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 Prestige
    Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.
  2. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    As this powerful, minutely documented film reveals, the tragedy wasn’t caused by the failure of the Peoples Temple to realize its goals. In many ways, it was succeeding as a self-sufficient community.
  3. Requiem
    Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine.
  4. Climates
    This film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words.
  5. The Wild Blue Yonder
    There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a great filmmaker’s imagination.
  6. Commune
    A breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.
  7. Iraq in Fragments
    From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.
  8. Copying Beethoven
    Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.
  9. Fast Food Nation
    It's a mirror and a portrait, and a movie as necessary and nourishing as your next meal.
  10. The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes
    Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty.
  11. The Aura
    Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.
  12. The History Boys
    The current of intellectual energy snapping through the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play feels like electrical brain stimulation.
  13. The Bergman Trilogy
    Intimate, compelling film.
  14. Days of Glory
    It is a chronicle of courage and sacrifice, of danger and solidarity, of heroism and futility, told with power, grace and feeling and brought alive by first-rate acting. A damn good war movie.
  15. Charlotte's Web
    May not be perfect, but it honors its source and captures the key elements -- the humor and good sense, as well as the sheer narrative exuberance -- that have made White’s book a classic.
  16. Venus
    Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.
  17. Curse of the Golden Flower
    Since his debut in 1987 with "Red Sorghum" Mr. Zhang has made more controlled films but never one that's more fun. With Curse of the Golden Flower he aims for Shakespeare and winds up with Jacqueline Susann. And a good thing too.
  18. Make It Funky!
    The accidental poignancy of Make It Funky! comes from juxtaposing the charisma and dignity of those musicians - and the knowledge of how much great music New Orleans has given the world - with the unavoidable images of devastation from the last two weeks.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Mr. Jacobs's approach is descended from a long line of minimalist filmmakers, from Jacques Tati ("Monsieur Hulot's Holiday") up through Jim Jarmusch ("Mystery Train"), but The GoodTimesKid dances, like Diaz, in its own sweet style. It doesn't get to the point because getting there is the point.
  20. The Italian
    There is something slightly magical about the lighting, almost as if this were a fantasy land from which Vanya might actually make an escape. This sense of unreality, of magical thinking and wishing, carries the story and Vanya through a remarkable journey.
  21. Breach
    One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world.
  22. Bridge to Terabithia
    Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.
  23. The Cats of Mirikitani
    The result is a movie that evolves naturally from the filmmaker's compassion for her subject; as much as possible, she remains off camera, and her immense act of charity is never permitted to become the film's focus. Instead this remarkable documentary offers a brief but satisfying look at a defiantly self-sufficient life.
  24. Offside
    While the gist of Offside is the same (as "The Circle"), its tone is more insouciant, as it celebrates the guile and toughness of its heroines while casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing their jailers.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    Mr. Hazlewood’s strategy also draws attention to the lack of psychological detail in the central love triangle, which isn’t good. But the music still pierces, the blood still flows, and the overall conception is so original that even when the movie falters in the moment, it dazzles in the memory.
  26. The Hoax
    It is for the most part a jumpy, suspenseful caper, full of narrow escapes, improbable reversals and complicated intrigue. But it has a sinister, shadowy undertow, an intimation of dread that lingers after Irving's game is up.
  27. Hot Fuzz
    Since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies, they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as "The Full Monty" blown to smithereens.
  28. The Valet
    If you love to hate the superrich, The Valet, a delectable comedy in which the great French actor Daniel Auteuil portrays a piggy billionaire industrialist facing his comeuppance, is a sinfully delicious bonbon.
  29. Waitress
    Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress who plays her.
  30. Election
    By the end, Mr. To has proven himself to be a genre hack of uncommon intelligence and soul: a first-rate entertainer who can thrill you into thinking.
  31. Linda Linda Linda
    The irritations and tedium of high school life are staged with refreshing simplicity, while the performers interact with an age-appropriate naturalness the American teenage movie rarely achieves.
  32. Shrek the Third
    Shrek the Third seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter.
  33. The Hip Hop Project
    Giving "inspirational" a good name, Matt Ruskin's vibrant and soulful documentary The Hip Hop Project sets its universal message to an inner-city beat.
  34. Golden Door
    What makes Mr. Crialese's telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival.
  35. Fido
    It won't make you bleed, just howl.
  36. Strike
    Schlöndorff calls the film "a ballad inspired by true events," and its occasional bouts of clumsiness and sentimentality are inseparable from its power.
  37. A Mighty Heart
    Effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art.
  38. Talk to Me
    The result is a movie that offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time
    Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.
  40. Hairspray
    The overall mood of Hairspray is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it.
  41. Sunshine
    A first-rate, seemingly sweat-free entertainer, Mr. Boyle always sells the goods smoothly, along with the chills, the laughs and, somewhat less often, the tears. He’s wickedly good at making you jump and squirm in your seat, which he does often in Sunshine, but he tends to avoid tapping into deep wells of emotion.
  42. Live-In Maid
    Modest in scope, but it feels complete, fully inhabited, in a way that more overtly ambitious movies rarely do.
  43. La faute à Fidel!
    Julie Gavras’s wonderful film, Blame It on Fidel, views its ideological conflicts through the eyes of a smart, willful child.
  44. Deep Water
    Again and again you want to shout at the screen: “Turn back. All will be forgiven.” This tale of risk, though, ends not with man conquering nature but in calamitous failure.
  45. Delirious
    Tom DiCillo’s angry comedy Delirious subjects modern celebrity culture to a microscopic examination that shows the toxic virus of fame squirming and multiplying under its lens.
  46. The 11th Hour
    An unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    The movie’s “Rocky” formula proves irresistible anyway; unsurprisingly, New Line has commissioned Mr. Gordon to remake this story with actors.
  48. In the Shadow of the Moon
    In the Shadow of the Moon is such a morale booster. The power of its archival images hasn’t diminished with familiarity.
  49. Romance & Cigarettes
    There is more raw vitality pumping through Romance & Cigarettes, John Turturro’s passionate ode to the sensual pulse of life in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, than in a dozen perky high school musicals. This is a movie in which a dirty mind is a good thing. Call it “The Singing Id.” Prudes, be forewarned.
  50. Across the Universe
    Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.
  51. Michael Clayton
    Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal. It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame.
  52. The Darjeeling Limited
    The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.
  53. Strange Culture
    Somewhere between documentary and dramatization, fact and impression, Strange Culture molds one man’s tragedy into an engrossing narrative experiment that defies categorization.
  54. Gone Baby Gone
    One of the graces of Gone Baby Gone is its sensitivity to real struggle, to the lived-in spaces and worn-out consciences that can come when despair turns into nihilism.
  55. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    Has an offbeat, absurdist charm that turns a potentially creepy conceit into an odd, touching adventure.
  56. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    Curiously exhilarating. Some of this comes from the simple thrill of witnessing something, or rather everything, done well.
  57. Terror's Advocate
    It is one of the most engaging, morally unsettling political thrillers in quite some time, with the extra advantage of being true.
  58. Lynch
    It’s precisely the worshipful feel of Lynch -- including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr. Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog -- that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing. It’s like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly.
  59. Enchanted
    The film works its magic largely by sending up, at times with a wink, at times with a hard nudge, some of the very stereotypes that have long been this company’s profitable stock in trade.
  60. Southland Tales
    Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.
  61. Margot at the Wedding
    Frequently brilliant, finally baffling film.
  62. Grace Is Gone
    Mr. Cusack demonstrates once again that he is Hollywood’s second-most-reliable nice guy, after Tom Hanks. Devoid of vanity, with no hidden agendas, he never strains to be likable. Good will, integrity and a native common sense ooze out of him.
  63. Nanking
    What makes the film bearable is the knowledge that a few people did what they could to hold the line against humanity’s worst instincts. The voices in Nanking speak for the persistence of good in times and places where a moral crevice opens to reveal a vision of hell on earth.
  64. The Water Horse
    Ffamily-friendly escapist fare that should enthrall, without insult, fantasy-minded viewers of any age.
  65. Taxi to the Dark Side
    If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.
  66. The Witnesses
    The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned. But in the director’s farsighted vision of life, the ground under our feet is always shifting. As time pulls us forward, the shocks of the past are absorbed and the pain recedes. In its light-handed way, The Witnesses is profound.
  67. Chop Shop
    There is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.
  68. Young@Heart
    The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor.
  69. Redbelt
    A satisfying, unexpectedly involving B-movie that owes as much to old Hollywood as to Greek tragedy.
  70. Surfwise
    Doug Pray’s wonderfully engaging look at love and family and the relentless pursuit of happiness, personal meaning and perfect waves.
  71. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.
  72. The Foot Fist Way
    An itsy-bitsy, ultra-indie, super-silly comedy packing huge laughs and unexpected heart.
  73. My Winnipeg
    Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.
  74. Full Battle Rattle
    Gives a remarkably thorough and detailed account of the difficult conditions facing American soldiers in Iraq.
  75. Trumbo
    Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: "The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil."
  76. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    Its one-week theatrical run will make it eligible for Academy Award consideration, though given that organization's often pitiful record when it comes to nonfiction film, it seems unlikely that a movie this subtly intelligent would make its short list.
  77. Space Chimps
    If "Wall-E" pushes the boundaries of what can be done in an animated movie, Space Chimps proves that the old formula is still pretty effective when executed well.
  78. Kabluey
    The film's distance from factual reality oddly enhances its bleak underlying vision. It portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.
  79. Boy A
    Mr. Garfield's performance makes Jack so endearing and vulnerable that as he takes his first wobbly steps, like a baby bird shoved from its nest, your instincts are protective.
  80. Death Race
    The movie is legitimately greasy, authentically nasty, with a good old-fashioned sense of laying waste to everything in sight -- including the shallow philosophizing and computer-generated fakery that have overrun the summer blockbuster.
  81. W.
    The pleasure of Mr. Stone's work has never been located in restraint but in excess, a commitment to extremes that can drown out the world or, as in this film, give it newly vivid, hilarious and horrible form.
  82. Trouble the Water
    They have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts’s visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama.
  83. Fear(s) of the Dark
    Shot in luminous whites, pulsing blacks and gorgeous grays, the stories explore sexual insecurity, rural superstition and sociopolitical anxieties with an inventiveness that's seldom scary but never less than mesmerizing.
  84. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Gonzalo Arijón’s documentary offers an incontrovertible argument for the necessity of team spirit in the face of catastrophe.
  85. I've Loved You So Long
    A revelation comes near the end that is both tremendously moving and a bit disappointing, in the way that the solutions to great mysteries frequently are. This turn does not diminish the accomplishment of Ms. Scott Thomas's deep, subtle and altogether stunning performance, but it does alter the scale of the movie, turning it into a more manageable, less existentially unsettling drama.
  86. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    It is impossible not to be fired up by Kurt Kuenne's incendiary cri de coeur, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.
  87. Eden
    A picture so modest and minor-key that the emotional bruise it leaves may take days to develop.
  88. Bolt
    What keeps Bolt fresh is an unaffected exuberance, a genuine sense of fun, that is expressed above all through obsessive attention to craft.
  89. What Doesn't Kill You
    It tells a good story well, and in the process quietly says a little something about what it means to look at the American dream from the bottom up.
  90. Service (Serbis)
    Gentle, bawdy and at times rambunctiously, ticklishly rude.
  91. Under the Sea 3D
    A visually enthralling 40-minute tour of the southwestern Pacific depths.
  92. Katyn
    The result is a film with a stately, deliberate quality that insulates it against sentimentality and makes it all the more devastating.
  93. 12
    With its thunderous drama and larger-than-life characters, which lend it a brawling energy, 12 is never dull.
  94. Everlasting Moments
    The result is an experience that, even as it feels a bit familiar, is nonetheless engrossing and satisfying.
  95. Tokyo Sonata
    Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama -- if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair -- there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.
  96. The Song of Sparrows
    Although The Song of Sparrows has some of the trappings of a naturalistic drama, it is really a series of strict moral lessons pieced together into an austere Islamic sermon.
  97. Every Little Step
    The premise of Every Little Step is no less inspired for seeming so simple and obvious, and it pays tribute to the durability and continued relevance of “A Chorus Line,” which first opened in New York in 1975, before many of the performers in the movie were born.
  98. Il Divo
    As operatic cinema, it ranks alongside the best of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
  99. Julia
    Ms. Swinton demands to be seen even when her character is on a self-annihilating bender so real that you can almost smell the stink rising off her. So I sat in my seat, cursed the screen and was grateful to watch an actress at the height of her expressive power claw toward greatness.
  100. Big Man Japan
    The most impressive special effect here is Mr. Matsumoto's hilariously restrained performance, a tour de force of comedic concision in a movie bloated by increasingly surreal developments.
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