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. With Friends Like These...
    Originally released seven years ago on home video, is only now surfacing as a theatrical release. Although it's no classic, it's a cut or two smarter than the average Hollywood comedy. At its best, it plays like a less acerbic, less Jewish triple episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (review of re-release)
  2. The Red Orchestra
    Films like "The Pianist" and "Schindler's List" immerse viewers in the bleakness of that time. The Red Orchestra is set in a sunnier world, which seems more frighteningly false. The bright, quotidian landscape seems a facade that threatens to tumble at any moment.
  3. David Hockney: The Colors of Music
    Over all, this deferential film salutes Mr. Hockney's artistry as an elixir for creaky texts, a hallucinogen for orthodox opera fans, and an antidote to his own senescence. As much as he lets the filmmaker be present, he successfully avoids real intimacy, keeping his personal life comfortably backstage.
  4. Voices in Wartime
    Rick King's stirring documentary Voices in Wartime is not, as you might guess from the title, a compilation of soldiers' battlefield letters to their families back home. This intense little film is about poetry, and not just Homer's "Iliad."
  5. Raging Dove
    Bruising but illuminating documentary.
  6. Another Road Home
    Moving and ultimately hopeful, Another Road Home makes no effort to soften or simplify its prickly themes.
  7. Wild Safari 3D
    The cinematic safari's simple pleasures are best experienced with the littlest ticket-holders, who get an edifying thrill ride and a computer-assisted sense of a wider world.
  8. The War on the War on Drugs
    The movie is 74 minutes of hilarious pro-drug vignettes, loosely strung together like a themed episode of "Saturday Night Live."
  9. Almost Brothers
    Despite being edited in a style that jarringly blurs the past and the present by switching from one to the other without preparation, Almost Brothers is strong stuff.
  10. A Sidewalk Astronomer
    An inspiring film about an inspired teacher. It should leave all viewers with an ounce of curiosity eager to hit the streets with Dobsonian telescopes of their own.
  11. Lustre
    Lustre is a post-Sept. 11 love letter to a New York past that Mr. Jones clearly mourns.
  12. Answering the Call: Ground Zero's Volunteers
    The resulting film is a record of indefatigably focused activity that began with the simple goal of rescue but evolved into a therapeutic tool for resolution and acceptance.
  13. Hard Goodbyes: My Father
    Considering the delicate and weighty subject matter, the film's tone is surprisingly light, sometimes even humorous, which helps to balance the harsh sentiments that death inevitably brings.
  14. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    Interspersing shots from the original film - many of which are justly famous for their power and complexity - with interviews, Mr. Ferraz has produced a welcome piece of historical explication.
  15. Santo Domingo Blues
    Without losing sight of the music's essential energy, Mr. Wolfe peppers his film with quietly resonant shots.
  16. Three Days of Rain
    A quiet, thoughtful film about isolation and separation.
  17. The Optimists
    The director, who also served as producer along with Lisa Comforty, his wife, spent 12 years compiling the archival clips and photographs that make up this compact and elegant film.
  18. The Swenkas
    Intriguing documentary.
  19. Unveiled
    With its deliberately overexposed film stock and driving electronic score, Ms. Maccarone's film occasionally suffers from a self-conscious artiness, but at its center is an extraordinary performance by Ms. Tabatabai as Fariba, a young woman whose expectations have been lowered by a lifetime of systematic mistreatment but who still holds out hope for the possibility of both justice and love.
  20. 39 Pounds of Love
    A bracingly honest yet poetic portrait of a man refusing to be defined by the limitations of his body.
  21. Isn't This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal
    Watching the aging, but still spirited, singers come together to express their gratitude for the man who started their careers is often genuinely touching.
  22. Workingman's Death
    In the film's production notes, Mr. Glawogger wonders, "Is heavy manual labor disappearing or is it just becoming invisible?" In this visually impressive but proudly unscientific hymn to progress, the answers are yes and yes.
  23. The Beautiful City
    Only inconsistent pacing and a few minor contrivances that develop late in the film dull its otherwise quietly effective dramatic impact.
  24. Drawing Restraint 9
    The uninitiated viewer can admire it simply for the majesty of its visual poetry.
  25. Police Beat
    A delicately funny tale about everyday surrealism.
  26. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    This pleasant if inconsequential romantic comedy from the Croatian director Hrvoje Hribar is distinguished by its good-natured sensibility and rowdy, slightly fabulous tone: a kind of Eastern European magic realism, without the magic.
  27. La tropical
    Crammed with comments from patrons and performers, La Tropical is a sensual celebration of people for whom dancing is the "most important nonreligious ritual."
  28. Animals and More Animals
    What emerges is less the celebration of an institution than a picture of man's relationship to nature that is every bit as beguiling as a Rousseau.
  29. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Tells the depressing, often ridiculous and generally enraging story of how and why Mr. Chong, an extremely laid-back and genial camera presence, ended up doing time in the minimum-security Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.
  30. The Garden of Earthly Delights
    Affected but elegant, this digital video riff on "Death in Venice" was orchestrated by Lech Majewski, the Polish writer, painter and director of films, plays and operas. His musicality is evident in the fresh and lively flow of images, though his tin ear for dialogue and staleness of theme enervates the composition.
  31. Room
    Room is an existential horror film, a parable of the war against terror being waged in Julia's psyche.
  32. Rank
    As thorough an examination of the sport as you could hope to squeeze into 90 taut, well-organized minutes.
  33. Two Sons of Francisco
    Similar stories in the United States tend to be turned into made-for-television mush. This one is manipulative in its own way, but it casts a sweet spell nonetheless.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Cantor's Tale
    The movie is most engaging when following Mr. Mendelson around his old neighborhood, Borough Park, which, we learn, is simply teeming with bakers whose singing is on a par with their knishes.
  35. Be with Me
    The fact that her story of triumph over unimaginable odds doesn't come freighted with mystical and religious bromides makes it all the more inspiring.
  36. So Much So Fast
    Despite its immersion in tragedy and decline, So Much So Fast is leavened by unexpected humor.
  37. Conventioneers
    Smart, resourceful indie.
  38. As the Call, So the Echo
    Keir Moreano’s muted yet moving record of his father's experience as a volunteer doctor in Vietnam, documents a journey that's substantially more philosophical than medical.
  39. The Great Warming
    A straightforward, quietly persuasive primer on the climate-change crisis.
  40. Encounter Point
    It isn't often that you see a film about Israelis and Palestinians that can be called hopeful, but Ronit Avni's assured, thoughtful and clear-eyed documentary certainly qualifies.
  41. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    As this smart, hard-bitten woman with an eighth-grade education pursues her quest, the documentary portrays the debate between connoisseurship and science as a culture war.
  42. Four Eyed Monsters
    This innovative chronicle of a truly modern romance also conveys, in a painful, darkly humorous way, a variety of ultra-identifiable truths, including the loneliness often suffered by big-city inhabitants and the complexities of sexual intimacy.
  43. Hermanas
    A perceptive and beautifully acted drama.
  44. Family Law
    Delicate, bittersweet comedy.
  45. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
    Julian P. Hobbs directs by getting out of the way of his star's soulful eyes and considerable talent, allowing Mr. Mays to feed on the tension between the rationality of his character's courtroom argument and the utter lunacy of his beliefs.
  46. Reminiscing in Tempo
    Ellington fans will certainly relish the many vintage clips scattered throughout.
  47. Resilience
    One of those rare ensemble dramas whose actors work toward common goals rather than individual awards, the movie resolves its creeping escalation of poor judgment and reprehensible behavior with surprising emotional force.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sacrifice
    Nonfiction doesn't quite describe what Ms. Bruno does. Her work takes risks with form to imply that individual suffering and transcendence are but particles in a river of spiritual energy that dwarfs geography and time.
  49. I Love You
    An unusually perceptive scrutiny of absence and emptiness.
  50. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    If it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, "a typical German story," the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.
  51. China Blue
    A heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China.
  52. Room 314
    Like most films of this type, Room 314 demands a great deal from its performers, not all of whom withstand the intense scrutiny. Fortunately, the action is bookended by four of the best.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    East of Havana
    So much of American pop thrives on a bratty facsimile of courage that when you see the real deal, it's a revelation. East of Havana is the real deal.
  54. Notes on Marie Menken
    Notes on Marie Menken shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
  55. The Border Post
    Border Post is notable for representing all of Yugoslavia's former member republics among its producers and for a tone that juggles humor and harshness without sacrificing either.
  56. The Go Master
    Gorgeously shot, moving through the decades in a gentle adagio, it is less a chronicle than a tribute -- and also, to non-initiates in the game of go, a bit of a puzzle.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sacco and Vanzetti
    The movie's meat-and-potatoes style seems less a failure of imagination than a means of putting in the foreground its intriguing subject matter.
  58. Syndromes and a Century
    Syndromes and a Century, like its curious title, has the logic of a dream, a piece of music or perhaps a John Ashbery poem. Its coherence is evident; it is too lovely and lucid to be frustrating or dull. But it takes place just on the other side of conscious apprehension.
  59. Severance
    A lively romp through terrain less traveled than you might think.
  60. Missing Victor Pellerin
    An enigmatic and utterly compelling story of incinerated art, unbridled egos and exotic plants.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway
    ShowBusiness is packed with telling details that the director, Dori Berinstein, was lucky to catch on camera.
  62. Memories of Tomorrow
    Memories of Tomorrow finally understands that the real victim of this terrible affliction is the partner left behind.
  63. The Boss of It All
    Like all of Mr. von Trier's films, The Boss of It All is a cold, misanthropic work that places no faith in institutions and in humanity itself. But it's also very funny.
  64. Steel City
    Mostly Mr. Jun's script is sharp, and Laurie Metcalf, James McDaniel, America Ferrera and Raymond J. Barry in supporting roles help keep the tale mesmerizing, in a small-scale sort of way.
  65. Pierrepoint
    In Pierrepoint:The Last Hangman Timothy Spall sinks his teeth into one of the juiciest roles of his career.
  66. Being Human
    Set against lovely verdant scenery but structured as a series of rambling vignettes, the stories in Being Human don't entirely mesh.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beyond Hatred
    An example of a film whose style doesn’t merely suit its story but amplifies its meanings.
  68. Jhoom Barabar Jhoom
    A giddy romantic comedy with star power.
  69. Czech Dream
    When they discover they've been made fools of, they accept this performance event with surprising equanimity. There is a lot of grumbling but no riot. They get the joke.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Longing
    Intrigues because it presents an outwardly decent man falling equally in love with two women but eschews simplistic judgments.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Method
    The sum total of this gamesmanship is a suspenseful, funny film that touches on a corporation’s responsibility to society, the price of ambition, the persistence of workplace sexism, the destructive competition between women, and why it’s a good idea to take an extra shirt to your next interview.
  72. Closing Escrow
    Even naysayers of reality TV’s simplistic structure, which the film openly borrows, may find themselves rooting for a couple of choice -- and having fun in the process. The real-estate game can actually be a laughing matter when you’re not a contestant.
  73. Primo Levi's Journey
    Vividly impressionistic and delightfully curious.
  74. The Unknown Soldier
    The reckoning with the past, which has occupied West German society since the 1960s, has been painful and divisive, which makes the calm, empirical spirit of this film all the more impressive.
  75. Great World of Sound
    I found Mr. Zobel’s film touching and amusing, but it also left me a bit queasy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    In its modest way, Outsourced may be unique: a charming culture-clash romance that could be taught in business schools.
    • The New York Times
  77. Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey of a Woman
    A fascinating blend of musical, melodrama and feminist fairy tale, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag shows Bollywood’s moral universe in transition.
  78. Golda's Balcony
    Inert yet strangely compelling film.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Life of Reilly
    Built around “Save It for the Stage,” a one-man stage show by Charles Nelson Reilly, a showbiz gadfly and Tony Award-winning theater director.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Steal a Pencil for Me
    What makes Ms. Ohayon’s movie special is its recognition that epic horrors don’t erase private dramas.
  81. Everything's Cool
    Just below the movie’s attitude of pep-rally cheer is a mood that approaches despair. Mr. Gelbspan has probably amassed as much hard evidence of climate change as anyone alive.
  82. 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
    Part tribute, part musical mystery, ’Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris shines an overdue spotlight on a great who got away.
  83. Protagonist
    Jessica Yu’s enthralling documentary exploration of people with obsessive needs for control and self-mastery.
  84. Woman on the Beach
    Wry and tender and delicately melancholic, Woman on the Beach shows a newly confident filmmaker again working near the top of his form after the disappointing “Tale of Cinema” (2005), even if the new film unfolds straightforwardly, with none of the narrative ellipses and puzzle-box complications, the flashbacks and parallel story lines of his earlier work.
  85. CJ7
    A devilishly entertaining curveball thrown at unsuspecting family audiences.
  86. Lost in Beijing
    In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power.
  87. The Silence Before Bach
    The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie.
  88. Girls Rock!
    A jubilant documentary about a place where power chords and empowerment go hand in hand.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sputnik Mania
    The movie lets parallels between that time and the post-9/11 era emerge organically, in the manner of a fable that subtly illuminates your own life.
  90. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    Crammed with colorful interviews, digital animation and live performances, this frisky and forthright film by Dean Budnick chronicles a vision of financing social progress with really great tunes.
  91. Love Songs
    The girl-boy-girl threesome, which turns out to be short-lived, is perhaps the most straightforward emotional configuration in this odd, witty, touching film.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    From moment to moment, Planet B-Boy is fun, sometimes thrilling and packed with illuminating details and striking personalities.
  93. Hats Off
    Ten years in the making, Hats Off is a documentary tribute to the 93-year-old actress Mimi Weddell, one of those people for whom the word “individual” seems especially apt.
  94. Tuya's Marriage
    Mr. Wang and his screenwriting collaborator, Lu Wei (“Farewell My Concubine”), portray a world that, apart from its hardship, is thoroughly recognizable in its human complexity. Its characters are motivated by the same needs for companionship and material well-being and the same demons — greed, lust, jealousy and despair -- that drive everybody.
  95. Smart People
    The great virtue of Smart People, attributable to Noam Murro’s easygoing direction as well as to Mr. Poirier’s wandering screenplay, lies in its general preference for small insights over grand revelations.
  96. Without the King
    The film, fluidly shot by James Adolphus, remains deeply sensitive to the complexities of a culture whose attachment to monarchy contravenes its best interests. This dilemma is gradually becoming clear to Princess Sikhanyiso, the oldest of the king's 22 children and a student in California. Intelligent, articulate, caring and strong-willed, she could be her country's best hope.
  97. Tashan
    Vijay Krishna Acharya, an accomplished screenwriter making his directing debut, seems eager to show that he can deliver a movie in the high style -- bright, pop and technically sophisticated -- to which Bollywood has become accustomed.
  98. Unsettled
    Adam Hootnick’s Unsettled makes the political personal, drawing a scattershot yet intimate picture of a nation divided.
  99. Beauty in Trouble
    A movie of stark contrasts and zigzagging motives, Beauty in Trouble moves from the golden serenity of a Tuscan villa to the powdery chaos of a Czech garage without sacrificing thematic confidence or nuanced performances.
  100. Expired
    It's possible that two actors other than Samantha Morton and Jason Patric might do justice to Cecilia Miniucchi's story about two badly matched Santa Monica, Calif., parking enforcement officers who stumble and grope into a relationship. But it's hard to think of a better match for the stubborn idiosyncrasies of Ms. Miniucchi's visual style and worldview than these two.
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