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. Honeymoon
    A lean, low-budget debut that taps into newlywed anxiety with subtle wit and no small amount of style.
  2. Swearnet: The Movie
    Listening to these three swear up a blue streak is amusing for five minutes or so, but that’s about it.
  3. Faith Connections
    Mr. Nalin applies an on-the-ground approach, mainly looking at holy men and lost boys at the gathering. But he lets the sprawl slacken his overlong film’s grasp and, strangely, underplays the nuances of the event’s spiritual aspects.
  4. At the Devil's Door
    At the Devil’s Door is reasonably absorbing but never scary or satirically sharp (despite references to mortgages and foreclosures). It mostly settles for inducing sensation.
  5. The Man on Her Mind
    It is Ms. McAllister who is the brightest light amid the talky, often sentimental exchanges. She lends charm and conviction to a character who might otherwise have proved insufferable.
  6. Archaeology of a Woman
    Burdened by a ludicrous script and messy direction, Ms. Kirkland — a headstrong veteran performer who is nothing if not game — has proved that she can play this kind of role in her sleep. If only the movie around it were worthy of her efforts.
  7. Altina
    In Peter Sanders’s sassy documentary Altina... there’s plenty of interesting ground to cover.
  8. The Green Prince
    If The Green Prince sustains the tension of a well-executed thriller, it is achieved at the cost of a dispassionate objectivity.
  9. I Am Eleven
    Ms. Bailey’s willingness to let the children talk and to let the viewer impose broader meaning elevates it.
  10. Bird People
    There are plot twists, and then there is what Ms. Ferran does here, which is to transform — impetuously, improbably and altogether marvelously — this somber, realistic tale into something else entirely.
  11. The Skeleton Twins
    The Skeleton Twins is a well-written and acted movie about contemporary life that doesn’t strain for melodrama and is largely devoid of weepy soap opera theatrics. A small, precise, character-driven vignette, it has no pretensions to make any kind of grand statement about The Way We Live Now.
  12. Stray Dogs
    Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.
  13. Dolphin Tale 2
    For the right age group, though, the film hits its marks: It’s wholesome, engaging and rife with impressive aquatic photography.
  14. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    As a whole, it doesn’t quite work, but the parts — particular moments, observations and insights about the way people behave and perceive themselves — are frequently excellent.
  15. The Drop
    Mr. Roskam’s direction is gratifyingly loose. He lets the story, which is really the least interesting part of the movie, more or less take care of itself, allowing us to savor pungent morsels of dialogue and bits of low-key actorly showboating.
  16. Born to Fly
    A singularly focused and avant-garde talent, Ms. Streb bends the messy rush of risk to her indomitable will.
  17. My Old Lady
    As the truth tumbles out, the dialogue and the carefully timed revelations make My Old Lady seem increasingly stagy. But the performances go a long way toward camouflaging the screenplay’s clunky mechanics.
  18. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    Mr. Gomes remains laudably faithful to his character, and Ms. Guedes’s bodily sense of languor gets across more than any crystal-clear dramatic statement would.
  19. The Rule
    The Rule, by the married filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno, doesn’t show us enough detail about how they’re applied to distinguish St. Benedict’s from countless other parochial schools, private institutions and military academies.
  20. Kelly & Cal
    The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.
  21. Wetlands
    The tone is breezy, bright and brash, vividly illuminated by Ms. Juri’s extraordinarily unprotected and utterly fearless performance.
  22. Frontera
    Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.
  23. Memphis
    A soulful cinematic tone poem.
  24. God Help the Girl
    Belle and Sebastian fans will be fully sated; everyone else might feel as if they’d consumed a meal consisting entirely of meringue.
  25. No No: A Dockumentary
    As this smart and sympathetic profile shows, Dock Ellis didn’t need a no-hitter, stoned or otherwise, to define himself; he was his own best work.
  26. Thunder and the House of Magic
    The story is unremarkable, but its execution zings.
  27. Innocence
    Hilary Brougher’s Innocence (based on Jane Mendelsohn’s 2000 novel) moves to the formulaic beats of the second-rate TV movie, albeit one cloaked in an ultra-glossy sheen.
  28. Naked Opera
    Mr. Rollinger, a protagonist of a curiously circumscribed life, proves to have an opaque appeal.
  29. Falcon Rising
    Mr. Chapman administers some of his (amplified) thwacks and drop kicks with a likable, you-should-know-better air of amusement, recalling a Reagan-era TV cop show.
  30. The Identical
    This movie’s earnest infectiousness is tough to deny.
  31. But Always
    Watching it means waiting for the other shoe to drop: anticipating the moment when this already tacky weepie will resolve itself in horrific, exploitative fashion.
  32. The Congress
    Ari Folman’s genre mash-up The Congress could use a freakier title, something either more appealing or appalling to go with the weird, sometimes wonderful visions flowing through it.
  33. Last Days in Vietnam
    The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage.
  34. Raja Natwarlal
    Mr. Deshmukh’s setup can be overly fussy — some of the con machinations seem needlessly complicated and hard to follow, or maybe not quite worth following — but his payoff works. And his cast, too, hits the right notes and finds an easy rhythm.
  35. Gringo Trails
    The only urgent message in Gringo Trails would seem to be the screamingly obvious one: Visitors should behave themselves.
  36. Rocks in My Pockets
    The bravery of Ms. Baumane’s own coping methods (which some may disagree with) brings her tough-minded film to a cleareyed, forward-looking conclusion that doesn’t lose sight of her demons.
  37. As Above, So Below
    This quivering effort from the director John Erick Dowdle only increases in impenetrability whenever anything mildly curious occurs.
  38. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    For all its gloss, “Kundo” fails to resonate. You appreciate the execution, but the film is hindered by its lack of novelty and metaphorical weight.
  39. Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering
    Having a mild-mannered writer tell this story by sitting in a chair in front of some pretty art in a house museum and just talking seems lackadaisical, but Mr. Moss’s message is clear, shrewdly edited and peculiarly interesting.
  40. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    Enervatingly synthetic, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears slices and dices the images and tropes of Italian giallo-style slasher films into an inert pile of style.
  41. Life of Crime
    As a late-summer caper movie, it hits the spot. The film offers the intriguing contrast of actors and a director (Daniel Schechter) taking a different approach to known material.
  42. The Last of Robin Hood
    The story comes to feel mild (and incomplete) in its tempered nostalgia.
  43. Canopy
    The strength of Canopy is its filmmaking. With this haunting work, Mr. Wilson, joined by the talented cinematographer Stefan Duscio and the sound designers Rodney Lowe and Nic Buchanan, has made a promising debut.
  44. The Calling
    Preposterous as it is, The Calling remains stubbornly suspenseful until near the end.
  45. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    Temperate in tone but screaming with subtext, Jamie Marks Is Dead climbs above the current glut of supernaturally inclined entertainment by dint of a hushed unease that permeates almost every frame.
  46. Last Weekend
    Mostly, Last Weekend is an elegiac ode to affluence.
  47. The Naked Room
    While The Naked Room may raise awareness, it often feels voyeuristic in less productive ways.
  48. The Notebook
    The Notebook is a skillfully made movie, with sequences that may haunt you after you leave the theater. But it lacks the power to turn its virtuosity, or the emotional discipline of its remarkable young leads, into a source of insight.
  49. Shadows from My Past
    The issue of national atonement is a sprawling topic, one ill served by the film’s unfocused and amateurish presentation. At times, the movie seems less like a full-fledged documentary than like a pitch session.
  50. Patema Inverted
    The music is lovely, and the animation is soft and imaginatively detailed. Patema and Age may not know what’s upside down or right-way up, but their director is never in any doubt.
  51. The Damned
    Playing characters with no real substance, the actors struggle to develop a sense of shared peril.
  52. Mardaani
    In her pursuit, Shivani pistol-whips perps, performs a flying tackle on a criminal astride a motorcycle, shoots an assassin at point-blank range and stabs an assailant through the hand. Her final confrontation with Walt is a sweaty aria of hand-to-hand martial arts combat.
  53. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    At times, Mr. Harris’s voice-over narration veers into academic abstraction or lyrical emotionalism in ways that undercut the eloquence of the images, but over all he is a wise and passionate guide to an inexhaustibly fascinating subject.
  54. The November Man
    There is something to be said for a thriller that rips along with no regard for anything other than its own pace, coasting on Mr. Brosnan’s blunter-than-Bond suavity and Ms. Kurylenko’s beauty.
  55. Starred Up
    Though it is, finally, an affecting story of two damaged men bound by blood and something like love (and also a thrillerish catalog of double crosses and shifting allegiances), it is, above all, a study in the patterns of chaos that govern penitentiary life.
  56. Cam2Cam
    For a would-be skin-and-horror treat, though, Cam2Cam is surprisingly prudish. It doesn’t really traffic in sex; the camera mostly averts its gaze from the murders, preferring blood spatter patterns; and the acting is predictably wooden.
  57. The Possession of Michael King
    Dim in wits and lighting, The Possession of Michael King strains our eyes, spits on our intelligence and saps our generosity of spirit. Relatively untaxed, however, is the part of the brain that processes new experiences: There’s scarcely a shot or an idea in this first feature from David Jung that we haven’t seen many times before.
  58. May in the Summer
    The hand-wringing and revelations are familiar from many wedding movies, but May in the Summer gains added potency from its cross-cultural tensions and the drama the characters face in reconciling tradition with modern life.
  59. 14 Blades
    While 14 Blades grinds on perhaps a half-hour too long, its ambitions and energies show that for a fresh take on the western, go east.
  60. To Be Takei
    [Ms. Kroot's] banalizing documentary is self-defeating as it tags along with Mr. Takei and his wonky husband, Brad, on their busy daily schedule.
  61. Jersey Shore Massacre
    Acknowledging Hurricane Sandy, Jersey Shore Massacre reminds viewers that it’s hardly the worst disaster to hit the region. But it gives the Hindenburg stiff competition.
  62. Kink
    A fascinating profile of the online pornography provider Kink.com.
  63. Are You Here
    [An] endearing muddle, which flails in search of an identity.
  64. When the Game Stands Tall
    Thomas Carter, the director, whips us into a frenzy during the big winning-again-is-everything game, as all sports underdog movies must. But in the end, the only real impact is limited to a few scenes.
  65. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    The best antidote to all the glowering and posing is Eva Green: As Ava, the titular dame, she’s nothing short of a godsend.
  66. K2: Siren of the Himalayas
    Shedding light on the filmmaking process would have only enriched this well-wrought but limited extreme-sports portrait.
  67. Salvo
    A soulful romance, an existential action flick and something of a miracle movie — the appealing slow-burner Salvo hovers at the crossroads of genre.
  68. Kabbalah Me
    Kabbalah Me, which distinguishes between “narrow consciousness” and “expanded consciousness,” merely walks the middle ground.
  69. See You Next Tuesday
    Loving difficult people (and being difficult, and sometimes helpless) is the subject of the film’s drama, shot through with comedy and satire, thanks to Mr. Tobia’s razor-sharp, rapid cutting of scenes and needling dialogue.
  70. The One I Love
    Mr. McDowell manages and massages the mystery, even while he forgets to do much with the camera except periodically have it chase after someone. He can be frustratingly inattentive to the visual possibilities offered by the story.
  71. If I Stay
    The director, R. J. Cutler, whose previous work has mostly been in big- and small-screen documentaries, has a way of underplaying large feelings and amplifying subtle shifts of mood.
  72. Love Is Strange
    By the time the movie is over, you feel as if the people in it were friends you know well enough to tire of, and to miss terribly when they go away.
  73. Winter in the Blood
    The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.
  74. Expedition to the End of the World
    The film is essentially an evolved hybrid of global environmental documentary and the group-trip experiments of reality television. Its biggest step onto unfamiliar terrain might be its ambivalent ending, conveying uncertainty about what can or should be done next.
  75. Red Hollywood
    Insistently cinematic and dialectical, Red Hollywood has another virtue: It doesn’t toss everyone into a single leftist lump. Differences are articulated and illustrated, as individual voices rise and fall, fade and endure.
  76. The Admiral: Roaring Currents
    A turgid, foursquare naval epic.
  77. Jake Squared
    Jake Squared combines the most grating tendencies of meta navel-gazing with the sexism of reality television — pushing the limit of viewer tolerance to zero.
  78. A Will for the Woods
    It’s possible to admire the four directors’ unflinching depiction of the dying process, but the film is mostly unilluminating and grim — not least because almost all of the deaths discussed are untimely.
  79. 37: A Final Promise
    It’s an awkward mix of sentiment, underdeveloped relationships and rock ’n’ roll pretensions, and it never quite gels into the “Love Story” for the 21st century that it wants to be.
  80. We Are Mari Pepa
    For all its enthusiastic vulgarity and truly terrible punk rock, We Are Mari Pepa is a gently endearing portrait of four amiable Mexican teenagers feeling their way toward adulthood.
  81. Mr. X
    Though Ms. Louise-Salomé’s film strikes a potentially irritating pose as a kind of artistic séance — shrouding interviewees in shadow, conjuring up clips with the drifting rhythm of the unconscious — it delivers articulate insights and has an elegant construction.
  82. The Word
    The Word is never boring, though that has as much to do with the mounting absurdities and ripe acting as it does with the resourceful use of crosscutting by the director, Gregory W. Friedle.
  83. Dinosaur 13
    Dinosaur 13 may not be the best documentary, but as a scientific soap opera, it’s a doozy.
  84. Moebius
    Mr. Kim does show an abiding concern here for the unsubtle realities of human libido and cruelty, but he’s alarmingly tone-deaf as he makes his points, and shows disregard for his female characters as he uses them up.
  85. Level Five
    Its themes are a bit nostalgic and some of its technology looks dated, but there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new.
  86. Jealousy
    Mr. Garrel’s method goes beyond realism to achieve a kind of psychological intimacy that is rare and, in its low-key, meandering way, tremendously exciting.
  87. Abuse of Weakness
    It is hard to imagine that any other actress could muster the stubborn ferocity that Isabelle Huppert brings to the role of Maud.
  88. Life After Beth
    Written and directed by Jeff Baena, this first feature feels sloppily plotted and uncertain of its destination. Seasoned actors are left to yell pointlessly at one another, while Beth and the zombie angle slowly decompose.
  89. The Trip to Italy
    Like its predecessor, The Trip to Italy flirts with seriousness yet invariably, perhaps rightly, it always goes for the joke, the pun, the fun and the sun.
  90. The Giver
    In the end, it taketh — your time, patience and faith in newly imagined dystopias — more than it giveth.
  91. The Expendables 3
    It’s all a bit like a classic-rock tribute concert, or playing with all your action figures at once, or maybe “Cannonball Run,” with the strained buddy-buddy back-and-forth.
  92. Let's Be Cops
    [A] disposable comedy.
  93. Coldwater
    Proceeding in a tone of unrelieved misery, Coldwater is a punishing, predictable drama that’s almost rescued by strong acting and good intentions.
  94. I Am Happiness on Earth
    If you hang on, the slow-paced “I Am Happiness” may teach you how to appreciate its scoreless, flat, dreamlike flow.
  95. Frank
    Mr. Abrahamson’s main achievement, enabled by the sensitive and resourceful cast, is to find a tone that is funny without flippancy, sincere without turning to mush.
  96. Step Up: All In
    Step Up All In, directed by the dancer and choreographer Trish Sie, signals a slight retreat from the bonkers, protest-themed “Step Up Revolution."
  97. After
    After turns out to be working territory that, while emotionally fraught, has already been pretty thoroughly mined.
  98. Into the Storm
    This film is actually less menacing than marveling, though a disturbing opening scene in a storm-tossed van could fit right into Mr. Quale’s earlier work.
  99. What Now? Remind Me
    Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, What Now? Remind Me is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence.
  100. The Maid's Room
    The Maid’s Room has much to recommend, including the versatile Mr. Camp (“Tamara Drewe,” “Compliance”) in a Machiavellian role. But it doesn’t marshal its twists toward a convincing or satisfying conclusion.
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