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. Grass
    With its pointed narrative, the film makes its case with a minimum of pushiness and a subtle nod to its crowd.
  2. American Virgin
    As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.
  3. Thirteen
    For all its narrative glitches and its homemade quality, Thirteen evokes the rhythm, texture and tone of Nina's world in a way that a more carefully scripted film never could.
  4. Better Living Through Circuitry
    The movie is essentially pro-Ecstasy. No matter how much the D.J.'s may claim that their electronic sounds produce the euphoria of a good rave, the movie clearly implies that Ecstasy is the key that unlocks it all.
  5. Passion of Mind
    It's hard to take Passion seriously because it brings to mind the kind of shallow psychology that wouldn't be out of place in a history short about Sigmund Freud on "ABC Schoolhouse Rock."
  6. 8 ½ Women
    Its message is quite simple and all too familiar: when it comes to sex, all men are little boys.
  7. Shanghai Noon
    A refreshing movie that's so good natured, so confident of its ability to provoke not queasy awe or numb exhaustion but pure delight.
  8. 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.
  9. Mission: Impossible II
    Once the basic conflict is established, the story plods along, alternating between preposterous -- in a bad way -- speeches and even more preposterous -- but in a good way -- shootouts and slugfests.
  10. The Well
    With a neck-snapping jolt, turns into the scariest exercise in cinematic sleight of hand since "The Blair Witch Project."
  11. Luminous Motion
    It's a bit like "The Sixth Sense," but without the melodramatic comfort of the supernatural.
  12. Small Time Crooks
    In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination.
  13. Road Trip
    Bad taste is timeless. And sometimes it can be so funny that you can't help laughing.
  14. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    It conveys plenty of wonder while mostly avoiding any saccharine preachiness.
  15. Dinosaur
    As luxuriant and intoxicating as a theme park ride; more remarkably, it feels like a real movie.
  16. Shadow Boxers
    Upbeat.
  17. Held Up
    By the end, even the irrepressible Mr. Foxx seems tired and defeated, and we can only hope he perks up in time for his next movie.
  18. Coming Soon
    Its frank good humor stands in sharp contrast with the strange combination of timidity and exploitiveness of more widely distributed recent teenage comedies.
  19. Center Stage
    Sexy and infectious in spite of itself.
  20. Hamlet
    New York becomes a complex character in this vital and sharply intelligent film.
  21. Screwed
    A confusedly misconceived hybrid of interracial buddy comedy and imitation Marx Brothers farce.
  22. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.
  23. Gladiator
    Grandiose and silly.
  24. Luminarias
    Easy to like and difficult to admire.
  25. La Nouvelle Ève
    But most of the movie's notes are appallingly right.
  26. Dream of Light
    The purity and breadth of this meticulous study are all the more gratifying in view of its unprepossessing style.
  27. The Basket
    Avoids succumbing to the preachiness that is the bane of so many family films, and for a movie like this, that's no small feat.
  28. I Dreamed of Africa
    Advance word of mouth has suggested that Ms. Basinger...turns in a performance comparable to Meryl Streep's in "Out of Africa." Would that it were so. Ms. Basinger certainly works hard at her role.
  29. Up at the Villa
    It reminds us that Italy is beautiful, that Fascism was a dreadful nuisance and that Sean Penn is a great actor, deserving of better vehicles than this vintage lemon.
  30. Adorenarin doraibu
    Mr. Yaguchi's film is so brazenly cheerful and charmingly engineered that even the sourballs in the cast are sucked in.
  31. Human Traffic
    Mostly it's exhilarating.
  32. Michael Jordan to the Max
    The format and the purposeful blandness of the script make Jordan seem remote, more icon than human being.
  33. Into My Heart
    Dreary.
  34. The Idiots
    Has nothing on its mind besides the squirming discomfort of its audience, the achievement of which it holds up as a brave political accomplishment.
  35. Frequency
    What makes Frequency work despite is shamelessness is the surreal aura that imbues almost every scene with a sense of heightened feeling.
  36. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    What results is a candy-colored broad comedy with noteworthy performances.
  37. Bossa Nova
    There must be a name for a picture so inconsequential, in which the music provides so much of the chemistry that you get the feeling Bossa Nova would be funereal without it.
  38. Where the Heart Is
    No-Good Men, Foolish Choices and Birth on the Floor of a Wal-Mart.
  39. Timecode
    It's amazing to see a film so brazenly experimental, so committed to reflecting on the circumstances and techniques of its making, that is at the same time so intent upon delivering old-fashioned cinematic pleasures like humor and pathos, character and plot.
  40. Committed
    Comedy, like marriage, takes more work than this.
  41. The Big Kahuna
    If the movie looked any cheaper, you might think you were paying more to get into the theater than was spent on making the film.
  42. J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche
    Brain-dead.
  43. From the Edge of the City
    It captures a gritty urban reality without moralizing or sentimentalizing its hapless young protagonist.
  44. Gossip
    If you're looking for a 90-minute post-teen soap opera with pretty people, ludicrous hairpin turns and a whopper of an ending, the movie will keep you mindlessly off balance.
  45. U-571
    Yet there is so little characterization that when the sub goes down, you may find yourself confused as to which of the supporting cast members lived through the torpedo blast.
  46. Croupier
    Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen in waves whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.
  47. The Virgin Suicides
    Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.
  48. Love & Basketball
    It's in the small touches that this movie comes alive, and it's rare that directors can pull off this kind of thing.
  49. Where the Money Is
    Coasts to a smooth, frictionless stop, but its star doesn't; he works as if his career depended on this movie.
  50. The Girl Next Door
    Melancholy.
  51. Third World Cop
    Shot in smeary video, it sports the static, by-the-book camera work of a daytime soap-opera.
  52. American Psycho
    A lean and mean horror comedy classic.
  53. 28 Days
    Begins with such a flurry of promise that it comes as a sharp disappointment when this drug-rehab comedy skids out of control.
  54. Set Me Free
    Propelled by a captivating, wrenching performance by Karine Vanasse as Hanna, a 13-year-old girl adrift in a sea of powerful emotions in Montreal in 1963.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Restaurant
    It takes very good actors to convey this kind of nuance, and the cast of Restaurant does consistently splendid work.
  56. Return to Me
    Weightless and polite when it means to be magical and gentle, Return to Me is a piece of fruit gone soft from being off the vine too long.
  57. Southpaw
    What the film resembles more than anything else is one of the miniature human-interest profiles that the networks have taken to inserting between the events in their Olympic coverage.
  58. Me Myself I
    A sugarcoated romantic comedy that is just clever enough to make you wish it were three times as smart and only a third as sweet.
  59. Rules of Engagement
    There's not much going on here, and there is little suspense.
  60. Est - Ouest
    Wargnier's sumptuous, moving new film, captures both the hope of the returning Russians and their brutal betrayal.
  61. The Filth and the Fury
    Electrifying.
  62. Joe Gould's Secret
    Settles for being an atmospheric scenes-in-the-life biography of someone's most unforgettable character. It could have been so much more.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Ready to Rumble
    Not a satire of the idiocy of professional wrestling, but a long, self-satisfied wallow in it.
  64. Black and White
    It's another of Mr. Toback's quick-talking autobiographies that, like the best pop, have a clock running on their expiration dates.
  65. Price of Glory
    In films, as in the ring, heart and will without exceptional talent don't produce winners.
  66. The Road to El Dorado
    Little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teeny bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.
  67. The Skulls
    Less interested in politics than in profitably flattering the suspicions and resentments of its intended teenage audience.
  68. High Fidelity
    Witty, exquisitely fine-tuned screen adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel
  69. Beau Travail
    A film that has the sweep and esthetic power of a full-length ballet.
  70. X
    Has the sleepy feel of an urban fairy tale, but getting there is a long trip.
  71. The Color of Paradise
    Leans a bit too much toward the lachrymose and has a wrong-note final image.
  72. Here on Earth
    Still never having to say you're sorry.
  73. Buddy Boy
    Even the walls seem to be sweating something viscous and unpleasant.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Whatever It Takes
    A thinly veiled "Cyrano," with the prom in mind.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All I Wanna Do
    Surprisingly pleasant, thanks to smart, unstereotyped performances.
  76. Such a Long Journey
    The main problem with Such a Long Journey is its storytelling. There is simply too much happening.
  77. Waking the Dead
    Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.
  78. Winter Sleepers
    Winter Sleepers has many such breathtaking moments in which sounds and images synergize with an explosive precision.
  79. Romeo Must Die
    Sadly, if this movie was a fight, they'd have stopped it.
  80. Les convoyeurs attendent
    A sharp critique of empty values and pointless striving.
  81. Erin Brockovich
    The feel-good movie of the year.
  82. Final Destination
    Even by the crude standards of teenage horror, Final Destination is dramatically flat.
  83. Beyond the Mat
    Wants to blend thrills and pathos, getting at the many sides of what is, as Mr. Blaustein describes it, a carny act.
  84. The Disappearance of Finbar
    Acted by an appealing cast, enlivened with well-chosen and varied music and filmed with bleak beauty by the cinematographer Eduardo Serra.
  85. Soft Fruit
    The general talent and dedication of the ensemble mitigate the script's occasional lapses into sentimentality and noisy confrontation.
  86. Babymother
    Would much rather wallow in music than develop the strands of a story.
  87. Deterrence
    Probably serves some useful purpose, despite its ham-fisted preachiness and mediocre acting.
  88. Mission to Mars
    There doesn't seem to be an original moment in the entire movie, and the score is so repetitive that it could have been downloaded directly from EnnioMorricone.com.
  89. The Ninth Gate
    About as scary as a sock-puppet re-enactment of "The Blair Witch Project," and not nearly as funny.
    • 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.
  91. The Next Best Thing
    The moment the movie loses its lighthearted spirit is the moment it loses touch with reality
  92. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    There is a lot of violence, but not much action; a plot involving vengeance, jealousy and double-crossing, but not a great deal of suspense.
  93. Drowning Mona
    A dreary crash of malapropisms and slapstick maimings wrapped very loosely around a murder mystery.
  94. What Planet Are You From?
    Wants to be sweet and dark at the same time, but it is as distant as a planet's satellite.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    3 Strikes
    Feels like a very long late-night comedy sketch that occasionally veers beyond tastelessness toward something worse.
  96. Judy Berlin
    Mendelsohn's fusion of science fiction and Chekhovian melancholy finds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.
  97. Mifune's Last Song
    The brusque realism of Kragh-Jacobsen's style -- his careful suppression of style -- allows a surprising sweetness to emerge.
  98. Claire Dolan
    Cartlidge's beautifully still performance, mournful one moment, defiant the next, lets you see into Claire's soul without editorializing or begging for our empathy.
  99. The Waiting Game
    Ordinary lives have become an ordinary film.
  100. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    Sivan has accomplished something extraordinary: he has given political extremism a human face.
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