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. Waging a Living
    Neither hectoring nor sanctimonious, the film plays like an illustrated version of Barbara Ehrenreich's recent best-seller "Nickel and Dimed," and has an editing style that's brisk and unexploitative.
  2. Memories of Murder
    What distinguishes Memories of Murder, setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity.
  3. Tropical Malady
    Shows a young filmmaker pushing at the limits of cinematic narrative with grace and a certain amount of puckish willfulness.
  4. Saraband
    Ms. Ullmann, now 65, and Mr. Josephson, 81, have a supreme mastery of the Bergman style. Their performances are spiritual and emotional X-rays.
  5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    I call it wondrous because, in spite of lapses and imperfections, a few of them serious, Mr. Burton's movie succeeds in doing what far too few films aimed primarily at children even know how to attempt anymore, which is to feed - even to glut - the youthful appetite for aesthetic surprise.
  6. Happy Endings
    It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.
  7. The Warrior
    A minimalist but strikingly beautiful tale of renounced violence told with uncommon precision and depth.
  8. Bad News Bears
    Filled with small, cute kids and large, goofy laughs and buoyed by fine supporting work from Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden, the director's latest effort won't rock your movie world, but the fact that he manages to keep the freak flag flying in the face of our culture of triumphalism is a thing of beauty.
  9. The Edukators
    A slyly effective thriller and of a deft comedy of romantic confusion. Whatever its shortcomings as a consideration of globalization and its discontents, The Edukators succeeds brilliantly in telling the story of a man who falls in love with his best buddy's girlfriend and doesn't know what to do about it.
  10. The Aristocrats
    It works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex.
  11. Tony Takitani
    A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.
  12. Junebug
    Junebug envelops us in texture of a world the movies rarely visit.
  13. Secuestro express
    The constant threat of violence and rape is difficult to endure, but the unpredictable Secuestro Express is more than just a dizzying thrill ride laced with small doses of pitch-black comic relief.
  14. Duma
    A soulful, piercingly beautiful story.
  15. The Goebbles Experiment
    A rare and chilling glimpse into a brilliant but toxic mind.
  16. Pretty Persuasion
    An obscene, misanthropic go-for-broke satire, Pretty Persuasion is so gleefully nasty that the fact that it was even made and released is astonishing. Much of it is also extremely funny.
  17. The Century of the Self
    An unusually cerebral filmed essay that demands focus and patience from its audience as it sets about the task of unearthing a secret history of the 20th century. Adam Curtis, the film's director and writer, saves the proceedings from being overly dry with his visual wit and deft touch with archival materials.
  18. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    Even a starring role in the American version of the British show "The Office," which has given Mr. Carell a higher profile, conveys neither his sheer likability nor his range as an actor, both crucial to making this film work as well as it does.
  19. Red Eye
    The casting of the two leads is a nice surprise in Red Eye, as is its modest scale. One of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things - the performances and little bits of business from the extras - that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up.
  20. Clean
    Albrecht brings out a side of Mr. Nolte rarely seen on the screen, and he gives a deep and touching portrayal of a haggard, beleaguered older man.
  21. Reel Paradise
    Reel Paradise is a deliberately untidy, open-ended, thoroughly absorbing chronicle that lets the lives of its characters spill across the screen without editorializing.
  22. This Divided State
    Raw, chaotic and engagingly eager.
  23. The Constant Gardener
    This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.
  24. The Memory of a Killer
    The title character in this nicely kinked Belgian thriller faces a unique adversary: the enemy hot on his heels is Alzheimer's.
  25. Games of Love and Chance
    A graceful and sympathetic look at how the lives of teenagers intersect with a work of literature.
  26. William Eggleston in the Real World
    Mr. Eggleston proves the polished granddaddy who, early on, recognized beauty in a garish wasteland. In this accomplished look at a storied career, he instructs - without words - how to see all that is hauntingly familiar.
  27. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    This is synergy of a high order.
  28. Music from the Inside Out
    Daniel Anker's profound and moving documentary Music from the Inside Out reflects upon such abstractions, capturing the power of the creative process in an uncommonly perceptive and inspiring way.
  29. Corpse Bride
    There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.
  30. Thumbsucker
    Mr. Pucci, emerging slowly from behind a stray lock of brown hair, plays Justin's ambiguous transformation with deft understatement. And Mike Mills, who wrote and directed, keeps the film from slipping either into melodrama or facile satire, the two traps into which this genre is most apt to fall.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stupid Boy
    An intriguing examination of alienation and dysfunction, tonally haunting rather than melodramatic.
  32. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    A beautiful and devastating meditation on war, history and loss.
  33. Oliver Twist
    With tact and enthusiasm, Mr. Polanski grabs hold of a great book and rediscovers its true and enduring vitality.
  34. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Because federal indictments for conspiracy to murder have yet to be handed down, the documentary is necessarily discreet about naming names and detailing its evidence. A sequel would go a long way toward solving the documentary's many unanswered questions.
  35. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    Mr. Richard's film makes a persuasive case for Langlois as one of the most important figures in the history of film and therefore in the history of 20th-century art.
  36. Shopgirl
    Elegant and exquisitely tailored.
  37. After Innocence
    Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary After Innocence confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system.
  38. Innocence
    The line between cinematic art and exploitation has rarely seemed finer and nervier, at least in recent memory, than in the French film Innocence.
  39. Ballets Russes
    Ballets Russes does tell a marvelous story of midcentury show business, encompassing both the most exalted expressions of pure art and the sometimes grubby commerce that sustained it.
  40. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    If all this sounds a bit nuts, dangerously self-indulgent and very of its experimental moment, it is. But it's also highly entertaining and, at moments, revelatory about filmmaking as a site of creative tension between individual vision and collective endeavor.
  41. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Makes its case with breathtaking force.
  42. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    His (Ralph Fiennes) Voldemort may be the greatest screen performance ever delivered without the benefit of a nose; certainly it's a performance of sublime villainy.
  43. Syriana
    It aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time.
  44. The Far Side of the Moon
    Based on Mr. Lepage's play of the same title, Far Side of the Moon carries traces of the theater both in some of the dialogue and in its schematic construction. That said, it has been beautifully shot by the cinematographer Ronald Plante in the kind of high-definition digital video that makes the future of cinema look rather less grim than usual.
  45. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    The next two hours might not have quite delivered on that initial promise of wonder - we grown-ups, being heavy, are not so easily swept away by visual tricks - except when I looked away from the screen at the faces of breathless and wide-eyed children, my own among them, for whom the whole experience was new, strange, disturbing and delightful.
  46. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    In a film filled with plaintively expressive faces, characters say as much when they don't talk as when they speak Mr. Arriaga's dialogue, which sometimes sounds like hardscrabble poetry, sometimes sounds real as dirt and is, rather surprisingly, often darkly funny.
  47. Munich
    More than anything, Munich is a slammin' entertainment filled with dazzling set pieces and geometric camerawork.
  48. Caché (Hidden)
    While this film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically astute, and more complicated than it at first appears.
  49. The Intruder
    The best way to enjoy The Intruder is to surrender to its poetry without demanding cut-and-dried explanations.
  50. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.
  51. The Fall of Fujimori
    A cautionary essay on the risks to democracy posed by the fight against terrorism.
  52. Bubble
    Easier to admire than love, Bubble is a fascinating exercise that seems calculated to repel most audiences, which probably suits Mr. Soderbergh just fine.
  53. Curious George
    With top-drawer voice talent including Joan Plowright and Dick Van Dyke, original songs by Jack Johnson, and old-fashioned two-dimensional animation that echoes the simple colors and shapes of the books, Curious George is an unexpected delight.
  54. The Ister
    The Ister asks you not to think, but to think hard. Your reward, given in proportion to your level of attention, commitment and participation, is to see the simplest things in a new light, possessed of vast new dimensions.
  55. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    At one point, during one of his occasional verbal rambles, he (Young) says half-jokingly, half-defensively that he's got some love songs left in him. This film, which is at once a valentine from one artist to another and a valentine from a musician to his audience, is surely proof that he does.
  56. Through the Fire
    Behind the cheering and popping flashbulbs of Through the Fire lurks another, much darker movie, one that questions the relationship between sneaker manufacturers and financially deprived kids with exceptional talent.
  57. The Fallen Idol (re-release)
    Beautifully shot by the French cinematographer Georges Périnal (whose credits include Cocteau's "Blood of a Poet"), the film soon evolves from a claustrophobic domestic affair into a mordantly discomfiting look at the betrayal of innocence.
  58. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances.
  59. Little Fish
    As in all her screen performances, Ms. Blanchett immerses herself completely in her character, a damaged, high-strung woman determined to live the straight life while surrounded by temptation.
  60. 16 Blocks
    Mr. Willis has always been an acquired taste, but for those who did acquire that taste, riding shotgun on his good times and bad, it's a pleasure to see him doing what comes naturally.
  61. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis, which chronicles the entire election-strategizing process in scrupulous detail, will pack a punch with even the most informed viewer.
  62. Deep Sea
    The soothing voices of Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet provide the informative yet often uninspired narration. And Danny Elfman's mystical sounds serve up just the right atmosphere for this almost complete immersive experience, during which adults will be made into giggling children, and children into aspiring marine biologists.
  63. The Hills Have Eyes
    Snobs may balk, purists will be appalled, but this new and exceedingly nasty version of Wes Craven's 1977 cult shocker is awfully good at what it does. And mostly what it does is make you feel awful.
  64. Ask the Dust
    More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.
  65. Find Me Guilty
    Find Me Guilty, Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game.
  66. Inside Man
    Filled with playful noise and nonsense, clever feints and digressions, Inside Man has a story to tell, but its most sustained pleasures come from its performances, especially the three leads.
  67. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    Liz Mermin documents the hilarious, moving and sometimes fractious meeting of diametrically different cultures, one that has suffered unimaginable horrors and one that believes a good perm is the answer to everything.
  68. L'Enfant (The Child)
    The Dardennes know how to build a scene for maximum tension: you yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill. But because they make moral thrillers, what matters isn't only actions and events but their emotional, spiritual and psychological costs.
  69. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Jeff Feuerzeig, who won the best-director award at the 2005 Sundance festival, cobbles together a moving portrait of the artist as his own ghost, using a wealth of material provided by Mr. Johnston, from home movies to audiocassette diaries to dozens of original, and often heartbreakingly beautiful, songs.
  70. Friends with Money
    Greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers.
  71. 4
    As opaque as it is mesmerizing, 4 demands open eyes and open minds, but neither is it as difficult as all its weighty silences, oblique detours and countless images of glistening, sweating animal flesh - Mother Russia's raw and seriously overcooked - might suggest.
  72. Mountain Patrol
    Films about environmental catastrophes tend to wax preachy, putting pedagogy and scolding above art. This one, for all its sorrow and the throb of righteous anger it provokes (only about 50,000 antelopes remain), is more than anything a work of creative imagination.
  73. Somersault
    Somersault, which the Australian Film Institute garlanded with 13 awards, including best film, director, actor and actress (for Ms. Cornish's astonishing performance), is a movie about the looks on people's faces and the disparity between the surface and the roiling chaos beneath.
  74. Akeelah and the Bee
    The innate suspense and charm of the spelling bee, along with a trio of crack performances, turn what is in essence a formulaic sports picture into something more satisfying: an underdog tale that manages to inspire without being sappy.
  75. Three Times
    Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's hypnotically beautiful cinematic trilogy Three Times doesn't just illuminate faces and objects; it seems to fill them up, as if they were lighted from within.
  76. La Moustache
    No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.
  77. District B13
    With backing from the film's producer and co-writer, Luc Besson, the director, Pierre Morel, mounts a breakneck B movie inspired by Hong Kong action extravaganzas, the gritty genre classics of John Carpenter and the Thai neo-kung fu parable "Ong Bak." He hasn't reinvented this particular wheel, but he gets it spinning with delirious savoir-faire.
  78. Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    This new film feels like something of a gift, as if the director had decided to burn some of his favorite songs for his newfound friends, the world-cinema audience.
  79. Nacho Libre
    Endearingly ridiculous.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wordplay
    Whatever the documentary's flaws, the filmmakers should be saluted for giving us a rare glimpse of life in these trenches.
  81. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
    Combines pieces of an extended interview with this Canadian singer-songwriter, poet and author, now 71, with a tribute concert organized by Hal Willner at the Sydney Opera House in January 2005.
  82. The Motel
    Michael Kang's small, perfectly observed portrait of Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), a Chinese-American boy who lives and works in a dingy downscale motel operated by his mother, captures the glum desperation of inhabiting the biological limbo of early adolescence.
  83. Who Killed the Electric Car?
    A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, Who Killed the Electric Car? is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries.
  84. Changing Times
    In Changing Times, Mr. Téchiné, the great French director, is near the peak of his form. Weaving a half dozen subplots, he creates a set of variations on the theme of divided sensibilities tugging one another into states of perpetual unrest and possible happiness.
  85. Monster House
    Unpretentious, smartly written and a lot of fun.
  86. Miami Vice
    Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle.
  87. The Bridesmaid
    Deceptively understated and finally ferocious.
  88. Quinceañera
    As smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced.
  89. The Illusionist
    This entertaining movie is content to be something a bit more modest: a pungent period folk tale that teases you until the very end.
  90. Factotum
    Like the film itself, Mr. Dillon’s performance works through understatement.
  91. Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
    The atmosphere is so thick, the talk so assured, the performances so disciplined and the fear so fearsome, that Mr. Refn’s final iteration of his pattern achieves the hard, bright light of an archetype from hell.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lassie
    Lassie balances cruelty and tenderness, pathos and humor without ever losing sight of its youngest audience member.
  93. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Feisty, intellectually engaging.
  94. SherryBaby
    What distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing -- which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats -- and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance. She treats the character neither as a case study nor as an opportunity to show off her range, but rather as a completely ordinary and therefore arrestingly complicated person.
  95. Le petit lieutenant
    Le Petit Lieutenant embraces the spectrum of human drama and comedy, and like a lot of French films it is keenly involved with the everyday pulse of work.
  96. Man Push Cart
    Filmed in less than three weeks, Man Push Cart is an exemplary work of independent filmmaking carried out on a shoestring. Mr. Razvi’s convincing performance is a muted portrait of desolation bordering on despair.
  97. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    hough the picture is wrenching, at times devastating, it leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art.
  98. 49 Up
    Suzy's marriage, Nick's divorce, Paul's work history: none of it is my or anyone else's business. But these things -- these people -- have become, through Mr. Apted's films, a vital part of modern life, which seems to grow richer every seven years, when the new "Up" movie comes out.
  99. The Ritchie Boys
    Those whose tolerance of Greatest Generation war stories isn't exhausted, not to mention those who still thrive on them, will find the group of men who called themselves the Ritchie Boys good company.
  100. Marie Antoinette
    A thoroughly modern confection, blending insouciance and sophistication, heartfelt longing and self-conscious posing with the guileless self-assurance of a great pop song. What to do for pleasure? Go see this movie, for starters.
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