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. Ever After
    Veering wildly between farce and suds, the movie never makes up its mind whether it's a spoof, a soap opera or a feminist pep talk.
  2. Schizopolis
    It winds up illustrating the very emptiness it mocks.
  3. Mrs. Winterbourne
    But the film, written by Phoef Sutton and Lisa-Maria Radano and directed by Richard Benjamin in a style cute enough to peel paint off the walls, can't do much to generate romantic sparks between its two young leads.
  4. The Last Emperor
    The Last Emperor is like an elegant travel brochure. It piques the curiosity. One wants to go. Ultimately it's a let-down.
  5. Truly Madly Deeply
    Truly, Madly, Deeply should be enchanting, but it isn't. Everyone pushes too hard, especially Mr. Minghella, the writer and director. There are a few amusing lines and a lot of terrible ones, including Nina's overwrought response, early in the film, when her sister wants to borrow Jamie's cello: "It's like asking me to give you his body!"
  6. White Nights
    White Nights is only tolerable when Mr. Baryshnikov is on screen, especially when he is dancing alone or with Mr. Hines, with whom he does a couple of ballet-tap numbers that are of an order of excellence that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.
  7. French Kiss
    French Kiss may have a more putatively foolproof formula, but everyone here has done vastly more interesting work. Too much gets lost in translation.
  8. Something Wild
    Something Wild is often "Something Wrong."
  9. High Heels
    High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively.
  10. Flashdance
    With a score by Giorgio Moroder, and with ingenious costumes that are utterly au courant, Flashdance contains such dynamic dance scenes that it's a pity there's a story here to bog them down.
  11. The Mosquito Coast
    In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat.
  12. Disclosure
    The storytelling of Disclosure is too forced and polemical to be on a par with better Crichton tales like "Jurassic Park." This time, it's the author who's the dinosaur.
  13. The Doors
    It is made by a Morrison groupie for other groupies, a film that leaves the rest of us locked outside wondering what the fuss is about.
  14. Tequila Sunrise
    The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.
  15. Look Who's Talking
    Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super.
  16. Kalifornia
    Kalifornia, which was written by Tim Metcalfe, lets its stars overact to the rafters as it vacillates between wild pretentiousness and occasional high style.
  17. The Black Stallion Returns
    It is funny, unpretentious and fast-paced. It has a kind of comicbook appreciation for direct action and no time whatsoever for mysticism or for scenery for its own sake, though most of it was shot in Morocco and is fun to look at.
  18. Clue
    there is so little genuine wit to be found in ''Clue.'' The film does have a speedy pace, but that could hardly be confused with Mr. Hawks's madcap humor; instead, it involves a lot of running around through secret passages, and some slapstick routines involving dead bodies. The actors are meant to function as an ensemble, but that merely means that they often repeat the same line simultaneously.
  19. The A-Team
    The obstacle that the director Joe Carnahan and his colleagues failed to clear was finding the right self-mocking tone for a movie that was, by the looks of it, too expensive to risk real laughs.
  20. Piranha 3-D
    The entertainment formula behind this short and nasty movie - devised according to someone's idea of what teenage boys with the guile, the facial hair or the "guardian" to gain admission to an R-rated movie are likely to enjoy - is sloppy and simple.
  21. Marmaduke
    These cinematic feats are accomplished with meat-cleaver editing and awkward, jittery computer-generated imagery. The well-cast voices for the expressionless animals are at least good for a few smirks.
  22. Survival of the Dead
    Placidly photographed and lacking in urgency, "Survival" shows us the living flailing at fate and the dead just flailing.
  23. 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.
  24. Milan Hlavsa a Plastic People of the Universe
    In short, here is a VH1 "Behind the Music" special that has something a little more special behind it: music that didn't sell many records but helped change a nation.
  25. Diario di una siciliana ribelle
    Loaded down with rhetorical devices -- writer and director, Marco Amenta, drowns it in a flood of sentimental effusions.
  26. Diamonds and Rust
    A film that chugs along as listlessly as the ship itself, discovering moments of value in a sea of ennui.
  27. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    Tells its glumly bodice-ripping tale with somber sensitivity.
  28. Into My Heart
    Dreary.
  29. Some Body
    A shaky, uncertain film that nevertheless touches a few raw nerves.
  30. Garmento
    Although Garmento exhibits a flailing comic energy, its eagerness to condemn everything about Seventh Avenue, along with its sub-par acting and a choppy narrative style that finally runs amok, lends it a tone of hysterical finger-pointing.
  31. Echoes
    Has a strained, unconvincing screenplay whose failure to connect the dots of its story suggests that it might have been largely improvised.
  32. A House on a Hill
    The film is full of artists who seem to be straddling the line between compromise and conviction. There is much straddling in A House on a Hill, and not enough engagement.
  33. Controlled Chaos
    As a movie, Controlled Chaos is often bumpy, naïve and erratically acted.
  34. Union Square
    Mr. Szklarski doesn't seem to have a strong point of view on his material. Too often, the film drifts into a kind of passive voyeurism, offering the unhappy spectacle of these wasted lives without perspective and without hope.
  35. Ali Zoua: Prince of the Streets
    An overdose of morbid sentimentality.
  36. Born to Be Blind
    Born to Be Blind, for all its haphazard structure, takes you about as far inside Maria's world as a film could reasonably be expected to go, but at moments it also feels uncomfortably exploitative.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Condo Painting
    An 87-minute documentary on the life, work and thought of George Condo, a garrulous painter with a mischievous sense of humor and an eccentric, quasi-mystical view of art and the world it inhabits.
  38. Evergreen
    Directed by the first-timer Enid Zentelis, Evergreen seems waterlogged with rainy-day imagery and somber moods.
  39. Rockets Redglare!
    Aimless, sometimes amiable documentary.
  40. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    Less savvy propagandists than Mr. Moore, the Celsius 41.11 filmmakers apply their thesis with a trowel.
  41. Bound for Pleasure
    It's all oddly sweet, and, for the viewer at least, more than a little dull.
  42. Ya lyublyu tebya
    There's not much in the way of message here. Or wit. Or convincing sexual chemistry. You I Love' just wants to say that young Muscovites are wild and crazy guys and that they can laugh at capitalism's excesses.
  43. In Shifting Sands: The Truth About Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq
    Surprisingly dry and dispassionate.
  44. Hollywood Buddha
    In Hollywood Buddha, Mr. Caland plays, directs and reimagines himself. This is truly a vanity project, as evidenced by the ample amount of screen time he gives his own pecs and thighs.
  45. My Wife's Name Is Maurice
    The obvious forerunner of My Wife Maurice, is "La Cage aux Folles," a movie that is several cuts above this frantically overwrought imitator.
  46. Loners
    With its studied nonchalance, Loners reaches neither the hilarity of an episode of "Friends" nor the ethnographic stickiness of "The Real World" on MTV.
  47. Shwaas
    The simplicity of the tale becomes a bit tedious.
  48. Sky Blue
    Teeters unsteadily between dystopian fable and Saturday-morning cartoon.
  49. Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man
    Giorgio Perlasca, who has been compared to Oskar Schindler, deserves better than this Italian television film.
  50. Night of Henna
    Broadly acted, clumsily written and directed with crude sincerity, it is a well-meaning feminist morality play unlikely to be of much interest outside the community in which it takes place.
  51. Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    The offending videotape is never seen, but the entire film is built around its absence. Periodically, the film returns to a written police account of the video, which scrolls up the screen, documenting the animal's suffering blow by blow to the sound of ominous music.
  52. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    Structurally, Sex, Politics and Cocktails is wildly, almost frantically inventive, with techniques ranging from stop-motion to split-screen to silent film-style intertitles. But no amount of directorial trickery can mask the essential vacuousness of the story and its characters.
  53. A Decent Factory
    A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization.
  54. Proteus
    An incomplete portrait of a complicated man.
  55. Human Error
    The film's many voids are not meaningfully filled by all the monsters and assembly-line workers that crop up.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Piggie
    With its exasperating camerawork, murky lighting - at least two scenes are near indecipherable - and interminable shots of Fannie gazing slack-jawed at the world, Piggie is a disappointing debut.
