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. The Unspeakable Act
    Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.
  2. The End of Love
    Mr. Webber, a skilled actor, has not devised a narrative with sufficient momentum or tension to sustain much interest.
  3. A Place at the Table
    Though the directors, Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, smartly choose examples from among the working poor — reframing obesity as chronic malnourishment in areas where it’s easier to find a burger than a banana — they’re reluctant to get down in the political dirt.
  4. Here I Learned to Love
    While the film ends abruptly, leaving you to wonder about the rest of the brothers’ lives, those tales can’t have matched the ordeals of their start.
  5. The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek
    By the time the humor overreaches, escalating into the surreal, you’ve fallen under the movie’s spell. Audacity and invention more than compensate for the deficiencies. Who knows what Ms. Cohen will do next? But it should be interesting.
  6. A Fierce Green Fire
    This distillation of Philip Shabecoff’s book doesn’t really capture the urgency and militancy promised in the title.
  7. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    The interviews are mostly good and instructive, but the well-chosen historical footage is better.
  8. Phantom
    The dialogue is dreadful (though we are at least spared the usual hokey Russian accents) and the wrap-up ridiculous, the only mystery being why this peculiarity was ever greenlighted at all.
  9. Stoker
    The final act of Stoker walks a fine line between the sensational and the silly. Mr. Park is less interested in narrative suspense than in carefully orchestrated shocks and camouflaged motives.
  10. Pavilion
    Unguided by obvious story signposts, you slip from image to image, pulled along by their beauty (the digital cinematography is by Chris Dapkins) and by the dreamy, leisurely rhythms of the editing (by Seth Bomse).
  11. Welcome to Pine Hill
    [Mr. Miller's] film shows the influence of other recent work in the American neo-neo-realist vein, notably Ramin Bahrani’s “Goodbye, Solo” and Lance Hammer’s “Ballast,” and like them relies on understatement and indirection to arrive at a powerful and resonant meaning.
  12. Future Weather
    [A] tiny, beautifully acted movie.
  13. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    Molly’s Theory of Relativity is an intentionally uncomfortable movie to watch. The fifth feature from Jeff Lipsky, this eccentric, often high-pitched family comedy might be described as a surreal, post-Freudian gabfest.
  14. War Witch
    Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.
  15. Leviathan
    Leviathan, a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony.
  16. The Condemned
    The Condemned is uncanny only in its resemblance to a television soap, with acting as flat as the lighting and scenes that end with the kind of cliffhanger moments that otherwise announce commercial breaks.
  17. Jack the Giant Slayer
    If it drifts with increasing frequency it’s because, well, this finally is just a digitally souped-up, one-dimensional take on Jack and the Beanstalk.
  18. Dark Skies
    Dark Skies certainly parades textbook genre trappings...But those elements are employed with consummate dexterity.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tristana (re-release)
    Buñuel has made a marvelously complex, funny and vigorously moral movie that also is, to me, his most perfectly cast film. [21 Sept. 1970]
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Feb 21, 2013
  20. Red Flag
    If only Red Flag were funnier and tighter and had a sharper idea about what it means to blur the lines between self-interrogation and self-absorption. As it is, the movie throws off too few sparks.
  21. Rubberneck
    It’s dragged down by non-scene after non-scene, and filmmaking choices that don’t earn their keep.
  22. Stuck
    An unabashed sales pitch for international adoption, Thaddaeus Scheel’s Stuck aims for the heart much more than the mind.
  23. Northeast
    Northeast is as tedious as the life of the film’s central character.
  24. Kai po che!
    Ambitious but uneven, Kai Po Che (based on Chetan Bhagat’s novel “The Three Mistakes of My Life”) mixes, not quite successfully, traditional Bollywood storytelling with something less conventional.
  25. Inescapable
    Plagued by clunky action sequences and a porous plot the cast visibly wilts.
  26. 11 Flowers
    Delicate and autobiographical (Wang Han was the director’s name when he was a child, and the story is constructed from his boyhood memories), 11 Flowers clings steadfastly to its youthful point of view.
  27. Snitch
    For all its violence and road rage, Snitch doesn’t disintegrate into noisy popcorn nonsense.
  28. One Life
    The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the-making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.
  29. Murder 3
    Murder 3 progresses in skeletal fashion, its story laid out brief chunk by brief chunk amid bass-heavy dance beats, other music that telegraphs suspense, or, least objectionable, ponderous quiet.
  30. Escape from Planet Earth
    Escape From Planet Earth makes a tolerable diversion for a winter’s day or evening, just not a memorable one.
  31. The Berlin File
    As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.
  32. Almost in Love
    The actors manage to just sidestep the chummy, self-congratulatory air of showbiz insiders, leaving viewers the pleasure of savoring their invention. No glib answers are offered, but the search proves rewarding.
  33. Saving Lincoln
    The whole affair has an artificial look reminiscent of a community theater production on a cardboard set. The vintage images don’t add enough to make up for the visual distraction. The story, though, is of moderate interest.
  34. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    If the film’s spare re-enactments are a little awkward, they also smartly repurpose Dahmer’s studied reserve into a meditation on perversion as hypnotic as it is repulsive.
  35. Shanghai Calling
    Though Mr. Hsia, a television alumnus who also wrote the script, has created a somewhat predictable story infused with stereotypes old and new, he gains mileage from light humor, buoyant energy and some appealing performers.
  36. Like Someone in Love
    Every shot — everything you see, and everything you don’t — imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.
  37. Safe Haven
    The weakest parts of Safe Haven are its action sequences, in which the illusion of reality is shattered by ham-handed editing, garish special effects and comic-book dialogue.
  38. Beautiful Creatures
    There’s not much new under the moon here, which makes what the writer and director Richard LaGravenese does with the story all the more notable.
  39. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Everything that made the first “Die Hard” memorable — the nuances of character, the political subtext, the cowboy wit — has been dumbed down or scrubbed away entirely.
  40. Lost in Thailand
    Like many broad successes this unremarkable movie proves decidedly reluctant to yield any golden secret to box-office bonanzas, unless you count tried-and-true chase formulas and a moral about rethinking priorities.
  41. Would You Rather
    By the midway point, viewers will be questioning whether they would rather remain in their seats or put their eyes out with a fork.
  42. Porfirio
    Vividly depicting the indignities of the flesh, Porfirio offers a harshly sensual portrait of a man imprisoned by paralysis and the callousness of the state.
  43. A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    Gliding from intimate to surreal, from aurally disjunctive to visually seductive, Rubberband is a languorous ballad of sadness and disappointment.
  44. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    As big a bouquet as the film is to Mr. Ferlinghetti, it is also a mash note to City Lights, a cultural touchstone and North Beach landmark.
  45. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    For all its visual pizazz A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III has the jerky momentum of a collection of disconnected skits loosely thrown together with only the vaguest notion of where it’s heading or what it all means. At best it is a mildly diverting goof with a charmless lead performance. Its underlying misogyny leaves a sour taste.
  46. Night Across the Street
    Unlike his precursors Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, who reveled in the shock of incongruity, Mr. Ruiz took it in stride. His gliding, floating camera could make wild impossibilities look utterly natural. And so it is in Night Across the Street, where the present commingles with the past, and seeming is another way of being.
  47. As Luck Would Have It
    A toothless examination of marketing and morality, Álex de la Iglesia’s As Luck Would Have It combines lecture, farce and soapy sentiment in a single misshapen package.
  48. The Playroom
    The Playroom captures the malaise of mid-’70s suburbia with a merciless accuracy not seen since Ang Lee’s 1997 film, “The Ice Storm.”
  49. Lore
    The film sustains an air of overarching mystery in which the viewer, like the title character, is in the position of a sheltered child plunked into an alien environment and required to fend for herself without a map or compass.
  50. Identity Thief
    As is the case with other unsatisfactory diversions, it is entirely possible to ignore the worst parts of this movie, to drift along during the lulls, slide over the half-baked jokes and just wait for Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Bateman to do their things.
  51. Side Effects
    While the plot may be predictable (and more than a little preposterous) in retrospect, Mr. Soderbergh handles it brilliantly, serving notice once again that he is a crackerjack genre technician.
  52. No
    Marshall McLuhan called advertising the greatest art form of the 20th century. In No, Pablo Larraín’s sly, smart, fictionalized tale about the art of the sell during a fraught period in Chilean history, advertising isn’t only an art; it’s also a way of life.
  53. Caesar Must Die
    There’s an elemental, almost primitive quality to the Tavianis’ condensing that, at its most effective, dovetails with the prison’s severely circumscribed material reality, as if the high walls, barred windows and suffocating rooms were manifestations of the characters’ states of mind.
  54. David
    Rather than being a star- or song-driven showcase (despite a notably eclectic soundtrack), David zigzags tonally and visually thanks to Mr. Nambiar, an eager student of flair.
  55. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    The samples of Mr. Abu-Jamal's writings aren't generous enough to establish whether his is a singular voice or just a prolific one, with Mr. Vittoria instead letting the film wander considerably.
