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. Seven Veils
    In short, Seven Veils offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form.
  2. The Interpreter
    Conventionally described as a political thriller, but The Interpreter is as apolitical as it is unthrilling.
  3. Wish You Were Here
    After the painstaking buildup, the revelations are disappointingly predictable.
  4. Cuckoo
    All this gives “Cuckoo” a strange, lusty vigor that’s hugely entertaining.
  5. The Monkey
    The farce props up the nihilism, and gives The Monkey a strangely hopeful refrain.
  6. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    This leisurely paced two-hour movie is a reasonably tasty banquet for the same Anglophiles who embrace "Downton Abbey."
  7. The Bad Batch
    It is a fluent and knowing pastiche of genres and styles with a brazen and vigorous wit of its own.
  8. Rams
    Directed with a genial breeziness by Jeremy Sims, the movie negotiates emotional downshift and uplift with confidence.
  9. Mission to Lars
    Documentaries about disabilities don’t come any smarter or more touching than Mission to Lars, a beautiful sibling road trip tale with a heavy-metal flourish.
  10. S.O.B.
    It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time.
  11. Breaking Bread
    A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.
  12. Bad Milo!
    What could have been a very funny short film about self-control and befriending your id instead becomes a rambling commentary on father-son dysfunction and the limits of proctology.
  13. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
    His sumptuous film is as strange and mesmerizing as it is imaginatively ghastly. It's a sophisticated, spookily intense rendering of Ms. Rice's story.
  14. The Great Water
    What makes the film worth watching are the extraordinary performances by the more than 250 children cast as orphans.
  15. Zebraman
    Driven less by civic duty than by the need to escape his dreary life, Zebraman is a tragic, touching figure too often obscured by Kankurou Kudo’s hyperactive screenplay and a special-effects team drunk on alien slime.
  16. Never Goin' Back
    By rights, Never Goin’ Back should be a chore to sit through. The jokes are dated, the behavior tasteless and the setups tired. Yet the movie has a ramshackle charm that’s due entirely to its vivacious leads, whose mutual devotion and easy, unlabeled sexuality feels endearingly innocent.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Restaurant
    It takes very good actors to convey this kind of nuance, and the cast of Restaurant does consistently splendid work.
  18. The Negotiator
    Though the film has its basis in an actual event that took place in St. Louis, it takes on the homogeneous look of many other thrillers in which an emergency escalates into a paramilitary operation.
  19. Rubble Kings
    At slightly more than an hour, the film may not be definitive, and its chronology is a little fuzzy. Even so, Rubble Kings is a fascinating, valuable work of social, music and New York history, a celebration of a peaceful revolution by those who helped birth it.
  20. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    “As I AM” rockets through its subject’s life, teeming with testimonials from the superstar producer-D.J.s Mark Ronson and Paul Oakenfold, among many others. And then it ends, leaving you spent. And wistful.
  21. A Radiant Girl
    At points, the contrast between Irene’s joy and the encroaching horrors is jarring and eerie, but A Radiant Girl seldom hits these notes — the rest is deflating and awkward.
  22. Keith Richards: Under the Influence
    You certainly feel as if you were getting to know the man as he really is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gaining much insight.
  23. On the Map
    The movie makes no attempt to engage any current situation, basking instead in a one-dimensional nostalgia.
  24. The Man Without a Face
    The best that can be said about Mr. Gibson as a director -- and this is no mean achievement -- is that it's often possible to forget he was the man behind the camera. Most of this film has a crisp, picturesque look and a believable manner.
  25. Contact
    The movie, adapted from a novel by Carl Sagan, presents one long chain of teasingly open-ended questions about reason versus faith and technology versus religion, and ends up tentatively embracing mysticism over rationality.
  26. I Touched All Your Stuff
    The filmmakers pop their story’s bubble in a confusing finish, but it all ends up feeling like a mystery novel that simply never revealed the key clues.
  27. Lamb
    Mr. Partridge never figures out how to complicate his version and its voices, or maybe doesn’t want to. He softens Lamb and Tommie with tears, safe hugs and averted looks and, once they land in the countryside, mires them in sentimentality.
  28. Lucy
    Buoyed by Ms. Johansson’s presence, Mr. Besson keeps his entertainment machine purring. He may be a hack, but he’s also a reliable entertainer.
  29. Major League
    Major League trots out the standard formula, but has the wit to make fun of it now and then. The film is so loopy that it glides over its cliches and indulges in some congenial movie-baseball silliness.
  30. Rock Rubber 45s
    Bobbito Garcia, the author, basketball maven, sneaker obsessive, D.J. and all-around culture entrepreneur, is one of the most personable documentary subjects I’ve encountered in quite some time.
  31. A Million Miles Away
    In peddling the mythical American dream narrative, the film misses an opportunity for conflict or character development and falls short of delving into bigger, more interesting themes: assimilation, immigration, gender roles, family conflict.
  32. The Devil Wears Prada
    Miranda is played by Meryl Streep, an actress who carries nuance in her every pore, and who endows even her lighthearted comic roles with a rich implication of inner life. With her silver hair and pale skin, her whispery diction as perfect as her posture, Ms. Streep's Miranda inspires both terror and a measure of awe.
  33. Hello I Must Be Going
    This is ultimately a tale of affirmation, self-acceptance and second chances, and its lessons, while not unwelcome, are a bit too forced and neatly packaged to make it fully satisfying.
  34. Touched With Fire
    Touched With Fire is an actor’s field day, and both Mr. Kirby and Ms. Holmes boldly meet the challenge of playing bright, high-strung artists struggling with depression.
  35. We Are the Flesh
    We Are the Flesh, its abundance of repellent imagery notwithstanding, has an air of the academic about it.
  36. Butterfly Kiss
    Where most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma.
  37. The American
    It is a reasonably skillful exercise in genre and style, a well-made vessel containing nothing in particular, though some of its features - European setting, slow pacing, full-frontal female nudity - are more evocative of the art house than of the multiplex.
  38. African Cats
    At one point the lions make a meal of a lovely young zebra they've just killed. That spelled the end for the little boy sitting next to me. "I'm too scared," he said, and he dragged his mom out of the theater. Sorry, kid, it's a jungle out there, even in Disneynature.
  39. Nuit #1
    Their eloquent monologues, interspersed with vicious verbal skirmishes, are artfully constructed, occasionally poetic expressions of pain, delivered in well-formed sentences that suggest the movie might have originated as a two-person stage drama.
  40. Eric Larue
    As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.
  41. The Way We Were
    By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Anderson Tapes
    In Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes the quality of professionalism appears in rather lovely manifestations to raise a by no means perfect film to a level of intelligent efficiency that is not so very far beneath the reach of art.
  43. Zoolander
    Often unspeakably funny.
  44. 2 Days in New York
    The film, which is about a chaotic 48 hours in Marion's life, succumbs to the chaos it depicts, and so undermines its best intentions. It is, all in all, a likable mess.
  45. Harmontown
    Mr. Harmon is delightfully talented at improvisation, freestyling nonsense lyrics. Mr. Berkeley, on the other hand, proves himself a dismayingly predictable chronicler, making sure that we know exactly what we’re supposed to think and efficiently packaging jokes and revelations.
  46. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    A parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what.
  47. The Postman Always Rings Twice
    Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.
  48. Stop-Loss
    Ms. Peirce’s movie, which she wrote with Mark Richard, is not only an earnest, issue-driven narrative, but also a feverish entertainment, a passionate, at times overwrought melodrama gaudy with violent actions and emotions.
  49. Trollhunter
    One of the many pleasures of the Norwegian director André Ovredal's clever and engaging mock documentary Trollhunter is the way it plays with the idea of the supernatural rule book.
  50. How to Train Your Dragon
    To be sure, this new iteration is entertaining, bears a sense of heart and brings a tight script of fantasy and friendship to life.
