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. Croupier
    Clive Owen conveys a sharp, cynical intelligence that rolls off the screen in waves whenever he widens his glittering blue eyes.
  2. Chinatown
    Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirites-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep." Others may not be as finicky. [21 June 1974]
    • The New York Times
  3. The Ignorant Fairies
    The acting is impeccable, and the intentions are serious and noble, but the affection it elicits stops short of love, and its coziness never risks true intimacy.
  4. Duplex
    A refreshingly mean-spirited gothic real estate comedy.
  5. Pi
    As smart as it is, Pi is awfully hard to watch. Filmed with hand-held cameras in splotchy black-and-white and crudely edited, it has the style and attitude of a no-budget midnight movie.
  6. Slums of Beverly Hills
    Ms. Jenkins, who makes her writing and directing debut with wit and confidence, keeps the small surprises frequent and the coming-of-age perspective sharp.
  7. Stepmom
    To its credit, the film doesn't sugarcoat its women too monstrously, and it lets real conflicts and opinions occasionally creep in.
  8. Brokedown Palace
    Brokedown Palace is good enough so that you wish it were better.
  9. An Ideal Husband
    Life at the top has rarely looked or sounded more fabulously elegant.
  10. Trekkies
    It is probably hopeless in the presence of Trekkies to do anything but sit back -- amused, bemused and astonished -- and watch the devotions of fans of the various incarnations of "Star Trek."
  11. Varsity Blues
    A paint-by-numbers story that offers no surprises and a hero and villain etched in white and black with few shades of gray.
  12. American Pie 2
    The "American Pie" movies succeed where many other comedies aimed at the youth market falter: they manage to be both lewd and sweet, exploiting the natural prurience of young people while implicitly comforting their raging anxieties.
  13. Amistad
    Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.
  14. The Newton Boys
    If Mr. Linklater is not entirely at ease with action sequences (or with the obligatory having-fun montage once the brothers become successful), he still makes this (after ''Before Sunrise'' and ''Suburbia'') another admirable directorial stretch.
  15. Bolivia
    This film, Mr. Caetano's feature-length directorial debut, has an emotional integrity that's concise and direct.
  16. Borstal Boy
    A likable rites-of-passage memory piece doused in period nostalgia, including the prominent use of vintage Movietone newsreels to mark the events of World War II.
  17. One True Thing
    Bluntly, poignantly believable.
  18. U.S. Marshals
    A movie that knows how to pace its audience. Watching it is like going for a long and satisfying jog.
  19. The X Files
    Though both stars are sometimes eclipsed when the film strains for big action episodes, Mr. Duchovny sustains enough cool, deadpan intellect and suppressed passion to give the story a center. Ms. Armstrong has the harsher, more restrictive role, but she plays it with familiar hardboiled glamour.
  20. Psycho
    It remains the most structurally elegant and sneakily playful of thrillers. At least some things never change.
  21. The Prince of Egypt
    A well-made work with much to recommend it, even if its worthiness is not the brightest flare on the movie horizon this season.
  22. Groove
    The film's seductive lack of pretension will make a fan of you.
  23. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Ms. Slesin sums up the complicated feelings of Secret Lives with one well-chosen phrase: what these people are suffering from, she says, is the "trauma of gratitude." Her film is as complex and moving as that formulation.
  24. The Company
    Enjoyably lithe and droll yet somehow almost water-soluble; it seems to dissolve onscreen.
  25. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    As this taut, viscerally propulsive insider's history of the sport in its early years skids and leaps forward with a jaunty visual panache, it is impossible not to be seduced by its hard-edged vision of an endless teenage summer.
  26. The Real Blonde
    A lively, well-constructed film with a large and appealing cast.
  27. Winged Migration
    It may sound facetious, but Winged Migration provides such an intense vicarious experience of being a flapping airborne creature with the wind in its ears that you leave the theater feeling like an honorary member of another species.
  28. Rock Star
    Represents the usual victory of simplistic screenwriting conventions over the rich, gamy ambiguities of the subject. But while its slide into perfunctory storytelling dilutes the raw, silly spectacle of sex and noise, the movie still has enough wit and insight to make it worth watching.
  29. Girlhood
    As spare as the juvenile institution in which much of it was filmed. As you watch it, you wish the film would fill in more of each girl's background.
  30. Dark City
    So relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns. Although its story doesn't add up when you analyze it afterward, the movie does take you on a visually arresting ride that offers many unsettling surprises right up to a sentimental sunburst of an ending that has a paranoid undertone.
  31. 30 Years to Life
    Though 30 Years to Life doesn't break any new ground, it's a light, engaging, well-carpentered film, with a quick wit and a sense of character just deep enough to lend some weight to the laugh lines.
  32. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    Cheerful, giddy fun.
  33. X2: X-Men United
    Mr. Singer and his collaborators grasp that comic books, for all their obligatory fights and explosions, are at bottom about their brave, troubled, impossibly muscled characters.
  34. Heartbreakers
    Naughty is an outdated word in an era of proud nastiness, but Heartbreakers has a slinky, teasing quality that recalls the dressed-up comedies of the studio era.
  35. G.I. Jane
    Mr. Scott's affinity for the visceral and strenuous, from ''Alien'' to ''Blade Runner'' to ''White Squall,'' is much more central here than the renegade feminism of his ''Thelma and Louise.'' With punishing intensity, he plunges his audience into the maelstrom of the training program.
  36. Ghosts of the Abyss
    Whether he's working in nonfiction or science fiction, Mr. Cameron remains an artist of great instinctive power. In Ghosts of the Abyss, he uses every means of probing that modern science has put at his disposal -- electronic, mechanical, sonic -- only to find that the tragic reality of the Titanic, its myths and its meanings, remain tantalizingly beyond his reach.
  37. My Mother Likes Women
    As My Mother Likes Women gallops along, it picks up speed and takes its characters on a whirlwind tour of Prague before rushing back home. As it accelerates, its texture thins and its story turns strained and eager to please. But it never loses its cheeky sense of humor about love and the havoc it can wreak.
  38. The Parent Trap
    The visual illusion that Ms. Lohan is actually two characters has been accomplished so seamlessly that it barely diverts attention from one of the film's greatest passions, its product plugs.
  39. About Adam
    Seems refreshing, even mildly subversive.
  40. Songcatcher
    Songcatcher is a sweet, lyrical ode to rural America in the early 1900's.
  41. Cats & Dogs
    Only a sourpuss could fail to be amused by this movie's sight gags and action sequences or to be charmed by its lighthearted good humor.
  42. Spice World
    Disarmingly, the film thus acknowledges the Spice Girls' flash-in-the-pan status and lets them kid around about their frankly synthetic career.
  43. Cold Creek Manor
    The movie ultimately belongs to Mr. Dorff, whose villain is as frightening as any human reptile to have slithered onto the screen in quite some time.
  44. Solomon & Gaenor
    Does an almost dismayingly good job of conveying its characters' grim, bare-bones existence and the stultifying sexual and religious taboos that the lovers flout.
  45. Mighty Aphrodite
    Dependably well made and not quite like any Allen film that came before. Nimble film making like this isn't necessarily geared to the magnum opus, but Mr. Allen can achieve fine, amusing results even while thinking small. [27 October 1995, P.C1]
  46. Crimson Gold
    The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.
  47. The Execution of Wanda Jean
    Offers an unusual opportunity to observe the inequities in the death penalty, not just the inherent immorality but also the haphazard administration of it and public misperception of how the whole thing works.
  48. Spartan
    A vigorous and engrossing genre exercise that manages the difficult trick of being both logically meticulous and genuinely surprising. Its elaborately implausible story gestures now and then toward an idea, but the movie's main concern is technique.
  49. Bamboozled
    Spike Lee has grabbed a tiger by the tail in his scabrously risky new comedy, Bamboozled. The wonder is how long he succeeds in hanging on.
  50. Summer of Sam
    This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.
  51. 8 Women
    Indefensible, cynical, even grotesque; it is also pure -- that is to say innocent and uncorrupted -- fun.
  52. Seabiscuit
    Somehow we are never quite swept into the boisterous, democratic world of which Seabiscuit, in Ms. Hillenbrand's account, was the plucky, galloping embodiment.
  53. The War of the Roses
    The film's outstanding nastiness, which is often diabolically funny until a poorly staged final battle sequence simply takes things too far, has something real and recognizable at its core.
  54. 50 First Dates
    The unlikely sweetness of the story carries the day. What is most astonishing is the confidence with which the filmmakers push their premise to its logical conclusion, turning an ending that could have been either laughable or appalling into something so effortlessly heartfelt as to be nearly sublime.
  55. The Italian Job
    Feels a like smooth, exciting whoosh down a ski slope.
  56. Zoolander
    Often unspeakably funny.
  57. Manhunter
    What matters in movies like this is that, with only hours, then minutes, then seconds to go as the murderer waves a knife in the vicinity of the blind woman's throat, the good guys are closing in, and Mr. Mann builds to his climax with considerable force.
  58. The Claim
    A languorously muted, occasionally magnificent film.
  59. Anything Else
    Small-scale and loose. It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.
  60. Gloria
    A smoother, funnier, more suspenseful and more endearing version of the 1980 John Cassavetes film of the same title.
  61. October Sky
    Despite its "based on a true story" opening credit, this earnest, nostalgic film has a way of seeming too good to be true.
  62. Smilla's Sense of Snow
    This story has now been gracefully adapted by Bille August into a sleek, good-looking film that captures the book's peculiar fascination.
  63. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    An oblique, vaguely sorrowful study in domestic emotion, structured around the small eruptions of feeling -- tenderness, anger, and joy -- that punctuate the slow serenity of daily life.
  64. Six Days Seven Nights
    Ms. Heche and Mr. Ford make an appealing, wisecracking team, and they look comfortable with the rugged demands of their roles.
  65. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Lovely, uncomplicated though limited movie.
  66. El mariachi
    Mythic pulp has its allure, and it also has its limitations. El Mariachi displays no real emotion except a profound appreciation for the genre film making that has inspired it, and a delight in manipulating the elements of such stories.
  67. Joy Ride
    Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.
  68. The Green Mile
    A film with a counterproductive tendency to take its time...but unassumingly strong, moving performances and Darabont's durable storytelling make it a trip worth taking just the same.
  69. Almost Peaceful
    It takes talent to make audiences care about ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as it takes guts to end a movie with something as corny as the sounds of children playing.
  70. Jim Brown: All American
    At its most provocative, the movie explores the masculine mystique and the myth of the black stud.
  71. Animal Factory
    Willem Dafoe steals the picture with his comic timing.
  72. Last Life in the Universe
    May seem frustratingly elusive at times, but it's a rewarding film that's beautiful to look at.
  73. Shadow Magic
    Gentle and easy to take.
  74. Deep Blue Sea
    Imagine a cut-rate "Titanic" stripped of romance and historical resonance and fused with "Jaws," shorn of mythic symbolism and without complex characters, and you have the essence of this live-action horror comic.
  75. Anaconda
    A trashily entertaining reptilian version of ''Jaws'' set in the steaming heart of the Amazon rain forest.
  76. The Wedding Singer
    Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985.
  77. Runaway Jury
    John Cusack gives one of his wiliest performances in some time, and one of his most mature, as Nick Easter, an aging slacker drafted into jury duty. He subverts his protracted-adolescent cheekiness and pours the melted charm into something far bleaker.
  78. A Song for Martin
    Watching it, I kept imagining the depth of feeling Ingmar Bergman and his troupe might have brought to the same material. As much as A Song for Martin hurts, it doesn't quite go the distance.
  79. Me Without You
    Under its drab contemporary trappings, the movie, is really a Jane Austen-like moral parable in which goodness is rewarded and selfishness punished.
  80. The Debut
    Sometimes amateurishly acted by the appealing younger cast but is nonetheless a neat blend of well-drawn major characters and drama, music, dance, romance and humor that generates considerable charm and achieves a heartwarming resolution of its generational conflict.
  81. Gangster No. 1
    The psychological underpinnings give this picture a charged emotional atmosphere. The dizzying unspoken feelings between the two men mesh so well that the movie seems to have been worked out like a perverse drawing-room comedy.
  82. Auto Focus
    Gets to you like a low-grade fever, a malaise with no known antidote. When it was over, I wasn't sure if I needed a drink, a shower or a lifelong vow of chastity.
  83. Monsieur Ibrahim
    The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Mr. Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Mr. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Mr. Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance.
  84. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    Mr. Cameron has made a swift, exciting special-effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense and greatly improves upon the first film's potent but rudimentary visual style. He has also broadened his initial idea to encompass better developed characters (after all, the first Terminator was barely verbal), a livelier wit and a more ambitious, if nuttier, message.
  85. Urban Legend
    Maybe there will be an oversaturation of ''Scream''-inspired horror films someday soon, but this one feels fresh.
  86. Reign of Fire
    Loads of fun. It has a jamming B-picture buzz -- the kind of swift filmmaking and high spirits that have been missing from movies for a while.
  87. One Last Kiss
    Provides more than enough sentimental catharsis for a satisfying evening at the multiplex.
  88. Booye kafoor, atre yas
    Perhaps it's the difference in culture, but the thoughtfulness in Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine shows that its creator isn't letting himself or his audience off the hook.
  89. Beyond the Mat
    Wants to blend thrills and pathos, getting at the many sides of what is, as Mr. Blaustein describes it, a carny act.
  90. The Tracker
    These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.
  91. Two Girls and a Guy
    Robert Downey Jr.'s Blake Allen is enough of a raging dynamo to find the dark humor and desperate romanticism at the heart of Mr. Toback's ego trip of a premise, and to make Blake sympathetic too.
  92. The Human Stain
    The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.
  93. Antwone Fisher
    A movie so profoundly in touch with its own feelings that it transcends its formulaic tics.
  94. Japanese Story
    Ultimately too thin for its length and too dependent on easy assumptions about its characters. But it does demonstrate that Ms. Collette is more than able to carry a movie, and it leaves you hoping she will soon have another chance to do it.
  95. Monster
    The movie's biggest disappointment is the vague, unfocused performance of Ms. Ricci, an actress known for taking risky, unsympathetic roles. Here she seems somewhat intimidated by her character.
  96. Reconstruction
    Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.
  97. The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    The film's most weirdly beautiful moments are its excerpts from Bowery's collaborations with the Michael Clark Dance Company.
  98. Paid in Full
    An unpretentious, sociologically pointed slice of life.
  99. Casa de los babys
    Some of the pieces in its jigsaw puzzle are too fragmentary, and there's a sense of racing against time to fill in the blanks. Yet the movie's even-handed portrayal of two cultures uneasily transacting the most personal business resonates with truth.
  100. Divided We Fall
    The filmmakers explore not only the banality of evil, but also the banality of goodness, and the ridiculousness, as well as the tragedy, of their collision.
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