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. The Animal
    Transcendently dumb but very funny comedy.
  2. A Real Young Girl
    Crude, unpolished, yet curiously dreamy.
  3. What's the Worst That Could Happen?
    The movie turns into a cobweb of tricky spins and twists that seems like a hip-hop version of "Ruthless People."
  4. Himalaya
    Somehow, in spite of the stunning vistas and some witty and affecting moments, the story seems to unfold at a distance; the human drama is diminished by the setting rather than amplified by it.
  5. The Man Who Cried
    It's hard to be drawn into a movie if you're never entirely sure what it's supposed to be about, other than about 100 minutes.
  6. The Road Home
    A cinematic ballad of such seamless construction and exquisite tonal balance it transcends most of the pitfalls of movies that aspire to a classic, lyric simplicity.
  7. Pearl Harbor
    Works best as a bang-and- boom action picture, a loud symphony of bombardment and explosion juiced up with frantic editing and shiny computer-generated imagery.
  8. Our Song
    So unlike most Hollywood coming-of-age stories as to seem downright revolutionary.
  9. Fast Food Fast Women
    Almost creates a sense of dread as you sit watching its raft of aimless, self-absorbed neurotics clang into one another.
  10. Strange Fits of Passion
    Metamorphoses from a character study into a confusingly edited sampler of sexual possibilities that feels both programmatic and old-hat.
  11. Petits frères
    Captures the vulnerability and aimlessness of its unfortunate characters with a heart-in-your-throat rawness that recalls some of the more poignant moments of Italian neo-realist cinema.
  12. Angel Eyes
    The product is so synthetic it has only attitude where its heart ought to be.
  13. Moulin Rouge!
    Simultaneously stirring and dispiriting.
  14. Shrek
    A giggly cocktail, though it's more foam than drink.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Performance
    The film progresses by what I imagine a series of electro‐shocks to be like, but a shock treatment administered not by a therapist but by a misprogrammed computer.
  16. Under Hellgate Bridge
    Sergio's urban melodrama Under Hellgate Bridge suggests the contemporary equivalent of any number of 1930's B movies.
  17. Startup.com
    Moves slowly and grimly toward the moment that for the audience is the most engrossing though filled with dread: when things begin to unravel and the participants are no longer aware of the cameras. That is when your shoulders tense and you lean toward the screen.
  18. The King Is Alive
    The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm.
  19. The Trumpet of the Swan
    A bland, well-meaning mishmash that never coheres into a dramatic whole.
  20. Bread and Roses
    He plies his viewers with plenty of bread -- chewy and, to some tastes, dry and starchy scenes -- but he also scatters petals of whimsy and delight to nourish the senses.
  21. A Knight's Tale
    The picture itself is good-humored, but bland and predictable. It's a cross between an All-American vaudevillian version of "Shakespeare in Love" and Mel Brooks's "Robin Hood: Men in Tights."
  22. About Adam
    Seems refreshing, even mildly subversive.
  23. The Man Who Bought Mustique
    A compulsively watchable but repugnant portrait of a selfish eccentric born to privilege.
  24. Pavilion of Women
    It might have been a satisfying if not terribly original piece of historical melodrama, but its clumsiness turns it, against its best intentions, into half-baked operatic kitsch.
  25. Ice from the Sun
    It is the kind of film that only a certain breed of cinematic cultist could tolerate. Its grade-school-level acting, for instance, is so rudimentary that it makes the cast of "The Blair Witch Project" (which Ice From the Sun seems to be consciously parodying at times) appear Stanislavskian.
  26. The Young Girl and the Monsoon
    Crackles dangerously to life whenever Constance (who narrates the film) is on the screen with her father Hank (Terry Kinney).
  27. Under the Sand
    Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano etude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.
  28. Eureka
    Eureka never comes to life. -- In pursuing its aesthetic agenda so single-mindedly, the movie leaves the characters behind in the muck.
  29. Time and Tide
    A woozy, disconnected piece of filmmaking about drugs, rock 'n' roll and the aftermath of sex.
