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. The Hawk Is Dying
    Set in North Florida and based on a book by Harry Crews, The Hawk Is Dying is a dreary study of male angst groaning beneath the weight of its own symbolism.
  2. Race You to the Bottom
    Self-consciously edgy and romantically limp.
  3. Are We Done Yet?
    An ill-advised sequel to "Are We There Yet?" and a feeble fable of better parenting through home improvement.
  4. The Reaping
    The only remotely notable thing about this particular jumble of boos, bangs and door creaks...is that it tries to wed the horror trend with the heated-up God market.
  5. Redline
    This film is about surfaces, for young men with testosterone to burn, and the racing passages snap.
  6. In the Land of Women
    The meek, mopey comedy In the Land of Women is the film equivalent of a sensitive emo band with one foot in alternative rock and the other in the squishy pop mainstream: a softer, fuzzier "Garden State."
  7. The Invisible
    This latest recycling of foreign-grown frights shows less interest in horror than in healing.
  8. Kickin It Old Skool
    A romantic subplot is formulaic, and, most disappointing, the break-dance sequences don't sizzle, though the film's director, Harvey Glazer, is known for his music videos. Keep an eye out, however, for some nutty cameos.
  9. Next
    In Next, a crummy action and speculative-fiction hybrid, Nicolas Cage plays a guy who can see into the future two minutes at a time. It's too bad that Mr. Cage couldn't tap into those same powers of divination to save himself from making yet another inexplicably bad choice in roles.
  10. The Wedding Weekend
    Fortunately, there is Molly Shannon as the money manager's disgruntled wife, giving a selfless, robust performance. Bracingly astringent in an unlikable role, she almost turns a potential liability into the film's salvation.
  11. The Last Time
    A Michael Keaton outing is always cause for celebration, no matter how ramshackle the vehicle ("First Daughter," anyone?) or paper-thin the role.
  12. Mr. Brooks
    A werewolf movie masquerading as a thriller, it looks like a canny attempt by Bruce A. Evans, its director and screenwriter (with Raynold Gideon), to establish a "Saw"-like franchise using the names of fading ’80s stars to lend the project a semblance of respectability.
  13. Nancy Drew
    As it is, Nancy Drew stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula -- a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case -- and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cashback
    Cashback suggests a “Malcolm in the Middle” episode directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The hero’s pained, hilarious childhood flashbacks deserve a much better movie.
  15. Fat Girls
    Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film.
  16. If I Didn't Care
    The movie itself is a shell. The characters, especially the unstable Hadley, barely exist. And even by the loose standards of film noir, the mechanics of the murder plot, and the story’s jolts and twists toward its abrupt surprise ending, are unconvincing.
  17. War
    Most regrettably, War squanders the considerable merits of its leads.
  18. The Last Legion
    This might have made a good children’s film.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Death Sentence
    Aside from a stunning three-minute tracking shot as the gang pursues Nick through a parking garage, and Mr. Bacon’s hauntingly pale, dark-eyed visage, Mr. Wan’s film is a tedious, pandering time-waster.
  20. The Hunting Party
    A misfired, misguided would-be satire.
  21. December Boys
    A coming-of-age tale so treacly it doesn’t just tug your heartstrings, it attempts to glue them to your ribs.
  22. Silk
    Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.
  23. The Brave One
    Don’t be fooled. The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.
  24. Cover
    The sledgehammer message is clear: Best friends can help when you need a McMansion, but only God can help when your husband needs a man.
  25. Feast of Love
    A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.
  26. Lust, Caution
    Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.
  27. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    A faux documentary grounded in ethnicity and mired in absurdity, Finishing the Game is a terrific idea still waiting to be fashioned into a real movie.
  28. The Good Night
    The comedy of male midlife angst dates back at least to “The Seven-Year Itch,” when it was sweet and innocent. Each time it is recycled, it gets more sour and joyless.
  29. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity Kurt Cobain About a Son, but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it.
  30. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Although neither Ms. Berry nor Mr. Del Toro can be faulted in their scenery-chewing moments, these star turns make you uncomfortably aware that they are Oscar-conscious auditions for the Big Prize. Their naked ambition subtly contaminates a movie that, despite its fine acting, has the emotional impact of a general anesthetic.
  31. Bella
    If Bella (the title doesn’t make sense until the last scene) is a mediocre cup of mush, the response to it suggests how desperate some people are for an urban fairy tale with a happy ending, no matter how ludicrous.
  32. August Rush
    To describe August Rush as a piece of shameless hokum doesn’t quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this contemporary fairy tale.
