The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Assisted Living
    May be a comedy, but its images of physical frailty are inescapably unsettling. As the camera fixates on frail, spotted trembling hands unsteadily reaching out, it is impossible not to imagine a future in which those hands could be yours.
  2. Daybreak
    If Daybreak weren't so powerfully acted, its accumulating anguish would be too much to bear. As it is, all three couples, especially Knut and Mona, verge on caricature.
  3. Freak Weather
    Like its heroine, Freak Weather is courageous but disorganized; its loopy, screwball tone feels at odds with the gravity of the scenes of chaos and violence it depicts.
  4. Fear X
    Grimly austere barely begins to describe the atmosphere of dread that seeps through Fear X like a toxic mist.
  5. Travelers and Magicians
    As he did in "The Cup," Mr. Norbu provides a lot of ingratiating comic moments. His Buddhism is the laughing, playful kind, and does not ask the Western audience - for whom the film is clearly intended - to deal with any uncomfortably complex religious issues.
  6. Alone in the Dark
    So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.
  7. Hide and Seek
    That Mr. De Niro and especially Miss Fanning manage to register through all this murk is a testament to their talent, which however squandered does nonetheless shine.
  8. Aliens of the Deep
    A visual adventure worthy of that much degraded adjective, awesome.
  9. Lost Embrace
    This is a small movie about a small world, but its modesty is part of what makes it durable and satisfying.
  10. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
    This one-sided account brings some lesser-known offenses to light and advances a scenario that is bold and detailed. But it is hardly dispassionate.
  11. Army of One
    Puts a bitterly ironic spin on the Army's best-known recruiting slogan, "Be all that you can be."
  12. Are We There Yet?
    The always charismatic Ice Cube makes Are We There Yet? watchable.
  13. Beautiful Boxer
    A rare hybrid: an underdog sports picture that's also a transgender fairy tale.
  14. Head-On
    Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, Head-On is a hopeful film.
  15. Monsieur N.
    If it all adds up to too much for one film to encompass with ease, Monsieur N, is certainly richer than most of what you'll find on the History Channel.
  16. Watermarks
    A moving documentary that approaches the Holocaust from a fresh, intimate perspective.
  17. She's One of Us
    Handsome but empty film.
  18. Arakimentari
    More of a sketch than a fully developed portrait.
  19. Assault on Precinct 13
    The main thing this "Assault" lacks is a point. Mr. Carpenter's film still resonates with the political paranoia and social unease of the era. Mr. Carpenter's cynical refusal to distinguish clearly between good guys and bad guys feels freshly unsettling, while Mr. Richet's "modernization" looks like something we've seen a hundred times before.
  20. Machuca
    Both sweet and stringent, attuned to the wonders of childhood as well as its cruelty and terror.
  21. With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America
    Our turbulent political climate is so clogged with the instant hysteria demanded by the chattering class to keep its voice in shouting condition that a sedate documentary examining the long-term weather patterns is a welcome respite from the noise.
  22. Coach Carter
    This may be the coach's story, but to the extent that Coach Carter is interesting rather than merely inspirational, it's because of the team.
  23. Elektra
    No question, the film's best special effect is Ms. Garner, especially when she's in costume.
  24. Racing Stripes
    Racing Stripes is unlikely to ascend to the pantheon of perennially watchable children's films, but like its hero, what it lacks in skill, it makes up for in heart.
  25. The Chorus
    A deeply conventional story about truculent or orphaned boys and the gentle soul who finds himself by shaping the tots into a chorus.
  26. Appleseed
    While there are some genuinely dazzling moments of visual bravura, the marriage of flatness and depth that Mr. Aramaki attempts doesn't quite work.
  27. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Given the event's size and complexity, it is perhaps inevitable that this documentary feels haphazard and superficial, more tourist's photo album than analysis. Still, the glimpses it offers are never less than fascinating.
  28. About Baghdad
    The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is distracting. Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.
  29. White Noise
    A film worthy neither of Mr. Keaton's talents nor even a desperate horror fan's attention.
  30. Solitude
    Ultimately feels like a clinical study without wider resonance.
  31. Murder-Set-Pieces
    It is hard to know what exactly Mr. Palumbo is trying to say in his debased film.
  32. Sky Blue
    Teeters unsteadily between dystopian fable and Saturday-morning cartoon.
  33. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    The hokey solemnity of A Love Song for Bobby Long suggests "The Mundane Secrets of the Ya-Ya Brotherhood" or "The Notebook Goes to the Big Easy." The movie is another example of Hollywood's going soft and squishy when it goes South.
