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. Kinsey
    Mr. Condon's great achievement is to turn Kinsey's complicated and controversial career into a grand intellectual drama.
  2. Veer-Zaara
    If Veer-Zaara were an American television movie, it would be embraced as fabulously trashy.
  3. Finding Neverland
    A handsome-looking film about the writer and his unripe inspirations, the actor Johnny Depp neither soars nor crashes, but moseys forward with vague purpose and actorly restraint.
  4. New Guy
    New Guy isn't the first movie to get laughs from the bloodless milieu of contemporary corporate life. But it may be the first to offer a frightening glimpse of the actual blood pulsing beneath.
  5. Overnight
    Any movie that makes you root against the underdog, though, is cause for suspicion, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Montana, perhaps aware of this, try belatedly to restore Mr. Duffy's status as a victim.
  6. The Polar Express
    A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology.
  7. Callas Forever
    A lip-synching hall of mirrors, it is essentially a piece of highbrow karaoke.
  8. Fade to Black
    Even if the film could use some trimming, its hip-hop splendor proves hype-worthy.
  9. Brother to Brother
    Filled with ideas and some nice acting, particularly from Mr. Mackie and Mr. Robinson, both of whom hold the screen easily, Mr. Evans has crammed a great deal of thought and a lot of obvious feeling into his first dramatic feature.
  10. Cachorro
    At the end, Bear Cub does have a brush with sentimentality. But by then, its integrity and low-key truthfulness has been certified in a dozen different ways.
  11. Alfie
    The comedy in Alfie is plentiful but bittersweet, and the character's bad behavior pleases more than it repels, principally because the star Jude Law's beauty and easy charm go a long way to softening the edges.
  12. The Incredibles
    Because it is so visually splendid and ethically serious, the movie raises hopes it cannot quite satisfy. It comes tantalizingly close to greatness, but seems content, in the end, to fight mediocrity to a draw.
  13. Farmingville
    Though it has the slight, informal feel of a made-for-television documentary shot on video, Farmingville is an unusually sensitive and sophisticated piece of investigative journalism.
  14. A Silent Love
    Ultimately, A Silent Love transcends its problem-play situation to ponder how the best laid plans for an arranged marriage are no match against the vicissitudes of passion in a romantically besotted culture.
  15. Voices of Iraq
    If this film cannot claim to represent the political "truth" about the war - what film could? - it certainly provides a broad glimpse of daily life in Iraq.
  16. It's All About Love
    A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.
  17. Malevolence
    Malevolence will lead Halloween-inspired viewers into this dark place for some palpitations, but the thrills will come from sheer density of gruesome images, not from frightfully new ideas.
  18. Enduring Love
    Mr. Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.
  19. Birth
    Without Ms. Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.
  20. Saw
    Does a better-than-average job of conveying the panic and helplessness of men terrorized by a sadist in a degrading environment, but it is still not especially scary.
  21. Ray
    While not a great movie, is a very good movie about greatness, in which celebrating the achievement of one major artist becomes the occasion for the emergence of another.
  22. 800 Bullets
    Entirely too well-behaved.
  23. Magnifico
    Modest but engaging Filipino tear-jerker.
  24. Home of the Brave
    Includes familiar film of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and of demonstrators in Birmingham being attacked with fire hoses, but it distinguishes itself with touching film of Jim Liuzzo and his children being interviewed and of political leaders of the day.
  25. Sideways
    Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.
  26. Stella Street
    The concept doesn't translate well to the longer form. The sense of the absurd is watered down.
  27. Fish Without a Bicycle
    Isn't totally without humor or insight.
  28. Happy Hour
    Throughout Happy Hour, observations that mean next to nothing are presented as nuggets of profound enlightenment.
  29. Undertow
    As with the 70's films of Terrence Malick, one of Undertow's producers, the more intoxicated it becomes with rural desolation and fecundity, the more deeply in touch it puts you with its characters' souls.
  30. The Manson Family
    Finally, though, Mr. Van Bebber seems more interested in recreating the grainy look of scratched 1970's film stock than in reflecting on the horrors he depicts, making this a difficult sell for all but the strongest stomachs among connoisseurs of vintage gore.
  31. Lightning in a Bottle
    Remarkable concert documentary.
  32. Postmen in the Mountains
    It is an endearing, likable film, though its benign surface may cover some subtle propaganda on behalf of China's centralized government.
  33. The Machinist
    May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.
