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. How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    The movie, adapted by Terry McMillan from her semi-autobiographical novel, is pointedly boundary-breaking in its positive portrayal of a May-September relationship between a younger man and an older woman.
  2. Latter Days
    Works in the end because of its commitment to its characters and a handful of fine performances.
  3. Mr 3000
    If there was any question about how well Bernie Mac's charm, demonstrated in stand-up comedy and on his Fox sitcom, would play on the big screen, the news is good: no problem.
  4. A Chronicle of Corpses
    Mr. McElhinney has created a movie that is not without the flaws endemic in low-budget productions but still projects an amazing degree of stylistic assurance and originality.
  5. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Ultimately, the adored candidate looks as if she were really running for posterity, not for the presidency - a noble, lesser accomplishment.
  6. Mysterious Object at Noon
    Mr. Weerasethakul's film is like a piece of chamber music slowly, deftly expanding into a full symphonic movement; to watch it is to enter a fugue state that has the music and rhythms of another culture.
  7. Down with Love
    Works hard to earn it and is, for the most part, intelligent and amusing, even if it never achieves the full-tilt zany desperation of Delbert Mann's "Lover Come Back," the best of the real Hudson-Day movies.
  8. Drumline
    If all this does not quite add up to a coherent movie, it does produce a bouncy, boisterous and charming one, which becomes downright thrilling when it shows the bands in action.
  9. Say Anything...
    The predictable surface of Say Anything is constantly being cracked by characters who think and talk like real people and by John Cusack's terrifically natural, appealing Lloyd.
  10. Piñero
    It is a career-defining performance that could catapult the 37-year-old actor beyond bland romantic leads and into the kinds of juicy anti-heroic parts once gobbled up by Mr. Hoffman and Robert De Niro.
  11. Con Air
    The colorfully written Con Air is a solid chip off "The Rock," pumped up and very well cast, with the prettiness and polish of advertising art.
  12. The Limey
    Among Soderbergh's widely varied films ("sex, lies and videotape," "Kafka," "The Underneath," "Schizopolis," "Out of Sight"), this one actually has the best chance of becoming anyone's sentimental favorite.
  13. Mean Creek
    Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.
  14. Harvard Man
    Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.
  15. Illuminata
    Summons the stock characters of behind-the-scenes theater stories and affectionately invests them with new life.
  16. Criminal
    Even with its tepid lead performance, Criminal is a clever and diverting caper film. At least, it is as long as you don't think too hard about it.
  17. Never Die Alone
    Primarily a riveting genre film that neatly exhibits the director's growing assurance -- Donald Goines would be proud.
  18. Max
    A historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society.
  19. No Man's Land
    One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.
  20. Deadline
    Not as dynamic as it should be, given the punch of the story it tells, but it makes its points.
  21. The Butterfly
    Its scrupulous, even-toned gentleness makes " The Butterfly suitable for children, while its clear-eyed intelligence and refusal to condescend should make it appealing to adults.
  22. People I Know
    Would like to think of itself as a film on the edge, a contemporary descendant of "Sweet Smell of Success." But as it dawdles along, it fails to find contemporary corollaries to the super-charged language and caffeine-fueled pace of that grimy 1957 masterpiece.
  23. Moog
    At the very least, Moog should persuade you that the history of music over the last century is as much a story of technology and sound as a family tree of stylistic influences. It's a very useful reminder.
  24. Barbershop
    I've seen better movies recently, but it's been a long time since I've left one feeling the easy, full-bellied happiness this one evoked.
  25. Grass
    With its pointed narrative, the film makes its case with a minimum of pushiness and a subtle nod to its crowd.
  26. Panic Room
    An above-average thriller.
  27. Sweet Home Alabama
    If Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story. But it still has its effectively goofy comic moments.
  28. Ride with the Devil
    Dramatically skimpy, even though the movie stirs together themes of love, sex, death and war.
  29. America's Heart and Soul
    A feel-good documentary.
  30. Get Over It
    Mild, harmless and occasionally affecting, possessing the fizz of diet soda and the sweet snap of slightly stale bubble gum.
  31. Bad Lieutenant
    Mr. Ferrara has his saving graces, too, the chief one being raw talent, which he continues to display while telling even the most far-fetched story.
  32. The Peacemaker
    Culminates in a show-stopping action sequence set in midtown Manhattan, directed by Ms. Leder with crisp economy and furious energy.
  33. Clifford's Really Big Movie
    Will provide preschoolers with comfort and amusement, though not rapture or enchantment.
  34. Goya in Bordeaux
    Visual knockout of a film.
  35. A Real Young Girl
    Crude, unpolished, yet curiously dreamy.
  36. Next Stop Wonderland
    Next Stop Wonderland isn't really much more than a beautifully acted, finely edited sitcom, but it creates and sustains an intelligent, seriocomic mood better than any recent film about the urban single life.
  37. Deep Impact
    Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.
  38. Blue Gate Crossing
    Little more than a vignette elongated into a feature-length movie. Moody and slow moving, it depends on the truthfulness of its performances to carry it.
  39. Cellular
    It's an honest, unpretentious, well-made B picture with a clever, silly premise, a handful of sly, unassuming performances and enough car chases, decent jokes and swervy plot complications to make the price of the ticket seem like a decent bargain.
  40. Pretty in Pink
    Fortunately, the actors are mostly likable, and the story is told gently enough to downplay both its trendiness and its conventionality.
  41. Home of the Brave
    Includes familiar film of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and of demonstrators in Birmingham being attacked with fire hoses, but it distinguishes itself with touching film of Jim Liuzzo and his children being interviewed and of political leaders of the day.
  42. 25th Hour
    If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.
  43. Clerks
    [Smith] also has an uncommonly sure sense of deadpan comic timing.
  44. The Cooler
    Luckily this picture is rescued from cliché by the quality of the acting, and Mr. Kramer wisely gives the actors room to work.
  45. Dogma
    Smith makes a big, gutsy leap into questions of faith and religion. He miraculously emerges with his humor intact and his wings unsinged.
  46. Distant
    Such an accurate depiction of cramped spirits, small-mindedness and men unable to make changes in their lives takes its toll. Distant feels as if it's going nowhere in no particular hurry, and finally leaves us distant from its characters.
  47. Seven Years in Tibet
    Beyond his struggles with an unwieldy accent and the screenplay's hokum, Mr. Pitt gives a sincere if labored performance enhanced by a sense of genuine struggle.
  48. Not Another Teen Movie
    A happy, nasty and frequently hilarious assault on 20 years' worth of youth pictures.
  49. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.
  50. Starsky & Hutch
    The movie's advertising tagline ("Starsky & Hutch — they're the Man") needs to be amended. The film belongs, completely and utterly, to Snoop Dogg.
  51. Notting Hill
    The movie has lots of glossy charm even if Ms. Roberts and Grant seem less like lovers than members of a support group for the desperately attractive.
  52. Selena
    On its own good-natured terms, Selena' is both pleasant to watch and instructive in familiarizing a movie audience with the Texan-Mexican borderland music known as Tejano.
  53. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Too fixated on 1939 for its own good. Its passionate immersion in a past that only dimly resonates with younger audiences may be a badge of its integrity, but that immersion trumps its vision of the future and leaves us in a land of nostalgia.
  54. Undertow
    As with the 70's films of Terrence Malick, one of Undertow's producers, the more intoxicated it becomes with rural desolation and fecundity, the more deeply in touch it puts you with its characters' souls.
  55. Before Sunrise
    What Mr. Linklater does best here is to come up with conversational gambits that have just the right fancifulness to suit this situation.
  56. The Corporation
    The Corporation is a dense, complicated and thought-provoking film, but it simplifies its title character.
  57. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Going Upriver is a small, valuable contribution to the continuing project of sorting out and making sense of Vietnam, a war that, among other things, opened a fissure at the heart of American liberalism that has yet to heal.
  58. Behind the Sun
    The blend of grim violence with romantic whimsy tilts toward sentimentality. Mr. Salles has the confidence of a storyteller too entranced by his tale to worry about the resistance of his audience, which he thus effortlessly overcomes.
  59. Training Day
    Mr. Washington's dry-ice grandeur -- the predator's reflexes contrasting with a pensive mouth -- deserves regard, and his powerhouse virtuosity will almost guarantee him an Oscar nomination.
  60. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    It conveys plenty of wonder while mostly avoiding any saccharine preachiness.
  61. Antz
    Antz works best just showing off its prodigious voice talent.
  62. Contact
    The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality.
  63. Everything Put Together
    A finely acted expressionistic critique of the suburban baby culture and its joys, fears and fetishes.
  64. Galaxy Quest
    It keeps its tongue firmly in its cheek, offers a few genuine laughs, moves swiftly, if not at warp speed, and is led by a talented cast.
  65. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Smoothly incorporates archival material, including scenes of Mr. Zinn's public appearances, interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan and Alice Walker (his student at Spelman). Matt Damon also reads well-chosen excerpts from Mr. Zinn's writing.
  66. Spun
    A swaggering journey into hell that conveys a chortling amusement at its own apocalyptic imagination.
  67. George of the Jungle
    The kind of silly summer fun that gives family entertainment a good name.
  68. Liberty Heights
    If Liberty Heights is much too soft at its center, it still offers a deeper immersion in that old '50s feeling than any other Hollywood film in recent memory.
  69. An Everlasting Piece
    The director serves up a nice helping of blarney, but he seems to have left his schmaltz in Baltimore.
  70. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so - in a much more dignified, documented way - does Mr. Greenwald.
  71. Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    Anyone who attended Broadway shows in the days when ticket prices were reasonable and the actors and singers performed without amplification will feel a rush of nostalgia as these troupers offer what amounts to a breezy compilation of after-dinner remarks.
  72. Japan
    Luckily Mr. Reygadas has talent to match his ambitions; or, rather, gifts that undercut them sufficiently to give his film a prickly, haunting poignancy.
  73. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    A searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world. Mr. Junkerman's film is best understood as a necessary, if partisan, text in that continuing argument.
  74. Scream 2
    Even if you haven't spent as much obsessive time at the video store as these guys have, you might enjoy helping 'Scream 2' laugh all the way to the bank.
  75. The Thin Red Line
    One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.
  76. Me, Myself & Irene
    The humor in Me, Myself and Irene is often outrageous but rarely cruel.
  77. New Guy
    New Guy isn't the first movie to get laughs from the bloodless milieu of contemporary corporate life. But it may be the first to offer a frightening glimpse of the actual blood pulsing beneath.
  78. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    "Croupier," the director's comeback film of 2000, which also starred Mr. Owen, is a riskier, more interesting exercise in English noir than I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, but the new film, whose title comes from a Warren Zevon song, nonetheless serves as a fine stylistic showpiece.
  79. Robot Stories
    The most startling aspect of Robot Stories is not the mix that the director built from spare parts left on the curb but the evolving dramatic acumen of its maker; he's a talent with a future.
  80. The Inheritance
    As the relentlessly morose movie shows, a corporate hero is not the same thing as a humanitarian; in many ways, he's the antithesis.
  81. Dig!
    If universities ever start graduate programs in rock stardom, Dig! will surely be a cornerstone of the curriculum, for it works as both an instruction manual and a cautionary tale.
  82. Jump Tomorrow
    The sweetness at the core of the raggedy low-budget romantic comedy Jump Tomorrow is hard to resist.
  83. One Swallow Brought Spring
    A quiet, slow-moving tale, very much in tune with the gradual rhythms of traditional agricultural life.
  84. Cachorro
    At the end, Bear Cub does have a brush with sentimentality. But by then, its integrity and low-key truthfulness has been certified in a dozen different ways.
  85. Cure
    The final scene is a piece of cunning visual wit that makes you realize how artful and sneaky Cure, has been beneath its clinical, deadpan surface.
  86. Jurassic Park
    It becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away.
  87. Malèna
    What begins as a blushing, priapic opera buffa about coming of age turns into a verismo shocker, before softening into something mellower.
  88. The Matrix Reloaded
    Relax, the staging of the action sequences is as viciously elegant as you've been primed to expect, though there is a dispiriting more-of-the-same aspect to the picture.
  89. Bread and Roses
    He plies his viewers with plenty of bread -- chewy and, to some tastes, dry and starchy scenes -- but he also scatters petals of whimsy and delight to nourish the senses.
  90. Suzhou River
    Mr. Lou lets it play on for too long. Suzhou River offers impeccable attitude and captivating atmosphere, but little emotional or intellectual impact.
  91. Alien: Resurrection
    Tauntingly flirtatious scenes between Ms. Ryder and Ms. Weaver give this film a sexual boldness that the others' action-adventure spirit lacked.
  92. Postmen in the Mountains
    It is an endearing, likable film, though its benign surface may cover some subtle propaganda on behalf of China's centralized government.
  93. Primary Colors
    It's a movie struggling with its own identity crisis, and with the obvious constraints created by its subject matter.
  94. Honey
    Honey brings out the wholesome, affirmative side of the hip-hop aesthetic without being overly preachy, and it offers a winningly utopian view of show-business success without real costs or compromises.
  95. Human Traffic
    Mostly it's exhilarating.
  96. Enemy at the Gates
    Enemy at the Gates has its deficiencies, but the first-rate cast is not among them.
  97. Southern Comfort
    Southern Comfort sent shock waves through this year's Sundance Film Festival, even though it is as much about generosity and courage and tolerance as it is about a potentially discomforting subject.
  98. The Deserted Station
    If repetition has stripped Iran's post-revolutionary cinema of some of its modish luster, The Deserted Station is still a valuable addition to a literature whose characteristics are now internationally well-established.
  99. The Man Who Bought Mustique
    A compulsively watchable but repugnant portrait of a selfish eccentric born to privilege.
  100. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.
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