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 Change-Up
    The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.
  2. 30 Minutes or Less
    If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.
  3. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    The fall-off in sexiness, soulfulness and wittiness from Ms. Gugino and Antonio Banderas, the parents in the first three "Spy Kids" films, to Ms. Alba and Joel McHale is whiplash steep.
  4. The Apparition
    At one point Ben helpfully looks under the house to see what might be causing the ruckus. "Watch out for spiders!" Kelly says. Actually, Ben - and the filmmakers - have a lot more to worry about.
  5. The Three Musketeers
    The campy new screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers has all the reality and visceral excitement of a $75 million literary theme park dotted with fancy villages heavily patrolled by security.
  6. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Characters are simply triggers for the overwrought action sequences, though between the Edward Scissorhands editing and occasional wobbling background, even those are less than distinct.
  7. Trespass
    So why? Why would stars of the magnitude of Mr. Cage and Ms. Kidman sign on to a project whose screenplay is so inept that the movie, even if profitable, will stand as a career-impeding setback? Can't they read?
  8. Jack and Jill
    There are a few funny moments in Jack and Jill, most of them celebrity cameos that also serve to affirm what a cool, connected celebrity Mr. Sandler is. The most sustained of these is the appearance of Al Pacino as himself, falling for Jill and giving the film a jolt of genuine zaniness. I'm sorry to say that this may be Mr. Pacino's most convincing performance in years.
  9. New Year's Eve
    A depressing two-hour infomercial pitching Times Square as the only place in the universe you want to be when the ball drops at midnight on Dec. 31. (Believe me, it's not.)
  10. What's Your Number?
    If nothing else the ramshackle, scatterbrained rom-com What's Your Number? confirms the arrival, heralded by "Bridesmaids," of a new subgenre, the smutty chick flick, into the Hollywood mainstream.
  11. Peep World
    A family circus of dysfunction that's so familiar you may feel tempted to place bets on how everything will shake out.
  12. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    While it seems there's no getting away from this marketing aesthetic, the resemblance at times to a video game is far, far too acute.
  13. Cat Run
    An incoherent hybrid of buddy movie, "Girls Gone Wild" episode and James Bond spoof that employs cheap cinematic tricks like multiple split screens for no apparent purpose.
  14. Ouija
    What Ouija lacks in wit and originality, it makes up in volume — a trademark of the “Transformers” director Michael Bay, who is one of the producers.
  15. The Dark Tower
    About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.
  16. Drawing with Chalk
    Screaming "vanity project" from every hackneyed frame, Drawing With Chalk is yet another example of midlife American males doing all they can to avoid acting their age.
  17. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    There isn't much swashbuckling chemistry between Mr. Renner and Ms. Arterton, and the script doesn't give them enough of the witty lines that can elevate these types of movies to must-see status.
  18. Two Gates of Sleep
    The intent is perhaps some kind of dark tone poem, and the cinematography (by Jody Lee Lipes) is lovely. But oh, the tedium.
  19. They're Out of the Business
    What was sometimes charming and funny in "Turnaround" is almost uniformly dreary in "Business," a result of tired humor, a monotonous pace and Mr. Schaeffer's inexpressiveness as an actor.
  20. Footprints
    From its "once upon a time" beginning to the anticlimactic end, Footprints remains fatally lodged in La-La Land.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    The movie's main theme, no surprise, is the struggle of The Times to survive in the age of the Internet. But it does little to illuminate that struggle, preferring instead a constant parade of people telling the camera how dreadful it would be if The Times did not survive. True, of course, but boring to the point of irritation after five or six repetitions.
  22. The Perfect Host
    Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.
  23. The Ledge
    The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.
  24. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.
  25. Seven Days in Utopia
    A stultifying hybrid of athletic instruction film and Christian sermon.
  26. Free Birds
    Free Birds is likely to leave audiences fuzzy-headed and vaguely nauseated instead of nourished and satisfied.
  27. Vacation!
    Filmed on Hatteras Island, N.C., Vacation! meanders like an endless summer's day; even its tragic conclusion feels incongruously fragile.
  28. Movie 43
    The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.
  29. Gone
    Seriously depleting the skanky-villain bin at central casting, the moronic thriller Gone stars Amanda Seyfried as Jill.
  30. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    The film’s director, Jon M. Chu, executes a pretty good high-altitude fight scene. Still, there should be a “Fans Only” sign at the door of every theater.
  31. Safe Haven
    The weakest parts of Safe Haven are its action sequences, in which the illusion of reality is shattered by ham-handed editing, garish special effects and comic-book dialogue.
  32. Oblivion
    Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.
  33. A Love Affair of Sorts
    The real problem here, though, is that noting the it's-all-about-me nature of modern life already feels like a point that no longer needs making. Yeah, we're self-absorbed and shallow; so what else is new?
  34. Scary Movie 5
    Marlon Wayans’s satire “A Haunted House” got to “Paranormal” first, and for a much smaller budget delivered bigger laughs.
  35. Septien
    A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.
  36. The Host
    Dopey, derivative and dull, The Host is a brazen combination of unoriginal science-fiction themes, young-adult pandering and bottom-line calculation. That sounds like it should work (really!), but it never does, largely because the story is as drained of energy as are its moony aliens.
  37. Thor: The Dark World
    The battle scenes are as lacking in heat and coherence as the central love story.
  38. Seventh Son
    If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.
  39. The Son of No One
    The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.
  40. Golf in the Kingdom
    Everyone spouts nicely turned baloney elevating golf to the level of a religious experience, which grows tedious fairly quickly. The film almost works, though, if you view the whole thing as a very, very dry comedy.
  41. Father of Invention
    The screenplay, by Mr. Cooper and Jonathan D. Krane, is so sketchy that it feels like a hastily executed first draft.
  42. Bunraku
    Everything feels secondhand in Guy Moshe's Bunraku, a potpourri of genres that ends up a morass of clichés.
  43. The Lucky One
    If realism is what you're after, you'll do better at "The Three Stooges." The Lucky One is where you will find death, redemption and kisses in the rain.
  44. Creature
    The six actors in the central, edible roles seem as if they could have pulled off a "Scream"-like satire, but since they weren't asked to, there's nothing much for them to do but follow the clearly visible paths to their doom.
  45. Grave Encounters
    As the uniformly annoying characters stumble around, screaming and cursing, we don't give a hoot for their survival. Quite the reverse: we're counting the minutes until the asylum's ghostly inhabitants silence them for good.
  46. Brother's Justice
    The career of the actor Dax Shepard hasn't skyrocketed, but neither has it sputtered...Brother's Justice, his flailing, ultralow-budget directorial debut, will not accelerate his professional trajectory.
  47. After Earth
    For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.
  48. The Raid: Redemption
    The mousetrap setup and tight fight spaces, the bad blood and cruel deaths - soon makes the movie grindingly monotonous, a blur of thudding body blows.
  49. The Divide
    We wait, from one cringe-inducing, hide-your-face-from-the-screen act after another, to see how much worse the behavior will become.
  50. 13
    What does it add up to? Nothing much. A tense, paranoid nightmare with a chilly metaphysical overview has been trampled into a blustering, bad cartoon.
  51. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    As she learns the value of public schools and pickup trucks, her erstwhile friends in Philadelphia seem happy to be rid of her. By movie's end, you'll feel exactly the same.
  52. The Greater Good
    This emotionally manipulative, heavily partial look at the purported link between autism and childhood immunization would much rather wallow in the distress of specific families than engage with the needs of the population at large.
  53. Silver Tongues
    Filled with joyless people in drab rooms (Josh Silfen's grubby cinematography doesn't make things any cheerier), Silver Tongues takes a novel idea and uses it to jerk us around. Swirling with unease, its scenes set us up for a payoff that never materializes and strand its actors in a bitter present.
  54. Beneath the Darkness
    Someone involved with Beneath the Darkness has either watched too many horror movies or not enough. There is not an original thought in this story, written by Bruce Wilkinson, or in the way it is directed by Martin Guigui.
  55. The Viral Factor
    The Viral Factor wants to be both an action movie and a soap opera. But the merging of the two genres by Dante Lam, a director based in Hong Kong, is clumsy, and so is the film.
  56. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    Limp pacing and countless shots of Washington’s skyline plague the narrative. Ms. Smollett-Bell exudes an earthy appeal, but it’s the charismatic Mr. Jones who steals the picture. Given all the stifling preachiness, that’s to be expected.
  57. Won't Back Down
    However you take its politics, the film upholds a dreary tradition of simplifying and sentimentalizing matters of serious social concern, and dumbing down issues that call for clarity and creative thinking. Our children deserve better.
  58. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    A disposable trifle of fleeting rewards that - like many a feature built around a "Saturday Night Live" sketch - shows its seams after three minutes.
  59. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely.
  60. Dark Tide
    Long before it ends Dark Tide capsizes and sinks with a sickening glug.
  61. October Baby
    Not even a dewy heroine and a youth-friendly vibe can disguise the essential ugliness at its core: like the bloodied placards brandished by demonstrators outside women's health clinics, the film communicates in the language of guilt and fear.
  62. Deadline
    Without Mr. Roberts and his grinning insouciance, this well-meaning mess would have no heartbeat at all.
  63. Last Will and Embezzlement
    The film has a bare-bones look that only intensifies its nearly painful sincerity.
  64. Billy Bates
    Ms. DeLia serves it up in fragmentary fashion, with lots and lots of writhing, brooding, meaningfully vacant stares and so on. Several scenes are in danger of being unintentionally comic.
  65. A Green Story
    This stately film lays out the good, the bad, the sad and the proud in stark patterns, to mostly soporific effect.
  66. American Animal
    It's showtime!" says Jimmy, the one-man band of American Animal. And for Matt D'Elia, who plays him in this hour and a half of pretentious mind games, it certainly is. There are other players, but it's all about Jimmy, portrayed with a free-associative, Jim Carrey-like mania.
  67. Virginia
    Virginia is a wildly unpredictable piece of work. Playing the kind of role that is often associated with Laura Dern, Ms. Connelly gives a brave, full-tilt performance that is true to the character but can't hold the movie together.
  68. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    The film is nothing if not liberal with its bloodletting, which integrates cleverly at times with the 3-D: lopped fingers, for example, fly toward the audience. But personalities and plot are thumbnail sketches at best.
  69. Hick
    Ms. Portes's script strains credulity, and it's not helped by Mr. Martini, who can't find the right tone.
  70. 30 Beats
    Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.
  71. Mansome
    Mr. Spurlock's film already feels a few years late to the discussion of an easily mockable subject, but it is a dud as a diversion.
  72. Cellmates
    The credibility is low, the idealism high and the sentiment through the roof in Jesse Baget's slender, micro-budgeted comedy Cellmates, a schematic parable about racism and (less overtly) illegal immigration.
  73. It's a Disaster
    The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.
  74. The Inbetweeners Movie
    The movie is apparently the most popular British comedy in history. I guarantee that its success has nothing to do with the quality of the actual movie.
  75. Starbuck
    Starbuck is up to its eyeballs in mush.
  76. Little Birds
    I don't think Mr. James intended to make a creepy, exploitative movie about teenage runaways - or, for that matter, a moralistic, cautionary tale of girls gone bad. But those are the default categories that Little Birds stumbles toward, perhaps because the filmmaker has not found a cogent way to channel his curiosity or his empathy.
  77. General Education
    Among the problems with the humorless comedy General Education is that the lead character's sister is more interesting than he is, and she spends much of her screen time as a mute mime.
  78. Runner Runner
    It feels like a halfhearted bluff and has the stale smell of yesterday’s after-shave.
  79. The Internship
    Written by Mr. Vaughn and Jared Stern, The Internship spreads the corporate gospel with sporadic jokes, the usual buddy-film shenanigans (a visit to a strip club, a teasingly shared bed) and a lot of motivational cant.
  80. Supercapitalist
    Dry as new bank notes and doggedly uncinematic, Simon Yin's $upercapitalist approaches the seamy side of international finance with a story as stale as the subprime meltdown.
  81. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    Hallie's dad said it was Rocky Horror for toddlers whatever that is. Me and Hallie are 7 and we thought it was for babies.
  82. About Time
    A flimsy bit of mildly romantic, putatively comic Anglophile bait.
  83. Knight Knight
    This comedy, the first feature by Ms. Bucher, suffers from technical limitations, perhaps imposed by a tough nine-day shooting schedule. The recording sounds muted; the whimsical musical score oversells the jokes; and the lackluster visuals fail to match the pungency of the language.
  84. Lay the Favorite
    The movie is a bust, and, as usual in these situations, it is easier to say how than why, and best to say as little as possible, cut one's losses and move on.
  85. My Uncle Rafael
    My Uncle Rafael stumbles over forced plotting and setups and falls prey to its hero's avuncular mushiness.
  86. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, a film based on Peter Cameron's novel, is several kinds of excruciating.
  87. My Worst Nightmare
    Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.
  88. The Black Tulip
    Newlyweds are slaughtered, a child kidnapped and a suicide bombing foiled, all of it advanced by chunks of clumsy dialogue and embarrassingly labored acting.
  89. Delivery Man
    As artificial as the inseminations it celebrates, Delivery Man is a soggy comedy more focused on stimulating your tear ducts than your funny bone.
  90. Delhi Safari
    The worst thing about the animated film Delhi Safari isn't that it's awful. It's that it shamelessly rips off much better animated movies.
  91. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.
  92. Wrong
    Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.
  93. Machete Kills
    All too soon, Machete Kills collapses into a deranged, directionless splatter comedy that exhausts its bag of tricks, many of them recycled from this grindhouse auteur’s 2010 spoof.
  94. Jurassic World
    There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.
  95. Knife Fight
    The tone of Knife Fight is mean until the movie flips a switch and turns pious and mawkish as Paul tries to make amends for past sins. Whether playing it sleazy or noble, Mr. Lowe brings little emotional weight to his role.
  96. Jobs
    The Great Man theory of history that’s recycled in this movie is inevitably unsatisfying, but never more so when the figure at the center remains as opaque as Jobs does here.
  97. Grudge Match
    [An] overlong, drab, not-so-funny sports comedy.
  98. Baggage Claim
    Predictability and clichés get in the way of comedy here, especially with a lead character who rarely comes across as more than blandly sweet.
  99. Inescapable
    Plagued by clunky action sequences and a porous plot the cast visibly wilts.
  100. Kafka
    Kafka is opaque without ever being mysterious, frightening or suggestive of anything but movie making. Its chases through dark narrow streets don't create suspense, since nothing is at stake.
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