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. Loners
    With its studied nonchalance, Loners reaches neither the hilarity of an episode of "Friends" nor the ethnographic stickiness of "The Real World" on MTV.
  2. Domestic Violence
    The picture itself is about, yes, cycles, and as tiresome as that sounds, 10 minutes into the film you'll be white-knuckled and unable to look away.
  3. Waydowntown
    A smart, sardonic satire.
  4. Maelstrom
    Probably the first romantic drama ever narrated by a smelly dead fish.
  5. The Son's Room
    The movie's rejection of even a tinge of melodrama lends it a special integrity.
  6. The Mothman Prophecies
    About as threatening as the real-life insect the apparition resembles; its large, mossy wings may scare some people, but the bug can only damage your woolens. The movie flirts with more damage than it can actually cause.
  7. Wannabes
    Doesn't really know how to end. But if its melodramatic final moments are ludicrous, they don't seriously dilute the acidity of the sour little swatch of urban sociology that has come before.
  8. Hey, Happy!
    The film feels too formulaic and too familiar to produce the transgressive thrills of early underground work.
  9. Metropolis
    A hallucinatory tour de force of color, perspective and scale, virtually encapsulates the history of Japanese animation.
  10. Storytelling
    The most pleasing paradox in Storytelling -- a determinedly paradoxical and, in spite of much of what I've said here, a genuinely pleasing movie -- is that it sets out to debunk this notion and ends up affirming it.
  11. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The film's resolute indifference to fashion makes it, perhaps paradoxically, a refreshing piece of old-style entertainment, accompanied by a whooshing, trembling score by Edward Shearmur.
  12. Beijing Bicycle
    At once somber and mysterious, comical and sad. It shows just how lonely a crowded city can be.
  13. A Walk to Remember
    Proves that a movie about goodness is not the same thing as a good movie.
  14. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    To imagine the life of Harry Potter as a martial arts adventure told by a lobotomized Woody Allen is to have some idea of the fate that lies in store for moviegoers lured to the mediocrity that is Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.
  15. Beyond the Ocean
    Dour and bleak, yet this melodrama -- which doesn't amount to much of anything -- may stick with you.
  16. American Adobo
    As the film loses its grip on its multiple stories, the title begins to suggest an overheated stew bubbling out of its pot. By the end of the film, the intersecting dramas and histrionic performances have spilled all over the floor, so to speak.
  17. Ha-Hesder
    Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.
  18. Italian for Beginners
    Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.
  19. State Property
    At the end the picture seems to acknowledge its own ludicrousness, but by then it, like Beans, is beyond rescue.
  20. Snow Dogs
    Snow Dogs is, even by the standards of a tradition that includes "Son of Flubber" and "The Shaggy D.A.," remarkably inept.
  21. Milan Hlavsa a Plastic People of the Universe
    In short, here is a VH1 "Behind the Music" special that has something a little more special behind it: music that didn't sell many records but helped change a nation.
  22. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    Extremely well acted. But as frequently as The Farewell touches on politics, it is essentially an excoriating (and sometimes grimly amusing) domestic drama of a latter-day king and his concubines.
  23. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    The picture has a daring attention-span deficit and an epic silliness that can be awesomely entertaining.
  24. E-Dreams
    The movie is a little claustrophobic -- a marathon of conference calls, frenzied pointing and clicking, and office pep talks.
  25. Orange County
    The gags and subplots, rather than adding up to sustained hilarity, compete with each other.
  26. What Time Is It Over There?
    Tsai not only gives the audience a chance to breathe but also lets us luxuriate in the mood of deadpan melancholy his movie evokes so beautifully.
  27. Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    The re- enactments, however fascinating they may be as history, are too crude to serve the work especially well.
  28. Impostor
    The ending is meant to be clouded with ambiguity, but really it is unequivocally happy because it means the movie is over.
  29. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    As the film's images accumulate, the movie becomes a sustained and ultimately refreshing meditation on surrender to the idea of temporality.
  30. Charlotte Gray
    The movie works so diligently to convey a spirit of heroic uplift and fails so completely that it feels like a tragic misfire.
  31. I Am Sam
    Not a bad movie, and its intentions are unimpeachable. But its sentimentality is so relentless and its narrative so predictable that the life is very nearly squeezed out of it.
  32. Dark Blue World
    This could be called an art house version of "Pearl Harbor," except that sounds vaguely nutritious, like fat- free yogurt or a historical episode of A&E's "Biography." But Dark Blue World is all empty carbs, like malted milk balls.
  33. Black Hawk Down
    Sitting through the accomplished but meaningless Black Hawk Down is like being trapped in an action film version of "Groundhog Day," condemned to sit through the same carnage over and over.
  34. Gosford Park
    A virtuoso ensemble piece to rival the director's "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" in its masterly interweaving of multiple characters and subplots.
  35. Monster's Ball
    The raw intimacy of some of the scenes -- whether they take place at a diner, in the death house or in the bedroom -- is breathtaking.
  36. The Shipping News
    The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.
  37. Ali
    We see the movie levitate when Ali and Brown chant, "Float like a butterfly," the slogan that takes on a different meaning in each context, starting off as hopeful and spry, finally becoming rueful and pointed. When the film pulls off moments like these, it's breathtaking -- a near great movie.
  38. The Majestic
    The most indolent waste of screen time since Andy Warhol's marathon shot of the Empire State Building.
  39. Kate & Leopold
    Has only the most tangential relation to reality, and therein lies its slender charm.
  40. A Beautiful Mind
    The movie can -- indeed, should -- be intellectually rejected, but you can't quite banish it from your mind.
  41. A Song for Martin
    Watching it, I kept imagining the depth of feeling Ingmar Bergman and his troupe might have brought to the same material. As much as A Song for Martin hurts, it doesn't quite go the distance.
  42. How High
    Many of the faces that emerge through the murk appear bug-eyed. And much of the dialogue, which is frequently shouted, is only semi-intelligible.
  43. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    After Jimmy Neutron was over, I felt glassy-eyed and a little headachy. But the boy genius who accompanied me to the screening could not take his eyes off the screen. I think he's in his room right now, building a shrink ray to try out on his dad.
  44. Little Otik
    A handmade dream, cobbled together from dirt, wood and more imagination than most of us can muster in our most fevered states. Because this Czech master refuses to work in the scrubbed, antiseptic manner of most animators, this fable comes to life as hilarious and creepy.
  45. Joe Somebody
    Continually squanders its opportunities for hilarity.
  46. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    The playful spookiness of Mr. Jackson's direction provides a lively, light touch, a gesture that doesn't normally come to mind when Tolkien's name is mentioned.
  47. Kandahar
    Kandahar feels like a Magritte painting rendered in sand tones, and your eyes are drawn to the screen. There aren't enough of these moments, though, and Mr. Makhmalbaf lessens their power by repeating them.
  48. Lantana
    Astonishingly well acted film, so much so that it seems unfair to single out any of the performances. Mr. Lawrence's camera sense is as sure and unobtrusive as his feel for acting. The movie just seems to happen, to grow out of the ground like a thorny plant, revealing the intricate intelligence of its design only in hindsight.
  49. Piñero
    It is a career-defining performance that could catapult the 37-year-old actor beyond bland romantic leads and into the kinds of juicy anti-heroic parts once gobbled up by Mr. Hoffman and Robert De Niro.
  50. Iris
    Rarely does a movie feel as leaden-footed as Iris, especially when it tries to bounce back and forth. The audience is transported between two very obvious stories and becomes slightly irritated by the grinding inevitability of both of them. As a result, Iris Murdoch gets lost in the shuffle.
  51. Not Another Teen Movie
    A happy, nasty and frequently hilarious assault on 20 years' worth of youth pictures.
  52. The Royal Tenenbaums
    At once endearing and unbearably show-offy, it seems to be the product of a sensibility formed by age-inappropriate reading.
  53. Vanilla Sky
    Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.
  54. Behind the Sun
    The blend of grim violence with romantic whimsy tilts toward sentimentality. Mr. Salles has the confidence of a storyteller too entranced by his tale to worry about the resistance of his audience, which he thus effortlessly overcomes.
  55. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
    Has a lovely, unadorned, though distended sentimentality.
  56. In July
    Mr. Akin pursues his happy, silly love story without embarrassment, and In July is ultimately more endearing than irritating.
  57. Princesa
    It could easily have become either prurient or moralistic, but Mr. Goldman's stance is that of a sympathetic observer, and his style combines ground-level realism with a touch of Almodóvarian extravagance.
  58. Baran
    The lovely clarity of this story, which seems to have been drawn from the literature of an earlier age, is well served by the artful subtlety of the telling. Mr. Majidi prefers imagery to exposition, and his shots are as dense with meaning, and as readily accessible, as Dutch paintings.
  59. Segunda piel
    The movie is quiet, modest and sympathetic almost to a fault; its scenes of emotional discord, accompanied by a swooning, sniffling score, seem best suited to cable television. It's like a Lifetime movie about men.
  60. Tuvalu
    Helmer's wildly whimsical debut film, Tuvalu, is the kind of movie that might one day find itself in the hall of fame of surreal movie weirdness alongside cult favorites like "Eraserhead," "Delicatessen" and the avant-garde frolics of Guy Maddin.
  61. Final
    Though its story is fuzzy, the acting and direction in Final give it an air of quiet, dignified ambition.
  62. Last Orders
    Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.
  63. Eban and Charley
    The picture is so predictable that the bad acting becomes a distraction.
  64. The Business of Strangers
    With an intensity that few movies have mustered, The Business of Strangers makes you feel the acute loneliness of it all.
  65. No Man's Land
    One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.
  66. Ocean's Eleven
    Soderbergh rallies a seismic jolt of enthusiasm, and the movie is an elating blaze of flair and pride.
  67. B-52
    It is intermittently engrossing, though a little overextended for the deadpan approach that Mr. Bitomsky uses.
  68. Texas Rangers
    This violent meatball western deserves to be forgotten quickly.
  69. ABCD
    A better and more serious film than its forerunner, "American Desi."
  70. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    Haneke, who wrote and directed, is a skillful, minutely observant filmmaker who trusts his audience to be able to put two and two together. Unfortunately, he's often too cryptic, which leaves viewers still trying to make connections when they should already be reacting to the moral lessons implied by them.
  71. The Independent
    It strings along its joke just long enough to keep from wearing out its welcome.
  72. The Affair of the Necklace
    Drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.
  73. Behind Enemy Lines
    As intense an immersion in military ambience as a Hollywood movie could hope to provide in just over 90 minutes.
  74. Trouble Every Day
    Ultimately seems naïve. In developing the comparison of sex and cannibalism, it never goes beyond the standard Draculian symbol of blood to include other bodily substances.
  75. Bangkok Dangerous
    Some of the nonstop commotion of Bangkok Dangerous is funny and inventive -- but much more of it is simply irritating and obfuscating.
  76. In the Bedroom
    When a film as profoundly quiet as In the Bedroom comes along, it feels almost miraculous, as if a shimmering piece of art had slipped below the radar and through the minefield of commerce.
  77. Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    Essential viewing for anyone who desires a sense of the finer human grain of a war that now commands the attention of the world as never before.
  78. Black Knight
    A movie that knows its audience. Its underlying philosophy might be: why try harder when this is all they expect?
  79. Sidewalks of New York
    The time is right for a breezy, captivating New York romantic comedy. Sidewalks of New York is not an especially good movie, but it will do.
  80. The Devil's Backbone
    Mr. del Toro provokes your screams and shudders, but he also earns your tears.
  81. Spy Game
    The problem lies in the calculating pretentiousness of using human misery to make shallow entertainment seem serious. It's worth comparing Spy Game with "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman's far superior exercise in post-cold-war spycraft.
  82. Out Cold
    A ski party movie in which the clothes are a little more revealing than they were 35 years ago, the practical jokes are a little more tasteless, and the uncertainty over sex is pretty much nonexistent.
  83. Così ridevano
    The movie is powerfully acted. Mr. Lo Verso's passionate, fiery-eyed Giovanni is an incandescent star turn by an actor with world class charisma.
  84. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.
  85. The Fluffer
    Moves nimbly from behind-the-scenes comedy to melodrama, with occasional stumbles into pop psychology and film-noir violence.
  86. Novocaine
    Nothing is particularly believable here, but there are still a few moments of silly, sinister fun.
  87. The Simian Line
    Might be described as a muddy, cliché-ridden sudsfest that lurches uncertainly between comedy and soap opera without finding its emotional or visual footing.
  88. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    Given that movies can now show us everything, the manifestations that Ms. Rowling described could be less magical only if they were delivered at a news conference.
  89. Bombay Eunuch
    The film offers a concise history of hijras, who used to officiate at births, weddings and other religious rituals.
  90. The Wash
    Isn't much of a movie (it'll play much better on the small screen), but the likable chemistry between Dre and Snoop counts for a lot.
  91. I Remember Me
    An intrepid sleuth, Ms. Snyder seems to have left no stone unturned in her search for answers.
  92. Maze
    This mishmash of emotional tones can't be redeemed by the performers' considerable investment in their work.
  93. King of the Jungle
    Mr. Rosenfeld is a writer whose talent shines through in the way he harvests minute pearls.
  94. Heist
    Heist is a pleasure to watch, and the greatest pleasure is to watch Mr. Lindo and Mr. Hackman steal it.
  95. Shallow Hal
    The most shocking thing about it may be its unabashed sincerity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Otomo
    A bleak and powerful work, one we probably need more than ever these days.
  97. Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV
    The movie's relentless comic excess is ultimately a little exhausting. But the longer the series endures, the more likely it is to achieve classic cult status.
  98. Happenstance
    Perhaps it's all a bit too much, and perhaps it doesn't add up, but the loose ends give the picture a jaunty, improvised feeling that, while it leads to some confusion, is ultimately part of its whimsical charm.
  99. Tape
    In portraying this threesome, Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman give the most psychologically acute performances of their film careers.
  100. Domestic Disturbance
    Jettisoning any ambition toward thrillerhood, Domestic Disturbance becomes a plodding, obvious angry-dad melodrama, ambling toward the final, fatal showdown between parent and usurper.
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