The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Billy the Kid
    Presenting neither an argument for medication nor its rejection, Billy the Kid is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man.
  2. I Am Legend
    There is something graceful and effortless about this performance (Mr. Smith's), which not only shows what it might feel like to be the last man on earth, but also demonstrates what it is to be a movie star.
  3. Youth Without Youth
    In this film Mr. Coppola blurs dreams and everyday life and suggests that through visual and narrative experimentation he has begun the search for new ways of making meaning, new holy places for him and for us. He may not have found them yet, but, then, he’s just waking up.
  4. Cassandra's Dream
    Woody Allen’s latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all.
  5. The Orphanage
    The Orphanage, a diverting, overwrought ghost story from Spain, relies on basic and durable horror movie techniques.
  6. Steep
    An undeniably impressive visual spectacle that follows the sport of extreme skiing.
  7. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    The film is more funny ha-ha than LOL; it’s a smarty-pants satire that mocks and embraces almost every cliché in the biography playbook.
  8. The Business of Being Born
    A passionate ground-level examination of home childbirth.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How She Move
    There’s nary a twist you don’t see coming. But the film’s strong acting, spectacular dance routines and culturally specific details turn clichés into catharsis. It’s the sort of film that sends you home with a spring in your step.
  10. Caramel
    You are likely to remember this charming film, directed by Nadine Labaki, less for its gently comic, mildly melodramatic plot than for its friendly and inviting atmosphere.
  11. Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert
    What you do see are diverting 3-D effects and lots of playing to the camera by Ms. Cyrus, who performs as both herself and as her television alter ego, Hannah Montana. To her credit her attire isn’t tawdry, and it appears that she can sing.
  12. Praying with Lior
    Patiently and delicately, Ms. Trachtman teases out the tricky dynamics of a family dealing with a disabled child.
  13. The Band's Visit
    Mr. Kolirin, it emerges, is wrenching comedy out of intense melancholia.
  14. Definitely, Maybe
    A nimble and winning little romance
  15. Be Kind Rewind
    In its sweet, lackadaisical way, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind illuminates the pleasures and paradoxes of movie love.
  16. The Counterfeiters
    The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.
  17. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    The performances are charming and convincing, and Mr. Joelsas does a good job of conveying Mauro’s loneliness and confusion as well as his playfulness. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation may not be terribly fresh or original, but its warm, sweet, nostalgic tone is hard to dislike.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Semi-Pro
    Semi-Pro finds the sweet spot between sports melodrama and parody, and hammers it for 90 diverting minutes.
  19. Married Life
    This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
  20. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    How light is this movie? So buoyant that even an air raid warning, signaling that this whole world is about to crumble under the blitz, can’t dampen its giddy spirits.
  21. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain is a reminder that art sometimes keeps the truth alive far better than the news.
  22. Shelter
    Coming out has rarely looked so pretty.
  23. My Brother Is an Only Child
    A lively minor addendum to the grand tradition of Italian fraternal cinema.
  24. Meduzot
    The film’s spirit is refreshingly playful and sweet.
  25. Dark Matter
    Dark Matter, with its view of cutthroat politics and competing egos inside a university, is also laudable in its refusal to soft-pedal the viciously petty side of the academic fishbowl.
  26. Street Kings
    It’s easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end.
  27. The Forbidden Kingdom
    A faithful and disarmingly earnest attempt to honor some venerable and popular Chinese cinematic traditions.
  28. The Take
    Occasionally the visuals seem overly stylized, but Mr. Furman knows enough to showcase his stars’ unvarnished performances.
  29. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.
  30. Roman de gare
    A thriller, a murder mystery and a somewhat self-conscious literary puzzle. All of that is entertaining enough, if a bit preposterous and overdone, but the twists and convolutions of the film’s beginning and end enable a middle that is dizzying domestic comedy.
  31. Standard Operating Procedure
    A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.
  32. Then She Found Me
    Then She Found Me, a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment.
  33. Fugitive Pieces
    For a tale spiked with so much torment, Fugitive Pieces feels remarkably soothing.
  34. Mister Lonely
    Mister Lonely, self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it's also more than that: it's a small, imperfect world.
  35. Son of Rambow
    A likable, lightly sticky valentine to childhood, the 1980s and the dawning of movie love, Son of Rambow was written and directed by Garth Jennings and produced by Nick Goldsmith, the duo behind the underappreciated fantasy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
  36. XXY
    If XXY is imagistically too programmatic (a scene of carrots being sliced is typical of its Freudian heavy-handedness) and devoid of humor, it never seems pruriently exploitative. It sustains an unsettling mood of ambiguity that lingers long after the final credits.
