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. She's Out of My League
    If you’re going to make a romantic comedy called She’s Out of My League about a schlubby nice guy and a pneumatic blonde, the last thing you want is for the audience to be left thinking: “He’s right. She’s way out of his league.”
  2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    There is nothing wrong with the story itself, but the tone is grating and the pacing sluggish. Episodes that might be howlingly funny on the page turn weirdly gross and sadistic on screen.
  3. Clash of the Titans
    The remake doesn’t as much improve on the original as match it goofily amusing moment for moment.
  4. 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.
  5. Swimfan
    Like "Cruel Intentions," Swimfan is entertaining enough to be considered a guilty pleasure. But to transcend the teenage movie genre both movies would have needed a baby Glenn Close, and both came up short.
  6. Around the Bend
    A heavily padded, thinly conceived, well-meaning movie.
  7. 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.
  8. Beyond Vanilla
    It's hard not to chuckle, and hard, too, not to marvel at the many varieties of human experience.
  9. The Tuxedo
    May have been tailored just for Mr. Chan, but it still feels like off-the-rack garb. And by now, Mr. Chan deserves much better than a hand-me-down suit that smells like a rental.
  10. The Adventures of Felix
    Makes its points gently; the picture presents its socially conscious messages as if they were written in the sand, on the beaches where Felix would probably prefer to frolic.
  11. Ordinary Sinner
    Mr. Davis has a lot of ideas, but when it comes to dramatizing them, he is unable to give them an engaging form.
  12. Double Jeopardy
    Would-be Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse games...are more memorable for their settings...than for their sense.
  13. Dog Run
    Too fuzzy-headed to rise above the pack.
  14. The Young Unknowns
    Held back throughout by the self-conscious, overly explicit dialogue and the judgmental, moralistic undertone that throbs throughout.
  15. Bounce: Behind the Velvet Rope
    The picture is obsessed with strength and the use of physical force, though its attitudes are often slippery.
  16. Down to Earth
    Mr. Rock's attempts to disentangle himself from his persona while offering audiences a sliver of insight into his world is a lofty ambition, but Down to Earth falls short.
  17. O
    In trying to make "Othello" more lifelike and bring it down to a younger audience -- in effect, to make it more democratic -- the adaptation has rendered the material artless.
  18. The Guys
    What limits The Guys -- what makes it an exercise in art therapy rather than a work of art -- is its decorous refusal to probe deeply into its characters, or to exploit any of the dramatic potential their accidental relationship might contain.
  19. Once in the Life
    (Fishburne's) performance here, witty and profane, vulnerable and strutting, nearly holds the movie together.
  20. States of Control
    In the end, Lisa's revolt seems as predictably programmatic, and as widely abstracted from observable human behavior, as the movie that contains her.
  21. Off the Hook
    Poverty, capable of stunting lives, can also blight films. A case in point is the earnest and heartfelt but undernourished and plodding Off the Hook.
  22. Downtown 81
    It's as a documentary that Downtown 81 is most successful, particularly at those moments when the somewhat unfocused filmmaking allows us to look past the foreground characters and catch glimpses of a vanished cityscape.
  23. Tortilla Soup
    As predictable as a fast-food restaurant. The actors' exuberance goes a long way, but not far enough.
  24. Two Can Play That Game
    A likable, featherweight romantic comedy that hardly asks to be taken seriously, but its very triviality is, in some ways, quite significant.
  25. History Lessons
    Unfortunately the clips themselves are so battered, grainy and sordid that they are more depressing than inspiring.
  26. Exhuming Mr. Rice
    Someone deserves the grand prize for persuading David Bowie to participate in this minor drama .The movie is bland and ordinary.
  27. Lies
    The daring but only partly successful Korean film Lies is built around voyeurism.
  28. Ha-Hesder
    Leaves a movie that wants to be a searching moral examination of human motivation under stress frustratingly opaque at the center.
