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. Dandelion
    So much care has been taken to build a mood of hushed suspense that the rushed, tragic conclusion, in which too little is shown and too little explained, leaves you deeply unsatisfied.
  2. Never Been Thawed
    Propelled by astute, straight-faced performances, it succeeds in stirring up some maniacal laughs.
  3. A Tale of Two Pizzas
    The film borrows themes and cast members from HBO's "Sopranos," but the script lacks the nuance and wit of that series's creator, David Chase.
  4. Life, Translated
    Stuffed with plummy English accents and the most inauthentic classroom scenes since those of "Billy Madison," Life, Translated has a childlike innocence that seems targeted toward a preteenage audience.
  5. The Squid and the Whale
    Both sharply comical and piercingly sad. Mr. Baumbach surveys the members of the flawed, collapsing Berkman family with sympathy but without mercy, noting their individual and collective failures and imperfections with relentless precision.
  6. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    The animation is a marvel - all the more so because the most demanding sequences seem almost casually tossed off. The world of Wallace and Gromit is one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies, a place where lumpy, doughy characters achieve a peculiar dignity in spite of their grotesque features and the ridiculousness of their circumstances.
  7. Zombie Honeymoon
    Leisurely paced and never truly engaging or frightening (beyond the fear commitment-phobes may experience), this low-budget film, shot on high-definition video, looks cheap, but makes up for it in part with solid performances (especially Ms. Coogan's) and capable direction by Dave Gebroe, whose script is infused with some wickedly funny lines.
  8. The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat!
    Messy, unfunny and unforgivably dull.
  9. Capote
    A fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he (Capote) pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin.
  10. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    The mixture of old-fashioned themes with newfangled techniques makes The Greatest Game Ever Played a canny piece of feel-good entertainment.
  11. Into the Blue
    This undiluted nonsense is best suited to DVD-rental desperation. Still, aficionados of cheap cinematic thrills involving beautiful and stupid young people will be happy to learn that while the film fizzles far more than it sizzles, its director, John Stockwell, is a connoisseur of the female backside, which he displays to great and frequent advantage.
  12. Serenity
    Scene for scene, Serenity is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments.
  13. Carlito's Way: Rise to Power
    Rise to Power is notable for one achievement: It makes Sean Combs (better known, at the moment, as Diddy) unconvincing as a rich man who enjoys power and luxuries.
  14. Going Shopping
    Going Shopping, like Mr. Jaglom's other movies, has enough smart, knowing touches and enough easy spontaneity among its well-chosen actors to make you wish it added up to more than what it turns out to be: a flighty, motor-mouthed cinematic divertissement.
  15. Little Manhattan
    Small-scale, perfectly acted family film.
  16. MirrorMask
    Astonishing and frustrating, the fusion of live action and computer animation created by the Jim Henson Company in MirrorMask is an example of too much lavished on too little.
  17. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Gently, affectionately and with wit, this lovely movie gives the 1950's its due, but not for a moment does it go overboard and make you want to go back there.
  18. The War Within
    The War Within succeeds only as a thriller with some wartime overtones, rather than as a character study that thrills.
  19. Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    The biggest, longest, most expensive Leone Western to date, and, in many ways, the most absurd... Granting the fact that it is quite bad, Once Upon the Time in the West is almost always interesting, wobbling, as it does, between being an epic lampoon and a serious hommage to the men who created the dreams of Leone's childhood. (Review of Original Release)
  20. An Adolescent
    The film, at least 20 minutes too long, has too many competing story lines to succeed as more than an oddball mood piece.
  21. My Big Fat Independent Movie
    Has a knowing, insider quality that could generate a modest cult following.
  22. Santo Domingo Blues
    Without losing sight of the music's essential energy, Mr. Wolfe peppers his film with quietly resonant shots.
  23. Three Days of Rain
    A quiet, thoughtful film about isolation and separation.
  24. Forty Shades of Blue
    Alan, who Mr. Sachs has said was based on his own father, is a great character - passionate, complicated, bursting with life. Those words also describe Mr. Torn's performance.
  25. A History of Violence
    A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year.
  26. Flightplan
    To watch Ms. Foster storm through a phony airplane for an entire movie has its very minor pleasures - given the numerous close-ups, you can study her lovely face at your leisure - but there is nothing here to feed the head or fray the nerves.
  27. Roll Bounce
    A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it.
  28. Daltry Calhoun
    Although the film starts off somewhat amusingly, the first-time feature director Katrina Holden Bronson (who also wrote the unbalanced script) seems to have spent more energy assembling the overbearing soundtrack than expanding on her characters' fractured relationships.
  29. Dear Wendy
    The story is laughably incoherent, which would be less bothersome if the movie were not also so unremittingly pretentious.
  30. Dirty Love
    Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage.
  31. Dorian Blues
    With some gentle humor that will delight the "Napoleon Dynamite" set, Dorian Blues lights a natural little footpath between two ways of living.
  32. Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D
    The film is an unabashed promotion for space exploration.