  33. The Sasquatch Gang
    There’s precious little to laugh at in The Sasquatch Gang, a sad attempt to board the loser-nerd comedy bandwagon.
  34. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.
  35. Redacted
    Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.
  36. Alvin and the Chipmunks
    Despite its shout-outs to the holiday season, this is essentially airplane fodder, not a perennial. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the sequel.
  37. The Kite Runner
    Mr. Forster, who previously directed “Monster’s Ball” and “Finding Neverland,” has been soundly defeated by The Kite Runner. Despite the film’s far-flung locations (it was shot primarily in China), there is remarkably little of visual interest here; the setups are banal, and the scenes lack tension, which no amount of editing can provide.
  38. Flakes
    A business course on cutthroat capitalism disguised as a slacker comedy: That’s the kindest way to describe Michael Lehmann’s Flakes.
  39. Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    Like a feature-length version of the television sitcom “My Name Is Earl,” only Canadian -- and not funny.
  40. The Eye
    Louder and more literal than its inspiration, The Eye benefits from a spiky performance by Alessandro Nivola as Sydney’s rehabilitation counselor. “Your eyes are not the problem,” he tells her at one point. He is so, so right.
  41. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Instead of the kind of inspired imaginative synergy that distinguished the “Lord of the Rings” and later “Harry Potter” pictures, this movie, directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”), feels more like a sloppy, secondhand pander.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Witless Protection
    The slapstick and action set pieces are lame, and its performances range from competent to annoying.
  43. The Other Boleyn Girl
    Forced to compete for kingly favors, the women were soon rivals, a contest that, in its few meagerly entertaining moments, recalls the sisterly love in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”
  44. College Road Trip
    Eyes popping and mouths agape, Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symoné mug their way through College Road Trip as if it were a silent movie -- which, come to think of it, would have been a lot less irritating.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Doomsday
    In terms of story, “The Descent” and Doomsday are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, Doomsday is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.
  46. Sleepwalking
    As Mr. Maher, in his feature directing debut, brings in surreal touches and puts on literary airs, the film’s grip loosens, and its vernacular turns increasingly wooden.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Drillbit Taylor
    So ploddingly directed (by Steven Brill) and lazily written that it adds up to little more than a diffuse collection of second-hand gags and jokes, few of them funny.
  48. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    This is screenwriting by numbers. Unlike, say, Ken Loach’s marvelous “Bread and Roses,” Under the Same Moon is too busy sanctifying its protagonists and prodding our tear ducts to say anything remotely novel about immigration policies or their helpless victims.
  49. Shutter
    The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from “Psycho,” and draws unease from Jane’s disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie’s most fascinating player.
  50. 21
    Greed is good and comes without a hint of conscience in 21, a feature-length bore about some smarty-pants who take Vegas for a ride.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chapter 27
    Except for Judah Friedlander’s earthy, funny work as a paparazzo, most of the performances are vague and dull, including Lindsay Lohan’s supporting turn as a fictional Beatles fan who befriends Mr. Chapman.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Ruins
    More disgusting than scary, The Ruins is the latest in a long line of horror films about upper-middle-class travelers being terrorized in unfamiliar environments.
  53. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.”
  54. Chaos Theory
    A predictable romantic dramedy that isn’t particularly tender, moving or amusing, Chaos Theory suffers first and foremost from featuring the least engaging couple to headline a movie in some time.
  55. The Fall
    A genuine labor of love -- and a real bore.
  56. Noise
    The movie, whose cacophonous soundtrack, when turned up, conjures your worst nightmare of sirens, car alarms, jackhammers and sundry aural assaults, is a one-trick film that rapidly wears out its welcome.
  57. Savage Grace
    Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.
  58. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark, The X-Files: I Want to Believe is the generally bad-news follow-up to the show’s first feature-film incarnation, "The X-Files."
  59. Step Brothers
    They're losers that only a mother, an entertainment manager or a gang of self-satisfied comedy insiders could love.
  60. A Very British Gangster
    Plays less like a documentary than an E! exposé of lowlife skulduggery.
  61. Baghead
    The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass.
  62. Brideshead Revisited
    Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons.
  63. No Regret
    It is perverse that a movie concerned with objectification would reduce its hero to an object.
  64. Beautiful Losers
    Though Mr. Rose can't be blamed for waxing nostalgic, he can't much expect us to care about so fawning and self-serving a document.
  65. The Spirit
    What is most striking about The Spirit is how little pleasure it affords, in spite of its efforts to by sly, sexy, heartfelt and clever all at once.
  66. Righteous Kill
    A clutter of recycled cop-movie and serial-killer film clichés.
  67. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency.
