The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Rubberneck
    It’s dragged down by non-scene after non-scene, and filmmaking choices that don’t earn their keep.
  2. The Condemned
    The Condemned is uncanny only in its resemblance to a television soap, with acting as flat as the lighting and scenes that end with the kind of cliffhanger moments that otherwise announce commercial breaks.
  3. Kiss of the Damned
    More focused on philosophy then feeding, “Kiss” marries a mash-up of undead clichés (I know, let’s have another lingering shot of the moon!) to hilariously stilted conversations.
  4. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.
  5. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.
  6. Mental
    Mental wildly overplays the kookiness and quirk.
  7. Kon-Tiki
    There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.
  8. Family Weekend
    This belabored comedy, directed by Benjamin Epps, has a slick visual veneer and some capable performances, especially by Ms. Rulin and Ms. King. But the script, by Matt K. Turner, is loaded with contradictions, its hollow flirtation with subversion amount to airplane pablum.
  9. Annie
    The cast would have been better served by a middle school production overseen by a creatively frustrated, inappropriately ambitious drama teacher than by this hacky, borderline-incompetent production, which was directed by Will Gluck from a screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna.
  10. My Amityville Horror
    These days, when paranormal-themed shows are all over television, Mr. Lutz sounds like just another guy peddling an unverifiable spooky story.
  11. Erased
    Viewed solely as a string of action sequences, Erased delivers the kind of dryly efficient, wearyingly familiar entertainment that already clogs too many of our movie screens.
  12. Crimewave
    It's full of film knowledge and is amazingly elaborate for a low-budget movie. The only problem is that it's not funny. One smiles at the inspiration of the jokes, though not at their execution.
  13. V/H/S/2
    The horror anthology has a long tradition, going at least as far back as the British classic “Dead of Night,” in 1945. The best offer surprise endings or a sense of humor. You won’t receive much of either here. Just vertigo and maybe a wicked case of induced attention deficit disorder.
  14. K-11
    To borrow RuPaul’s delightful catchphrase, the only possible response to a project like this is to advise it to “sashay away.”
  15. Crazy and Thief
    It’s a far cry from the wonders of Morris Engel’s “Little Fugitive” and might have been better off in a kid’s-size portion as a short.
  16. The Kill Hole
    The film grasps for credibility with scenes of a support group (featuring some real veterans) and cryptic voice-overs that strive for profundity but achieve only pretentiousness.
  17. Paris-Manhattan
    Were it not for the charming Patrick Bruel as a no-nonsense security expert and Alice’s unlikely suitor, this spun-sugar concoction would be well nigh unwatchable.
  18. Love Sick Love
    Love Sick Love deteriorates into a series of pranks that are not funny enough to register as comedy or brutal enough to qualify as horror.
  19. Himmatwala
    Himmatwala feels timid and overeager. Except when it’s terrible.
  20. Leonie
    Leonie Gilmour was almost certainly unusual and unusually self-reliant. Too bad that the film that bears her name ultimately reduces her to the mother of her child.
  21. Le Pont du Nord
    It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]
  22. Salinger
    Salinger, directed by Mr. Salerno, is less a work of cinema than the byproduct of its own publicity campaign.
  23. Turtle Hill, Brooklyn
    Turtle Hill is inconclusive from start to finish, and while that appears purposeful, it’s also pretty dull.
  24. The Second Meeting
    Their meeting was arranged by the filmmaker, and their encounters reek of false bonhomie.
  25. Bert Stern: Original Madman
    An unappealing jumble of sex, regret and hero worship, “Bert Stern” is an odd tribute to brilliance muffled by lust.
  26. Java Heat
    The film, directed by Conor Allyn, is rarely more than a few minutes away from a gun battle or a tedious chase, and soon you cease to care who is shooting at, or running from, whom or why.
  27. No One Lives
    Mr. Kitamura, an action enthusiast who prefers to show rather than tell, seems unaware that the film’s dialogue is laughable, its characters unfathomable and the acting often less than optimal.
  28. Austenland
    Advancing without a single original idea or surprising moment, Austenland seems torn between poking fun at the British and lampooning Austen’s many American fanatics — a riskier enterprise, considering that they’ll be needed to fill theater seats.
  29. Unmade in China
    Slack storytelling (including snippets from a post-film Q. and A. session) and patchy filmmaking seal the unappealing deal.
  30. Vehicle 19
    This one is well photographed, yet it’s still just a lot of cars and noise.
  31. The Great Gatsby
    Nothing that Mr. Clayton does with the actors or with the camera comes close to catching the spirit of Fitzgerald's impatient brilliance. The film transforms "Gatsby" into a period love story that seems to take itself as solemnly as "Romeo and Juliet."
  32. Revenge of the Nerds
    It is the absence of genuine comedy that exposes glaringly the film's fundamental attitude of condescension and scorn toward blacks and women, and a tendency toward stereotyping that clashes violently with its superficial message of tolerance, compassion and fair play.
  33. 1st Night
    If 1st Night had a glint of social satire, it might have amounted to something more than a frivolous fatuity. But it plays as an arch, hammily acted farce.
  34. Think Like a Man Too
    Things turn loud and desperate and stay that way.
  35. How Sweet It Is
    Brian Herzlinger’s How Sweet It Is, an ode to the healing powers of musical theater, misfires so badly at the beginning that it takes a while to notice when it goes from godawful to sweetly awful.
  36. Pilgrim Song
    Ostensibly about a walk in the woods, this slight, uncertain film spends most of its time off trail.
  37. I Give It a Year
    This painfully awkward product fails on almost every level.
  38. Blood
    Dark, airless and packed with psychological hurt that seems to spring from nowhere, this angry morality play, tucked inside a police procedural, suffers from a crippling lack of back story and characters whose relationships are fraught with unexplained complexity.
  39. The Angry Birds Movie
    The kids of today deserve better. So do I, come to think of it.
  40. Devil's Due
    Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett direct with competence but a dispiriting lack of originality.
  41. Assassin's Creed
    For an ostensible action movie, the cast spends an awful lot of time standing around and looking lost. I can only guess that they were following their director’s lead.
  42. Labor Day
    The movie’s principal saving grace is Ms. Winslet’s convincing portrayal of Adele, a despairing woman of low self-esteem just a twitch away from a nervous breakdown. In almost every other respect, this overbaked romantic hokum is preposterous.
  43. Sirius
    Mr. Kaleka’s film feels a bit like wandering into a hotel convention hall full of true believers who have been chatting for hours.
  44. Hello Herman
    Pointing at everything and elucidating nothing, Hello Herman arrives freighted with the anti-bullying agenda of its director, Michelle Danner.
  45. The Theory of Flight
    The novelty of hearing Ms. Bonham Carter spew four-letter words fades quickly. So does the sight of Mr. Branagh elaborately rehearsing how to rob a bank. This versatile actor has many strengths, but as his wooden turn in ''Celebrity'' has already demonstrated, comedy isn't one of them.
  46. Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter)
    This time Mr. Altman, such a stunningly intuitive portraitist when he truly plumbs the mysteries that guide his characters, works without inventiveness and with glaring nonchalance.
  47. The Rambler
    The Rambler...feels like a slender plot with additional scenes pasted on.
  48. As Cool as I Am
    Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.
  49. Dallas Buyers Club
    There is warmth and intelligence here, and undeniable sincerity, but also a determination, in the face of much painful and fascinating history, to play it safe.
  50. The Frozen Ground
    The movie’s only fresh element is the wintry setting, which shrouds everything in a mood of weary fatalism. Otherwise, it’s the same old, same old, efficiently discharged and utterly disposable.
  51. Hatchet III
    Too busy with limb-severings and gunfire to bother being intelligent.
  52. Killing Season
    It’s not worthless, but it’s not good. As a genre film, it’s too ambitious; as an art film, it’s too obvious.
  53. Rushlights
    When it comes to film plotting, too many twists just result in an annoying tangle. And there are too many twists in Antoni Stutz’s uninvolving Rushlights.
  54. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Fifty Shades of Grey might not be a good movie — O.K., it’s a terrible movie — but it might nonetheless be a movie that feels good to see, whether you squirm or giggle or roll your eyes or just sit still and take your punishment.
  55. Terminator Genisys
    It’s amusing to see identical Arnolds clash like titans, but nobody here seems to have fully grasped that they had another heavyweight in Mr. Clarke.
  56. Adore
    One of the things that makes Adore, which was written by Christopher Hampton, hard to take seriously is how seriously it takes itself, how utterly purged of humor or credible human complication the drama at its center turns out to be.
  57. Hell Baby
    The film, written and directed by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, rarely dares to be smart, settling instead for familiar gags that would have the Devil himself yawning.
  58. Of By For
    If the lineup is bipartisan, the analysis oscillates between apt and obvious, culminating inevitably in amen calls for popular action.
  59. Pawn Shop Chronicles
    "Hee Haw” meets “Pulp Fiction” at the meth lab: That describes the style of Pawn Shop Chronicles, a hillbilly grindhouse yawp of a movie that belches in your face and leaves a sour stink.
  60. The Artist and the Model
    It is a film with nothing but delight — no major revelations, no gravity and no meaning. This superficiality is a problem only because of the pretense of being about great art.
  61. The Judge
    Various secrets come dribbling out... They add up to a sprawl of narrative that is as unconvincing as the suspiciously sprawl-free, nostalgia-tinged town where it all takes place.
  62. Paradise
    Like much of Ms. Cody’s work, Paradise plays out in quippy sound bites, only this time they feel entirely unsuited to Lamb’s sheltered background.
  63. A Teacher
    Long on atmosphere and short on believability.
  64. The Ultimate Life
    The Ultimate Life is hampered by a predictable story, stereotypical characters and wooden acting.
  65. Winnie Mandela
    The movie plays like a made-for-television quickie.
  66. A.C.O.D.
    A.C.O.D., an unfunny comedy about a guy mooning over his parents’ divorce decades later, is so eager to please it’s hard to hate. But it’s sluggish even at 87 minutes, clichéd and gives you nothing of interest to look at other than some familiar faces.
  67. Zaytoun
    In grabbing for the heart this one-size-fits-all fable sadly ignores the mind.
  68. The Muslims Are Coming!
    This well-intentioned “docu-comedy” (as the filmmakers label it in publicity notes) is not very funny.
  69. To Be or Not to Be
    In a spirit of levity, contused by frequent doses of shock, Mr. Lubitsch has set his actors to performing a spy-thriller of fantastic design amid the ruins and frightful oppressions of Nazi-in-vaded Warsaw. To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case.
  70. Ass Backwards
    The film, a comedy without much comedy in it... clumsily tries to merge road trip humor and beauty pageant parody.
  71. McCanick
    The dour McCanick banks way too much on what it is not telling us, making for a movie that thinks it’s being cryptically suspenseful but is really just annoying.
  72. Grace Unplugged
    Feels like a religious tract more than a movie.
  73. Stonehearst Asylum
    This shockingly flabby effort from Mr. Anderson — who, in features like “The Machinist” (2004) and “Session 9” (2001), showed a much surer hand with oppressive atmospheres and troubled psyches — feels as nutty as its characters.
  74. Addicted
    The actors are uniformly handsome and mostly serviceable, though the same can’t be said about the filmmaking or the writing.
  75. Maggie
    Zombies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a certain Terrence Malick je ne sais quoi — what could go wrong? More or less everything in this low-budget head-scratcher and periodic knee-slapper.
  76. Big Ass Spider!
    The director, Mike Mendez, shows no signs of knowing how to make campy horror work the way that the creators of similar movies on Syfy do. It has to be either subtle or over the top. This is neither.
  77. Capital
    Its indictment of capitalism is so shrill and one-note that it may just as easily set off fits of giggling, because its characters are so ridiculously evil.
  78. I'm in Love with a Church Girl
    This is a message film with the narrative sophistication of a recruiting pamphlet.
  79. Last Love
    This dull, dawdling film, adapted from Françoise Dorner’s novel “La Douceur Assassine,” eventually succumbs to sentimentality.
  80. Son of God
    Son of God may have hit the mark if part of the goal was to create a portrait flat enough to allow audience members to project their own feelings onto the screen.
  81. Immigrant
    In the end, the filmmaker’s message is nearly lost in this poorly constructed film.
  82. Angels Sing
    It’s as thinly written and unoriginal as made-for-television seasonal filler, and why it isn’t on the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime is a mystery, but fans of the singers in it might get a kick out of seeing them.
  83. Nurse 3D
    Nurse 3D isn’t nearly as fun as a movie about a homicidal, sex-obsessed, clothing-averse health care provider ought to be.
  84. Speciesism: The Movie
    A painfully gauche, galumphing attack on factory farming, meat eating, animal experimentation and human supremacy.
  85. The Truth About Emanuel
    The film never finds its dramatic footing. Nor, sadly, its common sense.
  86. Caught in the Web
    A messy collision of strained portrayals, semi-comic incidents and tear-jerking tactics.
  87. Sex, Love & Salsa
    For a romantic comedy that doubles as a mockumentary, it can be downright creepy.
  88. Fantastic Four
    This Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank from a script he wrote with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, feels less like a tale of superhero beginnings than like a very long precredit opening sequence.
  89. Sabotage
    Sabotage isn’t any good, even if its jagged, jolting visual excesses and frenzied energy keep you awake, gasping and guffawing by turns.
  90. Summer in February
    Picturesque seascapes are about the only thing to recommend in Summer in February.
  91. Regression
    The movie is ultimately a tepid and frustrating experience.
  92. Gimme Shelter
    The film is more of a pageant than a convincing drama. It’s so determined to deliver its moral that it loses its grip on the reality of its characters.
  93. This Is Where I Leave You
    There is almost nothing here that you haven’t seen a dozen times before, and even the surprises feel flat and familiar. More dispiriting still is that this drab complacency is wrapped around messages of daring, honesty and spontaneity.
  94. Merry Christmas
    One of those who’s-the-murderer parlor games is a plot pillar of Merry Christmas, an experiment in filmmaking by Anna Condo that itself feels like a parlor game, and not a particularly entertaining one.
  95. The Wedding Ringer
    Mr. Hart tells wild tales, Mr. Gad is humiliated, and most everyone else gets to dish out or receive abuse. But the laughs are not a sure thing.
  96. Bullett Raja
    If Bullett Raja had more spark, it might be fun to contemplate its barely hidden crisis-of-masculinity subtexts.
  97. Night Train to Lisbon
    After barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires.
  98. San Andreas
    The most disturbing thing about this may be how dull and routine it seems. Computer-generated imagery can produce remarkably detailed vistas of disaster — bridges and buildings collapsing; giant ships flung onto urban streets; beloved landmarks pulverized — but the technology also has a way of stripping such spectacles of impact and interest.
  99. Reasonable Doubt
    In lieu of tension, the film is stuffed with crazed musical crescendos, amateurish structural feints and pregnant pauses that cry out for the familiar “chu-CHUNG” of a “Law & Order” scene change.
  100. Pan
    The dominant emotion in Pan is the desperation of the filmmakers, who frantically try to pander to a young audience they don’t seem to respect, understand or trust.
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