  33. Occupation: Dreamland
    Occupation: Dreamland presents a compelling study of composure and decency in the midst of overwhelming pointlessness.
  34. Oliver Twist
    With tact and enthusiasm, Mr. Polanski grabs hold of a great book and rediscovers its true and enduring vitality.
  35. Into the Fire
    Even if it ends on a hopeful note, this is a feel-bad movie that leaves a bitter aftertaste.
  36. Loudmouth Soup
    For all its experimental intentions, Loudmouth Soup feels familiar: a claustrophobic Hollywood satire that's short on kinesis and long on conversation.
  37. Novo
    Sleek, attractive and ultimately vapid.
  38. Everything Is Illuminated
    Taken on its own, without comparison with its literary source, the movie, Mr. Schreiber's first as writer and director, is thin and soft, whimsical when it should be darkly funny and poignant when it should be devastating.
  39. Proof
    It's funny how movies about smart people often play so dumb.
  40. HellBent
    Because more time is dedicated to crafting authentic, sympathetic characters than the average horror movie, it's easier to overlook the film's often-corny dialogue and so-so special effects.
  41. Cry_Wolf
    First-time screenwriters Jeff Wadlow and Beau Bauman prove more adept at staging mind games than creating chills and thrills for the audience.
  42. Just Like Heaven
    It's not heaven, exactly, but after the purgatory of the late summer movie season, it may be close enough.
  43. Lord of War
    Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).
  44. Corpse Bride
    There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.
  45. Thumbsucker
    Mr. Pucci, emerging slowly from behind a stray lock of brown hair, plays Justin's ambiguous transformation with deft understatement. And Mike Mills, who wrote and directed, keeps the film from slipping either into melodrama or facile satire, the two traps into which this genre is most apt to fall.
  46. The Thing About My Folks
    Despite the grumpy, flatulent behavior the script demands of him, Mr. Falk rises above the treacly shenanigans.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stupid Boy
    An intriguing examination of alienation and dysfunction, tonally haunting rather than melodramatic.
  48. One Bright Shining Moment
    Still, as the documentary plods past the two-hour mark, much of Mr. McGovern's legend seems dependent on Nixon's faults, and even the Democrat's political supporters, with hindsight's many gifts, can't infuse his persona with any more dynamism.
  49. G
    A somewhat faithful but not very graceful retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's elegant Jazz Age tragedy "The Great Gatsby."
  50. Venom
    Venom certainly can't be called a good movie, but within its genre it's perfectly palatable.
  51. Separate Lies
    The movie is so busy constructing its labyrinthine plot that it often forgets to plumb the souls of its characters.
  52. Hard Goodbyes: My Father
    Considering the delicate and weighty subject matter, the film's tone is surprisingly light, sometimes even humorous, which helps to balance the harsh sentiments that death inevitably brings.
  53. Human Error
    The film's many voids are not meaningfully filled by all the monsters and assembly-line workers that crop up.
  54. Finding Eleazar
    If Mr. Shicoff ultimately comes across as a short-tempered, egotistical prima donna, the upshot of all the fuss is worth it: his Viennese performance is transcendent.
  55. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    Interspersing shots from the original film - many of which are justly famous for their power and complexity - with interviews, Mr. Ferraz has produced a welcome piece of historical explication.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Piggie
    With its exasperating camerawork, murky lighting - at least two scenes are near indecipherable - and interminable shots of Fannie gazing slack-jawed at the world, Piggie is a disappointing debut.
  57. The Future of Food
    Quietly inflammatory film.
  58. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    A beautiful and devastating meditation on war, history and loss.
  59. Chain
    For all its bleakness, the movie, filmed in nearly a dozen states and in half a dozen countries, is not without a certain beauty. There is comfort to be found in blandness and homogeneity.
  60. Answering the Call: Ground Zero's Volunteers
    The resulting film is a record of indefatigably focused activity that began with the simple goal of rescue but evolved into a therapeutic tool for resolution and acceptance.
  61. The Man
    While nothing in the movie - least of all the two main performances - is especially fresh or original, it does have a few decent gags and amusing moments.
  62. An Unfinished Life
    Solemn, sentimental bore of a movie that suffocates in its own predictability and watered-down psychobabble.
  63. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
    While not especially good - judged strictly on its cinematic merits, it ranges from O.K. to god-awful - it is still a fascinating cultural document in the age of intelligent design.
  64. Cote d'Azur
    Neither funny nor sexy, nor leavened by the wistful laissez-faire wisdom of the typical sophisticated Gallic comedy, it is less than a trifle.
  65. Keane
    Mr. Kerrigan isn't just playing with our sympathies; he's also playing with our assumptions. That keeps the tension going.
  66. Steal Me
    With its lovely scenery and languid pacing, has a warmth and a naturalness that transcend its overheated material.
  67. Campfire
    If Campfire is solidly acted, it is visually drab and has a haphazard narrative momentum.
  68. Green Street Hooligans
    Green Street Hooligans, an accidental advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous and the somnolent pleasures of cricket that, in the end, is mostly about the pleasures, both visceral and visual, of violence.