  68. The Duchess
    An overstuffed, intellectually underbaked portrait of a poor little rich girl.
  69. Hounddog
    Hounddog is never more than a sluggish dawdle from shack to swimmin' hole and back again.
  70. Igor
    An animated twist on the Frankenstein story that never sparks to life.
  71. Max Payne
    Max’s righteous anger finds various allies and targets, though it is not always clear who is which. They are played by Mila Kunis, Beau Bridges and Ludacris with just enough panache and expressiveness to uphold the (increasingly irrelevant) distinction between a movie and a video game.
  72. An American Carol
    Cheap shots and mean spirits abound, as do celebrity cameos (James Woods, Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, Kelsey Grammer). But it's the laziness of the writing that most offends.
  73. Repo! The Genetic Opera
    Feels destined to please a campy coterie of fans and no one else.
  74. Crossing Over
    If Mr. Kramer's outrage felt honest, his film would be easier to respect. But time and again, he undermines his own righteousness by pumping up the violence and stripping down his talent.
  75. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Any movie that awards a former Monty Python cast member a Nobel Prize in anything cannot be all bad. And The Day the Earth Stood Still could be worse.
  76. Adam Resurrected
    The film is so flat that it leaves you wondering if Mr. Kaniuk's book is ultimately untranslatable to the screen.
  77. Dark Streets
    Diverting enough as a series of music videos, Dark Streets strikes postures in place of drama.
  78. Delgo
    Too leaden for adults and too baffling for kids.
  79. Yes Man
    Yes Man rarely rises to genuine hilarity. It takes no risks, finds no inspiration and settles, like its hero, into a dull, noncommittal middle ground. Should you see this movie? Maybe. Whatever. I don't care.
  80. Marley & Me
    Bland, obsequious adaptation of John Grogan’s best-selling memoir.
  81. Bride Wars
    A dopey if largely painless romantic comedy.
  82. Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    A tossed-off comedy from Adam Sandler's production company that makes one long for the comparative genius of "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry."
  83. Inkheart
    Aims for a blend of whimsy and tingly suspense but botches nearly every spell it tries to cast.
  84. He's Just Not That Into You
    Whenever faced with another puerile movie ostensibly about women, I play a little game called What Would Thelma and Louise Do?
  85. The International
    So undistinguished that the moments you remember best are those that you wish another, more original director had tackled.
  86. The Edge of Love
    The story here, plucked from Thomas's life and embellished, proves almost entirely devoid of interest.
  87. The Perfect Sleep
    Easy on the eyes but brutal on the ears.
  88. American Swing
    It leaves you feeling queasy.
  89. Bart Got a Room
    The movie imprisons its talented cast (including Alia Shawkat as Danny’s overlooked soul mate and Brandon Hardesty as his worldly best friend) in roles that leave little room for anything but caricature.
  90. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    X-Men Origins: Wolverine will most likely manage to cash in on the popularity of the earlier episodes, but it is the latest evidence that the superhero movie is suffering from serious imaginative fatigue.
  91. The Big Shot-Caller
    The characters' quirks lend The Big Shot-Caller a certain authenticity, and it is easy to empathize with Mr. Rhein's Lonely Guy in the City. But this minuscule indie variation of "Saturday Night Fever" moves only in fits and starts. When it ends on a cautiously upbeat note, you feel that you have seen just the stumbling first act of an unfinished drama.
  92. Land of the Lost
    The only marginally interesting, if unsurprising, thing about the pricey movie spinoff of the junky children's television show Land of the Lost is that a lot of money has been spent on yet another cultural throwaway.
  93. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.
  94. Aliens in the Attic
    Robert Hoffman as the boyfriend, who spends most of his time under the marionettelike control of either the aliens or the human children, provides the film's occasional funny moments.
  95. Mystery Team
    The results are hit-and-miss. Some bits fall thuddingly flat, and the characters are rarely more than stick figures.
  96. The Blue Tooth Virgin
    Starts out feeling a little too “inside Hollywood” and only grows more so as it rolls along. By the end, this small film about scriptwriters ends up being mostly for scriptwriters, despite appealing performances from the two leads.
  97. Defamation
    Disorganized and somewhat annoying.
  98. Tenderness
    Tenderness is a movie undone by its formulaic plot conventions, and its need to give its star more screen time than his characters merits.
  99. Tooth Fairy
    Watching the first half-hour of Tooth Fairy is like reaching into a grab bag of novelties, as the movie unveils its tricks... After that, the wit more or less evaporates, replaced by bloated sentimentality and clumsy plot exposition.
  100. Alice in Wonderland
    Busy, garish and periodically amusing.
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