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. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    The story is told in faux-documentary style, echoing the films of Christopher Guest, and if the cast never quite matches Mr. Guest's ensemble in comic inventiveness, they nonetheless manage to invest a very slight story line with a loose, scruffy charm.
  2. Sisters in Law
    When the right thing is done, it is uplifting in any context. Sisters in Law positively soars.
  3. Lucky Number Slevin
    From its sly, amused performances to its surreal comic book gloss to its artfully nervous camerawork, Lucky Number Slevin sustains the blasé tone and look of a smart-aleck thriller that buries its heart under layers of attitude.
  4. The Benchwarmers
    The Benchwarmers is the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well. It is also, to quote Mr. Schneider, "a master's thesis on the form of a quintessential Adam Sandler comedy."
  5. Phat Girlz
    Barely written and stiffly directed.
  6. Take the Lead
    Take the Lead, despite its nifty concept and fiery leading man, feels sloppy and rushed.
  7. Friends with Money
    Greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers.
  8. Simon
    Tackles weighty social issues with quiet intelligence and low-key charm.
  9. On a Clear Day
    Despite a familiar crop of lovable eccentrics and a predictably inspirational thrust, the movie resists formula just enough to achieve a surprising degree of emotional traction.
  10. When Do We Eat?
    In his sour little movie When Do We Eat?, the director Salvador Litvak, like many before him, misses the target, landing instead in the adjacent territories of Tries Too Hard and Bad Taste.
  11. 4
    As opaque as it is mesmerizing, 4 demands open eyes and open minds, but neither is it as difficult as all its weighty silences, oblique detours and countless images of glistening, sweating animal flesh - Mother Russia's raw and seriously overcooked - might suggest.
  12. Free Zone
    If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.
  13. Sir! No Sir!
    In his smart, timely documentary about the G.I. Movement, Sir! No Sir!, Mr. Zeiger takes a look at how the movement changed and occasionally even rocked the military from the ground troops on up.
  14. 95 Miles to Go
    Two groups of people should probably not see 95 Miles to Go. Unfortunately, they're the two groups that were probably envisioned as the film's core constituencies: stand-up comics and Ray Romano fans.
  15. The Outsider
    A tragically missed opportunity to illuminate one of the more unusual cinematic talents working today.
  16. Quality of Life
    A minor movie, modestly made, that develops to a counterculture beat but ends with a status quo conundrum: Is selling out the new keeping it real?
  17. I Am a Sex Addict
    The movie is a minor triumph of sincerity, neatly skirting the pitfalls of narcissism and unexamined misogyny. It never mugs for our good will, only our witness, which it rewards with honesty and wit.
  18. Basic Instinct 2
    A disaster of the highest or perhaps lowest order.
  19. ATL
    The fun here is in seeing a new batch of rappers try acting, and some of them turn out to be eminently watchable.
  20. Ice Age: The Meltdown
    The animation is uninspired (with so much ice, the creatures need to be twice as good-looking), and the story is humdrum. (The saber-toothed tiger learns to swim!)
  21. Slither
    While Slither sometimes feels like a monster-mash, what makes it work is how nimbly it slaloms from yucks to yuks, slip-sliding from horror to comedy and back again on its gore-slicked foundation.
  22. Brick
    It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.
  23. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    As for the authorial conceit - assembling the movie from giddy, spastic, amateur photography captured from every part of the arena - at best it yields energetic perspectives on the show, at worst it looks like a cellphone video camera having an epileptic seizure.
  24. Adam & Steve
    The gay, independent comedy Adam & Steve is as crude and nonsensical as any number of B-list studio equivalents, with the added disadvantages of a low budget and shaky direction by Craig Chester, who wrote and also stars.
  25. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Jeff Feuerzeig, who won the best-director award at the 2005 Sundance festival, cobbles together a moving portrait of the artist as his own ghost, using a wealth of material provided by Mr. Johnston, from home movies to audiocassette diaries to dozens of original, and often heartbreakingly beautiful, songs.
