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. The Matrix Revolutions
    There is very little that is tantalizing or suspenseful. The feeling of revelation is gone, and many of the teasing implications of "Reloaded" have been abandoned.
  2. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    As these tumultuous events play out in the film... they generate the suspense of a smaller-scale "Seven Days in May."
  3. Suspended Animation
    A sturdy, well-made piece that never quite overcomes its structural flaws.
  4. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.
  5. Shattered Glass
    An astute and surprisingly gripping drama not only about the ethics of magazine writing, but also, more generally, about the subtle political and psychological dynamics of modern office culture.
  6. The Human Stain
    The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.
  7. Girlhood
    As spare as the juvenile institution in which much of it was filmed. As you watch it, you wish the film would fill in more of each girl's background.
  8. Sister Helen
    Using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique that suggests the cinéma vérité documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, Ms. Cammisa and Mr. Fruchtman vividly capture the dynamic of tenderness and rage that characterizes Sister Helen's relationship with the 21 men who live under her roof.
  9. The Singing Detective
    Lurches when it should glide, shouts when it should whisper and mumbles when it should sing.
  10. Radio
    Mr. Harris's coach is not a flashy role. But the actor, who effortlessly embodies an all-American ideal of strength and decency, drains as much of the syrup from his character as any actor could hope.
  11. Brother Bear
    This opulent movie, with gorgeous rainbow animation, is heavy on message but light on humor.
  12. Elephant
    By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.
  13. Scary Movie 3
    The franchise, which had begun to run out of steam in Part 2, has been given a shot of adrenaline with the replacement of the Wayans Brothers as the prime creative forces by Hollywood's original spoof-meister, David Zucker.
  14. Beyond Borders
    All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.
  15. Last Party 2000
    Starts to seem less like a political documentary than a one-sided "Battle of the Network Stars," with the younger generation clearly winning the charisma challenge.
  16. In the Cut
    A disjointed, sometimes fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects.
  17. Morning Sun
    Does a thoughtful job of streamlining the bloody realities -- both literal and psychological -- of China's Cultural Revolution into roughly two hours of film.
  18. Sylvia
    Christine Jeffs's film is an emotionally rich biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow.
  19. Veronica Guerin
    The end titles and the ones that introduce Veronica Guerin...are the most informative parts of the film, and also the most powerful. What comes between them is a flat-footed, overwrought crusader-against-evil melodrama, in which Ms. Blanchett's formidable gifts as an actress are reduced to a haircut and an accent.
  20. Runaway Jury
    John Cusack gives one of his wiliest performances in some time, and one of his most mature, as Nick Easter, an aging slacker drafted into jury duty. He subverts his protracted-adolescent cheekiness and pours the melted charm into something far bleaker.
  21. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.
  22. Returner
    A smorgasbord that seems to have been picked out of a Dumpster. It clumsily combines a fish-out-of-water story with bits lifted from sources including the "Terminator" movies, "Star Wars," "Starman," "Close Encounters," a couple of Pink Floyd albums and H. G. Wells.
  23. Pieces of April
    Hedges's intelligent and touching farce, Pieces of April, makes an important contribution to a small and insignificant subgenre: Thanksgiving Day failure. It does so by raising the bar.
  24. 9 Dead Gay Guys
    The film strains mightily to be flashy and hip but finishes more in the realm of the merely distasteful.
  25. Porn Theater
    Functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them.
  26. Dopamine
    A wan, wistful Generation Y romance.
  27. The Flower of Evil
    Wanders rather than moves chillingly toward its climax.
  28. Good Boy!
    As children's film premises go, this is a cute one, but the execution is a failure.
  29. Flesh for the Beast
    Fans of the genre -- or "gore hounds" as they are known in fandom -- will find plenty to enjoy in Mr. West's enthusiastic approach to his work.
  30. Intolerable Cruelty
    Something not seen in movie theaters for a long time: an intelligent, modern screwball comedy, a minor classic on the order of competent, fast-talking curve balls about deception and greed like Mitchell Leisen's "Easy Living" and Billy Wilder's "Major and the Minor."
  31. House of the Dead
    Does little more than add another title to the very long list of movies influenced by George Romero's 1968 horror classic, "Night of the Living Dead."
  32. Girls Will Be Girls
    Appropriately cynical, pleasantly camp (Coco has the best hair -- a teased, sprayed flip) and just fresh enough to be funny more often than not.
  33. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Mr. Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence, but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd, feverish integrity.
  34. Small Voices
    This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.
  35. Bus 174
    So wrenching and absorbing that you can easily lose sight of the sophistication of its techniques.
  36. Mystic River
    Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.
  37. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Feels fabricated, studio-bound and claustrophobic, which doesn't add to the ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity this genre has always depended on.