  30. The Mummy Returns
    The noisome action sequences of The Mummy Returns are preferable to the quiet times, when the cast is limited to spouting dialogue that is a banal combination of exposition and homily.
  31. Deuces Wild
    A film that desperately wants to be a music video circa 1983.
  32. Green Dragon
    Loses its way in rhetorical excess and blatant sentimentality.
  33. The Forsaken
    Had it exhibited a modicum of restraint, The Forsaken could have been twice as scary.
  34. Mauvais Sang
    While the screen flashes and flickers, little else is happening.
  35. One Night at McCool's
    Packs a lot into one night, but it's wearying. It's like a kid determined to show you every toy in his room, and there's nowhere to escape.
  36. Driven
    Even fans of open-wheel racing, the high-speed, high-stress pastime that is the subject of Renny Harlin's hectic new film, may walk away from it more logy than exhilarated.
  37. The Golden Bowl
    If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.
  38. Town & Country
    What it does offer, however, are the pleasures of watching its seasoned stars expertly go through their familiar paces.
  39. The End of the Road
    So disorganized that it seems to be pulling its conclusions out of its pockets, along with scraps of paper, matches, lint and half-forgotten junk.
  40. Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story
    Fascinating but somewhat repellent.
  41. The Luzhin Defence
    Moves with fluidity and ease through brisk opening conventions to a perfectly poised and balanced endgame.
  42. The Charcoal People
    Bluntly downbeat.
  43. The Low Down
    What distinguishes The Low Down from movies like "The Brothers McMullen" and "My Life's in Turnaround" is its ragged edge of authenticity, its refusal to plot its characters' lives on the graph of romantic comedy convention.
  44. The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm
    Emerges as an uncommonly sober, well-researched film of its type.
  45. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
    Nostalgia and comedy are run through a food processor until they become a flavorless paste.
  46. Harry Is Here to Help
    A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.
  47. Freddy Got Fingered
    The movie's comic heart consists of a series of indescribably loopy, elaborately conceived happenings that are at once rigorous and chaotic, idiotic and brilliant.
  48. The Center of the World
    In a culture apparently defined by lap dancing, ersatz architectural sublimity and the virtual contact of cyberspace, how do we know what is real? The Center of the World, for example, is as phony as can be.
  49. 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.
  50. Brigham City
    Brigham City, like "God's Army," may proselytize for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but Brigham City is also an example of concise, skillful filmmaking.
  51. Lakeboat
    Mr. Mantegna, who as an actor is one of the leading interpreters of Mr. Mamet's work, gives generous room to the movie's first-rate ensemble.
  52. The Body
    If the film were a fight, they'd have stopped it.
  53. The Circle
    The political implications of the film are manifest, as is the quiet courage of making it.
  54. Bridget Jones's Diary
    Ms. Zellweger accomplishes the small miracle of making Bridget both entirely endearing and utterly real.
  55. Josie and the Pussycats
    Few people other than future airline passengers should be subjected to such misery.
  56. Kingdom Come
    You are left with the feeling that its excesses notwithstanding, it knows its chosen terrain.
  57. Chopper
    Mr. Bana's Chopper is so scarily convincing that he makes you feel the eruptive force of each mood swing and the way his character's paranoia, egomania and conscience- stricken apologies are part of a volatile emotional cycle.
  58. Joe Dirt
    Relentlessly softheaded and softhearted.
  59. The Girl
    Has the dreary one-track banality of a feature-length version of an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries," Showtime's series for people who like soft core but are too lazy to leave the house.
  60. Just Visiting
    Over all, the humor has been sanitized a bit compared with the darker, more grotesque comedy of the French original.
  61. Beautiful Creatures
    Beneath its studiedly ugly surface, this bargain-basement answer to "Thelma and Louise" is as loathsome as any mindless, blood-drenched Hollywood action-adventure yarn.
  62. The Day I Became a Woman
    What appears on the screen has a starkness that is almost indelible.
  63. Along Came a Spider
    Overplotted, hollow thriller.
  64. Pokémon 3: The Movie
    All about bright colors and constant movement.
  65. Shadow Magic
    Gentle and easy to take.
  66. Booye kafoor, atre yas
    Perhaps it's the difference in culture, but the thoughtfulness in Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine shows that its creator isn't letting himself or his audience off the hook.
  67. Blow
    Depp's witty, spare performance gives the picture a poignancy -- a depth of feeling, if you'll allow the pun -- that Mr. Demme's hectic direction and the hurried script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes don't quite earn.
  68. Mau Mau Sex Sex
    The fun is contagious.
  69. All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    So good it leaves you starved for more.
  70. Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras
    Amateurish and incoherent.
  71. Amores Perros
    A film in which nothing is what it seems, this is the kind of genre touch that Mr. González Iñárritu expands into something far more haunting.
  72. The Tailor of Panama
    The first really good spy movie about the impossibility, under present historical circumstances, of making a really good spy movie.
  73. Someone Like You...
    Chandler's script has, by my count, exactly one sort-of-funny line and not a single scene whose comic possibilities are successfully exploited.
  74. Spy Kids
    An enjoyable and charming if overactive fantasy.
  75. Tomcats
    Desperately, depressingly in thrall to the Farrelly formula.
  76. Faat Kiné
    Sembène is a far more adroit and elegant storyteller than many may be accustomed to seeing.
  77. Butterfly
    While instructive on environmental concerns about the impact of logging, Butterfly does not reward those who seek dispassionate psychological insight into the zealous Ms. Hill.
  78. The Brothers
    Darts nervously between soap opera and sitcom, rarely blending them in a way that lets the two genres enhance each other.
  79. Heartbreakers
    Naughty is an outdated word in an era of proud nastiness, but Heartbreakers has a slinky, teasing quality that recalls the dressed-up comedies of the studio era.
  80. Say It Isn't So
    All you really need to know about Say It Isn't So,the latest flatulent noisemaker from the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy factory, is that late in the movie, Chris Klein punches a cow from behind and finds his arm stuck inside.
  81. Too Much Sleep
    Maquiling creates an unusual and intriguing tone somewhere between sharp, deadpan comedy and a soft, dreamy surrealism.
  82. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    An inspiring demonstration of that old saw about necessity being the mother of (in this case, artistic) invention.
  83. American Desi
    Most of it has to do with the ways younger Indian-Americans keep their culture alive in the United States and the ways they don't.
  84. Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
    An engaging and colorful but somewhat overbalanced documentary.
  85. Memento
    A brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like "The Usual Suspects" and "Pi."
  86. Enemy at the Gates
    Enemy at the Gates has its deficiencies, but the first-rate cast is not among them.
  87. The Dish
    Maintains a tone that remains as light and easygoing as the Australians living in the area.
  88. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Amusing but extremely derivative.
  89. Simon Magus
    May be reasonably diverting, but the story never matches the movie's fantastic visual imagination.
  90. Biandan, guniang
    Like Lou Ye's "Suzhou River," a Hitchcock homage similarly set in Shanghai's demimonde, So Close to Paradise offers an intriguing and sometimes self-canceling mixture of emotion and style.
  91. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Far from the first movie in which a fearless woman coaxes the inner tiger crouched inside a mild-mannered milquetoast to spring into action, but it is one of the most charming.
  92. 15 Minutes
    It's fleet- footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff.
  93. Get Over It
    Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.
  94. Blow Dry
    Seems both overplotted and underimagined, though there is at least some creativity and a dose of realism, evident in the hairstyles themselves.
  95. The Gleaners & I
    She (Varda) plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore.
  96. Me You Them
    An unexpected delight, a film that weds the humor and magic of a folk tale with a very modern feel for the psychological dynamics between men and women and for the subtle politics of male rivalry in a macho culture. It has been made and acted with intelligence and evident love, which deserves to be requited.
  97. 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.
  98. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
    The documentary doesn't get near the prowess of its subject; it passes through your life like a minor daydream.
  99. The Caveman's Valentine
    Works as everything but a mystery, yet it is intriguing in a number of ways. And the ending is as resolute as you might have hoped for. It lets Romulus and the movie retain their integrity.
  100. See Spot Run
    The movie equivalent of a box of Froot Loops followed by a half-gallon Pepsi chaser.
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