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. The Kid & I
    Good intentions do not guarantee good movies, or even watchable ones. A sad case in point is The Kid and I.
  2. The Far Side of the Moon
    Based on Mr. Lepage's play of the same title, Far Side of the Moon carries traces of the theater both in some of the dialogue and in its schematic construction. That said, it has been beautifully shot by the cinematographer Ronald Plante in the kind of high-definition digital video that makes the future of cinema look rather less grim than usual.
  3. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Here, as in so many other documentaries about troubled musicians, the word genius is casually tossed around. But does every unstable, self-destructive artist defiantly living on the edge qualify for that description? In Van Zandt's case, maybe yes.
  4. Exist
    Properly speaking, Exist is not a protest film but a protest video - the grass-roots medium of choice - and Ms. Bell makes good use of the technology. Mock interviews reinforce a strong documentary impulse, while digital blurs and layering further distance the material from status quo moviemaking.
  5. The Boys of Baraka
    The Boys of Baraka is so rich that you wish there were more of it.
  6. Down to the Bone
    The kind of movie most independent films strive in vain to be: a small, beautifully faceted gem.
  7. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    The unabashedly sentimental film is a juicy morsel for the great British actress Dame Joan Plowright, who endows Mrs. Palfrey with stoic charm and decency.
  8. Seamless
    Given the material, Seamless can't be faulted a certain star-struck superficiality
  9. The Ice Harvest
    There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.
  10. In the Mix
    A one-dimensional romantic comedy that feels like an old-fashioned vehicle picture, the kind the big movie studios used to make in the 1930's and 40's just to bring in the fans of a particular actor or actress.
  11. Just Friends
    Overcompensates for its sloppiness with loud, knockabout farce.
  12. Rent
    Often dramatically jumbled and musically muddled - but every time the film seemed ready to tip into awfulness, the sneer on my lips was trumped by the lump in my throat.
  13. Yours, Mine and Ours
    So snug, airtight and insulated from reality that the nice, well-scrubbed "Cheaper by the Dozen" seems almost rambunctious by comparison.
  14. The Libertine
    The rhythms of the dialogue move to the same beat as steadily as a metronome ticks and tocks, while every sentence is polished like stone, absent the jaggedness of real breath and life. You can hear the play in this thing without even knowing it was based on a theatrical production.
  15. Syriana
    It aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time.
  16. 39 Pounds of Love
    A bracingly honest yet poetic portrait of a man refusing to be defined by the limitations of his body.
  17. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    His (Ralph Fiennes) Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose; certainly it's a performance of sublime villainy.
  18. Walk the Line
    There is no way a feature-length movie could do justice to such bounty, and Walk the Line settles for the minimum.
  19. Oxygono
    It does have the feel of farce at times, but much of the time it just seems determined to shock.
  20. Private
    An emotionally and politically loaded allegory.
  21. The Big Risk
    A tough and touching exploration of honor and friendship among thieves.
  22. Unveiled
    With its deliberately overexposed film stock and driving electronic score, Ms. Maccarone's film occasionally suffers from a self-conscious artiness, but at its center is an extraordinary performance by Ms. Tabatabai as Fariba, a young woman whose expectations have been lowered by a lifetime of systematic mistreatment but who still holds out hope for the possibility of both justice and love.
  23. Zizek!
    Entertaining without being especially illuminating. If you must see only one documentary about a Slovene philosopher this year, it might be better to read his books.
  24. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Nicolas Rossier's cohesive documentary covers this complex incident - and Haiti's deteriorating condition since Mr. Aristide's exile - in a taut, well-balanced 82 minutes.
  25. Breakfast on Pluto
    In a year overcrowded with wonderful performances by lead actors, Mr. Murphy's immensely appealing turn ranks among the strongest.
  26. Gilles' Wife
    Has an appealing surface beauty, largely due to the talented cinematographer Virginie Saint Martin, and an equally shallow mystery.
  27. The Syrian Bride
    The film uses the situation to evoke a sense of the absurd, sometimes with dry, deadpan humor.
  28. Pride & Prejudice
    Gathers you up on its white horse and gallops off into the sunset. Along the way, it serves a continuing banquet of high-end comfort food perfectly cooked and seasoned to Anglophilic tastes.
  29. Derailed
    Riddled with holes and undeveloped characters, and marred by lurching rhythms that may reflect some triage editing, so it's hard to see what Mr. Hafstrom brings to this film other than a murky palette.
  30. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    In the enchanted limbo between waking and sleeping, Zathura feels both real and unreal, like a dream you could shake off at any moment.
  31. Bee Season
    A serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head.
  32. Ellie Parker
    For Ms. Watts, it is a small, brave acting tour de force.
  33. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    Ms. Silverman is a skilled performer, and Jesus Is Magic is occasionally very funny, but don't be fooled: naughty as she may seem, she's playing it safe.
  34. Cape of Good Hope
    Satisfying and memorable film.
  35. Good Morning, Night
    At times Good Morning, Night feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity.
