by gags and cultural feedback, it's an exercise in lowbrow postmodernism, a movie-movie contraption more nuts than Charlie Kaufman's gnarliest fever dream. It's cleverly stupid.
  90. The Wild
    While the kids are giggling at gambling pigeons and psychedelic chameleons, parents can enjoy a screenplay sensitive to the travails of single fatherhood and the evils of oppression. In The Wild, the most valuable weapons are honesty, tolerance and the ability to be oneself.
  91. Kinky Boots
    All it wants is to divert you for about 100 minutes and leave you with the glow of vicarious comradeship, as blue-collar blokes and drag queens pull together to save the day. Foot fetishists will drool.
  92. Hard Candy
    During the ensuing narrative unpleasantness and visual incoherence (meaningless choker close-ups, pointless slow motion), Hayley subjects Jeff to a range of torture, all in the name of, well, what? Despite the two fine performances, it's hard to say.
  93. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Principally a work of gorgeous surfaces, shot mostly in silvery black-and-white film by the cinematographer Mott Hupfel, with an occasional splash of saturated color.
  94. Look Both Ways
    Bogged down by the stylistic gimmickry of bustling montages and jarring animated segments, Look Both Ways aims for existential drama but succeeds only in reminding us that misery loves company.
  95. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    Mr. Hancock, a longtime practitioner of Buddhism who encourages his adoring colleagues to journey beyond their "comfort zones," resulting in some interactions and freestyle jamming that are truly infectious.
  96. Mountain Patrol
    Films about environmental catastrophes tend to wax preachy, putting pedagogy and scolding above art. This one, for all its sorrow and the throb of righteous anger it provokes (only about 50,000 antelopes remain), is more than anything a work of creative imagination.
  97. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    The movie bubbles with incest, adultery, religion and homosexuality -- steamy themes that incite the cast to fits of enthusiastic overemoting.
  98. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    Mr. Dunn and his colleagues dig up some interesting information during their inquiry, like the origins of the devil-horns hand signal, metal's signature salute, but their insider love of the music finally proves as big an obstacle to the film as their ploddingly pedagogic approach.
  99. Nathalie...
    Anne Fontaine's seductive film Nathalie is mostly about French star power and sex, so it's somewhat surprising that it is also subtle and intriguing.
  100. The Sisters
    Insufferable characters make for an insufferable play or movie. The Sisters, a grueling family feud conceived by Richard Alfieri, proves the point.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »