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. Friday the 13th
    There's an itch for this kind of material, and here it is scratched -- to the bone.
  2. Examined Life
    A modest, intermittently engaging film.
  3. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
    Reveling in the vivid Bangkok locations, Geoff Boyle’s photography is crisp and bright, and Dion Lam’s action choreography unusually witty.
  4. The Cake Eaters
    Superior acting elevates a small, overcrowded ensemble piece set in rural upstate New York into something a little deeper and truer than the mawkish disease-of-the-week movie it threatens to become.
  5. The Great Buck Howard
    An agreeable show business satire with a warm heart.
  6. Skills Like This
    Drawing much of its energy from an eclectic and fully integrated soundtrack, Skills Like This gazes indulgently on 20-something aimlessness and the comfort of assigned roles. In Mr. Miranda's hands sloth can be more appealing than you might think.
  7. The Education of Charlie Banks
    Probes class consciousness with rather more sensitivity than originality.
  8. Sleep Dealer
    The plot of Sleep Dealer is a bit thin, and the performances are earnest and dutiful. But there is sufficient ingenuity in the film’s main ideas to hold your attention, and the political implications of the allegorical story are at once obvious and subtle.
  9. The Soloist
    The film is imperfect, periodically if unsurprisingly sentimental, overly tidy and often very moving.
  10. Management
    Mike may be a bumbling sad sack, but Mr. Zahn gives him just enough spunky appeal to lend this unlikely fly-by-afternoon coupling and its consequences a shred of credibility.
  11. Dead Snow
    As is often the case with movies of this type, the real stars are the special-effects team, which does some admirably disgusting work.
  12. Grace
    Mr. Solet does not possess anything close to Mr. Polanski’s storytelling or image-making skills, but with the help of his sound crew (four people are given sound design or editing credits), he keeps you on the edge of your seat, or perhaps the edge of fleeing the theater.
  13. No Impact Man: The Documentary
    I can’t, in the end (all appearances to the contrary), judge Mr. Beavan or this film too severely. Making an impact is easy. Making a difference is hard.
  14. More Than a Game
    The art is lacking, but the material is remarkable enough to make up for pedestrian filmmaking.
  15. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Art executed under the most excruciating conditions deserves a far more searching study than this too short film, which has the structure of a hurried checklist. Even so, a lot of the art shown in the documentary, often side-by-side with photographs of the same places and events, is compelling.
  16. Trucker
    Trucker sometimes feels like a performance in search of a movie.
  17. Wonderful World
    The major miscalculation in Wonderful World is the presence of a dream figure, known as the Man (Philip Baker Hall)...he throws this delicate, intelligent film, which at its best suggests a muted hybrid of “The Visitor” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” off balance.
  18. Off and Running
    The role played by her camera in exacerbating Avery’s natural, adolescent self-absorption continues to nag; in the end, I was less concerned for the wildly indulged Avery -- whose own narration reveals a charismatic and extremely fortunate young woman -- than for the hearts breaking around her.
  19. The Yellow Handkerchief
    If Mr. Hurt gives a meticulously detailed performance, he is still so innately refined that Brett never quite registers as an authentic blue-collar type, either vocally or in his body language. Ultimately, men like Brett are just not in Mr. Hurt’s DNA, and you are left with the impression of observing a silk purse artfully (but only partially) disguised as a sow’s ear.
  20. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    A sly retrospective exercise in corporate self-congratulation masquerading as an insider’s tell-all.
  21. Just a Kiss
    What elevates the movie above the run-of-the-mill singles blender is its surreal sense of humor and technological finish.
  22. Blackwoods
    Far from a future cult classic, it turns out to be smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning.
  23. Hush!
    Rambling, occasionally very funny reflection on the meaning of family in contemporary Japan.
  24. Cowboys & Angels
    The coming-of-age story about the corruptions of the big city has been done a few thousand times, but at least this one offers a fresh mix of open-minded intelligence and a heartfelt point of view.
  25. The Fluffer
    Moves nimbly from behind-the-scenes comedy to melodrama, with occasional stumbles into pop psychology and film-noir violence.
  26. Tell Me Something
    It doles out information so arbitrarily that you are robbed of the twin pleasures of figuring out clues and figuring out you've been fooled.
  27. The Weight of Water
    There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.
  28. The Château
    Here is one performer (Testud) whose features -- small sad eyes, sharp nose, wide rueful smile -- can sustain a feature by themselves.
  29. Cradle Will Rock
    Although Robbins might have drawn some of these characters with less obviousness and more satirical bite, he ably keeps this lively, complicated film on track.
  30. Dick
    An uproariously dizzy satire...Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature.
  31. Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
    Oddly charming.
  32. Onmyoji: The Yin Yang Master
    Has the sense of gritty, practical politics of a Japanese samurai epic combined with the high-flying stunt work and magical special effects of a Hong Kong romp. Ultimately this film by Yojiro Takita is satisfying on neither level, but not for lack of trying.
  33. Dancing at the Blue Iguana
    An ensemble piece developed from an improvisational workshop, the movie exudes a haunted melancholy that recalls such early Alan Rudolph films as "Choose Me" and "Welcome to L.A," and it includes several flashy performances.
  34. Mother India
    The film is at once a sort of Indian "Stella Dallas," which finds the heroine making sacrifice after sacrifice on behalf of her family, and a "Gone With the Wind"-style epic of social change.
  35. The Trench
    What lifts The Trench above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust.
  36. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.
  37. How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    Reminds us that when it comes to comedy, it's all in the writing. Mr. Kalesniko's satirically barbed screenplay, whose spirit harks back to the comic heyday of Blake Edwards, stirs up an insistent verbal energy that rarely flags.
  38. In Too Deep
    Treats its characters seriously and doesn't resort to the obvious very often.
  39. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    Its subject matter is intrinsically upsetting.
  40. Sidewalks of New York
    The time is right for a breezy, captivating New York romantic comedy. Sidewalks of New York is not an especially good movie, but it will do.
  41. Return to Never Land
    If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.
  42. Lan Yu
    Lan Yu is like a less dizzily gorgeous companion to Mr. Wong's "In the Mood for Love" -- very much a Hong Kong movie despite its mainland setting.
  43. The Young Girl and the Monsoon
    Crackles dangerously to life whenever Constance (who narrates the film) is on the screen with her father Hank (Terry Kinney).
  44. Let It Snow
    Let It Snow is cheery, and it gets by on the energy of the actors, who may be as taken by the movie's guilelessness as audiences could be. The film's naïveté makes up for its rampant predictability.
  45. Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda
    This crowd-pleasing spectacle is like a series of showstopper sequences from a musical without much attention paid to the story that is supposed to hold it all together.
  46. Judy Berlin
    Mendelsohn's fusion of science fiction and Chekhovian melancholy finds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.
  47. Love's Labour's Lost
    Even though Love's Labour's Lost is, in showbiz terms, a turkey stuffed with chestnuts, you wouldn't trade it for a pot of gold.
  48. The Day Silence Died
    An easygoing exercise, impossible to dislike but not especially memorable, engaging but finally derivative:
  49. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Mr. Law doesn't disgrace himself here, though he doesn't have much to do, and the director, Po Chih Leong, is deft at creating atmosphere, but it's an atmosphere we've all seen before.
  50. An American Rhapsody
    Ms. Gardos is not a particularly flavorful filmmaker, but she is an honest one.
  51. Innocence
    Mostly mediocre melodrama, though the actors suffering over love's labors lost are quite fine.
  52. From the Edge of the City
    It captures a gritty urban reality without moralizing or sentimentalizing its hapless young protagonist.
  53. 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.
  54. The Strange Case of Señor Computer
    Mr. Sawyer eventually overreaches, striving for tragedy with a grim, cautionary ending that seems meant to evoke "Frankenstein." But the film's offhand, homemade quality sustains a quirky appeal.
  55. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
    Simultaneously fascinating and vexing in ways that might tax informed devotees of both baseball and film.
  56. Mifune's Last Song
    The brusque realism of Kragh-Jacobsen's style -- his careful suppression of style -- allows a surprising sweetness to emerge.
  57. Agnes Browne
    Has an episodic rhythm and little dramatic tension.
  58. Orfeu
    Finds a sprawling, vivid middle ground somewhere between documentary and myth.
  59. The Way Home
    The story, touching though it is, does not quite have enough emotional resonance or variety of incident to sustain a feature, and even at 85 minutes it feels a bit long. The premise, too, is a little thin.
  60. Brown Sugar
    Sustains the charm of an early 60's New York romance.
  61. Family Fundamentals
    An earnest study in despair.
  62. The Business of Fancydancing
    Although the film is initially clumsy and a little hard to follow, Mr. Alexie takes his time in setting his characters in play, and the visual clunkiness becomes secondary to the eloquent emotional desolation.
  63. Interview with the Assassin
    Mr. Burger has a performer who can dart between stentorian self-assurance and cringing pathos, maintaining his character's ambiguity until the final sequence of this resourceful and ingenious entertainment.
  64. Kaaterskill Falls
    Establishes its ominous mood and tension swiftly, and if the suspense never rises to a higher level, it is nevertheless maintained throughout.
  65. Himalaya
    Somehow, in spite of the stunning vistas and some witty and affecting moments, the story seems to unfold at a distance; the human drama is diminished by the setting rather than amplified by it.
