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 Perfect Game
    So overwhelmed by its own based-on-actual-events tale that it can’t find the tone to tell it effectively.
  2. Pornography
    Puzzles more than it pleases.
  3. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    The ever reliable, rubber-faced Song Kang-ho plays Tae-goo, the train robber, and gives the film what little comic spark it has.
  4. The Good Heart
    No amount of splenetic ranting by Brian Cox, a wonderful actor, when given the right role, can salvage The Good Heart from terminal mawkishness.
  5. Harry Brown
    Mr. Caine is one of the few reasons to sit through Harry Brown, an exercise in art-house exploitation directed by Daniel Barber and tarted up with self-importance and a generally striking visual design.
  6. The Trotsky
    The Trotsky runs 20 minutes too long and several rungs above the head of its target audience. And though Mr. Baruchel can be very funny in small doses -- a slacker sidekick in “Knocked Up,” a gung-ho kid in “Tropic Thunder” -- here he swiftly becomes insufferable, a neurotic nudnik in funeral director attire and John Turturro hairdo.
  7. Multiple Sarcasms
    Woody Allen proved long ago that the self-pitying introvert is a fit subject for a movie, but only if the film has a strong enough sense of humor to make us laugh at ourselves. But Brooks Branch, who directed Multiple Sarcasms and wrote the screenplay with Linda Morris, was either too lazy to come up with the absurdist aphorisms that might give Multiple Sarcasms a lift, or he labored under the delusion that Gabriel’s metaphysical malaise is such a fresh idea that it deserves microscopic inspection.
  8. The Expendables
    Might more aptly be described as Bad Kurosawa, Bad Peckinpah or Bad Leone. Which might be a way of saying that it's better-than-average Stallone. I can't quite say that it's not bad: it is bad! But not entirely in a bad way.
  9. Trash Humpers
    Idolized in some quarters and reviled in others, Mr. Korine, now 37, may be a bit long in the tooth for the enfant terrible act.
  10. Finding Bliss
    Except for the usual double entendres in which titles of mainstream Hollywood hits are twisted into salacious puns, Finding Bliss (Bliss is the name of the company's resident star) isn't especially funny. Nor is it sexy, despite flashes of nudity and fleeting glimpses of Grind's works in progress.
  11. Stolen
    Plays like a middling episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” drawn out an extra half-hour and embellished with pretentious literary and cinematic flourishes.
  12. Audrey the Trainwreck
    Frank V. Ross wrote and directed this slice of Midwestern mumblecore in a style -- overlapping dialogue, off-center compositions, a jumpy, disconnected narrative -- that suggests Robert Altman without any of Altman's instincts for character and poetry.
  13. The Concert
    The harder this desperately obsequious circus of a movie tries to entertain, the more it falls short.
  14. The Dry Land
    Sincere performances elevate an underdeveloped script and awkward filmmaking in The Dry Land, a coming-home drama as inexpressive as its traumatized lead.
  15. The Sicilian Girl
    Belonging more in the realm of tragic melodrama than true crime, The Sicilian Girl is hobbled by sluggish direction (by Marco Amenta, who previously addressed Atria's story in his 1997 documentary, "One Girl Against the Mafia: Diary of a Sicilian Rebel"), and a revulsion to nuance.
  16. Flipped
    That Flipped isn't insufferably cute is a measure of its integrity. But it still strains to view the world through the eyes of children without a filter of grown-up cynicism. It is plodding and awkwardly paced.
  17. The People I've Slept With
    A raunchy romantic comedy that, like its heroine, rarely has both feet on the ground.
  18. Vampires Suck
    This pointless parody dumps us in the fictional town of Sporks, Wash., a location lousy with vampires and werewolves.
  19. Saw 3D
    Be aware: if you see the film in a theater equipped with RealD 3D and Dolby sound, you'll come away with a pretty good idea of what it would feel like to have flying body parts hit you in the face.
  20. The Winning Season
    Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.
  21. Legendary
    The schmaltzy sports movie Legendary is a kind of contemporary answer to the old Charles Atlas ad in which a 97-pound weakling develops muscles and triumphantly punches out the bully at the beach.
  22. Alpha and Omega
    This talking-animal tale - has old-fashioned backgrounds that occasionally achieve a touch of grandeur, but that's about the best that can be said for it.
  23. Burlesque
    Once again, Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" haunts the stage with derbies and splayed legs, but with results that are strictly Sally Bowdlerized.
  24. TRON: Legacy
    A sequel with far less color and cinematic imagination, and many more bells and whistles, including a freakishly special-effected Mr. Bridges going mano a mano in cyberspace with the grizzled real deal. Twice as much Jeff Bridges does not necessarily mean twice as much entertainment - bummer.
  25. Yogi Bear
    There's exactly one thing about the misbegotten big-screen Yogi Bear that might make you think back with any fondness to the Hanna-Barbera cartoons on which it's based. That would be Justin Timberlake's charming performance as the voice of Boo-Boo Bear.
  26. Picture Me: A Model's Diary
    Say what you like about "America's Next Top Model," any single episode of Tyra Banks's campy confection offers more insight into objectification and disposability than this film in its entirety.
  27. My Soul to Take
    A thoroughly dreary, by-the-numbers exercise.
  28. The Next Three Days
    There is all kinds of potential here, but Mr. Haggis lacks the Hitchcockian sense of mischief to make it blossom.
  29. Douchebag
    The title may be mildly provocative in its vulgarity, but the most striking feature of this movie is its dullness.
  30. Kalamity
    For all its seriousness, Kalamity lacks a steady narrative drive; its speeches are too long, and its themes become repetitive.
  31. Red Dawn
    In his debut the director, Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator with a long list of credits, handles the low-fi action well, which helps divert attention from the bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics.
  32. The Tempest
    Ms. Taymor's overscaled sense of stage spectacle can be impressive and effective, even moving, but her three-dimensional, high-volume compositions translate awkwardly into the cosmos of cinema, which turns her pageantry into mummery and the physical exuberance she likes to draw from performers into mugging.
  33. The Taqwacores
    The Taqwacores aims for a provocative, anarchic cool by juxtaposing Islam and punk rock. But the storytelling is so muddled and the filmmaking so unpolished - and not in a good way - that mostly this movie is just unpleasant. It's also not nearly as insightful as it thinks it is.
  34. Eichmann
    Mr. Kretschmann holds your attention through each whining complaint and bland denial. His character may be banal, but his portrayal is the only thing that keeps you watching.
  35. Knucklehead
    A number of talented performers are stymied by this mediocre material.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story
    Were it not for a masterly production coup - an extensive interview with the camera-shy Mr. Koufax - this slight and unambitious work would be wholly indistinguishable from basic-cable filler.
  37. Ong Bak 3
    Ong Bak 3, which picks up the largely incoherent story of the rebel prince Tien battling evil lords and demons in some mythical pocket of Thai history, is actually less bloody than its predecessor.
  38. The Rite
    Dull, pretentiously verbose movie.
  39. I Am Number Four
    Sluggish and derivative, I Am Number Four is another elaborate puberty metaphor with superpowers substituting for testosterone.
  40. The Sound of Insects
    Mr. Liechti clearly finds value and even a measure of spiritual grace in this man's radical renunciation of life. You'll be pardoned for finding it numbing.
  41. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
    It's strictly for the fans, who will furiously parse the changes in the narrative (including a new female pilot) and the nonsensical stew of philosophical and religious symbolism.
  42. No Strings Attached
    Not entirely terrible. That is high praise indeed, given that this is a film aspiring to match the achievement of "27 Dresses," "When in Rome" and "Leap Year."
  43. The Mechanic
    There's some limited entertainment to be found in a movie as insistently conflicted as The Mechanic, but the accretion of sadism, humorlessness and antediluvian sexual politics is finally more exhausting than enlivening.
  44. Priest
    It becomes clear pretty quickly that the only real thought in the movie has gone into the cowboy-gothic costumes and the computer-generated effects.
  45. Johnny Mad Dog
    An assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers made with boys and girls who actually fought in that country's recent war, left me wrung out - furious, confused, deep in thought.
  46. Scream 4
    The central conceit of the characters' fates being determined by the "rules" of horror movies feels irredeemably tired; a clever idea that was worth one movie.
  47. Mother's Day
    Crisply shot and surprisingly well acted, Mother's Day suffers from an overly long script (a tornado hovers off screen to no apparent purpose) and annoying glitches in continuity.
  48. Your Highness
    May be better enjoyed in an herb-enhanced condition. Getting stoned is, after all, a running joke in this comedy, which is as thin as rolling paper and just as ephemeral.
  49. The Dictator
    That potential is mostly squandered in The Dictator, which gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.
  50. Something Borrowed
    The most dispiriting thing about Something Borrowed is that with a little more art, craft and wit it could have been a lot better, maybe even good.
  51. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    It is by far the least strange of all the "Pirates" episodes so far, with none of the cartoonish exuberance or creepy-crawly effects that made its predecessors intermittently delightful.
  52. The Hangover Part II
    The funniest, most reckless moments in The Hangover Part II, the largely mirthless sequel to the 2009 hit "The Hangover," take place in the final credits.
  53. Dressed
    Even those viewers who share the film's conviction that preparing a collection for New York Fashion Week is inherently fascinating may lose interest long before the final frock is fitted.
  54. Waiting for Forever
    I felt tentative stirrings of admiration for an indie movie that so aggressively flouts the hard-shelled conventions of romantic comedy. But more often than not, I felt suffocated by the gaseous sentimentality and lightheadedness of a story that drops in subplots that it can't begin to develop.
  55. Rage
    Offsetting its outlandish premise with believable performances, Rage (Rabia) delivers a heavy-handed metaphor for immigrant invisibility.
  56. Blackmail Boys
    What a shame the Shumanskis won't sign their real names to the film. You'd almost think they were as afraid as Andrew.
  57. Carbon Nation
    This film seems blissfully unaware that political obstructionists are paralyzing the legislative process; that deep-pocketed influence peddlers have a vested interest in maintaining the fossil fuel culture; that, in general, people resist change.
  58. Now & Later
    Offensive only in Mr. Wortham's dreadful acting, Now & Later is part of a series at the Quad called "Unrated: A Week of Sex in Cinema" - a title that should ensure plenty of backsides on seats.
  59. Cowboys & Aliens
    Favreau wavers uncertainly between goofy pastiche and seriousness in a movie that wastes its title and misses the opportunity to play with, you know, ideas about the western and science-fiction horror.
  60. Mars Needs Moms
    It seems that it's time to admit that dressing actors in LED-studded catsuits, asking them to give performances on sterile white sets and handing the results to a team of computer animators is not a way to make a good movie.
  61. The Conspirator
    The few glimpses we catch of the Ford's Theater production of "Our American Cousin" are unfortunately the liveliest and most convincing moments in this well-meaning, misbegotten movie.
  62. Larry Crowne
    A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.
  63. Monte Carlo
    Cheery, corny and perhaps calculatingly unoriginal, this is packaged entertainment so familiar it feels like a remake and so wholesome you could swear Sandra Dee starred in the 1959 original. Think of it as "No Sex and the City" for tweeners.
  64. Zookeeper
    It's hard to completely dislike a movie in which Mr. James makes like Fay Wray, hitching a ride on the back of his gorilla pal, Bernie (voiced by Nick Nolte), as Bernie clambers up a bridge.
  65. Final Destination 5
    A new wrinkle in how the killings spool out actually makes the film even more predictable, and the deaths, which tend to be squirmy rather than explosive, are so perfunctory and lazily jokey that they leave a decidedly bad aftertaste.
  66. Home
    We've heard it all before, if not in the schoolmarmish tones of Glenn Close, whose patronizing narration ("The earth is a miracle") makes the film feel almost as long as the life of its subject.
  67. The Thing
    This debut feature from Matthijs van Heijningen is as stiff as the Antarctic tundra. Where the earlier film pulsed with precisely calibrated paranoia and distinctly drawn characters, this inarticulate replay unfolds as mechanistically as a video game.
  68. On the Road
    It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.
  69. Dream House
    This crackpot thriller from the usually competent Jim Sheridan leaves only one mystery unsolved: what on earth was he thinking?
  70. Kill the Irishman
    An extravagantly corny ode to the collapse of the Cleveland mafia in the 1970s.
  71. London Boulevard
    Cultivation and fine manners are nowhere to be found in the foul urban cesspool of William Monahan's London Boulevard. This palpitating mess of a movie certainly doesn't lack for pungent atmosphere.
  72. The Raven
    The Raven tries to blend all of these motley genres together, and though the effort is valiant, the result is a mess. I suspect Poe's review of it would have been much more savage than mine.
  73. Iron Man 3
    Stuff blows up and then more stuff blows up because that’s what happens when diversions like this hit movie screens around this time of year: chaos reigns and then some guy cleans it up.
  74. Elektra Luxx
    Elektra Luxx has some scattered witty notions, but it is not funny.
  75. Shark Night 3D
    The result is a movie that isn't crummy, exactly, just blah: when the freakiest teeth on screen belong not to one of Walt Conti's animatronically realized sharks but to a good-ol'-boy called Red, you know you have a problem.
  76. Joyful Noise
    A lower echelon of musical comedy hell (or heaven, if you love the hoariest musical comedy clichés).
  77. The Vow
    When they are on the screen together here, there is enough physical charm and emotional warmth to distract from the threadbare setting and the paper-thin plot. But those defects ultimately get in the way of the stars and leave you wondering: Is this a romance about neurological impairment or a neurologically impaired romance?
  78. The Over the Hill Band
    This drippy dramedy embraces every inappropriate-oldster cliché with depressing calculation.
  79. 47 Ronin
    47 Ronin can’t entirely paper over the void at its center, traceable partly to the shadowboxing of computer-aided filmmaking or studio tinkering.
  80. Ex Drummer
    As the not-so-comic violence and the violent, misogynistic sex pile up, it becomes the kind of black humor in which the joke is largely on the audience.
  81. Tyrannosaur
    The characters are trapped, suffocated, pushed through a story that gives them very little room or time to figure themselves out, and that finally turns their feelings into the wan stuff of fable.
  82. The Avengers
    The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.
  83. That's My Boy
    That's My Boy is a pretty wretched movie if you want to activate your brain cells, but its busily plotted second half approaches involving.
  84. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is such a smashing title it's too bad someone had to spoil things by making a movie to go with it.
  85. Sympathy for Delicious
    These characters may serve an obscure metaphorical agenda, but they make no psychological sense. And as the movie contemplates the rewards and perils of giving and receiving, it winds itself into stomach-turning knots.
  86. Ted
    The sin of Ted is not that it is offensive but that it is boring, lazy and wildly unoriginal. If Triumph the Insult Comic Dog ever got a hold of Ted, there would be nothing left but a pile of fluff and a few scraps of fur.
  87. Total Recall (2012)
    This premise contains the seeds of an interesting economic and political allegory, but the ambitions of the filmmakers - lie in the direction of maximum noise and minimum sense.
  88. Meeting Spencer
    Isn't quite savvy enough to compete with the slyest entries in that genre or madcap enough to run with the zaniest.
  89. I Don't Know How She Does It
    If Kate's hyperkinetic cheer and shrill self-absorption are Carrie trademarks, 13 years after "Sex and the City" first appeared on television, their appeal has all but evaporated. I Don't Know How She Does It seems stuck in the past.
  90. Chimpanzee
    To experience Chimpanzee, the latest piece of gorgeously shot pablum from Disneynature, is to endure an orgy of cuteness pasted over some of the most asinine narration ever to ruin a wildlife movie.
  91. Square Grouper
    The film mixes period footage with visually unappealing contemporary interviews. If you're expecting voluble, outsize personalities with colorful war stories, you'll be disappointed.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The High Cost of Living
    This debut feature by the Canadian director Deborah Chow is so artistically well-intentioned and earnest in its ambitions that you can almost forgive the banality of its every scene.
  93. Kidnapped
    Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming Kidnapped into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.
  94. A Thousand Words
    The director, Brian Robbins, perhaps as a result of his prime-time pedigree, has so carefully engineered this manipulative machine that little emotional residue remains - only a product inoffensive, unsurprising and uninspiring.
  95. Sarah's Key
    Undone by its very premise: that the two stories it tells can coexist in the same film.
  96. Life in a Day
    It's a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled.
  97. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.
  98. Earthwork
    Imagine spending an afternoon watching a bunch of vagrants putter around on an abandoned city lot, and you've pretty much nailed the viewing experience of Earthwork, a painfully dull account of a year in the life of the Kansas crop artist Stan Herd.
  99. Dirty Girl
    Deep down, though, this movie by the first-time writer-director Abe Sylvia is desperate for approval. Starting out with a blast of profanity and sexual brazenness, it lands in a zone of earnest, sloppy weepiness.
  100. American Reunion
    Remember "American Pie"? If you do, this movie is redundant and sad. If you don't, it's irrelevant.
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