  34. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    That The Assassination of Richard Nixon is as well directed, acted and shot as it is makes Mr. Mueller's inability to invest his film with significance all the more disappointing.
  35. The Merchant of Venice
    Btter-than-average screen Shakespeare: intelligent without being showily clever, and motivated more by genuine fascination with the play's language and ideas than by a desire to cannibalize its author's cultural prestige.
  36. In Good Company
    In Good Company lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of "About a Boy," as well as Mr. Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo directing debut.
  37. Fat Albert
    In Fat Albert, that trademark is resurrected to depressingly diminished ends.
  38. Darkness
    The real mystery is why such a mangled film was not junked altogether.
  39. The Woodsman
    What is more remarkable is that he (Bacon)has found a way, without the slightest hint of vanity or ostentation, to convey the inner life of a man who is almost entirely shut down.
  40. The Keys to the House
    The kind of quietly unassuming tear-jerker that works its way into your heart despite the occasional cries of protest emanating from your head.
  41. In the Realms of the Unreal
    Obscure by nature and unwieldy by design, Darger's work is difficult to confront and consume; Ms. Yu has brought it a little closer, and that is as fine a public service as an art documentary can provide.
  42. The Phantom of the Opera
    Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.
  43. Meet the Fockers
    Ms. Streisand hasn't been called on to deliver an immortal or even interesting performance, but she is a pip to watch.
  44. Hotel Rwanda
    A political thriller based on fact that hammers every button on the emotional console.
  45. Imaginary Heroes
    Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.
  46. Open My Heart
    It does achieve a certain claustrophobic fascination, but never gets around to making its point.
  47. Beyond the Sea
    Beyond the Sea, with all its gaping faults, is the genuine article. It succeeds in being deeply and sincerely insincere.
  48. Flight of the Phoenix
    A moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.
  49. The Sea Inside
    The film fails to convey the claustrophobic terror experienced by a man who called his book "Letters From Hell."
  50. The Life: What's Your Pleasure?
    A tedious, not-at-all titillating exploitation film.
  51. Spanglish
    Mr. Sandler has a solid, fumbling likability, without which Spanglish would be not merely annoying but despicable in its slick complacency.
  52. The Aviator
    Visually sumptuous if disappointingly hollow account of Hughes's early life.
  53. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Mr. Silberling has made a movie that's far rougher in texture and tone than Mr. Handler's books, but while he doesn't have the author's sense of whimsy (or irony) he manages to construct a pleasantly watchable entertainment in all the spaces in the story not laid siege to by Mr. Carrey.
  54. Million Dollar Baby
    With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.
  55. Santa Smokes
    Ms. Hulslander is often charming, but Mr. Schauder's Johnny is one of those narcissistic characters whom, inexplicably, everybody in the movie adores.
  56. A Talking Picture
    In both its intellectual reach and the elegant simplicity of its form, A Talking Picture bears resemblance to Andrei Sokurov's "Russian Ark."
  57. Dolls
    With some staggeringly beautiful photography of cherry blossoms and scarlet autumn leaves, Dolls is so enthralled with its own cinematography that it can't bear to edit itself, and during the autumn and winter segments of the bound beggars' journey, it almost reaches a standstill.
  58. Ocean's Twelve
    Enjoyable, unabashedly trivial caper flick.
  59. A Tale of Two Sisters
    In a subversion of the usual horror-movie rhythm, the central secret is revealed about halfway through.
  60. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    The actor's (Murray) quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism.
  61. Shwaas
    The simplicity of the tale becomes a bit tedious.
  62. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.
  63. Blade: Trinity
    A choppy, forgetful, suspense-free romp that substitutes campy humor for chills.
  64. House of Flying Daggers
    A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving.
  65. After Midnight
    Diverting and often charming, but it never really holds together.
  66. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    This deflating documentary gives up its quest for answers too easily.
  67. Conspiracy of Silence
    Deery's modest drama is one big, obvious argument against the vow of celibacy for Roman Catholic priests, but it has heart.
  68. The Deserted Station
    If repetition has stripped Iran's post-revolutionary cinema of some of its modish luster, The Deserted Station is still a valuable addition to a literature whose characteristics are now internationally well-established.
  69. Jesus, You Know
    Tells the truth where it counts most: in its unblinking exploration of one of the most private of human experiences.
  70. WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Unfortunately, his (Schechter) uneven, unpolished documentary, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, takes on far too many antagonists.
