The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The Nativity Story
    At its best, The Nativity Story shares with "Hail Mary" an interest in finding a kernel of realism in the old story of a pregnant teenager in hard times. Buried in the pageantry, in other words, is an interesting movie.
  2. 3 Needles
    Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles, might have been to the AIDS epidemic what "Traffic" was to the drug trade.
  3. 10 Items or Less
    This is a picture with nothing to prove, and not all that much to say, but its modesty and good humor make it hard to resist.
  4. Off the Black
    Off the Black is so much Mr. Nolte’s movie that it couldn’t exist without him. His character is the latest in a long line of Hemingway-esque ruins, marinated in beer and testosterone, who have become Mr. Nolte’s specialty.
  5. The Painted Veil
    Whether through craft or constitution, Mr. Norton invests Walter with a petty cruelty that makes his character’s emotional thaw and Kitty’s predicament all the more poignant.
  6. The Pursuit of Happyness
    It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness.
  7. The Secret Life of Words
    The exquisitely coordinated performances elicit an empathy as powerful as anything I can remember feeling in a recent film.
  8. Rocky Balboa
    Surprisingly Rocky Balboa, is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It's all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable.
  9. Comedy of Power
    As ever, Mr. Chabrol’s style is delicate and precise. Comedy of Power is not his deepest or most ambitious film, and its stance of knowing resignation in the face of corruption can feel a little glib. But Ms. Huppert's ferocity compensates for the director's detachment; no French actress is as riveting to watch once the gloves come off.
  10. Freedom Writers
    In Freedom Writers Hilary Swank uses neediness to fine effect in a film with a strong emotional tug and smartly laid foundation.
  11. Unconscious
    If Unconscious consistently overplays its hand, its fusion of a Sherlock Holmes-style detective story (Alma is the master sleuth, and Salvador her Dr. Watson) with a delirious bedroom farce in the spirit of early Pedro Almodóvar is frequently very funny.
  12. Ever Since the World Ended
    Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, Ever Since the World Ended features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones.
  13. God Grew Tired of Us
    Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn't leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.
  14. Tears of the Black Tiger
    The intoxicating madness of Tears of the Black Tiger is in the end too willed, too deliberate, to be entirely divine.
  15. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Nicolas Rossier's cohesive documentary covers this complex incident - and Haiti's deteriorating condition since Mr. Aristide's exile - in a taut, well-balanced 82 minutes.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    G.I. Jesus
    May be a mixed bag, but it is so impressive in so many ways that it demands to be taken seriously. It's a black comedy about a returning Iraq war veteran named Jesús (Joe Arquette) that aims for an absurd, satirical tone (think "Dr. Strangelove" by way of "Coming Home") but rarely hits the mark.
  17. Puccini for Beginners
    It all looks easy when it's carried off this smoothly. But as any number of stilted duds can attest, applying a Philip Barry or Woody Allen sensibility to 21st-century New Yorkers in their 30s is as delicate a craft as diamond cutting.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burning Annie
    A thoroughly professional comedy, well paced, attractively photographed and smartly acted.
  19. Avenue Montaigne
    Avenue Montaigne is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.
  20. Close to Home
    The movie, written and directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager, is really a study of people coping with excruciating boredom and the absurd aspects of military life.
  21. The Astronaut Farmer
    The opening shots, of Farmer on horseback in his space suit, hint at a strangeness that the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, but it does have a visual freshness that makes the bromides and clichés palatable.
  22. Amazing Grace
    The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance.
  23. Starter for 10
    Starter for Ten offsets its rite-of-passage clichés with relaxed performances and an extremely likable lead.
  24. The Taste of Tea
    A bit of patience is required to get through The Taste of Tea, but patience is often rewarded, and it certainly is by this droll and oddly touching film.
  25. Wild Tigers I Have Known
    Like "Twelve and Holding," another film from last year's New Directors series, Wild Tigers achingly sympathizes with the desperate lengths an obsessed adolescent will go to in pursuit of love. As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of "Tea and Sympathy," the future teachers of Logan's life lessons will "be kind."
  26. The Exterminating Angels
    One of Mr. Brisseau's subjects is the volatility of desire, the way the path of erotic curiosity can swerve from satisfaction into recrimination and confusion. A porno-philosopher in the venerable French tradition, he blends a frank appeal to the audience's nether regions with some teasing attention to its mind.
  27. I Think I Love My Wife
    Mr. Rock has not only done his best work as a director and screenwriter but has also made an unusually insightful and funny mainstream American movie about the predicaments of modern marriage.
  28. Shooter
    This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Mr. Fuqua, who happens to be surprisingly good with actors, does have a knack for chaos.
  29. Iluminados por el fuego
    Blessed by Fire, a bitter remembrance of the Falklands War in 1982, captures battlefield chaos and confusion with a visceral force you won't forget.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    The movie's wild performances and droll humor are tough to resist.
  31. Boy Culture
    A slick and absorbing drama.
  32. Color Me Kubrick
    Even if it doesn't add up to more than a fitfully amusing collection of comic sketches, Color Me Kubrick is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame.
  33. First Snow
    A noirish thriller that revels in ominous visual moods, deepened by Cliff Martinez's spare, shivering guitar score, this heartland "Appointment in Samarra" is a mind-teaser that speaks the flat, evasive language of its seedy characters.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Journey from the Fall
    The film depicts one family's endurance in sturdy, old-movie style, with sweeping camerawork, a monumental and occasionally intrusive orchestral score, gorgeous yet forbidding natural vistas and enough shocking tragedies, brazen escapes and crowd-pleasing acts of defiance to fuel several action-adventure pictures.
  35. Blades of Glory
    Fast, light, frequently funny comedy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lookout
    Mr. Frank’s screenplay for The Lookout was long considered one of Hollywood's great unproduced scripts. The end product doesn't justify that buildup...Still, there's a lot to like here, and the film's bleak setting and empathetic tone add interest to what could have been a by-the-numbers affair.
  37. After the Wedding
    A fine and, on a scene-by-scene basis, often better than fine, if effectively unadventurous work.
  38. Grindhouse
    The obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives Grindhouse its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.
  39. Ping Pong
    Stylistically stunning and completely nuts, Ping Pong is nevertheless perceptive about male social hierarchies and the benefits of knowing your place.
  40. Red Road
    In the arresting Red Road, the dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has evolved from a grim fantasy of totalitarianism into a banal fact of life.
  41. The TV Set
    At times The TV Set seems to unfold almost entirely without exaggeration.
  42. Rock the Bells
    A fascinating glimpse of a dreamer and a music culture that has always depended on dreams.
  43. Disturbia
    There are no big surprises, but the jumps and jolts are well timed and the overall mood is at once grisly and good-natured -- more diverting than disturbing.
  44. Lonely Hearts
    As fictional characters in a movie that is fetishistic in its attention to period detail, Mr. Leto and Ms. Hayek work well together as an unsavory couple two rungs down the social ladder from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity."
  45. Year of the Dog
    It's funny ha-ha but firmly in touch with its downer side, which means it's also funny in a kind of existential way.
  46. Fracture
    The screenwriters, Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers, hit the customary thriller notes with a touch of humor, and the director, Gregory Hoblit (who worked similar terrain in "Primal Fear"), arranges those notes into a catchy, insistent rhythm.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    It achieves the documentary format’s basic goal of illuminating history while also demonstrating, through filmmaking choices, how an artist’s style reveals his or her personality.
  48. Jindabyne
    The real flaw is that the movie's best features -- the aching clarity of its central performances -- threaten to be lost in a wilderness of metaphor and mystification.
  49. Les amitiés maléfiques
    As a group portrait of apprentice intellectuals the film has an almost documentary accuracy. It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L'iceberg
    Its simultaneously silly and grave tone finds humor in the characters' delusions and obsessions while celebrating their uniqueness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Casting About
    A solid documentary about how art is made.
  52. In Search of Mozart
    An adamantly linear, myth-busting stride through a prodigiously talented life.
  53. Flanders
    Whether you like or loathe Mr. Dumont’s movies, his unsettling vision of humanity stripped of cultural finery feels profoundly truthful.
  54. Bug
    The escalating hysteria and grisly set pieces of Bug may strain credulity, but Ms. Judd has never been more believable as a woman condemned to attract the wrong kind of man.
  55. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    The cannibals, coconuts and landlocked locations have been replaced by the high-seas high jinks that made the first film so enjoyable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Radiant City
    The cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin's eerie, sometimes monumental images italicize the experts' statements, making the suburbs seem like an asphalt-and-Sheetrock dreamscape where democracy goes to die.
  57. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    Though it is modest, almost anecdotal, in scale, 12:08 East of Bucharest is also characterized by a precise and sneaky formal wit.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You're Gonna Miss Me
    Luckily, the director Keven McAlester keeps Mr. Erickson's humanity front and center. He lets music critics and musicians praise Mr. Erickson's smiling banshee voice (which influenced Janis Joplin) and pioneering use of feedback, but he doesn't insist on his subject's genius or oversell his importance.
  59. When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan
    As a music document and as a labor of unabashed love, the nonfiction feature Gypsy Caravan could hardly be better; as a movie, it could stand some improvement.
  60. Manufactured Landscapes
    Absorbing if unsettling documentary.
  61. 1408
    The movie is most effective in its early scenes of prickly menace, and while the Dolphin is no Overlook (the haunted hotel in "The Shining"), its old-world creepiness is exactly right.
  62. Black Sheep
    Once you have seen a sheep munching on a bloody human leg, you may think twice about your next leg of lamb. On the other hand maybe you'll be inspired to seek vengeance. To provoke one of these responses -- vegetarianism or a defiant meat eating -- may be the point of this odd, amusing film.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Broken English
    A well-acted, smartly directed film that’s depressing because it could have amounted to so much more. It departs from the studio-financed romantic-comedy template in just one, unfortunately fatal respect: it makes a point of pride out of rejecting cliché, then swoons into its embrace.
