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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    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Home Alone
    Kevin has the potential to be the mawkish child or the obnoxious little adult so common on screen, but he is neither. Played with great glee by Macaulay Culkin, he is a totally endearing, up-to-the-minute little boy.
  2. Aliens
    Under the direction of James (''The Terminator'') Cameron, [the special effects team has] put together a flaming, flashing, crashing, crackling blow-'em-up show that keeps you popping from your seat despite your better instincts and the basically conventional scare tactics.
  3. North Face
    Transfixing in the way that well-told life-and-death adventure tales inevitably are. It is the film’s more mundane elements -- an awkward, under-nourished love story and half-baked politics -- that are problematic.
  4. Dinner for Schmucks
    The film collects a cast of performers who know how to be funny. The success of this movie, following a formula upheld by just about any recent hit comedy you can name, lies as much with supporting players and plot-derailing set pieces as with the central story and characters.
  5. Human Weapon
    A gripping and important documentary.
  6. Warrior of Light
    It would be foolish for a middle-class do-gooder confronting homeless children on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to expect conventional morality to have any meaning to them at all. That's one of the blunt, no-nonsense observations of Yvonne Bezarra de Mello, the Brazilian human rights activist profiled in Monika Treut's hard-headed documentary.
  7. Djomeh
    An investigation, at once lucid and enigmatic, of exile, loneliness and the fragile possibility of friendship.
  8. The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story
    In a very real way, The Great Dance constitutes an act of preservation and a requiem.
  9. Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures
    The feelings that this simple, deeply intelligent movie produces -- of horror, admiration, hope and grief -- are as hard to name as they are to dispel.
  10. My Terrorist
    The movie's disparate voices coalesce here as an emotionally charged microcosm of the conflict.
  11. A Moment of Innocence
    Almost forbiddingly austere.
  12. Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain
    Has a lavish ceremonial gloss. It is also a very erotic movie.
  13. New Suit
    What's oddly appealing about this film is the sweetness that the director, François Velle, manages to extract from Craig Sherman's rather bitter screenplay.
  14. Domestic Violence
    The picture itself is about, yes, cycles, and as tiresome as that sounds, 10 minutes into the film you'll be white-knuckled and unable to look away.
  15. Marion Bridge
    Remarkable for its seamless ensemble performances.
  16. Thirteen
    For all its narrative glitches and its homemade quality, Thirteen evokes the rhythm, texture and tone of Nina's world in a way that a more carefully scripted film never could.
  17. Berlin Babylon
    Babylon is about architecture as a balm, and this is a particularly good time for such a film.
  18. Acts of Worship
    It's about individuals, not about sensations. If the characters' backgrounds are not examined in detail, the movie still conveys an intimate sense of who they are and their emotional connections.
  19. El bonaerense
    Powerful sweat-stained swatch of Argentine neo-realism.
  20. Raja
    What distinguishes Raja from every other movie to contemplate the treacherous intersection of passion, avarice and power is its unsettling emotional honesty. The two central performances are so spontaneous and mercurial that the reckless flirtation seems to be unfolding before your eyes.
  21. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    Lagaan may look naïve; it is anything but. This is a movie that knows its business — pleasing a broad, popular audience -- and goes about it with savvy professionalism and genuine flair.
  22. A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
    A cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.
  23. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    As these tumultuous events play out in the film... they generate the suspense of a smaller-scale "Seven Days in May."
  24. Small Voices
    This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.
  25. People Say I'm Crazy
    Very well edited by Laura C. Murray and set to an effective score by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, People Say I'm Crazy is a small film but an extremely affecting one.
  26. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    Does an impressive job of relating the complicated history of the war and of filling in the background.
  27. Titanic Town
    In its harshly realistic scenes... it stirs your blood.
  28. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Best and most touching when it shows how willing punk is to eat its young.
  29. Last Dance
    One of the thrills of the movie is watching the improvisatory trial-and-error process as the dancers explore psychological themes, contorting their graceful, amazingly limber bodies into visual representations of relationships and emotional states.
  30. Ae Fond Kiss...
    For the most part, Paul Laverty's screenplay and the strong, naturalistic performances lend it a specificity that sets it apart.
  31. Cinévardaphoto
    The unutterably charming Cinévardaphoto brings together three short works by the filmmaker Agnès Varda, one shot in digital video, the others on celluloid.
  32. March of the Penguins
    This sentimental but riveting film has no qualms about playing on our emotions.
  33. Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing
    "For my vision of the cinema," Orson Welles once said, "editing is not simply one aspect. It is the aspect." According to Edge Codes.com, a wonderfully informative new documentary, what was true for Welles's cinema is true for the medium as a whole.