  34. The Grudge
    Less scary than creepy, The Grudge may have lost some oomph in the translation from Japanese to English, and the desire for a PG-13 rating probably muted the violence and perhaps the scares.
  35. Surviving Christmas
    As you watch the comedy lurch along, the woozy, sinking sensation it produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of that spiked eggnog.
  36. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    Less savvy propagandists than Mr. Moore, the Celsius 41.11 filmmakers apply their thesis with a trowel.
  37. Sex Is Comedy
    The result is a minor, meandering film.
  38. P.S.
    What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense.
  39. The Final Cut
    The core of the movie is a satirical political thriller that juxtaposes dual points of view that could be described in cinematic terms as "It's a Wonderful Life" versus "Chinatown." The digressions should have been pared away.
  40. Moolaadé
    To skip Moolaade would be to miss an opportunity to experience the embracing, affirming, world-changing potential of humanist cinema at its finest.
  41. Eulogy
    The screenplay is closer in tone to an uneasy mixture of post-"Seinfeld" bile and unfocused Altmanesque satirical misanthropy. Partly because the story's structure is so haphazard, most of the jokes land with a thud.
  42. Being Julia
    Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.
  43. Hair Show
    Ultimately, the coiffure competition serves as a gaudy, cheerful distraction from a plot that becomes plodding and a sister act that makes you wish for some peacekeeping brothers.
  44. Saints and Soldiers
    Thanks to an impressive cast of largely unknown actors, this small-scale, meticulously researched film tells its story with quiet conviction.
  45. Shall We Dance
    An old- fashioned feel-good fantasy that piles on the euphoria.
  46. Team America: World Police
    Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.
  47. In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    A cinematic canonization that presents the 40th president as the 20th century's godsend.
  48. The Scandal
    Given that Untold Scandal is, like its predecessor, an epic story of spreading displeasure, the director's ability to keep it from feeling petty is a major feat.
  49. Vera Drake
    The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.
  50. Around the Bend
    A heavily padded, thinly conceived, well-meaning movie.
  51. Vodka Lemon
    The thicket of relationships that the director, Hiner Saleem, has created and weaves his cast and camera through is so invitingly hotblooded and crowded with hilariously melodramatic incident that the snowbanks are not nearly as forbidding as they initially seem.
  52. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    If the film's old-movie homages are affectionate, they're slavishly imitative and scattershot, and the story is so willfully daffy that not even the hint of a subtext asserts itself. The film rides on the dubious assumption that camp and infantilism are the same thing.
  53. Go Further
    Mr. Harrelson seems appealingly goodhearted, but his naïve idealism leaves him always on the edge of self-parody.
  54. The Hillside Strangler
    Relentlessly unpleasant film.
  55. Silent Water
    Silent Waters is several different movies, and most of them feel negligible and meandering, until the film finally packs a wallop.
  56. Stage Beauty
    As drama, Stage Beauty is both timorous and ungainly, words that might also describe Ms. Danes's performance.
  57. Friday Night Lights
    Uplifting and troubling, partly because it is more honest than most sports movies about the high cost and short life span of high school football glory.
  58. Primer
    At a certain point, Mr. Carruth's fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.
  59. Raise Your Voice
    Ms. Duff's screen presence and the film's infectious high spirits will make this piece of fluff appealing to young moviegoers without conveying any sinister messages
  60. The Child I Never Was
    The film is airless and mirthless, but it's hardly worthless; in fact in many ways it's more purposeful than the snuff-film scenes of an average "CSI" episode.
  61. Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate
    A documentary 10 times as engrossing as the film that is its subject.
  62. Arna's Children
    Has the makings of a great documentary, but a subject as complex as this demands greater rigor, deeper intelligence and a sense of dialectics.
  63. The Card Player
    The film unfolds as a tired, thoroughly conventional police procedural that might as well be titled "CSI: Roma."
  64. Tarnation
    Certainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence.
  65. Taxi
    A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.
  66. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Going Upriver is a small, valuable contribution to the continuing project of sorting out and making sense of Vietnam, a war that, among other things, opened a fissure at the heart of American liberalism that has yet to heal.
  67. Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
    Artistry is not the inevitable outcome, and fluffy costumes and French location shoots are the only production elements that don't seem wholly amateurish.
  68. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Never backing off from big, emotional moments, but also fleshing out the necessary transitions between them, he has realized his finest movie. It's a renaissance for Mr. Schultz, who seems to be speaking with his own voice after all these years.
