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. Wheel of Time
    The movie might as well have been called "An Immersion in Tibetan Buddhism." With minimal explanation, it puts you right in the center.
  2. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    What counts in a movie like this are stars so dazzling that we won't really notice or at least mind the cut-rate writing and occasionally incoherent action. Sometimes Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie succeed in their mutual role as sucker bait, sometimes they don't, which is why their new joint venture is alternately a goof and a drag.
  3. The Honeymooners
    Superfluous though it may be, The Honeymooners is not so bad.
  4. High Tension
    By turns unnerving and numbing.
  5. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    Mr. Rodriguez seems unsure what his film is really about, making the moral of the story -- "dream an unselfish dream" -- feel more like a vaguely judgmental homily than a satisfying conclusion.
  6. Howl's Moving Castle
    Sophie, in both her incarnations, joins an impressive sisterhood of Miyazaki heroines, whose version of girl power presents a potent alternative to the mini-machismo that dominates American juvenile entertainment. Not that children are the only viewers likely to be haunted and beguiled by Howl's Moving Castle - all that is needed are open eyes and an open heart.
  7. Slutty Summer
    The film is a labor of love for Casper Andreas, who wrote, directed and starred in this first feature. For the actors he has chosen, it's a labor of lust, with copious necking and grappling required. For the audience, it's just a labor.
  8. Wild Side
    Too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked.
  9. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
    May be the opposite of trash, but it is something just as disposable: dead literary meat. Dragged down by a stuffy screenplay clotted with generic period oratory, overdressed to the point that the actors seem physically impeded by their ornate costumes, and hopelessly muddled in its storytelling, the movie is edited with a haphazardness that leaves many dots unconnected.
  10. 5x2
    Told in the usual sequence, the story of Gilles and Marion would be a banal bell curve of infatuation, bliss, boredom, regret and recrimination. As it is, 5x2 does not quite make the case that Gilles and Marion are entirely worth our interest, let alone our sympathy, but the reversal of narrative order gives their ordinary moments together a faint aura of mystery, as Mr. Ozon teases us with the conceit that it will all make sense in the end - or rather, the beginning.
  11. Paternal Instinct
    Warm and fuzzy documentary.
  12. Café Lumière
    Café Lumière stands in relation to "Tokyo Story" as a faint, diminished echo. It is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, a chance to witness one major filmmaker paying tribute to another in the form of a rigorously minor film.
  13. The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam
    That "The Keeper" was made by a novice is evident in the visible seams between the present-day narrative and the flashbacks; the whole thing plays like a loopy amalgam of stilted costume picture and after-school special.
  14. Cinderella Man
    Lightly stained a nicotine brown and topped by two male actors who could steal a movie from a basket of mewling kittens and an army of rosy-cheeked orphans, the film is as calculating and glossy a hard-luck tale as any cooked up on the old M-G-M lot.
  15. Lords of Dogtown
    From start to finish, is pretty much a blast.
  16. Rock School
    Alternately hilarious and alarming documentary.
  17. Apres Vous (After You)
    Had it had the concision and symmetry of a classic French farce, Après Vous could have been an irresistible laugh machine.
  18. Deep Blue
    Much of what the filmmakers and their team of cinematographers capture is undeniably remarkable, but their overt attachment to certain scenes can make watching a chore.
  19. Milwaukee, Minnesota
    Mr. Garity's performance doesn't quite redeem this sorely lacking production.
  20. Caterina va in città
    Its rich, wide-angle view of Italian politics and society stays with you. The details may vary from nation to nation in the industrialized West, but the big picture is pretty much the same everywhere.
  21. The Story of an African Farm
    Meets its main requirements: it adapts a classic novel in gleaming cinematic form, and it ridicules the foibles of ruthless adults.
  22. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    Of these four plots, the story of Carmen's blended family is by far the most consistently engaging, largely because of the vibrant presence of Ms. Ferrera.
  23. The White Diamond
    The film, which includes some breathtakingly beautiful images of the green, wet Guyanese jungle and a monumental waterfall that cuts through it, is driven less by narrative than by ideas and impressions.
  24. Or
    This well-meaning but irritatingly naïve feature delves into the horrors of prostitution, or more accurately, the filmmaker's horror about the subject.
  25. Invisible
    Though each character is living a distinctly personal tragedy, the filmmaker's antipathy to context or coherence effectively bars us from all but the most fleeting emotional involvement.
  26. A Wake in Providence
    Lovingly shot on location in the Italian neighborhoods of Providence, this comfortably predictable film has its pleasures, most notably a dryly funny Adrienne Barbeau as the brothers' hip, hard-drinking Aunt Lidia.
  27. The Longest Yard
    Softer, louder and cleaner than the 1974 version, the new film sentimentalizes the prisoners and the game, filing down their sharpest edges so that winning becomes a matter of triumph rather than resistance.
  28. Madagascar
    Madagascar arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little.
