The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. A Man Vanishes (1967)
    Seemingly banal in its conceit, wildly startling in its execution, it tracks a film crew that, like a detective squad, investigates what became of an ordinary man.
  2. Barrymore
    Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for "a line, a line" much as Richard III calls for a horse.
  3. Jab Tak Hai Jaan
    Even though the film drags, the magic of Bollywood is that this story's muddle of twists only clarifies the urgency behind the undying desires of all concerned parties.
  4. The Law in These Parts
    By keeping its focus admirably tight, the sober and sobering Israeli documentary The Law in These Parts presents a devastating case against the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
  5. Buffalo Girls
    A story that, though sickly fascinating, is as crudely rendered as its images.
  6. Citadel
    This spare first feature from the Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy (drawing on his own experiences) has an atavistic pulse, evoking a decaying society where elevators fail and bus drivers cower behind mesh grills.
  7. Nature Calls
    If the Boy Scouts offered a merit badge for inept filmmaking, Todd Rohal would certainly earn it with Nature Calls, an unwatchably bad movie about a camping trip gone haywire.
  8. Chasing Ice
    The film doesn't just serve up Mr. Balog's amazing and undeniably convincing imagery. It also records his personal struggles as knee problems threaten his ability to hike the difficult terrain to get the shots he wants.
  9. A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    It's a colorful patchwork of family high and low points, schoolboy days, professional triumphs and assorted epiphanies (including sex with women followed by sex with men).
  10. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Schadenfreude carries a delectable tang no matter the language, and as the history of Hollywood shows, stories about pretty people behaving badly remain reliably alluring.
  11. Coming Up Roses
    The grittier side of Coming Up Roses, which Ms. Albright wrote with Christina Lazaridi, is unconvincing boilerplate grunge.
  12. Café de Flore
    It must be said that Café de Flore is true to its hyper-romantic belief system. And unlike most movies in the "Touched by an Angel" school of storytelling, it doesn't descend into cheap sentimentality. It may be hokum, but it is sophisticated hokum.
  13. In Another Country
    What the point here might be is a bit more elusive. It may be simply to allow Ms. Huppert, one of the most adventurous actresses in movies, the opportunity to try something new. And that might be enough.
  14. A Royal Affair
    A Royal Affair suffers from the richness of the historical material - there is so much going on here - and also, perhaps, from a patriotic desire to treat it reverently. Unfortunately it never fully comes to life.
  15. Burn
    For all the alarming statistics cited in the film, Burn is not a depressing movie. The firefighters interviewed are remarkably resilient men who talk enthusiastically about the adrenaline rush of their work. And the film makes you thankful for members of this macho breed, who relish risking their lives to save others.
  16. Starlet
    The bright sun that blasts through Starlet, a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie about love and a moral awakening, bathes everything in a radiant light, even the small houses with thirsty lawns and dusty cars.
  17. 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.
  18. Lincoln
    Go see this movie. Take your children, even though they may occasionally be confused or fidgety. Boredom and confusion are also part of democracy, after all. Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece - an omen, perhaps, that movies for the people shall not perish from the earth.
  19. Skyfall
    As Bond sprints from peril to pleasure, Mr. Craig and the other players - including an exceptional, wittily venal Javier Bardem, a sleek Ralph Fiennes and a likable Ben Whishaw - turn out to be the most spectacular of Mr. Mendes's special effects.
  20. Festival of Lights
    It ends up being largely just another story about a rebellious American teenager.
  21. Girl Walk: All Day
    The result is exhausting but undeniably exhilarating.
  22. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
    Gradually becomes an echo chamber of personal dramas and exploits, not to mention propulsive soundtrack cues - all within a sport already nursing a penchant for self-documentation.
  23. High Ground
    Michael Brown (a renowned mountaineer), digs below the adventure itself to reveal the gaping holes in our veteran care. Doing so, he translates a collage of experiences - some desperate, some hopeful, all tragic - into a first-person commentary on the malign reverberations of war.
  24. North Sea Texas
    Pim's withdrawn demeanor and inability to verbalize his emotions - the character is basically one big ache - make it more challenging than it should be to immerse ourselves in his journey.