  26. Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    Despite a gloriously baroque performance from Mr. Wahlberg - attempting moves certified only for Antonio Banderas - Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School remains irredeemably soggy.
  27. Iowa
    As the downward spiral continues, "drugs are evil" is pounded into our heads again and again until numbness sets in; in this case, even a touch of subtlety would have sent a more powerful and lasting message.
  28. Iron Island
    Less consumed by behavioral details than many of his filmmaking compatriots, Mr. Rasoulof makes bold use of symbolic imagery - a satellite television is confiscated and tossed overboard - suggesting that utopias inevitably come at the price of isolation and authoritarianism.
  29. Toro negro
    An unflinching look at bullfighting and debasement in the Yucatán Peninsula - will entail witnessing animal torture and death. And that's not the worst of it.
  30. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Modelworks
    The director Yan-Ting Yuen revisits the country's recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular.
  31. Drawing Restraint 9
    The uninitiated viewer can admire it simply for the majesty of its visual poetry.
  32. Inside Man
    Filled with playful noise and nonsense, clever feints and digressions, Inside Man has a story to tell, but its most sustained pleasures come from its performances, especially the three leads.
  33. Stay Alive
    The star of Stay Alive is a cutting-edge video game, but the film still has hackneyed horror at its heart. And worse, it's not even the stylishly, wittily executed hackneyed horror of the "Scream" movies.
  34. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    Liz Mermin documents the hilarious, moving and sometimes fractious meeting of diametrically different cultures, one that has suffered unimaginable horrors and one that believes a good perm is the answer to everything.
  35. Lonesome Jim
    Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise.
  36. Mardi Gras: Made in China
    With any luck, this film will manage to open a few closed eyes (or minds).
  37. L'Enfant (The Child)
    The Dardennes know how to build a scene for maximum tension: you yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill. But because they make moral thrillers, what matters isn't only actions and events but their emotional, spiritual and psychological costs.
  38. The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    Living proof that hard work and dedication can lead to professional and private gratification through the best and worst of times, Mr. Busch stands as solid source material for a film and for general inspiration.
  39. Stoned
    Stoned accomplishes the unlikely feat of making the golden years before medical science and the law caught up with rock culture look dull.
  40. Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
    Unpleasant, uncouth and painfully unfunny..
  41. Puzzlehead
    Puzzlehead reveals the selfishness of creation with style, originality and the understanding that even a tin man can have a heart.
  42. Shadow: Dead Riot
    This berserk little B-movie is obviously the greatest zombie flick ever set in an experimental women's prison, easily the underground treat of the season, and totally off its rocker.
  43. American Gun
    If American Gun avoids the most obvious kinds of sensationalism, it has the flaw common to many editorial broadsides of overstuffing its episodes with melodrama and symbolism.
  44. V for Vendetta
    The more valid question is how anyone who isn't 14 or under could possibly mistake a corporate bread-and-circus entertainment like this for something subversive. You want radical? Wait for the next Claire Denis film.
  45. Find Me Guilty
    Find Me Guilty, Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game.
  46. She's the Man
    Everything projects as if for the benefit of a nearsighted and dimwitted ticket holder at the back of the room. To his credit, Mr. Fickman has mastered one device unique to the cinema, making repeated use of the corny training montage.
  47. Thank You for Smoking
    Glibly funny and eager to please.
  48. Take My Eyes
    The director, Iciar Bollain, who wrote the screenplay with Alicia Luna, invests Antonio with humanity, which would be more impressive if she had paid more attention to exploring the darker recesses of Pilar's inner life.
  49. Don't Tell
    Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel.
  50. Don't Come Knocking
    Filled with haunting visual panoramas. One of the most resonant is a nighttime shot of the Elko skyline dominated by a glittering casino. Evoking a once and future gold rush, it says more about the Old West and the New West than all of Mr. Shepard's elliptical, stagy dialogue can muster. Such powerful images make Don't Come Knocking well worth contemplating.
  51. The Devil's Miner
    A brave, sincere film that leaves you wishing that more light had been shed on the darkness.