  36. The Comedians of Comedy
    Part stand-up performance, part behind-the-scenes chit-chat, Michael Blieden's indulgent and often numbingly slow documentary follows four semiknown comedians.
  37. La sierra
    Posing proudly with their rifles or musing matter-of-factly about their own deaths, the boys are tragic enough. But it's the girls who break your heart, stoic and wise beyond their years.
  38. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    The parts of Get Rich or Die Tryin' that feel most genuine have to do with friendship and family, rather than with criminal intrigue. But the movie ultimately lacks an emotional core. It will certainly make 50 Cent even richer, but it wouldn't have killed him to try a bit harder.
  39. The Swenkas
    Intriguing documentary.
  40. Chicken Little
    A hectic, uninspired pastiche of catchphrases and clichés, with very little wit, inspiration or originality to bring its frantically moving images to genuine life.
  41. Jarhead
    Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant.
  42. Brooklyn Lobster
    An unusually pure example of American kitchen-sink realism.
  43. The Dying Gaul
    Mr. Sarsgaard gives the riskiest screen performance of his career. Save perhaps for Sean Penn's outbursts in "Dead Man Walking" and "Mystic River," no actor in a recent American film has delivered as explosive a depiction of a man emotionally blasted apart.
  44. Gay Sex in the 70s
    Within that narrow framework, the film is quite successful, using archival photographs, clips from pornographic films and television commercials, and interviews to evoke the period between June 1969, when the Stonewall riots brought homosexuality out of the shadows, to June 1981, when the AIDS epidemic began.
  45. I Love Your Work
    Directed by the young actor Adam Goldberg, best known for playing the Jewish soldier who falls to a Nazi knife in "Saving Private Ryan," I Love Your Work is an attempt to say something interesting about modern celebrity.
  46. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Makes its case with breathtaking force.
  47. Christmas in the Clouds
    A wisp of a movie so bursting with good cheer that even its sole meanie is given a personality makeover before the end credits.
  48. Derailroaded
    Larry (Wild Man) Fischer, the psychotic songwriter and performer (found to be both paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar) is sympathetically profiled in Josh Rubin's documentary.
  49. The Legend of Zorro
    This is a hiss-the-villain, cheer-the-hero kind of movie.
  50. Prime
    All of this makes the movie pleasant, but not very memorable - a pale mirror image of "Shopgirl," which touches on some similar themes.
  51. Saw II
    It's fully apparent that this sequel is more trick than treat and doesn't really compare to its fine predecessor - though it still manages to be eye-opening (and sometimes positively nauseating) in itself.
  52. The Weather Man
    Neither the screenplay nor the direction has the requisite depth to turn the banality of one unremarkable life into the stuff of Chekhov, much less of Mr. Payne.
  53. New York Doll
    Greg Whiteley's small, tender documentary portrait New York Doll looks at life after rock 'n' roll as experienced by Arthur (Killer) Kane, the original bassist for the legendary glam-punk band the New York Dolls.
  54. Paradise Now
    Along the way, Paradise Now sustains a mood of breathless suspense. Politics aside, the movie is a superior thriller whose shrewdly inserted plot twists and emotional wrinkles are calculated to put your heart in your throat and keep it there.
  55. The Passenger (re-release)
    No other performer (Jack Nicholson) in an Antonioni film, except Jeanne Moreau in "La Notte," has so gracefully submitted to Mr. Antonioni and survived intact. (Review of Original Release)
  56. Three... Extremes
    Though Three ... Extremes may seem tame to jaded fans of what has been termed New Asian Horror, it serves as a fine introduction to the genre for those who are curious but squeamish.
  57. little man
    Weighing in at almost exactly one pound and unable to breathe or eat on his own, Nicholas James Baba-Conn seemed doomed to a very short life; his chance for survival was calculated at close to zero.
  58. Ballets Russes
    Ballets Russes does tell a marvelous story of midcentury show business, encompassing both the most exalted expressions of pure art and the sometimes grubby commerce that sustained it.
  59. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    If all this sounds a bit nuts, dangerously self-indulgent and very of its experimental moment, it is. But it's also highly entertaining and, at moments, revelatory about filmmaking as a site of creative tension between individual vision and collective endeavor.
  60. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    An icy-cool study of violence both mediated and horribly real.
  61. Doom
    This claustrophobic mess of a movie offers only carnage.
  62. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Follows a formula, but the formula, when applied with skill and intelligence, as it is here, is pretty much foolproof.
  63. Shopgirl
    Elegant and exquisitely tailored.
  64. Stay
    Marc Forster takes a maximalist approach to this mumbo jumbo, which means that in addition to lots of wacky angles, shiny surfaces, seemingly endless stairs, and sets of twins, triplets and quadruplets, he deploys the unsettling vision of three talented actors - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling - straining credulity and neck tendons in the service of serious claptrap.
  65. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    I don't think Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is an altogether bad movie. It's just a movie with no particular reason for existing, a flashy, trifling throwaway whose surface cleverness masks a self-infatuated credulity.