  66. Breakfast of Champions
    The movie looks and feels like a frantic, live-action psychedelic cartoon.
  67. Les amants criminels
    Such an amalgam of fairy tales, old movies and tabloid stories that it never develops a life of its own.
  68. Claire Dolan
    Cartlidge's beautifully still performance, mournful one moment, defiant the next, lets you see into Claire's soul without editorializing or begging for our empathy.
  69. The Caveman's Valentine
    Works as everything but a mystery, yet it is intriguing in a number of ways. And the ending is as resolute as you might have hoped for. It lets Romulus and the movie retain their integrity.
  70. Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
    An engaging and colorful but somewhat overbalanced documentary.
  71. L'ennui
    Overly schematic, not always believable in its crude sexual mechanics and ultimately unsensual. But it lays out the laws of erotic attraction with a brutal directness that is downright scary.
  72. Tuvalu
    Helmer's wildly whimsical debut film, Tuvalu, is the kind of movie that might one day find itself in the hall of fame of surreal movie weirdness alongside cult favorites like "Eraserhead," "Delicatessen" and the avant-garde frolics of Guy Maddin.
  73. The Turandot Project
    The sheer scale of the production, and the size of the venue, make the film interesting to watch.
  74. The Sticky Fingers of Time
    Works, in its deliberately low-key way.
  75. Luminous Motion
    It's a bit like "The Sixth Sense," but without the melodramatic comfort of the supernatural.
  76. The Operator
    If The Operator, which is Mr. Dichter's directorial debut, has a clever concept, it clasps it much too fiercely to its chest.
  77. Focus
    The movie's surreal style, with its film-noir camerawork and ominous lighting, turns the story into a fable about fear and nonconformism, and Mr. Macy's and Ms. Dern's carefully shaded caricatures match the mood.
  78. Final
    Though its story is fuzzy, the acting and direction in Final give it an air of quiet, dignified ambition.
  79. Duets
    Every so often a movie comes along that's bad in such original and unexpected ways that it inspires an almost admiring fascination
  80. Maelstrom
    Probably the first romantic drama ever narrated by a smelly dead fish.
  81. Undisputed
    Lacks more than subtext: it barely has text. At times, the picture seems to have been edited with a blowtorch. But it gets the job done efficiently and swiftly.
  82. Mad Love
    An often watchable, though goofy and lurid, blast of a costume drama set in the late 15th century.
  83. The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy
    Emerges as an engaging if occasionally hokey inspirational melodrama about the importance of community in the face of life's disappointments.
  84. The Basket
    Avoids succumbing to the preachiness that is the bane of so many family films, and for a movie like this, that's no small feat.
  85. All the Little Animals
    Would seem hokey if it didn't have powerful, extraordinary central performances and cinematography that lends the English landscape around Cornwall a mythical cast.
  86. Naqoyqatsi
    By far the grimmest of these nonnarrative, nonverbal cinematic tone poems with epic ambitions. Although none of the three could be described as cheery, Naqoyqatsi, whose title is the Hopi Indian term for war as a way of life, reeks of doomsday.
  87. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    The access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable, and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant of the 20th century.
  88. Rosetta
    Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic.
  89. The House of Mirth
    Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.
  90. Janice Beard
    As Janice, Eileen Walsh, an engaging, wide-eyed actress whose teeth are a little too big for her mouth, infuses the movie with much of its slender, glinting charm.
  91. Washington Heights
    For all its untidiness, Washington Heights teems with life, and its star, Mr. Perez, has charisma to burn. The movie vividly depicts the interdependence and solidarity of people in working-class urban neighborhoods where residents really need one another.
  92. King of the Jungle
    Mr. Rosenfeld is a writer whose talent shines through in the way he harvests minute pearls.
  93. Where's the Party Yaar?
    Clearly understands its target audience of first-generation Indian-Americans and has its pleasures to provide.
  94. Holy Smoke
    As Holy Smoke moves from its early mix of rapture and humor into this more serious, confrontational stage, it runs into trouble.
  95. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    A suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them.
  96. Time and Tide
    A woozy, disconnected piece of filmmaking about drugs, rock 'n' roll and the aftermath of sex.
  97. Pushing Tin
    Newell's ensemble timing and breezily sardonic style make it work better than might be expected.
  98. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Except for the access the director, David Teboul, had to Mr. Saint Laurent's inner circle, "Times" wouldn't be out of place on A&E.
  99. AKA
    His (Roy's) informed contempt is highly entertaining, but he neglects some of the more problematical and perhaps more illuminating aspects of his story.
  100. The Red Violin
    Wants to make a grand statement about the mystical power (both celestial and demonic) of great music. But give or take some scattered musical moments, the frame in which that message is couched is too kitschy to let that vision catch fire.
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