  52. Iluzija
    Mr. Ristovski's story (written with Grace Lea Troje) feels a bit underdeveloped, partly because he uses too many lingering, silent shots of Marko and doesn't give the boy much of a voice.
  53. Don't Trip ... He Ain't Through with Me Yet
    The film's first half, at least, is full of good comedy, no matter what the crowd.
  54. The Big Question
    The overall effect, especially given the gorgeous setting and liquid-gold cinematography, is less a discussion of the divine than a commercial for it.
  55. Beyond Honor
    Amateur acting, a wobbly script and a hard-to-swallow finale round out the film, which will, sadly, invoke ridicule in place of shock and anguish.
  56. Hate Crime
    With a little more subtlety - and a lot less predictability - the movie might have played more like a thoughtful drama and less like an outrageous exercise in wish fulfillment.
  57. The Beautiful City
    Only inconsistent pacing and a few minor contrivances that develop late in the film dull its otherwise quietly effective dramatic impact.
  58. Failure to Launch
    The movie has only the most tenuous connection with reality. But the same could be said of classic 30's screwball comedies in which the treacherous feints and ploys of the mating game are transmuted into witty, romantically charged repartee.
  59. The Hills Have Eyes
    Snobs may balk, purists will be appalled, but this new and exceedingly nasty version of Wes Craven's 1977 cult shocker is awfully good at what it does. And mostly what it does is make you feel awful.
  60. The Shaggy Dog
    Ms. Curtin is one of several examples of quirky casting that make this Shaggy Dog much more fun than it might have been.
  61. Ask the Dust
    More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.
  62. Duck Season
    Inside this small canvas - almost the entire film unfolds in the one apartment - Mr. Eimbcke turns each character into an epic.
  63. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Viewer discretion is advised, if only because it's well-nigh unwatchable.
  64. Evil
    The movie is as blunt as its title. It portrays such behavior as "evil" without offering any deep insights or revelations, beyond handing out the plot equivalent of a lollipop at the end of the movie as compensation for the vicarious anguish.
  65. Game 6
    A tale of one man's meltdown that ought to have an expiration date of Oct. 27, 2004, stamped on every frame.
  66. Shakespeare Behind Bars
    The filmmakers, Hank Rogerson and Jilann Spitzmiller, encourage us to marvel at the transformative power of art. In Shakespeare Behind Bars, the most restricted people in society find freedom in performance and release in words.
  67. The Fallen
    Directed by Ari Taub with a naturalistic style and a nonpartisan eye, The Fallen finds its humanity in the dailiness of a soldier's life, in the long stretches of nothing, where tensions swell and the killing of a deer can spark a mutiny.
  68. Neighbour No. 13
    Suffering its own split personality, The Neighbor No. Thirteen is an art house exploitation film neither arty nor exploitative enough.
  69. 16 Blocks
    Mr. Willis has always been an acquired taste, but for those who did acquire that taste, riding shotgun on his good times and bad, it's a pleasure to see him doing what comes naturally.
  70. Aquamarine
    Ms. Paxton isn't quite as magnetic as a movie mermaid ought to be, but the two buddies are a treat to watch, especially Ms. Roberts, showing the genes of her Aunt Julia.
  71. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    Mr. Chappelle looks and sounds alternately ebullient and weary. It was directed by Michel Gondry, the madcap genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but in its tone and vibe feels like Mr. Chappelle's all the way.
  72. Ultraviolet
    Mr. Wimmer is more concerned with fetishizing his heroine and patronizing his audience. The verdict? Ultrasilly.
  73. Deep Sea
    The soothing voices of Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet provide the informative yet often uninspired narration. And Danny Elfman's mystical sounds serve up just the right atmosphere for this almost complete immersive experience, during which adults will be made into giggling children, and children into aspiring marine biologists.
  74. Merry Christmas
    If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?
  75. Woman Is the Future of Man
    Mr. Hong is not yet the equal of Mr. Antonioni, but it has become increasingly difficult to see intellectually stimulating, aesthetically bold films like this in American theaters.
