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. All Together
    If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.
  2. Sassy Pants
    Once the film softens, it starts to come unglued.
  3. Sexy Baby
    This scattershot investigation of the effects of Internet pornography on female behavior only ruffles the surface of a complex issue, one that demands a much larger sample than three white, educated women.
  4. Tai Chi Zero
    Fast and mostly fun, the movie also seems compulsively too much, throwing everything it can think of at you, lest it fail to entertain.
  5. Yogawoman
    Yogawoman, with narration enunciated by the actress and yogini Annette Bening, begins with an intriguing premise: yoga, historically a practice dominated by men in India, now occupies a mat-carrying slot on women's schedules the world over. That idea remains anthemic more than analyzed, and doing yoga proves more appealing than watching a film promote it.
  6. A Man's Story
    An unsatisfying look at the London designer Ozwald Boateng, was shot over 12 years and aspires to a degree of intimacy, yet this glancing treatment is not very enlightening.
  7. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
    Gradually becomes an echo chamber of personal dramas and exploits, not to mention propulsive soundtrack cues - all within a sport already nursing a penchant for self-documentation.
  8. Dragon
    As a whole, it does not quite work, especially at the end, when Mr. Chan tries for a Shakespearean climax of filial rebellion and paternal rage. But at its less grandiose moments, the combination of expressive acting and kinetic action pays off in ways that are likely to satisfy both novices and adepts in martial-arts fandom.
  9. Save the Date
    The reunion of Ms. Caplan and Mr. Starr, cast mates on Starz network's "Party Down," seemed intriguing. That series, though, with all the fizz and social comedy that this movie lacks, was a better showcase for them.
  10. 28 Hotel Rooms
    At the very least 28 Hotel Rooms, the first feature written and directed by Matt Ross, is an impressively executed acting exercise for Chris Messina and Marin Ireland.
  11. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    A well-meaning but inexpertly dramatized account of the roundup of 13,000 Parisian Jews in the summer of 1942.
  12. Buffalo Girls
    A story that, though sickly fascinating, is as crudely rendered as its images.
  13. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Relies too much on rehash and preaching to the choir to kindle a broad-based outrage, but it does make you wonder what really happened on May 24, 1990.
  14. The ABCs of Death
    At its best when merging shocks with social commentary, this halting compilation improves significantly as it nears the end of the alphabet.
  15. Saving America's Horses: A Nation Betrayed
    Filled with crushing facts about animal cruelty yet also overstuffed and overwrought, it's emotionally and visually tough to watch.
  16. Honor Flight
    The film might have made a decent end-of-broadcast segment on a newscast. But inflated to feature length and devoid of nuance or fresh insights, it just seems self-congratulatory - aren't we great for having done this for these old guys? - and exploitive.
  17. Happy New Year
    A dully directed movie that sends a message but lacks oomph.
  18. Yelling to the Sky
    It's disconcerting to watch Sweetness, tiny and light-skinned, assaulting Latonya, large and dark-skinned, partly because it bluntly if inconclusively underscores a crucial color divide that runs through this film like a throbbing vein.
  19. The Girl
    What at first came across as a tale of dawning conscience increasingly starts to feel rigged.
  20. Let Fury Have the Hour
    Infinitely less than the sum of its parts, Antonino D'Ambrosio's Let Fury Have the Hour crams 50 thoughtful artists into a disappointingly muddled film.
  21. The Monuments Men
    It can be nice to spend time with these actors even when you don’t believe their characters for a single second, and there’s no denying this movie’s easy pleasures... Yet because Mr. Clooney can’t figure out what kind of story this is, he too often slips into pandering mode.
  22. Tabu
    It is, of course, art rather than history - an elegant composition of dreams, memories and suggestive images - but its artfulness seems like an alibi, an excuse for keeping the ugliness of history out of the picture.
  23. Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    If the intent was to keep the characters here just as anonymous as most migrant workers are to prosperous people in the United States, it succeeds: Pedro and his family remain mere sketches. If, however, the aim was a more meaningful portrait of hardship and aspiration, the film is merely underdone. It's no secret that life in many places is hard.
  24. Clandestine Childhood
    When a filmmaker proves as reluctant as Mr. Ávila to speak up about the past, to engage with its full complexity, it can be hard to hear what he's saying.
