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. Journeys with George
    A witty reminder that campaigns are an endless string of foolish events and photo ops that are wildly detached from the hard issues a president has to deal with.
  2. Under the City's Skin
    The real protagonist is the family itself -- a fragile, complex organism undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and indifference of the society around them.
  3. The Hunted
    The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one.
  4. Agent Cody Banks
    This Frankenfilm comes lumbering out of the laboratory of the Danish director Harald Zwart, any trace of personality surgically removed and replaced by a fully road-tested cliché.
  5. Spun
    A swaggering journey into hell that conveys a chortling amusement at its own apocalyptic imagination.
  6. Bend It Like Beckham
    Its cheery inoffensiveness, though, is in some ways disappointing.
  7. Laurel Canyon
    Reconfirms the filmmaker's talent as an acutely observant chronicler of upscale bohemian subcultures.
  8. Nowhere in Africa
    Despite a shaky narrative focus and dramatic reticence, its journey is consistently absorbing.
  9. Bringing Down the House
    High-school cafeteria soup has more flavor than this bland, tepid throwback.
  10. The Safety of Objects
    With the help of an ensemble that is nearly flawless, she (Troche) assembles the damaged human elements of Ms. Homes's world with patience and precision, and more often than not chooses dry understatement over easy satire or obvious sentiment.
  11. Irreversible
    Though Mr. Noé; displays prodigious filmmaking technique, his punk-operatic meditation on life, love, anger and -- most important -- guilt is superficially inventive, but singularly adolescent.
  12. Tears of the Sun
    Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.
  13. Chaos
    The film's mechanical workings are still impressive, but between the unsympathetic characters and the coldly precise direction, there is little here for an audience to clutch to its heart.
  14. Journey to Western Xia Empire
    The landscape photography is magnificent...But its stereotypical characters, melodramatic plotting and audience-pleasing close-ups of adorable children all suggest the profound limitations of filmmaking by committee, whether that committee meets in Beijing or Burbank.
  15. Ten
    A work of inspired simplicity.
  16. Cradle 2 the Grave
    The cinematographer-turned-director likes his MTV-style editing so much that in his drive for hyperkinetic overkill he sacrifices coherence to wallow in barely contained chaos.
  17. Horns and Halos
    Here is a rich tale of our times, very well told with an appropriate minimum of means.
  18. Poolhall Junkies
    The proliferating subplots require many big emotional confrontations, so the movie seems to reach its climax 20 minutes in, and then every 15 minutes or so thereafter. This is fairly exhausting.
  19. Foreign Sister
    There is a reason formulas endure: they work. And even under these threadbare circumstances, the developing friendship between the two women carries a faint but effective dramatic charge.
  20. Dischord
    The story is so crowded with incident and implication as to be both nonsensical and impossible to act, so the actors, when they are not bursting into fits of temper, smile mysteriously.
  21. Bolivia
    This film, Mr. Caetano's feature-length directorial debut, has an emotional integrity that's concise and direct.
  22. Open Hearts
    Until the end, when it begins to go soft, the movie takes two strands of soap opera convention -- a life-changing accident and an adulterous affair -- and spins their suds into gold.
  23. Tales of Erotica
    The results, to judge from the examples here, have been stuffy and disappointing, an unholy alliance between Playboy Channel prurience and PBS cultural alibis.
  24. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    So busy building its symbolic frame that it forgets to develop its characters, or even to make them likable.
  25. Dark Blue
    Unfortunately, the rest of the movie does not live up to Mr. Russell's performance.
  26. Lawless Heart
    By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.
  27. Gods and Generals
    A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.
  28. Old School
    Like a half-empty glass of Coke that's been sitting out for a couple of days; sure, it looks like cola, but one sip tells you exactly what's missing.
  29. The Life of David Gale
    Tries to show it has its heart in the right place, but it's such a crude undertaking that it doesn't actually seem to have a heart at all.
  30. From the Other Side
    A spare, painterly and scrupulously unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants massed at the United States border.
  31. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The film they have put together is dense with sound and information, but it moves with a swift, lilting rhythm that is of a piece with the musical heritage it explores.
  32. The Ballad of Bering Strait
    This competently made picture seems a rehash, and not a terribly interesting one. What's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.
  33. Ordinary Sinner
    Mr. Davis has a lot of ideas, but when it comes to dramatizing them, he is unable to give them an engaging form.
  34. Painted Fire
    Mr. Im's own aesthetic command is evident in the movie's wealth of beautiful, perfectly framed images of nature -- shots so full of passion and perception that they could almost be paintings themselves.
  35. Love at Times Square
    For those looking for a vacation from the irony and the cruelty that have invaded so much of American popular culture, this scruffy little Indian film is a delightful getaway.
  36. The Jungle Book 2
    Drab and unenticing.
  37. Gerry
    With all its quirks, Gerry seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.
  38. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Like "The Sixth Sense," He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not reaches for a crowning final twist, but in this case it falls flat.
  39. All the Real Girls
    Remarkable for its genuine, unpretentious lyricism.
  40. Daredevil
    Tacky and disposable.
  41. Stone Reader
    Enchanting and diverting documentary.
  42. Zus & zo
    To attempt a culinary metaphor, Ms. van der Oest manages a yolky, runny sitcom omelet rather than the airy soufflé of farce.
  43. Deliver Us from Eva
    If Deliver Us From Eva is amusing, it is not uproarious.
  44. Kedma
    But for all its provocation, Kedma is an often dull, incoherent film, and its characters remain frustratingly sketchy
  45. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    It does have its tart, fizzy moments.
  46. Shanghai Knights
    With Shanghai Knights, he (Chan) has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.
  47. May
    Led by Ms. Bettis's discreetly campy May, the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is.
  48. Biker Boyz
    The movie is so sloppily written and directed that its bits of bluster never cohere.
  49. Lost in La Mancha
    After watching the fascinating and compelling new documentary Lost in La Mancha, you may forever wonder how it is that movies are made at all.
  50. The Guru
    A grindingly conventional comedy that insists on tying up its subplots in pretty ribbons and bows.
  51. Final Destination 2
    Has a ghoulish wit. It's not as cheekily knowing as the "Scream" movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the "Evil Dead" franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand.
  52. The Recruit
    Like Christopher Walken or Marlon Brando, Mr. Pacino frequently uses his gifts to make mediocre movies more interesting. Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but he, at least, is not.
  53. Chaos
    There is not a decent (or even half-decent) male character to be found in Chaos, a gripping feminist fable with a savage comic edge.
  54. Darkness Falls
    About as scary as a ride on a minor roller coaster, it unrolls its amplified butcher-block shock effects within the first five minutes.
  55. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    The access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable, and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant of the 20th century.
  56. Amen.
    In the end Amen is neither as moving nor as illuminating as it should be. It suffers especially when compared -- as is inevitable, given the closeness of their release dates -- with "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's movie about a Polish Jew during the Nazi occupation.
  57. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.
  58. En kærlighedshistorie
    A disturbing, somewhat repellent portrait of a depressed middle-class woman's struggle to live comfortably in the world.
  59. Divine Intervention
    It is impossible not to marvel at Mr. Suleiman's knack for turning rage and hopelessness into burlesque.
  60. P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
    Mr. Guttenberg's direction of "Cat," is competent and unadorned, bringing out whatever qualities the text possesses -- mainly good-naturedness.
  61. A Guy Thing
    Most of the meager charms of the chaotic romantic farce A Guy Thing spring from the deft comic contortions of Hollywood's ultimate nerdy sidekick, Jason Lee.
  62. National Security
    Lacks the wit to do anything new and instead recycles tired jokes and attitudes.
  63. Kangaroo Jack
    What better to do with such a quiet, majestic landscape than to liven it up with the noise and vulgarity of lowest-common-denominator American pop culture?
  64. City of God
    As the movie's frenetic visual rhythms and mood swings synchronize with the zany, adrenaline-fueled impulsiveness of its lost youth on the rampage, you may find yourself getting lost in this teeming netherworld.
  65. Crimson Gold
    The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.
  66. Close, Closed, Closure
    The freer and more sophisticated approach of "Divine Intervention" makes these traditional-minded documentaries look somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned by comparison, but both have a value as reportage that Mr. Suleiman's film does not pretend to have.
  67. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    With its many unsolved mysteries, WXIII joins a long list of film-noir projects that end up stranded in the maze of their own invention.
  68. The Son
    To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.
  69. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    Offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.
  70. Just Married
    Anyway, you will be glad that they have found each other, and eager to wish them a long and happy life together -- somewhere else, as 95 minutes in their company is plenty.
  71. The Slaughter Rule
    A bleak, lyrical meditation on the frontier spirit and American machismo and its torments.
  72. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    A good piece of work more often than not, and this is one of the few times an actor turned director has chosen to subvert the feel-good genre for his maiden voyage.
  73. Love Liza
    The movie is so small and emotionally constricted that it gives Hoffman too little room to explore his range.
  74. Sonny
    Emotionally incoherent.
  75. Nicholas Nickleby
    The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs, a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.
  76. Max
    A historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society.
  77. The Hours
    Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.
  78. The Pianist
    Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion.
  79. Chicago
    Who would have expected Ms. Zellweger --- and Miramax -- to come through in a musical? And it's one of the few Christmas entertainments to run under two hours. Who couldn't love that?
  80. In Shifting Sands: The Truth About Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq
    Surprisingly dry and dispassionate.
  81. Pinocchio
    It's an oddity that will be avoided by millions of people, this new Pinocchio. Osama bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden.
  82. Catch Me If You Can
    Supremely entertaining.
  83. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Bland but harmless.
  84. Smokers Only
    Too predictable to leave much of an impression.
  85. Thorns
    Following Bollywood's tradition of excessive generosity, Mr. Gupta tosses in too much of just about everything, resulting in a two-and-a-half-hour film that may exhaust some viewers.
  86. Two Weeks Notice
    Breezing along on gusts of stale air and perky inanities, Two Weeks Notice is a romantic comedy so vague and sadly undernourished that it makes one of Nora Ephron's low-cal strawberry sodas seem as tempting as a Philip Barry feast.
  87. Morvern Callar
    This minimalist film is slightly hobbled by its minimal plot; it's the crucial difference between a movie with moments of greatness and a great movie.
  88. Spider
    Brilliantly realized but bone-chillingly bleak.
  89. Narc
    Narc is convincing, an entertaining, grimy view of the traps of machismo tucked inside a cop thriller.
  90. Gangs of New York
    This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.
  91. Antwone Fisher
    A movie so profoundly in touch with its own feelings that it transcends its formulaic tics.
  92. 25th Hour
    If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.
  93. Devils on the Doorstep
    In its dry and forceful way, it delivers the same message as Jiri Menzel's "Closely Watched Trains" and Danis Tanovic's "No Man's Land." While acknowledging that war is hell, it goes further to suggest it is ludicrous.
  94. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Never has a film so strongly been a product of a director's respect for its source. Mr. Jackson uses all his talents in the service of that reverence, creating a rare perfect mating of filmmaker and material.
  95. The Guys
    What limits The Guys -- what makes it an exercise in art therapy rather than a work of art -- is its decorous refusal to probe deeply into its characters, or to exploit any of the dramatic potential their accidental relationship might contain.
  96. Evelyn
    Slight and dogged; its surprises are likable but minor.
  97. Maid in Manhattan
    Blandly charming.
  98. Star Trek: Nemesis
    An amiably klutzy affair whose warm, fuzzy heart emits intermittent bleats from the sleeve of its gleaming spacesuit.
  99. Intact
    The latest movie from Spain to use the conventions of the thriller to explore knotty and fascinating philosophical questions.
  100. The Jimmy Show
    The kind of movie that is a must to avoid on a bad day. Even on a good one, it could send you into a funk.
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