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. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    A competently made, moderately diverting variation on a genre standard.
  2. The Legend of Hercules
    This movie, with its relatively modest running time and not-quite-household-name cast, is no more ridiculous than, let’s say, the “Thor” movies, and a lot less pretentious.
  3. Hamlet
    While Mr. Ramsay accomplishes some kind of a trick in streamlining the play, his trimming of corners feels more like a taking away of the center.
  4. Loves Her Gun
    Adopting an appealingly low-key approach to a high-stakes subject, this gently observant drama from Geoff Marslett takes its sweet time introducing the girl to the gun, but when it does, we’re all but guaranteed to care.
  5. Divorce Corp
    The tone ranges from wounded to disgusted, but a movie positing this deep a rot in the system needs to be more measured and better made to take hold.
  6. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    Mr. Kaufman’s talent can be debated, but his love for his job is stamped on every garish, oozy frame.
  7. If You Build It
    The movie’s biggest weakness comes with its tendency to film people telling us what’s going on rather than having us observe.
  8. Truth
    Filled with sappy dialogue and screeching strings, Truth is a puerile excavation of secrets and sickness.
  9. The Suspect
    At 137 minutes, the film overstays its welcome with multiple concluding flourishes (and exceeds the sentiment threshold).
  10. Chander Pahar (Mountains Of The Moon)
    One reason Chander Pahar seems so plodding is that Mr. Mukherjee has a habit of telling us what he doesn’t know how to show.
  11. The Truth About Emanuel
    The film never finds its dramatic footing. Nor, sadly, its common sense.
  12. The Rocket
    What gives this movie its sting is that, despite Mr. Mordaunt’s insistent attempts at uplift, death hovers over this story at every single moment.
  13. Raze
    If you can stand to watch this movie — a big if — there is food for thought here about the subjugation and exploitation of women, the limits of psychological and physical endurance, and more.
  14. Dumbbells
    The movie is so incoherent that its screenplay, by Mr. Drolet and Mr. Richards, might as well have been scrawled between takes as it was being filmed.
  15. In Bloom
    The two lead performances — Lika Babluani as Eka and Mariam Bokeria as Natia — are direct and unaffected, but also enigmatic in the way that nonprofessional screen acting can be in the hands of a sensitive director.
  16. Cold Comes the Night
    The cash, the clichés — it’s hard not to be impatient with a movie as openly lazy as Cold Comes the Night, which is redeemed only by its performances.
  17. Free Ride
    Free Ride offers an unsettling vision of a demimonde whose inhabitants live with the reality that there may be no tomorrow.
  18. The Great Flood
    A striking experiment in music and moviemaking.
  19. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    The changes — goodbye, white suburbia; hello, gritty diversity — recharge the batteries somewhat. But there’s no escaping that the found-footage phenomenon has gone from fresh and original to just plain annoying.
  20. In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter
    If the film at times seems only a tender profile of a quiet and quirky individual, it is also a meditation of a private life at its end.
  21. Beyond Outrage
    The strategy and strategizing of Beyond Outrage still feel like overkill (if you’ll pardon the expression).
  22. The Best Offer
    Mr. Rush can’t fly far on Mr. Tornatore’s dialogue and workmanlike plotting, and Sylvia Hoeks, as Claire, doesn’t bring a corresponding energy.
  23. Justin Bieber's Believe
    Another piece of propaganda for the Bieber proletariat.
  24. August: Osage County
    August: Osage County falls into an uncanny valley between melodrama and camp, failing to achieve either heights of operatic feeling or flights of knowing parody. The jokes are too labored, too serious.
  25. Lone Survivor
    It is a modest, competent, effective movie, concerned above all with doing the job of explaining how the job was done.
  26. 47 Ronin
    47 Ronin can’t entirely paper over the void at its center, traceable partly to the shadowboxing of computer-aided filmmaking or studio tinkering.
  27. The Wolf of Wall Street
    This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess, but it is never less than wide-awake.
  28. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Though it is a celebration of modesty, there is also quite a lot of vanity in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
  29. The Invisible Woman
    You may become impatient with the leisurely pace of The Invisible Woman and its occasional narrative vagueness, but its open spaces leave room for some of the strongest acting of any contemporary film.
  30. Grudge Match
    [An] overlong, drab, not-so-funny sports comedy.
  31. Dhoom 3
    “Dhoom 3” is very much the Aamir Khan show.
  32. Personal Tailor
    Messy in parts and at least 15 minutes too long, Personal Tailor is also cunningly acted and lushly photographed (by Zhao Xiaoshi) in dazzling candy-bright colors.
  33. All the Light in the Sky
    The cosmic and the microscopic are casually — and delicately — juxtaposed in All the Light in the Sky, an evocative, slightly melancholic movie.
  34. Walking with Dinosaurs
    The movie looks great, the writing is peppered with moments of wit, and there’s even an educational component built in as dinosaur facts are displayed on the screen.
  35. The Selfish Giant
    Intent on showing that Arbor and Swifty live in a world of radically limited possibilities, barely sustained by their families and failed by the state, Ms. Barnard locks them into a narrative prison. Their fates seem predetermined less by their circumstances than by the iron will and limited imagination of their creator.
  36. The Past
    The story is nearly obscured by its schematic design (everyone doesn’t just have his or her reasons; he or she is also guilty), but there are mysteries, surprises and complexities, notably in the representation of the children and in Ms. Bejo’s thorny, layered performance with its strata of neediness, resentment and hope.
  37. The New Rijksmuseum
    The film dwells on the logistical and bureaucratic details of the process, and if it does not exactly write a fresh chapter in the history of art, it stands as an exemplary study in the sociology of art administration.
  38. Her
    At once a brilliant conceptual gag and a deeply sincere romance, Her is the unlikely yet completely plausible love story about a man, who sometimes resembles a machine, and an operating system, who very much suggests a living woman.
  39. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    It’s a frequently amusing, occasionally hilarious, rarely unpleasant grab bag of mild mockery and inspired lunacy, decked out with cameos from beloved comic performers and random celebrities.
  40. Paradise: Hope
    Instead of being contemptuous and sardonic, the portrait of inchoate adolescent longing in Paradise: Hope is poignant.
  41. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    With a character who can essentially say and do whatever she wants, you might expect a bit more.
  42. Liv & Ingmar
    [A] small, likably sentimental film.
  43. Tricked: The Documentary
    A documentary that presents the sexual exploitation of young women as a systemic cancer that feeds on public misconception as much as male appetites.
  44. Friend 2: The Legacy
    In addition to the copious flashbacks, there is an overly generous heaping of styles on display.
  45. The Unbelievers
    Too slight to persuade, The Unbelievers is also too poorly made to entertain. The rational roots of atheism deserve a much better movie than this.
  46. Beatocello’s Umbrella
    Beatocello’s Umbrella could have been a terrible movie. In theory and largely in execution, it is little more than a promotional video for Kantha Bopha, a group of hospitals in Cambodia, and Dr. Richner, who has run them since the early 1990s. But what a guy!
  47. Here Comes the Devil
    A muddled supernatural thriller that fails to capitalize on either its horrific prologue or eerie location.
  48. Hours
    Mr. Walker is convincing as a man battling grief, exhaustion and, occasionally, an intruding outside world where lawlessness has taken hold.
  49. What's in a Name?
    In their intensity, the actors’ incisive, impeccably coordinated performances are pitched slightly above normal conversation but not so much that “What’s in a Name?” shatters credibility.
  50. Some Velvet Morning
    While there’s much to admire in how Mr. Tucci and Ms. Eve perform Mr. LaBute’s artful, apocalyptic duet, this is one seriously out-of-date tune.
  51. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    There are, once again, too many busy, uninterestingly staged battles that lean heavily on obvious, sometimes distracting digital sorcery. But there are also pacific, brooding interludes in which the actors — notably Mr. Freeman, an intensely appealing screen presence — remind you that there’s more to Middle-earth than clamor and struggle.
  52. American Hustle
    Mr. Bale, like some other stars who embrace playing ugly, feels as if he’d been liberated by all the pounds he’s packed on and by his character’s molting looks, an emancipation that’s most evident in his delicately intimate, moving moments with Ms. Adams and Ms. Lawrence.
  53. Saving Mr. Banks
    The best parts of Saving Mr. Banks offer an embellished, tidied-up but nonetheless reasonably authentic glimpse of the Disney entertainment machine at work.
  54. Nuclear Nation
    This modest film observes evacuees from Futaba, a small town near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, making do in their temporary shelter. Partly because this version of the movie was drastically edited to 96 minutes from 145, it feels sketchy and disjointed.
  55. Revolution
    Trying to gather too much into his net, Mr. Stewart gets a little lost, but his bottom line could not be clearer: When the oceans die, so do we.
  56. Implanted
    Mr. Verrette shows talent in conveying complex emotions, yet he’s handicapped by his grand ambition and an inability to do simple scenes well.
  57. Commitment
    For all the shooting, knifing and nattering about sleeper cells, the film feels weirdly static and terminally tired.
  58. Night Train to Lisbon
    After barely stirring to life, Night Train to Lisbon mercifully expires.
  59. White Reindeer
    Mr. Clark finds unexpected heart amid cliché and frigidity.
  60. Khumba
    A wondrous and slightly deranged story about oddballs embracing their differences.
  61. Lenny Cooke
    Like the 1994 documentary landmark “Hoop Dreams,” Lenny Cooke measures out the years with a pensive jazz motif, but the film feels comparatively stuck on a couple of notes.
  62. All the Way Through Evening
    More reminiscent of public television than of cinema, this rather humbly wrought movie makes no claim to being comprehensive in recalling a scary time.
  63. Merry Christmas
    One of those who’s-the-murderer parlor games is a plot pillar of Merry Christmas, an experiment in filmmaking by Anna Condo that itself feels like a parlor game, and not a particularly entertaining one.
  64. Live at the Foxes Den
    A slight movie that could have been significantly better with a little story doctoring.
  65. Swerve
    The fatalities and clichés escalate, as the wife plays the femme fatale, and the men run circles around one another amid the dust, blood and some tonally off, ill-conceived cutesiness.
  66. S#x Acts
    The movie’s observations of the wolf pack mentality of privileged teenage boys who view every conquest as proof of their prowess is casually devastating.
  67. The Last Days on Mars
    The Last Days on Mars ultimately can’t transcend its pulpy roots.
  68. Twice Born
    Whatever thoughtful instincts Mr. Castellitto might possess are undermined by his addiction to cinematic prettiness.
  69. Inside Llewyn Davis
    This is not a biopic, it’s a Coen brothers movie, which is to say a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship. To put it another way, it’s a folk tale.
  70. Breakfast with Curtis
    Desultory, dauntingly DIY but secretly efficient, Breakfast With Curtis is something like a leafy summer afternoon in movie form.
  71. Out of the Furnace
    It’s a heavy, solemn tale of blood ties that turns into a melodramatic gusher filled with abstractions about masculinity, America and violence, but brought to specific, exciting life by Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson.
  72. Bullett Raja
    If Bullett Raja had more spark, it might be fun to contemplate its barely hidden crisis-of-masculinity subtexts.
  73. Angels Sing
    It’s as thinly written and unoriginal as made-for-television seasonal filler, and why it isn’t on the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime is a mystery, but fans of the singers in it might get a kick out of seeing them.
  74. Shored Up
    The problems are clearly explained, though the film doesn’t have solutions any more than public officials do, since shoreline development is already a fact of life.
  75. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    The purpose was no doubt more spiritual than the film conveys; if so, the execution doesn’t do the effort justice.
  76. The Punk Singer
    Ms. Hanna’s creativity and force are catching. But other voices are needed to evaluate her achievements with a fuller sense of cultural context and perspective.
  77. The End of Time
    [Mr. Mettler’s] images of galaxies, mandalas, particle accelerators and glowing red lava become his real subjects. He uses music and sound to control the pace, to slow time, as if cinema were a form of enforced meditation.
  78. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    Mr. Elba’s towering performance lends “Long Walk to Freedom” a Shakespearean breadth.
  79. Caught in the Web
    A messy collision of strained portrayals, semi-comic incidents and tear-jerking tactics.
  80. Cousin Jules
    Cousin Jules is in many ways a wonder to see and hear, but there is less to it than meets the eye.
  81. Homefront
    The movie is as blunt an instrument as the poster, but it’s also crammed with enough moving parts and unexpected distractions (Winona Ryder as a “meth whore”) to make it an indefensibly enjoyable piece of exploitation hackwork.
  82. Black Nativity
    Ms. Lemmons has a tough time finding her tone. From scene to scene, the actors are good and then less so, while the direction wavers from assured to unsteady.
  83. Frozen
    Frozen, for all its innovations, is not fundamentally revolutionary. Its animated characters are the same familiar, blank-faced, big-eyed storybook figures. But they are a little more psychologically complex than their Disney forerunners.
  84. Oldboy
    If you have seen the earlier version, you can occupy yourself with point-by-point comparisons. If not, you may find yourself swerving between bafflement and mild astonishment, wondering how a movie that works so hard to generate intensity and surprise can feel so routine and bereft of genuine imagination.
  85. Gori Tere Pyaar Mein
    Instead of one satisfyingly complex film, it’s two or three films in one, a turducken of comedies.
  86. The Christmas Candle
    The residents of the English village Gladbury in the period holiday film The Christmas Candle might as well be bustling about in a snow globe for all their dimples, yuletide obsession and quaint, consumptive coughs.
  87. Contracted
    The ending to this fable misses the opportunity for broader metaphorical resonance, but getting there has its own unnerving rewards.
  88. It's Better to Jump
    The film feels like a work of community advocacy.
  89. This Is Where We Live
    Though the developing bond between the two men — one of whom is virtually nonverbal — is credible and even touching, the storytelling is too oblique to reel you in.
  90. Weekend of a Champion
    It’s a vintage flashbulb moment of two men at the peak of their talents, one on his way to securing his second world championship, and the other between the twin triumphs of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.”
  91. Cold Turkey
    Cold Turkey has some fine actors who put effort into their roles, but it’s getting harder and harder to care about or laugh at adult characters who have botched up their affluent lives and are still obsessed with events from childhood.
  92. Die Narbe (The Scar)
    Comes across as more of an extravagant gesture than a fully realized artistic conceit.
  93. Detroit Unleaded
    Detroit Unleaded is about as gentle as comedies come these days, commendably so.
  94. JFK: A President Betrayed
    Fifty years later, this is one of many additions to the Kennedy catalog. Although it’s more suited for the small screen, it is a worthy entry nonetheless.
  95. Home
    A jarring realism comes both from Mr. Oliver’s script and the performances by an ensemble of brilliant character actors.
  96. Narco Cultura
    Narco Cultura feels like two short films sandwiched together to make a feature. One is a shallow pop-music documentary focusing on Mr. Quintero. The other is an equally superficial portrait of the embattled Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.
  97. Delivery Man
    As artificial as the inseminations it celebrates, Delivery Man is a soggy comedy more focused on stimulating your tear ducts than your funny bone.
  98. Everyday
    Moment by moment, it all adds up. The scenes of the family huddling and hugging, greeting and parting, and reaffirming primal bonds are quietly moving.
  99. 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.
  100. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    Blissfully unconventional as a documentary and as an intellectual endeavor, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? won’t tell you everything you’ve always wanted to know about Mr. Chomsky, but its modesty is one of its strengths, along with Mr. Gondry’s entrancing, vibrant illustrations.
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