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. Tomboy
    The story that emerges is programmatic and largely unsurprising, but these children give it messiness, joy and life.
  2. Garbo: The Spy
    Edmon Roch has a great story to tell in Garbo the Spy, and he recounts it with the flair of a Hollywood spy movie: "Garbo" is dramatic, entertaining, even funny in parts.
  3. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    The most gratifying thing about "Eames" is that it shows, in marvelous detail, how their work was an extension of themselves and how their distinct personalities melded into a unique and protean force.
  4. In Darkness
    It is suspenseful, horrifying and at times intensely moving. But the ease with which it elicits these responses from the audience feels more opportunistic than insightful.
  5. Don 2
    If "Mission: Impossible" and "Ocean's Eleven" had a bombastic, funny and slick cousin, it might be Don 2.
  6. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    Dizzily enjoyable documentary.
  7. Romantics Anonymous
    Romantics Anonymous might vaporize if the director and the actors didn't have such easy command over the tone of this singularly Gallic fairy tale. If you added a dozen songs and brought it to the stage it would be completely at home.
  8. An African Election
    As we join throngs of excited citizens at a public vote-counting, their uninhibited zeal for the process only highlights the jaded cynicism that threatens to overwhelm our own.
  9. My Piece of the Pie
    Paints an alluring picture of a pan-European cosmopolitan culture whose characters hopscotch from one country to another with hardly a second thought in a lighthearted floating party.
  10. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode.
  11. Miss Minoes
    It's a Christmas present for cat lovers. Miss Minoes, the tweaked title of a 2001 Dutch film by Vincent Bal, is being given an American theatrical run (dubbed into English), and it's a pleasantly quirky, family-friendly fable with lots of meowing.
  12. Lula, the Son of Brazil
    A conventional, rather shallow up-by-your-bootstraps drama, but with a difference.
  13. Albatross
    Niall MacCormick's direction, while unfocused, locates a sweet center in the bonding of the two young girls, effortlessly capturing the way unexpected friendship, like first love, can completely alter the look of the world.
  14. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    Photographed in crisp black and white by Nat Bouman, this enormously likable movie keeps sexual politics on the back burner and the universal search for connection front and center.
  15. It's About You
    Because Kurt Markus's Super 8 camera is the cinematic equivalent of a single microphone, the film's look matches the scratchy quality of its ancient (by rock 'n' roll standards) sound. The crudeness brings out the elemental quality of music that digs deeply into the soil of working-class American life in songs that express the defiance, despair and nobility of people who refuse to go down without a fight.
  16. Last Days Here
    Nevertheless the fierce loyalty of Mr. Liebling's nearest and dearest is extremely touching, and Last Days Here - despite its stinginess with back story and early performance footage - works hard to reveal the man beneath the four-decade heroin habit.
  17. Frankenweenie
    While Frankenweenie is fun, it is not nearly strange or original enough to join the undead, monstrous ranks of the classics it adores.
  18. The Island President
    The hope that infuses this movie makes it all the more upsetting to walk out of the theater and contemplate a looming disaster that the world's leaders seem unable to prevent.
  19. Tonight You're Mine
    The look, the rhythm and the scruffy, on-the-fly ambience of the film make it feel unusually fresh and lively. It may be the same old song, but it's also a catchy remix.
  20. Girl in Progress
    The movie, by virtue of its self-conscious parody of the kind of movie it is, turns out to be an unusually smart and sensitive example of the genre.
  21. Kill List
    That assured style is the spackle that holds Kill List together: when the plot doglegs into insanity, and the characters follow suit, this brutal fever dream refuses to fall apart.
  22. Sound of My Voice
    A smart, effectively unsettling movie about the need to believe and the hard, cruel arts of persuasion.
  23. Keyhole
    To a die-hard Maddinite this may be a little disappointing, but for that reason Keyhole may also be a perfect gateway into the bizarre and fertile world of a unique film artist.
  24. Chronicle
    Mr. DeHaan, whose vulnerability and physical awkwardness here can evoke the young Leonardo DiCaprio in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," is invaluable. Mr. Russell and Mr. Jordan are as likable as their characters, but it's Mr. DeHaan who pulls you uneasily in.
  25. Splinters
    A real-life examination of competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea, the film derives tension from the proverbial big tournament but also from how the event helps foster a worthy morality.
  26. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Highlighting the wacky while playing down the distasteful, Marie Losier's playful profile of the English musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his second wife, Lady Jaye, takes a lighthearted look at the things they did for love.
  27. First Position
    An appealing, largely upbeat documentary about young ballet dancers duking it out.
