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. Despicable Me 2
    Once again, the lesson that more is not necessarily better, something rarely learned by blockbuster sequels, is forgotten.
  2. The Lone Ranger
    A very long, very busy movie that will unite the generations in bafflement, stupefaction and occasional delight.
  3. Magic Camp
    The enchantment is irresistible in Judd Ehrlich’s documentary Magic Camp, a spry and revealing examination of Tannen’s Magic Camp.
  4. Petunia
    It’s possible to make a great movie out of family dysfunction, but this one is too short on insight to rank with the best of the genre.
  5. 100 Bloody Acres
    This fairly rote tale of rural ghouls and their passing-through prey has its own hick charm, mostly because of performers who never overplay their hands.
  6. The Secret Disco Revolution
    The Secret Disco Revolution, however limited, is one smart documentary. It’s so clever that it makes fun of itself.
  7. Laurence Anyways
    A big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.
  8. A Band Called Death
    A Band Called Death is more concerned with bringing out the personal connections behind their driven music than with insisting upon the group’s distinction in the perennial music history search for oddities and firsts.
  9. Gideon's Army
    Gideon’s Army is a bare film with no narrator and a minimal soundtrack. That’s all it needs to grab you by the throat.
  10. Some Girl(s)
    There are a lot of truthful notes in Some Girl(s), but there are also false ones that let you know that you are being played with. You’d best beware.
  11. Redemption
    Its narrative continuity is so sketchy and the screenplay so haphazard that the movie doesn’t add up to more than trash, seasoned with pretentious religiosity.
  12. Byzantium
    Again and again, as the story shifts between women, times and moods, Mr. Jordan adds a punctuating flourish...that exquisitely illustrates the once-upon-a-time mood.
  13. I'm So Excited
    The journey generally drags because the spinning characters, with their tired jokes and familiar melodramas, soon feel so mechanical, like the automated parts in an Almodóvar machine.
  14. Museum Hours
    This movie is rigorously and intensely lifelike, which is to say that it’s also a strange and moving work of art.
  15. White House Down
    As demented and entertaining as promised, and a little less idiotic than feared.
  16. The Heat
    The volatile chemistry between Ms. McCarthy and Ms. Bullock is something to behold, and carries The Heat through its lazy conception and slapdash execution.
  17. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    As a musical experience, it is generous and moving. But as a documentary, “Sing Me the Songs” is an awkward hybrid of concert film and rock-star biography.
  18. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    There’s a lot to learn from How to Make Money Selling Drugs, but sometimes there’s just a lot.
  19. Homegoings
    Ms. Turner captures the intimacy of solemn, heartfelt moments, and salutes a man who honors their value.
  20. Kuichisan
    At once loose and dense, Ms. Endo’s treatment wilts somewhat when drawn out to feature length, though it’s a nice place to visit.
  21. A Hijacking
    In A Hijacking, his assured, intense second feature, the Danish director Tobias Lindholm turns tedium and frustration into agonizing suspense.
  22. Bert and Arnie's Guide to Friendship
    If you’re watching this film and waiting for something funny or insightful to come along to assuage your annoyance, you’ll wait a long time.
  23. Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth
    On its own terms — setting aside the likelihood of knee-jerk political objections to its mission — it’s more convincing than many films pegged to specific causes.
  24. Rushlights
    When it comes to film plotting, too many twists just result in an annoying tangle. And there are too many twists in Antoni Stutz’s uninvolving Rushlights.
  25. Downloaded
    No one is as intriguing as the thoughtful, soft-spoken Mr. Fanning, a onetime idealist thwarted by the piracy label and the dated assumptions of a calcified communications infrastructure.
  26. Maniac
    By not centering on the victims, Mr. Khalfoun nearly makes the film about pitying the panic-prone killer; the camerawork lacks the ominous, confident glide of much Steadicam horror.
  27. Somm
    Somm, though an entree into a little-known world, rarely finds a second dimension.
  28. Unfinished Song
    The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.
  29. The Attack
    Mr. Doueiri creates characters, emotional colors and political contradictions that have the agonized sting and breathe of life.
  30. World War Z
    World War Z often feels smaller and quieter than it is, because your attention is drawn to details and moments rather than to showstopping spectacles or self-important themes.
  31. Three Worlds
    Each thread of the plot is followed to its dangling, ragged conclusion in a movie that may be painful to watch but that maintains a chilly integrity.
  32. Monsters University
    While it’s a visual enchantment (there’s a knockout compendium of horror film clichés), its reversion to a largely male domain after “Brave,” its first and only female-driven story, is a drag.
  33. My Best Day
    A gently wry sense of humor about human foibles and some well-turned exchanges keep the proceedings drifting along pleasantly enough, until characters start convening for the requisite heart-to-hearts and making-up.