  25. A Man's Story
    An unsatisfying look at the London designer Ozwald Boateng, was shot over 12 years and aspires to a degree of intimacy, yet this glancing treatment is not very enlightening.
  26. Vamps
    Aging is probably the real theme here, but it's approached sidelong and has no punch. Still, only the nostalgia has any real conviction.
  27. Jack and Diane
    Jack & Diane offers a glaring example of a writer and director, Bradley Rust Gray, unable to trust in the simple strength of his material.
  28. The Details
    Instead of turning soft and squishy, this examination of karma gets tougher as it goes along. Its refusal to settle into a cozy niche may be commercially disastrous, but I take it as a sign of integrity.
  29. The Bay
    There is a lot of nasty stuff to look at, but very little that is genuinely haunting, jolting or terrifying.
  30. This Must Be the Place
    Maybe, beneath the stylistic flourishes and bursts of operatic emotion, it is a simple story of psychological struggle, about a man in midlife reckoning with the damage of his past. But to settle on that interpretation is to deny or discount the splendid strangeness of Mr. Sorrentino's vision - and also, therefore, of the curious corners of reality he discovers along the way.
  31. A Late Quartet
    It would be shortsighted to dismiss this deeply felt, musically savvy film, set in a refined cultural precinct of Manhattan, as sudsy melodrama.
  32. The Man with the Iron Fists
    As erratically enjoyable as it is consistently ridiculous, the martial arts pastiche The Man With the Iron Fists is the latest evidence that the vogue for neo-exploitation cinema shows no sign of flagging.
  33. Wreck-It Ralph
    Manages to be touching as well as silly, thrilling and just a bit exhausting. The secret to its success is a genuine enthusiasm for the creative potential of games, a willingness to take them seriously without descending into nerdy pomposity. I am delighted to surrender my cynicism, at least until I've used up today's supply of quarters.
  34. Flight
    Flight is freakishly real; it's one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules.
  35. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.
  36. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    The film is nothing if not liberal with its bloodletting, which integrates cleverly at times with the 3-D: lopped fingers, for example, fly toward the audience. But personalities and plot are thumbnail sketches at best.
  37. The Revisionaries
    Interviewing a wide range of concerned parties, Mr. Thurman's presentation is admirably evenhanded; though he clearly supports the scientists.
  38. Dust Up
    Flaunting gross-out violence and cartoonish trappings, Dust Up is the sort of self-impressed tedious effort that many thought had died with the post-Tarantino imitations of the 1990s.
  39. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Mr. Laue is an intriguing subject, smart, affable and with a dry wit.
  40. Dinotasia
    Neither educational nor engaging.
  41. The Black Tulip
    Newlyweds are slaughtered, a child kidnapped and a suicide bombing foiled, all of it advanced by chunks of clumsy dialogue and embarrassingly labored acting.
  42. The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling - Ireland 1965
    What you see is the intensity of rock 'n' roll at a time when it still felt risky and thrilling.
  43. Pusher (2012)
    There's an ugly, jittery beauty to Pusher, a very fine British redo of a 1996 Danish movie of the same title.
  44. Orchestra of Exiles
    Orchestra of Exiles aspires to a level of primary research that other historical documentaries could take a page from.
  45. The Other Son
    Ms. Lévy is rescued from her maudlin, preachy tendencies by the skill and sensitivity of the actors, who turn a wobbly parable of tolerance into a graceful and touching story of real people in a surreal situation.
  46. The Loneliest Planet
    It is gripping and haunting, but also coy and elusive.
  47. Gut
    Unfolding in awkward diner conversations and uncomfortable bedroom scenes, Gut has a cold, flat look that gives even a child's stuffed toy a sinister sheen.
  48. Fun Size
    Movie merits include a good cast, a tidy script and jokes just provocative enough.
  49. Chasing Mavericks
    When the movie works, its buoyancy can be infectious and persuasive.
  50. Sleep Tight
    Mr. Balagueró is so overtaken by his villain that he becomes like César, displaying an eagerness to play the role of tormentor, which kills both the movie's pleasure and its flickering political subtext.
  51. The Zen of Bennett
    In simple, blunt language he exalts "quality," "warmth," "feeling," "truth" and "beauty," without trying to define or elaborate on those concepts.
  52. Sassy Pants
    Once the film softens, it starts to come unglued.
  53. Cloud Atlas
    This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket.
  54. Paranormal Activity 4
    Paranormal Activity 4 will please the fans, and that should sustain this low-budget, highly profitable franchise.
  55. Le Grand Amour (1969)
    The delightfully playful, playfully imaginative Grand Amour was directed by Pierre Etaix, a filmmaker, illustrator, musician and clown whose major work and poetic melancholia has long been denied to filmgoers.
  56. Bad 25
    Though at times a tad worshipful, the film's tone is ultimately more awed than hagiographic, its commenters too cleareyed and candid to back away from negative publicity or public disenchantment.
  57. Chicks
    Ms. Letourneur's film also bears a rare, even strange, stamp of authenticity.
  58. Bestiaire
    This may not be a fuzzy wuzzy, warm-and-cuddly song to animals, but in revealing the everyday, sometimes repellent surrealism of the park - where zebras, elephants, camels and ostriches walk among slowly moving cars, and lions bang wildly against their small cages - he forces you to look at the often unseen. It may not be pretty, but it is essential viewing.
  59. Yogawoman
    Yogawoman, with narration enunciated by the actress and yogini Annette Bening, begins with an intriguing premise: yoga, historically a practice dominated by men in India, now occupies a mat-carrying slot on women's schedules the world over. That idea remains anthemic more than analyzed, and doing yoga proves more appealing than watching a film promote it.
  60. Sexy Baby
    This scattershot investigation of the effects of Internet pornography on female behavior only ruffles the surface of a complex issue, one that demands a much larger sample than three white, educated women.
  61. My Worst Nightmare
    Its tepid satire of art world pretensions culminates with a visual dirty joke that is mildly amusing but still not worth the wait.
  62. All Together
    If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.
  63. Unmasked Judeophobia
    In the end the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are conflated, weakening the filmmaker's argument. Ultimately the varying points are way too much to take on in one film.
  64. Nobody Walks
    It would be tempting to dismiss Nobody Walks as a trivial erotic divertissement, even more so because it doesn't apply the kind of symbolic gloss found in a '60s film of serial seduction, like Pasolini's "Teorema." Banal as its situation may be, it picks at every scab you may have left over from wounds suffered during the mating games of your youth.
  65. The Flat
    A film that begins as a family quest but evolves into a gripping study of know-don't-tell reticence and the umbilical tie of a lost homeland.
  66. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    The film is most illuminating in showing how democratic practice can still find a new voice and innovative means with each generation. The fascinating efforts of Anonymous can be messy, but so are many freedoms when asserted so boldly.
  67. Brooklyn Castle
    It's deeply satisfying watching these public school, hard-knock kids win, and Ms. Dellamaggiore knows it.
  68. That's What She Said
    An unpleasant comedy about friendship, aims to be a female twist on the bromance. Crude and knockabout, it nonetheless has - like many a bromance - a sloppy, sentimental heart.
  69. Question One
    Some viewers will be frustrated by the film's determination to be evenhanded, but with this same battle likely to be fought repeatedly in the coming years (the issue is again on the 2012 Maine ballot), Question One stands as a pretty good primer in how referendums are won and lost.
  70. The First Time
    Sure, you've seen this story before, but this version has a freshness nonetheless.
  71. Tai Chi Zero
    Fast and mostly fun, the movie also seems compulsively too much, throwing everything it can think of at you, lest it fail to entertain.
  72. The Sessions
    The Sessions is a pleasant shock: a touching, profoundly sex-positive film that equates sex with intimacy, tenderness and emotional connection instead of performance, competition and conquest.
  73. Alex Cross
    A grim, dispiritingly stupid waste of time, energy, money and talent.