  29. Luminarias
    Easy to like and difficult to admire.
  30. Mutant Aliens
    Plympton fails to develop compelling personalities for any of his characters.
  31. 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.
  32. Light It Up
    Turns out to be a pretentiously righteous drama that drowns any claim to serious attention in a sea of superficial characters.
    • The New York Times
  33. Loving Jezebel
    Mr. Bader was lucky to get a good cast.
  34. Smokers Only
    Too predictable to leave much of an impression.
  35. 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.
  36. Returning Mickey Stern
    A sweet, well-intended picture, but like its title character, it is not quite good enough for the big leagues.
  37. Scarlet Diva
    Permeated by a self-pitying, adolescent naïveté.
  38. Julien Donkey-Boy
    The territory where the circus sideshow meets the avant-garde...visually arresting, dramatically blurry.
  39. Hit and Runway
    Hit and Runway is a case of the emperor's old clothes: drab, sentimental rags that desperately want to be something else.
  40. Return to Me
    Weightless and polite when it means to be magical and gentle, Return to Me is a piece of fruit gone soft from being off the vine too long.
  41. Body Shots
    More focused on surface than true revelation.
  42. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    Something to behold; it's just not much to watch, despite admirable ambition and a few tense, well-thought-out sequences.
  43. Greenfingers
    The film is as synthetic as a rubber rose, but it is all but indistinguishable from the organically grown, bred-in-Britain article.
  44. 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.
  45. 8 ½ Women
    Its message is quite simple and all too familiar: when it comes to sex, all men are little boys.
  46. Onegin
    Feels too cramped, indoorsy and bloodless to catch romantic fire.
  47. Food of Love
    Tossed by successive waves of floridity and biliousness, Food of Love finally washes up on the shores of camp.
  48. The Three Marias
    Its emotional climate is too extreme to invite identification, and its characters are too single-minded in their revenge to evoke pity, terror or even much interest.
  49. Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Very little of consequence can be said of the film, other than that it is quieter and more realistic than the Bollywood spectacles that are India's best-known movies.
  50. Wildflowers
    A dreamy, impressionistic inquiry into the legacy of the 1960's, but it's less concerned with history than with mood.
  51. The Banger Sisters
    Certainly begins with its heart in the right place. But the movie eventually snaps under the strain of its plot contrivances and its need to reassure.
  52. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    With its many unsolved mysteries, WXIII joins a long list of film-noir projects that end up stranded in the maze of their own invention.
  53. Aimee & Jaguar
    There is surprisingly little emotional amplitude in the film.
  54. Went to Coney Island on a Mission from God... Be Back by Five
    Never quite comes to dramatic or comic life.
  55. The Suburbans
    It's cute and jokey and has no particular edge.
  56. Waga jinsei saiaku no toki
    A mildly amusing Japanese appropriation of 1950's American detective movies.
  57. The Waiting Game
    Ordinary lives have become an ordinary film.
  58. The Blackout
    Like most of Mr. Ferrara's films, The Blackout takes place in a trance state -- events are fuzzy, line readings even fuzzier. There are mysterious ellipses in the plotline and lots of droning electric guitar work on the soundtrack.
  59. Maze
    This mishmash of emotional tones can't be redeemed by the performers' considerable investment in their work.
  60. 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.
  61. Thorns
    Following Bollywood's tradition of excessive generosity, Mr. Gupta tosses in too much of just about everything, resulting in a two-and-a-half-hour film that may exhaust some viewers.
  62. XX/XY
    A sour portrait of Gen X yuppies who settle for adult lives that appear at once soulless and overprivileged.
  63. The Crew
    Some of it is, I'll admit, pretty funny.
  64. Scotland, Pa.
    Too leisurely paced and visually drab for its own good, it succeeds in being only sporadically amusing.
  65. The Crimson Rivers
    The full explanation for the movie's graphically depicted horrors is preposterous even by the almost-anything- goes standards of the action-thriller conspiracy genre.
  66. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    So busy building its symbolic frame that it forgets to develop its characters, or even to make them likable.
  67. Down and Out with the Dolls
    The results suggest a slightly more ribald version of "Josie and the Pussycats."
  68. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Feels fabricated, studio-bound and claustrophobic, which doesn't add to the ripped-from-the-headlines authenticity this genre has always depended on.
  69. 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.
  70. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.
  71. The Bachelor
    Its satire is too broad to carry much of a sting.
  72. P.S. Your Cat Is Dead!
    Mr. Guttenberg's direction of "Cat," is competent and unadorned, bringing out whatever qualities the text possesses -- mainly good-naturedness.
  73. Simply Irresistible
    It is a measure of the shortcomings of this genial, well-meaning but ultimately unenchanting film that scene after scene is stolen by the second bananas.
  74. Martin & Orloff
    An occasionally savvy farce that suffers from attention deficit disorder.
  75. The Ballad of Bering Strait
    This competently made picture seems a rehash, and not a terribly interesting one. What's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is.
  76. Reindeer Games
    The movie is staged like a pit stop -- Reindeer Games goes from being fun to being laughable.
  77. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    A clever if muddled collection of riffs on the "Blair Witch" juggernaut, dressed up with intellectual pretensions by Joe Berlinger, who directed this film with a chortling zest.
  78. Eight Legged Freaks
    Awkward, obvious and sporadically -- very sporadically -- amusing.
  79. The Closer You Get
    Another high-concept Irish Spring comedy.
  80. Jakob the Liar
    Alternates between bumbling group antics and strained poignancy...anticipates all laughter and emotion in ways that make it its own worst enemy.
  81. Manic
    The camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.
  82. 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.
  83. The Shipping News
    The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.
  84. The Accidental Tourist
    The Accidental Tourist often relies on Miss Tyler's methods without tempering them, and gives a tone of crashing obviousness to material that need not have seemed that way. [23 Dec 1988, p.C12]
  85. The Hunt for Red October
    The movie finally is never very convincing. Even the special effects aren't great. Mr. Connery, however, wears the movie as if it were a favorite old hat. He makes it look good.
  86. The Heart of Me
    The end product suggests tepid, bottom-drawer Merchant-Ivory in which the emotions rarely catch fire.
  87. Primal Fear
    Pared down to a farfetched plot and paper-thin motives, the story relies on an overload of tangential subplots to keep it looking busy. [3 Apr 1996, p.C15]
  88. 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.
  89. Sugar & Spice
    The movie is full of scattershot gags and indifferent acting, but you get the feeling that it's bad on purpose, which makes it, given the number of teenage movies that are terrible by accident, not bad at all.
  90. The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human
    A one-joke mockumentary.
  91. 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.
  92. Uptown Girls
    Fatally true to the hypocritical values of its niche market. While pretending to teach a lesson in compassion, it wallows in the perks of privilege.
  93. Buffalo Soldiers
    Sloppy when it should be incisive, indulgent when it should be astringent, and ultimately unsure of what it is mocking and in what spirit.
  94. Rape Me
    Ms. Depentes and Ms. Thi -- push such chic amoralism to its logical conclusion, composing a numbing alternation of pornographic scenarios and brutal killings. The result is like something you'd see momentarily unscrambled on a hotel television set, but with better music and a little more of a story line.
  95. Joe Somebody
    Continually squanders its opportunities for hilarity.
  96. Chill Factor
    A mechanically efficient chase-by-numbers movie.
  97. Maestro
    A passionate but messy, often inarticulate home movie.
  98. Abandon
    A thriller wrapped in heavy-duty gauze to muffle the chills.
  99. Passionada
    As Passionada ambles toward a formulaic fairy-tale ending, it exudes such giddy self-assurance that you wish you could believe in it.
  100. Love Stinks
    A one-dimensional comedy that mostly falls flat.
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