  69. Dig!
    If universities ever start graduate programs in rock stardom, Dig! will surely be a cornerstone of the curriculum, for it works as both an instruction manual and a cautionary tale.
  70. Shark Tale
    Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.
  71. I Heart Huckabees
    The film is a snort-out-loud-funny master class of controlled chaos.
  72. Ladder 49
    What makes this nonsense more galling than usual is that while Ladder 49 might have started out as a heartfelt attempt to honor those in the line of literal fire, it weighs in as an attempt to exploit their post-Sept. 11 symbolism.
  73. Unconstitutional
    Use experts and eyewitnesses to less rousing effect than Michael Moore has. Sometimes their arguments inspire unintended doubts about the alleged abuses.
  74. The Cloud of Unknowing
    It takes skill to drain a perfectly good story like that of all intrigue and momentum, but Richard Sylvarnes, a photographer who directed the movie, manages to pull it off.
  75. Incantato
    The film serves up all the splendor of Bologna, and then an ending that is baloney.
  76. The Yes Men
    Diverting if heavily padded, this is the newest addition to an increasingly crowded field of political nonfiction films and certainly the easiest viewing.
  77. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Ultimately, the adored candidate looks as if she were really running for posterity, not for the presidency - a noble, lesser accomplishment.
  78. Blissfully Yours
    Marks the emergence of one of the more original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years.
  79. The Raspberry Reich
    Revolting and hilarious satire.
  80. Moog
    At the very least, Moog should persuade you that the history of music over the last century is as much a story of technology and sound as a family tree of stylistic influences. It's a very useful reminder.
  81. First Daughter
    Plays more like a nightmare than a dream, and an exceedingly unnerving one at that. Sam isn't just a prisoner of her parents' ambitions; like nearly everyone else in this film, she's a zombie, sleepwalking through life while Rome burns.
  82. A Dirty Shame
    I object to A Dirty Shame not because it is offensive - to do so would be another way of congratulating Mr. Waters for his bogus daring - but because it is boring. Beyond offering a catalog of interesting practices and lampooning their dedicated practitioners, the movie has very little to say about sex.
  83. Rick
    The belated sentimentality of the movie is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
  84. Mind the Gap
    Mr. Schaeffer takes his time cryptically setting up his characters' situations in the film. When they finally start moving toward one another and revealing their secrets, the revelations flow like diet soda.
  85. The Last Shot
    Laborious and logy when it should be madcap and effervescent.
  86. The Forgotten
    In the preposterous thriller The Forgotten, a pseudospiritual, mumbo-jumbo, science-fiction inflected mess, the director Joseph Ruben does not just fail to tap into Ms. Moore's talent; he barely gets her attention.
  87. Infernal Affairs
    The sophistication of the stylized minimalism here in Infernal Affairs is dazzling.
  88. Shaun of the Dead
    By treating the genre as a joke, this satire, whose title plays off George A. Romero's 1979 golden oldie, "Dawn of the Dead," yields ironic dramatic dividends.
  89. Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell is more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who, having stripped down to the nitty-gritty once too often, may finally have nothing left to show.
  90. The Motorcycle Diaries
    Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding, the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty.
  91. September Tapes
    Maybe Mr. Johnston, who has directed television commercials and music videos, intended this to be a guessing game. But the method robs the real encounters of their power and, even more important, trivializes the subject.
  92. Hollywood Buddha
    In Hollywood Buddha, Mr. Caland plays, directs and reimagines himself. This is truly a vanity project, as evidenced by the ample amount of screen time he gives his own pecs and thighs.
  93. The Take
    A stirring, idealistic documentary that examines the grass-roots cooperative movement in financially devastated Argentina, raises basic questions about economics, government and human nature.
  94. Story of the Eye
    It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, "A Chronicle of Corpses."
  95. Cowboys & Angels
    The coming-of-age story about the corruptions of the big city has been done a few thousand times, but at least this one offers a fresh mix of open-minded intelligence and a heartfelt point of view.
  96. Merci Docteur Rey
    Strains to be the ne plus ultra of arch, hyper-sophisticated fun, but the laughs are few.
  97. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    Has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still.
  98. Particles of Truth
    Tense and tiresome.
  99. Head in the Clouds
    This pulpy, sex-drenched wartime epic seems frivolous, quaint and foolishly prurient.
  100. Zelary
    It has a familiar, lived-in feel, and if its observations of rural life at a time of political turmoil don't feel terribly original, they are nonetheless absorbing and sometimes powerful.
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