  71. The Green Butchers
    A movie in search of a theme. Svend and Bjarne aren't bad or uninteresting characters, and certainly the two talented actors playing them are inherently watchable. But there's too little meat on these bones.
  72. The Aryan Couple
    The problem, as it is so often in well-intentioned movies of this kind, is that rather than illuminate the enormity of Nazism, The Aryan Couple trades upon our knowledge of it for emotional impact.
  73. Closer
    Unlike most movie love stories, Closer does have the virtue of unpredictability. The problem is that, while parts are provocative and forceful, the film as a whole collapses into a welter of misplaced intensity.
  74. AmnesiA
    The first feature written and directed by Martin Koolhoven. It reveals him as a skillful manipulator of disturbing visual images (much of the film is washed in inky blue) and a screenwriter adept at sustaining a mood of impending doom.
  75. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Gathers riveting, rarely seen news clips from the era into a chronology that plays like a suspenseful police drama.
  76. Purple Butterfly
    Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.
  77. Easy
    Ms. Weinstock does accomplish something quite tricky, though. She does an impressive job of capturing the brave messiness of single life, or at least of 20-something dating, and her sex scenes have a rare feel of authenticity.
  78. A Very Long Engagement
    Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.
  79. Ae Fond Kiss...
    For the most part, Paul Laverty's screenplay and the strong, naturalistic performances lend it a specificity that sets it apart.
  80. Straight-Jacket
    Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.
  81. Paper Clips
    Inspiring, but also, as a film, a little tedious, without enough narrative or exploration to justify its feature length.
  82. Notre musique
    Mr. Godard treads on dangerous ground by linking the historical suffering of Jews and the Palestinians, but his sympathy for both people is so manifest, his sense of history so deep, that the film defies reductive readings.
  83. Christmas with the Kranks
    Slick and treacherous.
  84. Alexander
    This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him.
  85. Bob, Verushka & the Pursuit of Happiness
    A cross-cultural clunker.
  86. Fear and Trembling
    Mr. Corneau, an eclectic director with a mildly perverse sensibility, turns the conflict of cultures into a psychodrama that is at once lighthearted and intense.
  87. Jandek on Corwood
    A canny look at both sides of a musical experiment. Jandek plucks out his atonal efforts, and the record-store obsessives speculate about every subtlety.
  88. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    As he (Wong Kar-wai) floods the screen with beauty and fills the soundtrack with hypnotic rhythms, he forges a filmmaking style of incomparable eroticism.
  89. National Treasure
    If National Treasure mattered at all, you might call it a national disgrace, but this piece of flotsam is so inconsequential that it amounts to little more than a piece of Hollywood accounting.
  90. Bad Education
    Bad Education is a voluptuous experience that invites you to gorge on its beauty and vitality, although it has perhaps the darkest ending of any of the films by the Spanish writer and director.
  91. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The movie itself triumphs by similar means; it is a marvel of unleashed childishness, like a birthday party on the edge of spinning out of control.
  92. Ya lyublyu tebya
    There's not much in the way of message here. Or wit. Or convincing sexual chemistry. You I Love' just wants to say that young Muscovites are wild and crazy guys and that they can laugh at capitalism's excesses.
  93. Muhammad: The Last Prophet
    In its way, a triumph of globalization, a polished, Western-style entertainment about a distinctly non-Western subject. Its message, like the Abyssinian king's, is finally one of reconciliation: we're not as different as we seem.
  94. Who Killed Bambi?
    Watching it is like a slow injection of a numbing anesthetic. It may send a chill to your heart, but along with it goes a warning signal to your brain not to believe a word of this hooey.
  95. Bright Future
    Casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cover.
  96. Little Lili
    For all its spikiness, there are hurdles that La Petite Lili cannot overcome. Abridged and abbreviated, Chekhov's leisurely philosophic reflections evoke a musty aroma of pressed flowers in a scrapbook that is out of tune with the times.
  97. Noel
    Though clearly meant as a heartwarmer in the longstanding holiday tradition, the film comes off as strange and sour.
  98. Seed of Chucky
    Most of the humor falls flat. One of the film's little joys is John Waters in a small part as a sleazy photographer who ends up having his face melted off with sulfuric acid.
  99. After the Sunset
    A jewel-heist frolic so stale it feels like a retread of a retread.
  100. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    Man, does this one make the first movie look like a masterpiece. What was Renée Zellweger thinking? It can't have been fun to put on all that weight, especially for a film as ghastly as this.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »