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. My Dead Friend Zoe
    Most of the filmmaking in My Dead Friend Zoe feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast.
  2. The Flower of My Secret
    [Almodovar’s] returns to the mordant but sympathetic comedy of his early, best work. Though the new film is not as antic as "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," it is funny and free of the nasty undertone that has made him seem tired and tiresome lately.
  3. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
    “Recorder” doesn’t explore the extent to which Marion’s original project of analysis was subsumed by the compulsion to tape everything. But her taping of everything created an irreproducible archive that is enlightening and the stuff of madness.
  4. Lovely & Amazing
    Holofcener's smart, acidic comedy Lovely and Amazing zeroes in on contemporary narcissism and its fallout with a relentless, needling accuracy.
  5. Knafayim Shvurot
    The movie's sense of emotional claustrophobia is underscored by a complete lack of interest in Middle Eastern politics, or in anything outside the troubled family unit.
  6. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    The proto-punk warriors known as the MC5 left a dent that outlasts their mostly negligible record sales, and the director's curiosity is piqued by the group's sociological impact.
  7. Joy Ride
    Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.
  8. Lambert & Stamp
    A loving, freewheeling new documentary by James D. Cooper, tells this origin story with panache and nostalgia.
  9. Stan & Ollie
    Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly deliver dynamite performances that capture the expressions and physicality of the star comedians without ever descending into caricature. They never strain for laughs but are consistently amusing.
  10. Undine
    Undine is ultimately more enigmatic than most of Petzold’s work. It is also, like its title character, eerily beautiful. While it could well serve as a high-end date movie, it’s also something more.
  11. Risky Business
    Risky Business improves as it goes along.
  12. Charlie's Country
    Unlike those in many art-house releases, this wilderness is not an abstract arena for playing out alienation but a living, breathing land with deep, abiding significance for Charlie and his fellow Aborigines cast adrift.
  13. Under the Tree
    Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film’s tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.
  14. Attack the Block
    This fabulously inventive debut feature, written and directed by the British comedian Joe Cornish, never flags.
  15. The Fate of Lee Khan (1973)
    Once the players are established, the movie falls into a sweet lather, rinse, repeat mode of scenes, alternating character intrigue and fighting.
  16. Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
    It’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.
  17. Get Me Roger Stone
    Topicality is all or at least a large part of the movie’s draw.
  18. Cul-de-sac
    Is Mr. Polanski endeavoring to tell us anything about life or crime or perversion in this complex and terminally morbid joke?If he is, I sure don't get it — except maybe that people are sick, that even good humor isn't funny and that social sterility is.
  19. The Count of Monte Cristo
    Refusing to pander to restless derrières, they’ve given this big, bounding, beautifully cinematic swashbuckler almost three hours to breathe. Yet their pacing is so frisky — and Celia Lafitedupont’s editing so elegant — your derrière is unlikely to complain.
  20. The Wolf of Wall Street
    This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess, but it is never less than wide-awake.
  21. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    Commendably, the film, narrated by John Leguizamo, sugarcoats nothing, and the people involved - the players, their trainers, their parents, the scouts - are remarkably forthright.
  22. Notes on Blindness
    The tone of the narration is so wrenchingly honest that the film never lapses into self-pity or relies on mystical platitudes.
  23. Zombi Child
    The movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal; Zombi Child is fueled by insinuation and fascination.
  24. 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.
  25. Diamond Tongues
    The prickly tone is a difficult balancing act, and Diamond Tongues may settle for being a softer-hearted film than its most cynical scenes portend. But it has a palpable affection for Toronto’s cultural scene and for Ms. Goldstein.
  26. Nothing Lasts Forever
    That marketing campaigns are built on fallacies isn’t exactly revelatory, but in pairing his excavation of the diamond myth with new inquiries into how the industry is evolving (and how it’s stagnating), Kohn strikes on something valuable.
  27. My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
    Cousins’s attuned eye and ear keep us interested afresh in the Hitchcock magic.
  28. Dark Horse
    Dark Horse is a canny package that uses the classic structure of the sports-underdog story to deliver a glowing ode to community pride and the merits of collective action over individual gain.
  29. Sweet Land
    The film’s guileless, heartfelt style veers perilously close to corniness at times, but the superb cast dares you to mock.
  30. One Cut, One Life
    As much as the film is shadowed by a keen awareness of mortality, One Cut, One Life often pulses with an almost ecstatic vitality. In its vision of human existence, life is as messy and unpredictable as it is precious.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    House of Usher
    Under the low-budget circumstances, Vincent Price and Myrna Fahey should not be blamed for portraying the decadent Ushers with arch affectation, nor Mark Damon held to account for the traces of Brooklynese that creep into his stiffly costumed impersonation of the mystified interloper.
  32. The Two Popes
    The actors draw out both the spiritual and the psychological dimensions of their characters. The interplay, a duet with sweet and eccentric harmonies, is fascinating to observe, even as it undermines the overall structure of the narrative.
  33. Muscle Shoals
    At once overstuffed with interviews and intellectually underdeveloped, the movie charts the area’s music industry and what is lyrically if elusively called the Muscle Shoals sound.
  34. Honey
    Honey, the impressive debut feature by Ms. Golino, sustains a contemplative mood with undersaturated cinematography that evokes the world as perceived through a light mist.
  35. Mala Mala
    While affirming the dignity of its subjects, Mala Mala shows there’s little glamour attached to the pursuit of selfhood.
  36. Notturno
    The past two decades of documentary film have produced many anatomies of history that attempt to summarize several millenniums, but Rosi’s borderless tableaus bring out another kind of truth in faces, places and pure feeling.
  37. Misery
    It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster. Misery is just good enough that one wishes it were far better. The ideas are there, but they become lost in the heavy-handed treatment.
  38. 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.
  39. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.
  40. Win Win
    Win Win goes a bit soft in places, protecting its characters from serious danger or tough moral reckoning. But the film's niceness is also central to its appeal, because nearly all of the characters are people you enjoy spending time with.
  41. 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.
  42. A Cry in the Dark
    The screenplay for A Cry in the Dark, adapted by Robert Caswell and Mr. Schepisi from a book by John Bryson, isn't perfect, but it provides Miss Streep with the kind of raw material that allows her to create a character who, while being perfectly ordinary, is always unexpectedly special.
  43. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Mostly, the documentary is a fond portrait of how one man nurtured his artistic temperament and risked being misunderstood — sometimes by his own family.
  44. Clouds of May
    The film's shapeliness and depth are not immediately apparent; for much of its running time, it feels diffuse and anecdotal, but in retrospect you appreciate the subtlety and heft of the story, as well as the tricky profundity of Mr. Ceylan's approach.
  45. Stamped from the Beginning
    In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.
  46. Heaven Knows What
    The Safdie brothers capture a density of activity as endemic to the city as it is to Harley’s daily hustle. By tapping into her routines, instead of framing her along solely tragic lines, the filmmakers fashion a diary of experience that’s all the more absorbing.
  47. The Son of Joseph
    The Son of Joseph can be trying in its whimsy, yet it builds to a lovely finale that evokes the Bible, the French Resistance and the surreal.
  48. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    This is synergy of a high order.
  49. Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    Crammed with enough melodrama to fill several soap operas.
  50. The Cider House Rules
    The author's fantastical world of wonders and the director's tender-hearted compassion mesh into what is easily the finest film realization of an Irving novel.
  51. 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.
  52. Croupier
    Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen in waves whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.
  53. Girl on the Bridge
    Leconte's visual instincts are so impressive that they outstrip his story, leaving us flushed and dazzled, but also, as after a long night of champagne and baccarat (to say nothing of other irresponsible pleasures), hungry, tired, and homesick.
  54. Free Time
    Burgess carries this succinct (and arguably slight, narratively disjointed) comedy without making you want to strangle his often willfully naïve character.
  55. Fyre
    Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.
  56. Last Summer
    Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.
  57. Félicité
    Mr. Gomis’s cinematic style is spectacularly multifaceted.
  58. The Crucible
    Handsome and impassioned, vigorously staged by the director of ''The Madness of King George,'' this ''Crucible'' is a reminder of the play's wide reach, which goes well beyond witch trials in any century. As adapted gamely by the playwright into a screenplay that takes advantage of scenic backgrounds and photogenic stars, ''The Crucible'' now speaks to subtler forms of dishonesty and opportunism than it did before.
  59. Goodbye to Language 3D
    It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.
  60. Time to Choose
    Charles Ferguson’s latest documentary, Time to Choose, is a sobering polemic about global warming that balances familiar predictions of planetary doom with a survey of innovations in renewable energy technology that hold out some hope for the future.
  61. In Flames
    Kahn manages to assemble the story in a way that escapes feeling like a series of object lessons.
  62. The French Dispatch
    Anderson expresses a fan’s zeal and a collector’s greed for both canonical works and weird odds and ends, a love for old modernisms that is undogmatic and unsentimental. Which is not to say unfeeling.
  63. Under The Wire
    While the movie is rightfully more interested in lauding her bravery than highlighting her sometimes abrasive personality, these small moments help to humanize a portrait that can at times seem more awestruck than enlightening.
  64. 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.
  65. Blue Velvet
    As fascinating as it is freakish. It confirms Mr. Lynch's stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.
  66. Infernal Affairs
    The sophistication of the stylized minimalism here in Infernal Affairs is dazzling.
  67. Bernie
    Gaudily vibrant, at times morbidly funny.
  68. Jinn
    Jinn may end a little too neatly after challenging so many of the conventions of its genre, but it’s easy enough to look past.
  69. Road to Morocco
    A lampoon of all pictures having to do with exotic romance, played by a couple of wise guys who can make a gag do everything but lay eggs.
  70. Chasing Ice
    The film doesn't just serve up Mr. Balog's amazing and undeniably convincing imagery. It also records his personal struggles as knee problems threaten his ability to hike the difficult terrain to get the shots he wants.
  71. Bridesmaids
    The movie is smart about a lot of things, including the vital importance of female friendships. And it's nice to see so many actresses taking up space while making fun of something besides other women.
  72. Fever Dream
    Lllosa’s sensually shot film takes the story of a mother facing strange danger and casts a spell that feels like being dropped into the character’s mind.
  73. Benedetta
    Verhoeven brings more vitality to his work than many filmmakers half his age, and his screenplay (with David Birke) is a tasteless hoot, gleefully cramming the frame with blood, fornication and flagellations galore.
  74. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    A more concise and affecting summation of the Tibetan crisis would be hard to imagine.
  75. El Norte
    Not exactly a great film, but it's a very good one that, through the devices of fiction, manages to provoke a number of healthily contradictory feelings about the world we all inhabit at the moment.
  76. The Invisible Woman
    You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of The Invisible Woman and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film.
  77. Tully
    Tully isn’t really interested in the sustaining joys of female bonding. It has a message to deliver, which is as sincere and decent as it is obvious: Mothers need help, sometimes serious help. Which is why it’s strange that as Marlo very visibly sinks into postpartum depression — you can see Ms. Theron pulling Marlo deeper and deeper inside — the movie pretends that her burden is somehow too hidden for anyone to notice.
  78. Elizabeth
    This Elizabeth is presented as a glamorously stressed-out modern woman who must cope with a super-intense case of having it all.
  79. Born in Flames
    Born in Flames, while inventive, is also much too diffuse and overcrowded. Only those who already share Miss Borden's ideas are apt to find her film persuasive.
  80. Separated
    If Separated is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity.
  81. Pleasure
    Excess is the sine qua non of porn, so that’s expected. What is more surprising — and welcome — is how Thyberg engages feminist issues like a woman’s agency while making you laugh, freaking you out and prompting you to squirm.
  82. The Muppets
    The rainbow connection is a smooth, unbroken arch.
  83. Time Out of Mind
    Mr. Gere is fascinating to observe in this role, partly because he refuses to solicit sympathy, or even attention. Time Out of Mind is an intimate portrait of a man caught between the desire to be left alone and a need for human connection.
  84. Darkest Hour
    Churchill’s resolve, like the bravery of the soldiers, airmen and ordinary Britons in “Dunkirk,” is offered not as a rebuke to the current generation, but rather as a sop, an easy and complacent fantasy of Imperial gumption and national unity.
  85. The Automat
    If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.
  86. An Inconvenient Truth
    As unsettling as it can be, it is also intellectually exhilarating, and, like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study.
  87. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    Audiard's superb remake improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth.
  88. Twelve Monkeys
    Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.
  89. Nimona
    Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.
  90. Lady Vengeance
    A convoluted hodge-podge of time frames, subplots and bit player back stories.
  91. 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.
  92. 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.
  93. Kippur
    Immerses you in violence and agony, but it may leave you with a curious feeling of detachment.
  94. The Clay Bird
    Easily one of the finest pictures of 2003 or any other year.
  95. Lawless Heart
    By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.
  96. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.
  97. Shrek 2
    Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.
  98. I Shot Andy Warhol
    The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.
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