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. Hook
    Hook is overwhelmed by a screenplay heavy with complicated exposition, by what are, in effect, big busy nonsinging, nondancing production numbers and some contemporary cant about rearing children and the high price paid for success.
  2. Wish You Were Here
    After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.
  3. The Expendables 3
    It’s all a bit like a classic-rock tribute concert, or playing with all your action figures at once, or maybe “Cannonball Run,” with the strained buddy-buddy back-and-forth.
  4. Fukrey
    Too often it calls to mind the much better “Delhi Belly,” which had a genuinely madcap script and sharper things to say about being young, urban and Indian.
  5. Pandora's Promise
    Mr. Stone builds his case seamlessly but leaves no room for dissent, much less a drop of doubt.
  6. Assaulted: Civil Rights Under Fire
    Like so much of current polarized communication, “Assaulted,” wherever it is shown, is likely to be preaching to the choir.
  7. Breaking the Girls
    An erotic thriller with too many twists and back stories to count.
  8. Petunia
    It’s possible to make a great movie out of family dysfunction, but this one is too short on insight to rank with the best of the genre.
  9. My Best Day
    A gently wry sense of humor about human foibles and some well-turned exchanges keep the proceedings drifting along pleasantly enough, until characters start convening for the requisite heart-to-hearts and making-up.
  10. Somm
    Somm, though an entree into a little-known world, rarely finds a second dimension.
  11. Just Like a Woman
    The story arc is so familiar...that the main emotional response is hollow relief as every beat is, indeed, hit just as expected.
  12. L.A. Superheroes
    L.A. Superheroes is at times endearing, humorous and insightful. But her golden nugget of a story idea suffers in the big-screen telling.
  13. The Nut Job
    The Nut Job features muddy-colored and often ugly animation, a plot that feels too stretched out and loaded with details to hold the attention of most children, and more flatulence jokes than anyone deserves.
  14. Mood Indigo
    More begets more and then too much in Mood Indigo.
  15. Ramaiya Vastavaiya
    There is something for everyone in Prabhudheva’s ambitious Bollywood film Ramaiya Vastavaiya — comedy, romance, action and the obligatory music-and-dancing numbers — but hardly any of it is convincing, and the proceedings are rife with clichés.
  16. Filth
    After a certain point, watching it is like listening to the ravings of an increasingly incoherent and abusive drunk.
  17. The Canyons
    With The Canyons, [Mr. Schrader] tries to get at something real under all the hard, glossy surfaces, but ends up caught in the divide between the movie that he seems to have wanted to make and the one he did.
  18. The Lifeguard
    This directorial debut by Liz W. Garcia, a writer for television, bears some echoes of its creator’s origins, going from deft to trite in its drama and setting up character arcs that feel sappily resolved within its feature length.
  19. A Single Shot
    Mr. Rosenthal puts the story’s parts into play well enough, but once everyone and everything is in position that’s more or less where they stay as this slow story downshifts to a crawl.
  20. Chennai Express
    The movie chugs along for most of its 2 hours and 20 minutes searching for comedy and characters in a frantically overplotted story.
  21. National Security
    Though not without substance, National Security is marred by writing that’s not nearly as creative as the torments it portrays.
  22. Off Label
    The film’s stacked stories naggingly lack a cohesive train of thought beyond the often harmful pervasiveness of pharmaceuticals in American society.
  23. Once Upon Ay Time in Mumbai Dobaara!
    Poor pacing and editing result in a lack of transition between scenes; poignant moments are punctuated with distracting music; and the dialogue is overstuffed with platitudes that land like corny messages from fortune cookies.
  24. Savannah
    The film’s tale ends up being less rich than its lovely Georgia settings.
  25. C.O.G.
    Despite smatterings of wit and a stable of skilled performers, C.O.G. struggles to find a consistent tone, its episodic structure veering from farcical to poignant to dangerously raw.
  26. Million Dollar Arm
    Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.
  27. Escape from Tomorrow
    None of it is as scary or as funny as it should be, and what starts out as a sly thumb in the eye of corporate power ends up as a muddled and amateurish homage to David Lynch.
  28. Five Dances
    A promising, though static, new film that never leaves its taciturn shadows for a single emotionally gripping moment.
  29. Gung Ho
    It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.
  30. 36 Saints
    A modest effort only fitfully attaining its aims.
  31. What If
    A balloon of cuteness that makes you yearn for a pin, What If is Saturday night comfort food for those who need to believe that even the most curdled among us can find a mate.
  32. Prince of Darkness
    A surprisingly cheesy horror film to come from Mr. Carpenter (''Halloween,'' ''Escape From New York,'' among others), a director whose work is usually far more efficient and inventive.
  33. A Case of You
    While this unrelentingly midtempo movie milks Brooklyn for its chic, it manages to denude it of its color.
  34. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    With a character who can essentially say and do whatever she wants, you might expect a bit more.
  35. CZ12
    The film is about exotic locations (including a volcano), garish humor (often at the expense of Mr. Chan or women), fisticuffs, stunts and frenetic visual bombast.
  36. Toad Road
    Mr. Banker teases us with a dizzy, dislocating shooting style that throws up a succession of eerily arresting images. Even so, his film never overcomes the fact that watching drugged-out wastrels is rarely interesting — unless, of course, you’re one of them.
  37. Narco Cultura
    Narco Cultura feels like two short films sandwiched together to make a feature. One is a shallow pop-music documentary focusing on Mr. Quintero. The other is an equally superficial portrait of the embattled Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.
  38. Lost for Words
    The conventions are trundled out in Stanley J. Orzel’s cross-cultural romance, Lost for Words, but not the tension or the chemistry.
  39. Boss
    Boss is billed as an action comedy, but it isn’t always clear what is part of the joke and what isn’t.
  40. Blood and Ties
    After a promising start, it degenerates into unconvincing ticking-clock melodrama.
  41. Reaching for the Moon
    Ms. Otto conveys a double-edged intelligence as the film’s pinched notion of “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,” while Ms. Pires strides about, every snap judgment and grand gesture a measure of her appeal. Both are hemmed in by direction and a screenplay that are relentlessly on point (as well as an off-the-shelf score).
  42. The Christmas Candle
    The residents of the English village Gladbury in the period holiday film The Christmas Candle might as well be bustling about in a snow globe for all their dimples, yuletide obsession and quaint, consumptive coughs.
  43. Billy & Buddy
    Very young children fluent in French may enjoy the film for its jokes, but anyone old enough to read the subtitles is likely to be unamused.
  44. Cold Turkey
    Cold Turkey has some fine actors who put effort into their roles, but it’s getting harder and harder to care about or laugh at adult characters who have botched up their affluent lives and are still obsessed with events from childhood.
  45. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    The purpose was no doubt more spiritual than the film conveys; if so, the execution doesn’t do the effort justice.
  46. Swerve
    The fatalities and clichés escalate, as the wife plays the femme fatale, and the men run circles around one another amid the dust, blood and some tonally off, ill-conceived cutesiness.
  47. Tim's Vermeer
    Shooting in unattractive, hard-edge digital, Teller condenses Mr. Jenison’s years-long pursuit into 80 glib, alternately diverting, exasperating and tedious minutes.
  48. It's Better to Jump
    The film feels like a work of community advocacy.
  49. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    The problem is that Mr. Vaughn has no interest in, or perhaps understanding of, violence as a cinematic tool. He doesn’t use violence; he squanders it.
  50. Passengers
    Passengers increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.
  51. Lenny Cooke
    Like the 1994 documentary landmark “Hoop Dreams,” Lenny Cooke measures out the years with a pensive jazz motif, but the film feels comparatively stuck on a couple of notes.
  52. Dumb and Dumber To
    The Farrellys are still not much interested in film as a visual medium, and when Lloyd and Harry aren’t smacking each other or dropping their pants, you might as well be listening to a radio play. There’s a story, but it doesn’t matter, certainly not to the leads or the good-natured sidekicks like Kathleen Turner and Rob Riggle.
  53. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    The best and maybe the only way to appreciate Alice Through the Looking Glass is to surrender to its mad digital excess and be whirled around through time and space in a world of grotesque overabundance.
  54. Jane Got a Gun
    Whatever feminist angle the film might have once aspired to is lost in its listless shuffle.
  55. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    Mr. Perry’s latest film touches upon some recognizable and realistic challenges with efficient compassion, but there’s probably more dramatic tension in a car pool than in this film’s collection of predicaments.
  56. Cold Comes the Night
    The cash, the clichés — it’s hard not to be impatient with a movie as openly lazy as Cold Comes the Night, which is redeemed only by its performances.
  57. The Boy Next Door
    Mr. Cohen, no stranger to delivering pulp product, employs visual clichés as if they were flash cards; no exposed thigh or made-you-jump reveal goes unexploited.
  58. Live at the Foxes Den
    A slight movie that could have been significantly better with a little story doctoring.
  59. The Sacrament
    Mr. West sets the scene reasonably well, ratcheting up a sense of unease with old-fashioned shadows and some nighttime scrambling, but he gets lost once he shifts from fooling around in the dark to recreating mass death.
  60. Ms. 45
    Abel Ferrera...has a tin ear for dialogue and an evident penchant for ludicrous material. But beyond that, he is clearly a talented fellow. One can only hope he finds something else to make movies about very soon.
  61. Justin Bieber's Believe
    Another piece of propaganda for the Bieber proletariat.
  62. Gods of Egypt
    If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece.
  63. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Tighter, tougher and every bit as witless as its predecessor, The Divergent Series: Insurgent — the second segment in the cycle — arrives with a yawn and ends with a bang.
  64. Grand Piano
    This proudly old-fashioned movie will pull any trick in the book to hold your attention. And it needs those tricks: Damien Chazelle’s screenplay is sloppy, ludicrous and ultimately devoid of suspense.
  65. Ice Age: Collision Course
    The movie’s actual entertainment value rises considerably during the dialogue-free sequences.
  66. The Best Offer
    Mr. Rush can’t fly far on Mr. Tornatore’s dialogue and workmanlike plotting, and Sylvia Hoeks, as Claire, doesn’t bring a corresponding energy.
  67. The Gunman
    It’s not a hard and fast rule, but in general when the main character, sometime in the third act, says, “I did some bad things ... ” and stares off into the middle distance, the implied end of the sentence is “including this movie.”
  68. And So It Goes
    Relatable doesn’t have to mean routine, but Mr. Reiner doesn’t always bother to tell the difference.
  69. Before I Go to Sleep
    If it weren’t for the diligent performances of its stars, who inject some emotional depth into this bogus claptrap, Before I Go to Sleep would be an unwatchable, titter-inducing catastrophe.
  70. 24 Exposures
    24 Exposures plays like an exercise. With a thin plot — the usual parade of possible killers — it falls to the actors to provide zing.
  71. If You Build It
    The movie’s biggest weakness comes with its tendency to film people telling us what’s going on rather than having us observe.
  72. Divorce Corp
    The tone ranges from wounded to disgusted, but a movie positing this deep a rot in the system needs to be more measured and better made to take hold.
  73. Hamlet
    While Mr. Ramsay accomplishes some kind of a trick in streamlining the play, his trimming of corners feels more like a taking away of the center.
  74. Stalingrad
    The movie’s few spectacles — particularly the composite image of Russian soldiers aflame after a fuel depot explodes — seem to consume the creative energies of the filmmakers, with their palpable pride in staging patriotic deaths from the safe distance of history.
  75. True Story
    The real story of Christian Longo and Michael Finkel might be a fascinating and disturbing tale of crime, curiosity and journalistic ethics, but that’s not what this movie is.
  76. Almost Human
    In this blood-splattered wasteland, neither original ideas nor acting skills flourish.
  77. The Longest Ride
    Someone put together a listicle! That’s the kind of criticism this brand was made for.
  78. Song One
    Heartfelt but enervated, Song One noodles around the Brooklyn music scene without stirring up magic.
  79. Ping Pong Summer
    This gentle comedy, while entirely unmemorable, releases a genuine warmth that deflects harsh judgment. It doesn’t, however, excuse characters that are little more than props for embarrassing fashion or delivery systems for dated slang.
  80. I Origins
    “Another Earth” was a heartfelt entertainment that managed to infuse a tantalizing science fiction premise with thought and feeling. I Origins is too committed to explaining itself to repeat the trick and falls into the trap of taking its daffy intellectual conceits far too seriously.
  81. The Better Angels
    The sense of predestination hangs heavily over the movie, but not a sense of life.
  82. No God, No Master
    Dignified to a fault and crammed with historical worthies (like a pre-deportation Emma Goldman), this dry tour of union hall strife and kitchen table sentiment wears its sympathies proudly.
  83. Nostalghia
    Loveliness, I'm afraid, is really what this movie is all about.
  84. Love Is in the Air
    The two leads have enough genuine sex appeal to make the film endurable.
  85. Jobriath A.D.
    It’s cruel but must be said: Presented in hushed, reverent tones, Jobriath A.D. often comes across as mockumentary material; each ghastly career move is followed by another. Hampered by limited video of Jobriath, the film lacks a sense of him or his music.
  86. Earth to Echo
    Technology remains no substitute for well-written characters and genuine intrigue and atmosphere, so despite the cute special effects and camera jostling, this film feels like an extended episode of an after-school show by Disney.
  87. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    In 3-D, the firefighting scenes are visually striking — with plumes of smoke and chemical dust — though the backgrounds, like other aspects of the film, lack dimension.
  88. Hasee Toh Phasee
    While the film starts out as a seemingly fresh take on the romantic comedy, it is saddled with numerous contrivances and the clichéd trappings of the genre.
  89. Beijing Love Story
    There’s a little effort to give each story its own tempo and style; you notice bits and pieces plucked from other movies or TV shows.
  90. Highway
    The cinematographer Anil Mehta’s lovely, unfussy images ground the film and show us a good bit of India... Mr. Ali’s story, though, wanders too long and too far, sometimes coming off like a forced mash-up of “It Happened One Night” and “Patty Hearst.”
  91. In the Blood
    Deficient even in most of its set pieces, In the Blood does Ms. Carano (and Caribbean tourism) few favors. Somebody, please give her a better script and director.
  92. Get Hard
    The highest praise I can give Get Hard is that it is not quite as awful as it could have been.
  93. The Protector 2
    With jokes and computer-generated spectacles diluting the action, this is not one for fight-film purists.
  94. The Island of St. Matthews
    It’s a stretch to call Mr. Everson’s film a documentary.
  95. War of the Worlds: Goliath
    Considering that the fate of humankind is at stake, War of the Worlds: Goliath is remarkably uninvolving.
  96. The Anonymous People
    However good the intentions, this sluggish documentary about the stigma of substance abuse and the barriers to recovery never comes close to catching fire.
  97. Stay
    The movie, admirably shot on location, has a cast that is nonetheless directed without much verve by Wiebke von Carolsfeld. The film was adapted from a novel by Aislinn Hunter, but the characters’ inner lives remain elusive.
  98. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    In aggressively sunny picker-uppers like the Marigold movies, there is a thin line between adorable and insufferable. And in the second “Marigold,” Mr. Patel has succumbed to his tendency toward cuteness.
  99. Wolf Creek 2
    Even more inadvisable was the decision (whether made by Mr. McLean or his backers) to transform the mercurial psychopath Mick Taylor (a truly menacing John Jarratt) into a roguish cartoon.
  100. A Promise
    Ms. Hall’s Lotte is the weak link in the triangle. Despite all her character’s flowery words of longing, she can’t convey the heat bottled under Lotte’s demure demeanor.
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