  38. The Event
    A dawdling affair that never finds its own rhythm. Early on, it gets lost in its own earnestness and never finds its way back.
  39. Out of Time
    Although it is briskly directed and enjoyably stylized, the film is shallow -- but empty.
  40. Concert for George
    The sweet, solemn music of George Harrison, who died two years ago, has rarely sounded more majestic than in the sweeping performances of the enlarged star-studded band that gathered in London at Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 29 to commemorate his legacy.
  41. The Station Agent
    The movie's writer and director, Tom McCarthy, has such an appreciation for quiet that it occupies the same space as a character in this film, a delicate, thoughtful and often hilarious take on loneliness.
  42. Wonderland
    With its flashbacks, split-screen montages, decade-jumping soundtrack, sped-up action and frequent shifts of light and color, Wonderland feels like "Law & Order" on crack.
  43. School of Rock
    A very funny for-kids-of-all-ages delight that should catapult Mr. Black straight to the top of the A-list of Hollywood funnymen.
  44. Southlander: Diary of a Desperate Musician
    This poorly acted, ramshackle tour of the lower echelons of the Los Angeles rock scene has the feel of a largely improvised home movie filmed without retakes, and its sense of humor could only be fully appreciated by struggling musicians.
  45. Bollywood/Hollywood
    Disappointingly shallow and not terribly funny romantic comedy.
  46. My Life Without Me
    Ms. Polley is a naturally subtle actress, and part of her appeal lies in an unusual ability to seem at once forthright and enigmatic, but this time she comes off as a bit smug.
  47. Prey for Rock & Roll
    If the movie is terrific on ambience and street language (the women call one another Dude), much of its melodramatic story involving a rape and payback feels forced.
  48. Duplex
    A refreshingly mean-spirited gothic real estate comedy.
  49. The Rundown
    The director, Peter Berg ("Very Bad Things"), keeps the predictable story line on course without developing a truly compelling momentum in the action sequences or finding anything fresh in the interaction of the stock characters.
  50. Under the Tuscan Sun
    The story of self-discovery through which the writer and director Audrey Wells leads Frances is eminently superficial, although Ms. Wells keeps the movie going with a steady, commanding hand and casts it with an actress who can deftly downshift from serene to sodden.
  51. Bubba Ho-tep
    There is a grungy high spirit during the first third of this film, but then it dissipates like a mist from an aerosol can.
  52. Luther
    As the film veers uncertainly between meticulous historical recapitulation and shameless hokum, it brings enough characters to populate a mini-series. When the historical details become too clogged, the movie shamelessly overcompensates by wallowing in cheap sentimentality.
  53. Yossi & Jagger
    If the situation has all the ingredients of a shrill, tearful melodrama, the filmmaker, working from a taut screenplay by Avner Bernheimer that doesn't waste a word or a gesture, keeps the emotional lid firmly in place.
  54. 7 Year Zig Zag
    Quickly moves beyond the oppressive into the cruel and unusual.
  55. Demonlover
    The entrancing visual imagery goes a long way toward filling in the screenplay's gaps in logic.
  56. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.
  57. Cold Creek Manor
    The movie ultimately belongs to Mr. Dorff, whose villain is as frightening as any human reptile to have slithered onto the screen in quite some time.
  58. Mambo italiano
    As Angelo, Mr. Kirby has a boyish charm, which is probably the best that can be said for this film as well.
  59. In This World
    If there is heartbreak in this movie, there is also a sense of energy that makes it almost exhilarating.
  60. Anything Else
    Small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.
  61. Casa de los babys
    Some of the pieces in its jigsaw puzzle are too fragmentary, and there's a sense of racing against time to fill in the blanks. Yet the movie's even-handed portrayal of two cultures uneasily transacting the most personal business resonates with truth.
  62. To Be and to Have
    The interest of To Be and to Have, though, is not sociological: it is not really about the French educational system, rural life or even the way children learn. It is, rather, the portrait of an artist, a man whose work combines discipline and inspiration and unfolds mysteriously and imperceptibly.
  63. Secondhand Lions
    May be pure hokum, but at least it knows how to spin a yarn.
  64. The Fighting Temptations
    This movie feels phony and slick, as if it were cooked up by Darrin's cynical ad agency, rather than at his aunt's stove down in Montecarlo.
  65. Underworld
    Achieves only loudness, aggressive confusion and one of the silliest head-splittings in film history.
  66. Emerald Cowboy
    Though Mr. Hayata seems convinced that he is a colorful, romantic figure, the movie itself is crushingly mundane and unlikely to attract any audience beyond close relatives.
  67. Millennium Actress
    To watch Millennium Actress is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.
  68. Dummy
    A mildly engaging addition to that curious sub-genre of American independent filmmaking, the whimsical comedy of Long Island alienation.
  69. Luster
    Relentlessly bright and superficial, even when the subject turns to self-destruction.
  70. So Close
    With the exception of some of the battles, which have the angry desperation of Mr. Yuen's inspired martial-arts choreography, Close is a nominal effort.
  71. Matchstick Men
    Both entertaining and empty: an emotional shell game that leaves you feeling cheated even though, on the surface at least, everyone is a winner.
  72. Cabin Fever
    Sustains such a palpable mood of foreboding until the end.
  73. Lost in Translation
    Here he (Murray) supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all.
  74. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one.
  75. Warrior of Light
    It would be foolish for a middle-class do-gooder confronting homeless children on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to expect conventional morality to have any meaning to them at all. That's one of the blunt, no-nonsense observations of Yvonne Bezarra de Mello, the Brazilian human rights activist profiled in Monika Treut's hard-headed documentary.
  76. The Same River Twice
    A piercingly poignant then-and-now portrait of five friends.
  77. Where's the Party Yaar?
    Clearly understands its target audience of first-generation Indian-Americans and has its pleasures to provide.
  78. Carnage
    Ms. Gleize, through a series of oblique, half-comic scenes and meticulous, rhyming visual compositions, offers up an elegant, discursive essay on carnality and carnivorousness -- on sex, death, meat and the ravening hunger for companionship.
  79. The Order
    A murky ecclesiastical horror film, may be the nadir of the subgenre that produced "The Exorcist" (at its high end) and "Stigmata" (at its middle-to-low end).
  80. Home Room
    The lead performances of Home Room go a long way toward camouflaging the severe flaws of this exceedingly earnest movie.
  81. Party Monster
    His (Culkin's) performance is earnest and brave, but also mannered when it should be un-self-conscious, and awkward when grace is called for.
  82. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Maintaining a winking distance from his comic persona, Mr. Spade radiates a cunning show-business cynicism that lets you know he's aware that he's slumming to make a buck.
  83. Taking Sides
    Sparked by the actors' powerful performances, Arnold's moral absolutism and Furtwängler's lofty aestheticism make for a dramatically compelling clash.
  84. Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?
    A rueful, reflective companion piece to "Born to Lose."
  85. The Backyard
    This stuff is much too strange and much too disturbing to be invented.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (re-release)
    Throughout, there's a skillful balance between the vulnerability of New Yorkers and the drastic, provocative sense of comedy that thrives all over our sidewalks.
  87. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    What really separates "Midlands" from Leone's desiccated, terse genre work is Mr. Meadows's doting attention to his characters' decency. It gives a demonstrative bittersweetness to a likable but small story.
  88. Civil Brand
    Before Civil Brand erupts into over-the-top melodrama (which is pretty early), it shows some interest in its characters, and in its less screechy moments the dialogue has the rough, bantering ring of actual speech.
  89. The Other Side of the Bed
    A satire of contemporary sexual warfare that leaves you smiling but also stung.
  90. Jeepers Creepers II
    You don't have to be a horror-movie scholar to know that nothing significant is going to happen in any movie with "2" in the title; the creature has to stay around long enough at least to complete a trilogy and fill out a nice boxed set of DVD's.
  91. Suddenly
    When Suddenly finds its soul in the last half-hour, the title begins to make a lovely sort of sense.
  92. My Boss's Daughter
    This muddled comedy of confusion feels as if it were a Farrelly brothers' comedy that has sat exposed to the elements long past its expiration date.
  93. Dust
    A potent, assured and ambitious piece of filmmaking brought down by weighted dialogue and, playing Americans, the British actors Adrian Lester and Joseph Fiennes and the Australian David Wenham.
  94. The Medallion
    As soon as the medallion appears, so do the digital maneuverings -- speeded-up movement, composite images, objects and people morphing into supernatural thingamajigs -- that undercut the genuine thrills of the genuine action.
  95. Babí léto
    Mr. Brodsky's final screen performance in one of his richest roles finds overlapping layers of humor and pathos.
  96. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    A skillfully organized account of Mr. Rogowski's life and of the sport's boom period. But despite the earnest testimony of two former girlfriends, the movie maintains a chilly distance from its subject.
  97. Rana's Wedding
    Ms. Khoury, often filmed in close-up, gives a deeply sensitive, unsentimental performance, and the feelings that crowd on her face (sometimes more than one at a time) run the gamut from despair to ambivalence to hysterical frustration to tenderness and joy.
  98. Green Card Fever
    An amiable but highly didactic romantic drama.
  99. Don't Tempt Me
    An unfocused, overplotted, painfully derivative comic fantasy.
  100. Venus Boyz
    She (Baur) has clearly earned the trust and respect of her subjects, the first qualification for any responsible documentarist, and they have repaid her with an intimate glimpse into their singular lives.
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