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. Escape from Planet Earth
    Escape From Planet Earth makes a tolerable diversion for a winter’s day or evening, just not a memorable one.
  2. Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya
    Runs out of gas long before its on-the-lam stars.
  3. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    The widescreen canvas is an improvement over television's limited expanse. But if you're not among the indoctrinated, don't bother.
  4. The Moth Diaries
    Roiling with jealousy, suicide and latent lesbian urges, The Moth Diaries dances on the border between hallucination and reality without fully committing to either. Yet the film's narrative frailties are offset by impeccable performances and a consistently eerie tone, helped along by a location as forbidding as the "Overlook."
  5. Five Time Champion
    Deliberately small-scale, Five Time Champion has tough-minded moments but too often veers toward the sweet and even the treacly. It's pleasant enough, but too careful to be very involving.
  6. To the Arctic
    The threat of global warming to their habitat is spelled out simply in the narration, delivered by Meryl Streep. Otherwise, To the Arctic is a little dry.
  7. Casa de mi Padre
    A quick-sketch routine stretched - amusingly, absurdly, thinly - to feature length.
  8. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    A rich opportunity is squandered with Laredoans Speak, a documentary of laudable aspirations suffering from its pronounced sympathies.
  9. Life Happens
    Most appealing is Kate Bosworth, whose sharp humor as Deena has a bite that dares you to dismiss her. Even if you might dismiss her film.
  10. Jess and Moss
    Mr. Jeter, who has made his feature-length debut with this film, tries to capture the loose feel of childhood's open-ended summers. But the vocabulary of his imagery feels worn out, and the ambience feels handed down.
  11. Cirkus Columbia
    Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.
  12. On the Ice
    Glinting white vistas and endless light blanket On the Ice, a frigid drama that's tough to warm up to.
  13. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    Stylistically a formulaic, middle-drawer television movie about intergenerational strife and forgiveness. Every plot turn is groaningly predictable. But at least the lead performances set off sparks.
  14. Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Unless you're among those who still drop acid as a midnight-movie apéritif, your enjoyment of this retro oddity remains far from guaranteed.
  15. The Fairy
    An alternately effortless and forced French-language diversion.
  16. How to Start a Revolution
    There is much more to be explored than this noble documentary, made on a tiny budget, has the resources to examine.
  17. Natural Selection
    Aside from Ms. Harris's performance, the main reason to recommend Natural Selection - very conditionally - is that its creator clearly has talent. He simply lacked the resources to make the movie he envisioned.
  18. The Trouble with Bliss
    Nobody in this sweet-natured, low-testosterone trifle is out for blood. Mr. Hall gives an agreeable portrayal of a man-child not unlike David Fisher, his character on "Six Feet Under."
  19. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    The result is a frustratingly superficial look at a smart, driven and sometimes frightened young man who always felt as though he were "racing against time."
  20. The FP
    The film has an effective synthesizer score by George Holdcroft. It also offers some funny bits (a hokey prechampionship workout montage, a ridiculous gunfight), but not enough. And for such a film, its bargain-basement production values and lack of wit unexpectedly prove a greater liability than an asset.
  21. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Heist feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher.
  22. Patriocracy
    Brian Malone's documentary Patriocracy feels as if it were made by someone who had been out of the country since the Clinton administration and upon re-entering was shocked at the polarized, dysfunctional state of the federal government.
  23. We the Party
    Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.
  24. Surviving Progress
    Like too many short documentaries, it can't do justice to its complex topic or finally to those of us watching. Because, while Surviving Progress puts forth a lot of general advice (stop the deforestation of the Amazon), it offers little in terms of real, practical, graspable solutions. People need hope; moviegoers do too.
  25. Darling Companion
    If you found "Benji the Hunted" unbearably intense or "Marley & Me" a bit too hard-edged, then Darling Companion may be the dog movie for you. On the other hand, if you like to watch cute pooches doing cute stuff on screen, you may be a little disappointed.
  26. Elles
    In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.
  27. Headhunters
    As black comedy, the film is crude and downright sloppy when compared with the clockwork machinations of the Coen brothers' creations, as it has been since its premiere. Brown's panic is capably rendered, but his ordeals are not worth enduring to the bitter end.
  28. Payback
    You can't help feeling that the movie owed its subject - and its audience - a bit more.
  29. God Bless America
    Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.
  30. Apart
    A brief appearance by Joey Lauren Adams adds a welcome warmth to the standard therapist role, but otherwise all is bewilderment and repetition.
  31. Restless City
    Mr. Dosunmu seems to have directed all his actors to pause before delivering lines, giving a languor to the film that comes to feel studied.
  32. Delicacy
    It's a lightweight romance that occasionally shows a sense of humor but seems afraid to turn it loose.
  33. Pray for Japan
    If making a decent movie required only good intentions, then Pray for Japan would be off and running. As it is, though, this muddled collage of random impressions and personal histories, emerging from last year's destruction of the Tohoku coastline by the earthquake and tsunami, doesn't document a tragedy so much as repeat a mantra.
  34. Jesus Henry Christ
    Whatever it intends, Jesus Henry Christ is not especially funny. There are witticisms galore in both the thematically recurrent imagery and the dialogue, but very few qualify as jokes, and any laughter is hard to come by. Willfully zany would be a more apt description.
  35. 300: Rise of an Empire
    The naval collisions and melees play out in panel-like renderings that are bold and satisfying for the first half-hour but lack the momentum and bombastic je ne sais quoi of “300.”
  36. Four Lovers
    Too lazy and too scared to say anything pertinent about love, society and the human condition, Four Lovers is content to be a pleasant, mildly titillating divertissement with no meaning at all.
  37. God Save My Shoes
    The film takes 70 minutes and a lot of silly chatter to conclude what every woman well knows: wearing hooker heels will have most men eating out of her hand. Or, if she's lucky, licking her aching feet.
  38. The Beat Hotel
    The arts documentarian Alan Govenar takes his turn at burnishing the legend with The Beat Hotel, a mild-mannered primer centered on the cheapo Paris boardinghouse.
  39. Artificial Paradises
    When a small drama sputters to life at the end, it's too late. You've already been lulled into dreamland.
  40. The Face of Love
    That Mr. Posin and Mr. McDuffie have stacked the deck against Nikki would be more irritating if Ms. Bening didn’t immediately make this woman come so satisfyingly alive, breathing believable vitality and at times contradictory emotions into what might have otherwise registered as a blur or cliché.
  41. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Given how little creative wiggle room there is in properties like The Winter Soldier, it’s a minor triumph that the Russos imprint any personality on the movie, which is less a stand-alone work than a part of an ever-expanding multimedia enterprise.
  42. Kids of Today
    This bid to connect clubbing elders with their young counterparts, though, is undercut by a nostalgic insistence that the partying was a lot more fun, wild and meaningful back in the day.
  43. Late Bloomers
    As more characters, including the couple's three children - enter the picture, Late Bloomers loses its narrative thread and becomes so choppy that you have the sense that it was butchered during the editing process. What remains is the skeleton of a story that leads to an abrupt, icky-cute ending.
  44. Madea's Witness Protection
    A comedy that's too late to the Ponzi-scheme party to be topical, and not outrageous enough to take advantage of its own setups.
  45. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    It would be odd not to feel something about Hana and the Brady family, but Inside Hana's Suitcase feels more like a historical teaching aid than like a great movie.
  46. Citizen Gangster
    A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.
  47. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.
  48. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    Alas, dance films like Wim Wenders's innovative, kinetic "Pina" have now set a high barre, and by comparison the traditional talking-head style of this documentary seems primed for showings on public television.
  49. Chronicling a Crisis
    Alternately tedious and illuminating, this deeply honest and scattered movie revels in its lack of purpose.
  50. Sleepless Night
    Hectic and harebrained, this galloping French thriller tosses a potpourri of plot points - crooked cops, sleazy gangsters, stolen drugs and an underage hostage - into a packed-to-the-gills nightclub, and stirs. Repeatedly.
  51. A Bag of Hammers
    Any film tossing comic interludes among its closing credits has to be convinced of their hilarity and of the good will the movie has earned with viewers by then. Perhaps the film's naked traffic in sentiment up to that point made Mr. Crano so bold. Whatever; his confidence was unwarranted.
  52. Liberal Arts
    The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.
  53. Nesting
    Aging Gen-Xers, it turns out, aren't all that witty, and Ms. Hillis and Mr. Grinnell don't have the kind of chemistry that might make this setup work.
  54. The Good Doctor
    Ultimately, even after momentarily falling apart in a fit of paranoia, Martin remains a cipher in a movie that never fulfills its potential as melodrama. If The Good Doctor isn't a bad movie, it tells only half the story.
  55. Never Stand Still
    This film has the everyday vibe of a bunch of friends putting together a summer camp video. Gosh, the substance of Jacob's Pillow should be a little less sleepy.
  56. Hit and Run
    The movie feels like a grown-up version of little boys making whooshing noises and staging collisions while playing with toys on a living room floor. It belongs to the same star-and-his-pals-cutting-up genre as the lesser comedies by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.
  57. Mighty Fine
    Mighty Fine chugs along heartily until it abruptly stops on the edge of cliff, leaving you feeling shortchanged. It is a couple of crucial scenes away from feeling complete.
  58. Red Lights
    Before Silver hijacks the plot, Rodrigo Cortés's smart, talky screenplay and tense direction hold our attention, as much for the unpredictability of the story as the ease with which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy slide into their roles.
  59. Crooked Arrows
    Directed by Steve Rash, Crooked Arrows gets points for its glimpses of Native American culture and history - the film's backers include the Onondaga Nation - but too many of these scenes are disappointingly static.
  60. Richard's Wedding
    What works here is the pleasantly naturalistic acting from people who don't look like typical actors.
  61. One Day on Earth
    One Day on Earth shows, there's a fine line between coherence and chaos.
  62. The Heat
    The volatile chemistry between Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Bullock is something to behold, and carries The Heat through its lazy conception and slapdash execution.
  63. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Though it is a celebration of modesty, there is also quite a lot of vanity in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
  64. Corpo Celeste
    Ms. Rohrwacher combines a documentary impulse (effective in family scenes) with a more allegorical one. Her film gets clunky when allegory has the upper hand, and that means Corpo Celeste often stumbles, along with its 12-year-old heroine, Marta (Yle Vianello).
  65. Patagonia Rising
    A beautifully filmed and patiently explained assessment of a proposal to build five hydroelectric dams in the Patagonia region of Chile.
  66. 2 Days in New York
    The film, which is about a chaotic 48 hours in Marion's life, succumbs to the chaos it depicts, and so undermines its best intentions. It is, all in all, a likable mess.
  67. Stella Days
    Relaxed performances and pillow-soft photography compensate somewhat for the story's narrow ambitions, but they're not enough to invigorate a movie that clearly would rather charm than challenge.
  68. Arbitrage
    Instead of digging into the psychology and morality of greed, Mr. Jarecki only glances and lectures in that direction before piling on a lot of melodramatic complications, including a death, an investigation and a cynical detective (Tim Roth). These days, it seems, the illegal manipulation of hundreds of millions of dollars simply isn't enough to incite moral outrage.
  69. That's What She Said
    An unpleasant comedy about friendship, aims to be a female twist on the bromance. Crude and knockabout, it nonetheless has - like many a bromance - a sloppy, sentimental heart.
  70. Goats
    If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.
  71. Dead Man Down
    Dead Man Down, unfortunately, turns out to be too innocuous to qualify as either actually good or delectably bad.
  72. Walk Away Renee
    Walk Away Renee lets us observe a mother-son bond, but Mr. Caouette hasn't found a way to galvanize this incarnation of material for strangers.
  73. Nitro Circus: The Movie
    Only a couple of times do the stunts have that extra ingredient - wit - that makes this kind of thing amusing to watch.
  74. Killer Joe
    Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with Killer Joe, which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.
  75. The Impossible
    There is a troubling complacency and a lack of compassion in The Impossible, which is less an examination of mass destruction than the tale of a spoiled holiday.
  76. Falling Overnight
    The film's sweetness is endearing but too featherweight to engage.
  77. Dreams of a Life
    For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.
  78. The Citizen
    The Citizen is a heartfelt plea for charity, tolerance and all-around loving kindness — admirable aims sadly shackled to Sam Kadi’s inexpert direction.
  79. The Paperboy
    It is by turns lurid, humid, florid, languid and stupid, but it is pretty much all id all the time.
  80. Meet the Fokkens
    Why the sisters felt that prostitution was their best alternative remains unclear, either because they aren't interested in revealing that part of themselves, or the filmmakers didn't know how to get them to talk. Or maybe Ms. Provaas and Mr. Schroder weren't interested, for political or personal reasons, in making what, despite the laughter, they ended up with: another sad story about whores.
  81. The Awakening
    Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.
  82. True Wolf
    Having devoted much of their lives to combating lupine myths by introducing Koani to wonder-struck schoolchildren, Mr. Weide and Ms. Tucker are ill served by a director who reduces the anti-wolf lobby to caricature and the debates over reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies to grossly biased clips.
  83. For Ellen
    Rather than finding an interesting, resonant ambiguity in his experience, Ms. Kim and Mr. Dano settle for a kind of suggestive vagueness, losing the thread of their character in the snow, steam and cigarette smoke that provide the film's main visual motif and perhaps also its dominant metaphor.
  84. Promised Land
    An earnest attempt, sometimes effective, sometimes clumsy, to dramatize the central arguments about fracking and its impact.
  85. Quartet
    A sincere but sloppy piece of work. Mr. Hoffman dotes on his cast of first-rate British actors of a certain age - and invites us to savor their energy and professionalism. This is not difficult, though the efforts of these fine actors might have yielded greater delight if they had been given more to do.
  86. Rio 2
    A tropical tornado of cadmium and cobalt, magenta and marigold, Carlos Saldanha’s frantic follow-up to his well-received 2011 animated feature, “Rio,” ups the ante on sound and movement but pays scant attention to story.
  87. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    Bilbo may fully learn a sense of friendship and duty, and have quite a story to tell, but somewhere along the way, Mr. Jackson loses much of the magic.
  88. The Manzanar Fishing Club
    The time with these survivors is appreciated, as who knows how much longer we'll have access to this living history. But I'd rather have heard them describe something other than bait, or how their fishing rods advanced from willow to bamboo to items from the Sears catalog.
  89. Hellbound?
    Mr. Miller makes a questionable choice in setting the film against the backdrop of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, and he lingers too long on an offensive fringe group that hangs out near ground zero with signs saying the terrorist attacks were God's will. But for most of the way, his treatment is substantive and evenhanded.
  90. Doctored
    Unfortunately, in waving the flag for more holistic, naturopathic treatments, the already meandering Doctored loses focus, touching on topics like alternative cancer treatments, autism and vaccination, and genetically modified produce. Mr. Sheehan seems to forget the primary documentarian directive: First, do no harm to your main argument.
  91. Snitch
    For all its violence and road rage, Snitch doesn’t disintegrate into noisy popcorn nonsense.
  92. Admission
    Mr. Weitz lines up a target placed at the explosive intersection of class, race, region and every other source of societal anguish, and then does not so much miss as aim in another direction — or several — letting fly a volley of darts that land as lightly as badminton birdies.
  93. Here Comes the Devil
    A muddled supernatural thriller that fails to capitalize on either its horrific prologue or eerie location.
  94. Vulgaria
    The film's kinky energy eventually wanes, the pileup of profanities losing its initial zing.
  95. American Autumn: an Occudoc
    As manifestoes go it is calm and smart, offsetting its stridency with discussion, music, even humor, while issuing a call to arms.
  96. Now, Forager
    This uneven, slow-brewed film begins by observing a brittle relationship about to crumble, but it is better at portraying how the exacting standards of food professionals can lead to personal grief.
  97. Bel Borba Aqui
    Bel Borba Aqui gives us plenty to look at, but not much to think about.
  98. Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    Partly reverent, mostly sendup, Just 45 Minutes From Broadway depicts theater folk as those lovably quirky people who can't stop performing in life, for better or worse. This film might be perfect for a preteen acting camp, or anyone whose eyes have that glowing, cultlike spark of the stage-obsessed.
  99. We're the Millers
    What really drives the movie is its own search for something to make fun of, and for a comic style that can feel credibly naughty while remaining ultimately safe and affirmative.
  100. Waiting for Lightning
    In this overly sympathetic film he's a superhero without feelings, curiously bloodless except for the moment just before the China jump, when his mother presents him with his stepfather's ashes for inspiration.
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