  64. You Kill Me
    Straight-up ridiculous, but it's also consistently funny and nicely played by a well-complemented cast that finds its collective groove and never misses a beat.
  65. Sicko
    Sicko is the least controversial and most broadly appealing of Mr. Moore’s movies. (It is also, perhaps improbably, the funniest and the most tightly edited.) The argument it inspires will mainly be about the nature of the cure, and it is here that Mr. Moore’s contribution will be most provocative and also, therefore, most useful.
  66. Live Free or Die Hard
    Bruce Willis is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rescue Dawn
    For the most part, Rescue Dawn is a marvel: a satisfying genre picture that challenges the viewer’s expectations.
  68. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    A sleek, swift and exciting adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s longest novel to date.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hula Girls
    You’ve seen this film many times. It always works.
  70. Interview
    Vaporous and chilled to freezing, Interview lacks a single honest moment, but it does have plenty of diverting ones.
  71. My Best Friend
    A comforting, sentimental tale of a kind that would be insufferably maudlin if made in Hollywood and unbearably affectless if it showed up at Sundance. Somehow it’s easier to take in French.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Reservations
    The emotional details of Kate, Nick and Zoe’s journey are surprising, honest and life-size, and the film’s determination to present their predicament sympathetically, without appealing to retrograde ideals of femininity and motherhood, makes it notable, and in some ways unique.
  73. The Willow Tree
    The Iranian director Majid Majidi’s sad, soulful film The Willow Tree is his second movie to explore blindness and sight on multiple levels.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Them
    The movie is scarier if you know nothing about it going in. It has no larger agenda. It’s not an allegory, a satire or a commentary. It’s just a modestly relentless suspense picture that propels its characters through a series of dreamscapes.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Descent
    Hard to watch but essential to see, Descent is at once realistic and rhetorical, and driven throughout by righteous anger that comes from an honest place.
  76. Rocket Science
    The surest sign of the movie’s integrity is that it resists any temptation to build the story to a climactic debate.
  77. Stardust
    Michelle Pfeiffer is Lamia, as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented.
  78. Mr. Bean's Vacation
    The kids at my screening loved it. Besides, at its heart, Mr. Atkinson’s movie, a huge hit overseas, speaks in an international language.
  79. Ladrón que roba a ladrón
    An effervescent comedy coasting on the charisma of its stars.
  80. Sunflower
    Like Douglas Sirk without the throw pillows, Sunflower is a shamelessly old-fashioned melodrama performed with such sincerity that resistance is futile.
  81. 3:10 to Yuma
    More likely to be recalled as a moderately satisfying entertainment than remembered as a classic.
  82. The Bubble
    Mr. Fox may be a romantic, but he understands that love is rarely all you need.
  83. Ira & Abby
    Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.
  84. The Last Winter
    Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film The Last Winter, crawling through the hallways and howling into the dread night.
  85. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    Laid back and affectionate, “Cheese” is the movie version of a dear friend you could spend all day with.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    The movie is so likable that it glides over its many plot holes... The film’s direction, by Andy Fickman, is raucous but never crass, and the affable Mr. Johnson is committed to every moment.
    • The New York Times
  88. The Kingdom
    The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down.
  89. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    As the latest tribute -- Jim Brown’s loving documentary, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song -- makes clear, he’s still busy, still angry, still hopeful, still singing.
  90. Lake of Fire
    One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For the Bible Tells Me So
    There is no denying that the film, however inelegant, fills a need. The inevitable DVD should be packaged in a plain cardboard sleeve, so that viewers can carry it in their pockets and, if confronted by a homophobe, hand it over and say, “Watch this, then get back to me.”
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out of the Blue
    The director confronts horror without wallowing in it, a strategy befitting a film that’s not about how people die, but how they live.
  93. Dan in Real Life
    Dan in Real Life is neither wildly farcical nor mockingly cruel, but rather, for the most part, winningly gentle and observant.
  94. Canvas
    A movie that rings emotionally true, despite structural contrivances and dim, washed-out color.
  95. Why Did I Get Married?
    More than anything, a Tyler Perry movie is an interactive experience, and Why Did I Get Married? is no exception. At the screening I attended, it was often difficult to hear the dialogue between bouts of enthusiastic applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”
  96. American Gangster
    Greatness hovers just outside American Gangster, knocking, angling to be let in.
  97. Bee Movie
    The real fun is the insect shtick.
  98. Darfur Now
    What Darfur Now offers is a collective vision of actions, small and large, taken on many fronts, to end the crisis. The movie is a quiet, methodical call to action.
  99. War Dance
    War/Dance, in spite of its slickness, is an honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance in an African tribal culture.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    Despite its laid-back script, “Smiley Face” is as prankishly political as Mr. Araki’s “Doom Generation,” evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »