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. This Divided State
    Raw, chaotic and engagingly eager.
  2. Supercross
    Provides plenty of authentic dirt-flying motorcycle thrills, but the film's excruciating earnestness and clunky script frequently slow its energetic pace to a grinding halt.
  3. Reel Paradise
    Reel Paradise is a deliberately untidy, open-ended, thoroughly absorbing chronicle that lets the lives of its characters spill across the screen without editorializing.
  4. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Because federal indictments for conspiracy to murder have yet to be handed down, the documentary is necessarily discreet about naming names and detailing its evidence. A sequel would go a long way toward solving the documentary's many unanswered questions.
  5. Lustre
    Lustre is a post-Sept. 11 love letter to a New York past that Mr. Jones clearly mourns.
  6. The Skeleton Key
    One of the most enjoyably inane movies of the season, this faux Southern Gothic offers an embarrassment of geek pleasures.
  7. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    There is an essential meanness to the entire project, tapping the manipulative power of taunts. Such jokes don't jibe with the times, the culture.
  8. Four Brothers
    Atmospheric, propulsive and ultimately preposterous melodrama.
  9. The Great Raid
    A tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand.
  10. Asylum
    Dreary, claustrophobic drama.
  11. The Goebbles Experiment
    A rare and chilling glimpse into a brilliant but toxic mind.
  12. Grizzly Man
    Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.
  13. Pretty Persuasion
    An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, Pretty Persuasion is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing. Much of it is also extremely funny.
  14. Chaos
    The only thing this so-called cautionary tale will inspire audiences to do is to never sit through another insultingly awful piece of exploitative trash "conceived" by David DeFalco.
  15. Pulse
    The most horrifying thing in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's fiercely original, thrillingly creepy Pulse (released as "Kairo," or "Circuit," in Japan) is the way the ghosts move.
  16. The Century of the Self
    An unusually cerebral filmed essay that demands focus and patience from its audience as it sets about the task of unearthing a secret history of the 20th century. Adam Curtis, the film's director and writer, saves the proceedings from being overly dry with his visual wit and deft touch with archival materials.
  17. Clean
    Albrecht brings out a side of Mr. Nolte rarely seen on the screen, and he gives a deep and touching portrayal of a haggard, beleaguered older man.
  18. A State of Mind
    A rare and often chilling glimpse into the culture of North Korea.
  19. The Dukes of Hazzard
    It would help if the movie were actually funny - or if it actually bothered to be a movie, rather than some car chases punctuated by shots of Ms. Simpson sashaying toward the camera (or more often, away from it).
  20. Broken Flowers
    Like a perfect, short-lived love affair, its pleasure is accompanied by a palpable sting of sorrow. It leaves you wanting more, which I mean entirely as a compliment.
  21. 2046
    Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.
  22. My Date with Drew
    As his movie-in-progress goes along, his pursuit of a childhood dream looks increasingly like an excuse by a canny aspiring filmmaker to create a work sample.
  23. Saint Ralph
    This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch.
  24. Secuestro express
    The constant threat of violence and rape is difficult to endure, but the unpredictable Secuestro Express is more than just a dizzying thrill ride laced with small doses of pitch-black comic relief.
  25. Duma
    A soulful, piercingly beautiful story.
  26. Proteus
    An incomplete portrait of a complicated man.
  27. Junebug
    Junebug envelops us in texture of a world the movies rarely visit.
  28. Darwin's Nightmare
    Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.
  29. Young Rebels
    Though it could do with fewer talking-head interviews and more extended clips from these impassioned live performances, Young Rebels is essential viewing for anyone interested in rap music, free speech issues or the youth culture of contemporary Cuba.
  30. Must Love Dogs
    Proving once again that skillful performances can't create something out of almost nothing - the best they can do is make it palatable.
  31. Sky High
    This zippy Disney adventure-comedy, crammed with special effects, asks that age-old rhetorical question, "Is there life after high school?," and answers it with a cheerful "Not really."
  32. Stealth
    What's interesting about Stealth isn't its nitwit story... No, what's interesting about this movie - and many others of its kind - is that it continues the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.
  33. The Aristocrats
    It works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex.
  34. Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-screen
    In the main, Mr. Palm sticks to the usual biopic formula: a chronological account of a heroic individual told through talking heads, still photographs and film clips. Mr. Palm's principal deviation from this formula is that some of the interviews take place in moving cars.
  35. Oyster Farmer
    This darkly humorous, sometimes even raunchy film mostly eludes a typical cutesy, feel-good formula.
  36. Tony Takitani
    A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.
  37. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.
  38. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    The film is a requiem for the living as well as for the dead.
  39. Yat luk che
    Like Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso," Just One Look is a tribute to the formative power of cinema, a coming-of-age film that nimbly interweaves the adolescent hero's struggles with clips from the movies that shape his romanticized notions of life.