  34. Vehicle 19
    This one is well photographed, yet it’s still just a lot of cars and noise.
  35. The Stroller Strategy
    Mostly you root for Mr. Michel’s couple to reconnect simply so the movie will come to an end.
  36. Storm Surfers 3D
    The vistas are spectacular, the waves fearsome, the filming often amazing.
  37. Hatchet III
    Too busy with limb-severings and gunfire to bother being intelligent.
  38. Fukrey
    Too often it calls to mind the much better “Delhi Belly,” which had a genuinely madcap script and sharper things to say about being young, urban and Indian.
  39. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    A record of a man’s tormented youth, his broad artistic impulses and the price he paid for following them.
  40. Berberian Sound Studio
    It’s not unlike many of Mr. Strickland’s beloved Italian films, which could be superb exercises in cinematic style and atmosphere while remaining imperfect.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    20 Feet from Stardom
    This generous, fascinating documentary about the careers of backup singers, most of them African-American women, seeks to rewrite the history of pop music by focusing attention on voices at once marginal and vital.
  42. In the Fog
    Mr. Loznitsa doesn’t lighten the mood with any familiar filmmaking tricks: there are, for instance, no musical cues to guide you over the troubling or ambiguous passages. Like the characters, you work through each surprising turn.
  43. The Guillotines
    The incrementally served up pieces never satisfactorily cohere. The blades fly as do the heads, but the movie remains disappointingly aground.
  44. Call Me Kuchu
    This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.
  45. Aliyah
    This smart, sober movie makes you feel the full weight of the challenges he faces.
  46. The Bling Ring
    The Bling Ring occupies a vertiginous middle ground between banality and transcendence, and its refusal to commit to one or the other is both a mark of integrity and a source of frustration.
  47. Man of Steel
    At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, Man of Steel will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off.
  48. More Than Honey
    A fascinating but rambling documentary.
  49. Pandora's Promise
    Mr. Stone builds his case seamlessly but leaves no room for dissent, much less a drop of doubt.
  50. This Is the End
    The film, at its phoned-in worst and also at its riotous best, has a terminal feeling. It suggests that a comic subgenre based on the immaturity, sexual panic and self-mocking tendencies of men who should be old enough to know better has reached its expiration date.
  51. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    This pull-no-punches portrait shocks and amuses with equal frequency.
  52. Finding Joy
    A clumsy mixed-nuts comedy.
  53. Hey Bartender
    [A] tidy and ingratiating documentary ode to high-end mixologists.
  54. I Send You This Place
    Less a documentary than an experimental essay tapping age-old notions of the sublime, it’s a perplexing artifact that flirts with the banal yet moves with lovely intuitive rhythms.
  55. The Rambler
    The Rambler...feels like a slender plot with additional scenes pasted on.
  56. Tiger Eyes
    It’s all a bit precious and predictable.
  57. One Mile Above
    Cinematographer Du Jie delivers moments of visual ecstasy that almost make us forget that they’re framing a reckless cipher.
  58. Fame High
    Fame High, a timely plug for arts education, does what its subjects hope to do: it opens our hearts and entertains with truth.
  59. Free Samples
    Free Samples is a modest but pleasant small-budget movie with two bits of laziness in the script, but one particularly sweet performance that makes up for them.
  60. Hello Herman
    Pointing at everything and elucidating nothing, Hello Herman arrives freighted with the anti-bullying agenda of its director, Michelle Danner.
  61. Free China: The Courage to Believe
    “Free China” is not news, and, however moving, it’s really not art. It’s advocacy. In that aim, it is ardently committed.
  62. Rapture-Palooza
    Rapture-Palooza has a promising setup and a cast with a good track record of bringing the funny, yet it never does live up to its potential.
  63. Violet & Daisy
    While the film has an appealingly dreamy, summer-in-New-York look and a pleasantly languorous rhythm, it gives the actors very little to do and the audience almost nothing to care about.
  64. The Purge
    The message just gets louder and louder, cruder and cruder, which is too bad because Mr. DeMonaco knows how to set a stage.
  65. As Cool as I Am
    Just when its parts should come together, As Cool as I Am crumbles to bits.
  66. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet is a sly, elegant meditation on the relationship between reality and artifice. But it is a thought-experiment driven above all by emotion.
  67. Wish You Were Here
    After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.
  68. The Prey
    It doesn’t aspire to art-house significance, just to white-knuckled entertainment.
  69. Dirty Wars
    [A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.
  70. The Internship
    Written by Mr. Vaughn and Jared Stern, The Internship spreads the corporate gospel with sporadic jokes, the usual buddy-film shenanigans (a visit to a strip club, a teasingly shared bed) and a lot of motivational cant.
  71. Much Ado About Nothing
    From its very first scenes, Mr. Whedon’s film crackles with a busy, slightly wayward energy that recalls the classic romantic sparring of the studio era.
  72. Triumph of the Wall
    Neither the very relaxed pace of this builder, Chris Overing, nor Mr. Stone’s sporadically amusing neuroses about his filmmaking make for a gripping documentary.
  73. I Do
    In a better movie you might play along with contrived plot twists and fake obstacles, but watching I Do, a movie with thin characters and a languorous pace, you find yourself talking back to the screen.
  74. Run It
    An entwined triptych of sorts unified by invective, slurs and characters demanding that others shut up, Run It is a very patchy affair.
  75. Sirius
    Mr. Kaleka’s film feels a bit like wandering into a hotel convention hall full of true believers who have been chatting for hours.
  76. The Wall
    The photography is often lovely, and Ms. Gedeck convincingly portrays a woman who as the ordeal stretches on month after month seems to be gradually losing her individuality and blending into the landscape.
  77. Student
    It’s the no-nonsense filmmaking, seamlessly integrating even dreams and visions, that keeps us fixed on the bold line of the student’s trajectory, all the way through to a transcendent ending.
  78. The History of Future Folk
    It may not make much sense in a brief plot summary, but it makes perfect, daffy sense on the screen.
  79. American Mary
    This film — the second from the Soskas, and shot in their hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia — combines gore, quiet dread, feminist conviction and a visual classicism, often using a red palette, with impressive, unbelabored dexterity.
  80. After Earth
    For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.
  81. The Kings of Summer
    The best way to enjoy The Kings of Summer is to view it as a likable comic fantasy dreamed up by filmmakers (Chris Galletta wrote the screenplay) who are close enough to adolescence to infuse their ramshackle story with a youthful, carefree whimsy.
  82. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    Mark Kendall’s quietly moving documentary, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus, is as modest and farsighted as its cast of Guatemalans who make a living resurrecting discarded American school buses.
  83. Now You See Me
    Long before the story culminates with a preposterous final revelation, whatever hopes you had that Now You See Me might have had anything to say about the profession of magic, rampant greed or anything else have been dashed.
  84. Shadow Dancer
    The movie takes no political positions. With an icy detachment, it peers through the fog of war and examines the slippery military intelligence on both sides to portray a world steeped in secrecy, deception and paranoia.
  85. The East
    It may be asking too much of The East — which is, after all, a twisty, breathless genre film — to wish that it would frame the contradictions of contemporary capitalism more rigorously. The movie is aware that they exist, and wishes that they could be resolved more or less happily, which is hard to argue with, though also hard to believe.
  86. Hannah Arendt
    Hannah Arendt conveys the glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought.... The movie turns ideas into the best kind of entertainment.
  87. Nancy, Please
    It’s a brutally unsympathetic portrait of situational anxiety that withholds comfort from Paul and viewer alike, and Mr. Semans refuses to relent.
  88. A Wedding Invitation
    A Pan-Asian romantic melodrama that virtually pokes you in the eye with its fakery.
  89. A Green Story
    This stately film lays out the good, the bad, the sad and the proud in stark patterns, to mostly soporific effect.
  90. Fast & Furious 6
    A satisfying thrill ride, at least on a par with the earlier installments.
  91. Epic
    As beautiful as it is, Epic is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.
  92. The English Teacher
    The acting, especially Ms. Moore’s, is solid. But her strong, sympathetic performance fails to transform The English Teacher into anything more than a sitcom devoid of laughs, except for a soupçon of literary humor. It is a movie at odds with itself.
  93. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    For all its faults, “We Steal Secrets” reminds us that despite the potential of WikiLeaks, its project of truth and consequences remains treacherous and complicated in practice.
  94. Fill the Void
    What the film makes clear, with unfailing sensitivity and wry humor, is that for Shira and her family the ordinary arrangements of living are freighted with moral and spiritual significance.
  95. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight is a wonderful paradox: a movie passionately committed to the ideal of imperfection that is itself very close to perfect.
  96. The Hangover Part III
    The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.
  97. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    A skilled portrait of a literary light shadowed by his public profile. The film, written and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, tacitly suggests a reconsideration of its subject, who deserves it.
  98. 3 Geezers!
    This is one terrible movie.
  99. Doin' It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC
    Paced by Eddie Palmieri’s up-tempo, percussive score, “Doin’ It” bounces like a crossover dribble, gliding swiftly and surely through interviews, videos and history lessons, then transitioning to today’s dedicated ballers and playground culture.
  100. Aurangzeb
    The plot of Aurangzeb is inevitably too complicated, and the themes presented more interestingly than they are wrapped up. But for much of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time, it ably weaves Bollywood tropes...with contemporary outrage at the rules of the game.
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