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 Godfather: Part II
    The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was...Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing, and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.
  2. A Night at the Roxbury
    A lot like the brothers themselves: undeniably pathetic but strangely lovable. Still, do you really want to spend an hour and a half with them in a dark room?
  3. Scooby-Doo
    Not entirely without charm.
  4. Beverly Hills Ninja
    If you're nostalgic for the third grade and all those little wads of wet paper bouncing off the back of your neck, Beverly Hills Ninja is the movie for you. It is one extended fat joke, tricked out in ceremonial robes.
  5. Callas Forever
    A lip-synching hall of mirrors, it is essentially a piece of highbrow karaoke.
  6. The Reckoning
    Trudges along the well-trod path of high-minded, schematic storytelling.
  7. Returner
    A smorgasbord that seems to have been picked out of a Dumpster. It clumsily combines a fish-out-of-water story with bits lifted from sources including the "Terminator" movies, "Star Wars," "Starman," "Close Encounters," a couple of Pink Floyd albums and H. G. Wells.
  8. Open Range
    Mr. Costner's relentless, root-canal humorlessness turns what might have been an enjoyable B-picture throwback into a ponderous drag.
  9. The Affair of the Necklace
    Drags and meanders when it wants clarity and clockwork, and bogs down in hazy, vague emotions.
  10. What Lies Beneath
    Glazes over faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and neither is very flavorful after sitting around for a while.
  11. 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.
  12. The Last Shot
    Laborious and logy when it should be madcap and effervescent.
  13. Three Kings
    It isn't nearly as successful a showcase for this filmmaker's extraordinary talents.
  14. Big Daddy
    It's a flimsy sentimental comedy with more product plugs and fewer laughs than might have been hoped for.
  15. 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."
  16. Who Killed Bambi?
    Watching it is like a slow injection of a numbing anesthetic. It may send a chill to your heart, but along with it goes a warning signal to your brain not to believe a word of this hooey.
  17. Van Wilder
    What's lacking is the sense of structure that might have made Van Wilder more than a meandering succession of random gags.
  18. Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
    Artistry is not the inevitable outcome, and fluffy costumes and French location shoots are the only production elements that don't seem wholly amateurish.
  19. Jackass: The Movie
    Like a documentary version of "Fight Club," shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest. It also offers a supremely literal-minded version of slapstick.
  20. The Alamo
    Thornton's performance is lost in a film that is more of a schematic success than a dramatic one.
  21. Dumb and Dumber
    A movie that knows much better than to try to make sense. It is essentially a strung-together series of gags, most of them thought up by Lloyd, an inveterate practical joker.
  22. Valentin
    The film feels authentic only during the scenes between Valentín and his selfish, angry father.
  23. The Matrix Revolutions
    There is very little that is tantalizing or suspenseful. The feeling of revelation is gone, and many of the teasing implications of "Reloaded" have been abandoned.
  24. The Hebrew Hammer
    Would have worked brilliantly as a five-minute late-night comedy sketch, flogs its premise for nearly an hour and a half, generating too few laughs to justify the enterprise.
  25. Dances with Wolves
    Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.
  26. Grind
    Buried somewhere under the gross-out jokes and the wet-lipped ogling at an endless parade of jiggling bikini-clad flesh in Grind is the kernel of a cheerful little movie about the world of competitive skateboarding.
  27. Noel
    Though clearly meant as a heartwarmer in the longstanding holiday tradition, the film comes off as strange and sour.
  28. Gypsy 83
    This is a tiny, vulnerable, rather treacly film at heart, one that would probably float away were it not for Ms. Rue's generous presence.
  29. Zhou Yu de huo che
    Comes to seem less a movie than a memory of movies -- or, at worst, a commercial Frankenstein's monster, sewn together to fill a perceived gap in the market.
  30. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    A high-minded, lethally dull biography of the legendary golfer Bobby Jones.
  31. The King and I
    The animation is done in rich, jewel-like colors, but it seems strangely flat. The overall film does, too, although the glorious Rodgers and Hammerstein music makes up for a lot.
  32. The Trumpet of the Swan
    A bland, well-meaning mishmash that never coheres into a dramatic whole.
  33. The Ring
    While impressively made, this impassive and cold feature fails, in a spectacular fashion, to deliver the thrills.
  34. Bubba Ho-tep
    There is a grungy high spirit during the first third of this film, but then it dissipates like a mist from an aerosol can.
  35. The Prince and Me
    A cream puff with a melted marshmallow inside it. As the temperature rises, the whole gooey thing starts to melt.
  36. Series 7: The Contenders
    Seems stranded in that nowhereland between irony and sarcasm.
  37. Vengo
    Seems held back by vestiges of an old-fashioned format that Mr. Gatlif has long since outgrown.
  38. Batman
    It's neither funny nor solemn. It has the personality not of a particular movie but of a product, of something arrived at by corporate decision.
  39. America's Sweethearts
    Like a bottle of lukewarm Champagne -- an expensive one, judging by the label -- America's Sweethearts opens with a promising burst of effervescence and quickly goes flat.
  40. Defying Gravity
    Plods along, never catching dramatic fire, sometimes suffering from amateurish acting and often relying on its intrusive and treacly music to impart mood and rhythm.
  41. Overnight
    Any movie that makes you root against the underdog, though, is cause for suspicion, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Montana, perhaps aware of this, try belatedly to restore Mr. Duffy's status as a victim.
  42. Jackpot
    The movie is smart in small ways, yet an underachiever in big ones -- but it will probably play very well on television. On the big screen, it's distended and diffuse.
  43. American Pie
    Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.
  44. Connie and Carla
    As a female vocal duo, their performances are passable, if a little dull and lacking in any sense of camp exaggeration.
  45. Hair Show
    Ultimately, the coiffure competition serves as a gaudy, cheerful distraction from a plot that becomes plodding and a sister act that makes you wish for some peacekeeping brothers.
  46. The Fighting Temptations
    This movie feels phony and slick, as if it were cooked up by Darrin's cynical ad agency, rather than at his aunt's stove down in Montecarlo.
  47. After the Sunset
    A jewel-heist frolic so stale it feels like a retread of a retread.
  48. 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.
  49. Luther
    As the film veers uncertainly between meticulous historical recapitulation and shameless hokum, it brings enough characters to populate a mini-series. When the historical details become too clogged, the movie shamelessly overcompensates by wallowing in cheap sentimentality.
  50. Twist
    In both Twist and "Idaho," the act of placing a larger-than-life literary figure in a constrained, narrowly naturalistic environment merely strips the characters of their scale and interest.
  51. Underworld
    Achieves only loudness, aggressive confusion and one of the silliest head-splittings in film history.
  52. Just Married
    Anyway, you will be glad that they have found each other, and eager to wish them a long and happy life together -- somewhere else, as 95 minutes in their company is plenty.
  53. The Village
    The film's ridiculousness would not be so irksome if Mr. Shyamalan did not take his sleight of hand so seriously, if he did not insist on dressing this scary, silly, moderately clever fairy tale in a somber cloak of allegory.
  54. Wonderland
    With its flashbacks, split-screen montages, decade-jumping soundtrack, sped-up action and frequent shifts of light and color, Wonderland feels like "Law & Order" on crack.
  55. The Beach
    Not a terrible movie, just an insubstantial one. All of DiCaprio's charisma and the director's savvy are used to divert us from the fact that there's not much going on.
  56. The New Guy
    A bad-taste comedy with a heart.
  57. Blade
    Although the opening scene suggests a dark urban satire, Blade quickly turns into a cartoonish futuristic action-adventure yarn in which Blade is the only thing keeping humanity from being exterminated by vampires in a hematological holocaust.
  58. City of Angels
    The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.
  59. Kikujirô no natsu
    Dreamy touches can't compensate for the film's main flaw, which is that the relationship between the two main characters never really develops.
  60. The Saint
    Loud, frantic, ridiculously overproduced and featuring a preening performance by Val Kilmer as a supposedly brilliant master of disguise, The Saint is sheer overkill.
  61. Wild at Heart
    This time, though, Mr. Lynch's conceits are less often pleasurably disorienting than out of focus.
  62. Open My Heart
    It does achieve a certain claustrophobic fascination, but never gets around to making its point.
  63. The Passion of the Christ
    On its own, apart from whatever beliefs a viewer might bring to it, The Passion of the Christ never provides a clear sense of what all of this bloodshed was for, an inconclusiveness that is Mr. Gibson's most serious artistic failure.
  64. Chasing Papi
    A nonstop underscore of Latin pop, as well as several arbitrarily interpolated dream sequences and animated passages don't do nearly enough to make up for the film's unfocused frenzy and lack of genuine comic invention.
  65. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.
  66. No Such Thing
    More abrasively quirky than a lesser Bjork B-side, though the hideous monster who co-stars hails from Iceland, too.
  67. À cause d'un garçon
    Well-meaning and hopelessly bland, You'll Get Over It, instantly drops into the tone of didactic realism that rules most television fiction, drawing easy moral lessons from a scrubbed-up simulacrum of everyday, middle-class life.
  68. Christmas with the Kranks
    Slick and treacherous.
  69. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    The hokey solemnity of A Love Song for Bobby Long suggests "The Mundane Secrets of the Ya-Ya Brotherhood" or "The Notebook Goes to the Big Easy." The movie is another example of Hollywood's going soft and squishy when it goes South.
