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. Dolores Claiborne
    Written as a book-length harangue from its heroine's point of view, and directed efficiently by Taylor Hackford, Dolores Claiborne has become a vivid film that revolves around Ms. Bates's powerhouse of a performance.
  2. Puzzlehead
    Puzzlehead reveals the selfishness of creation with style, originality and the understanding that even a tin man can have a heart.
  3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
    Of course, while your brain is fritzing out, you're trying to figure out how the cinematic trick was done and what the implications might be for other old films. Scary, disturbing, intriguing, all at once.
  4. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    This pleasant if inconsequential romantic comedy from the Croatian director Hrvoje Hribar is distinguished by its good-natured sensibility and rowdy, slightly fabulous tone: a kind of Eastern European magic realism, without the magic.
  5. Two Lives
    Two Lives is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability.
  6. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.
  7. Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars
    As a musical biography, this comes up short; it plays substantially better as a story of recovery and recovered integrity.
  8. Brian's Song
    The film's only concession to contemporary cinematography was in the cliché of lyrical slow motion, with extended sequences of the two football players, one white and the other black, running together through sylvan glades. More than that, though, the basic story is moving.
  9. Quartet
    Almost always entertaining to watch and infuriatingly wrong in several important ways, chief among these being the casting of Miss Adjani as Marya.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Marooned
    If Marooned falls short as a soaring blockbuster, it does keep both feet on the ground.
  11. Run Silent Run Deep
    A better film about war beneath the ocean and about guys in the "silent service" has not been made.
  12. The Conquest
    The movie, which begins with Mr. Sarkozy's election-night victory in May 2007, only intermittently rises above the tone of an arch, sniping drawing-room comedy peopled with mild caricatures.
  13. Dreams of a Life
    For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.
  14. Something to Talk About
    It's rambling and unfocused, but still fresh enough to break the usual Hollywood mold.
  15. Ahead of the Curve
    The film’s subjects are overwhelmingly earnest, but the movie suffers for its substitution of enterprise over entertainment.
  16. The Rugrats Movie
    The pleasant surprise is that the film is a delight.
  17. The Roost
    The Roost proceeds with such youthful enthusiasm that its rawness is more charming than annoying.
  18. Bleed for This
    With their scrupulous but unobtrusive attention to pertinent details, Mr. Younger, Mr. Teller and the rest of the cast make Bleed for This more than an inspiring version of Mr. Pazienza’s story; they make it a genuinely interesting one.
  19. The Swimmers
    The Swimmers tells this story as an inspirational (but rarely sugarcoated) crowd-pleaser. Within those terms, it hits its marks.
  20. Off the Black
    Off the Black is so much Mr. Nolte’s movie that it couldn’t exist without him. His character is the latest in a long line of Hemingway-esque ruins, marinated in beer and testosterone, who have become Mr. Nolte’s specialty.
  21. Comedian
    Instead of prying into his soul, the filmmakers investigate his working conditions and offer a sort of backstage ethnographic study of the professional stand-up culture.
  22. Vampire Hunter D
    Handsome, well-executed film that nonetheless feels a bit long at 111 minutes. Those who are already anime fans will certainly find it stimulating; but this may not be the one to convert the uninitiated.
  23. Finding Forrester
    The screenplay by Mike Rich is so far-fetched and riddled with holes that Mr. Van Sant's urban realist touches only underscore the falseness of what's on the screen.
  24. Fever
    Every shot seems measured for maximum effect, and when the pace suddenly quickens in a late action sequence on a deserted subway train, it results in a moment of pure Hitchcockian panic that reverberates like thunder in the fretful, melancholy air.
  25. The Claim
    A languorously muted, occasionally magnificent film.
  26. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    Mr. Silberling has made a movie that's far rougher in texture and tone than Mr. Handler's books, but while he doesn't have the author's sense of whimsy (or irony) he manages to construct a pleasantly watchable entertainment in all the spaces in the story not laid siege to by Mr. Carrey.
  27. Justifiable Homicide
    The filmmakers build an argument that is both intellectual and emotional, concentrating as much on the forensic evidence as on Ms. Rosario's passionate commitment to finding justice for her son.