  37. Frontier(s)
    Although at times Mr. Gens veers dangerously close to the unpardonable, with images that evoke the Holocaust too strongly, Frontier(s) finally works because its shivers are as plausible as they are outrageous.
  38. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Quite a bit darker than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," both in look and in mood. It is also in some ways more satisfying.
  39. Before the Rains
    Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece Before the Rains may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy.
  40. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    Brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact.
  41. Stuck
    Stuck, while not strictly a horror film, is steeped in gore and carries a seam of mocking gallows humor as relentless as that of "Sweeney Todd."
  42. Hancock
    Hancock makes for one unexpectedly satisfying and kinky addition to Hollywood's superhero chronicles. Touching and odd, laden with genuine twists and grounded by three appealing lead performances.
  43. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    The whole affair is pulpy, jokey, sometimes touching and frequently nonsensical: a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun.
  44. The Go-Getter
    Mr. Hynes, who wrote the screenplay, seems well aware of the challenge of breathing fresh life into a familiar formula. Much of the dialogue is so quirky it sounds overheard instead of scripted. The performances are correspondingly spontaneous.
  45. Brick Lane
    Certainly touching, even heart-rending at times, and it mostly steers clear of the didacticism and sentimentality its subject matter often invites. But it never takes the full measure of its modest heroine, and makes her world a bit too small.
  46. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    In Kit’s world the absent father (a familiar theme from girls' novels including "Little Women" and "A Little Princess") is an epidemic, and the picture makes this the impetus for children's resourcefulness and emotional development.
  47. A Man Named Pearl
    Assembled without frills or fuss, A Man Named Pearl is as much a portrait of a small Southern town as of an unassuming black folk artist.
  48. Australia
    A testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.
  49. Felon
    Mr. Dorff’s hot-wired portrayal of a prisoner under physical and psychic siege gives Felon its emotional through line as Wade’s attitude metamorphoses from stunned disbelief, to terror, to despair, to fury and finally to hope.
  50. Berlin
    As a cautionary tale Lou Reed’s Berlin is an 85-minute public-service announcement that preaches "Just say no." The force of the music, however, lends this tawdry melodrama a tragic stature.
  51. Transsiberian
    Until it fizzles in an anticlimactic train crash, it is extremely entertaining.
  52. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Although Vicky Cristina trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its locations and stars -- and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply -- it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss.
  53. The House Bunny
    This particular wheel hasn't been reinvented, but at least it gets a nice fresh coat of bubblegum-pink paint and a star to pilot it with aplomb.
  54. I.O.U.S.A.
    Equal parts enlightening and alarming.
  55. I Served the King of England
    The performance of Mr. Barnev, who has the poker face and agility of a silent clown, defines the style of a film whose timing and physical comedy look back to 1920s slapstick.
  56. Traitor
    A somber, absorbing and only moderately preposterous new thriller.
  57. Mister Foe
    If the extremity of Hallam's temperament tests the limits of our sympathy as well as our credulity, Mr. Bell's ability to seem by turns sweet and scary prevents us from losing interest entirely.
  58. Ping Pong Playa
    A bright, nimble diversion, a quick-witted picture that's fast on its feet.
  59. Flow: For Love of Water
    Irena Salina's astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests.
  60. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    A gentle, pleasantly unrushed piece of moviemaking. There’s a tonic simplicity to how it gets the job done, and if the film comes off as fairly conventional stuff, it nevertheless succeeds on its own modest, middlebrow terms.
  61. The Lucky Ones
    Because the lead actors work so well together, adding depth and levels of vulnerability to fairly underwritten roles, the emotional consequences of the sense of displacement these "lucky" characters -- lucky to be alive, lucky to have met one another -- must deal with always ring true.
  62. Choke
    It adds up to an entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado.
  63. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    Regards its characters with affectionate detachment, and assures its audience that no great calamities or revelations are in store. Instead, there are a series of small crises and tiny epiphanies, all adding up to a story that courts triviality in its pursuit of charm.
  64. The Express
    If a movie of this kind didn't traffic in overstatement, it wouldn't be doing its job, which is to provide a strong dose of simple, rousing emotion.
  65. Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging -- the mind reels while watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, even as the eyes water, the temples pound and the body trembles.
  66. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.
  67. Four Christmases
    Refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.
  68. Timecrimes
    The Spanish writer and director Nacho Vigalondo has audacity to spare. Constructing a looping, economical plot and directing like a fire marshal in a flaming building, he conjures urgency and disorientation from the thinnest of air.
  69. The Tale of Despereaux
    A pleasantly immersive, beautifully animated, occasionally sleepy tale.
  70. Last Chance Harvey
    There’s something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey.
  71. Just Another Love Story
    It may not go anywhere in particular, but it is as exciting as a trip through a well-equipped, scary fun house.
