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. The Lazarus Effect
    Despite eclectic casting and occasional experiments with objective camera, the director, David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), can’t breathe similar life into this risible mix of pseudoscientific hokum and supernatural freakouts.
  2. The Wait
    It’s all just so much empty eye candy.
  3. The Captive
    The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.
  4. The Giver
    In the end, it taketh — your time, patience and faith in newly imagined dystopias — more than it giveth.
  5. Magic in the Moonlight
    Magic in the Moonlight is less a movie than the dutiful recitation of themes and plot points conducted by a squad of costumed actors. The tidy narrative may advance with clockwork precision, but the clock’s most prominent feature is the snooze button.
  6. G.B.F.
    Unlike such forerunners as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls,” however, this movie, doesn’t have a believable moment in it.
  7. Chander Pahar (Mountains Of The Moon)
    One reason Chander Pahar seems so plodding is that Mr. Mukherjee has a habit of telling us what he doesn’t know how to show.
  8. The Cobbler
    The sophomoric humor may be absent, but in its place is only a soufflé of whimsy, seasoned with soot, that fails to rise.
  9. Serena
    The actors don’t just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.
  10. She's Funny That Way
    There’s barely a whiz-bang punch line or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce.
  11. Indigo Children
    Indigo is vaguely defined here as having a certain sensitivity and even power, but the movie doesn’t quite share those qualities, collapsing from a lack of direction in more than one sense.
  12. God's Pocket
    As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.
  13. Wish I Was Here
    Wish I Was Here is so eager to please that you are never allowed to feel uncomfortable for more than a minute or two before a reassuringly stale joke rushes in to pat you on the head.
  14. Equals
    It is so vague, cliché-ridden and devoid of surprise and suspense that once you grasp its premise, watching it is like leafing through a design magazine kept in a refrigerator.
  15. The Voices
    Grisly but not especially suspenseful, tongue-in-cheek without any real wit, The Voices aims to hit the intersection of horror and comedy but tumbles into an uncanny valley of tedious creepiness.
  16. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    It is about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head.
  17. Brightest Star
    Allegories involving astronomy, baseball and sandwiches are hinted at but are no better developed than the characters.
  18. After the Dark
    Slack acting (perhaps aggravated by the harsh lighting design) and the script’s inability to build characters together vaporize the chances for the movie, which is both smugly clever and at times distastefully clueless.
  19. The Outsider
    After a somewhat tense opening chase involving a lot of girders, much of the film is rather shakily assembled.
  20. The Bag Man
    At least Mr. De Niro, who disappears from the movie until the end, seems to be enjoying himself. The force of his bonhomie gives this murky-looking, empty conceit of a film a desperately needed lift of facetious humor.
  21. Special ID
    Maddeningly muddled and frustratingly counterintuitive... the story shuttles between Hong Kong and mainland China without a noticeable gain in logic or reduction in decibels.
  22. Le Chef
    For a film about mouthwatering cuisine, it offers only fleeting delectable sensations.
  23. Shirin in Love
    It’s the kind of movie that makes you zero in on and root for an actor (Ms. Madigan) as she tries to wring something real out of her lines, but there’s no saving this film.
  24. Goodbye World
    As these overwritten characters cope and make fresh romantic missteps, the movie cruises obliviously along, littered with glib dialogue and howler developments.
  25. Authors Anonymous
    Mr. Farina gives Authors Anonymous a sharpness it otherwise lacks.
  26. As Above, So Below
    This quivering effort from the director John Erick Dowdle only increases in impenetrability whenever anything mildly curious occurs.
  27. Lucky Bastard
    Robert Nathan’s Lucky Bastard is a sorry-looking found-footage thriller as unconvincing as its characters’ thrashing orgasms.
  28. The Brothers Grimsby
    Mr. Cohen just seems off his game in “Grimsby,” and it may be that the movie’s high concept proved too constricting for someone who has done some of his best work (as in the “Borat” film) with a looser, more episodic format.
