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. Argo
    It's a doozy of a story and so borderline ridiculous that it sounds - ta-da! - like something that could have been cooked up only by Hollywood.
  2. An Affair of the Heart
    An agreeable documentary about the pop singer Rick Springfield and his legions of female fans.
  3. In My Mother's Arms
    In My Mother's Arms takes a distressing snapshot of an ongoing struggle.
  4. The Oranges
    How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.
  5. Wuthering Heights
    The grunts and howls seem every bit as mannered as the florid diction of Olivier and Oberon, perhaps even more so. Their artifice, like Brontë's own, was overt, whereas Ms. Arnold strives to disguise hers in the trappings of authenticity. And as a result, the impact - the grandeur, the art - of Wuthering Heights is diminished.
  6. Sister
    Trading the cooler, more emotionally detached style and vibe that characterized "Home," her debut feature, about a family falling apart, Ms. Meier quietly goes for the emotional jugular in Sister.
  7. The House I Live In
    It's easy to take issue with a documentary like The House I Live In, which tackles too much in too brief a time and glosses over complexities, yet this is also a model of the ambitious, vitalizing activist work that exists to stir the sleeping to wake.
  8. Trade of Innocents
    Part infomercial, part public-service announcement, Trade of Innocents carries such a suffocating human-rights burden that it never had much chance of becoming an actual movie. Yes, child trafficking is horrific; but embedding your raise-the-alarm mission in a film this inept runs the risk of arousing more amusement than activism.
  9. Decoding Deepak
    "Decoding" ultimately becomes Gotham's gentle tribute to Dad, who shall probably provide handsomely for his heirs. It is also a tacit endorsement of Chopra Inc.
  10. Fat Kid Rules the World
    This adaptation of K. L. Going's 2003 young-adult novel about a rejuvenated overweight teenager takes a humble, heartfelt approach, until sentiment loses out to message sending.
  11. Frankenweenie
    While Frankenweenie is fun, it is not nearly strange or original enough to join the undead, monstrous ranks of the classics it adores.
  12. Avé
    No one can really run away - that's the animating principle of the Bulgarian film Avé, which is placid and unchallenging, with tiny eruptions of striking purpose.
  13. Bel Borba Aqui
    Bel Borba Aqui gives us plenty to look at, but not much to think about.
  14. Now, Forager
    This uneven, slow-brewed film begins by observing a brittle relationship about to crumble, but it is better at portraying how the exacting standards of food professionals can lead to personal grief.
  15. V/H/S
    A low-budget horror anthology with segments both ghastly and moronic.
  16. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, a film based on Peter Cameron's novel, is several kinds of excruciating.
  17. Butter
    Well acted and sporadically amusing - especially when Olivia Wilde's profanity-spewing stripper is around - Butter alternates between looking down its nose at Midwestern passions and cooing over smugly liberal values.
  18. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Advocating freedom from a system that "doesn't want you to die and doesn't want you to get well," this hard-hitting film leaves us finally more hopeful than despairing.
  19. Taken 2
    What follows seems like a nonstop car and foot chase, with Albanian after Albanian falling victim to Bryan's remarkable aim and hand-fighting skills. Foreigners bad, Americans good, box office busy.
  20. The Paperboy
    It is by turns lurid, humid, florid, languid and stupid, but it is pretty much all id all the time.
  21. The Double Steps
    It's never clear how Mr. Lacuesta, whose use of other art-cinema conventions (like nonprofessional performers) risks cliché, sees these parts working together or what he wants you to take from them. He's so committed to non-transparency as a principle that he locks you out.
  22. Dear Mandela
    Following the efforts of a South African housing rights group, the documentary Dear Mandela illustrates how fresh injustices have succeeded the inequality once enforced by apartheid.
  23. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    Unable to shape these events into a dramatic structure, the director, Camilo Vila, resorts to a meandering tale of random indignities suffered by a lead so bland he comes across less as principled than as stupendously naïve.
  24. Heroine
    Pulpy but attenuated, Heroine tries to do too much: deliver an exposé of the back-stabbing film business while also drawing a portrait of a woman caught in its vice.