  70. You Got Served
    Will probably keep its core audience of suburban teenagers mildly entertained for the course of its 93 minutes. Urban grumps, however, may be distracted by Mr. Stokes's annoyingly overedited execution of the dance sequences.
  71. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Mildly amusing but wholly unnecessary comedy.
  72. The Chronicles of Riddick
    The action is so frenetic that the ominous mood isn't allowed to penetrate, and this time the human factor is all but erased.
  73. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    Maintaining a winking distance from his comic persona, Mr. Spade radiates a cunning show-business cynicism that lets you know he's aware that he's slumming to make a buck.
  74. Home on the Range
    The best cartoons are built on the contradictory pursuit of meticulously arranged anarchy. But they never seem needy, or desperate for laughs, as Home on the Range does. The film seems hungrier for a pat on the head than a chuckle.
  75. Ice Age
    The blandly likable computer-animation extravaganza Ice Age actually seems like a fossil, a relic from another era.
  76. Patch Adams
    Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak.
  77. The Stepford Wives
    It does manage to fire off a handful of decent jokes and a few sneaky insights before losing its nerve and collapsing into incoherence.
  78. Welcome to Mooseport
    A terminally mild attempt to revive the populist political comedy pioneered by Frank Capra in the 1930's.
  79. Little Black Book
    Offering few laughs and a climactic scene of breathtaking cruelty, this plot-heavy movie, directed by Nick Hurran from a screenplay by Melissa Carter and Elisa Bell, draws you into its malignant force field against your will.
  80. Wicker Park
    The French original was a clever Hitchcock homage with a murder at its center. For reasons unknown, the murder plot has been dropped from the remake (though a few confusing traces of it remain), which leaves Wicker Park without much real urgency to drive its extremely contrived plot.
  81. Paparazzi
    Amazingly arrogant, immoral film.
  82. Touch of Pink
    Except for the piquant garnish of Mr. MacLachlan, the movie, written and directed by Ian Iqbal Rashid, is barely a cut above an amateur production. The attempts at humor fizzle, and the performances are wooden and overstated.
  83. Fat Albert
    In Fat Albert, that trademark is resurrected to depressingly diminished ends.
  84. Spanglish
    Mr. Sandler has a solid, fumbling likability, without which Spanglish would be not merely annoying but despicable in its slick complacency.
  85. The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Mr. Marshall, is not much of a film director. Depending on the budget, his movies look either cheap (like this one) or studio slick ("Pretty Woman"), and tend to have the same flat, presentational visual style that's familiar from most sitcoms.
  86. Blade: Trinity
    A choppy, forgetful, suspense-free romp that substitutes campy humor for chills.
  87. Barb Wire
    Isn't much when it comes to either deliberate or inadvertent humor. But it does have a few amusing moments.
  88. High School High
    There's not much sense to the plot. But the film makers' blunderbuss approach to humor, with visual and verbal jokes coming in profusion and scattering high and low, guarantees that just about every funnybone is bound to be hit, some more than once.
  89. The Mask
    An astonishingly lazy and perfunctory effort that does little to realize his (Carrey) comic potential.
  90. Feeling Minnesota
    No film winds up with a name like Feeling Minnesota if it has anything definite in mind.
  91. Billy Madison
    It succeeds as a reasonably smart no-brainer. If you've ever had a yen to relive the third grade, this must be the next best thing.
  92. Murder at 1600
    Directed by Dwight Little of "Free Willy 2," and written by onetime high school classmates, Wayne Beach and David Hodgin (Mr. Hodgin died in 1995), Murder at 1600 eagerly invokes other films and stock images without showing much style of its own.
  93. Bonnie and Clyde
    It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in "Thoroughly Modern Millie."
  94. Excess Baggage
    Ms. Silverstone's pouty all-American brashness counts for little in a film whose flat screenplay doesn't give her a single funny line.
  95. Prefontaine
    But even after the documentary affectation gives way to a more conventional narrative, the film has trouble ringing true.
  96. Phenomenon
    A whopping wrong turn throws this lightweight, benign-looking movie terminally off course.
  97. Star Trek: First Contact
    The series now lacks all of its original stars and much of its earlier determination. It has morphed into something less innocent and more derivative than it used to be, something the noncultist is ever less likely to enjoy.
  98. Dangerous Minds
    False and condescending films in this genre are nothing new, but Dangerous Minds steamrollers its way over some real talent.
  99. Congo
    This glib, overheated film about vicious primates delivers little suspense, nor are there signs of the 65 cited volumes and articles that turned Mr. Crichton's book into such a learning experience.
  100. Guarding Tess
    Having introduced the two principals and had some fun with their antagonism, the film has nowhere to go.
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