  29. One Candle, Two Candles...
    Mr. Rosebiani evidently wants to avoid depressing his audience while addressing a serious subject, but his aims are likely to be lost in this film’s strained mugging.
  30. Chlorine
    Jay Alaimo’s sour tale of suburban greed and marital disappointment, can’t even deliver a temporary high; mired in the blahs, the blues and the midlife crazies, this poor man’s “American Beauty” slowly sucks your will to live.
  31. How to Be Single
    This reheated “Sex and the City” adventure flops, even with Leslie Mann and Rebel Wilson hard at work being funny.
  32. Awful Nice
    In general, the film feels like all setup and no punch line.
  33. Tasting Menu
    Roger Gual’s half-baked film hopes to split the difference between romantic comedy and foodie delight but fails at both.
  34. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    Enervatingly synthetic, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears slices and dices the images and tropes of Italian giallo-style slasher films into an inert pile of style.
  35. Total Siyapaa (Total Chaos)
    The cramped first half, mostly in the Singh apartment, is crudely unfunny.
  36. Refuge
    Jessica Goldberg, who wrote and directed the film, prefers showcasing the somewhat treacly soundtrack to fleshing out back stories.
  37. The Slumber Party Massacre
    The fact that Miss Brown and Miss Jones have obviously tried to inject a little satire and innovation into the genre just makes the ultimate vulgarity of their film all the more disappointing.
  38. Burning Blue
    The script, by Mr. Greer and Helene Kvale, rolls along with lifeless, profoundly unimaginative dialogue.
  39. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    The movie is predictably sentimental at its root, but it’s also meant to be comedy, partly resting on Mr. Williams’s energetic but failed attempt to play a jerk.
  40. The Hero of Color City
    The Hero of Color City cannily distills the children’s movie to its lowest common denominator: bright colors flashing on screen.
  41. Emoticon
    With its underwritten characters (especially Walter) and scenes, it seems like a generic ABC Family plotline melded to a commercial for Facebook, Twitter and Skype.
  42. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    The Hundred-Foot Journey is likely neither to pique your appetite nor to sate it, leaving you in a dyspeptic limbo, stuffed with false sentiment and forced whimsy and starved for real delight.
  43. Let's Be Cops
    [A] disposable comedy.
  44. Third Person
    The storytelling is infuriatingly coy, as if Mr. Haggis were trying to fool you (and himself) into thinking that he has something to say. Third Person finds Mr. Haggis, like Mr. Neeson’s screen alter ego, running on empty.
  45. Jessabelle
    Jessabelle is depressingly rote.
  46. Altered States of Plaine
    Muddy sound contributes to the atmosphere of confusion, while the script (credited to the director, Nick Gaglia, along with Mr. Gallagher and Ms. Donohue) goes nowhere.
  47. Farmland
    Smooth and folksy, it traffics in broad, unchallenged claims that serve a single purpose: to persuade us that the only thing wrong with today’s farming methods is our misinformed perception of them.
  48. Don Peyote
    A bit too true to a frugal indie philosophy, where winging it beats reshooting, the film gets more woolly and unfocused; many scenes feel improvised and only occasionally hit their marks.
  49. Rage
    The hand-me-down showiness and sluggish storytelling by the director, Paco Cabezas, underline the monotony in this ordinary revenge thriller.
  50. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    James Cameron upstages the ocean in Deepsea Challenge 3D, a shallow vanity project that invites us to join him in marveling at his own daring.
  51. American Jesus
    It’s not clear what Aram Garriga thinks he is accomplishing in his simplistic “American Jesus,” but he’s not accomplishing much.
  52. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    Less methodical and witty than its predecessors, Patient Zero often turns its infected characters into mindless, lurching zombies.
  53. I Am I
    The film, financed by a Kickstarter campaign, looks polished enough. But its investors’ money might have been better spent elsewhere.
  54. The Beastmaster
    It's meant as a tiny bit of praise to say that the movie, which was made in southern California, looks as if it had been shot in Spain or Yugoslavia. It looks both big and cheap.
  55. Highlander
    Since none of the characters makes sense even on the movie's own terms, Highlander keeps on exploding for almost two hours, with nothing at stake.
  56. Spare Parts
    The movie’s setup has underdog appeal in spades. But it’s all for naught in a screenplay, by Elissa Matsueda (working from Joshua Davis’s 2005 article in Wired magazine), that plays down intellect in favor of corn and cliché.
  57. Under the Electric Sky
    This glossy movie from Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz about the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas feels the burden of promotional urges and lacks a sense of immersion in a multistage event attended by hundreds of thousands.
  58. Radio Free Albemuth
    This lifeless adaptation only proves that making entertaining movies out of hard-to-swallow ideas is as challenging as you might think.
  59. Louder Than Words
    There’s a way to tell this story that wouldn’t come across as soggy or manipulative. However well intentioned, Louder Than Words doesn’t find that tone.
  60. Sinister 2
    Despite Mr. Ransone’s goofy charm, Sinister 2 can’t claim the same finesse, substituting pedestrian plotting and a more graphic gore for the original’s restraint.
  61. Uncharted
    At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie Uncharted, an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series.
  62. War Story
    Aiming for a moody portrait of psychological distress, Mark Jackson directs with a sluggish pace, an abstract style and a dismal aesthetic that rebuff involvement.
  63. Kick
    A star can lift a movie like Kick, making its silliness sublime. That doesn’t happen here.
  64. Cam2Cam
    For a would-be skin-and-horror treat, though, Cam2Cam is surprisingly prudish. It doesn’t really traffic in sex; the camera mostly averts its gaze from the murders, preferring blood spatter patterns; and the acting is predictably wooden.
  65. 37: A Final Promise
    It’s an awkward mix of sentiment, underdeveloped relationships and rock ’n’ roll pretensions, and it never quite gels into the “Love Story” for the 21st century that it wants to be.
  66. Rudderless
    Rudderless, the misbegotten directorial debut of William H. Macy, is so dishonest, manipulative and ultimately infuriating that it never recovers after its bombshell revelation two-thirds of the way into the movie.
  67. Swim Little Fish Swim
    Mumbly dialogue, relentlessly jittery camerawork, a star who is also co-director and co-writer: Yes, it’s time for another movie that mistakes the claustrophobic world of young New York artsy types for something interesting.
  68. Outcast
    The barnacle-encrusted plot...is dumbed down to the studs.
  69. Open Windows
    Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.
  70. Innocence
    Hilary Brougher’s Innocence (based on Jane Mendelsohn’s 2000 novel) moves to the formulaic beats of the second-rate TV movie, albeit one cloaked in an ultra-glossy sheen.
  71. Sex Ed
    Unevenly directed by Isaac Feder, Sex Ed droops.
  72. The Water Diviner
    You don’t have to be a historian to wonder about the timing of the opening or a critic to regret that Mr. Crowe has signed onto a preposterous, would-be sweeping historical romance that’s far too slight and silly to carry the weight of real history.
  73. Meet the Mormons
    The narration promises surprises (“This story may challenge what you think you know about the roles men and women play in Mormon homes”), but the movie might have started by examining its straw-man conception of the audience.
  74. #Stuck
    Holly is supposed to be out of Guy’s league, but neither of them is up to carrying scene after scene of weak sparring and punny flirting.
  75. Independence Day: Resurgence
    The lackluster, at times abysmal writing wouldn’t much matter if Resurgence popped visually or featured a charismatic star who could lift a movie as effortlessly as Will Smith did in the first feature.
  76. Tiger Lily Road
    Tiger Lily Road aims for the bleak humor of a Coen brothers film, but a jaunty sitcom score spoils the tone. There’s barely an action that doesn’t strain credulity.
  77. Trash
    Trash is a shameless bid to recycle the mystique of “Slumdog Millionaire,” its likable, overrated prototype.
  78. Private Peaceful
    With its fusty air and glumly earnest performances, this unnecessary reminder of Steven Spielberg’s soppy 2011 staging of another of Mr. Morpurgo’s novels, “War Horse,” is about as entertaining as trench mouth.
  79. Starry Eyes
    A pretty young actress. A casting call. A private meeting with the lecherous man who has the power to give her the role. Starry Eyes tries to wring a horror movie out of this tired old setup but, halfway in, seems to realize it has nothing new to offer and becomes a mere gorefest.
  80. Hangar 10
    Saving most of its special-effects pennies until the final five minutes, Hangar 10 struggles to build a science-fiction movie from little more than a ghost of an idea and an infamous location.
  81. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
    This is crudely mounted, earnest advocacy, getting its points across at any cost.
  82. Fugly!
    Mr. Leguizamo, 50, still has charisma, but with his maniacal stage persona barely seen and the themes recycled from earlier projects, Fugly! is a dud.
  83. Always Woodstock
    This is a movie that runs on magical thinking.
  84. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas
    Saving Christmas seems determined to win any perceived war on Christmas through brute force.
  85. Occupy the Farm
    Rather than present an evenhanded assessment of the issues at stake, the director, Todd Darling, is so busy fist-pumping for urban farming — and so dazzled by his granola heroes — that naysayers must be demeaned and denigrated.
  86. All Relative
    All Relative, a tepid romantic comedy written and directed by J. C. Khoury, thinks it’s being surprising, but really it’s merely weaving several male sex fantasies together and making nothing insightful out of the resulting story.
  87. Monk With a Camera
    This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.
  88. Free the Nipple
    The logistics of raising money and securing permits for the cause are not the most compelling or irreverent subject. The movie’s goal is straightforward advocacy.
  89. Skating to New York
    No role is sketched out beyond brush strokes, and no relationship is meaningfully examined.
  90. After The Fall
    After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.
  91. Wild Card
    Slow-motion knockouts follow, with Mr. Statham as sure-fisted as ever, but the “Expendables” director Simon West can only summon dead air in between. Mr. Goldman’s slightly offbeat underworld is not very convincing, and Mr. Statham’s thick voice and inexpressive acting suggest brain fog rather than gritty blues.
  92. A Small Section of the World
    It’s like a gently distressed company film blown up to feature length.
  93. Isn't It Delicious
    The film’s tone becomes mawkish, akin to a Lifetime movie that flaunts a little bite before it wallows in melodrama. All wit is vanquished by it, as well as by the slow pace and cheap bits.
  94. A Little Game
    Cartoonish in its depiction of class disparities, A Little Game gains some subtlety from its performers: Mr. Abraham, an old pro, does fine work alongside Ms. Ballard, a newcomer.
  95. Life of an Actress: The Musical
    Unfortunately, poor execution prevents the movie from achieving an authentic throwback feel. Although the principal cast members are Broadway veterans, here they struggle with technological and tonal issues.
  96. Hillsong - Let Hope Rise
    “He can move the mountains.” “I was blind but now I see.” Those lines are but drops in the torrent of clichés saturating Michael John Warren’s narcotizing documentary Hillsong — Let Hope Rise.
  97. The King's Daughter
    Here’s a tragic tale: Once upon a time, an action-adventure drama began production. Nearly eight years, a title change and a new distribution plan later, the movie finally sees the light of day. Nothing about it feels worth the wait.
  98. Me Before You
    This floppy British romance, directed by Thea Sharrock and adapted by Jojo Moyes from her best-selling novel, sits at the point where tedium, ridiculousness and heartfelt sentiment converge, separated by an all-but-imperceptible distance.
  99. Expelled
    The tech-gadget-heavy plotting is so preposterously weak that it’s hard to look past the cheap laughs or half-baked direction.
  100. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    A story that kicked off two years ago at a reasonable gallop has now slowed to barely a limp.
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