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. Catch That Kid
    Mr. Freundlich's naturalistic sensibility gets in the way of the film's broad fantasy elements, turning what might have been a stylized romp like Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" into something a little too real for comfort.
  2. The Return
    At once highly naturalistic and dreamily abstract, playing out its mythic themes through vibrantly detailed characterizations (and remarkable performances by the entire cast). The Return announces the arrival of a major new talent.
  3. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.
  4. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.
  5. Blind Shaft
    Deftly swings to a spartan, engrossing climax, and the final twists spell out what the murderers are made of and the setting responsible for creating them. It is a true piece of film magic.
  6. On the Run
    There are some scenes that display impressive technical cunning, and others that show an astute regard for the emotional capacities of his able cast, but On the Run amounts to a sullen display of skill in a dubious cause.
  7. The Perfect Score
    A thin, pleasant teenage heist comedy with a chewy nugget of social criticism buried inside it.
  8. Latter Days
    Works in the end because of its commitment to its characters and a handful of fine performances.
  9. The Big Bounce
    The usual double-crosses and convolutions ensue, but the narrative is so haphazard that the whole thing -- both the caper and the movie that contains it -- seems to have been hastily improvised.
  10. You Got Served
    Will probably keep its core audience of suburban teenagers mildly entertained for the course of its 93 minutes. Urban grumps, however, may be distracted by Mr. Stokes's annoyingly overedited execution of the dance sequences.
  11. Eat This New York
    The directors Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack may not be great filmmakers -- it's hard to tell, based on this bare-bones picture -- but they know a great story, and more important, how to tell it.
  12. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    A 1950's movie magazine fantasy dressed up just enough to pass for contemporary.
  13. Touching the Void
    This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material.
  14. The Butterfly Effect
    Inhabited by a genuine spirit of cruelty, both toward its characters and its audience.
  15. Made-Up
    Its warm, occasionally off-putting individuality is more like what you look for in a friend than in a movie, and like a friend it invites you to see the unique beauty that lies under its superficial flaws.
  16. Empathy
    The director's seriousness and intelligence are evident, but so is her satisfaction in displaying them, and the movie has a self-indulgent, undisciplined tone that nearly obscures its provocative ideas.
  17. Teacher's Pet
    Marvelously quick-witted and gloriously goofy hand-drawn feature shows there's still more than 21 grams of life left in the form.
  18. Torque
    By Monday, Torque will look like a period piece with its expiration date, January 2004, prominently displayed. The inevitable movie-inspired video game will appear more realistic.
  19. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    The man who emerges is a likable, unpretentious musical enthusiast and roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solver who apparently led a charmed life.
  20. The Tracker
    These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.
  21. Along Came Polly
    The spectacle of two mature stars forced to grovel in the bathroom for cheap laughs is pathetic.
  22. Tokyo Godfathers
    For all its echoes of Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin (as well as Ford), the movie is also a love letter to modern Tokyo, whose alleyways and skyscrapers are drafted with flawless precision and tinted with tenderness and warmth.
  23. Cuba: Island of Music
    The material isn't organized in any formal way but works as a mosaic that has the feel of a jam session.
  24. My Baby's Daddy
    Having established its premise and set in motion an overloaded plot, the picture lurches this way and that, evoking more restlessness than laughter and more boredom than pathos.
  25. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Presents itself as an anguished brief against capital punishment, especially the execution of people who are legally insane...But the timing of its release smacks of the very exploitation that Mr. Bloomfield condemns.
  26. Chasing Liberty
    The lack of narrative sophistication allows an Ecstasy-like disposition to set in; "Liberty" becomes goo-goo eyed over itself. It lacks the discipline to define Anna sufficiently; rather, it portrays her as either a lovable naïf or a spoiled narcissist in desperate need of a lesson.
  27. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Except for the access the director, David Teboul, had to Mr. Saint Laurent's inner circle, "Times" wouldn't be out of place on A&E.
  28. Secret Things
    There is no denying the force of Mr. Brisseau's bizarre imagination and the personal conviction he brings to it.
  29. Millennium Mambo
    Despite its artistry, it seems to last nearly a millennium.
  30. Japanese Story
    Ultimately too thin for its length and too dependent on easy assumptions about its characters. But it does demonstrate that Ms. Collette is more than able to carry a movie, and it leaves you hoping she will soon have another chance to do it.
  31. The Company
    Enjoyably lithe and droll yet somehow almost water-soluble; it seems to dissolve onscreen.
  32. Paycheck
    Surprisingly . . . ept given that it is basically a dumb movie about smart people. This smooth but bland thriller may be the best we could expect from such a collaboration.
  33. The Young Black Stallion
    Joins the small pool of films that have dared to use Imax to tell a story.
  34. Cold Mountain
    The result is a mountain of honest, nourishing corn, a lavish evocation of simplicity that, for all its showy sophistication, has an appealing emotional directness. For all its sweep and scope and movie-star magic, Cold Mountain is studded with fine small moments and deft supporting performances.
  35. Cheaper by the Dozen
    A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.
  36. Peter Pan
    Mr. Hogan understands both themes, and his filmmaking style is a perfect mixture of wide-eyed wonder and slightly melancholy sophistication.
  37. Monster
    The movie's biggest disappointment is the vague, unfocused performance of Ms. Ricci, an actress known for taking risky, unsympathetic roles. Here she seems somewhat intimidated by her character.
  38. Children of Love
    Leaves a sour aftertaste since it's obvious that the filmmaker's intrusion on these unhappy people, fictional or not, only further worsens their discomfort and their difficulty communicating.
  39. Calendar Girls
    When the biggest compliment you can pay a picture is that it is professional and not smug, there's a little something missing, like invention.
  40. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    If there's one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is The Fog of War, Errol Morris's sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.
  41. The Butterfly
    Its scrupulous, even-toned gentleness makes " The Butterfly suitable for children, while its clear-eyed intelligence and refusal to condescend should make it appealing to adults.
  42. Mona Lisa Smile
    Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.
  43. House of Sand and Fog
    The nearly flawless execution of a deeply flawed premise.
  44. The Hebrew Hammer
    Would have worked brilliantly as a five-minute late-night comedy sketch, flogs its premise for nearly an hour and a half, generating too few laughs to justify the enterprise.
  45. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.
  46. Power Trip
    A skillful assemblage of newsreel clips, cartoons ridiculing the American interlopers, television commercials and interviews with power officials and ordinary Georgians. It gives new and darker meaning to that comfy adage "We're all connected."
  47. AKA
    His (Roy's) informed contempt is highly entertaining, but he neglects some of the more problematical and perhaps more illuminating aspects of his story.
  48. The Statement
    As much as these wonderful actors invest their performances with psychological nuance, their efforts go mostly for naught in a movie that gives character development a distant back seat to the grinding mechanics of its formulaic plot.
  49. Prisoner of Paradise
    Seems to just drift to a close rather than pronounce an end. This can be a result of wrestling with a daunting subject and not being up to its demands.
  50. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    The cast is uniformly high spirited and attractive, and Ms. Beyer's direction, apart from a few over-weighted Wellesian camera angles, is functional.
  51. Stuck on You
    It's a much funnier movie than the trailer would lead you to believe; it would almost have to be. But it is just not as consistent as their previous trash wallows.
  52. Something's Gotta Give
    Nobody else working in movies today can make her (Keaton) own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity.
  53. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    An auspicious feature-directing debut by Mr. Webber in so many ways -- a groaning board of temptations for the eye and ear -- that you may almost forgive the film its lack of drama and the perfunctory attempts at characterization. Viewing this film has been likened to watching paint dry; actually it is more like watching a painting dry.
  54. Way Past Cool
    Unfortunately, its inescapable comparison is to David Gordon Green's "George Washington," made the same year as Mr. Davidson's film but with a far greater sense of style and a more profound grasp of the fragility of young lives. Way Past Cool can't stand up to that kind of competition.
  55. Big Fish
    The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.
  56. Monsieur Ibrahim
    The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Mr. Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Mr. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Mr. Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance.
  57. What Alice Found
    A small, finely wrought drama.
  58. Honey
    Honey brings out the wholesome, affirmative side of the hip-hop aesthetic without being overly preachy, and it offers a winningly utopian view of show-business success without real costs or compromises.
  59. The Last Samurai
    Most watchable during the majestic brutality of the battle sequences. This is not only because of the handsome staging, but also because the keywords sacrifice and honor are evoked with verve and simplicity, more so than in the "exchange of idea" chats between Algren and Katsumoto, which sound like statements being read into the Congressional Record by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
  60. Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Never finds a comfortable fit between its biographies and its theorizing.
  61. The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    The film's most weirdly beautiful moments are its excerpts from Bowery's collaborations with the Michael Clark Dance Company.
  62. My Flesh and Blood
    In what has been called the Year of the Documentary, "My Flesh and Blood" stands beside "Capturing the Friedmans" and "The Fog of War" as an unforgettable experience.
  63. Valley of Tears
    Dense, contradictory and distressingly honest, Valley of Tears is that rarity among political documentaries: a genuinely thought-provoking film.