  25. High Tech, Low Life
    The result is a narrow, albeit intriguing window into a technological revolt that deserves a more far-reaching film than this one.
  26. Welcome to the Machine
    A strain of quixotic eccentricity runs through the film's endeavor; Mr. Weider basically has more material than he can marshal. As the film goes on, its elements are overshadowed by a reliance on Mr. Kaczynski's writings, which are selectively quoted and blared on screen as if part of a PowerPoint presentation.
  27. Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola
    A mix of gently outraged populism and low-powered romantic comedy, Vishal Bhardwaj's Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola might have been better with a chunk lopped off its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
  28. A Place at the Table
    Though the directors, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, smartly choose examples from among the working poor — reframing obesity as chronic malnourishment in areas where it’s easier to find a burger than a banana — they’re reluctant to get down in the political dirt.
  29. Hercules
    As the plot clogs up with foreseeable reversals, wisecrack duties go to Mr. McShane, whose oracular character keeps wrongly predicting his own death. Like Hercules, the movie is plagued by a split identity: It’s half-slog, half-Mel Brooks.
  30. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    The samples of Mr. Abu-Jamal's writings aren't generous enough to establish whether his is a singular voice or just a prolific one, with Mr. Vittoria instead letting the film wander considerably.
  31. The Fifth Estate
    This version of the WikiLeaks story, directed by Bill Condon from a script by Josh Singer, is a moderate snoozefest, undone by its timid, muddled efforts at fair-mindedness.
  32. Muppets Most Wanted
    The whole film seems to have a vague heaviness to it. The best Muppet movies have been great because they had charm. There’s no charm here, really; just self-referential jokes, decent but not memorable songs, and lots and lots of cameos.
  33. She's All That
    She's All That is essentially a formulaic comedy, but it has enough glimmerings of originality and wit to make you wish it were much bolder and funnier than it turns out to be.
  34. The Maze Runner
    A perfectly serviceable entry in the young-adult dystopian sweepstakes.
  35. About Last Night...
    You've a right to wonder why anyone would want to work so hard - with such an expenditure of imagination - to transform a play with such a distinctive voice into a movie that sounds like any number of others.
  36. The Company You Keep
    This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.
  37. Stuck
    An unabashed sales pitch for international adoption, Thaddaeus Scheel’s Stuck aims for the heart much more than the mind.
  38. I, Me aur Main
    The most interesting thing to watch in I, Me aur Main, the directorial debut of Kapil Sharma (his father, Rakesh Sharma, was the first Indian in space), is the changing moral landscape.
  39. Language of a Broken Heart
    Although Language of a Broken Heart, a romantic comedy written by and starring Juddy Talt, eventually drowns in clichés and predictability, it has a few decent moments of humor and some appealing performances that make it marginally better than most vanity projects.
  40. Darkman
    Darkman sustains mild interest throughout, but it never takes off, partly because a real-estate scam, gangland shootouts, city corruption and a love story clutter up the sad story of Westlake's strange mutation.
  41. Unfinished Song
    The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.
  42. Haute Cuisine
    As flatly directed by Christian Vincent, Haute Cuisine is a reserved, très simple tale that raises the occasional smile and tummy rumble but keeps hiccuping because of the drawn-out parallel story about her subsequent tour of duty.
  43. Rapture-Palooza
    Rapture-Palooza has a promising setup and a cast with a good track record of bringing the funny, yet it never does live up to its potential.
  44. Vanishing Waves
    This Lithuanian love story from Kristina Buozyte offers a discomfiting blend of visual ecstasy and narrative sterility.
  45. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    A film plunked somewhat unfortunately between the inspirational and the ordinary.
  46. Better Mus' Come
    Despite its cultural detail and fetching leads this Jamaican director’s colorful debut feature is undone by ragged scene construction, weak acting and a scattered script.
  47. The Revolutionary Optimists
    As heartening as it is to see a slum child tutored about vicious cycles of adversity and using the buzzword “partnership” with aplomb, the film comes to feel cut and dried.
  48. Old Goats
    The root of the movie’s appeal is less the scripted story than watching three game oldsters.
  49. Mindless Behavior: All Around the World
    Watching the quasi-documentary marketing tool Mindless Behavior: All Around the World, you would think that the boy band Mindless Behavior existed as a charity, so abundant are the platitudes about the members’ living for the fans, being positive, inspiring others and the self-actualization of the “mindless” state.
  50. Jupiter Ascending
    With its nods to the original “Star Trek” and David Lynch’s proto-steampunk hallucination “Dune,” it seduces the eye with filigreed flourishes even as the mind reels from some of the mildewy storytelling.
  51. Hamesima X
    The protagonist’s life changes for the better, but your mileage may vary.
  52. Mortem
    Most often Mortem just lacks bite, and the dedicated leads seem at times a little slight for the staging of a struggle at eternity’s edge.
  53. Love Is All You Need
    As Love Is All You Need ties up its loose ends, it settles into a rom-com formula with a predictable, upbeat ending. It feels good, sort of.
  54. Superman III
    Anyone who has been following the ''Superman'' saga will find this installment enjoyable enough, but some of the magic is missing.
  55. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
    Watching Star Trek — the Motion Picture...is like attending your high-school class's 10th reunion at Caesar's Palace. Most of the faces are familiar, but the décor has little relationship to anything you've ever seen before.
  56. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    It’s sweet, sentimental, almost inevitably touching if not especially persuasive, brushing against the thorns in each man’s life without drawing blood.
  57. Free the Mind
    Ms. Ambo communicates the notion of compassion and calm as something teachable, but perhaps feeling already convinced, she’s less ambitious as a filmmaker about taking her subject and her portraits to another level.
  58. Fists of Legend
    Shot with some wit and considerable speed, its short, sharp beatdowns are a refreshing change from the bloated action sequences favored by some of Mr. Kang’s genre contemporaries.
  59. Mr. Jealousy
    The film, which is better written than staged, could have been funnier if its actors weren't playing against type.
  60. The Hot Flashes
    In critical ways, the movie is a mess. The basketball scenes are so sloppy and haphazard that the would-be slapstick registers as confusion. But away from the court, the actors bring their caricatures to folksy comic life.
  61. Sex Tape
    The main reason that Sex Tape, while often quite funny, fails to qualify as a comedy is the absence of any real conflict or complication.
  62. Tammy
    Tammy’s journey, as they like to say in movieland, is into self-worth. Yet the far more interesting trip here, at least until her self-actualization kicks in, is through an America of lousy jobs, tyrannical bosses, nickel-and-diming poverty and real-looking women.
  63. And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
    To describe And Now a Word From Our Sponsor as a one-joke skit stretched well beyond the breaking point isn’t entirely fair, because when used ingeniously, which is very seldom, the joke lands.
  64. Project Almanac
    The wish fulfillment of time travel tends to be fun to watch, and the director, Dean Israelite, feeds on the friends’ giddy escapades for a while.
  65. One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    One Track Heart is too hagiographic to dive into messy spots, where truth tends to live.
  66. He's Way More Famous Than You
    This frenetic movie has moments of wit, and Ms. Feiffer, a seasoned screen and Broadway performer, has range, stamina and charisma.
  67. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    A Million Ways to Die in the West seems serious about only one thing: its contempt for the gun-crazed macho ethos exalted in countless Hollywood westerns. You might call the movie “Revenge of the Übernerd.”
  68. Re-emerging: The Jews of Nigeria
    “Re-emerging” can be pedestrian as filmmaking, though it remains interesting as long as it remains in Nigeria.
  69. Scarecrow
    It all goes decisively wrong when Jerry Schatzberg, the director, and Garry Michael White, who wrote the screenplay, decide to saddle the pair with a poetic vision that suddenly makes everything needlessly phony.
  70. Heli
    Heli, which won the directing prize in Cannes last year, is at once extreme and unspectacular, a grisly and lurid slice-of-life drama.
  71. Metallica: Through the Never
    Despite swooping camera movements and elaborate stagecraft, the film produces detachment rather than immediacy.
  72. Rising from Ashes
    Rising From Ashes has the phantom limbs of missed opportunities.
  73. Blood Ties
    There are some very good performances and parts of performances in Blood Ties, but the movie fails to convey a sense of tribal identity within this world.
  74. 3 Days to Kill
    By any reasonable standard, 3 Days to Kill is a terrible movie: incoherent, crudely brutal, dumbly retrograde in its geo- and gender politics. But it is also, as much because of as in spite of these failings, kind of fun.