  66. After Innocence
    Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary After Innocence confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system.
  67. White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
    Although too compressed by half, the film manages to recreate what, at one point, the hectoring narrator will call an "archaeology of repression."
  68. Emmanuel's Gift
    Sadly, Emmanuel's Gift is a powerful story of political change almost smothered by contrivance.
  69. Innocence
    The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.
  70. Protocols of Zion
    Makes it case expertly and powerfully, but it does not propose a solution. The cumulative effect of the film's message is enormous sadness that hate is so strong and so resistant to reason.
  71. Kids in America
    Because Kids in America can't decide whether it wants to be a stock teenage comedy or something more, it ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere.
  72. The Roost
    The Roost proceeds with such youthful enthusiasm that its rawness is more charming than annoying.
  73. The Optimists
    The director, who also served as producer along with Lisa Comforty, his wife, spent 12 years compiling the archival clips and photographs that make up this compact and elegant film.
  74. Naked in Ashes
    Ms. Fouce has gained unprecedented access to her subjects, but her own admiration for them makes this documentary more heartfelt than it is rigorous.
  75. The Time We Killed
    The Time We Killed has the raw intimacy of a filmed diary, but as with reading a stranger's journal, it eventually gets dull.
  76. Rooms for Tourists
    Mr. Bogliano, just 19 at the start of production, has made a promising debut that consistently hits the right creepy points while exhibiting impressive gory effects created with extremely limited resources.
  77. Ushpizin
    Stylistically Ushpizin belongs to a classic tradition of raucous Yiddish comedy that is easy to enjoy if taken lightly. At the same time, it sustains a double vision of ultra-Orthodox life.
  78. Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    A significant development turns Susan Kaplan's documentary into a thought-provoking story.
  79. Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis
    The running gags of the dual Living Dead chapters slow to a crawl after four hours, but viewers should discount the flaws of such low-budget, high-energy projects. These are scrappy installments that actually succeed in making the consumption of brains fodder for thought. [14 Oct 2005, p.E]
    • The New York Times
  80. Domino
    A lollapalooza of delectable cheap thrills.
  81. Elizabethtown
    Elizabethtown is a long, lurching trip to nowhere in particular, but Elizabethtown is a place where you wouldn't mind spending some more time, though perhaps under different circumstances.
  82. The Fog
    Mildly scary here and there. It does not play by all the horror movie rules (e.g., the black guy always dies first). And the cast is good-looking.
  83. Where the Truth Lies
    In the end, it is Mr. Egoyan's fealty to the novel, its feints and dodges, that proves the film's undoing.
  84. North Country
    That the film works as well as it does, delivering a tough first hour only to disintegrate like a wet newspaper, testifies to the skill of the filmmakers as well as to the constraints brought on them by an industry that insists on slapping a pretty bow on even the foulest truth.
  85. Innocent Voices
    As an outcry against the forcible conscription of children into armies around the world, Innocent Voices, is an honorable film. But as a balanced portrait of a tragic civil war, it is simplistic and opaque.
  86. Loggerheads
    If it isn't easy being any of the troubled people wandering through the film, Loggerheads makes it easy not only to believe in them, but to care about them as well.
  87. Nine Lives
    Together, however, they add up to a film that may be the closest movies have come to the cinematic equivalent of a collection of Chekhov short stories.
  88. Summer Storm
    Directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner like a barely legal pornography flick with extra plot, the movie is a perfect storm of clichés.
  89. The President's Last Bang
    Tight, sober and strangely comical.
  90. Don't Tell
    The kind of witless production that should rightly be cluttering the discount bins at your local video store.
  91. The Dark Hours
    A cold and moody psychodrama poised frustratingly on the border between novel and banal.
  92. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    Mr. Richard's film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art.
  93. Land of Plenty
    Land of Plenty, is like a clumsy, well-meaning intervention in a family quarrel. Mr. Wenders may not have the power to heal the rifts his movie acknowledges - and his account of them may not always be persuasive - but there is nonetheless something touching about his heartfelt concern.
  94. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    He [Clooney] has found a cogent subject, an urgent set of ideas and a formally inventive, absolutely convincing way to make them live on screen.
  95. The Gospel
    When not in song, the words that come out of the frustratingly undefined characters' mouths are mostly awkward and contribute to the film's overall incoherent narrative.
  96. In Her Shoes
    The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters' desires or ours.
  97. Two for the Money
    A confusion of tones, intentions and allusions, Two for the Money lurches from upbeat to downbeat without ever settling into a coherent groove.
  98. Waiting...
    Putrid comic stew.
  99. The Aggressives
    In the film's briskly paced 72 minutes, any open-minded viewer will discover something about identity and about the comfort these women have obviously found in learning to be their unusual, unfettered selves.
  100. Before the Fall
    If Before the Fall feels a tad overdetermined, it also feels emotionally honest. Calmly and carefully, Mr. Gansel makes large points with small scenes.
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