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. Mr 3000
    If there was any question about how well Bernie Mac's charm, demonstrated in stand-up comedy and on his Fox sitcom, would play on the big screen, the news is good: no problem.
  2. Crutch
    Self-conscious but nicely structured drama.
  3. Incident at Loch Ness
    These blatantly comic characters undercut the credibility established by Mr. Herzog's naturalistic performance, and sink the horror premise as quickly as it surfaces.
  4. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Too fixated on 1939 for its own good. Its passionate immersion in a past that only dimly resonates with younger audiences may be a badge of its integrity, but that immersion trumps its vision of the future and leaves us in a land of nostalgia.
  5. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Innocenc doesn't just reveal a wealth of visual enchantments; it restates the case that there can and should be more to feature-length animations than cheap jokes, bathos and pandering.
  6. Wimbledon
    Although Wimbledon is a much more conventional film, it still has cleverer-than-average dialogue and sharply drawn subsidiary characters.
  7. Silver City
    Nobody in it seems organically connected to anybody else. In a movie devoted to the idea that everything and everyone is connected, this is a serious failing, and it undermines Mr. Sayles's noble intentions.
  8. Unlikely Heroes
    Much of the time, unfortunately, the responsible, institutional filmmaking of Unlikely Heroes, from Moriah Films, an arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, does not do full justice to these stories.
  9. Reconstruction
    Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.
  10. Criminal
    Even with its tepid lead performance, Criminal is a clever and diverting caper film. At least, it is as long as you don't think too hard about it.
  11. Testosterone
    Makes no psychological sense. Even within the convoluted realm of film noir, the development of the relationships defies any logic.
  12. Cellular
    It's an honest, unpretentious, well-made B picture with a clever, silly premise, a handful of sly, unassuming performances and enough car chases, decent jokes and swervy plot complications to make the price of the ticket seem like a decent bargain.
  13. When Will I Be Loved
    The structure of When Will I Be Loved seems deliberately flimsy, and many of its details don't add up. But as a contemporary fable about getting and spending in the new gilded age, When Will I Be Loved strikes a chord that echoes.
  14. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    Mr. Anderson's screenplay provides a steady series of inventive action situations, and the director, Alexander Witt, makes the most of them. His work is fast, funny, smart and highly satisfying in terms of visceral impact.
  15. Evergreen
    Directed by the first-timer Enid Zentelis, Evergreen seems waterlogged with rainy-day imagery and somber moods.
  16. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    Openly polemical but also sobering documentary.
  17. A Letter to True
    It all makes for a poignant mix, the boy inside the man, pressing his nose against the glass, longing for the journalistic authenticity of someone like Burrows while still believing in Lassie and the unconditional love of True.
  18. The Private Archives of Pablo Escovar
    There is always something inherently interesting about the combination of wealth and evil, and even more intriguing about people who claim to have seen a monster's humanity.
  19. Virgin
    Ms. Kampmeier never brings her themes into tight focus. At one moment, the film is a detailed but familiar attack on smothering small towns and oppressive family structures; at another, it's a fable of feminist empowerment with an oddly fervent religious background.
  20. Remember Me, My Love
    An abrasive but innovative fusion of farce, satire and drama that blurs their boundaries in uncomfortable ways. It's a noisy movie whose characters tend to talk at medium-to-high volume.
  21. The Cookout
    Wants to be an outdoor, barbecue-grilled "Barbershop" but lacks the pungency and honesty of its prototype.
  22. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    The best case for Warriors is its cinematic time travels and its peek into the natural wildness of a long-closed countryside.
  23. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    Far more ambivalent and ambiguous film than Mr. Spielberg's. Both North and South are portrayed as brutal, abusive regimes that use their citizens as so much cannon fodder.
  24. Wicker Park
    The French original was a clever Hitchcock homage with a murder at its center. For reasons unknown, the murder plot has been dropped from the remake (though a few confusing traces of it remain), which leaves Wicker Park without much real urgency to drive its extremely contrived plot.
  25. Paparazzi
    Amazingly arrogant, immoral film.
  26. Persons of Interest
    Before the film hits its halfway mark, the presentation feels like a frustrating day at an immigration legal clinic where you can never look at the dossier or get to the bottom of the case.
  27. Rockets Redglare!
    Aimless, sometimes amiable documentary.
  28. Vanity Fair
    Vanity Fair has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream.
  29. Brothers in Arms
    Effective filmmaking, and at the moment, when a significant portion of this campaign is being fought in movie theaters, it's also effective politicking.
  30. Chooch
    Nice, but that doesn't mean the film is worth anyone's time besides those of their families, friends, neighbors and the nice man from Connecticut who let them use his restaurant.
  31. Suspect Zero
    Finally, a serial-killer movie so preposterous, so garnished with accidental laugh lines and absent essential narrative logic it may actually put a permanent kibosh on this tediously overworked crime subgenre. Here's hoping, at any rate.
  32. The Brown Bunny
    Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, The Brown Bunny is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous.
  33. Bush's Brain
    Whether or not Bush's Brain makes its case against Mr. Rove, the movie leaves you with the sickening feeling that it's no longer possible in American politics to stay out of the gutter unless, of course, you want to lose. Dirty politics work.
  34. Hero
    Filled with meticulous set pieces, including a showdown between Snow and Moon set among swirls of golden-yellow leaves, Hero is easy on the eyes, but it's too segmented to gather much momentum and too art-directed to convey much urgency.
  35. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    A programmer that once upon a time would have played on the bottom half of double bills, Anacondas has no pretensions and gets its little job done effectively, providing some small-scale laughs and chills for the late summer season.
  36. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    Villainy toward the infant class now comes from Jon Voight, descending to the depths of his 37-year-career.
  37. L.A. Twister
    Barely watchable.
  38. My Wife's Name Is Maurice
    The obvious forerunner of My Wife Maurice, is "La Cage aux Folles," a movie that is several cuts above this frantically overwrought imitator.
  39. Bright Leaves
    By the end of this reflective, wise, often hilarious movie, you feel as though he (McElwee) has slapped a huge chunk of raw, palpitating life onto the screen.
  40. End of the Century
    As End of the Century reveals even more starkly than the recent Metallica documentary, "Some Kind of Monster," harmony among band members becomes harder to sustain as the years gather, youthful enthusiasm wanes, and personalities define themselves.
  41. Almost Peaceful
    It takes talent to make audiences care about ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as it takes guts to end a movie with something as corny as the sounds of children playing.
  42. Nicotina
    While it demonstrates some formal ingenuity, it is for the most part a tasteless and derivative stew of overdone jokes, chronological tricks and labored shock effects.
  43. Rosenstrasse
    There's something unsettling when fiction exploits this history to such puny, self-interested ends.
  44. Mean Creek
    Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.
  45. Bright Young Things
    Waugh's dialogue, effortlessly catching the lockjaw intonations and facetious mannerisms of the British aristocracy between the world wars, is a gift to screenwriters and performers alike. The actors Mr. Fry has assembled receive the gift with gusto and grace.
  46. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so - in a much more dignified, documented way - does Mr. Greenwald.
  47. Red Lights
    The brilliant, sinister French thriller Red Lights is a twisty road movie in which every sign points toward catastrophe.
  48. Exorcist: The Beginning
    The risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid.
  49. Benji: Off the Leash!
    After a summer of computer-generated blockbusters, the amiably low-tech Benji: Off the Leash! seems like a breath of fresh air.
  50. Without a Paddle
    Pushes its ugly humor further than most.
  51. It's Easier for a Camel...
    The kind of exercise in semi-autobiographical reflection that is almost impossible to carry off without its seeming self-absorbed.
  52. AVP: Alien vs. Predator
    Between the Predators' dripping their glow-in-the-dark green blood and the Aliens' getting their rubber cement mucous all over everything, this is certainly a very sticky movie, though not, ultimately, a very frightening or commanding one.
  53. The Leopard (re-release)
    For the most part, Nino Rota's music provides a rich melodic surrounding for the pictorial magnificence, and a heretofore unknown Verdi waltz that is played at the ball at the finish appropriately supplements this remarkably vivid, panoramic, and eventually morbid show. (Review of Original Release)
  54. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Compassionate though it is, this is not a movie that offers much in the way of solace. It insists that there is no end to human weakness, and not much cure for it either. That's pretty strong stuff.
  55. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
    The character designs are flat and derivative, the backgrounds crude and uninviting, and the movements jerky and minimal. It's a sad excuse for a movie, but then, it isn't really meant to be one. It's a commercial with a ticket price.
  56. Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.
  57. Danny Deckchair
    A pleasantly sappy fable of new beginnings that suggests a Frank Capra film sweetened with an extra layer of sugar glaze.
  58. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Mr. Marshall, is not much of a film director. Depending on the budget, his movies look either cheap (like this one) or studio slick ("Pretty Woman"), and tend to have the same flat, presentational visual style that's familiar from most sitcoms.
  59. Bang Rajan
    No classic, but neither is it a joke.
  60. Last Life in the Universe
    May seem frustratingly elusive at times, but it's a rewarding film that's beautiful to look at.
  61. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Outfoxed will inevitably be discussed in the same breath (or with the same hyperventilating rage) as Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' but it lacks both the showmanship and the scope of that incendiary film.
  62. Stander
    Loses some its bearings once it turns into a caper movie. The movie hardly bothers to explain the mechanics of the jailbreak or of the robberies themselves, which take place in a flurry of disguises and stickups that has a Keystone Kops flavor.
  63. Code 46
    The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.
  64. Little Black Book
    Offering few laughs and a climactic scene of breathtaking cruelty, this plot-heavy movie, directed by Nick Hurran from a screenplay by Melissa Carter and Elisa Bell, draws you into its malignant force field against your will.
  65. Open Water
    The sharks are scary, and the ocean is vast and indifferent, but the most effective parts of Open Water, which is ultimately too modest to be very memorable, evoke a deeper terror, one that can chill even those viewers who would never dream of putting on a wet suit and jumping off a boat.
  66. Collateral
    Pitched between interludes of anxious intimacy and equally nerve-shredding set pieces, Collateral scores its points with underhand precision.
  67. L'autre monde
    Working in broad, often melodramatic strokes, Mr. Allouache paints a deeply pessimistic portrait of his native country.
  68. Festival Express
    To watch the biggest stars of their time in casual conversation, trading riffs and passing bottles, without benefit of publicists, handlers and security goons is to relive an innocent, anarchic time in the entertainment business when music, not marketing, was at the center of the enterprise.
  69. Gozu
    Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.
  70. Gender Bias
    Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.
  71. Thunderbirds
    A standard, gadget-crazed exercise in whiz-bang adventure with its tongue lodged deep inside its cheek.
  72. The Village
    The film's ridiculousness would not be so irksome if Mr. Shyamalan did not take his sleight of hand so seriously, if he did not insist on dressing this scary, silly, moderately clever fairy tale in a somber cloak of allegory.
  73. Intimate Strangers
    Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.
  74. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    The chemistry between the two is as old as Abbott and Costello. Harold is the sensible worried one, and Kumar zany and reckless. The movie's funniest moments, set at Princeton University, caricature and then demolish the image of Asian-Americans as nerdy, sexless bookworms incapable of fun.
  75. The Manchurian Candidate
    A political thriller that manages to be at once silly and clever, buoyantly satirical and sneakily disturbing, but he (Demme) has recovered some of the lightness and sureness of touch that had faded from his movies after "The Silence of the Lambs."
  76. Proteus
    Tricked up with an elaborate flashback structure, subtitled dialogue in three languages and as many gratuitous aesthetic touches as the traffic will bear, Proteus emerges as a heavy, pretentious and derivative film.
  77. Daughters of the Sun
    With her shaved head and staring eyes, Aman actually looks as if she had been stripped entirely of her sexuality, like a Holocaust victim. What does seem certain is that a bootleg print of "Yentl" is still making its way through Iran's filmmaking underground, leaving a wide trail of influence behind it.
  78. She Hate Me
    Spike Lee carries his political exasperation beyond outrage into chaos. The carelessness with which he hurls his feelings about hot-button topics onto the screen is the filmmaking equivalent of last-ditch marketing: grab everything in sight, roll it up into a big messy mud ball, and hurl it against the wall, hoping that something sticks.
  79. Garden State
    Small, smart, off-kilter comedy.
  80. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.
  81. Orwell Rolls in His Grave
    Less a formal documentary than a rambling screed.
  82. Catwoman
    A howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless style.
  83. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Smoothly incorporates archival material, including scenes of Mr. Zinn's public appearances, interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan and Alice Walker (his student at Spelman). Matt Damon also reads well-chosen excerpts from Mr. Zinn's writing.
  84. A Home at the End of the World
    In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.
  85. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.
  86. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.
  87. The Bourne Supremacy
    This is high-speed action realism carried off with the dexterity of a magician pulling a hundred rabbits out of a hat in one graceful gesture. The crowning flourish is an extended car chase through the streets and tunnels of Moscow that ranks as one of the three or four most exciting demolition derbies ever filmed.
  88. Free Radicals
    Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.
  89. Nola
    A movie that pits a substantial actor like Mary McDonnell, playing a New York madam, against a bogus story that crossbreeds noirish affectations and romantic comedy into an unpalatable mush that suggests strawberry ice cream slathered with beer.
  90. Make a Wish
    If Make a Wish is meant to be a parody, it lacks one essential element: humor. If it's meant to be a horror movie, it lacks the corresponding qualities of shock and suspense. It's almost enough to make "Friday the 13th" look like a masterpiece. Almost.
  91. Zhou Yu de huo che
    Comes to seem less a movie than a memory of movies -- or, at worst, a commercial Frankenstein's monster, sewn together to fill a perceived gap in the market.
  92. A Cinderella Story
    Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.
  93. Maria Full of Grace
    Sustains a documentary authenticity that is as astonishing as it is offhand. Even when you're on the edge of your seat, it never sacrifices a calm, clear-sighted humanity for the sake of melodrama or cheap moralizing.
  94. Touch of Pink
    Except for the piquant garnish of Mr. MacLachlan, the movie, written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid, is barely a cut above an amateur production. The attempts at humor fizzle, and the performances are wooden and overstated.
  95. I, Robot
    Lacks both the intellectual rigor and the soulful sublimity of "A.I.," but it nonetheless allows some genuine ideas and emotions to pop up amid the noise and clutter.
  96. Flavors
    Bright, good-spirited and blissfully short.
  97. Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
    The skills on display in Freestyle are too varied and idiosyncratic for one movie to contain, but this one at least offers a heady, rousing education in an art form that is too often misunderstood.
  98. Let's Get Frank
    Has no interest in exploring Mr. Frank's family background or love life. This frustrating lack of context leaves you wanting a lot more in the way of texture.
  99. The Door in the Floor
    Surely the best movie yet made from Mr. Irving's fiction. It may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that are better than the books on which they are based.
  100. Planet Earth: Dreams
    Isn't very successful at evoking the dream state, but does a good job of inducing it.
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