  56. Girls Against Boys
    Men are pigs, and women are sick of it, says Girls Against Boys, a dumb, dreary, let's-get-back-at-them slasher in which pulverized genitals pass for feminist critique.
  57. Bullet to the Head
    While the veteran action director Walter Hill hasn't done much to enliven this dull, unmemorable material, with its mechanically moving parts and popping gunfire, its dull-red splatter and spray, he has brought a spark of wit to the proceedings, starting with the figure of Sylvester Stallone.
  58. John Dies at the End
    It lays waste to linear narration, thematic coherence, psychological plausibility and just about everything else you might expect to encounter. It zigs, zags and trips over its own feet and on its own home-brewed hallucinogens. It's a ridiculous, preposterous, sometimes maddening experience, but also kind of a blast.
  59. The Last Gladiators
    [Mr. Gibney] scales down his approach considerably here, generally for the better, rather than extrapolate a theory of violence and everything.
  60. Warm Bodies
    Warm Bodies is an improbable romance sweetened with appealing performances and buoyed by one of the better cute meets in recent romantic comedy.
  61. Koch
    Like Walt Whitman, another hard-to-classify embodiment of the spirit of New York, he is contradictory and multitudinous. The hour and a half Mr. Barsky provides might be enough time for a lesser figure. Mr. Koch...needs more.
  62. Sound City
    [Grohl] shows a decent grasp of how to pace a documentary and how to push nostalgia buttons, avoiding the marsh of smarminess most - though not quite all - of the time.
  63. Race 2
    Race 2, directed by Abbas-Mastan, has little to offer besides its loving gaze at wealth and flesh.
  64. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    There isn't much swashbuckling chemistry between Mr. Renner and Ms. Arterton, and the script doesn't give them enough of the witty lines that can elevate these types of movies to must-see status.
  65. Movie 43
    The kindest thing to be said of Movie 43, a star-saturated collection of crude one-joke vignettes made with big-time directors, is that most of the participants seem to relish being naughty.
  66. Knife Fight
    The tone of Knife Fight is mean until the movie flips a switch and turns pious and mawkish as Paul tries to make amends for past sins. Whether playing it sleazy or noble, Mr. Lowe brings little emotional weight to his role.
  67. Nana
    Naturalistic and mysterious, Nana is terrifyingly dependent on its diminutive star. Insisting on neither written lines nor predetermined actions (the film's short script was used primarily to obtain financing), Ms. Massadian, who worked with the child for almost two years, has coaxed a performance of remarkable lucidity.
  68. Supporting Characters
    This well-acted film captures a generational and occupational sliver of New York life that rings true.
  69. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    Some limitations of adapting secondhand material show through in the uneven visual quality and diminished control over mood. Yet Mr. Herzog is openly inspired, as ever, by the rugged independence of these resourceful trappers, who seem stoic about everything but their faithful dogs.
  70. Parker
    Parker...is not a great movie....But Parker is nonetheless great fun. It is part of a welcome trend, or counter-trend, in action filmmaking, an effort to strip away the apocalyptic bloat and digital fakery that have overtaken the genre and return to its pulpy, nasty, mechanical roots.
  71. The Taste of Money
    Even as The Taste of Money swerves toward a frantic climax and a sentimental denouement, it remains intriguing. It feeds an insatiable curiosity about how the other half - or, in current parlance, the 1 percent - lives, and what it shows us is gorgeous, grotesque and disconcertingly human.
  72. Yossi
    What began as a reasonably hardheaded look at profound and rapid cultural change turns into a feel-good fantasy of salvation.
  73. The Pirogue
    The most powerful thing about The Pirogue is the way it deals with emotionally charged events matter-of-factly, rather than melodramatically. The story Mr. Touré has chosen to tell is both painfully specific - about these individuals, in this boat - and immeasurably vast, since the experience it depicts is shared by millions of people around the world. And yet somehow he gets the scale just right.
  74. Stolen Seas
    A documentary that yearns to be an adventure movie, Stolen Seas can't resist drowning its invaluable insights in thundering, drum-heavy music and flashing visuals. Magnificent in its thoroughness and nuance, this dense, multifaceted study of Somali piracy really needs to settle down.
  75. Our School
    Discrimination against nomadic populations is hardly restricted to Romania, but the integration of that country's largest ethnic minority seems particularly pressing. If only that view were shared by the Romanian adults on screen, most of whom display a shocking degree of prejudice.
  76. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    Evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread.