  75. One Mile Above
    Cinematographer Du Jie delivers moments of visual ecstasy that almost make us forget that they’re framing a reckless cipher.
  76. The Book of Life
    This often beautiful and too-often moribund, if exhaustingly frenetic, feature tends to be less energetic than the dead people waltzing through it.
  77. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is the latest example of a wonderful children’s book turned into a mediocre movie.
  78. Thief
    Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple. Time after time scenes start off well and slip into unintentionally comic excess.
  79. Dealin' with Idiots
    Mr. Garlin has such a soft touch that at times the film feels feather-light, almost devoid of emotional traction.
  80. Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp
    Though directed with some flourishes, including a riveting use of music and attractive animated pulp art, the film is weighed down by the testimony of bespectacled professors from hip critical studies and English departments and a psychologist.
  81. SPECTRE
    There’s nothing surprising in Spectre, the 24th “official” title in the series, which is presumably as planned. Much as the perfect is the enemy of good, originality is often the enemy of the global box office.
  82. Broken
    At a certain point, Mr. Norris forsakes realism for theatricalized fantasy, and Broken ultimately loses its stylistic cohesion, if not its humanity.
  83. Jug Face
    Some low-budget manifestations of the supernatural jazz up the frights now and again, but as the novelty of worshiping a hole in the ground fades, the film paints itself into a corner.
  84. Pusher
    Mr. Refn may yet have justification for boasting about his natural talent. There is one magnificent scene in Pusher... Maybe Mr. Refn's next film will take us into that emotional territory.
  85. Good Ol' Freda
    Good Ol’ Freda celebrates an intensely private witness to four of the most public lives in pop-culture history.
  86. La Playa D.C.
    An urban drama limited by its nonprofessional cast and impressionistic, scattered storytelling.
  87. Dear Mr. Watterson
    But viewers looking to learn more about Mr. Watterson and his creation than what’s contained in his Wikipedia entry may come away as hopped-up with impatience as Calvin when confronted by parental indifference.
  88. Centro Histórico
    The film’s final shot might seem a little too apt a summary of an audience’s reaction: Mr. Trêpa, looking into the camera, shrugs.
  89. Born to Royalty
    With the film’s incessant strings and narration by Hugh Bonneville of “Downton Abbey,” the earnest yet pompous tone could almost be mistaken for a Monty Python parody of the BBC-standard style.
  90. Terraferma
    As Terraferma tightens its focus on a courageous resolution of tough issues, too much nuance is jettisoned along the way.
  91. When Comedy Went to School
    Fortunately for the filmmakers, most of the comedians interviewed here — Jerry Stiller, Jackie Mason, Jerry Lewis and many other (mostly male) voices — provide lighthearted remembrances to elevate this poorly executed documentary.
  92. Men at Lunch
    The film feels meandering. Not only does it offer a jumble of ideas that aren’t followed through, but it’s also structured oddly.
  93. Dom Hemingway
    Dom Hemingway is a bright, shiny bauble with next to no lasting power.
  94. Linsanity
    Unfortunately, Linsanity, following the conventions of the sports bio genre, ends at its peak, with only a brief nod to these events. Lin raised his game’s possibilities; you just wish that Mr. Leong had raised his.
  95. Parkland
    Because the film, which affects the style of “United 93,” offers no new insights, theories or important information, you’re left wondering why it was made.
  96. Haunter
    Lifted by the sepulchral Stephen McHattie as Lisa’s nemesis, the film’s frazzled thought experiment becomes an adequate yarn.
  97. Inch'Allah
    Grim, intelligent and vividly photographed by the director’s father, Philippe Lavalette, Inch’Allah works best when the camera alights on Ava and Rand, whose marvelously mobile faces convey all the complexity that Chloe lacks.
  98. And While We Were Here
    Subject matter that seemed mildly shocking, even radical, a half-century ago may be impossible to refresh, though the screenplay, by Ms. Coiro, has a firm grasp of its characters.
  99. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    It’s difficult to dislike a documentary with such noble, generous subjects, but the film is unfocused and repetitious, not sure whether it is a road trip, a story of a couple or an exploration of small art institutions.
  100. Implanted
    Mr. Verrette shows talent in conveying complex emotions, yet he’s handicapped by his grand ambition and an inability to do simple scenes well.
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