  57. Doing Time for Patsy Cline
    The saving graces of the film, written and directed by Chris Kennedy, are its performances, especially Mr. Roxburgh's portrayal of a floundering lost soul with little to show for an itinerant life, and Ms. Otto's ditsy, mercurial and ultimately touching country singer.
  58. 95 Miles to Go
    Two groups of people should probably not see 95 Miles to Go. Unfortunately, they're the two groups that were probably envisioned as the film's core constituencies: stand-up comics and Ray Romano fans.
  59. Standing Still
    Yet another movie dedicated to privileged self-involvement; just once, it would be nice to observe the early-adulthood traumas of, say, some plumbers or pipe fitters. Surely they have friends, too.
  60. Peaceful Warrior
    For all its manifest corniness, this is an achingly sincere and supremely unembarrassed effort to transform an audience for the good. Its heart is very much in the right place - a place that movies all but ignore - but its mind is a mush.
  61. Going Under
    The director, Eric Werthman, a practicing psychotherapist, presents Peter and Suzanne's dilemma like a case study from his own files rather than a real, flesh-and-blood-and-handcuffs relationship.
  62. Snow Blind
    Snow Blind calls itself a documentary, but it's really all about selling the product of snowboarding; it never stops feeling like the in-house channel on a ski-lodge television.
  63. The Decomposition of the Soul
    This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination.
  64. The Wayward Cloud
    It feels willed, aggressive and unconvincing -- clammy rather than cool -- in a way that suggests artistic frustration rather than discovery. The water shortage may be a metaphor for the director’s creative desiccation, which his admirers can only hope is temporary.
  65. American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    The documentary illustrates the premise that if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Until everything collapses, and the filmmakers are left grasping at straws, it's absorbing in a sick way.
  66. The Treatment
    A movie with its heart and head in the right place. Too bad its aesthetic sensibilities and technical coordinates are not as well situated.
  67. Provoked: A True Story
    Unfortunately, in keeping its inflammatory subject matter at arm’s length, Provoked does exactly the same to its audience.
  68. Lights in the Dusk
    This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Laura Smiles
    Part domestic drama, part thriller, the microbudget shot-on-video feature Laura Smiles is so ambitious that its ultimate failure is more depressing than anything in its dark script.
  70. Cash
    How many helicopters, armored vehicles and burglars suspended from ceilings can you take? Cash, for all its flash, leaves you hungry. But not for more.
  71. O Jerusalem
    Whether on a Middle Eastern battlefield or the streets of New York, characters converse in stilted, expository mouthfuls that smother emotion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meeting Resistance
    Many interviewees concede that the resistance is both disorganized and decentralized, and imply that some of the fighters are ethnic partisans jockeying for a slice of what will remain should the United States pull out.
  73. Holly
    There’s a riveting story lurking inside Holly, a documentary-fiction hybrid about sex trafficking in Cambodia. It’s just not the one the filmmakers want to tell.
  74. He Was a Quiet Man
    By the time it reaches a weak, ambiguous conclusion, the movie has gone everywhere and nowhere, much like its psychotic main character, Bob Maconel (Christian Slater).
  75. Day Zero
    Its view of the near future may be vaguely plausible and its performances persuasive, but its formulaic construction, internal inconsistencies and fuzzy ending undermine its integrity. It has nothing to say about the big issues -- manhood, war and friendship -- that hasn’t been explored with more depth and honesty in a hundred other movies.
  76. City with No Mercy
    Flash Point”attaches coldly professional visuals to a narrative so baffling that it’s rarely clear who is pounding on whom or why.
  77. Hacia la oscuridad
    Antonio Negret's sloppily executed film plays like a car commercial and a military-recruitment promo.
  78. The First Saturday in May
    There are a lot of horses but absolutely no sense in The First Saturday in May, a glib, lazy documentary about six trainers on the proverbial road to the 2006 Kentucky Derby.
  79. A Previous Engagement
    More tired than the fantasy it promotes, A Previous Engagement aims at middle-aged women with the subtlety of a pitch for bladder-control medication.
  80. Sangre De Mi Sangre
    Although it exhibits a heartfelt connection with the city's half-invisible population of illegal immigrants, its myriad inconsistencies and strained plotting are increasingly frustrating.
  81. Forgiveness
    The message may be clear -- suppress the past at your peril -- but the execution is a mess. As for the line-dancing soldiers, your guess is as good as mine.
  82. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    It's like being trapped in a roomful of teenage girls for 80 minutes.
  83. Nights and Weekends
    The problem with the movie is that James and Mattie exhibit little but shallow, infantile neurosis, with next to no hint of a complex -- or even legible -- inner life.
  84. Reunion
    Reunion overflows with catharsis -- at least for those on screen. This may not be quite the moment to solicit our sympathy for self-absorbed beneficiaries of Ivy League privilege.
  85. Empty Nest
    The film dithers along with Leonardo, whose self-involved tedium -- and the movie's -- is occasionally interrupted by fantasy sequences.
  86. Home
    For all its honesty, Home has only the most tentative narrative coherence. It's a collection of beautifully acted fragments that leave you longing for a story to connect them. The pretty but rather shallow poetry doesn't begin to do the job.
  87. Sikandar
    This odd, unsuccessful movie, written and directed by Piyush Jha, is too rigged to have any broader implications about the bloody standoff in Kashmir between militants and the Indian Army.
  88. White on Rice
    Bland and only occasionally funny.
  89. Skiptracers
    Mr. Mendheim wants Skiptracers to be more than jokey. When the shaggy-dog tales flag, he cranks up the soulful country-rock. But the score, much of it by Langhorne Slim & the War Eagles, can’t change the "Dukes of Hazzard" mood. If Mr. Mendheim wanted heart, he should have provided it the old-fashioned way: in his storytelling.
  90. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Compacted into an 80-minute mishmash of interviews, confessions and sketches, melded into a shaky mosaic, the answers from a cross section of men are shallow, self-serving and ultimately unenlightening.
  91. Irene in Time
    Smothering insightful moments in verbal and musical treacle (courtesy of Harriet Schock’s sticky songs), Mr. Jaglom displays an endearing lack of cynicism but an equal lack of discipline.
  92. Afterschool
    In truth there isn’t much story here, or much insight either; the kind of alienated teenagers wandering through this film exist in movies far out of proportion to their number in real life.
  93. Araya
    Whatever visual poetry the film possesses is overwhelmed by the thuddingly bad and nearly ceaseless narration, written by Ms. Benacerraf and Pierre Seghers.
  94. The Little Traitor
    A muddled morality tale more interested in coming of age than getting of wisdom.
  95. The War on Kids
    Offering neither balance nor solutions (a segment on the overuse of medications like Ritalin is especially powerful, but especially in need of counterargument), The War on Kids questions what kind of citizens we are producing.
  96. Paa
    It’s stunt acting and frequently more creepy than moving, but it also gives Paa it’s weird I’m-my-own-grandpa charge.
  97. Phyllis and Harold
    The problem with these my-family-was-messed-up-and-I need-to-share projects is that they require an audience of complete strangers to give a damn. And while we sometimes do, it’s usually because the material is inherently compelling (“Tarnation”) or the filmmaking uncovers truths beyond the template of family therapy (“51 Birch Street”). Sadly, Phyllis and Harold fulfills neither requirement.
  98. The Last New Yorker
    The Last New Yorker would like to think of itself as a comic fairy tale, but Lenny’s pride and self-delusion are too pathetic to be amusing.
  99. Shutterbug
    Intermittently beautiful but frustratingly leaden, Shutterbug labors ineffectually to promote authenticity over artifice. A heavily stylized paean to undoctored images, the movie never quite clicks as a succession of moving ones.
  100. The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom
    The filmmakers, chronicling the Dalai Lama’s somewhat muddled attempts to respond to the protesters’ calls while not antagonizing China, do a fair amount of muddling themselves. They lurch awkwardly between reverence for the Dalai Lama and hints that he has become, politically, irrelevant or an obstacle.
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