  69. Kamikaze Girls
    The yummy Japanese confection Kamikaze Girls deserves both a better title and an audience to go with it.
  70. Music from the Inside Out
    Daniel Anker's profound and moving documentary Music from the Inside Out reflects upon such abstractions, capturing the power of the creative process in an uncommonly perceptive and inspiring way.
  71. Make It Funky!
    The accidental poignancy of Make It Funky! comes from juxtaposing the charisma and dignity of those musicians - and the knowledge of how much great music New Orleans has given the world - with the unavoidable images of devastation from the last two weeks.
  72. Walking on the Sky
    A modern-day "Big Chill" wannabe without the subtlety, humor, memorable soundtrack, strong performances or convincing dialogue.
  73. Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing
    "For my vision of the cinema," Orson Welles once said, "editing is not simply one aspect. It is the aspect." According to Edge Codes.com, a wonderfully informative new documentary, what was true for Welles's cinema is true for the medium as a whole.
  74. Usher
    But if Usher is stilted, it is also quite touching, and if Mr. Harrington's acting is less than natural, it's completely in line with the standards of the genre. Vincent Price was no Olivier either.
  75. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    This is synergy of a high order.
  76. Transporter 2
    Purely shallow but never dull, the film wisely pushes the limits of absurdity to the extreme, making it easier to submit to its sheer camp.
  77. A Sound of Thunder
    This picture achieves a level of badness that is its own form of sublimity. You almost - please note that I said almost - have to see it to believe it.
  78. Underclassman
    The latest bit of damaged goods offered up in the Miramax clearance sale, Underclassman plays like the longest episode of "21 Jump Street" ever made.
  79. Margaret Cho: Assassin
    Though specializing in confrontational, caustic and often raunchy humor, Ms. Cho has a relaxed and playful stage presence.
  80. 3 Dancing Slaves
    Mr. Morel's predilection for murky, nearly pitch-black cinematography and spare, elliptical dialogue indicates his debt to filmmakers like François Ozon and Claire Denis, but Three Dancing Slaves lacks the psychological precision of Mr. Ozon's or Ms. Denis's work.
  81. Mind Game
    A sometimes enthralling, sometimes exhausting tour de force.
  82. The Constant Gardener
    This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.
  83. Games of Love and Chance
    A graceful and sympathetic look at how the lives of teenagers intersect with a work of literature.
  84. William Eggleston in the Real World
    Mr. Eggleston proves the polished granddaddy who, early on, recognized beauty in a garish wasteland. In this accomplished look at a storied career, he instructs - without words - how to see all that is hauntingly familiar.
  85. The Brothers Grimm
    Kitted out in period garb and dubious British accents, the actors throw themselves into this flimsy contrivance with energy, but are badly served by a director focused on flipping switches and twirling knobs. Despite a few early sparks of promise The Brothers Grimm sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure.
  86. The Cave
    Not only is the film dreadfully dull: every time something potentially exciting does occur, the scenes are so muddled and chaotic that it is impossible to make out what is happening.
  87. Undiscovered
    Though filled with romantic contrivances and overlong musical numbers, Undiscovered is curiously lifeless. Bland actors portray single-cell characters in a plot scarcely more diverting than Ms. Simpson's reality vehicle, "The Ashlee Simpson Show."
  88. The Baxter
    In the end, The Baxter is a Baxter of a movie: well meaning and mildly likable, but unlikely to sweep you off your feet.
  89. Eternal
    Lush, lurid and completely besotted with itself, Eternal is one of those movies normally found slinking around the ether of late-night cable television.
  90. Formula 17
    More interested in romance than sex, Formula 17 swoons with youthful innocence.
  91. The Memory of a Killer
    The title character in this nicely kinked Belgian thriller faces a unique adversary: the enemy hot on his heels is Alzheimer's.
  92. Wall
    The French filmmaker Simone Bitton takes a measured look at the barrier in her documentary Wall, a film that considers hard-core political realities alongside agonizing personal truths.
  93. We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
    The spiky documentary in their honor keeps alive the echoes of their slapdash, Smithsonian-worthy sound.
  94. La visa loca
    There are certainly deeper issues simmering below the deceptively lightweight film's surface, but its full impact will most likely be lost on non-Filipino audiences.
  95. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.
  96. Red Eye
    The casting of the two leads is a nice surprise in Red Eye, as is its modest scale. One of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things - the performances and little bits of business from the extras - that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up.
  97. Valiant
    Valiant is in dire need of some "Shrek"-ian sass, not to mention a drop or two of genuine emotion.
  98. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    Mr. Toledo's performance as the shallow and cowardly, yet strangely sympathetic Rafael is a wonder of comic timing, while Ms. Cervera is unforgettable as Lourdes, the ugly duckling who becomes not a swan, but a monster.
  99. Now & Forever
    Theresa Russell is terrific as Angela's slatternly but loving mother, but her character disappears abruptly midway through the movie.
  100. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    There is so much talent on display in Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, it is a drag that the film never rises to the level of its director's obvious ability.
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