  34. Finding Eleazar
    If Mr. Shicoff ultimately comes across as a short-tempered, egotistical prima donna, the upshot of all the fuss is worth it: his Viennese performance is transcendent.
  35. State of Fear
    Pamela Yates's harrowing documentary chronicles 20 years of terror, brutality and repression.
  36. The Real Dirt on Farmer John
    Offers one man's extraordinary life as a gateway to a larger history of tragedy and transition. It's an unflinching account of what farming takes -- and, more important, what it gives back.
  37. Sisters in Law
    When the right thing is done, it is uplifting in any context. Sisters in Law positively soars.
  38. Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela
    A fascinating glimpse not just of the early campaigns of the African National Congress, but also of the way childhood memories can obscure larger truths.
  39. House of Sand
    At first House of Sand may seem like a stark tale of survival, but a surprisingly lush and colorful romance blossoms in its bleak and gorgeous desert setting.
  40. Home
    Home brilliantly illuminates the invisible damage inflicted by years of deprivation. When survival hinges on trusting no one but yourself, the kindness of strangers can seem too good to be true.
  41. The Decay of Fiction
    If there were more experimental films as entertaining as The Decay of Fiction, Pat O’Neill's luminous Hollywood ghost story, the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public.
  42. 51 Birch Street
    Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.
  43. Chats perchés
    One can never get enough of this prodigiously talented octogenarian artist and his bestiary.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    The filmmakers have loftier goals, though, and in the end their existential tabloid style justifies itself. Abduction isn't about what happened, but about the painful introspection that is sparked by not knowing.
  45. Stolen Childhoods
    Harrowing yet hopeful film.
  46. The Color of Olives
    Using only natural light, Ms. Rivas and Mr. Sarhandi frame everything with an artistry that belies the difficulty of their working conditions, creating a film as unhurried and dignified as the Amer family itself.
  47. Guru
    Given a rich, multidimensional role, Mr. Bachchan ably seizes on its abundant opportunities.
  48. In the Pit
    With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Friday
    Epic and raw, Black Friday is cut from the same bloody cloth as "Salvador" and "Munich."
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tazza: The High Rollers
    Bet on Tazza to entertain; you can't lose.
  51. Blockade
    It all has a ghostly feel, like eerie murmurs during a séance: the static of history heard on a short-wave radio.
  52. Daratt
    The film has the feel of a gift. Particularly noteworthy are Mr. Haroun's eloquent silences, visual and aural.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Los Muertos
    Like a slowed-down, more realistic and psychologically penetrating cousin of a Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick film, Los Muertos is primarily concerned with the rhythms and textures of life.
  54. Surviving Picasso
    Freed from the slavishness of most authorized biography, the film makers try bold strokes.
  55. Private Fears in Public Places
    The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.
  56. Stephanie Daley
    Without standing on a soapbox Stephanie Daley suggests a tragic gender gap between men who judge and women who feel.
  57. Diggers
    A quintessential American independent movie, Diggers isn't going to change the history of cinema. But it has integrity. It feels like life.
  58. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
    Mr. Tsai's films are held together internally, and connected one to another, by an elusive, insistent logic that is easier to recognize than to describe. But once you do start to recognize it, each new movie offers passage to an exotic place that feels, uncannily, like home.
  59. Brand Upon the Brain!
    Delirious, ingenious, often very funny and strangely touching film.
  60. Private Property
    Private Property embraces the banal and the monstrous, and affords Ms. Huppert opportunity to astonish rather than overwhelm.
  61. Trust
    Though Mr. Hartley's films are richly detailed, there are no frills or grace notes. Such work risks being too blunt, but Trust comes through.
  62. A Man of No Importance
    A Man of No Importance is a small film with far more charm than its premise might suggest. It is acted with great warmth and wit by an ideal cast.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Palms
    The term "sports film" doesn't do justice to the director Szabolcs Hajdu's movie White Palms, a punishing, beautiful drama.
  64. In Between Days
    Sensitive, modest, thrillingly self-assured first feature by So Yong Kim, was one of the standouts of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival -- exactly the kind of thoughtful, independent work one hopes to find there and too rarely does.
  65. Over the GW
    A disturbing look at reprogramming that masquerades as rehabilitation. Having been forced to drink the Kool-Aid, Mr. Gaglia has produced a work that's as much an act of emesis as of filmmaking.
  66. Joshua
    Poised self-consciously between art and entertainment, Joshua offers imaginative staging and some superb performances.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crossing the Line
    So fascinating that Crossing the Line is riveting.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Macbeth
    For four centuries William Shakespeare’s plays have been reinvented to fit contemporary sensibilities. But few recent efforts can match the Australian writer and director Geoffrey Wright’s brutal and thrilling new version.
  69. In Paris
    Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Exiled
    The movie is consistently engrossing and sometimes touching, thanks to its hard yet subtle characterizations and Mr. To’s refusal to condescend.
  71. Half Moon
    Fateful and funny, haunting and magical.
  72. Still Life
    A modern master of postmodern discontent, Jia Zhang-ke is among the most strikingly gifted filmmakers working today whom you have probably never heard of.
  73. Alice's House
    Chico Teixeira’s languid, libidinous Alice’s House is the best argument against marriage and motherhood to appear in many a year.
  74. Jar City
    Jar City is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality.
  75. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    The film is by turns cranky, funny, wistful and resolute.
  76. Boarding Gate
    Even in Boarding Gate, a modestly scaled, self-consciously tawdry exercise in genre appropriation, Mr. Assayas manages to say more about what it is to be human -- to desire, to fear, to be alone -- than most filmmakers say in a lifetime.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shotgun Stories
    The film is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture.
  78. Stuff and Dough
    The brilliance of Stuff and Dough is that it wraps this powerful, disturbing drama in an anecdote from ordinary life. As is often the case in recent Romanian movies, the acting is so accomplished as to be invisible.
  79. The Tracey Fragments
    In the hands of a more literal-minded filmmaker The Tracey Fragments might well have been dreary and unbearable, a chronicle of florid self-pity justified by arbitrary cruelty. Instead it is fierce, enigmatic and affecting.
  80. Before I Forget
    An unblinking portrait of a complicated, solitary gay man who has outlived his working years.
  81. Mad Detective
    If the insanely inventive and entertaining Mad Detective weren't so weird -- and in Cantonese -- hordes of action geeks would be lining the block to see it.
  82. Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    A lovely, drifty first feature that feels less like a documentary and more like an act of rapturous devotion.
  83. A Secret
    Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.
  84. All of Us
    This powerful, conceptually sure film is relevant beyond the concerns of the moment as both a model of documentary method and compassionate social filmmaking.
  85. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Generous in spirit and nimble in technique, this riveting documentary about the Republican operative (who died of a brain tumor in 1991) reveals a scrappy genius rife with contradictions.
  86. Cargo 200
    Art house meets grind house in Cargo 200, Alexey Balabanov’s morbidly compelling thriller set in the Soviet Union.
  87. Guest of Cindy Sherman
    At once a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse, bittersweet autobiography and witty trip down art-world memory lane, Guest of Cindy Sherman isn't out to settle scores or exploit access, public or otherwise.
  88. Shall We Kiss?
    The players in this mouth-watering Gallic soufflé are so attractive, well mannered and comfortably grounded in the bourgeois world that you needn’t fear for their well-being, minor heartaches notwithstanding.
  89. Still Walking
    This is life as it’s lived, not dreamed. And this is a family bound not only by sorrow, but also by a shared history that emerges in 114 calibrated minutes and ends with a wallop.
  90. Big Fan
    A spasmodically funny and bleak film about the love that speaks its name.
  91. Wolke Neun
    All the more disappointing, then, when what has been a celebration of last-ditch passion slides abruptly into a cautionary tale. Until that point the movie's refreshingly unbiased tone allows us to make our own moral judgments, teasing us with the possibility that, occasionally, the scarlet woman can escape unbranded. I, for one, was rooting for her.
  92. The Maid
    It takes Mr. Silva a while to finish his story, but the ending of The Maid is so intelligently handled and so generously and honestly conceived, it proves well worth the wait.
  93. Adela
    A gem of contemporary neo-realism, the movie offers a ground-level view of a poor but vital community where many residents survive by scavenging bits of recyclable steel and plastic.
  94. Collapse
    His well-rehearsed rhetoric is shockingly persuasive, and since the majority of his premises are verifiable, any weakness in his argument lies in inferences so terrifying that reasonable listeners may find themselves taking his advice and stocking up on organic seeds. (Those with no access to land can, postapocalypse, use them as currency.)
  95. Uncertainty
    A taut, skillful exercise in cinematic clockwork.
  96. Big River Man
    As his attention to detail and beauty shots prove, Mr. Maringouin has a terrific eye: he brings you close to Mr. Strel, sometimes within panting distance, without forgetting the larger, lovelier world.
  97. In Search of Memory
    It is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.
  98. Room and a Half
    Despite its moments of pathos and its expressions of homesickness, A Room and a Half, is an uplifting comedy. Like Fellini’s screen reminiscences, it is suffused with a hearty appreciation of the world’s absurdity, along with a hungry appreciation of its beauty.
  99. Daddy Longlegs
    He (Lenny) is completely appalling, and also completely himself, a kind of mad, disturbing integrity that is both matched and mitigated by the honesty of this lovely, hair-raising film.
  100. Still Bill
    Much of the biographical documentary Still Bill pleasant and even moving.
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