  28. Buried Prayers
    The film would be stronger if it told us a little more about what the survivors have been doing since the camp was liberated by the Soviets in 1944, but their reactions to revisiting the camp are wrenching to watch.
  29. Return
    In this stratum of Middle American society during wartime and hardship, the movie suggests, life is tough and challenging. You admire these characters for their considerable resilience while understanding that even the best-intentioned people can break under the stress.
  30. Peeples
    Revelations unfold predictably, but the subplots cohere and the assured pacing offers a stark contrast with the often disjointed tempos of Mr. Perry’s mosaics.
  31. Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
    Well made, and for once the talking-heads format is satisfying.
  32. The Miners' Hymns
    An elegant, elegiac found-footage work from Bill Morrison, best known for his silent-film reverie "Decasia."
  33. The Wolverine
    A modest superhero picture may sound like a contradiction in terms, but really it is a welcome respite.
  34. The Magic of Belle Isle
    Ms. Madsen, radiant and tousled, without a trace of narcissism, conveys maternal devotion, undaunted courage and a serene sensuality. Real, if idealized, grown-ups: We haven't seen them much in the movies lately, but here they are.
  35. The Forgotten Space
    Unabashedly polemical and rigorously pessimistic, a sustained Marxian indictment of 21st-century capital. The narration, by Mr. Sekula, is at times lyrical and rarely subtle, but the film is most graceful and moving when its argument slows down or wanders into an interesting tangent.
  36. Intruders
    The monster that creeps into the satisfyingly shivery horror film Intruders doesn't just hide under the bed, it also lurks in dark corners, including those dimmed by your own imagination.
  37. Beautiful Creatures
    There’s not much new under the moon here, which makes what the writer and director Richard LaGravenese does with the story all the more notable.
  38. Good for Nothing
    Good for Nothing may be slight, but it portends a promising frontier for Mr. Wallis.
  39. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    The film is well organized and visually snazzy and keeps enough distance from its subject that you don't feel swamped in a tide of hysterical fandom.
  40. Free Men
    Hilali and Benghabrit were real people. Mr. Ferroukhi, who wrote the script with Alain-Michel Blanc, deftly interweaves their stories with the adventures of the fictional Younes, and so contributes a worthy and interesting chapter to the tradition of World War II dramas of conscience.
  41. Where Are You Taking Me?
    Though it eventually includes landscape and wildlife, Where Are You Taking Me? is no survey of Uganda; it's too quiet, slow and personal for that. But the film is an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation.
  42. Safety Not Guaranteed
    That time machine - a wonderful-looking gizmo with some lasers stolen from a medical laboratory - really exists. Whether it works or not, you'll have to see for yourself. It's worth the wait.
  43. Fun Size
    Movie merits include a good cast, a tidy script and jokes just provocative enough.
  44. For a Good Time, Call...
    Doesn't aspire to be more than a broad, sloppy, old-fashioned sitcom with a sexy gimmick. But it is quite funny.
  45. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Gerhard Richter may not fling paint at the canvas, Jackson Pollock-style, but as Corinna Belz shows in her documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, he can be his own kind of action painter.
  46. Whores' Glory
    Quietly powerful but dispiriting documentary, which compares the world's oldest profession as practiced from place to place.
  47. Hit So Hard
    Hit So Hard is the touching story of how and why Ms. Schemel ended up in her own private hell and how and why she made her way out again into the world of sunshine, sobriety and puppy dogs.
  48. Children of Paradise (1945)
    M. Carne has created a frequently captivating film which has moments of great beauty in it and some performances of exquisite note.
  49. Shakespeare High
    Performing Shakespeare can save children's lives. That is the persuasive argument of Alex Rotaru's documentary Shakespeare High, an inspiring, if too short and overcrowded, examination of the competition among high schools at the 90th annual Drama Teachers Association of Southern California Shakespeare Festival.
  50. Dissolution
    Filmed in high-definition black and white, Ms. Menkes's often exquisite compositions - a single, attenuated shot of the aftermath of a car crash is a miracle of choreography - drive a narrative mired in poverty and spiritual desperation.
  51. End of Watch
    A muscular, maddening exploitation movie embellished with art-house style and anchored by solid performances.
  52. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    At times it felt as if this film might challenge Pixar’s decade-long reign, but that promise wanes. Instead, the movie is sometimes so strange, colorful and wildly cute that it may end up becoming a “Yellow Submarine” for a new generation.
  53. Seven Psychopaths
    Meta to the max, filled with clever jokes and observations that stick like barbs and deflated ones that land with a thud, Seven Psychopaths is a leisurely riff about movies, violence, storytelling and the art of the steal.