  72. The Last House on the Left
    Replacing the earlier movie's more depraved sequences with sustained tension and truly unnerving editing, the director proves adept at managing mayhem in cramped spaces.
  73. Fados
    This veteran Spanish director has, in his latest, created both a tribute to an art form and a performance archive.
  74. Sherman's Way
    The director, Craig Saavedra, generates surprising warmth from the familiar tropes of the odd-couple road movie. Shooting mostly in the verdant sweep of California's wine country -- and with a superb supporting cast -- he allows Mr. Le Gros room to engage.
  75. Tokyo!
    Both in its parts and in the sum of them Tokyo! is playfully and sometimes disorientingly apocalyptic.
  76. Frost/Nixon
    Stories of lost crowns lend themselves to drama, but not necessarily audience-pleasing entertainments, which may explain why Frost/Nixon registers as such a soothing, agreeably amusing experience, more palliative than purgative.
  77. The Escapist
    Shapes a standard prison-break drama into a metaphysical study of freedom and reparation.
  78. Dragonball: Evolution
    May or may not appeal to fans of the Japanese fantasy franchise it is based on, but aficionados of apocalyptic teenybopper kung fu extravaganzas are in for a real treat.
  79. Hannah Montana: The Movie
    It's just as awesome as the tv show only bigger and prettier.
  80. Earth
    This is nature defanged and declawed for kiddie consumption, so the emphasis is on awwww-filled moments.
  81. Fighting
    Not everything that happens in Fighting entirely makes sense -- it’s a fable, after all, and a fable doesn't necessarily have to -- but it breathes with a rough, exuberant realism that you rarely see in movies of its kind.
  82. Throw Down Your Heart
    The gentle, upbeat documentary Throw Down Your Heart chronicles the African pilgrimage of the American banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck in search of the origins of his chosen instrument.
  83. Three Monkeys
    Good pulp depends, above all, on a ruthless sense of economy, and Three Monkeys is just a bit too profligate, too fancy, to be entirely convincing.
  84. Rudo y Cursi
    While the film is lively and engaging, it also, in the end, feels a little thin, largely because it is unsure of how earnestly to treat its own lessons about fate, ambition and brotherly love.
  85. O'Horten
    O'Horten is about frustration, patience, kindness and the wildness that lurks in even the calmest hearts. What's odd about that?
  86. Jerichow
    No one in Jerichow is entirely deserving of sympathy, which gives the film a detached, clinical feeling underlined by the director’s habit of observing emotions rather than evoking them.
  87. Dance Flick
    Its belly laughs leave you feeling liberated and not guilty; I repeat, not guilty.
  88. Pressure Cooker
    Pressure Cooker belongs to the honorable if overpopulated genre of inspirational films (both documentaries and features) dedicated to the proposition that one committed, passionate teacher can make all the difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.
  89. $9.99
    Though $9.99 manages to be quirky and enigmatic, it is in the end too self-conscious, too satisfied in its eccentricity, to achieve the full mysteriousness toward which it seems to aspire. It is odd, curious, intermittently intriguing but ultimately more interesting for its artifice than for its art.
  90. The End of the Line
    Well-researched and generally evenhanded in its delivery of information (Ted Danson provides the narration), the movie more than makes its points without needing to resort to a montage of adorable fish being bashed on the head.
  91. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    The film could be described as Exhibit A in a study of media celebrity and collective forgetfulness in the age of information overload.
  92. Somers Town
    An agreeable if slight, vaguely sketched character study times two.
  93. Adam
    The humor is delicate, and the performances sweet and sure; the script (by the director, Max Mayer) is not entirely predictable, and the Manhattan locations (lovingly photographed by Seamus Tierney) have a starry-eyed glaze.
  94. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    An affectionate, rollicking guide to the drive-in classics of Australian filmmaking from the 1970s and ’80s.
  95. Bandslam
    Buoyant, gratifying and, yes, rocking.
  96. I Sell the Dead
    The jokes do wear thin, and the setup does too, but it’s nonetheless worth noting what a couple of crafty thieves can do with elbow grease, some spare change and the kind of deep movie love that never dies.
  97. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A streamlined, adrenalized thriller that is not as deep as it would like to appear, treads a retrospective political tightrope.
  98. Taking Woodstock
    This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event.
  99. The September Issue
    This entertaining, glib movie is about the maintenance of a brand that Ms. Wintour has brilliantly cultivated since she assumed her place at the top of the editorial masthead in 1988 and which the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, has helped polish with a take so flattering he might as well work there.
  100. We Live in Public
    From the ample evidence, Mr. Harris’s own life in public was a bust. Ms. Timoner sees him as a cautionary tale as well as a visionary.
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