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. Cookie's Fortune
    Captivating.
  2. Revolution #9
    An unadorned, unsparing chronicle of a young man's descent into a nightmare of delusion, paranoia and self-destructive behavior.
  3. The Princess and the Warrior
    Deeply whimsical beneath its poker face, The Princess and the Warrior has the structure of an elaborate mind-teasing puzzle.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monterey Pop
    It is possible that the way to a new kind of musical—using some of the talent and energy of what is still the most lively contemporary medium—may begin with just this kind of musical performance documentary.
  5. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    A monumental treat as well as a crafty assemblage of mythologies.
  6. Billy Elliot
    Anchors its melodramatic formula in tough, heartfelt realism.
  7. Wendigo
    For those in search of something different, Wendigo is a genuinely bone-chilling tale.
  8. Millennium Actress
    To watch Millennium Actress is to witness one cinematic medium celebrating another, an expression of movie love that is wonderfully eccentric and deeply affecting.
  9. The Endurance
    The tale, in any case, is so gripping, so full of improbable turns and agonizing reversals that it bears repeating, and Mr. Butler and Ms. Alexander tell it straightforwardly and well.
  10. The Pledge
    Not a pleasant film, but it is deeply, scarily rewarding.
  11. Felicia's Journey
    Visually, and in its soundtrack of overlapping voices, the film sustains a mood of heightened consciousness.
  12. Tape
    In portraying this threesome, Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman give the most psychologically acute performances of their film careers.
  13. The Tailor of Panama
    The first really good spy movie about the impossibility, under present historical circumstances, of making a really good spy movie.
  14. Thomas in Love
    The film is full of ingenious details and effective character sketches (Thomas has a mother who would give Woody Allen the willies) that go a long way toward covering up its conventionalities.
  15. Tosca
    For the most part, it works beautifully as a movie without sacrificing the integrity of the opera.
  16. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Although the movie, adapted from a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, pushes emotional buttons and simplifies its true story to give it the clean narrative sweep of an extended folk ballad, it never goes dramatically overboard.
  17. Derrida
    The adoring and adorable documentary on the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
  18. Shine
    Fortunately, Hicks's direction has an elegance and dignity that rescue Shine from the exploitative and give the film an acute, genuinely sensitive style.
  19. Baby Boy
    Jody's story is told with so much heart -- and his character is acted with such a winning combination of playfulness, vulnerability and sexual dynamism by Mr. Gibson -- that you can forgive the occasionally incoherent storytelling, the overwrought moments and the haphazard, unconvincing excursions into dream and fantasy.
  20. Hoosiers
    This film's very lack of surprise and sophistication accounts for a lot of its considerable charm.
  21. Dead Again
    A big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (re-release)
    Throughout, there's a skillful balance between the vulnerability of New Yorkers and the drastic, provocative sense of comedy that thrives all over our sidewalks.
  23. Tumbleweeds
    There are many moments when what is on the screen stops looking like acting and becomes life itself, and you're watching real people change and grow before your eyes.
  24. Blackboards
    An indelible and ultimately moving vision of humanity buffeted by the elements and by international political tides.
  25. Sylvia
    Christine Jeffs's film is an emotionally rich biography of the poet Sylvia Plath, who is played with radiant conviction by Gwyneth Paltrow.
  26. Carnage
    Ms. Gleize, through a series of oblique, half-comic scenes and meticulous, rhyming visual compositions, offers up an elegant, discursive essay on carnality and carnivorousness -- on sex, death, meat and the ravening hunger for companionship.
  27. The Opposite of Sex
    What redeems the film's surface bitterness are sharp observations, laceratingly funny dialogue and something Dedee claims to find especially loathsome: a secret heart of gold.
  28. Clay Pigeons
    A film that delights by confounding expectations.
  29. Rounders
    Mischievously entertaining...Dahl's film has character in oversupply even if its actual characters are sometimes thin. Poker fever makes up for whatever the story lacks in everyday emotions.
  30. Analyze This
    As he demonstrated in "Groundhog Day," Ramis knows how to handle a high-concept story with unusual cleverness, and he does it again here. It helps to no end that De Niro and Crystal, despite their obvious differences, are perfectly in tune.
  31. Babí léto
    Mr. Brodsky's final screen performance in one of his richest roles finds overlapping layers of humor and pathos.
  32. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Intensely appealing.
  33. The Tenant
    The film is superbly acted by Mr. Polanski, Mr. Douglas and Miss Winters, who might not be entirely convincing as a Parisian concierge in a realistic film, but who fits into this nightmare perfectly.
  34. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    Very much a writer's film: Mr. Schickel's elegant, occasionally knotty prose, read by Sidney Pollack, offers a clear, nuanced interpretation of the artist's work in relation to his life.
  35. Charlotte Sometimes
    A tiny film that reflects a large talent.
  36. Our Father
    Poignant though it is, the movie is the opposite of depressing. There is too much life in it.
  37. Mystic Pizza
    Though in essence this is little more than a girls' romance novel brought to life, it has been filled with heart and humor. The place, the people and even the largely predictable situations in which they find themselves are presented in an entirely winning way.
  38. Rana's Wedding
    Ms. Khoury, often filmed in close-up, gives a deeply sensitive, unsentimental performance, and the feelings that crowd on her face (sometimes more than one at a time) run the gamut from despair to ambivalence to hysterical frustration to tenderness and joy.
  39. The Gingerbread Man
    With unexpected success, Robert Altman plays a John Grisham mystery in a seductive new key.
  40. Blue in the Face
    Good-humored, try-anything fun.
  41. Panic
    A sneaky and smart film noir.
  42. Swimming Pool
    Simultaneously a thoroughly mannered, mischievously artificial confection and an acute piece of psychological realism. Whose psychology, and which reality, remains ambiguous even after the tart, delicious final twist.
  43. Under the City's Skin
    The real protagonist is the family itself -- a fragile, complex organism undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and indifference of the society around them.
  44. Demonlover
    The entrancing visual imagery goes a long way toward filling in the screenplay's gaps in logic.
  45. You've Got Mail
    The film's mix of romance and reading matter is seductive in its own right, providing comfy book-lined settings and people who are what they read and write.
  46. The End of the Affair
    When it comes to holiday films worth swooning over, here's the one to see.
  47. The Apostle
    Duvall's unobtrusive direction moves the film at a leisurely pace that lets many scenes build the gentle, pleasing rhythms of small-town Southern life. A rare display of spiritual light on screen.
  48. About a Boy
    The Weitz brothers -- notorious as the authors of the "American Pie" series -- handle the sentimentality of the story with a light, sweet touch.
  49. Chuck & Buck
    Strange, intense and moving -- one of the few truly grown-up movies you're likely to see this year.
  50. Cremaster 3
    If Cremaster 3 is an innovative artwork that has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film, is it also a great movie? Probably yes.
  51. Real Women Have Curves
    Effervescent and satisfying, a crowd pleaser that does not condescend.
  52. Decasia
    Nothing more -- and nothing less -- than a collage of decaying, decomposing nitrate film stock...The unexpected thing is that its dying, in this shower of black-and-white psychedelia, is quite beautiful.
  53. My Architect
    The son's search is one of three strands of a story that the movie weaves into a meticulously structured portrait of a complicated man who remains elusive even after key elements of the puzzle have been pieced together.
  54. In My Skin
    As unrelenting an exploration of isolation and dissociation as Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."
  55. Stone Reader
    Enchanting and diverting documentary.
  56. The Grandfather
    Brims with understanding of the complexities of relationships, the frailties of humankind and the possibilities of joy.
  57. Tadpole
    Shot in just two weeks with a hand-held digital camera, the movie often looks frayed around the edges. Yet it has a soulful heart and a clear grasp of its rarefied milieu (Manhattan upper-level moneyed academia).
  58. Grosse Pointe Blank
    Enough wild-card energy to keep it bright and surprising.
  59. Juliet of the Spirits
    Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.
  60. Johnny English
    Unlike most movies of this kind, which run out of steam and ideas as they go along, Johnny English gains momentum, nudging you along from a few stray giggles to helpless, giddy laughter.
  61. Crazy/Beautiful
    It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.
  62. The Weather Underground
    This terrifically smart and solid piece of filmmaking lets the former Weathermen, now in their 50's and older, speak into the camera and reveal a bit of their personal histories as well as what the peace movement meant to them.
  63. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    Mr. Rithy Panh makes telling use of a survivor whose ability to communicate lends itself to the subject. The tragedy is that Mr. Vann Nath's powers are used to illuminate these horrors.
  64. Alice et Martin
    Your attention is rewarded by a film of surprising depth and a few deep surprises.
  65. Startup.com
    Moves slowly and grimly toward the moment that for the audience is the most engrossing though filled with dread: when things begin to unravel and the participants are no longer aware of the cameras. That is when your shoulders tense and you lean toward the screen.
  66. Trembling Before G-d
    Director Sandi Simcha DuBowski latches on to a provocative subject and invests it with a compelling tenderness.
  67. Our Lady of the Assassins
    Couldn't have succeeded had it been cast with movie stars. Its authenticity derives not only from the streets on which it was filmed but also from its able Colombian cast.
  68. Get Shorty
    The author's sardonic voice has been lost in most films based on his fiction, but this one nicely captures that unruffled Leonard authority. And since Get Shorty is about Hollywood, it invites the sneaky self-mockery that gives this film its comic punch.
  69. Children Underground
    A singularly depressing film. In the face of such unrelieved, grinding poverty, hope fades.
  70. Step Into Liquid
    Like his father, Mr. Brown has the magical ability to take his public on a two-hour vacation. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't need to worry about sand in your beer.
  71. Men in Black
    Dryly clever.
  72. L.A. Story
    Basically decent, intelligent and sweet. It's a fanciful romantic comedy whose wildest and craziest notion is that Los Angeles, for all of its eccentricities, is a great place to live.
  73. Lost in La Mancha
    After watching the fascinating and compelling new documentary Lost in La Mancha, you may forever wonder how it is that movies are made at all.
  74. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Mr. Lin makes the anxious grasping of these kids for some kind of emotional turf -- their own need to shatter the stereotypes that bind them -- the heart of Better Luck Tomorrow, a scenario that keeps the movie's blood racing.
  75. Groundhog Day
    That glimmer of recognition is what makes Groundhog Day a particularly witty and resonant comedy, even when its jokes are more apt to prompt gentle giggles than rolling in the aisles.
  76. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Makes a jolly absurdist stew out of its sources.
  77. Babe
    The movie maintains a refreshingly light touch in spinning a fable about individualism and conformity.
  78. The Dinner Game
    The Dinner Game, which Veber wrote and directed, is one of his better-constructed comedies of errors.
  79. The Fisher King
    What emerges, in the end, are a clever premise that has been allowed to go awry and several performances that are lively and unpredictable enough to transcend the confusion. Mr. Bridges, always a fine intuitive actor, has never displayed a greater range.
  80. Johnny Guitar (re-release)
    A goofy and remarkable film.
  81. The Wood
    Famuyiwa's dialogue is easygoing and witty, and the warmhearted comic performances mesh beautifully.
  82. Bukowski: Born into This
    Definitive and engrossing documentary.
  83. The Filth and the Fury
    Electrifying.
  84. The Isle
    A movie of extremes, and that goes for its aesthetics. As gory as the scenes of torture and self-mutilation may be, they are pitted against shimmering cinematography that lends the setting the ethereal beauty of an Asian landscape painting.
  85. LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
    An exemplary work of cinéma vérité that allows its subjects to speak for themselves, traffics neither in pity nor in political grandstanding.
  86. The King Is Alive
    The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm.
  87. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    Haneke, who wrote and directed, is a skillful, minutely observant filmmaker who trusts his audience to be able to put two and two together. Unfortunately, he's often too cryptic, which leaves viewers still trying to make connections when they should already be reacting to the moral lessons implied by them.
  88. The Piano Teacher
    Has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse.
  89. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.
  90. Yossi & Jagger
    If the situation has all the ingredients of a shrill, tearful melodrama, the filmmaker, working from a taut screenplay by Avner Bernheimer that doesn't waste a word or a gesture, keeps the emotional lid firmly in place.
  91. Femme Fatale
    The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.
  92. Bread and Tulips
    Soldini's amiable new comedy suggests that an older, better Italy of imagination, rationality and civility survives on the fringes of a modern nation obsessed, like most others, with consumerism, empty prosperity and easy pleasure.
  93. Edward Scissorhands
    Like a great chef concocting an exquisite peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, Mr. Burton invests awe-inspiring ingenuity into the process of reinventing something very small.
  94. Igby Goes Down
    Although Igby has its share of glitches and tonal inconsistencies, it packs an emotional wallop similar to that of another cultural golden oldie as beloved in its way as "The Catcher in the Rye": "The Graduate."
  95. Gerry
    With all its quirks, Gerry seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.
  96. There's Something About Mary
    A romantic comedy that's a hoot in every sense, worth a smidgen of disapproval and a whole lot of helpless laughter...The film works ridiculously well because it never stoops to being mean-spirited or (despite all appearances) authentically inane.
  97. Urbania
    As technically innovative as it is emotionally unsettling.
  98. The Eye
    Rarely has the basic nature of visual perception seemed so frightening.
  99. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.
  100. Intact
    The latest movie from Spain to use the conventions of the thriller to explore knotty and fascinating philosophical questions.
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