The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Restless
    For all its demureness, Restless captures some of the excitement of youthful romance in which the partners aren't just separate individuals but the products of divergent cultures.
  2. Non-Stop
    A breathless dash to nowhere in particular, doesn't feel bad.
  3. Red Planet
    A leaden, skimpily plotted space-age Outward Bound adventure with vague allegorical aspirations that remain entirely unrealized.
  4. Men of Honor
    Until its unbearably hokey ending, acquits itself reasonably well.
  5. Looking for an Echo
    Corny, suds-drenched movie. The kindest way of looking at this roughly patched-together story is as the cinematic equivalent of the music it memorializes.
  6. Little Nicky
    It's a clever idea bogged down in sophomoric sloppiness. Sitting through it doesn't feel like eternal damnation, but it's not exactly heaven, either. It's a $9.50 tour of adolescent purgatory.
  7. You Can Count on Me
    Melancholy little gem of a movie.
  8. Suzhou River
    Mr. Lou lets it play on for too long. Suzhou River offers impeccable attitude and captivating atmosphere, but little emotional or intellectual impact.
  9. Blue Moon
    Although the odds are against them, Mr. Gazzara and Ms. Moreno succeed in cutting through the forced sitcom banter to create a credible and touching portrait of a marriage of two proud individuals who respect each other even in moments of strife.
  10. The Weekend
    You have to admire the effort its attractive cast expends pumping life into stilted, flowery dialogue that confuses pretentious attitudinizing with profound insight.
  11. Me & Isaac Newton
    Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.
  12. Kippur
    Immerses you in violence and agony, but it may leave you with a curious feeling of detachment.
  13. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    Not only is it excruciatingly boring -- but its central premises are so banal and dubious as to border on offensiveness.
  14. Charlie's Angels
    It never pretends that it's anything more than trashy, cheesy fun. But even trash -- especially trash this expensive -- should at least be well made. Sure, it's easy on the eyes, but would a little brains be too much to ask?
  15. Once in the Life
    (Fishburne's) performance here, witty and profane, vulnerable and strutting, nearly holds the movie together.
  16. Loving Jezebel
    Mr. Bader was lucky to get a good cast.
  17. The Little Vampire
    Not often does a family film come along that is literate, clever, mischievous and just plain fun.
  18. A Room for Romeo Brass
    It is essentially a personal reminiscence of daily life that captures with an astonishing precision exactly what it felt to be a 12-year- old boy growing up in a particular time and place.
  19. A Time for Drunken Horses
    Because of its relentlessness, its crawling pace (the 77 minutes pass like 2 1/2 hours) and its sometimes confusing story, A Time for Drunken Horses may not be for every taste, but it's still an affecting, and in its way beautiful, movie.
  20. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Has occasional moments of heat, but not much warmth. And while it is pretty enough to look at, real beauty eludes it.
  21. Stardom
    Stardom makes its metaphor of 15 minutes seem like a lifetime.
  22. 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.
  23. Lucky Numbers
    A weak-witted comedy.
  24. What's Cooking?
    It's a meal you may feel you've eaten before, but you nonetheless walk away stuffed and happy.
  25. The Sculptress
    So poorly written, badly acted and ineptly directed that it denies you even the modest pleasure of making fun of it.
  26. George Washington
    This dream of a movie is set in such a place; with its delicate shifts of tone, it could be a fairy tale by Faulkner
  27. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    It's more a piece to admire than to be involved by, yet it's easy to imagine children hypnotized by a hero tinier than they are when "Kirikou" is continually loaded into the VCR.
  28. Sound and Fury
    Powerful, insightful, important and emotionally wrenching.
  29. The Wolves of Kromer
    Silly, heavy-handed film.
  30. The Yards
    For all its incongruities, The Yards is a serious film that strives for a moral complexity and a textural density rarely found in contemporary dramas.
  31. Just One Time
    Works hard at being charming, but comedy is best when it looks effortless.
  32. The Legend of Drunken Master
    Has enough going on to make it a classic. You'll want to own it.
  33. Calle 54
    Even better on a second viewing because the film is such a pure expression of the director's love for the music, a love so infectious it should leave you elated.
  34. Pay It Forward
    It's so enamored of its own upbeat view of human nature that it expects you to overlook its stick-figure characters, its creaky plot machinery and its remorseless assault on your tear ducts.
  35. Bedazzled
    Outrageous fun.
  36. MVP: Most Valuable Primate
    For juvenile filmgoers and families in search of a more-than-twice-told tale with uplifting messages about the rewards of perseverance, the virtues of animals and acceptance of the handicapped, MVP will do.
  37. Just Looking
    A candy-colored, unabashedly sentimental movie.
  38. Cleopatra's Second Husband
    Well acted, but it doesn't enrich its metaphor beyond giving an old story a sour contemporary resonance.
  39. Whispers: An Elephant's Tale
    Brilliant film of nature has been warped into something jarringly unnatural.
  40. Lost Souls
    It's the central story that's lacking.
  41. The Red Stuff
    Sublime in its involvement with the yearning of mankind to explore the heavens.
  42. Dr T and the Women
    The movie's sexual politics are as contrived as its plot, which veers off into one of the surprise endings of which Mr. Altman is so fond.
  43. The Contender
    A cast that chews the scenery with such obvious enjoyment that you're happy to put up with its tin-eared oratory and preposterous plot turns for the sake of a good ride.
  44. Billy Elliot
    Anchors its melodramatic formula in tough, heartfelt realism.
  45. The Ladies Man
    Has some funny, dirty-minded jokes, a few amusing cameos (including Julianne Moore in clown makeup) and a soundtrack loaded with juicy cuts of mid-70's vintage soul and funk.
  46. Animal Factory
    Willem Dafoe steals the picture with his comic timing.
  47. Ratcatcher
    The power of Ratcatcher comes from its hushed lyricism and Ms. Ramsay's talent for conveying emotional complexity.
  48. Followers
    Suffers from clumsy exposition and uneven acting, except in the case of Eddie T. Robinson.
  49. One
    The film's spareness and lack of words seem affected and ultimately unrealistic. At such moments, its refusal to put things into words and its crushing sense of gloom turn self-defeating.
  50. Taboo
    Illustrates the underlying fear that when energies that should be directed toward warfare are diverted into passion, unity is impossible.
  51. CyberWorld
    Unabashed, and often quite diverting, technological overkill.
  52. Two Family House
    Experience filmgoing joy.
  53. Bamboozled
    Spike Lee has grabbed a tiger by the tail in his scabrously risky new comedy, Bamboozled. The wonder is how long he succeeds in hanging on.
  54. Get Carter
    So minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world's first movie without even a text.
  55. Bootmen
    Too much soap opera colors its love story, and the industrial- strength dancing by booted men that is its centerpiece falls short of exhilaration.
  56. Digimon: Digital Monsters
    Comes off as noisy and ill conceived, long on morphing monsters, short on storytelling talent and uneven in its efforts at animation.
  57. Yi Yi
    In exchange for three hours of your time, Yi Yi will give you more life.
  58. Meet the Parents
    This is a high-concept comedy, and none of the jokes are forced, which makes Meet the Parents a singular achievement.
  59. Requiem for a Dream
    Be warned: it's a downer, and a knockout.
  60. Beautiful
    Teeters from a noisy sitcom (only one step removed from "The Beverly Hillbillies") to brickbat satire until it collapses in a pool of redemptive mush.
  61. The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy
    Emerges as an engaging if occasionally hokey inspirational melodrama about the importance of community in the face of life's disappointments.
  62. Girlfight
    The movie belongs to Ms. Rodriguez. With her slightly crooked nose and her glum, sensual mouth, she looks a little like Marlon Brando in his smoldering prime, and she has some of his slow, intense physicality. She doesn't so much transcend gender as redefine it.
  63. Remember the Titans
    If Remember the Titans is corny, it's unabashedly, even generously so.
  64. The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story
    In a very real way, The Great Dance constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem.
  65. Barenaked in America
    May not be dispassionate filmmaking, but it is certainly entertaining.
  66. Best in Show
    This comic jigsaw puzzle is crammed with deliriously funny little bits.
  67. The Specials
    Terminally whimsical, it generates a steady current of humor, much of it off-color.
  68. Prince of Central Park
    Remains a sadly earthbound thing, mired in a dismal realism that lies far from its natural environment.
  69. Chutney Popcorn
    Because Chutney Popcorn knows its characters deeply enough to let them determine events, it rises above formula. It is also unusually well acted.
  70. The Tavern
    Astringent and unsentimental, it is a case study of losing, its clear eye focused unwaveringly on the realities of commerce and kinship.
  71. The Fantasticks
    The movie version overflows with affection and good intention, but unwittingly turns a bauble of cheerful fakery into something that mostly feels phony.
  72. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Ottman doesn't have the firm grasp of tone necessary to make his deliberate ambiguities seem other than simple confusion, nor the sense of humor necessary to turn the deliberate clichés into effective satire.
  73. Under Suspicion
    Appears to be a somewhat sinister episode of "Nightline."
  74. Woman on Top
    This would-be spicy film has been made blandly palatable.
  75. Double Parked
    A modest but engaging mixture of comedy and drama that derives most of its energy from the performance of Callie Thorne.
  76. Left Luggage
    So intent on pushing its virtuous agenda that its characters often sound like mouthpieces parroting predigested attitudes.
  77. Tigerland
    Beneath the rough vérité exterior beats the same slick, corny heart.
  78. Dancer in the Dark
    Both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion.
  79. Twilight: Los Angeles
    The resulting compromise does not produce a perfect film, but it is a fine record of a classic production and an important reminder of an event that has not stopped echoing in American culture.
  80. Alma
    Begins to seem not so much an examination but an exploitation.
  81. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    Its subject matter is intrinsically upsetting.
  82. The Dream Catcher
    Sustains a mood of aimless adolescent angst, and its vision of the road is uncompromisingly bleak.
  83. Circus
    If an Olympic competition for overplotted movie is ever held, Circus seems a likely contender for the gold.
  84. Duets
    Every so often a movie comes along that's bad in such original and unexpected ways that it inspires an almost admiring fascination
  85. Urbania
    As technically innovative as it is emotionally unsettling.
  86. Human Resources
    The movie's dramatic climax is a father-son confrontation of stunning cruelty. Although the movie stops short of outright tragedy, it is suffused with a grief born of rifts that may never be mended.
  87. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Completed before the release of "American Beauty," this contrived, puffed up little picture nonetheless seems like a ripoff, perhaps because it mines the same tired assumptions and unexamined stereotypes about suburban family life.
  88. Goya in Bordeaux
    Visual knockout of a film.
  89. Bait
    Why Mr. Foxx, who was so impressive in "Any Given Sunday," chose to make a movie so boring and idiotic that it barely meets minimal standards of lowest- common-denominator entertainment.
  90. The Price of Air
    The picture is a smeary, dreary mess from start to finish.
  91. Paragraph 175
    At once admirable and deeply unsettling.
  92. Almost Famous
    What Mr. Crowe has done is nonetheless remarkable. He has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see.
  93. Pola X
    Pola X has enough fireworks to keep you in your seat. When it's over, you'll know you've had an experience.
  94. The Watcher
    By the end of The Watcher you'll need your own prescription.
  95. Backstage
    Backstage isn't as good as the rap documentaries "Rhyme and Reason" and "The Show," but it still casts a keen, observant eye...on this world.
  96. Solas
    Galiana's quietly monumental performance is one for the ages.
  97. Nurse Betty
    It is easily the finest American comedy since David O. Russell's "Flirting With Disaster," another road movie that never ran out of poignantly funny surprises.
  98. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.
  99. Anatomy
    The movie, which is crudely dubbed into English, lacks the raucous, anything-for-a-shock carnival humor of its American prototypes. After it's over, the only question worth asking is whether dear, cozy old Heidelberg can survive the slander.
  100. The Way of the Gun
    May feel redundant, but it is stylish and intelligent.
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