  40. The Devil's Rejects
    The Devil's Rejects is a trompe l'oeil experiment in deliberately retro filmmaking. It looks sensational, but there is a curious emptiness at its core.
  41. Hustle & Flow
    This disdain for women is not incidental to the film; it is integral to the fantasy Mr. Brewer is selling, which is that pimping is not as hard as it looks.
  42. The Island
    Glossy, witty eye candy with some moderately chewy stuff in the middle. This lavish, exhaustingly kinetic film is smarter than you might expect, and at the same time dumber than it could be. It's an impressive product: a triumph of cloning that almost convinces you that it possesses a soul.
  43. Bad News Bears
    Filled with small, cute kids and large, goofy laughs and buoyed by fine supporting work from Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden, the director's latest effort won't rock your movie world, but the fact that he manages to keep the freak flag flying in the face of our culture of triumphalism is a thing of beauty.
  44. 9 Songs
    9 Songs, for all its failed ambitions and its tinge of sexism, is lovely to watch.
  45. The Edukators
    A slyly effective thriller and of a deft comedy of romantic confusion. Whatever its shortcomings as a consideration of globalization and its discontents, The Edukators succeeds brilliantly in telling the story of a man who falls in love with his best buddy's girlfriend and doesn't know what to do about it.
  46. Last Days
    One of this year's indisputably great films.
  47. Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    It's an honorable introduction to an important figure.
  48. November
    In the same way that a crossword puzzle tickles the mind without asking to be taken as literature, November plays games for the sake of game-playing. It also has a pretentious streak.
  49. Yau doh lung fu bong
    Throwdown milks its emotion from a soap-opera score and the appealingly decadent performances of Mr. Koo and Ms. Ying.
  50. Rittenhouse Square
    There are certainly more unpleasant ways to spend an hour and a half, but it's unlikely that Rittenhouse Square will generate much interest outside Philadelphia.
  51. Making Grace
    A small, intimate documentary that patiently observes the highs and lows of a 30-something couple who want to become parents. That the couple are lesbians is perhaps the most remarkable feature of an unremarkable film.
  52. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    I call it wondrous because, in spite of lapses and imperfections, a few of them serious, Mr. Burton's movie succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed - even to glut - the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.
  53. Wedding Crashers
    Reasonably enjoyable until its guys are forced to grow up. Because bad behavior is usually more fun to watch than good, the movie is especially fine during the preliminaries.
  54. Happy Endings
    It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.
  55. The Reception
    It's an intimate chamber piece, dialogue-heavy and at times claustrophobic, but the four central characters are so deftly sketched, and their shifting alliances so intricately choreographed, that the film never feels talky or staged. The actors are consistently excellent.
  56. The Warrior
    A minimalist but strikingly beautiful tale of renounced violence told with uncommon precision and depth.
  57. The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
    Most of this is old news. And the filmmakers never make a coherent case, at least not to the layperson. As a result, the film, which runs about 90 minutes, seems painfully long.
  58. On the Outs
    Certainly not the first film to show how a crushing urban environment can make a sensible-sounding antidrug slogan like "just say no" seem like so much nonsense, but it's one of the strongest.
  59. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    Occasionally, this richly lyrical movie passes over the line separating sympathetic exploration from freak-show condescension.
  60. Return to the Land of Wonders
    An on-the-fly diary of events and impressions that offers insight into the challenges of extracting democracy from chaos.
  61. Murderball
    The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.
  62. Dark Water
    Wildly overproduced and filled with fussy flourishes that make even a derelict hallway look like a million bucks, Dark Water fails to rustle up either meaning or meaningful scares.
  63. Fantastic Four
    Compared with the psychological probing and spiritual brooding of "Batman Begins," Fantastic Four is proudly dumb, loud and inconsequential.
  64. The Beautiful Country
    It is hard not to admire the independence and ambition of The Beautiful Country, even if the film does fall short of its epic intentions.
  65. Saraband
    Ms. Ullmann, now 65, and Mr. Josephson, 81, have a supreme mastery of the Bergman style. Their performances are spiritual and emotional X-rays.
  66. Chronicles
    A film divided against itself. The more the cat-and-mouse game between prisoner and reporter points it in the direction of "The Silence of the Lambs," the closer it inches toward the sort of exploitation it condemns; for me, that's too close for Crónicas to be taken without a big grain of salt.
  67. Steve + Sky
    A mere slip of a movie, a wan character study of people who add up to little more than a series of studied quirks.
  68. Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
    As inspiring as it is, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana is too sweet for its own good; it plays like a spiritual infomercial.