  29. Bomb the System
    Bomb the System, which rides on a subtle hip-hop soundtrack, might be described as soulful pulp; cult recognition awaits it.
  30. The Ninth Day
    Succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story.
  31. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
    Directing his first feature, Christopher Browne shows flair and determination in getting the movie's pathos down pat, but he can't quite find enough that is pleasurable in its many reels.
  32. The Fearless Freaks
    Mr. Beesley, an Oklahoma City native who has been following and filming the Flaming Lips for 15 years, is far too close to his subject to offer a critical perspective, but he achieves a level of intimacy with the band members that most rock documentary directors can only dream of.
  33. Saving Face
    Everything that happens in the last half-hour betrays the canny, hardheaded perspective of what came before.
  34. A Common Thread
    Unfortunately, Ms. Faucher's screenplay, written with Gaëlle Macé, never finds its focus or reason for being, and Ms. Naymark just doesn't have enough screen presence to make up for the lack of a story or to justify all those tenderly attentive close-ups.
  35. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage.
  36. Second Best
    Sloppy but smart-enough-to-make-you-squirm comedy.
  37. 2009: Lost Memories
    The result is an impressive, if too long, first feature that is likely to raise Japanese hackles and Korean spirits in roughly equal proportion.
  38. 6ixtynin9
    Rejoices in a plot as tricky as its spelling.
  39. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    Structurally, Sex, Politics and Cocktails is wildly, almost frantically inventive, with techniques ranging from stop-motion to split-screen to silent film-style intertitles. But no amount of directorial trickery can mask the essential vacuousness of the story and its characters.
  40. Stolen Childhoods
    Harrowing yet hopeful film.
  41. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than "Star Wars."
  42. Mojados: Through the Night
    Manages to capture firsthand the danger, fatigue and sheer tedium of an arduous illegal border crossing from Mexico without ever becoming tedious itself.
  43. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    A respectful portrait of General Dallaire, now retired, who comes across as a thoughtful, resolute but profoundly shaken man, more philosopher than warrior.
  44. Mindhunters
    A quintessential Renny Harlin film: a big, dumb, loud action movie.
  45. Kicking & Screaming
    At best, this film is half-inflated.
  46. Monster-in-Law
    A shrunken, cowardly movie in deep denial of its true nature, which is far uglier than it is ever willing to admit.
  47. Unleashed
    The infinitely silly, unconscionably entertaining action film Unleashed earns most of its juice from the martial-arts star Jet Li.
  48. Mad Hot Ballroom
    Ms. Agrelo and Ms. Sewell deserve praise for discovering and illuminating this delightful corner of an educational system that is often portrayed in the grimmest terms, but their execution falls a bit short.
  49. My Mother
    Ma Mère may be ludicrous, but its cast displays a commitment that deserves more than grudging admiration.
  50. Layer Cake
    The newest in British gangland entertainment and the tastiest in years.
  51. Kings & Queen
    Late in his new film Kings and Queen, the wildly gifted French director Arnaud Desplechin yanks the rug from under his characters and sends both them and us reeling.
  52. Modigliani
    The best and maybe the only use to be made of the catastrophic screen biography Modigliani is to serve as a textbook outline of how not to film the life of a legendary artist.
  53. Tell Them Who You Are
    Near the beginning of the movie, the younger Wexler admits that the film is his attempt to get closer to his father. This sense of personal mission helps make Tell Them Who You Are the richest documentary of its kind since Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb."
  54. Crash
    So what kind of a movie is Crash? A frustrating movie: full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.
  55. House of Wax
    The set design is fairly elaborate by the standards of the genre, and the victims don't die in precisely the order you might expect, but everything else goes pretty much according to formula, including a last-minute plot twist that opens the creaky door to a sequel.
  56. Kingdom of Heaven
    Scott's ravishing visual style, characterized by a fetishistic attention to surface detail and unrelenting beauty, can work wonders with big subjects, but this is also a director who needs actors powerful enough to shoulder narrative and emotional extremes.
  57. Fighting Tommy Riley
    Despite its flaws, the film gets across some genuine melancholy, played up by a sobbing Irish fiddle.
  58. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    An intermittently funny free-for-all that tries desperately to flesh out a television sketch into a feature-length movie.
  59. Mysterious Skin
    A gorgeous, heartbreaking and utterly convincing work of art.
  60. The Great Role
    Mr. Coyote, who appears to be playing Steven Spielberg and steals every scene he is in.
  61. Brothers
    Filmed in the unadorned Dogme style and acted with a ferocious intensity.
  62. A Hole in One
    With its heavy symbolism and awkward, lurching pace, A Hole in One leaves viewers with little more than the vague conviction - which I think I already had going in - that falling in love is better than an ice pick to the brain.
  63. Up for Grabs
    Mr. Wranovics sometimes goes too far in setting up cute situations for filming witnesses' comments.
