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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    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    Despite the false bid for suspense in its framing device and its several ritual claims to excitement, it finally lacks even the interest of its own events. For this, I think the director is very much at fault.
  2. The Lost Weekend: A Love Story
    Whatever the truth of Ono’s manipulations in this affair — and Pang’s claims, including that Ono asked Pang to look after Lennon in an especially personal way, are at times hair-raising — they tinge this saga with a resentment that’s off-putting.
  3. The Pursuit of Happyness
    It's the same old bootstraps story, an American dream artfully told, skillfully sold. To that calculated end, the filmmaking is seamless, unadorned, transparent, the better to serve Mr. Smith's warm expressiveness.
  4. In Praise of Love
    Godard's artistry -- the way his scenes are at once archly stylized and informal, the quick precision of his eye -- is unarguable. But the beautiful images and solemn words cannot disguise the slack complacency of his vision.
  5. Eight Below
    Eight Below is Grade A pooch porn, an orgy of canine cuteness.
  6. Wolfgang
    A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, Wolfgang provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.
  7. The Bad Guys 2
    The directors Pierre Perifel and JP Sans put the narrative across with a blithe bounciness, and the all-star voice actors play along nicely.
  8. Bombshell
    Part of what works in the movie is that it does a good job of presenting the ordinary assaults that women, even those with great privilege, can endure simply to get through a day, including dehumanizing “compliments.”
  9. Belle
    The weave of the personal and the political finally proves as irresistible as it is moving, partly because it has been drawn from extraordinary life.
  10. Suspiria
    As the first hour of Suspiria grinds into the second and beyond (the movie runs 152 minutes), it grows ever more distended and yet more hollow. Unlike Argento, who seemed content to deliver a nastily updated fairy tale in 90 or so minutes, Guadagnino continues casting about for meaning, which perhaps explains why he keeps adding more stuff, more mayhem, more dances.
  11. 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.
  12. Avenue Montaigne
    Avenue Montaigne is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.
  13. 1408
    The movie is most effective in its early scenes of prickly menace, and while the Dolphin is no Overlook (the haunted hotel in "The Shining"), its old-world creepiness is exactly right.
  14. The Low Down
    What distinguishes The Low Down from movies like "The Brothers McMullen" and "My Life's in Turnaround" is its ragged edge of authenticity, its refusal to plot its characters' lives on the graph of romantic comedy convention.
  15. Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    Gigantic has the informal tone and structure of an illustrated scrapbook with excerpts from concert and television performances interwoven with lighthearted testimonials by friends, supporters, collaborators and admirers and augmented by witty animated segments.
  16. Mondays in the Sun
    This slow, episodic film is held together by the galvanic presence of Javier Bardem.
  17. Blackboards
    An indelible and ultimately moving vision of humanity buffeted by the elements and by international political tides.
  18. Enigma
    The mystery of Enigma is how a rich historical subject, combined with so much first-rate talent -- a highly capable (if not always exciting) director, a fine English cast, a script by Tom Stoppard -- could have yielded such a flat, plodding picture.
  19. Unlikely Heroes
    Much of the time, unfortunately, the responsible, institutional filmmaking of Unlikely Heroes, from Moriah Films, an arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, does not do full justice to these stories.
  20. The Sixth Sense
    Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.
  21. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    The chemistry between the two is as old as Abbott and Costello. Harold is the sensible worried one, and Kumar zany and reckless. The movie's funniest moments, set at Princeton University, caricature and then demolish the image of Asian-Americans as nerdy, sexless bookworms incapable of fun.
  22. Chain
    For all its bleakness, the movie, filmed in nearly a dozen states and in half a dozen countries, is not without a certain beauty. There is comfort to be found in blandness and homogeneity.
  23. Between Us
    Stingingly attuned to the tension between long-term love and last-minute misgivings, Between Us makes a familiar situation feel remarkably fresh.
  24. Pizza Movie
    It’s fast, witty, and packed with clever punchlines, though it still finds time for several scatological gags.