  69. A Sidewalk Astronomer
    An inspiring film about an inspired teacher. It should leave all viewers with an ounce of curiosity eager to hit the streets with Dobsonian telescopes of their own.
  70. Rebound
    Short on laughs, if supremely inoffensive, this sleepy nonentity of a movie finds Mr. Lawrence in his huggable teddy bear mode.
  71. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    Audiard's superb remake improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth.
  72. Undead
    In the end, the film is a stale, derivative mess that borrows heavily from every zombie and alien movie worthy of imitation, to only ho-hum effect.
  73. The World
    Loosely constructed, The World drifts along pleasantly for much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Mr. Jia has a terrific eye and an almost sculptural sense of film space (especially in close quarters), and he brings texture and density to even the most nondescript rooms.
  74. Almost Brothers
    Despite being edited in a style that jarringly blurs the past and the present by switching from one to the other without preparation, Almost Brothers is strong stuff.
  75. War of the Worlds
    Acting is not really the point of this movie, which seems to arise above all from Mr. Spielberg's desire to reaffirm that he is, along with everything else, a master of pure action filmmaking.
  76. Tropical Malady
    Shows a young filmmaker pushing at the limits of cinematic narrative with grace and a certain amount of puckish willfulness.
  77. This Revolution
    Admirable but unfocused.
  78. A Decent Factory
    A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization.
  79. Bewitched
    The film's screenwriters conjured up a very clever gimmick when they decided to revamp a favorite 60's television show. Too bad they forgot that a gimmick is no substitute for a screenplay, never mind a real movie.
  80. Land of the Dead
    One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in Land of the Dead. One thing is for sure: You won't go home hungry.
  81. Rize
    Indeed, the movie sometimes has trouble living up to the richness of its subject, or keeping up with the dances' rapid spread and evolution.
  82. Yes
    Yes is not just a movie, in other words, it's a poem. A bad poem. There is no denying Ms. Potter's skill at versifying - or for that matter, at composing clear, striking visual images - but her intricate, measured lines amount to doggerel, not art.
  83. Dallas 362
    Mr. Caan's debut film is not quite a whole thing, but it offers up enough promising fragments to make his sophomore effort worth watching for.
  84. Lila Says
    Ms. Giocante's intoxicating mixture of gamine innocence and womanly knowingness is almost too much for the movie - Lila is surely too much for Chimo - but her charisma, and Mr. Doueiri's insouciant, heart-on-the-sleeve style give it a mood that is at once breathlessly romantic and cannily down to earth.
  85. The Last Mogul
    More history lesson than dirt-digging expedition, and makes illuminating viewing for anyone curious about how the movies get made - information that is sometimes more interesting than the movies themselves.
  86. Memories of Murder
    What distinguishes Memories of Murder, setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity.
  87. March of the Penguins
    This sentimental but riveting film has no qualms about playing on our emotions.
  88. The War on the War on Drugs
    The movie is 74 minutes of hilarious pro-drug vignettes, loosely strung together like a themed episode of "Saturday Night Live."
  89. Herbie Fully Loaded
    A perfectly silly movie for a silly season that in recent years has forgotten how to be this silly. Directed by Angela Robinson, this latest installment in the movie-television franchise about a tiny car named Herbie with a will of its own and the temperament of a rambunctious 7-year-old knows exactly what it is and what it isn't.
  90. Waging a Living
    Neither hectoring nor sanctimonious, the film plays like an illustrated version of Barbara Ehrenreich's recent best-seller "Nickel and Dimed," and has an editing style that's brisk and unexploitative.
  91. The Deal
    It's when The Deal leaves the corporate offices behind that the story turns into a bogus, convoluted mess. Once the Russian mafia, personified by Angie Harmon playing an evil seductress with a terrible Russian accent, rears its head, the ballgame is over.
  92. The Perfect Man
    The range of Ms. Locklear's lobotomized acting runs from mild irritation to mild melancholy, expressed without expression.
  93. The Great Water
    What makes the film worth watching are the extraordinary performances by the more than 250 children cast as orphans.
  94. Heights
    Like the film, the characters mean well and look good. But they're so deeply immersed in their own heads that they can't see the world for their needs.
  95. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Though her movie has a clear narrative line, and might even be classified as romantic comedy, it is also a meticulously constructed visual artifact, diffidently introducing the playful, rebus-like qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.
  96. My Summer of Love
    The film is a triumph of mood and implication.
  97. The Talent Given Us
    The strange and delightful Talent Given Us is a movie that shouldn't work but does rather remarkably.
  98. Ethan Mao
    By the time we reach the "Butch Cassidy"-inspired climax, any filaments of credibility still clinging to these characters have completely disappeared.
  99. Batman Begins
    Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease.
  100. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    This warm, sorrowful film plays like a downbeat variation on an old World War II picture from Hollywood.
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