  77. The Last Stand
    The South Korean director Kim Jee-woon fails to dazzle with the endless speeding-car sequences, but that 60-second flourish during a lengthy firefight is almost worth the tedium.
  78. Mama
    Instead of delivering buckets of guts and gore, this ghost story offers a strong sense of time and place, along with the kind of niceties that don't often figure into horror flicks, notably pictorial beauty, an atmosphere throbbing with dread and actors so good that you don't want anyone to take an ax to them.
  79. Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    Despite its pictorial intensity and the extremity of some of its scenes, the film proceeds in a mood of detachment, turning the suffering physical beings under its scrutiny into abstractions.
  80. LUV
    It does not entirely succeed, but at its best Luv shows the kind of heart and intelligence that is always welcome - and often missing - in American movies.
  81. Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives
    A granola ode to natural childbirth that makes you want to hop into a tub of warm water and start pushing.
  82. Brief Reunion
    The film's biggest weakness is its unsympathetic main character, a snippy, nervous, expressionless control freak who gets more despicable as the story unfolds.
  83. Southwest (Sudoeste)
    Like a Bela Tarr film it leads you to consider the breadth of eternity, the limits of human consciousness and the possibility of reincarnation.
  84. Broken City
    Hughes visual choices can feel borrowed and clichéd, but his regard for beauty often compensates for his blunders, as does the sturdy, reliable appeal of another story of good and evil, men and women, light and dark, glass and steel, sex and power. As it turns out, there are eight million and one stories in the naked city.
  85. Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola
    A mix of gently outraged populism and low-powered romantic comedy, Vishal Bhardwaj's Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola might have been better with a chunk lopped off its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
  86. A Haunted House
    If the opening gag in your R-rated movie is an extended flatulence joke you should reconsider whether you're qualified to make such a movie. Not that flatulence jokes aren't funny; 8-year-olds love them. The thing is, not many 8-year-olds go to R-rated movies.
  87. FrackNation
    More than anything, FrackNation underscores the sheer complexity of a process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers.
  88. Welcome to the Machine
    A strain of quixotic eccentricity runs through the film's endeavor; Mr. Weider basically has more material than he can marshal. As the film goes on, its elements are overshadowed by a reliance on Mr. Kaczynski's writings, which are selectively quoted and blared on screen as if part of a PowerPoint presentation.
  89. My Best Enemy
    An awkward blend of anti-Semitic atrocities and identity-swapping absurdity, the World War II drama My Best Enemy struggles to find a convincing tone.
  90. Uprising (2013)
    A concise commemoration of a new society's birth pains.
  91. Let My People Go!
    Reuben is a whiny and uncoordinated prodigal son. His constant chafing at himself and the world is the film's biggest problem; by the midway point we're all wishing him back in Finland where he belongs.
  92. Clandestine Childhood
    When a filmmaker proves as reluctant as Mr. Ávila to speak up about the past, to engage with its full complexity, it can be hard to hear what he's saying.
  93. Struck by Lightning
    Except for Ms. Janney's monstrous mother and an Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen), Struck by Lightning gives its characters no dimension.
  94. Fairhaven
    There isn't a dishonest moment in Fairhaven, Tom O'Brien's piercing, wistful portrait of three longtime buddies in their mid-30s who reunite around a funeral in a southeastern Massachusetts fishing community.
  95. The Baytown Outlaws
    The Baytown Outlaws" avidly subscribes to the grindhouse aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. If it has the right spit-in-your-face attitude, it has neither the stamina nor the wit to go the distance, although it makes it about two-thirds of the way.
  96. Quartet
    A sincere but sloppy piece of work. Mr. Hoffman dotes on his cast of first-rate British actors of a certain age - and invites us to savor their energy and professionalism. This is not difficult, though the efforts of these fine actors might have yielded greater delight if they had been given more to do.
  97. Gangster Squad
    His (Fleischer) first feature, "Zombieland," was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies.
  98. High Tech, Low Life
    The result is a narrow, albeit intriguing window into a technological revolt that deserves a more far-reaching film than this one.
  99. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    Ms. Daddario is adequate, while Mr. Eastwood, as a lawman, strikes sinister notes. It's nice to see briefly Marilyn Burns, the record-holder in long-distance screaming in Tobe Hooper's original 1974 "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," and Gunnar Hansen, who played Leatherface in the same.
  100. 56 Up
    Life rushes by so fast, it flickers today and is gone tomorrow. In 56 Up - the latest installment in Michael Apted's remarkable documentary project that has followed a group of Britons since 1964, starting when they were 7 - entire lifetimes race by with a few edits.
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