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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    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Immortals
    Immortals is the latest disaster of post-conversion 3-D, a projected spectacle so dark it is literally hard to see. This is an ugly, burlap sack of a film, stitched with jagged seams and overstuffed with computer-generated chintz, gold-lamé leotards and fetishistic headgear.
  2. Abduction
    A sloppy, exploitative act of star worship created (if that's the right word for cynical hackwork) around Mr. Lautner, the pouty 19-year-old heartthrob of the "Twilight" franchise.
  3. Happythankyoumoreplease
    It is no wonder that the insufferable romantic comedy Happythankyoumoreplease, set in New York, looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television sitcom.
  4. There Be Dragons
    Beyond the lugubrious pageantry, there is no sign of emotional or spiritual life in the film, only windy posturing.
  5. Beginning of the Great Revival
    It demonstrates that mainstream Chinese cinema can be as guilty of self-indulgent overstatement as anything out of the West.
  6. An Invisible Sign
    Cuter than a basket of puppies licking a litter of kittens, An Invisible Sign is an excruciatingly whimsical collision of adult themes and kid-friendly aesthetic.
  7. Hesher
    You see, this character, who is given no back story, is Life with a capital L. He is the Forneys' guardian angel who rouses them out of their funk. Given the movie's U-turn into allegory, maybe he's supposed to be a punk Jesus. Not even Mr. Gordon-Levitt's unremittingly savage performance can begin to salvage such hokum.
  8. Cost of a Soul
    As one bloody encounter treads on the heels of the next, all that remains is a tiny indie undone by its own vicious ambitions.
  9. The Devil Inside
    The scariest thing about The Devil Inside is that a major studio like Paramount Pictures, which is distributing it, may be able to squeeze more profit out of a tedious, tediously exhausted subgenre that was already creatively tapped out when "The Blair Witch Project" spooked audiences more than a decade ago.
  10. House at the End of the Street
    At a certain point this would-be shocker suddenly jerks into high gear and becomes a blatant, incompetent rip-off of "Psycho."
  11. The Cold Light of Day
    A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.
  12. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Can the major studios still make magic? From the looks of Oz the Great and Powerful, a dispiriting, infuriating jumble of big money, small ideas and ugly visuals, the answer seems to be no — unless, perhaps, the man behind the curtain is Martin Scorsese or James Cameron.
  13. Programming the Nation?
    Fusty research, aging interviewees and decades-old advertising campaigns offer background to the uninitiated, but Mr. Warrick's muddled, undisciplined approach destroys even the possibility of a cogent overview.
  14. Killer Elite
    Whatever the case, Mr. Owen and Mr. Statham (who provides a nice duet with a chair) make a prettily matched pair amid the pileup of sub-Bourne action set pieces, sad laughs and clichés.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vincent Wants to Sea
    The principal characters can be reduced to a handful of tics, and the entire story line is immaculately devoid of incidental detail. It's like sitting in a padded cell for about 90 minutes.
  16. Fading of the Cries
    "How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.
  17. R.I.P.D.
    What’s missing is what’s often absent in industrial moviemaking of this type: story and characters, yes, but also the human touch and a sense that someone behind the scenes actually cares about the work.
  18. 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    Sex in this film looks so nonecstatic that a better title might have been "3D Sex and Zen: Zero Child Policy."
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stripped Down
    The onslaught of optical effects and deafeningly expressive foley suggest a voyage through a pinball machine piloted by the director Tony Scott.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Glitch in the Grid
    Not much happens, but the most basic shifts in time and place are so badly signposted, you'd be lost without a synopsis.
  21. Silver Bullets
    Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.
  22. Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    Lost in all this is Halston, who comes through only in dribs and drabs. If you're curious about him, skip this film. Read about him - you'll learn far more on his Wikipedia page - and look at his clothes. And if you're a filmmaker, go out and make a decent movie about him: he deserves it.
  23. Alex Cross
    A grim, dispiritingly stupid waste of time, energy, money and talent.
  24. Chernobyl Diaries
    The "Paranormal Activity" movies don't teem with metaphor, and neither does this film, directed by Brad Parker. The original "Night of the Living Dead" left you with plenty to chew on, so to speak; Chernobyl Diaries just leaves you feeling empty.
  25. Grown Ups 2
    This is pap, plain and simple: scattered raunch-lite devoid of emotional resonance. At best, it sells itself on the spectacle of a TV show’s cast reunion — and even then it disappoints.
  26. The Ghastly Love of Johnny X
    Unfortunately, “Ghastly Love” is a fallen soufflé, a spoof enormously pleased with itself but only occasionally entertaining.
  27. 21 and Over
    The movie’s humor — at the expense of Asians, Latinas and even Serbs — comes off just as tone deaf and random as Seth MacFarlane’s Oscar-night shenanigans.
  28. Paranoia
    Mr. Oldman and Mr. Ford are the only actors in the film, directed by Robert Luketic (“Legally Blonde”), skillful enough to navigate the yards of jargon-packed boilerplate in Jason Hall and Barry L. Levy’s thudding screenplay.
  29. The Victim
    Told with multiple flashbacks and minimal taste, this exuberantly scuzzy thriller - shot in less than two weeks with a budget as micro as the women's skirts - pits sleazy cops against fun-loving disrobers in the middle of scraggly foliage.
  30. Nature Calls
    If the Boy Scouts offered a merit badge for inept filmmaking, Todd Rohal would certainly earn it with Nature Calls, an unwatchably bad movie about a camping trip gone haywire.
  31. The Collection
    A pointless exercise in sadism.
  32. No Good Deed
    Even without Mr. Rice in the news, No Good Deed would be damaged goods: an inert “Cape Fear” rehash that can’t seem to choose its favorite contrivance.
  33. The Comedy
    If you can discern any critical distance or interesting perspective here, or even a good reason to spend 90 minutes in such company, I'm afraid the joke is on you.
  34. Smiley
    Failing to expand on the intriguing notion that evil can find physical form online, Smiley, like its sutured monster, is sadly more to be pitied than feared.
  35. Excuse Me for Living
    A lumbering mess in which he has somehow trapped several recognizable actors.
  36. Gut
    Unfolding in awkward diner conversations and uncomfortable bedroom scenes, Gut has a cold, flat look that gives even a child's stuffed toy a sinister sheen.
  37. A Haunted House
    If the opening gag in your R-rated movie is an extended flatulence joke you should reconsider whether you're qualified to make such a movie. Not that flatulence jokes aren't funny; 8-year-olds love them. The thing is, not many 8-year-olds go to R-rated movies.
  38. Getaway
    The glimmers of wit and carnival humor in the “Fast & Furious” franchise are nowhere to be found in Getaway.
  39. Olympus Has Fallen
    It may be too much to ask for anything more, but, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of pretending to blow up the White House, you might also want to pretend that something was at stake.
  40. Certainty
    He might as well be describing the act of watching this grating round robin of connubial dysfunction and romantic disappointment.
  41. New Jerusalem
    New Jerusalem feeling like an acting exercise in search of a theater class.
  42. Saving Grace B. Jones
    Ms. O'Neal's Grace is a fluttery Blanche DuBois type who transforms into a ranting madwoman wreaking havoc. Instead of an ax, she wields scissors. From here on, the movie is a grotesquely overacted, ineptly staged screamfest.
  43. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment.
  44. Race 2
    Race 2, directed by Abbas-Mastan, has little to offer besides its loving gaze at wealth and flesh.
  45. As Luck Would Have It
    A toothless examination of marketing and morality, Álex de la Iglesia’s As Luck Would Have It combines lecture, farce and soapy sentiment in a single misshapen package.
  46. Murder 3
    Murder 3 progresses in skeletal fashion, its story laid out brief chunk by brief chunk amid bass-heavy dance beats, other music that telegraphs suspense, or, least objectionable, ponderous quiet.
  47. The Numbers Station
    This dreary spy drama is as flat and airless as the concrete bunker in which it unfolds.
  48. Love and Honor
    The film dresses up pretty young things in fatigues and retro T-shirts for a story so clichéd and brainless that it’s almost more disturbing than laughable.
  49. Northeast
    Northeast is as tedious as the life of the film’s central character.
  50. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A mess from start to finish — though, judging by the ending, this story won’t be over any time soon — Insidious: Chapter 2 is the kind of lazy, halfhearted product that gives scary movies a bad name.
  51. If I Were You
    A comedy that is so scatterbrained and long-winded that much of it feels invented on the spot. (It’s also a half-hour too long.)
  52. Only God Forgives
    The movie is so devoid of emotion that its ritualized gore acts as a narcotic. Filmed in shades of red, with a minimal screenplay, Only God Forgives looks like a ghoulish fashion shoot in hell. Three words should suffice: pretentious macho nonsense.
  53. Copperhead
    Though the tale, based on a novel by Harold Frederic, remains relevant to our time, the film is too self-conscious and tedious for the message it delivers.
  54. The Happy House
    The film, a sleepy, low-budget affair, merely enacts a series of horror movie clichés, as if that were enough. Its bland actors and wit-free script do nothing with the familiar elements but present them.
  55. Triumph of the Wall
    Neither the very relaxed pace of this builder, Chris Overing, nor Mr. Stone’s sporadically amusing neuroses about his filmmaking make for a gripping documentary.
  56. Arthur Newman
    The glum, episodic and unbelievable Arthur Newman is the film equivalent of a dysfunctional computer sloppily assembled from discarded parts of other machines.
  57. Redemption
    Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.
  58. The Other Woman
    This female revenge comedy is so dumb, lazy, clumsily assembled and unoriginal, it could crush any actor forced to execute its leaden slapstick gags and mouth its crude, humorless dialogue.
  59. A Wedding Invitation
    A Pan-Asian romantic melodrama that virtually pokes you in the eye with its fakery.
  60. I Do
    In a better movie you might play along with contrived plot twists and fake obstacles, but watching I Do, a movie with thin characters and a languorous pace, you find yourself talking back to the screen.
  61. Finding Joy
    A clumsy mixed-nuts comedy.
  62. Run It
    An entwined triptych of sorts unified by invective, slurs and characters demanding that others shut up, Run It is a very patchy affair.
  63. The Stroller Strategy
    Mostly you root for Mr. Michel’s couple to reconnect simply so the movie will come to an end.
  64. Bert and Arnie's Guide to Friendship
    If you’re watching this film and waiting for something funny or insightful to come along to assuage your annoyance, you’ll wait a long time.
  65. The Keep
    The movie makes no sense as either melodrama or metaphysics, so that its expensive special effects go up in smoke. Literally.
  66. Universal Soldier
    Mr. Lundgren, who glowers his way all too convincingly through the role of a rabid bully, may well be the only man in the universe who can make Mr. Van Damme look like an actor.
  67. The Book Thief
    The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.
  68. Beneath
    Though the young actors...are appealing enough, you keep waiting for a boatful of humor to come along and rescue them. The whole film is a campy put-on, right? Apparently not.
  69. The Time Being
    An exhaustingly pretentious heave of artistic self-involvement, The Time Being takes an exceptionally handsome journey to nowhere at all.
  70. Red Tide
    The undisciplined shooting style and underdeveloped script confound the actors at every turn. Despite their best efforts, they never overcome the limitations of a movie more intent on cutting corners than fleshing out a story.
  71. Scenic Route
    An awkward, long-winded mash-up of therapy session, horror movie and survival tale with pretensions of psychological depth.
  72. Winter's Tale
    A thin line separates the magical from the preposterous, and by insisting so strenuously on its own magic, Winter’s Tale pitches helplessly into earnest ridiculousness.
  73. Ted 2
    Mr. MacFarlane can be funny, but Ted 2 is insultingly lazy hack work that is worth discussing primarily because of how he tries and fails to turn race, and specifically black men, into comedy fodder.
  74. Vikingdom
    Poor computer-generated effects give the movie an unsettling, two-layered feel.
  75. Bounty Killer
    Watching this movie feels like viewing a very long, expensive car commercial and waiting for the real film to begin.
  76. Mission Park
    [A] regrettably hokey first feature from Bryan Anthony Ramirez.
  77. Nothing Left to Fear
    The familiar special effects are not the most disappointing element here. It’s the squandering of the talented Ms. Heche, who is given top billing but almost nothing to do.
  78. Jewtopia
    On screen, where visuals reign and the simple pleasures of language are less paramount, the expanded Jewtopia is just a flat premise, uncomfortable not only because the clichés are groaners, but also because you feel sorry for everyone who’s working so hard to prop up the farce.
  79. Argento's Dracula 3D
    When insects are the best thing in your movie, it’s probably time to retire.
  80. CBGB
    There is no story to speak of. Just a series of anecdotes that gain very little when acted out on screen.
  81. A Perfect Man
    One of those projects whose very existence should baffle anyone hardy enough to endure all 94 minutes.
  82. Endless Love
    Directed by Shana Feste (“Country Strong”), this new Endless Love doesn’t have enough going on to make it memorably terrible: Banality is its gravest sin.
  83. Twice Born
    Whatever thoughtful instincts Mr. Castellitto might possess are undermined by his addiction to cinematic prettiness.
  84. Dumbbells
    The movie is so incoherent that its screenplay, by Mr. Drolet and Mr. Richards, might as well have been scrawled between takes as it was being filmed.
  85. The Fall of 1980
    It’s essentially a modern version of “The Big Chill” without the banging oldies soundtrack or competent actors.
  86. Commitment
    For all the shooting, knifing and nattering about sleeper cells, the film feels weirdly static and terminally tired.
  87. The Unbelievers
    Too slight to persuade, The Unbelievers is also too poorly made to entertain. The rational roots of atheism deserve a much better movie than this.
  88. The Mummy
    The “Mummy” reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess.
  89. Barefoot
    The movie acts like screwball comedy, but there are no laughs as Daisy and Jay’s connection lurches toward implausible romance.
  90. Big Bad Wolves
    Is there a point? All the filmmakers seem interested in is the ugliness of the main Israeli characters.
  91. Truth
    Filled with sappy dialogue and screeching strings, Truth is a puerile excavation of secrets and sickness.
  92. Jinn
    Most of the time, this incoherent thriller resembles an overheated trailer for itself: a glaringly rough assembly of ill-staged computer-generated action sequences and portentous moments.
  93. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    The jokes are thin, the computer animation is wanting and the inane plot is a series of set pieces strung together.
  94. Demi-Soeur
    This sickly sweet concoction sets your teeth on edge.
  95. Drive Hard
    Airless, senseless — and seemingly endless — this clumsy heist movie, directed by the prolific schlockmaster Brian Trenchard-Smith, manages to make even the magnificent coastline of Queensland, Australia, feel dreary.
  96. Entourage
    You could accuse it of glamorizing the shallow hedonism it depicts, but that charge would only stick if the movie had any genuine flair, romance or imagination.
  97. Moms' Night Out
    Little of it is funny or genuine, and the benefits and beauty of real faith are nowhere in evidence.
  98. Left Behind
    The director, Vic Armstrong — whose lengthy résumé hews primarily toward stunt work — displays no facility with actors and even less with pacing.
  99. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    You won’t find much offensive in Kevin James’s slick, innocuous vehicle Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. You won’t find much prompting an emotional reaction in general, so familiar are the jokes and situations. If Mr. James’s character thinks of safety first, so does this movie, to its extreme detriment.
  100. Mortdecai
    What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.
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