  28. Golda's Balcony
    Inert yet strangely compelling film.
  29. Aftermath
    Delivers its Holocaust-related story with the clunking force of a blunt instrument slammed into the skull.
  30. Ms. 45
    Abel Ferrera...has a tin ear for dialogue and an evident penchant for ludicrous material. But beyond that, he is clearly a talented fellow. One can only hope he finds something else to make movies about very soon.
  31. Chances Are
    Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.
  32. Roseanne for President!
    Fascinating.
  33. Permission
    If unwise remarks at a dinner can cast a pall over a longstanding relationship, then a great ending can redeem and even force reconsideration of an otherwise middling film.
  34. All the Old Knives
    While All the Old Knives keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.
  35. Five Minutes of Heaven
    A feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, the appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot.
  36. Wise Guys
    From its cartoony credits to its knish-and-cannoli close, Wise Guys is one funny movie.
  37. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    Like Mr. Lee's hit-and-miss effort ("Bamboozled"), Mr. Willmott's alternative history takes its inspiration and its rage from an America that has come both a long way and not nearly far enough. But while the filmmaker's anger is palpable it's not very inspired.
  38. The Photograph
    The sparks fly fast and persuasively — Rae and Stanfield make sense right away — and you’re soon cozying up with the couple while they share stories and increasingly heated looks in a dimly lit restaurant. The writer-director Stella Meghie understands that you want to see these two beautiful people get together, and she smoothly delivers on your own romantic (and romance genre) longings.
  39. Deconstructing Harry
    This poisonous, brazenly autobiographical comedy shows off the best of Mr. Allen's misanthropic humor.
  40. The Lesson
    Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer.
  41. Expired
    It's possible that two actors other than Samantha Morton and Jason Patric might do justice to Cecilia Miniucchi's story about two badly matched Santa Monica, Calif., parking enforcement officers who stumble and grope into a relationship. But it's hard to think of a better match for the stubborn idiosyncrasies of Ms. Miniucchi's visual style and worldview than these two.
  42. Cats Don't Dance
    While the animated characters, bright colors and an appealing Randy Newman score may keep the children content, Cats Don't Dance is no saccharine fantasy. Its Hollywood references and dark satire constitute its real strengths.
  43. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    Maybe half of the film is about his music career, and of that, not much at all is devoted to his commercial prime. This makes the film anti-mythological, but also far more robust.
  44. The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
    The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, the writing-directing feature debut of Henry Dunham, strands seven actors in a warehouse to bark exposition at one another. Listening closely is necessary: The monotonously dark visuals barely function to carry the story on their own.
  45. All the Right Moves
    A well-made but sugar-coated working-class fable about a football star.
  46. Maverick
    Fast, funny, full of straight-ahead action and tongue-in-cheek jokes, Maverick is Lethal Weapon meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That combination won't win any prizes for originality, but it works like a movie mogul's dream and sets the summer-film season off to an unbeatable start.
  47. G.I. Jane
    Mr. Scott's affinity for the visceral and strenuous, from ''Alien'' to ''Blade Runner'' to ''White Squall,'' is much more central here than the renegade feminism of his ''Thelma and Louise.'' With punishing intensity, he plunges his audience into the maelstrom of the training program.
  48. Funny Boy
    Mehta’s elaborate long takes contribute to the general sense of tumult, but the film never fully shakes the sense of stating the obvious.
  49. Mister Foe
    If the extremity of Hallam's temperament tests the limits of our sympathy as well as our credulity, Mr. Bell's ability to seem by turns sweet and scary prevents us from losing interest entirely.
  50. Despicable Me 2
    Once again, the lesson that more is not necessarily better, something rarely learned by blockbuster sequels, is forgotten.
  51. Kites
    The result is a lovers-on-the-lam blast of pure pulp escapism, so devoted to diversion that you probably won’t even notice the corn.
  52. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    Mr. Greenaway turns this tale of a bullying criminal and his unfaithful wife into something profound and extremely rare: a work so intelligent and powerful that it evokes our best emotions and least civil impulses, so esthetically brilliant that it expands the boundaries of film itself.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night of the Creeps
    Beyond it's obviously derivative inspiration, the film shows a fair ability to create suspense, build tension and achieve respectable performances.
  54. The Matrix Reloaded
    Relax, the staging of the action sequences is as viciously elegant as you've been primed to expect, though there is a dispiriting more-of-the-same aspect to the picture.
  55. I'm Dangerous with Love
    The film, though, might have been more powerful with a little less grit. A few minutes of dispassionate discussion by experts about ibogaine and the obstacles to its legalization in the United States would have enhanced the film without damaging its street cred.
  56. Lunch
    Low-key and low-tech, Lunch coasts on the earned wisdom of pros who know how to work a room. Right up to the arrival of their separate checks.
  57. Oscar Peterson: Black + White
    “Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance.
  58. Sheryl
    Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists.
  59. Nuclear Now
    The film’s aversion to formal or rhetorical bombast as it discusses scientists’ hopes for a better future is its own balm. We’re staring down catastrophe, Stone explains matter-of-factly, but our greatest tool is already in our grasp.
  60. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    Notable chiefly for its eye-catching urban backgrounds and an eclectic score that ranges from jazz and country to classical and choral.
  61. Armand
    By the end, a kind of narrative lethargy has set in. “Armand” feels mostly like an interesting formal exercise: an attempt to meld realism and surrealism in the most nondescript of places, but in a way that evokes an ancient terror.
  62. Ted
    The sin of Ted is not that it is offensive but that it is boring, lazy and wildly unoriginal. If Triumph the Insult Comic Dog ever got a hold of Ted, there would be nothing left but a pile of fluff and a few scraps of fur.
  63. Buffalo Girls
    A story that, though sickly fascinating, is as crudely rendered as its images.
  64. Bad Turn Worse
    A juicy neo-noir like Bad Turn Worse doesn’t have to make total sense to grab you.
  65. Visitors
    Time slows to a near-standstill as the film peers into humanity’s troubled soul, glimpsed through the individual faces, which sometimes appear to be studying us as intently as we are studying them.
  66. Not Okay
    As satires go, this one by the writer and director Quinn Shephard is hardly subtle — but though it lacks narrative finesse, Not Okay is brimming with provocative in-jokes for the extremely online.
  67. The Goonies
    It has crooks, bats, cobwebs, skeletons, a lovable monster, an underground grotto and a treasure hidden by some of the most considerate, clue-loving pirates who ever lived. Their ghostly ship is the movie's piece de resistance.
  68. I've Got Issues
    The movie observes collective pain with endearing absurdity.
  69. Wyrmwood: Apocalypse
    If you’d like to see the horror-action equivalent of an old metal rock musician lighting his electric guitar on fire and then playing it with his teeth, this is your movie.
  70. Beautiful Boy
    A kind of apocalyptic 21st-century "Ordinary People," Beautiful Boy, directed by Shawn Ku from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Armbruster, is so high-mindedly determined to avoid sensationalism that it sidesteps critical dramatic content and sabotages its own ambitions.
  71. Nearing Grace
    There's nothing remotely surprising in the entire film. But the generally winning -- and freakishly good-looking -- cast, endowed by Jacob Aaron Estes's script with intelligent, if occasionally overwritten dialogue, makes for viewing that is easy on the eyes and the ears.
  72. Baghead
    The semi-improvised performances, which seem so natural that it is tempting to confuse the actors with their characters, bring Baghead into the realm of group therapy observed through one-way glass.
  73. The Woman in Black
    Less gore is more here, and what a relief. The Woman in Black isn't especially scary, but it keeps you on edge, and without the usual vivisectionist imagery.
  74. The Bookshop
    Wistful but never sentimental, it quietly turns the fortunes of one little store into a comment on the fate of many.
  75. That's My Face
    This is fundamentally a recruiting film whose intent is to interest other African-Americans in exploring their spiritual traditions. It displays no real curiosity about its subject except to insist that it is the true path to enlightenment. Mr. Harris's stylistic gifts are quite evident; his reportorial instincts are a bit more muffled.
  76. U-571
    Yet there is so little characterization that when the sub goes down, you may find yourself confused as to which of the supporting cast members lived through the torpedo blast.
  77. The Golden Bowl
    If this handsome, faithful, intelligent screen adaptation of the novel doesn't leave you devastated, its ominous sense of a rarefied moral and aesthetic world bending before the accelerating streetcar of history will leave you with a mournful sense of loss.
  78. Saved!
    It has a bright young cast and a clever, eclectic soundtrack, but the tone veers unsteadily from mockery to preachiness, and the story loses its breath, hopping from one clumsily paced scene to the next.
  79. Farmingville
    Though it has the slight, informal feel of a made-for-television documentary shot on video, Farmingville is an unusually sensitive and sophisticated piece of investigative journalism.
  80. Santa vs. the Snowman
    It is best appreciated as an immersion in a three-dimensional toyland outfitted with enough whimsical gadgetry to fill a thousand playrooms.
  81. Goodbye to All That
    Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.
  82. Stolen Childhoods
    Harrowing yet hopeful film.
  83. My Scientology Movie
    My Scientology Movie relies on a shaggy, meandering charm. At times it plays like an extended skit on “The Daily Show”; yet its disorder also makes its insights — like how strongly the church’s training sessions resemble acting classes — feel refreshingly organic.
  84. Sky High
    This zippy Disney adventure-comedy, crammed with special effects, asks that age-old rhetorical question, "Is there life after high school?," and answers it with a cheerful "Not really."
  85. Wakefield
    The film, scrupulously faithful to its source, is decidedly literary, but not in an especially satisfying way.
  86. Yakuza Apocalypse
    Mr. Miike’s narrative model is essentially the Kool-Aid commercials of the 1980s: Periodically, somebody new bursts into the room or onto the street, and a fight or something bizarre takes place.
  87. Ten Thousand Saints
    If you are one of those people who romanticize the East Village in New York when it was at its grungiest, Ten Thousand Saints might be the movie of your dreams. Even if you’re not, it’s still a very fine film, full of quietly impressive performances and young characters who register as authentic.
  88. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    The Life & Crimes of Doris Payne has an embarrassment of riches in Ms. Payne’s story, and it’s often a ripping good yarn, but, as a film, it lacks the nimbleness and resourcefulness of its subject.
  89. Alex Strangelove
    Alex Strangelove is witty, compassionate and enjoyable throughout; a charming movie and in many respects an enlightened one.
  90. Kitchen Brigade
    Kitchen Brigade is a white-savior story par excellence, though at least it’s not difficult to swallow — the young people are lovely, and so is the food.
  91. All Eyes Off Me
    Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.
  92. Darling
    As a slashing social satire and also a devastating spoof of the synthetic, stomach-turning output of the television-advertising age--it is loaded with startling expositions and lacerating wit.
  93. 5x2
    Told in the usual sequence, the story of Gilles and Marion would be a banal bell curve of infatuation, bliss, boredom, regret and recrimination. As it is, 5x2 does not quite make the case that Gilles and Marion are entirely worth our interest, let alone our sympathy, but the reversal of narrative order gives their ordinary moments together a faint aura of mystery, as Mr. Ozon teases us with the conceit that it will all make sense in the end - or rather, the beginning.
  94. Romeo + Juliet
    Mr. Luhrmann's frenetic hodgepodge actually amounts to a witty and sometimes successful experiment, an attempt to reinvent "Romeo and Juliet" in the hyperkinetic vocabulary of post-modern kitsch. This is headache Shakespeare, but there's method to its madness.
  95. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac.
  96. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    There is no mystery about who wins the movie’s final bout, but it is never less than thrilling to watch Yen’s fluttering limbs in action.
  97. Being Eddie
    Being Eddie is a great time. Murphy is good company, and he’s hilarious as ever.
  98. The Five-Year Engagement
    The Five-Year Engagement dutifully hits the marks of its genre, but it is also about the unpredictability of life and the everyday challenges of love. The sensitivity and honesty with which it addresses those matters is a pleasant surprise.
  99. Free Guy
    Free Guy has charm, but there’s not much memorable in the same old quest, same old boss fight, then game over.
  100. The Salt of Tears
    The Salt of Tears is quite a bit more than a cad’s progress. There are fleeting shadows of Flaubert in this tale, which Garrel crafted in collaboration with two venerable screenwriters, Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann.
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