  76. In Cold Blood (re-release)
    Excellent quasidocumentary, which sends shivers down the spine. (Review of Original Release)
  77. 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.
  78. Home
    Home accumulates a blurry, on-the-fly atmosphere spiked with moments of unexpected sweetness. The movie, though, is most successful when the dialogue mutes and our attention is focused on Jonathan Wolff's gliding camera; in those moments, the brownstone is the most interesting character of all.
  79. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis, which chronicles the entire election-strategizing process in scrupulous detail, will pack a punch with even the most informed viewer.
  80. Sorry, Haters
    Unfolds with such utter looniness that the horrible final moments are more likely to inspire laughter than shock. Casually insulting our emotions and intelligence, Mr. Stanzler seems to have shaped his film with one goal in mind: to prove that audacity and recklessness are acceptable substitutes for craft and common sense. Needless to say, they're not.
  81. Al otro lado
    This infectious little movie enriches understanding of the immigrant experience insofar as it translates one of its main forms of expression. Where the movie goes wrong, albeit down a forgivable path, is in the attempt to personalize its subject by means of biographical focus on an aspiring corrido composer.
  82. Tsotsi
    To his credit, Mr. Hood's meditation on truth and reconciliation doesn't traffic in the cheap thrills of art-house exploitation, like "City of God"; he wrings tears with sincerity, not cynicism.
  83. Doogal
    An animated clunker.
  84. Madea's Family Reunion
    Both Ms. Angelou and Ms. Tyson deliver powerful, touching messages. Just as they're sinking in, the film turns into an unabashed chick flick with a painfully gaudy wedding that includes live angels hanging on wires from the ceiling.
  85. Running Scared
    Even a talented lead couldn't save Mr. Kramer from himself. As a writer, he may have fashioned a genre-busting screenplay, one that has its postmodern cake and eats it, too, but as a director he proves himself as blood simple, if generally less adept, as any Hollywood hire.
  86. Dirty
    A facile exercise in nihilism posing as an indie "Training Day" with street cred. Don't believe it.
  87. Little Fish
    As in all her screen performances, Ms. Blanchett immerses herself completely in her character, a damaged, high-strung woman determined to live the straight life while surrounded by temptation.
  88. Unknown White Male
    Crammed with friendly, sympathetic talking heads and pretty images of a stunned-looking Mr. Bruce, then 35, relearning life (he remembers how to walk but forgot family and friends), the film comes up frustratingly short when it comes to the particulars.
  89. Black Orpheus
    It really is not the two lovers that are the focus of interest in this film; it is the music, the movement, the storm of color that go into the two-day festival. M. Camus has done a superb job of getting the documented look not only of the overall fandango but also of the buildup of momentum the day before. (Review of Original Release)
  90. Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    For a film about death-camp survivors Forgiving Dr. Mengele is surprisingly uplifting and, at times, even lighthearted.
  91. Trudell
    No one in the film has a bad word to say about Mr. Trudell, despite his 17,000-page F.B.I. dossier; and by the time Robert Redford assures us that meeting him is not dissimilar to meeting the Dalai Lama, you may feel that all this worship does not do justice to an unusually stormy and complicated life.
  92. Workingman's Death
    In the film's production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, "Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?" In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.
  93. Date Movie
    Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, who wrote the screenplay, have crammed dozens of movie parodies into this deliberately juvenile spoof of romantic comedies. Mr. Seltzer, who directed, has made very few of them funny.
  94. Eight Below
    Eight Below is Grade A pooch porn, an orgy of canine cuteness.
  95. Freedomland
    An early candidate for worst film of the year is Freedomland, an inept, lethally dull drama.
  96. Battle in Heaven
    Working again with Diego Martínez Vignatti, the cinematographer for "Japón," the director doesn't just seize our attention; he commands it - forcing us into a world of terror and beauty.
  97. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.
  98. 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.
  99. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances.
  100. Winter Passing
    Its familiar story of an embittered child's homecoming and confrontation with a parent throws off dramatic sparks, but they never flare into a blaze.
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