  51. Days of Santiago
    Mr. Sibille breaks no sweat under the scrutiny, giving a quiet, concentrated performance that lends heft to less than revelatory material.
  52. The Good Shepherd
    The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.
  53. Bustin' Down the Door
    The darker side of the story -- how the advent of pro surfing was taken as an act of cultural colonialism by some of the locals -- adds gravity to this otherwise lightweight, if amiable summer diversion.
  54. Crazy/Beautiful
    It is an enormous improvement over the brainless, patronizing teenage romances that have slouched into (and quickly out of) theaters in recent years. But it could, if the filmmakers had trusted themselves and the actors a bit more, have lived up to its title.
  55. Runaway Jury
    John Cusack gives one of his wiliest performances in some time, and one of his most mature, as Nick Easter, an aging slacker drafted into jury duty. He subverts his protracted-adolescent cheekiness and pours the melted charm into something far bleaker.
  56. September 11
    Most impressive, and the only segment that dares to criticize the terrorists directly, is Mr. Imamura's contribution, the last part of the film.
  57. Stolen
    Rife with conspiracy and colorful characters, this globe-trotting intrigue has the makings of a splendid thriller, but Ms. Dreyfus has fashioned only a middling documentary, failing to locate a compelling structure or rhythm in the material.
  58. L'ennemi intime
    The movie goes flat, though, when Mr. Siri and his co-writer, Patrick Rotman, shift their attention from the action to the moral math of guerrilla warfare.
  59. Valhalla Rising
    Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the "Pusher" films and "Bronson" ), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.
  60. Big Miracle
    Big Miracle gets off to a shaky start, but once revved up, it becomes an involving work-against-the-clock-and-the-odds action movie.
  61. Wrecked
    Information leaks into the film via the radio and a few flashbacks, but Wrecked is mostly free of dialogue - and, unfortunately, suspense.
  62. Buried Prayers
    The film would be stronger if it told us a little more about what the survivors have been doing since the camp was liberated by the Soviets in 1944, but their reactions to revisiting the camp are wrenching to watch.
  63. Le Pont du Nord
    It's another example of the ever-widening gap between the real world and the fantasies of a kind of artistic temperament more concerned with random self expression than with the expression of coherent feelings or ideas about love, alienation, outrage, politics or even of movie-making. It shrivels the imagination instead of enriching it. [7 Oct. 1981]
  64. Dhoom 3
    “Dhoom 3” is very much the Aamir Khan show.
  65. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    This gentle comedy, the first feature directed by Rob Meyer, is an eye opener for anyone who takes the everyday natural world for granted. It is also a quiet brief for the cultivation of intellectual curiosity and scientific exploration at an age when hormones rule so much behavior.
  66. The Tower
    In its stunted theatrical version, the second half is a sketchy digest of events that leaves you feeling cheated.
  67. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    This collection of eight mini-sermons falls flat.
  68. Department Q: The Absent One
    The Absent One finds Mr. Kaas as watchable as before, though a few well-intentioned attempts to lighten up his character — an orphaned cat is brought in, a speech about his motivations is given — are clumsily executed, and instead divert from his terse and magnetic personality.
  69. Yarn
    It isn’t perfect — it’s a little too airy and artsy in spots — but still, thread and string should be jealous.
  70. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    Adam Wescott and Scott Fisher, Ms. Lazzarato’s management team, are executive producers for the film, and to a great extent “This Is Everything” seems to follow an agenda set by them in tandem with the movie’s subject, which is largely commendable in its pitch for acceptance and against bigotry.
  71. The Gardener
    Overall The Gardener is flat and lacking in soul, a word that comes up many times in the movie.
  72. This Is Our Land
    The drama is well-paced, and all of the actors are wonderful. Mr. Dussollier, a regular presence in the late works of Alain Resnais, is resourceful in communicating Berthier’s disturbing dual nature, and Ms. Dequenne remains appealing even when her character is making the most grievously ill-advised choices.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    The thoughtful, ironic script by Joyce H. Corrington and John William Corrington thins only toward the middle and the whole thing has been beautifully directed by Mar tin Scorsese, who really comes into his own here.
  74. The Year of Spectacular Men
    It is the movie’s saving grace that its family acting troupe faces the gobbledygook with openhearted silliness and sincerity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Longest Yard
    Though The Yard is a terrible picture, I'll admit to having unwillingly enjoyed some of the football practice and parts of the final game —even though it's much too long.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All the Bright Places
    Theodore’s story line is not always handled with the depth it should receive. It’s an unfortunate flaw in a film that impressively balances moments of joy with equally resonating despair.
  77. The Chalk Garden
    Ronald Neame, who has directed the picture, and John Michael Hayes, who has written the script, present us with a cozy, compact drama that follows a comfortable, sentimental line.
  78. The Day of the Locust
    Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.
  79. Pelé
    I did yearn to see more of his talents in action; his header goal in that year’s Italy final feels cosmically liberating. But however conventional as a whole, the movie feels troubled by the traumas of Pelé’s heyday.
  80. The Year Between
    This lived-in quality to the filmmaking supports equally relaxed performances from both veteran and emerging actors, making for an even-keeled and easy viewing experience.
  81. My Sailor, My Love
    The actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.
  82. We Bury the Dead
    We Bury the Dead is most haunting when it gestures at a world dazed with trauma and explores a path to personal closure through collective efforts.
  83. Margaret
    To watch the long, painful last hour of this movie is to watch all of his good ideas and smart impulses collapse into a heap of half-written, awkwardly acted, increasingly frantic scenes.
  84. Grand Piano
    This proudly old-fashioned movie will pull any trick in the book to hold your attention. And it needs those tricks: Damien Chazelle’s screenplay is sloppy, ludicrous and ultimately devoid of suspense.
  85. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    [Mr.Tillman] does lovely work here, particularly with the actors, even if his insistent ebullience can feel like a sales pitch.
  86. Vice Versa
    The film's best scenes are those between the goofily nonchalant Mr. Reinhold and the precociously stern Mr. Savage, however bluntly these moments call attention to the craziness of the premise.
  87. Kindergarten Cop
    No one laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger better than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. In Kindergarten Cop, he plays off the Schwarzenegger image more gleefully and successfully than ever before. That is not quite enough to save the movie from its lame, predictable script.
  88. A Boy Called Christmas
    Magic abounds in A Boy Called Christmas, Netflix’s first prestige holiday movie of the season, but pulsing through this winning adventure tale is something even stronger: the immersive power of storytelling.
  89. First Blood
    It's a film with a number of strengths, not the least of them its fierce, agile, hollow-eyed hero.
  90. Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Limited almost exclusively to tourist attractions, this documentary glimpse at the sights and sounds of occupied Tibet amounts to a rhetorically inflated vacation video.
  91. Ice Age
    The blandly likable computer-animation extravaganza Ice Age actually seems like a fossil, a relic from another era.
  92. The Boxtrolls
    While The Boxtrolls does follow kiddie-action genre conventions in its big, noisy climax — a hectic brawl of explosions, collisions and oversize machines — it also finds an impressive number of quiet, eccentric and haunting moments along the way.
  93. Rosaline
    The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.
  94. Roadie
    One problem is Jimmy and his mother's dialogue, which continues in the same clichéd vein as the opening scenes of him alone yelling and yammering into his cell.
  95. Norma Rae
    Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular.
  96. Good Fortune
    This is a movie that wants to have it both way.
  97. Aniara
    Kagerman and Lilja thoughtfully constructed their film, yet they leave nothing for the mind to do besides consume unrelenting tragedy.
  98. He Named Me Malala
    It only occasionally delivers the kind of unguarded moment that makes you feel as if you’re getting beneath the media image, and it is not at all interested in discussing broader issues raised by Ms. Yousafzai’s fame.
  99. WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
    On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should.
  100. Meet the Robinsons
    Meet the Robinsons is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.
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