The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Life or Something Like It
    The relentless upbeatness of Life or Something Like It wrecks the possibility of either real laughter or genuine pathos.
  2. Jason X
    Even the imaginative gore can't hide the musty scent of Todd Farmer's screenplay.
  3. Night at the Golden Eagle
    The visual intensity and the relentless degradation visited on the characters begins to feel prurient and dishonest.
  4. Rain
    The visual beauty of the film, rather than distracting from the troubling story, makes it more troubling still.
  5. The Salton Sea
    Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.
  6. Some Body
    A shaky, uncertain film that nevertheless touches a few raw nerves.
  7. Facing the Music
    Often feels like two movies loosely sewn together. By far the most compelling of the two is its portrait of Ms. Boyd, a woman who for all her quirks and self-dramatizing flourishes, emerges as a noble spirit on the side of the angels.
  8. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    An amiable, offhanded comedy about ethnic identity and last-chance romance.
  9. Murderous Maids
    Ms. Testud's performance, which earned her a César, the French Oscar, for most promising actress, is the source of the movie's lingering, troubling power.
  10. Mutant Aliens
    Plympton fails to develop compelling personalities for any of his characters.
  11. Space Station 3D
    If nothing else, Space Station 3-D is a film that agoraphobics and claustrophobics can agree on. Members of both groups should stay home.
  12. Murder by Numbers
    The real surprise, given the secondhand material, is that not everything proceeds by rote in Murder by Numbers.
  13. Girls Can't Swim
    Ultimately lacks the epic dimension of "Y Tu Mamá También," but its vision of that awkward age when sex threatens to overwhelm everything else is acute enough to make everyone who has been there squirm with recognition.
  14. Enigma
    The mystery of Enigma is how a rich historical subject, combined with so much first-rate talent -- a highly capable (if not always exciting) director, a fine English cast, a script by Tom Stoppard -- could have yielded such a flat, plodding picture.
  15. The Scorpion King
    As this chaotic barrage of muscle flexing, swordplay, fireballs, crude digital effects and comic-book quips hurls itself off the screen, it's like having several garbage cans clogged with stale pizza, lukewarm cola, soggy French fries and greasy, ketchup-stained napkins emptied over your head.
  16. World Traveler
    Neither the screenplay nor the film's visual vocabulary begins to evoke a charged spiritual tension between the protagonist and the world.
  17. Nine Queens
    The kind of movie that seduces you into becoming putty in its manipulative card-sharking hands and making you enjoy being taken in by its shameless contrivance.
  18. Chelsea Walls
    Yet the movie sustains a mood. It passionately believes in itself and in the value of the messy artistic lives it glosses, and some of that belief rubs off on you.
  19. The Triumph of Love
    Triumph of Love, Marivaux's 270-year-old romantic comedy, is a beguiling trifle, a gauzy, teasing inquiry into the fungibility of emotions.
  20. Mule Skinner Blues
    It might be tempting to regard Mr. Andrew and his collaborators as oddballs, but Mr. Earnhart's quizzical, charming movie allows us to see them, finally, as artists.
  21. The Cat's Meow
    A modest, restrained picture, as small and satisfying as one of Woody Allen's better recent efforts.
  22. Human Nature
    Should have been more polished, and less tame.
  23. Frailty
    Paxton's Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in "The Shining."
  24. The Other Side of Heaven
    What sets this syrupy swatch of kitsch apart from other films peddling a dogmatic religious agenda is the serious money that obviously went into it.
  25. Changing Lanes
    It is so dishonest that the title Changing Lanes can just as well refer to the cheaply contrived turns in the film.
  26. New Best Friend
    A preposterous, prurient whodunit.
  27. The Sweetest Thing
    After about 20 minutes of "Thing," a concussion begins to look enormously appealing.
  28. Echoes
    Has a strained, unconvincing screenplay whose failure to connect the dots of its story suggests that it might have been largely improvised.
  29. Karmen Gei
    Enormously likable, partly because it is aware of its own grasp of the absurd.
  30. Lucky Break
    Mr. Cattaneo restricts himself to the smiling blandness that has become the stock in trade of British comedies made for export, turning in a film that is forced, familiar and thoroughly condescending.
  31. Les Destinées
    Like a good novel, Les Destinées is many things: a family chronicle, a series of psychological portraits, a sumptuous re-creation of the past. But the film is also a pointed tribute to the French tradition of quality and distinction, a tradition in which it clearly includes itself.
  32. High Crimes
    For his part. Mr. Freeman shows himself, once again, incapable of giving a bad performance.
  33. American Chai
    American Chai may not tell a new story, but in its understanding, often funny way, it tells a story whose restatement is validated by the changing composition of the nation.
  34. 30 Years to Life
    Though 30 Years to Life doesn't break any new ground, it's a light, engaging, well-carpentered film, with a quick wit and a sense of character just deep enough to lend some weight to the laugh lines.
  35. Big Trouble
    The cast manages to maintain its dignity while sweat and dirt go flying around.
  36. The Komediant
    As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.
  37. Van Wilder
    What's lacking is the sense of structure that might have made Van Wilder more than a meandering succession of random gags.
  38. Astoria
    In retelling this timeworn story of conflict between young men in the New World and their stubborn Old World fathers, Mr. Efteriades may not have generated many sparks, but with his affection for Astoria and its people he has given his tale a warm glow.
  39. Crush
    The sudden, radical change of tone is something far beyond Mr. McKay's nascent abilities as a filmmaker, and Crush never really rights itself.
  40. Teddy Bears' Picnic
    Fitfully entertaining molehill of a movie.
  41. The Rookie
    Scene by scene, The Rookie does a better job of capturing the rhythms and rituals of the playing field and the electricity that flows between a team and its fans than well-regarded baseball films like "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural."
  42. The Piano Teacher
    Has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse.
  43. Time Out
    Recoing's performance is a sensitive portrayal of a man in the throes of an excruciating spiritual crisis.
  44. Death to Smoochy
    There are a few laughs, but I'm not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what "Smoochy" does.
  45. Panic Room
    An above-average thriller.
  46. No Such Thing
    More abrasively quirky than a lesser Bjork B-side, though the hideous monster who co-stars hails from Iceland, too.
  47. Clockstoppers
    A competent, unpretentious entertainment destined to fill the after-school slot at shopping mall theaters across the country.
  48. Shot in the Heart
    The director, Agnieszka Holland, and the screenwriter, Frank Pugliese, have created a scenario that unflinchingly captures the feverish and desperate intensity of Mikal's quest.
  49. Margarita Happy Hour
    Ms. Chaiken isn't much interested in melodramatic plot developments. Her talent lies in an evocative, accurate observation of a distinctive milieu and in the lively, convincing dialogue she creates for her characters.
  50. Sorority Boys
    A film that even a rabid lowbrow like Homer Simpson (or, when the mood strikes, this critic) would find beneath his dignity.
  51. Very Annie Mary
    As it lurches between mush and farce, Very Annie Mary churns up a few genuinely funny bits.
  52. Son of the Bride
    May be as exhaustive a study of one man's midlife crisis as has ever been brought to the screen. But as the movie lopes along, exhaustive becomes exhausting.
  53. Jim Brown: All American
    At its most provocative, the movie explores the masculine mystique and the myth of the black stud.
  54. Blade II
    Because of the movie's wonderful shamelessness, its mordantly funny chills and fights are huge turn-ons. A B picture in love with the zest of its comic-book origins, it embodies that medium's pulse-pounding spiritedness and silliness.
  55. Pauline and Paulette
    Rather than assaulting you with self-congratulatory tears, it leaves you with a bittersweet glow of wisdom and an appreciation of the small triumphs and difficult labors of love.
  56. Harrison's Flowers
    A stupefying mix of action, politics and melodrama.
  57. Showtime
    Plays every convention twice, once as parody and once by the book, but the movie, trying to be two things at once, fails at both.
  58. Sweet Smell of Success (re-release)
    Its pleasures are almost obscenely abundant.
  59. Y Tu Mamá También
    Director Alfonso Cuarón works with a quicksilver fluidity, and the movie is fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating.
  60. Promises
    Demonstrates the unusual power of thoughtful, subjective filmmaking.
  61. Resident Evil
    The movie has a frantic staccato style that is more game-oriented than cinematic.
  62. Ice Age
    The blandly likable computer-animation extravaganza Ice Age actually seems like a fossil, a relic from another era.
  63. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    Does an impressive job of relating the complicated history of the war and of filling in the background.
  64. Asphalt Zahov
    The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.
  65. All About the Benjamins
    This movie, a chaotic caper film at heart, wrecks its comic tone with some moments of gruesome violence.
  66. Festival in Cannes
    A good deal of anger washes through this acerbic portrait of the movie business in histrionically high gear. But so does a lot of sentimentality, and as the sentimentality quotient rises, it erodes the film's credibility.
  67. The Time Machine
    This uninviting and pallid version, starring Guy Pearce, is intent on grinding all the sharp edges off the original story, in effect making the movie childproof, so no one can get hurt touching it.
  68. Miss Wonton
    The director has fallen into the common first-timer's trap of biting off more than he can chew, stitching together an unwieldy, disorganized story out of subplots and flashbacks, without paying enough attention to the basic requirements of character and narrative.
  69. Esther Kahn
    It is also possible that the problem lies not with Mr. Desplechin but with Ms. Phoenix. Her Esther is a fascinating mixture of passivity and ferocity, but it's not clear that she has the range to show both sides of the character.
  70. Stolen Summer
    Summer is like an episode of the religious children's series "Davey and Goliath," without the entertainment value of animation and a talking dog.
  71. Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    One of the most purely enjoyable films ever made.
  72. Borstal Boy
    A likable rites-of-passage memory piece doused in period nostalgia, including the prominent use of vintage Movietone newsreels to mark the events of World War II.
  73. We Were Soldiers
    Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.
  74. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Mildly amusing but wholly unnecessary comedy.
  75. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    Reminds us that when it comes to comedy, it's all in the writing. Mr. Kalesniko's satirically barbed screenplay, whose spirit harks back to the comic heyday of Blake Edwards, stirs up an insistent verbal energy that rarely flags.
  76. The Cherry Orchard
    What makes this Cherry Orchard different from almost every other interpretation (and makes it essential viewing for lovers of Chekhov) is Ms. Rampling's extraordinarily rich portrait of Ranevskaya.
  77. Big Bad Love
    Beneath its stylistic and structural quirks, Big Bad Love -- is a self-indulgent celebration of self-indulgence.
  78. Maryam
    There's not much here; some of the shots feel so static that you wonder if they're being rehearsed before your eyes.
  79. Revolution OS
    Everybody loves a David and Goliath story, and this one is told almost entirely from David's point of view.
  80. Mean Machine
    The surface is rough and profane enough, and the acting sufficiently restrained, to cover the sentimental story with a varnish of gritty realism. But stylish bravado and bad-boy performances don't make the film any less predictable.
  81. Monsoon Wedding
    The agile handling of the soap-opera elements -- conventional plotting at best -- finally makes "Wedding" a pop, facile take on Capulet versus Montague stuff, likable but square.
  82. Dragonfly
    As the movie dragged on, I thought I heard a mysterious voice, and felt myself powerfully drawn toward the light -- the light of the exit sign. I have returned from the beyond to warn you: this movie is 90 minutes long, and life is too short.
  83. Queen of the Damned
    "Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster.
  84. Return to Never Land
    If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.
  85. Scratch
    Dense, exhilarating.
  86. The Last Man
    Feels more like a thought experiment than a fully developed story.
  87. Wendigo
    For those in search of something different, Wendigo is a genuinely bone-chilling tale.
  88. Hart's War
    Wants to be everything and adds up to nothing. "War" is a film that tries to excel on several levels and falls flat on all of them.
  89. Crossroads
    Everything she (Spears) does seems diluted and secondhand and is never transformed into something original or indelibly self-expressive.
  90. Super Troopers
    Bad and tasteless. You laugh neither with it nor at it but rather sit counting the minutes while the movie laughs, for no good reason, at itself.
  91. John Q
    So lacking in shame that it finally seems laughable.
  92. Much Ado About Something
    An inviting piece of film. Mr. Rubbo's cast of characters have the charisma of true devotees and stoked egos that match their intentions.
  93. Scotland, Pa.
    Too leisurely paced and visually drab for its own good, it succeeds in being only sporadically amusing.
  94. Rollerball
    The current version, however, like its predecessor, fails as entertainment. Mr. McTiernan's remake may be lighter on its feet -- the sober-minded original was as graceful as a tap-dancing rhino -- but it is just as boring and as obvious.
  95. Big Fat Liar
    If Ms. Bynes keeps going in this direction, she can conceivably develop a gallery of characters as rich and varied as Tracey Ullman's.
  96. Collateral Damage
    Manages to squeeze in several different endings — like a bad pop song that doesn't know when to fade out. But as Mr. Schwarzenegger's stature as an action figure diminishes, his effort to retain a piece of the market is touching.
  97. Swiri
    Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.
  98. Birthday Girl
    This breathless demi-noir has so much bounce that we barely get any time to mull over the gaping holes in its moth-eaten plot. It is competent but extremely slight.
  99. A Rumor of Angels
    As A Rumor of Angels reveals itself to be a sudsy tub of supernatural hokum, not even Ms. Redgrave's noblest efforts can redeem it from hopeless sentimentality.
  100. Slackers
    So lazy and slipshod it confuses the mere flashing of kinky soft-core imagery with naughty fun.
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