  74. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    The producers are going to have to hire a better director if they want moviegoers to be curious enough about this Galt guy to buy a ticket for the presumptive third and final chapter.
  75. Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    Partly reverent, mostly sendup, Just 45 Minutes From Broadway depicts theater folk as those lovably quirky people who can't stop performing in life, for better or worse. This film might be perfect for a preteen acting camp, or anyone whose eyes have that glowing, cultlike spark of the stage-obsessed.
  76. Holy Motors
    It's a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you're to do once you're there.
  77. The Prosecution of an American President
    There is no mistaking Mr. Bugliosi's conviction, nor the thoroughness of his research, which largely concerns the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
  78. Split: A Deeper Divide
    Even political foes agree here on today's parlous state of disagreement, leaving you keen to vote but feeling a little defeated already.
  79. Excuse Me for Living
    A lumbering mess in which he has somehow trapped several recognizable actors.
  80. Hotel Noir
    To succeed as more than a study in artifice, a film - especially one steeped in fatalism - needs to feel real.
  81. Madrid, 1987
    Sweet, sometimes dull and certainly overlong.
  82. Janeane from Des Moines
    With Ms. Wilson's rare talent for staying in character as the media circus swirls around her, Janeane From Des Moines is actually a commentary on the immense gap between a desperate citizen and the politics she had hoped might help her.
  83. Two Years at Sea
    The result is haunting.
  84. Special Forces
    Dedicated to French servicemen and wartime journalists, Special Forces aims to inspire but ends up wallowing in melodrama.
  85. Here Comes the Boom
    If you can choke down the implausible notion that the doughy Kevin James would last more than five seconds in a mixed martial arts ring, Here Comes the Boom is a moderately enjoyable, nontaxing sort of comedy.
  86. War of the Buttons
    The slick filmmaking - the movie has a glossy, Hollywood-ready feel that sometimes tips into the cutesy - works against its themes.
  87. Smiley
    Failing to expand on the intriguing notion that evil can find physical form online, Smiley, like its sutured monster, is sadly more to be pitied than feared.
  88. A Whisper to a Roar
    A vivid documentary with unusual access to the key players in the geopolitical dramas it recounts.
  89. The Iran Job
    This observant documentary avoids pedagogy; it's not always artful, but it has a relaxed, light touch that never topples into pretension.
  90. Least Among Saints
    Though both actors deliver performances more credible than the plot that frames them, their authenticity only highlights the script's affection for improbable coincidences and an ending even Garry Marshall might consider too pat.
  91. Gayby
    Inoffensive and low-key, Gayby is too diffuse to have much pop when it comes to the topics at hand: love and friendship, and how unconventional modern permutations might help rewrite the script of romance.
  92. The Thieves
    Loaded with all the twists, disguises, glamorous settings and split-screen montages you could ask for.
  93. Simon & the Oaks
    With its exhilarating World War II narrative and performances that touch notes intimate and grand, Simon and the Oaks has an exquisite, and epic, ache.
  94. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    A vibrantly vulgar comedy that never hangs around to admire its own cleverness.
  95. Photographic Memory
    The connections made in Photographic Memory are more tentative than those found in Mr. McElwee's earlier films, which also seek answers in roundabout ways while maintaining an acute eye for light, color, space and atmosphere.
  96. Sinister
    A twitchy Mr. Hawke builds a persuasive portrait of desperation with little help from the script and despite playing a character who makes so many mistakes he might as well be on a suicide mission.
  97. The Big Picture
    Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.
  98. Smashed
    The degree to which Smashed refuses to indulge a voyeuristic taste for the kind of sordid details exploited by reality television amounts to an unspoken declaration of principle. In lieu of self-pity, Smashed substitutes tough love.
  99. Middle of Nowhere
    Ms. DuVernay, from start to finish in this very fine movie, works to make sure that Ruby is a woman to remember.
  100. Seven Psychopaths
    Meta to the max, filled with clever jokes and observations that stick like barbs and deflated ones that land with a thud, Seven Psychopaths is a leisurely riff about movies, violence, storytelling and the art of the steal.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »