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. Supercross
    Provides plenty of authentic dirt-flying motorcycle thrills, but the film's excruciating earnestness and clunky script frequently slow its energetic pace to a grinding halt.
  2. Valiant
    Valiant is in dire need of some "Shrek"-ian sass, not to mention a drop or two of genuine emotion.
  3. Now & Forever
    Theresa Russell is terrific as Angela's slatternly but loving mother, but her character disappears abruptly midway through the movie.
  4. 3 Dancing Slaves
    Mr. Morel's predilection for murky, nearly pitch-black cinematography and spare, elliptical dialogue indicates his debt to filmmakers like François Ozon and Claire Denis, but Three Dancing Slaves lacks the psychological precision of Mr. Ozon's or Ms. Denis's work.
  5. Proof
    It's funny how movies about smart people often play so dumb.
  6. G
    A somewhat faithful but not very graceful retelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's elegant Jazz Age tragedy "The Great Gatsby."
  7. Venom
    Venom certainly can't be called a good movie, but within its genre it's perfectly palatable.
  8. Roll Bounce
    A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it.
  9. Daltry Calhoun
    Although the film starts off somewhat amusingly, the first-time feature director Katrina Holden Bronson (who also wrote the unbalanced script) seems to have spent more energy assembling the overbearing soundtrack than expanding on her characters' fractured relationships.
  10. Novo
    Sleek, attractive and ultimately vapid.
  11. Into the Blue
    This undiluted nonsense is best suited to DVD-rental desperation. Still, aficionados of cheap cinematic thrills involving beautiful and stupid young people will be happy to learn that while the film fizzles far more than it sizzles, its director, John Stockwell, is a connoisseur of the female backside, which he displays to great and frequent advantage.
  12. Carlito's Way: Rise to Power
    Rise to Power is notable for one achievement: It makes Sean Combs (better known, at the moment, as Diddy) unconvincing as a rich man who enjoys power and luxuries.
  13. The Gospel
    When not in song, the words that come out of the frustratingly undefined characters' mouths are mostly awkward and contribute to the film's overall incoherent narrative.
  14. A Tale of Two Pizzas
    The film borrows themes and cast members from HBO's "Sopranos," but the script lacks the nuance and wit of that series's creator, David Chase.
  15. The Fog
    Mildly scary here and there. It does not play by all the horror movie rules (e.g., the black guy always dies first). And the cast is good-looking.
  16. Emmanuel's Gift
    Sadly, Emmanuel's Gift is a powerful story of political change almost smothered by contrivance.
  17. Kids in America
    Because Kids in America can't decide whether it wants to be a stock teenage comedy or something more, it ends up stranded in the middle of nowhere.
  18. I Love Your Work
    Directed by the young actor Adam Goldberg, best known for playing the Jewish soldier who falls to a Nazi knife in "Saving Private Ryan," I Love Your Work is an attempt to say something interesting about modern celebrity.
  19. The Comedians of Comedy
    Part stand-up performance, part behind-the-scenes chit-chat, Michael Blieden's indulgent and often numbingly slow documentary follows four semiknown comedians.
  20. Æon Flux
    It's a movie best appreciated for the costumes, the sets and Ms. Theron's haughty athleticism.
  21. The Producers
    Ms. Thurman is the one bit of genuine radiance in this aggressively and pointlessly shiny, noisy spectacle.
  22. Stryker
    The mostly unprofessional cast does a lot of shouting and swearing, and Mr. Henry's face has a haunting impassivity, but the film does not offer much in the way of social insight or credible emotion.
  23. Hostel
    Hostel is motivated by an adolescent urge to shock. And while it's true that no civilized person will remain unscathed by the film's relentless bigotry - this is one of the most misogynistic films ever made - Mr. Roth's gory spectacles are too calculated to deliver the transgressive jolts they so obviously seek.
  24. Pizza
    The tone is half mocking, half forthright and completely boring.
  25. Imagine Me & You
    Enervating trifle.
  26. Who Gets to Call It Art?
    This glib, largely uninformative and poorly organized précis of the post-World War II art scene, with its emphasis on New York in the 1960's and the curator Henry Geldzahler, succeeds neither as history nor as art history.
  27. Tamara
    A low-budget horror film with even lower ambitions, Tamara is a movie of few innovations but one genuine, if unintentional, surprise.
  28. The Pink Panther
    Mr. Levy's cold, streamlined direction gives the movie the feel of a mechanical contraption manipulated by remote control with a nervous finger on the fast-forward button. Many of the jokes barely have time to register before we're on to the next stunt.
  29. Hate Crime
    With a little more subtlety - and a lot less predictability - the movie might have played more like a thoughtful drama and less like an outrageous exercise in wish fulfillment.
  30. Don't Tell
    Don't Tell, which was unaccountably nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film, is no better than a second-tier candidate for the Lifetime Channel.
  31. Stay Alive
    The star of Stay Alive is a cutting-edge video game, but the film still has hackneyed horror at its heart. And worse, it's not even the stylishly, wittily executed hackneyed horror of the "Scream" movies.
  32. Lonesome Jim
    Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise.
  33. Stoned
    Stoned accomplishes the unlikely feat of making the golden years before medical science and the law caught up with rock culture look dull.
  34. Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    Despite a gloriously baroque performance from Mr. Wahlberg - attempting moves certified only for Antonio Banderas - Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School remains irredeemably soggy.
  35. Iowa
    As the downward spiral continues, "drugs are evil" is pounded into our heads again and again until numbness sets in; in this case, even a touch of subtlety would have sent a more powerful and lasting message.
  36. Phat Girlz
    Barely written and stiffly directed.
  37. Free Zone
    If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Days of Heaven
    It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film.
  39. La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    The movie bubbles with incest, adultery, religion and homosexuality -- steamy themes that incite the cast to fits of enthusiastic overemoting.
  40. The Sisters
    Insufferable characters make for an insufferable play or movie. The Sisters, a grueling family feud conceived by Richard Alfieri, proves the point.
  41. Lady Vengeance
    A convoluted hodge-podge of time frames, subplots and bit player back stories.
  42. Art School Confidential
    In spite of some acute observations and a few interesting performances (most notably from John Malkovich as Jerome's drawing teacher and the ever-reliable Jim Broadbent as Strathmore's least illustrious alumnus), Art School Confidential is a dull and dyspeptic exercise in self-pity and hostility.
  43. An American Haunting
    An American Haunting purports to be based on a documented event, although most of its inspiration has been drawn from the empty well of "The Exorcist" and its progeny.
  44. Goal! The Dream Begins
    As the clichés mount, Danny Cannon directs as if he's the one on trial, teasing tension out of every pass and dribble. Most irritating of all is his determination to paint British soccer as a gentleman's game, a notion United's real fans would no doubt treat with the scorn it deserves.
  45. Over the Hedge
    There is no poetry here and little thought.
  46. Lemming
    The second half of the movie squanders suspense and momentum, solving its riddles by deflating them.
  47. Cars
    Both in its ingratiating vibe and bland execution, Cars is nothing if not totally, disappointingly new-age Disney.
  48. Stagedoor
    Stagedoor is like leafing through a collection of snapshots assembled with few captions and no text.
  49. The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress
    As much fun as that is for the choir being preached to, it would have been even more persuasive with a little less hammering and a little more historical perspective.
  50. Agnes and His Brothers
    Aside from appreciating the movie's sturdy performances, my reaction to this satire of the middle-class, all-German family swung from revulsion to mystification.
  51. Kill Your Idols
    Despite his access to both No Wave luminaries and atmospherically battered footage of various bands wreaking havoc at various venues, Mr. Crary never figures out what story he wants to tell.
  52. You, Me and Dupree
    A limp attempt to wed a romantic comedy to a buddy comedy, largely because the filmmakers see women as visitors from another planet, which is more or less what they now are in Hollywood.
  53. Mad Cowgirl
    A demented jag of blasphemy, multicultural weirdness, splatter-movie tropes and inchoate meat metaphors, Mad Cowgirl is an underground movie with little sense of grounding; the point is an aggressive pointlessness.
  54. Azumi
    The director, Ryuhei Kitamura, whose earlier films include the cult film "Versus," brings nothing new to the samurai-swordsman game other than some styling shorts for the whelps and a miniskirt for Azumi.
  55. Barnyard
    Like too many animated films aimed at children, Barnyard embraces stereotypes that generally no longer cut it in adult films, and for good reason.
  56. Jailbait
    A stagy, only mildly compelling prison drama that ends up feeling like purgatory to all involved.
  57. Hamilton
    To call Hamilton minimalist filmmaking is an understatement. Without plot or incident, and with only the flimsiest of characterizations, the movie operates primarily on the level of suggestion and insinuation.
  58. Poster Boy
    A polemic masquerading as a movie, Poster Boy unspools like a humorless lecture on right-wing homophobia.
  59. Trust the Man
    Ms. Moore is nicely lighted, but she too is poorly served by Mr. Freundlich's unfunny, unfocused screenplay, which basically stitches together a series of short scenes of four people whining in various combinations.
  60. Idlewild
    The joint doesn't jump in the musical Idlewild; it just twitches and stumbles. As much a missed opportunity as a terrible tease.
  61. Fratricide
    Every so often, Mr. Arslan cuts to Kurdistan, where a group of women wander the barren landscape, a Greek chorus gone astray in a film gone amiss.
  62. Princesas
    A maudlin melodrama about prostitutes in Madrid, Princesas is not, alas, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, but a dilution of his manner by the writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa.
  63. Surviving Eden
    Although the early scenes hold out some promise...the movie quickly runs out of ideas.
  64. I Trust You to Kill Me
    Inconsequential documentary.
  65. The Black Dahlia
    Mr. De Palma can be a director of dazzling creative lunacy, but there's little craziness in this restrained, awkward film. With the diverting exception of Hilary Swank, who plays a slinky degenerate named Madeleine Linscott, the leads are disastrous.
  66. Confetti
    Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that.
  67. Checking Out
    Stagy, stiff and marinated in egg cream.
  68. Employee of the Month
    Employee of the Month is more tired than a Wal-Mart greeter at the end of a Saturday shift. One can only hope its halfhearted suggestion that winning isn't everything is some comfort if the movie's grosses are as disappointing as its jokes.
  69. Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare
    Purely for curiosity’s sake this unusual, intermittently hypnotic quasi monster flick is worth checking out, at least until the initial "what is this?" effect wears off and it becomes as tiresome as listening to someone relate long-winded tales about nightmares or drug-induced exploits.
  70. The Grudge 2
    Puberty causes an exponential increase in evil -- and in incoherence -- in The Grudge 2.
  71. Man of the Year
    It swerves from thriller to romantic comedy to farce without much conviction, though you can occasionally salvage a glimmer of amusing possibility. Mr. Williams scores with a few throwaway jokes.
  72. The Marine
    Co-starring as Rome, the ringleader with "intimacy issues," Robert Patrick appears to be enjoying himself. That makes one of us.
  73. Saw III
    The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature.
  74. Death of a President
    Some will find profundity in the film's reversals and revelations, but its provocations are not particularly insightful or original. The Death of a President is, in the end, neither terribly outrageous nor especially heroic; it’s a thought experiment that traffics in received ideas.
  75. Shottas
    Cess Silvera, the film's writer and director, doesn't find any of the humanity or inner demons that would allow the characters to rise above B-movie exploitation.
  76. Unknown
    After a whole lot of buildup, and a real letdown of a payoff, the only enigma left is why we should care.
  77. The Return
    You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition.
  78. Deck the Halls
    Mr. Broderick and Mr. DeVito look tired and out of sorts, and you can hardly blame them, given the picture's inept, curdled mixture of sappiness and crude humor.
  79. Deja Vu
    The joke of it is, for all the pricey bangs and booms, the whiplash cinematography and the editing that turns film space into cubistic tableaux, a Bruckheimer-and-Scott partnership is only as good as its screenplay, and this one is a mess.
  80. Opal Dream
    A warning to parents everywhere about the dangers of indulging irrational behavior, Opal Dream is a sickly sweet tale of deep dysfunction masquerading as family solidarity.
  81. The Good German
    In his genre pastiche The Good German, Steven Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood, principally by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own filmmaking.
  82. Breaking and Entering
    What saves Breaking and Entering from foundering altogether in earnest self-regard is Mr. Minghella's evident affection for London, a city of inexhaustible architectural and human variety.
  83. Eragon
    If some of the characters won't be returning for the sequel, no matter. In all likelihood, neither will the audience.
  84. Home of the Brave
    As this cautious, politically evenhanded movie grinds along like clockwork, the fuse that should spark an emotional explosion fizzles after some sporadic hisses and sputters.
  85. Night at the Museum
    This season's answer to "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas," it's an overstuffed grab bag in which lumps of coal are glued together with melted candy.
  86. Primeval
    The screenplay, by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, tosses out a few chewy bits of B-movie wit, most of them supplied by Mr. Jones, who expresses the ambivalence of an African-American visiting the motherland through a series of bitter jokes.
  87. Blood and Chocolate
    Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition.
  88. Epic Movie
    The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Constellation
    If earnestness equaled skill, Constellation would be a classic.
  90. Norbit
    Not exactly uproarious. But Mr. Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on "Saturday Night Live," has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive.
  91. Coffee Date
    Leaving no cliché unturned, Coffee Date provides cheesy music, chats about "gaydar" and the obligatory are-you-looking-at-mine? urinal scene.
  92. Antibodies
    As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason.
  93. Reno 911!: Miami
    What feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air.
  94. The Abandoned
    After a while, Mr. Cerdà exhausts his repertory of spooky effects -- too many dark hallways and illogical, foreboding point-of-view shots -- and you begin to hunger for exposition, always a bad sign in a horror film. Even worse is that, by the time the explanations arrive, you no longer care.
  95. Wild Hogs
    Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Allen, who have never aspired very far beyond their affable television-comedy personas, are easier to watch than Mr. Travolta or Mr. Macy, who both undertake what can only be called acting. This is more than the picture deserves, but then again, so is Ray Liotta, as the chieftain of the bad bikers, and so is Ms. Tomei.
  96. The Ultimate Gift
    Reeking of self-righteousness and moral reprimand, Michael O. Sajbel’s Ultimate Gift”is a hairball of good-for-you filmmaking.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Brother
    The movie's strongest element is the chemistry between the reflective Mr. Kearse and Mr. Scott (who really has Down syndrome). Improving on its obvious antecedent in "Dominick and Eugene," their relationship feels real, not like a movie contrivance.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    The film is brazenly indebted to old cowboys-and-Indians movies and to James Cameron’s "Aliens." Gleefully sensationalistic and paced like an adults-only shoot-'em-up video game, it's ultimately less interested in subversion and subtext than in making viewers squirm, shriek and throw up into their popcorn bags.
  99. TMNT
    The turtles themselves may look prettier, but are no smarter; torn irreparably from their countercultural roots, our superheroes on the half shell have been firmly co-opted by the industry their creators once sought to spoof.
  100. Meet the Robinsons
    Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.
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