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. Fever Pitch
    Still, despite the visual clumsiness and the production's tattered seams, I found myself rooting for this movie anyway, partly because Lindsey and Ben make a nice fit, as do the actors playing them, partly because the Farrellys bring so much heart to their movies, and partly because Ms. Barrymore inspires more goodwill than any other young actress I can think of working today in American movies.
  2. Kung Fu Hustle
    For all its punches, kicks, whacks and thumps, the movie does not have much impact, and for all its affectionate nostalgia, it produces a strange kind of amnesia. It knocks the sense right out of your head, and its own as well.
  3. Eating Out
    Think of it as a modern-day variant on a Shakespearean comedy, only without the verbal felicity or dramatic structure.
  4. Winter Solstice
    The boys, particularly Mr. Webber as Pete, are astonishingly good, and Ms. Monaghan, who looks like a slightly more tomboyish Liv Tyler, makes a deep impression in a minor role. Mr. LaPaglia, of the television series "Without a Trace," brings a tender gravity to the shell-shocked Jim.
  5. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    Nobody does adultery in movies with more style and zest than the French, especially when the mode is frivolous. And anyone who watches Happily Ever After can identify with the grass-is-always-greener daydreams that haunt its characters.
  6. The Friend
    Some may be offended by this film's use of Sept. 11 as a plot device, but ultimately The Friend is less concerned with the politics of terror than with its psychology.
  7. Eros
    Lovely though it is to look at, it does not reveal very much. Sampling the works of three prominent directors in one sitting may be what gives anthology films like this one their appeal, but the experience is often more frustrating than fulfilling.
  8. A Hole in My Heart
    Mr. Moodysson may believe that he can stick it to the audience politically by sticking it to his characters. But like most film directors who commit to this strategy, his tactics come across as both naïve and wildly self-indulgent, while his fascination with the spectacle of the corrupt and the cruel is simply tedious.
  9. Voices in Wartime
    Rick King's stirring documentary Voices in Wartime is not, as you might guess from the title, a compilation of soldiers' battlefield letters to their families back home. This intense little film is about poetry, and not just Homer's "Iliad."
  10. First Love
    All setup and no payoff.
  11. David Hockney: The Colors of Music
    Over all, this deferential film salutes Mr. Hockney's artistry as an elixir for creaky texts, a hallucinogen for orthodox opera fans, and an antidote to his own senescence. As much as he lets the filmmaker be present, he successfully avoids real intimacy, keeping his personal life comfortably backstage.
  12. In Satmar Custody
    Modest, disturbing documentary.
  13. Sin City
    Sin City has been made with such scrupulous care and obvious love for its genre influences that it's a shame the movie is kind of a bore.
  14. Dust to Glory
    There is occasionally some gorgeous scenery, and the challenge of driving through silt is mildly interesting.
  15. Girl Play
    Neither performer upstages the other, but the admirable film is weakened by timidity or a lack of skill.
  16. Control
    A tour de force of grime, fluorescence and destinationless velocity, is more concerned with atmosphere than meaning.
  17. Look at Me
    A witty and acute examination of friendship, ambition and betrayal in the Parisian literary world.
  18. Beauty Shop
    Beauty Shop extends the popular "Barbershop" franchise to Atlanta and provides a sassy feminine counterpart to its cozy men's-club vibe.
  19. Odessa... Odessa!
    As it observes these people, most of them well over 60, it conjures a melancholy definition of exile as a haunted state of mind.
  20. Oldboy
    Entertaining to watch - notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal - which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem.
  21. Guess Who
    So mild and thin that it doesn't inspire much of a reaction at all. With one exception - a dinner table scene that is by far the most memorable in the movie - the racial humor is studiously unprovocative.
  22. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Ms. Miller has attempted to elevate a small Oedipal story about two damaged souls into a grandiloquent epic, Shakespeare by way of Bob Dylan. She misses by a significantly wide mark, largely because she loves her monster too much and his victim too little.
  23. D.E.B.S.
    The film has no idea of how to develop its one-joke premise. The tepid love scenes are as erotically charged as a home movie of a little girl hugging her Barbie doll, and the satire as cutting as the blunt edge of a plastic butter knife.