  54. Fake It So Real
    The taunts in the ring may be make-believe, but the slams against the mat are agonizingly genuine in Robert Greene's vivid documentary Fake It So Real.
  55. Love in the Buff
    There's charm aplenty in Pang Ho-Cheung's Love in the Buff, a romantic comedy that is as interesting for its glimpse into contemporary urban China as it is for the charisma of its leads.
  56. Scenes of a Crime
    This smart, cool-headed film, which has a "Rashomon"-like vision of the case, presents a disturbing picture of courtroom justice and how different people come to opposite conclusions, based on the same testimony.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear and Desire
    In essaying a dissection of the minds of men under the stress of war, Stanley Kubrick, 24-year-old, producer-director-photographer, and his equally young and unheralded scenarist and cast, have succeeded in turning out a moody, often visually powerful study of subdued excitements.
  58. Player Hating: A Love Story
    A sad chronicle of absent fathers and messed-up mothers, drugs as currency and violence as the period at the end of every argument.
  59. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    Therein lies the essence of this simple, bluntly effective movie. Its principal selling point - the supreme watchability of dogs, especially working dogs - is undeniably powerful.
  60. Fightville
    Spiked with energy and attitude, the nonfiction movie Fightville takes a fast look at a few men who, for pleasure and sometimes profit, like to smack and take down other men while practicing mixed martial arts.
  61. Snow on Tha Bluff
    This riveting account of thug life - the unglamorous, impoverished variety - is punctuated by constant profanity and undecipherable slang, occasional violence, steady drinking and weed or crack smoking.
  62. Carrie
    Ms. Peirce plays up the story’s religious themes and Carrie’s burgeoning power as she discovers her telekinetic gifts, even as the dread of the female body that deepens Mr. De Palma’s version somehow goes missing.
  63. Noah
    Mr. Aronofsky’s earnest, uneven, intermittently powerful film, is both a psychological case study and a parable of hubris and humility. At its best, its shares some its namesake’s ferocious conviction, and not a little of his madness.
  64. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Mr. De Felitta's moody, well-rounded film is a kind of excavation and investigation of Mr. Wright's actions as a piece of civil rights history.
  65. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Inventing Our Life is a fascinating introduction to a movement scrambling to adjust enough to guarantee a future, without severing all ties to its principled past.
  66. Dolphin Boy
    More grounded in simple observation than in fanciful theories, this effortlessly engaging story of sudden tragedy and halting recovery wisely focuses on the facts and leaves the wonder to the audience.
  67. Last Call at the Oasis
    However frustrated they may be by political paralysis, corporate trickery or plain human stupidity, none of them seem inclined to give up. When they do, we really will be screwed, and we won't have or need movies like this to tell us so.
  68. Caroline and Jackie
    With low-key, almost guileless performances, the film demonstrates that no matter how intelligent, well thought out and potentially enlightened a current sociological method (e.g., the “loving intervention”) may be, people will always find a way to turn it into something ludicrous, aggressive or both.
  69. Where Do We Go Now?
    At heart, this jolly, galumphing crowd-pleaser, which won the audience award at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a raucous sitcom about scrappy little boys whose canny mamas conspire to keep them out of trouble.
  70. Portrait of Wally
    The film's single-minded treatment puts property issues over other nuances of the affair, not least the art itself and the artist. A brief postscript about the early deaths of Schiele and his pregnant wife feels uncomfortably like an afterthought.
  71. Grassroots
    Although it only glosses the mechanics of local politics, it exudes an endearingly scruffy charm.
  72. Beloved
    Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.
  73. Sleepwalk with Me
    These episodes, some staged as surreal dream sequences, inject this otherwise prosaic-looking movie with a visual pizazz that makes Sleepwalk With Me more than just a glorified stand-up act.
  74. The Observers
    Solitude is a character, so much so that, 25 minutes in, when the first human voice is heard, it feels like an intrusion. And when the weather warms enough for tourists to make the trek up to the observatory, they register not as a welcome relief from loneliness but as annoyances.
  75. Bonsái
    There's nothing obscure about young love and loss, and a story, as Mr. Jiménez put it, about "youngsters who have to deal with this sudden lack of certainties which makes them more lonely than they could have ever imagined."
  76. Lovely Molly
    Generating suspense without blowing the special-effects budget, Mr. Sanchez paints an intimate portrait of a tormented personality. Though horrors are eventually unveiled, the film is more chilling in its slower, quieter moments.
  77. Bill W.
    Names and events are ticked off in rapid succession, and the big, and fascinating, question of what role spirituality played receives cautious attention at best. Nonetheless, Bill W. offers a trove of information for non-A.A. members through the life of a man whose dedication has helped others understand their own.
  78. Oslo, August 31st
    Mr. Trier and Mr. Lie - a quiet, recessive but nonetheless magnetically self-assured screen presence - emphasize Anders's individuality above all. Oslo, August 31st has the satisfying gravity of specific experience, and also, true to its title, a prickly sense of place.
  79. OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger's Movie
    This moving, penetrating documentary records his attempt to describe his conditions, confront them and learn to manage them.
  80. Found Memories
    Its clever final plot twist adds a gratifying jolt of the uncanny to what is otherwise a charming, bittersweet meditation on the passage of time and the equivocal power of images to capture an older world at the moment of its disappearance.
  81. Wish Me Away
    This scrappy-slick confessional is a fascinating study in dualities.
  82. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    As usual, the characters — and the performers playing them — step unto the breach to provide just enough wit and feeling to make Days of Future Past something other than a waste of a reasonable person’s time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    The largely amateur cast of black performers and their producer-director may be involved in basically simple action fare in The Harder They Come, but they also leave a slightly disturbing, documentary impression of the darker side of the sunny Jamaica.
  84. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    Far from imposing clarity on the historic gatherings, Tahrir embraces the thrill and uncertainty of popular action. In some ways resembling old-fashioned vérité, Stefano Savona's chronicle aims to plunge you into the crowds and clamor.
  85. UFO in Her Eyes
    Three-Headed Bird Village - the setting for Xiaolu Guo's stingingly funny satire, UFO in Her Eyes - is a quiet agricultural hamlet in the Guangxi province of southern China that is uprooted by instant globalization.
  86. Ikland
    Narrating as he goes, his humor as warm and dry as the ground beneath his feet, Mr. Soling is an unconventional explorer whose interactions with the long-suffering Ik - the women quiet and watchful, the men seamed and talkative - are politely deferential. He's clearly not there to engage in scientific study; he's simply reaching out across continents on a hunch that even eminent scientists can get it wrong.
  87. Americano
    Though not explicitly autobiographical, this film is deeply personal, and while the nature of cinema is very much on its mind, it rarely feels insular or self-conscious. Instead, it is wistful and nostalgic, and at the same time full of restless curiosity.
  88. Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
    This is a film that does sweat the technique, with at times illuminating and spirited results.
  89. Deadfall
    A diverting neo-noir, Deadfall brings to mind those dark, old-fashioned entertainments in rotation on Turner Classic Movies that suck you in with their genre machinery, sullen beauties and despair.
  90. Kumaré
    A goal of this practical program of discipline and reflection is to cultivate an inner guru so that you don't need someone like Kumaré.
  91. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Extremely likable and has value as a historical document specifically because it includes snippets from a dozen later-life interviews with Photo League members like Rosalie Gwathmey and Mr. Engel.
  92. Nate & Margaret
    Blessed with natural performances and brisk pacing, this unusual little movie would like us to know just one thing: Passion is fine, but a pal is priceless.
  93. Men on the Bridge
    A powerful portrait of working-class Istanbul that artfully suggests a wellspring of found moments. Quietly, steadily, it gathers a resonance belying its slice-of-life scale.
  94. Gypsy
    The movie filmed with nonactors, doesn't try to counteract stereotypes of the Roma people as shiftless, thieving hustlers. But it goes a long way toward explaining the antisocial behavior.
  95. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    The first interactions between human and animal are fascinating, as the trainers often apply different approaches. As the horses learn to trust their trainers, connections grow into deep bonds.
  96. Alps
    Like "Dogtooth," Alps works by systematically unsettling our sense of what is normal and habitual in human interactions.
  97. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Like "My Architect," Nathaniel Kahn's film about his father, Louis I. Kahn, this documentary is a son's attempt to forge a posthumous bond with an elusive parent.
  98. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    The script for Mockingjay Part 1, credited to Peter Craig and Danny Strong, gets the job done, but the performers matter far more than the words they deliver.
  99. Klown
    The film, directed by Mikkel Norgaard, somehow manages the difficult trick of going into taboo territory without ever feeling dirty. And Mr. Hvam has a knack for misdirection. Just when you're wanting to give his character a hug and forgive all, off he goes into even more inappropriate behavior.
  100. Nuit #1
    Their eloquent monologues, interspersed with vicious verbal skirmishes, are artfully constructed, occasionally poetic expressions of pain, delivered in well-formed sentences that suggest the movie might have originated as a two-person stage drama.
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