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. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster
    You realize you are witnessing a psychodrama of novelistic intricacy and epic scope.
  2. The Inheritance
    As the relentlessly morose movie shows, a corporate hero is not the same thing as a humanitarian; in many ways, he's the antithesis.
  3. Sleepover
    A wispy pubescent comedy.
  4. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    More amusing than annoying. It is not as maniacally uninhibited as "Old School" or as dementedly lovable as "Elf," but its cheerful dumbness is hard to resist.
  5. Riding Giants
    Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.
  6. Afraid of Everything
    The writer and director, David Barker, discards the didactic tone of so much American independent filmmaking in favor of a character study that leads to no easy conclusions.
  7. King Arthur
    Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.
  8. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.
  9. America's Heart and Soul
    A feel-good documentary.
  10. The Clearing
    Mr. Brugge has perhaps succeeded in avoiding vulgar melodrama, but he has hit on something far worse -- a bloodless melodrama, with bottled water running in its veins.
  11. Before Sunset
    The script of Before Sunset is both rambling and self-conscious, and at times it has the self-important sound of clever writing. But though it is sometimes maddening, the movie's prodigious verbiage is also enthralling.
  12. De-Lovely
    A movie so lifeless and drained of genuine joie de vivre it makes you long for the largely fictional earlier film.
  13. Spider-Man 2
    Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.
  14. The Path to Love
    Doesn't add much to the coming-out genre, as it has been established in countless Sundance competition films and made-for-television movies.
  15. The Notebook
    The scenes between the young lovers confronting adult authority have the same seething tension and lurking hysteria that the young Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood brought more than 40 years ago to their roles in "Splendor in the Grass."
  16. The Intended
    The performances are so skillful that the actors almost carry it off. But as the shocks come thicker and faster, the credibility of The Intended, wears away.
  17. Kaena: The Prophecy
    Has no local cultural history behind it. Its secondhand imagery and ideas seem to have barely involved its makers; it definitely does not involve its audience.
  18. Time of the Wolf
    You can feel frightened and disturbed by this movie without being especially moved by it.
  19. Two Brothers
    Yes, it's all terribly hokey. But once you accept the premise as a conceit that allows the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, to offer an intimate, utopian vision of the animal kingdom, Two Brothers succeeds as an inspirational pastorale and passionate moral brief for animal rights and preservation.
  20. White Chicks
    Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent American comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract.
  21. Fahrenheit 9/11
    While Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be properly debated on the basis of its factual claims and cinematic techniques, it should first of all be appreciated as a high-spirited and unruly exercise in democratic self-expression.
  22. Born to Be Blind
    Born to Be Blind, for all its haphazard structure, takes you about as far inside Maria's world as a film could reasonably be expected to go, but at moments it also feels uncomfortably exploitative.
  23. Ghostlight
    Represents something new under the sun: sincere camp.
  24. Saints and Sinners
    For an outside observer, Saints and Sinners doesn't make particularly compelling viewing, but Ms. Honor has given her subjects an excellent present on their big day: the ultimate wedding video.
  25. Swing
    A sweet, sincere labor of love that just isn't very good.
  26. The Hunting of the President
    In a misguided attempt to break up the monotonous flow of talking heads, the filmmakers have inserted oddly chosen clips from newsreels and public-domain features, meant to illustrate abstract concepts (like eavesdropping or government) while generating some low-level laughs.
  27. Facing Windows
    Despite its surreal touches and an improbable story that piles on the metaphors, the movie, which has a rich, honey-dripping score by Andrea Guerra, maintains a tone of refined heart-tugging realism.
  28. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.
  29. Father and Son
    Like a dream within a dream. Its images and emotions are vivid, disquieting and also hermetic, and while it may frustrate your desire for clear storytelling and psychological transparency, it has an intensity that surpasses understanding.
  30. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    "Croupier," the director's comeback film of 2000, which also starred Mr. Owen, is a riskier, more interesting exercise in English noir than I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, but the new film, whose title comes from a Warren Zevon song, nonetheless serves as a fine stylistic showpiece.
  31. The Terminal
    Rarely have I been so acutely aware of a movie's softness and sentimentality, and rarely have I minded less. Some of the credit surely goes to Mr. Hanks...His performance is so easy and amiable that its nuances emerge only in retrospect.
  32. What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
    Once upon a time this was known as "the power of positive thinking," and it didn't involve nearly so much math.
