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. Metropolis (re-release)
    Metropolis retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a high-voltage cable.
  2. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
    A curiously thrilling and often hilarious experience.
  3. Tosca
    For the most part, it works beautifully as a movie without sacrificing the integrity of the opera.
  4. Reign of Fire
    Loads of fun. It has a jamming B-picture buzz -- the kind of swift filmmaking and high spirits that have been missing from movies for a while.
  5. Sex and Lucia
    Both refreshing and confusing, the film equivalent of an ice cream headache.
  6. Never Again
    The movie, like its lovers, is really two films smushed together in the faint hope that sheer incongruity can grind out laughter.
  7. Halloween: Resurrection
    Spectators will indeed sit open-mouthed before the screen, not screaming but yawning.
  8. Road to Perdition
    A truly majestic visual tone poem.
  9. Last Dance
    One of the thrills of the movie is watching the improvisatory trial-and-error process as the dancers explore psychological themes, contorting their graceful, amazingly limber bodies into visual representations of relationships and emotional states.
  10. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
    It is billed as a "restored version," though the sound is still fuzzy and the image only occasionally rises to the level of murk.
  11. Presumed Guilty: Tales of the Public Defenders
    Makes compelling viewing. But it is viewing of an eerily familiar kind, almost as if the real-life lawyers in the film had patterned themselves on television archetypes.
  12. Rocco and His Brothers (re-release)
    Neither the neighborhood intimacy of "Mean Streets" nor the grandeur of the "Godfather" movies is imaginable without Visconti's example. Its richness, though, is inexhaustible, and well served by the spotless new 35-millimeter print being shown at Film Forum.
  13. Me Without You
    Under its drab contemporary trappings, the movie, is really a Jane Austen-like moral parable in which goodness is rewarded and selfishness punished.
  14. Read My Lips
    Like so many European pictures these days, Read My Lips seems destined to be remade in Hollywood, and it is unlikely to be improved by the addition of vainer actors, a simpler screenplay and flashier direction.
  15. Group
    It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama.
  16. Tattoo Bar
    The problem with the baroque and overripe Tattoo Bar is that everybody has a past. And there's so much crosscutting to those pasts in flashbacks, it's hard to keep track of whose past you're witnessing.
  17. Like Mike
    The director's breezy steadiness keeps the movie from hitting us over the head -- well, not too hard, anyway, no small feat since the steroid-juiced sentimentality of the ending may force some to flee before the outtakes unspool under the credits.
  18. Men in Black II
    As fizzy as the first, but not quite as refreshing. The pleasurable, eye-popping sense of surprise has diminished, and the teasingly referential attitude shows signs of fatigue.
  19. Songs from the Second Floor
    A heartbreakingly thoughtful minor classic, the work of a genuine and singular artist.
  20. The Powerpuff Girls
    What's really so appealing about the characters is their resemblance to everyday children. They're wildly energetic, competitive and (sometimes dangerously) impulsive. But they also learn from their mistakes, and their instincts are good. More power to them.
  21. Lovely & Amazing
    Holofcener's smart, acidic comedy Lovely and Amazing zeroes in on contemporary narcissism and its fallout with a relentless, needling accuracy.
  22. The Cockettes
    Revisits the San Francisco of the late 1960's and early 70's, a time and place so encrusted with legend and cliché that you might wonder if there is anything left to say. It turns out there is quite a lot -- which the filmmakers have brought triumphantly to life.
  23. Notorious C.H.O.
    Brilliant, over-the-edge concert film Notorious C.H.O. carries candid sexual humor into previously uncharted territory.
  24. Hey Arnold! The Movie
    Blown up way past television-set size, the animated film's squiggly lines and rushed renditions are pale and blurry. This may be the first cartoon ever to look as if it were being shown on the projection television screen of a sports bar.
  25. Harvard Man
    Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.
  26. Pumpkin
    The filmmakers try to balance pointed, often incisive satire and unabashed sweetness, with results that are sometimes bracing, sometimes baffling and quite often, and in unexpected ways, touching.
  27. Mr. Deeds
    Mr. Deeds is mostly terrible, a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news crew.
  28. Money Buys Happiness
    About 20 minutes in, it is clear that the couple will emerge as nothing more than crabby yuppies whose articulation of their pouts sounds like the same argument over and over again.
  29. Bobby G. Can't Swim
    Whenever the picture tries to be about something bigger, it turns predictable or maudlin or, in a few sad instances, both simultaneously.
  30. Juwanna Mann
    But even though, most of the time, you know exactly what will happen next -- you don't much mind. Nor do the many plot holes and improbabilities -- undermine its silly, raucous spirit.
  31. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler
    Instead of deepening the material, however, the narrative twists feel like purely formal interventions, intended to keep the film moving toward its foregone, heavily moralistic conclusion. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler is faultlessly professional but finally slight.
  32. Dahmer
    As gamely as the movie tries to make sense of its title character, there remains a huge gap between the film's creepy, clean-cut Dahmer (Jeremy Renner) and fiendish acts that no amount of earnest textbook psychologizing can bridge.
  33. Sunshine State
    Creates a cinematic mosaic of American lives unprecedented in its range, balance, subtlety and even-handedness.
  34. Lilo & Stitch
    Hardly a work of state-of-the-art virtuosity, but rather an example of quiet, confident craftsmanship that tells a sweet, charming tale of intergalactic friendship.
  35. Minority Report
    Though he can still deliver an amazing scare, Mr. Spielberg's interest now leans more toward exposition rather than the anticipatory. He is explaining the fun away.
  36. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    Although it leaves you with a knot in your stomach, its power is undercut by its own head-banging obviousness.
  37. War Photographer
    Documenting war is a small, partial but indispensable step toward its eventual eradication. Mr. Frei's quiet, engrossing film is a sad and stirring testimony to this vision and to the quiet, self-effacing heroism with which Mr. Nachtwey has pursued it.
  38. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Although there's plenty of opportunity for low comedy in the notion of an emperor and an oaf exchanging roles, The Emperor's New Clothes, much to its detriment, doesn't pursue them.
  39. ZigZag
    Might have been richer and more observant if it were less densely plotted. The characters would resonate more if there were fewer of them, and if they were not pushed through so many contrived dramatic incidents.
  40. Freeze Me
    The violent scenes veer vertiginously between slapstick, soft-core pornography and raw documentary, leaving you repelled and confused, as well as fascinated.
  41. Windtalkers
    We can only view Windtalkers with the same shaken detachment that characterizes Mr. Cage's Joe Enders, wishing that the codetalkers' real story, a little known and fascinating chunk of American history, had been given its true dramatic import.
  42. Gangster No. 1
    The psychological underpinnings give this picture a charged emotional atmosphere. The dizzying unspoken feelings between the two men mesh so well that the movie seems to have been worked out like a perverse drawing-room comedy.
  43. Scooby-Doo
    Not entirely without charm.
  44. The Bourne Identity
    The Bourne Identity, like its hero, triumphs through sheer unreflective professionalism. It is, by today's standards, a modest thriller, with a self-contained storyline and with very few big special effects.
  45. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    The masterstroke of this small, heartfelt directorial debut (by Peter Care, from a screenplay by Jeff Stockwell) is its integration of animated sequences (by Todd McFarlane) in which action-adventure caricatures of the comic book characters parallel or comment on events in the boys' lives.
  46. Cuba feliz
    In painting an unabashedly romantic picture of a nation whose songs spring directly from the lives of the people, the movie exalts the Marxian dream of honest working folk, with little to show for their labor, living harmoniously, joined in song.
  47. Virgil Bliss
    It is enough of an act of optimism just to raise the specter of heroic nobility, something that Virgil Bliss accomplishes with subtlety and poignancy.
  48. Secret Society
    Has the scruffy charm you expect from this kind of picture, and some admirable feminist pluck. But the story is -- forgive me -- a little thin, and the filmmaking clumsy and rushed.
  49. Bad Company
    Like many of the nonpolitical terrorist-as-villain spectaculars that have been held back after Sept. 11, has the whiff of something gone stale. Though it may have sat on the shelf for a while, this project had gone bad long before it was released.
  50. Ivansxtc
    Contrived as this may sound, Mr. Rose's updating works surprisingly well. -- the story's sympathetic, tragic sense of the fragility of individual dignity is, if anything, made even more haunting in this version.
  51. Cherish
    As a poky little character comedy, Cherish is enchanting in a small-scale way. But when Mr. Taylor tries to turn it into a genre thriller, Cherish deteriorates so quickly that it's unsettling -- but probably not in the way Mr. Taylor intended.
  52. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    Perhaps not since "Steel Magnolias" has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women.
  53. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    Not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece.
  54. Mama Africa
    What links these three stories besides their African settings is the calm, majestic presence of Queen Latifah, who introduces each one. The rapper, singer, actress and television personality towers over the movie, a stern but benign fortress of maternal common sense and wisdom.
  55. Kaaterskill Falls
    Establishes its ominous mood and tension swiftly, and if the suspense never rises to a higher level, it is nevertheless maintained throughout.
  56. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
    Mr. Gianvito's approach cannot really be called critical, since criticism would require some cogent analysis of causes and events.
  57. The Sum of All Fears
    It's a striking measure of the nervousness of the country right now that a movie so full of holes should be as gripping as it is, at least for its first two-thirds, after which it collapses into a swamp of sentimental mush.
  58. Undercover Brother
    The one-liners are clever enough and the physical comedy and pop-culture goofing sufficiently dumb and broad to make Undercover Brother, a reasonably pleasant experience.
  59. Elling
    Elling believes so fervently in humanity that it feels almost anachronistic, and it is too cute by half. But arriving at a particularly dark moment in history, it offers flickering reminders of the ties that bind us.
  60. The Next Big Thing
    This well-cast film does with a lighter hand for art what "The Producers" does for show business.
  61. Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
    Watching Paul Cox's impressionistic film based on the diaries of that legendary dancer and choreographer, it is impossible not to contemplate with a shudder the shadowy line between art, ecstasy and psychosis.
  62. Bartleby
    Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show."
  63. Master of the Flying Guillotine (re-release)
    Just know that you'll owe Master of the Flying Guillotine for the pleasure you'll get from viewing a venerable example of the kung fu genre.
  64. CQ
    May not make the splash it should; films about moviemaking rarely do. And that would be a shame, because the contrasts the director sets in motion and keeps playing against each other make an entertaining wrestling match.
  65. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Thrillingly smart, but not, like so many other pictures in this vein, merely an elaborate excuse for its own cleverness. As you puzzle over the intricacies of its shape, which reveal themselves only in retrospect, you may also find yourself surprised by the depth of its insights.
  66. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    As it stands, "Spirit" provides neither the profound human touch of the great Disney animation of the past, nor the dazzling, high-tech fun of present-day digital cartooning.
  67. Enough
    In the end you have to wonder why the highly reputed director Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter") and the gifted screenwriter Nicholas Kazan ("Reversal of Fortune") chose to go slumming in territory like this. They must have been offered wads of money to do the dirty job.
    • The New York Times
  68. Insomnia
    The anomalous proliferation of scenic beauty gives Mr. Nolan irony to play with, and he uses it spectacularly. The director and his gifted cinematographer, Wally Pfister, are clearly turned on by all this wasted beauty.
  69. Sia, the Dream of the Python
    In trying to reproduce the griot's tone, Mr. Kouyaté rejects psychological nuance and dramatic shading: this is a tale that advances quickly and boldly, peopled by deliberately one-dimensional characters.
  70. The Back of the World
    Each of these stories is terribly sad and terribly moving in its own right. Yet the film that Mr. Corcuera has spun around them only increases the viewer's sense of helplessness and passivity. No solutions are suggested, no actions are proposed, no reflection is invited. The misery of these people becomes just another voyeuristic spectacle, to be consumed and forgotten.
  71. The Importance of Being Earnest
    For all its distractions and additions, The Importance of Being Earnest is still a reasonably entertaining costume comedy. Wilde's satirical voice may be muffled, but at least it is audible.
  72. Late Marriage
    Powerful and very bitter comedy.
  73. The Believer
    This willfully provocative film portrait offers lots of raging, vulgarity and shock but little insight into the character's psychopathology.
  74. About a Boy
    The Weitz brothers -- notorious as the authors of the "American Pie" series -- handle the sentimentality of the story with a light, sweet touch.
  75. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    It is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.
  76. Cremaster 3
    If Cremaster 3 is an innovative artwork that has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film, is it also a great movie? Probably yes.
  77. Standing by Yourself
    Highly irritating at first, Mr. Koury's passive technique eventually begins to yield some interesting results.
  78. Ultimate X: The Movie
    This compilation of blisteringly tight stunts plays like the world's longest Mountain Dew commercial.
  79. Blackwoods
    Far from a future cult classic, it turns out to be smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning.
  80. Janice Beard
    As Janice, Eileen Walsh, an engaging, wide-eyed actress whose teeth are a little too big for her mouth, infuses the movie with much of its slender, glinting charm.
  81. The Lady and the Duke
    The director manages to evade both the stuffy antiquarianism and the pandering anachronism that subvert so many cinematic attempts at historical inquiry.
  82. Unfaithful
    Ms. Lane has the role of her career in Connie, and her indelible (and ultimately sympathetic) performance is both archetypal and minutely detailed.
  83. The New Guy
    A bad-taste comedy with a heart.
  84. Diamonds and Rust
    A film that chugs along as listlessly as the ship itself, discovering moments of value in a sea of ennui.
  85. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    Lagaan may look naïve; it is anything but. This is a movie that knows its business — pleasing a broad, popular audience -- and goes about it with savvy professionalism and genuine flair.
  86. A Man's Gotta Do
    Really, it's all as funny as a hernia.
  87. The Mystic Masseur
    A subtle, humorous, illuminating study of politics, power and social mobility.
  88. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.
  89. ABC Africa
    You come away from his film overwhelmed, hopeful and, perhaps paradoxically, illuminated.
  90. Hollywood Ending
    Probably the worst thing you can say about Hollywood Ending is that it has one: it turns out that Mr. Allen wasn't being ironic after all, he just made a comedy that feels ironclad.
  91. Fleeing by Night
    The kind of old-fashioned, grown-up weepie in which the hearts of men and women are cracked, and the shards flutter through the story. Its directness is the movie equivalent of hot, fresh popcorn.
  92. Spider-Man
    Spider-Man, while hardly immune to these vices, is, like Mr. Maguire, disarmingly likable, and touching in unexpected ways.
  93. Grin Without a Cat
    A Grin Without a Cat is a work of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a work of deft and subtle poetry, visual (in the rhyming of gestures and shapes across images and sequences) as much as verbal.
  94. Spiral
    Perhaps the most gripping thing about the ultimately disappointing Japanese horror film Uzumaki is the patient way the picture develops mood.
  95. Circuit
    There is a real subject here, and it is handled with intelligence and care.
  96. Sade
    In its quiet, literate way, the film is almost as subversive as its central character.
  97. Sex with Strangers
    It's the element of condescension, as the filmmakers look down on their working-class subjects from their lofty perch, that finally makes Sex With Strangers so distasteful.
  98. Vulgar
    Too campy to work as straight drama and too violent and sordid to function as comedy, Vulgar is, truly and thankfully, a one-of-a-kind work.
  99. For da Love of Money
    A loose but often amusing collection of gags.
  100. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    As this taut, viscerally propulsive insider's history of the sport in its early years skids and leaps forward with a jaunty visual panache, it is impossible not to be seduced by its hard-edged vision of an endless teenage summer.
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