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. Collaborator
    Collaborator has the tone and structure of an extended one-act play. Its uniformly wooden dialogue lends it the stage-bound feel of a tortured writing exercise.
  2. The Well Digger's Daughter
    There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.
  3. Rites of Spring
    The cinematographer, Carl Herse, knows his way around genre staples like claustrophobic cornfields, animal carcasses, porcelain-doll heads, voyeur perspectives, decrepit interiors and, of course, the time-honored serial-killer wall, with thumbtacked clippings and photographs about old murders. Nevertheless, Rites of Spring yields a slender bounty.
  4. Assassin's Bullet
    For the thickheaded thriller Assassin's Bullet the Bulgarian actress Elika Portnoy dreamed up a story with three roles for herself and fails to convince in any of them.
  5. Why Stop Now
    Once Why Stop Now? has exhausted its bag of tricks, there is a screeching of brakes as it approaches the edge of the cliff. Having expended all that stamina, the film collapses from exhaustion and settles for an abrupt, feel-good ending that is as perfunctory as it is preposterous.
  6. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    The whole enterprise has a get-off-my-lawn feel; it tries to pass off whining and a rose-colored-glasses view of the past as insight.
  7. Little White Lies
    With the exception of Marie Little White Lies focuses mostly on the men: whiny, strutting little boys whose exasperated, tight-lipped wives put up with their bad behavior and sometimes have to act like mommies.
  8. 2016: Obama's America
    Mr. D'Souza stumbles when interviewing George Obama, the president's half-brother, an activist who voluntarily lives amid squalor in Nairobi, Kenya. "Obama has not done anything to help you," Mr. D'Souza says. "He's taking care of me; I'm part of the world," George Obama replies.
  9. Bringing Up Bobby
    Despite Ms. Janssen's fine taste in music - it's lovely to hear Jorma Kaukonen's "Genesis" on the soundtrack - her film's downfall was ensured by a leading lady who will always be more credible chasing zombies than the American dream.
  10. The Oranges
    How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.
  11. Vamps
    Aging is probably the real theme here, but it's approached sidelong and has no punch. Still, only the nostalgia has any real conviction.
  12. The Day
    The Day cycles through bursts of horrific violence only to end much as it begins: static, hollow and vague.
  13. [REC] 3: Genesis
    With slapstick smothering the scares, [REC 3] is further marred by a plot in which the muted Catholicism of its antecedents is turned up to full blast.
  14. Serving Up Richard
    The story, too, undercuts the actors.
  15. Last Vegas
    If you approach Last Vegas expecting an emotionally engaging, in any way surprising, moviegoing experience, you will be disappointed. But if you want the equivalent of an old-fashioned television variety show — a Very Special Evening with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas and Kevin Kline — you might not have such a bad time.
  16. Backwards
    Pairing a dull romance with an even duller sport (at least as represented here), this cliché-ridden vanity project is more suited to the ABC Family channel than to the inside of a movie theater.
  17. Mulberry Child
    The film's subject matter is epochal, its delivery less so.
  18. Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy
    The average viewer might understandably find that pieces in the puzzle of Mr. Lombardi remain missing.
  19. Divergent
    Ms. Roth’s prose style is good enough and Tris appealing enough that, at least in the book, it’s easy to breeze past the plot holes. It’s harder to ignore those flaws in the movie, partly because the director, Neil Burger (“Limitless”), gives you little to hang onto — beauty, thrills, a visual style.
  20. Blinky & Me
    Mr. Magierski patches together the storytelling, delivered at home and during a visit to Poland, rather clumsily. His general effort to take the children's naïve point of view has amateurish and cutesy results.
  21. Switch
    Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."
  22. The Yakuza and the Mermaid
    If wallowing in the creative hiccups of tortured scribblers is your moviegoing goal, there are much better options.
  23. Heroine
    Pulpy but attenuated, Heroine tries to do too much: deliver an exposé of the back-stabbing film business while also drawing a portrait of a woman caught in its vice.
  24. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    Unable to shape these events into a dramatic structure, the director, Camilo Vila, resorts to a meandering tale of random indignities suffered by a lead so bland he comes across less as principled than as stupendously naïve.
  25. Trade of Innocents
    Part infomercial, part public-service announcement, Trade of Innocents carries such a suffocating human-rights burden that it never had much chance of becoming an actual movie. Yes, child trafficking is horrific; but embedding your raise-the-alarm mission in a film this inept runs the risk of arousing more amusement than activism.
  26. The Double Steps
    It's never clear how Mr. Lacuesta, whose use of other art-cinema conventions (like nonprofessional performers) risks cliché, sees these parts working together or what he wants you to take from them. He's so committed to non-transparency as a principle that he locks you out.
  27. Avé
    No one can really run away - that's the animating principle of the Bulgarian film Avé, which is placid and unchallenging, with tiny eruptions of striking purpose.
  28. Special Forces
    Dedicated to French servicemen and wartime journalists, Special Forces aims to inspire but ends up wallowing in melodrama.
  29. Gayby
    Inoffensive and low-key, Gayby is too diffuse to have much pop when it comes to the topics at hand: love and friendship, and how unconventional modern permutations might help rewrite the script of romance.
  30. Hotel Noir
    To succeed as more than a study in artifice, a film - especially one steeped in fatalism - needs to feel real.
  31. Least Among Saints
    Though both actors deliver performances more credible than the plot that frames them, their authenticity only highlights the script's affection for improbable coincidences and an ending even Garry Marshall might consider too pat.
  32. Madrid, 1987
    Sweet, sometimes dull and certainly overlong.
  33. Unmasked Judeophobia
    In the end the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are conflated, weakening the filmmaker's argument. Ultimately the varying points are way too much to take on in one film.
  34. Dinotasia
    Neither educational nor engaging.
  35. Dust Up
    Flaunting gross-out violence and cartoonish trappings, Dust Up is the sort of self-impressed tedious effort that many thought had died with the post-Tarantino imitations of the 1990s.
  36. The Bay
    There is a lot of nasty stuff to look at, but very little that is genuinely haunting, jolting or terrifying.
  37. Struck by Lightning
    Except for Ms. Janney's monstrous mother and an Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen), Struck by Lightning gives its characters no dimension.
  38. Festival of Lights
    It ends up being largely just another story about a rebellious American teenager.
  39. Coming Up Roses
    The grittier side of Coming Up Roses, which Ms. Albright wrote with Christina Lazaridi, is unconvincing boilerplate grunge.
  40. Shady Lady
    It comes as no surprise that the director, Tristan Loraine, comes from a background as an airline captain and a documentarian. Perhaps those jobs make best use of his skills.
  41. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    The backstage commentary circles around the bailiwick of a production designer and frustrations over Mr. Helnwein's literal interpretations. But they are rarely juicy or pursued in depth, and platitudes abound (with the exception of a matter-of-fact lighting designer named Bambi).
  42. Back to 1942
    It catalogs agony without making you feel it.
  43. The Normals
    The satire - about religion, medicine, TV culture - is larded unevenly, the homage overly obvious.
  44. Parked
    Parked collapses into sentimentality that not even an actor of Mr. Meaney's dignity and restraint can redeem from mawkishness.
  45. Young and Wild
    It's more about adolescent attitudes than the thrust of a story, yet the film's sexual intelligence is undone by a paralyzing voice-over and an encroaching case of the blahs.
  46. The Purge
    The message just gets louder and louder, cruder and cruder, which is too bad because Mr. DeMonaco knows how to set a stage.
  47. Allegiance
    This well-acted debut feature from Michael Connors (a former Army captain) is too limited in ambition and scope to satisfy our expectations.
  48. My Best Enemy
    An awkward blend of anti-Semitic atrocities and identity-swapping absurdity, the World War II drama My Best Enemy struggles to find a convincing tone.
  49. The Baytown Outlaws
    The Baytown Outlaws" avidly subscribes to the grindhouse aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. If it has the right spit-in-your-face attitude, it has neither the stamina nor the wit to go the distance, although it makes it about two-thirds of the way.
  50. Let My People Go!
    Reuben is a whiny and uncoordinated prodigal son. His constant chafing at himself and the world is the film's biggest problem; by the midway point we're all wishing him back in Finland where he belongs.
  51. Brief Reunion
    The film's biggest weakness is its unsympathetic main character, a snippy, nervous, expressionless control freak who gets more despicable as the story unfolds.
  52. Tomorrowland
    Its idea of the future is abstract, theoretical and empty, and it can only fill in the blank space with exhortations to believe and to hope. But belief without content, without a critical picture of the world as it is, is really just propaganda. Tomorrowland, searching for incitements to dream, finds slogans and mistakes them for poetry.
  53. The Brass Teapot
    The movie’s best bits lose out to the requisite moral turnaround.
  54. Emperor
    Mr. Jones’s performance is the only spark within this otherwise dull, well-mannered exercise.
  55. The End of Love
    Mr. Webber, a skilled actor, has not devised a narrative with sufficient momentum or tension to sustain much interest.
  56. Reincarnated
    Snoop has certainly tempered his worldview, but enlightenment isn’t as evident here as much as a woozy weariness, perhaps a long-term byproduct of being very, very stoned.
  57. Back to the Future Part III
    Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.
  58. I'm So Excited
    The journey generally drags because the spinning characters, with their tired jokes and familiar melodramas, soon feel so mechanical, like the automated parts in an Almodóvar machine.
  59. Xanadu
    Like The Wiz...Xanadu is desperately stylish without having any real style.
  60. Lost in Thailand
    Like many broad successes this unremarkable movie proves decidedly reluctant to yield any golden secret to box-office bonanzas, unless you count tried-and-true chase formulas and a moral about rethinking priorities.
  61. Planes
    Planes is for the most part content to imitate rather than innovate, presumably hoping to reap a respectable fraction of the box office numbers of “Cars” and “Cars 2,” which together made hundreds of millions of dollars (not to mention the ubiquitous product tie-ins).
  62. Saving Lincoln
    The whole affair has an artificial look reminiscent of a community theater production on a cardboard set. The vintage images don’t add enough to make up for the visual distraction. The story, though, is of moderate interest.
  63. Kai po che!
    Ambitious but uneven, Kai Po Che (based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life”) mixes, not quite successfully, traditional Bollywood storytelling with something less conventional.
  64. Red Flag
    If only Red Flag were funnier and tighter and had a sharper idea about what it means to blur the lines between self-interrogation and self-absorption. As it is, the movie throws off too few sparks.
  65. Genius on Hold
    This promisingly tragic tale is sunk by cartloads of context and an overbearing, slanted narration.
  66. A Fierce Green Fire
    This distillation of Philip Shabecoff’s book doesn’t really capture the urgency and militancy promised in the title.
  67. Lotus Eaters
    What Lotus Eaters can take pride in are Gareth Munden’s stunning black-and-white cinematography and Ms. Campbell-Hughes, a riveting visual subject suggesting miles of internal depth. She makes this wallow in callow company watchable.
  68. August: Osage County
    August: Osage County falls into an uncanny valley between melodrama and camp, failing to achieve either heights of operatic feeling or flights of knowing parody. The jokes are too labored, too serious.
  69. The Revolutionary
    It’s a remarkable story, even if The Revolutionary, a no-frills documentary drawn from five years of interviews, isn’t much of a movie.
  70. Maniac
    By not centering on the victims, Mr. Khalfoun nearly makes the film about pitying the panic-prone killer; the camerawork lacks the ominous, confident glide of much Steadicam horror.
  71. The English Teacher
    The acting, especially Ms. Moore’s, is solid. But her strong, sympathetic performance fails to transform The English Teacher into anything more than a sitcom devoid of laughs, except for a soupçon of literary humor. It is a movie at odds with itself.
  72. Dorfman in Love
    The sentiments are heartfelt, but the execution is common.
  73. Stuck in Love
    Although Stuck in Love is an indie film, it hews slavishly to Hollywood formulas.
  74. Tai Chi Hero
    Tai Chi Hero merely fills the eye, offering little that stays with you.
  75. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
    Captain Kirk and his crew go where too many film makers have too often gone before.
  76. Sightseers
    Working from a script by Ms. Lowe and Mr. Oram, Mr. Wheatley continues in the same bludgeoning, amusingly if dubiously deadpan fashion for what soon feels like an overextended joke.
  77. Antiviral
    At a certain point, Antiviral doesn’t know where to go or how to break out of its vacuum-sealed sepulcher, and Syd, even when vomiting blood, remains as incorporeal and creepy as a ghost. This is a movie that drinks its own tainted blood.
  78. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
    The Paranormal Activity movies have always been about carnival-ride sensations, the narrative through-line secondary. That’s fortunate, because those seeking closure to what continuity there has been will go home mostly disappointed.
  79. One Direction: This Is Us
    With a group so evidently versed in the visuals of rock history, it’s a shame that a filmmaker wasn’t hired who would pay homage to classic pop films instead of offering a satisfactory paid promotional.
  80. The Legend of Hercules
    This movie, with its relatively modest running time and not-quite-household-name cast, is no more ridiculous than, let’s say, the “Thor” movies, and a lot less pretentious.
  81. American Meat
    The film’s ending, introducing farmers whose lives (and weight) have been changed for the better, sounds enough like an infomercial to undermine the whole enterprise.
  82. Violet & Daisy
    While the film has an appealingly dreamy, summer-in-New-York look and a pleasantly languorous rhythm, it gives the actors very little to do and the audience almost nothing to care about.
  83. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    [A] glossy, fawning valentine to conspicuous consumption.
  84. Tiger Eyes
    It’s all a bit precious and predictable.
  85. Girl Most Likely
    A forced, laugh-challenged comedy with an appealing if not terribly well-used cast.
  86. Stranded
    The actors work hard to make us feel their fear of a creature that, for much of the movie, we don’t get to see. We don’t really need to see it, because we’ve seen it or something like it before.
  87. The Colony
    The Colony is two-thirds of a pretty good sci-fi suspense movie. But it eventually takes a disappointing turn and becomes yet another run-from-the-ghouls exercise, cheapening decent work by a good cast.
  88. Thérèse
    Mr. Miller’s stolid approach — with its waxwork figures, postcard beauty, insistent tastefulness and glaze of politesse — feels far too comfortably of this world to mount a critique of it.
  89. Drift
    This poor-surfers-make-good drama from Morgan O’Neill and Ben Nott relies more than it should on toned thighs and taut gluteals. Be grateful; there’s nothing to see on dry land that’s anywhere near as compelling.
  90. Dracula Untold
    Looking for plausibility in a movie called Dracula Untold is as pointless as looking for humor or personality in Mr. Evans’s dour performance.
  91. Heaven Is for Real
    Preachy and pretty, Heaven is a classy-looking product with a vanilla flavor and a pastel palette.
  92. When the Game Stands Tall
    Thomas Carter, the director, whips us into a frenzy during the big winning-again-is-everything game, as all sports underdog movies must. But in the end, the only real impact is limited to a few scenes.
  93. Walk of Shame
    The cast does a fine collective job, and Mr. Brill’s script flirts with clever charm here and there. But the whole film is a missed opportunity because the situations repeatedly defy credibility, and the humor never says anything remotely fresh about human nature or the world we live in.
  94. Aroused
    The women share their dreams, their thoughts on relationships and some of the hazards of their work. The serious, thoughtful responses carry the film.
  95. The Guillotines
    The incrementally served up pieces never satisfactorily cohere. The blades fly as do the heads, but the movie remains disappointingly aground.
  96. Cape Spin: An American Power Struggle
    A documentary should give audiences insights they can’t get elsewhere. Otherwise, it’s just one more tumble in an endless media churn.
  97. Absence
    Mundane conversations and outings drag on while the central mystery takes baby steps forward, suggesting that a shorter running time or a more developed script might have better served the originality of the premise.
  98. A Girl and a Gun
    Whether viewed as empowerment tools or aphrodisiacs, stress relievers or deadly bodyguards, these weapons and their owners never cohere into an actual point.
  99. Young & Beautiful
    What is most striking about this movie is how un-self-conscious it is as it conducts a prurient and superficial inquiry into adolescent female sexuality.
  100. Always
    Gentle and moving as it means to be, Always is overloaded. There is barely a scene here that wouldn't have worked better with less fanfare.
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