  33. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Nobody eviscerates the scary depths of male narcissism with such ferocity, and it is a huge relief to find Mr. Stiller flexing his oiled, low-comedy triceps with such vengeful glee.
  34. À cause d'un garçon
    Well-meaning and hopelessly bland, You'll Get Over It, instantly drops into the tone of didactic realism that rules most television fiction, drawing easy moral lessons from a scrubbed-up simulacrum of everyday, middle-class life.
  35. Grand Theft Parsons
    Parsons himself might have written a surreal, funny-sad ballad about the aftermath of his own death, but Grand Theft Parsons is little more than a surreal anecdote, told in too much detail and without enough soul or imagination to make anything more than a footnote to a legend.
  36. Bound for Pleasure
    It's all oddly sweet, and, for the viewer at least, more than a little dull.
  37. Around the World in 80 Days
    Despite its contemporary touches Around the World in 80 Days is a satisfying slice of old-fashioned storybook entertainment.
  38. Anonymous
    The real love story here may be between Todd the exhibitionist and Mr. Verow the voyeur, peeping in on his character's activities. They look to have a long and happy future together.
  39. Word Wars
    The film demands patience with grainy photography, garage-band power chords and eye-straining alphabetic jumbles. It's neither easy viewing nor easy living: the game has worn these men down to a childlike state, which makes them ultimately compelling.
  40. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    Anyone who attended Broadway shows in the days when ticket prices were reasonable and the actors and singers performed without amplification will feel a rush of nostalgia as these troupers offer what amounts to a breezy compilation of after-dinner remarks.
  41. The Chronicles of Riddick
    The action is so frenetic that the ominous mood isn't allowed to penetrate, and this time the human factor is all but erased.
  42. The Stepford Wives
    It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.
  43. Garfield
    That Garfield speaks in the supercilious, world-weary drawl of Bill Murray is some small consolation, as are a few of the animal tricks.
  44. Napoleon Dynamite
    The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.
  45. Imelda
    As a personality study Imelda is a devastating portrait of how power begets self-delusion. It must be said, however, that through it all Mrs. Marcos exudes considerable charm and even a flickering sense of humor.
  46. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Lovely, uncomplicated though limited movie.
  47. Deadline
    Not as dynamic as it should be, given the punch of the story it tells, but it makes its points.
  48. The Corporation
    The Corporation is a dense, complicated and thought-provoking film, but it simplifies its title character.
  49. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    This film may disappoint some dogmatic Old Hogwartsians: a few plot points have been sacrificed, and Mr. Cuarón does not seem to care much for Quidditch. But it more than compensates for these lapses with its emotional force and visual panache.
  50. I'll Sing for You
    Informal, pleasant film that ably captures Mr. Traoré's spirit.
  51. Firedancer
    It is a sincere, thoughtful work, though not a very accomplished one.
  52. Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer
    It becomes hard to tell just what Castaneda was advocating, apart from the liberal use of psychedelic drugs.
  53. Bukowski: Born into This
    Definitive and engrossing documentary.
  54. Soul Plane
    Not everyone will be thrilled by the movie, which is one long dirty (and occasionally very funny) joke.
  55. Saved!
    It has a bright young cast and a clever, eclectic soundtrack, but the tone veers unsteadily from mockery to preachiness, and the story loses its breath, hopping from one clumsily paced scene to the next.
  56. The Mother
    The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.
  57. Baadasssss!
    Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.
  58. The Day After Tomorrow
    The glacierization of half of the world's inhabited land is contemplated with barely a hint of horror. In fact, it looks kind of cool.
  59. Union Square
    Mr. Szklarski doesn't seem to have a strong point of view on his material. Too often, the film drifts into a kind of passive voyeurism, offering the unhappy spectacle of these wasted lives without perspective and without hope.
  60. Wake
    Instantly forgettable film.
  61. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Good-natured, mildly appealing video feature.
  62. The Five Obstructions
    Watching The Five Obstructions is at once like witnessing two chess masters playing dominoes and like spying on a series of therapy sessions. Mr. von Trier clearly sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst.
  63. Raising Helen
    A soft-hearted, squishy-minded prototype for a network sitcom, is mildly ingratiating but never laugh-out-loud funny. Even Ms. Hudson's intrepid radiance can't camouflage the premise's leaky foundation.
  64. My Mother Likes Women
    As My Mother Likes Women gallops along, it picks up speed and takes its characters on a whirlwind tour of Prague before rushing back home. As it accelerates, its texture thins and its story turns strained and eager to please. But it never loses its cheeky sense of humor about love and the havoc it can wreak.
  65. Stateside
    An unsalvageable mess.
  66. Love Me If You Dare
    Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.
  67. Control Room
    Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.
  68. Twist
    In both Twist and "Idaho," the act of placing a larger-than-life literary figure in a constrained, narrowly naturalistic environment merely strips the characters of their scale and interest.
  69. The Youth
    Mr. Ratnam is a dynamic, natural filmmaker who happily uses every device at his disposal, from rapid-fire MTV editing to sped-up action scenes that recall silent serials, to keep his lengthy film moving at a brisk pace. The film flags only when Mr. Ratnam must turn his attention to the soggy romantic subplots.
  70. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    Mr. Rithy Panh makes telling use of a survivor whose ability to communicate lends itself to the subject. The tragedy is that Mr. Vann Nath's powers are used to illuminate these horrors.
  71. Shrek 2
    Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.
  72. With All Deliberate Speed
    Mr. Gilbert wants a movie with both a golden glow and a corrosive center, something he has not quite achieved here.
  73. Carandiru
    Exudes a throbbing flesh-and-blood intensity so compelling that it's impossible to avert your eyes.
  74. Breakin' All the Rules
    The actor's (Jamie Foxx) deft touch lends the flighty story of mistaken identities and romantic mix-ups among mostly African-American characters in Los Angeles the kind of saucy bounce that Cary Grant lent to similar roles six decades ago.
  75. A Slipping-Down Life
    A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.
  76. Strayed
    It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.
  77. Springtime in a Small Town
    As Mark Li Ping-bing's beautiful cinematography observes the change of season, the movie becomes a broader meditation on rebirth, and how, in the language of T. S. Eliot, April, the month that stirs such hopes for the future, is also "the cruellest month" for awakening such keen desire.
  78. The 24th Day
    Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.
  79. Coffee and Cigarettes
    The implication that beauty and meaning can be found in odd places at unlikely, idle moments resonates through this lovely film.
  80. Troy
    For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.
  81. The Mudge Boy
    Depending on your choice, the film is either an unpleasantly masochistic fantasy or an unpleasantly sadistic one.
  82. Valentin
    The film feels authentic only during the scenes between Valentín and his selfish, angry father.
  83. Oasis
    The remarkable if overlong Korean film Oasis strips away much of the sentimentality and goody-two-shoes attitudes that the movies traditionally display toward disabled people.
  84. Super Size Me
    Goes down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.
  85. Van Helsing
    Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills.
  86. Seeing Other People
    There is enough discomfort on display to reinforce the cynical adage that sex is God's joke.
  87. New York Minute
    Polished and bouncy without being overly mawkish or unduly obnoxious. Above all, it is short.
  88. A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
    A cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.
  89. Superstar in a Housedress
    This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.
  90. The Clay Bird
    Easily one of the finest pictures of 2003 or any other year.
  91. Bulgarian Lovers
    Superbly acted, without a trace of coyness and with considerable heat.
  92. Laws of Attraction
    Laws of Attraction, like the somewhat better "Intolerable Cruelty," seems desperately unsure of itself at crucial moments.
  93. Since Otar Left
    Sustains a perfect balance of pathos, humor and a clear-headed realism. One tiny misstep, and it could have tumbled into an abyss of tears.
  94. Godsend
    The picture, which fails to achieve its ambitions or to fulfill our expectations, is ultimately worse than a violent piece of hack work, in which the director isn't interested in displaying his integrity -- or taste. You'd be better off downloading the trailer: a much more convincing piece of storytelling.
  95. Envy
    Squandered in foolish horseplay and on a story that zigzags so far out of control that it feels as if the screenwriter, Steve Adams, pasted together a bunch of zany notions in a frantic search for confusion.
  96. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    A high-minded, lethally dull biography of the legendary golfer Bobby Jones.
  97. The Saddest Music in the World
    Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.
  98. Mean Girls
    The director, Mark Waters, working with a smart casting team, has assembled a superb group of players. Scene by scene you can't help being impressed by Mean Girls; it's like a group of sketches linked by a theme, with some playing much better than others.
  99. People Say I'm Crazy
    Very well edited by Laura C. Murray and set to an effective score by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, People Say I'm Crazy is a small film but an extremely affecting one.
  100. Justice
    Generally low-key and likable, thanks mainly to a talented cast.
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