  24. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    This visually stylish work, with its vintage glamour photos, film and television clips, and snippets from a 1951 B-movie, "Racket Girls," is more of a scrapbook than a coherent history of the sport during its rough-and-tumble infancy.
  25. Nina's Tragedies
    The biggest weakness in Nina's Tragedies, is the character of Nadav. His shadowy presence leaves the movie without a solid center around which to spin its tales.
  26. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    Sandra Bullock looks as if she would rather be shoveling pig waste - though of course in some respects that is exactly what she's doing.
  27. Mondovino
    Smart, sincere and sloppy film.
  28. Beyond the Sea
    These tales of upward mobility seem at odds with Mr. Pérez-Rey's choice to include a clip from the 1983 remake of "Scarface," in which Al Pacino, playing a Marielito thug, introduces a machine gun as his "little friend."
  29. Ice Princess
    You can feel this niche-marketed tweener fantasy of athletic glory frantically trying to balance a decent sense of values against a market-savvy awareness.
  30. The Ring Two
    Despite Mr. Nakata's track record and the radiant presence of its star, Naomi Watts, The Ring Two is a dud.
  31. Melinda and Melinda
    As he (Allen) interweaves two versions of the Melinda story, one meant to be bathed in pathos, the other sprinkled with whimsy, it becomes apparent that his notions of comedy and tragedy do not quite correspond either to scholarly dogma or to everyday usage.
  32. Fifty-Fifty
    Ms. Omarova has a painter's eye for composition and a novelist's sense of character.
  33. Steamboy
    The film turns into a preposterous but engrossing spectacle, fueled by a resource more enduring than steam or its successors: big ideas.
  34. The Rider Named Death
    To make a film in 2005 that asks audiences to sympathize with the plight of a band of terrorists is an intellectually audacious gesture.
  35. Milk and Honey
    Milk and Honey is the kind of nightmare-in-a-box you might expect if Neil LaBute remade Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" on a shoestring.
  36. 16 Years of Alcohol
    The tedium of this antidrinking hoodlum's tale inspires the wrong kind of longing entirely.
  37. After the Apocalypse
    Despite its spasms of brutality and a swerve into the macabre, After the Apocalypse is, by comparison with more recent films of this type (the "Mad Max" series), gentle at heart and terribly sincere.
  38. Hostage
    More than sad, it's slightly sickening to consider the technology, talent and know-how squandered on Hostage, a pile of blood-soaked toxic waste dumped onto the screen in an attempt to salvage Bruce Willis's fading career as an action hero.
  39. Robots
    In the end, though, Robots is hollow and mechanical, an echo chamber of other movies and an awkward attempt to turn the intrinsically scary sensitive-robot theme into something heartwarming and cute.
  40. The Upside of Anger
    A seriously flawed movie wrapped around two nearly perfect performances.
  41. Millions
    A heartfelt, emotionally delicate children's movie about life and death and all the parts in between.
  42. In My Country
    High-minded but hopelessly wooden film.
  43. Mail Order Wife
    The narrative manages 30 solid minutes of ingenuity, before breaking into a version of Charlie Kaufman-style absurdity.
  44. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    Appealing if obvious little fable.
  45. Don't Move
    It is a beautifully made film - decorously composed, meticulously acted, cleanly photographed. But all of these qualities make it seem complacent and hypocritical when it wants to be honest and brave, and sentimental rather than emotionally daring.
  46. Dot the I
    If Dot the i, the directorial debut of Matthew Parkhill, has a crass visual flash, it fails to give its characters any credible substance. Even after it purports to eviscerate their psyches, they remain diagrammatic contrivances.
  47. Nowhere Man
    A weird blooper reel, shown as the credits roll, records how often the actors broke into nervous laughter, and this goofy coda undermines any serious intent or honest emotion in the previous, tedious 80 minutes.
  48. Off the Map
    With a director, screenwriter and star who have deep roots in the theater, Off the Map is more than anything an actor's film.
  49. The Buffalo Boy
    One of the strengths of Mr. Nguyen-Vo's film is that despite the overwhelming physical beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of his characters, he doesn't succumb to such aerated thinking. The world in Buffalo Boy" is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions.
  50. Santa Santita
    Magdalena relies on the magical-realism aspects of religious devotion, even though it began as a story more firmly, and admirably, rooted in a gritty reality.
  51. Sheriff
    Sheriff may have a point to make about the impact of family, roots and religion on the changing face of rural America, but the film, while admirably restrained and competently made, is too polite to clarify that.
  52. Be Cool
    Like the characters, the scenes pile up but go nowhere; the story seems fragmented, the actors unmotivated, unmoored. Mr. Gray has a feel for pulp, but is seriously off his game here.
  53. The Jacket
    This movie is terribly silly, but it's not completely terrible.
  54. The Pacifier
    Mr. Diesel could not have succeeded as a genre-switcher without the proven television talents of the film's able ensemble.
  55. Dear Frankie
    "Miramax porn." The term refers to manipulative tearjerkers like Dear Frankie whose sensitive performances, along with a light dusting of grit, allow them to be marketed as art films. This one is clever enough to fool a lot of people.
  56. Face
    The director's attention to details of character and locale makes for a precise evocation of a New York seldom seen in feature films.
  57. Gunner Palace
    The resulting film is an unruly, riveting assemblage of anecdotes and impressions. The larger political and military questions about the war in Iraq are kept deliberately in the background, which some viewers may find frustrating.
  58. Intimate Stories
    Almost every frame of this modest gem of a movie, directed by Carlos Sorin from a screenplay by Pablo Solarz, conveys the emptiness of the environment in which three interwoven vignettes unfold.
  59. Walk on Water
    Though it is marred by an implausible climax and a cloying conclusion, this movie's quiet intelligence sneaks up on you, marking the director as a talent to watch.
  60. Whisky
    A deadpan comedy shot through with a vein of despair, the Uruguayan film Whisky is a pint-size pleasure.
  61. The Best of Youth
    Full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel.
  62. Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating
    A slight, amusing documentary.
  63. The Red Orchestra
    Films like "The Pianist" and "Schindler's List" immerse viewers in the bleakness of that time. The Red Orchestra is set in a sunnier world, which seems more frighteningly false. The bright, quotidian landscape seems a facade that threatens to tumble at any moment.
  64. Cursed
    It's not bad enough to make you curse, but you are likely to laugh when you should scream, and to roll your eyes when you are meant to laugh.
  65. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
    So oblivious to genre that it occupies its own special stylistic niche, if you can imagine such a thing as a romantic revenge farce.
  66. Man of the House
    Nearly every one of the film's emotional scenes is too predictable to hit its mark, but Mr. Jones's dry delivery has its moments.
  67. Up and Down
    It skips from buoyant satire to domestic melodrama, leaving behind a curious mix of emotions.
  68. 10 on Ten
    A tediously didactic, often condescendingly reductive 10-part lesson on cinema.
  69. The Other Side of the Street
    Ms. Montenegro's rough-hewn integrity is the one quality that ennobles The Other Side of the Street, an otherwise confused mixture of cat-and-mouse thriller and sentimental old folks' love story that is well below the level of "Central Station."
  70. Sexual Dependency
    In Sexual Dependency, the filmmaker Rodrigo Bellott flirts with the allowable limit of themes in one movie. His frenzied but clever first film juggles race, class, jingoism, homophobia, sexual attraction and rape.
  71. Turtles Can Fly
    It is a heartbreaking film, and cruelty sometimes seems to be not only its subject but its method. Like the child on a high cliff that is one of its recurring images, the film walks up to the edge of hopelessness and pauses there, waiting to see what happens next.
  72. Because of Winn-Dixie
    A harmless, pleasant comic drama, but elements that may have seemed delightfully eccentric on the page take on unfortunate new tones when translated to film.
  73. Constantine
    Tilda Swinton is the Angel Gabriel, adding a touch of high-class celestial cross-dressing to this overblown, overlong attempt - which falls just short of success - to make a movie dumber than "Van Helsing."
  74. Son of the Mask
    An irredeemable mess, a computer-animated Punch and Judy show without wit, heart or a single memorable performance.
  75. Nabbeun namja
    If there is anything worth discovering in this sad slog of a story, it is the two fierce performances by Cho Je-Hyun and Seo Won, who play the lovers and turn the harsh drama into a showcase for their pained expressions.
  76. Bigger Than the Sky
    Finally it becomes clear that Mr. Corley's film is meant to be a tribute to the love of theater. It has just been posing as the story of one man's finding himself.
  77. Downfall
    It is fascinating without being especially illuminating, and it holds your attention for its very long running time without delivering much dramatic or emotional satisfaction in the end.
  78. Naked Fame
    The spare, enjoyable Naked Fame, by the documentarian Chris Long, suggests that today's pornography performers enjoy better life options than those revisited in "Inside Deep Throat."
  79. Schultze Gets the Blues
    It's a good thing the movie has so little dialogue, because when it talks, the words dilute its almost surreal visual spell, and the fructose turns to saccharine.
  80. The Animation Show 2005
    As it is, this collection clocks in at a fleet 87 minutes, which is shorter (and taken together, more lively) than a whole mess of features.
  81. Cinévardaphoto
    The unutterably charming Cinévardaphoto brings together three short works by the filmmaker Agnès Varda, one shot in digital video, the others on celluloid.
  82. Ong Bak
    Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.
  83. Bride & Prejudice
    As high concept and rife with cliché as anything ever churned out by Hollywood, but with worse production values and a load of sanctimonious political correctness.
  84. Hitch
    An average romantic comedy put together with enough professionalism to keep your cynicism momentarily at bay, featuring good-looking actors who also, in this case, seem like pretty nice people.
  85. Inside Deep Throat
    A "slam, bam, thank you, ma'am" trifle of an entertainment.
  86. My Mother's Smile
    Though the narrative is spotty, and occasionally confounding, there is an epic warmth in the way it's rendered.
  87. Uncle Nino
    Aggressive heartwarmer, which turns out to be much more of a heartburner.
  88. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    In Ms. Irving's affectionate film, Mr. Bittner is more of a sage than a deadbeat.
  89. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    Adorable.
  90. Unscrewed
    If Ms. Smith's and Mr. Hoffman's mopey, sheepish performances are quite convincing and ultimately sad, the movie constructed around them doesn't really know what it wants to say or how to say it.
  91. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    Mr. Hamzeh's film is responsible and intelligent, though, and important as a record of a disturbing incident.
  92. Nobody Knows
    Not for the faint of heart, though it has no scenes of overt violence, and barely a tear is shed. It is also strangely thrilling, not only because of the quiet assurance of Mr. Kore-eda's direction, but also because of his alert, humane sense of sympathy.
  93. Boogeyman
    The filmmakers are smart enough to keep the monster out of sight for a long time and then to show only glimpses, but a similar tactic of providing only glimpses of plot and character is disastrous.
  94. The Wedding Date
    Struggles from beginning to end to capture the charm and ebullience of "Four Weddings." The new movie's effort is mostly unsuccessful, but there are bright spots.
  95. Emile
    While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.
  96. Harry + Max
    There are brave, boundary-breaching movies, and there are mad, foolhardy ones. Harry and Max belongs to the latter breed.
  97. The Nomi Song
    An affectionate portrait, not only of Nomi, but also of the long-gone days when downtown Manhattan was an affordable enclave for creative misfits.
  98. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    Better than the usual three-stage journey of courage, heartbreak and redemption. In this case, the triumph of the human spirit comes with a small bitter chaser.
  99. Swimming Upstream
    The role, one of the meatiest of Mr. Rush's career, is equal in flash and complexity to his turns as the pianist David Helfgott in "Shine" and the Marquis de Sade in "Quills."
  100. Sunset Story
    One of the strengths of Sunset Story is that it introduces us to a pair of extraordinary women who have kept their dignity and independence in a world that conspires against them having either. The story of Lucille and Irja may break your heart, but it will also make your day.
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