  25. Swiss Army Man
    Impossible to categorize, this stunningly original mix of the macabre and the magical combines comedy, tragedy, fantasy and love story into an utterly singular package that’s beholden to no rules but its own.
  26. Bettie Page Reveals All
    No life is seamless, and not every biographical portrait needs to be, but this one is so riddled with awkward transitions, including on the soundtrack, that it tends to lurch distractingly, as if Mr. Mori were still trying to figure out how to piece the whole thing together.
  27. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    A surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait of Whitney Houston’s rise and struggles with fame and drugs before her death at 48.
  28. Domain
    You really can't hang a drama on a mathematical theory and expect it to serve as a shortcut for storytelling.
  29. Medora
    A mournful Midwestern ballad devoid of grace notes.
  30. Fright Night
    The old "Fright Night" was both self-aware and effectively scary, and if this one seems to prefer gruesome digital effects to old-fashioned bump-in-the-night spookiness, it still succeeds in keeping the audience both tickled and anxious.
  31. Keep an Eye Out
    Dupieux pulls off this bizarre procedural in a lean running time while hitting the notes of darkness and drollery just right.
  32. Ready or Not
    It’s Weaving who gives this blunt satire of class warfare a heart.
  33. Che
    Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.
  34. Wolke Neun
    All the more disappointing, then, when what has been a celebration of last-ditch passion slides abruptly into a cautionary tale. Until that point the movie's refreshingly unbiased tone allows us to make our own moral judgments, teasing us with the possibility that, occasionally, the scarlet woman can escape unbranded. I, for one, was rooting for her.
  35. Youth
    The problem with Youth is not that it’s empty — the accusation Kael and others lodged against Mr. Sorrentino’s precursors — but that it’s small. Its imagination feels shrunken and secondhand, in spite of the gorgeous vistas and beautiful naked women. Or actually, because of them.
  36. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    A divertingly eccentric, often comically absurd movie.
  37. Look Both Ways
    Bogged down by the stylistic gimmickry of bustling montages and jarring animated segments, Look Both Ways aims for existential drama but succeeds only in reminding us that misery loves company.
  38. 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.
  39. Saboteur
    To put it mildly, Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go. Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip.
  40. Toys in the Attic
    The movie should be manna for anyone who likes animated fantasias without wisecracks, commercials and overwrought warbling about self-actualization, meaning that it's suitable for those who will grow up either to be the next Tim Burton or simply to enjoy his movies.
  41. Code of Silence
    Code of Silence, as directed by Andy Davis, has a slick look and adequate pacing, though its action sequences tend to fizzle as they end.
  42. Continental Divide
    Mr. Apted has made this a sweet, engaging movie that audiences will very much want to see end well.
  43. The Europeans
    The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.
  44. Nasty Baby
    Mr. Silva’s accomplishment is not just in pulling off a jarring plot twist, but in handling a change of tone that turns the movie — and the audience’s assumptions about it — upside down.
  45. Born to be Blue
    In Mr. Hawke’s extraordinary performance, this glamorous enigma becomes a credible, if pathetic character who lives for only two things: to play the trumpet and to shoot heroin.
  46. Wolfen
    Wolfen is so good-looking that one tends to ignore a certain but very real inner vacuity.
  47. The Wild Boys
    It’s hard to untangle the film’s many bizarre indulgences, which at times seem intended to titillate as much as disturb, and yet somehow do neither. It’s all a bit too ludicrous to be sensuous or unsettling, or ultimately all that insightful.
  48. Come Early Morning
    An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.
  49. Muppet Treasure Island
    In this sendup of Treasure Island, there are no compelling heroes or villains, and the suspense is minimal. Most of the fun lies in watching the Muppets defuse the swashbuckling tale of its scariness by superimposing their own precociously verbal identities onto their characters.
  50. Before We Vanish
    Mr. Kurosawa, a prolific and skilled genre master, spins this parable with a light, nimble touch, punctuating heavy passages of exposition with punchy, modest action sequences and snatches of incongruously bouncy music.
  51. The Fury
    The Fury was directed by Brian De Palma in what appears to have been an all-out effort to transform the small-scale, Grand Guignol comedy of his Carrie into an international horror/spy/occult mind-blower of a movie. He didn't concentrate hard enough, though.
  52. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    The fuzziness of Mr. Avitabile’s sentiments on boundary-blind unity is echoed in the movie’s slack, tag-along portraiture.
  53. The Wanderers
    Makes mincemeat of an excellent novel.
  54. Madeleine Collins
    Despite Efira’s efforts, Judith’s inevitable breakdown never hits a satisfyingly deranged register. Her motivations turn out to be less spicy, and more blandly sympathetic than one had hoped from this pressure cooker of a film.
  55. Elvis
    In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.
  56. The Electric Horseman
    Invigorating.
  57. 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.
  58. Holy Hell
    Mr. Allen has made an engrossing and tense documentary, though his insider knowledge is sometimes a hindrance.
  59. Pick of the Litter
    In short, Pick of the Litter makes for unexpectedly suspenseful (and perhaps not entirely reputable) viewing.
  60. Kaboom
    Chaotic, trifling, oddly likable film.
  61. Mongolian Ping Pong
    Although its leisurely pace might be a bit tough going for restless Westerners, Mongolian Ping Pong is the kind of film that should rightly be seen by children, not just adventurous adults.
  62. Hell House
    As a director, Mr. Ratliff wisely rejects the temptation to make fun of his subjects, most of whom seem to believe sincerely that they are doing the work of God.
  63. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Has occasional moments of heat, but not much warmth. And while it is pretty enough to look at, real beauty eludes it.
  64. American Psycho
    A lean and mean horror comedy classic.
  65. Identity
    Reasonably well-executed thriller. It suffers not from awkwardness or silliness, which would make it more fun, but rather from its air-brushed, expensive pretentiousness.
  66. Intermission
    Altogether compelling.
  67. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    Although it leaves you with a knot in your stomach, its power is undercut by its own head-banging obviousness.
  68. Team America: World Police
    Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.
  69. Grand Canyon
    [Grand Canyon] eventually pulls its punches, taking an unconvincingly beatific look at the problems and dangers that have been so persuasively outlined in what has come before. But until it hits that false note, Mr. Kasdan's film is at least as fascinating as it is amorphous.
  70. Ray Meets Helen
    Ray Meets Helen has a wistful, whimsical sophistication that has all but disappeared from movies. Filled with imaginative visuals populated by the ghosts of the gone and hopes for the future, the movie is wonderfully, magically humane.
  71. Constructing Albert
    Sibling rivalry is a consistent subtext but only that — Mr. Adrià’s main concern is to create. As it happens, in this generally likable film he is at his most endearing when fixing himself a simple (but indeed delicious looking) grilled ham and cheese sandwich.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Christmas in Connecticut
    Peter Godfrey, the director, has a good deal to learn about the art of telling a boudoir joke in the parlor and getting away with it.
  73. Chinese Puzzle
    This warm-blooded paean to globalization is just enough in touch with reality to keep your eyes from rolling. For Chinese Puzzle genuinely likes people. It overlooks the faults and misbehavior of its eccentric characters to express a lighthearted optimism that doesn’t feel forced or manipulative. It is in love with life.
  74. Coming Home in the Dark
    While the whole thing is ruthlessly well done, it also sometimes seems to lean into a kind of moral relativism.
  75. Napoleon
    Napoleon is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character.
  76. Glass Chin
    Despite an appealing fondness for New York locations and habits, Mr. Buschel and his cinematographer, Ryan Samul, have embalmed their film in style. J. J.’s ostentatious speeches feel like a projection of self-conscious cleverness, and the film’s virtuoso lighting doesn’t always match up to the needs of a scene.
  77. You Kill Me
    Straight-up ridiculous, but it's also consistently funny and nicely played by a well-complemented cast that finds its collective groove and never misses a beat.
  78. Living Out Loud
    The filmmaker has borrowed from Chekhov the soul-baring introspection that can be so ineffable on the page or stage yet becomes so damply sensitive and dramatically vague on screen.
  79. Killing Them Softly
    In spite of the golden presence of Brad Pitt as the killer, a level-headed professional named Jackie Cogan, the movie has an agreeably scuzzy, small-time feeling.
  80. Downsizing
    Downsizing is an ambitious movie about the value of modesty, and its faults are proportionate to its insights. I sort of wish it felt like a bigger deal, but maybe that’s my problem.
  81. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    “Barb and Star” offers a mixed bag of laughs, often feeling like a Frankenstein assembly of various sketches. Still, I can’t help but admire its commitment to the act, and its gloriously unhinged absurdity.
  82. Marvelous and the Black Hole
    Cech is believable as a troubled teenager, and it’s refreshing to see an Asian American girl as a protagonist, but the film has a limited emotional range, jumping among several plot elements without fully fleshing them out.
  83. Bound
    The film is shot by Bill Pope with such enterprising flair that it never looks claustrophobic, but the action inevitably stalls in such close quarters.
  84. The Lost King
    Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, The Lost King isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones.
  85. Brideshead Revisited
    Mr. Goode shows all the charisma of a stalk of boiled asparagus molded into the likeness of Jeremy Irons.
  86. Fifty-Fifty
    Ms. Omarova has a painter's eye for composition and a novelist's sense of character.
  87. Comedy of Power
    As ever, Mr. Chabrol’s style is delicate and precise. Comedy of Power is not his deepest or most ambitious film, and its stance of knowing resignation in the face of corruption can feel a little glib. But Ms. Huppert's ferocity compensates for the director's detachment; no French actress is as riveting to watch once the gloves come off.
  88. 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.
  89. Where Is Where?
    Anyone looking for some idiosyncratic, visually stimulating entertainment this week could do worse than Where Is Where?, an intriguing narrative experiment by the Finnish artist and filmmaker Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
  90. Slingshot
    Portrayed entirely without sentiment, everyone here is equally abject, from the crushed victim of a human stampede to the starving baby playing in its own feces. The mood of scrambling desperation can be exhausting, but the filmmaking is never less than exhilarating.
  91. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ms. Forbes hasn’t made a movie about her father’s illness; she’s made one about her father, who, through hard and weird times, clearly helped give her what she needed so that one day she could tell this story.
  92. True Believer
    The film's view of Eddie Dodd is occasionally on the facile side, but Mr. Woods's performance is crackling and passionate enough to give the character depth despite that; it's also laced with snappish, self-mocking humor that Mr. Woods delivers particularly well. This performance is so razor-sharp that Eddie can be seen coming alive with each little triumph, reveling in each little maneuver and taking each little disappointment terribly hard. His enthusiasm is irresistible.
  93. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
    The movie strives for a knowing, amiable tone. It achieves a cutesy, slight one instead.
  94. Cloverfield
    Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.
  95. Miles Ahead
    Does it matter that stretches of Miles Ahead — a gun-rattling, squealing-tire car chase included — came out of the filmmakers’ imagination rather than Davis’s life? (Mr. Cheadle shares script credit with Steven Baigelman.) Purists may howl, but they’ll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie.
  96. Fury
    Within this gore-spattered, superficially nihilistic carapace is an old-fashioned platoon picture, a sensitive and superbly acted tale of male bonding under duress.
  97. Tamara Drewe
    There is something shallow and cautious about this film, which strains to maintain a glib, cheery demeanor that is not always appropriate to the details of the story.
  98. Fool for Love
    Fool for Love has several exceptional things going for it, namely the performances by Mr. Shepard as Eddie, Kim Basinger as May and Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man.
  99. The Reception
    It's an intimate chamber piece, dialogue-heavy and at times claustrophobic, but the four central characters are so deftly sketched, and their shifting alliances so intricately choreographed, that the film never feels talky or staged. The actors are consistently excellent.
  100. Nadja
    It is refreshing to see so much style and life in the old undead tale, and to watch this strong cast with its perfect deadpan attitudes.
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