  64. Kal Ho Naa Ho
    Its luxuriant, nearly three-hour running time allows lots of room for spectacular musical numbers and dramatic climaxes that are extended to the breaking point and beyond.
  65. Timeline
    Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.
  66. The Cooler
    Luckily this picture is rescued from cliché by the quality of the acting, and Mr. Kramer wisely gives the actors room to work.
  67. The Haunted Mansion
    The film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors.
  68. The Triplets of Belleville
    May be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.
  69. In America
    Thanks to Jim Sheridan's graceful, scrupulously sincere direction and the dry intelligence of his cast, In America is likely to pierce the defenses of all but the most dogmatically cynical viewers.
  70. Bad Santa
    Takes all the Christmas season's bad vibes and converts them into an achingly funny and corrupt dark comedy.
  71. El bonaerense
    Powerful sweat-stained swatch of Argentine neo-realism.
  72. El leyton
    Does a fine job of building up a sense of dread as its adulterous relationship gathers steam. So it's all the more disappointing when the movie ultimately collapses with a ridiculous comic ending that leaves you feeling almost as betrayed as its cuckolded husband.
  73. Blue Gate Crossing
    Little more than a vignette elongated into a feature-length movie. Moody and slow moving, it depends on the truthfulness of its performances to carry it.
  74. 21 Grams
    You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.
  75. Gothika
    Proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.
  76. The Barbarian Invasions
    The rapprochement between Rémy and Sébastien is beautiful to watch, and all of the characters in The Barbarian Invasions are played with a lusty warmth that makes them lovable even when they are being tiresome.
  77. The Cat in the Hat
    A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.
  78. Acts of Worship
    It's about individuals, not about sensations. If the characters' backgrounds are not examined in detail, the movie still conveys an intimate sense of who they are and their emotional connections.
  79. Mail Order Bride
    Might have generated a laugh or two had it not forced the actors into uncomfortable extremes of caricature.
  80. The Missing
    Nearly 50 years after John Ford's "Searchers" we have arrived at a point in film history when the movie industry can offer a less sophisticated version of the same material.
  81. Ticket to Jerusalem
    It has an air of melancholy humor as its characters fumble toward normalcy.
  82. The Singing Forest
    The Singing Forest was written and directed by Jorge Ameer, whose film "Strippers" opened three years ago and remained the single worst movie I had ever reviewed -- until now.
  83. Tupac: Resurrection
    Ms. Lazin succeeds in conjuring his presence and in showing how smart and likable he could be, but the film's perspective is frustratingly limited.
  84. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    If the movie has loads of nerve, its ambitious fusion of cartoons and live-action comedy is only fitfully amusing.
  85. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle.
  86. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Stupendously entertaining.
  87. Anything But Love
    A pleasant, good-natured picture that struggles, gallantly if vainly, to recapture the style and sensibility of a studio musical on the severely limited budget of an independent film.
  88. Hukkle
    It works just fine as a sophisticated wildlife documentary with a submerged narrative. But if you enjoy the challenge of solving difficult mysteries, Hukkle presents a tantalizing case waiting to be cracked.
  89. A House on a Hill
    The film is full of artists who seem to be straddling the line between compromise and conviction. There is much straddling in A House on a Hill, and not enough engagement.
  90. Mango Yellow
    For all the grimness and desperation on view in Mango Yellow, the characters emerge as robust, full-dimensional people in touch with their explosive feelings.
  91. My Architect
    The son's search is one of three strands of a story that the movie weaves into a meticulously structured portrait of a complicated man who remains elusive even after key elements of the puzzle have been pieced together.
  92. Martin & Orloff
    An occasionally savvy farce that suffers from attention deficit disorder.
  93. Just an American Boy
    A crude but stirring video documentary filmed over last year and this by Amos Poe, while Mr. Earle and his band were on tour.
  94. In My Skin
    As unrelenting an exploration of isolation and dissociation as Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."
  95. Love Forbidden
    A model French psychological drama in which very little action occurs but feelings and intuitions are documented with precision and discretion.
  96. Billabong Odyssey
    With its emphasis on global positioning devices, Jet Skis and computer-designed surfboards, Mr. Boston's film is very much concerned with the stuff and very little with the spirit of professional surfing as practiced today.
  97. Gloomy Sunday
    The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.
  98. Elf
    A charming, silly family Christmas movie more likely to spread real joy than migraine, indigestion and sugar shock. The movie succeeds because it at once restrains its sticky, gooey good cheer and wildly overdoes it.
  99. Love Actually
    A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.
  100. Hidden in Plain Sight
    A sober, focused piece that asks Americans to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard.
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