  64. Writer of O
    A most unfortunate film that combines standard documentary techniques, including talking-head interviews, with some maladroit dramatizations from Aury's life and her novel.
  65. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.
  66. xXx: State of the Union
    The makers of State of the Union subscribe to the Jerry Bruckheimer big-bang theory of action (big, bigger, biggest), but they don't share that maestro's attention to detail, or apparently his deep pockets. The state of this cinematic union is shabby indeed.
  67. 3-Iron
    A teasing, self-conscious and curiously heartfelt demonstration of his (Mr. Kim) mischievous formal ingenuity.
  68. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.
  69. Death of a Dynasty
    Watching the rest of Damon Dash's playful movie is like entering a room where a large, too noisy party is going on and never fully adjusting to the dark or the din.
  70. Funny Ha Ha
    It is a small, plain movie, shot in 16 millimeter in dull locations around Boston; but also, like its passive, quizzical heroine, it is unexpectedly seductive, and even, in its own stubborn, hesitant way, beautiful.
  71. The Holy Girl
    The Holy Girl may occasionally frustrate your desire for clarity and order, but in the end it will reward your patience, and you leave the theater in a state of quiet awe.
  72. Ladies in Lavender.
    The cinematic equivalent of a visit from a cherished but increasingly dithery maiden aunt.
  73. The Tunnel
    The film convincingly portrays the devastating, life-altering hardships and restrictions that the residents of the divided Berlin endured.
  74. Stalin's Wife
    A dense biographical collage.
  75. Another Road Home
    Moving and ultimately hopeful, Another Road Home makes no effort to soften or simplify its prickly themes.
  76. Wild Safari 3D
    The cinematic safari's simple pleasures are best experienced with the littlest ticket-holders, who get an edifying thrill ride and a computer-assisted sense of a wider world.
  77. Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    The offending videotape is never seen, but the entire film is built around its absence. Periodically, the film returns to a written police account of the video, which scrolls up the screen, documenting the animal's suffering blow by blow to the sound of ominous music.
  78. The Interpreter
    Conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling.
  79. A Lot Like Love
    Isn't half bad and every so often is pretty good, filled with real sentiment, worked-through performances and a story textured enough to sometimes feel a lot like life.
  80. King's Ransom
    Incoherent mess of a film.
  81. Double Dare
    Thin but pleasantly diverting documentary
  82. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    A tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.
  83. Madison
    Wants to be both heartwarming and quirky but is sometimes just cutesy instead.
  84. The Man Who Copied
    The movie never recovers from its jarring turn into a rushed, unconvincing caper movie with a blasé, Robin Hood attitude.
  85. One Missed Call
    Where "Ringu" derived its power from the simplicity of its premise and the purity of its execution, One Missed Call staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess.
  86. Night of Henna
    Broadly acted, clumsily written and directed with crude sincerity, it is a well-meaning feminist morality play unlikely to be of much interest outside the community in which it takes place.
  87. Dead & Breakfast
    Not a shred of suspense enlivens the proceedings, and the movie's idea of humor is having a man slip and slide on a floor covered in blood.
  88. Save the Green Planet!
    At once a sick comedy, a bile-raising thriller and a genre pastiche, Save the Green Planet is a welter of conflicting tones, dissonant moods and warring intentions.
  89. The Amityville Horror
    Low-key creepy rather than outright scary, the new Amityville marks a modest improvement over the original, partly because, from acting to bloody effects, it is better executed.
  90. House of D
    The burden of the story, which is maudlin and entirely unbelievable, weighs down even the more credible performances.
  91. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    The British comic turned actor (Paul Kaye) appears in almost every scene and he carries that weight admirably. He manages the very neat trick of keeping you interested in a character who doesn't merit our affection but earns it nonetheless.
  92. Torremolinos 73
    Such a joyous celebration of sex and filmmaking that viewers will forgive its director for taking time out to enjoy a little of both.
  93. The Girl from Monday
    Evokes a mood of tenderness. Beyond that, it is a weightless, sentimental and intellectually lazy effort from an independent filmmaker whose movies seem increasingly insubstantial.
  94. Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man
    Giorgio Perlasca, who has been compared to Oskar Schindler, deserves better than this Italian television film.
  95. Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control
    Dan Harnden's screenplay keeps things relatively interesting, despite the very thin plot.
  96. Palindromes
    The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook.
  97. State Property 2
    It is not saying much to point out that the sequel is better than its predecessor (directed by Abdul Malik Abbott), which was crude and amateurish in every way.
  98. 15: The Movie
    The law of averages demands that every once in a while a movie must come along starring young nonprofessional actors who aren't very good. That's unfortunately the case in 15.
  99. Raging Dove
    Bruising but illuminating documentary.
  100. Sahara
    As Sahara careens between swashbuckling silliness and semi-serious comment, it builds up reserves of energy and good will that pay off when it bursts into its final sprint, a rootin'-tootin' 21-gun finale as satisfying as it is preposterous.
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