  25. American Autumn: an Occudoc
    As manifestoes go it is calm and smart, offsetting its stridency with discussion, music, even humor, while issuing a call to arms.
  26. The Yakuza and the Mermaid
    If wallowing in the creative hiccups of tortured scribblers is your moviegoing goal, there are much better options.
  27. My Life as Abraham Lincoln
    The accessible and appealing Ms. Luft is a strong anchor. And Ms. Berman can be funny (especially with a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman send-up). It's intriguing to imagine what she could do with a tighter, more linear script.
  28. Six Million and One
    It is an emotional journey for these grown children, now in their 40s and 50s, who engage in sometimes heated conversations, several taking place on the actual sites where Joseph and other prisoners endured unimaginable suffering.
  29. The Other Dream Team
    Augmented by a trove of archival footage reaching back to the 1930s, Jesse Feldman's buoyant cinematography merges political history and sports mania into a triumphant timeline.
  30. Bringing Up Bobby
    Despite Ms. Janssen's fine taste in music - it's lovely to hear Jorma Kaukonen's "Genesis" on the soundtrack - her film's downfall was ensured by a leading lady who will always be more credible chasing zombies than the American dream.
  31. Harvest of Empire
    The filmmakers retain a touching faith that most Americans won't tolerate injustice when they know about it. This film is meant to teach them.
  32. Vulgaria
    The film's kinky energy eventually wanes, the pileup of profanities losing its initial zing.
  33. Solomon Kane
    Mr. Basset is too enamored of the usual action film clichés, down to some Hollywood-gangsta gun play. But he has a graphic visual style that suits the simplistic material and he keeps you watching even as the wet, sucking sounds of skewered flesh grow tedious.
  34. Headshot
    A dreamy, elliptical neo-noir about a cop turned killer turned something else altogether.
  35. Pitch Perfect
    Only occasionally funny and not at all illuminating about the rich world of a cappella singing.
  36. Won't Back Down
    However you take its politics, the film upholds a dreary tradition of simplifying and sentimentalizing matters of serious social concern, and dumbing down issues that call for clarity and creative thinking. Our children deserve better.
  37. Hotel Transylvania
    For the first half of the film, amusing monster humor keeps things interesting; some monsters, it turns out, are better at party games than others.
  38. Looper
    Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt's mug.
  39. Tales of the Night
    The narratives - involving princesses, sorcerers, dragons, talking animals - are familiar. But Mr. Ocelot invigorates them with lyricism: silhouettes evoke shadow plays, and often brilliant palettes reflect the cultures presented.
  40. The Waiting Room
    Scrupulously apolitical, The Waiting Room is the opposite of a polemic like Michael Moore's "Sicko." But by removing any editorial screen, it confronts you head-on with human suffering that a more humane and equitable system might help alleviate.
  41. Raaz 3: The Third Dimension
    The film world setting could be better exploited and Shanaya's jealousy made less mechanical, but Raaz 3 delivers other goods: some horror thrills, some true-love-versus-evil thrills and some unusually steamy bits.
  42. Electoral Dysfunction
    It's pleasant. It treats Democrats and Republicans respectfully, and its humor, with the comic Mo Rocca as guide, is closer to Garrison Keillor than to Michael Moore.
  43. House at the End of the Street
    At a certain point this would-be shocker suddenly jerks into high gear and becomes a blatant, incompetent rip-off of "Psycho."
  44. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    Dizzily enjoyable documentary.
  45. How to Survive a Plague
    In the words of Mr. Kramer: "The government didn't get us the drugs. No one else got us the drugs. We, Act Up, got those drugs out there. That is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim."
  46. Head Games
    Head Games gains credibility and power from compassion for athletes and respect for their accomplishments. But it also tries to open the eyes of sports lovers to dangers that have too often been minimized and too seldom fully understood.
  47. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The results are likable, unsurprising and principally a showcase for the pretty young cast, notably Mr. Miller, who brings texture to his witty if sensitive gay quipster.
  48. 17 Girls
    Wavering between light comedy and drama with wonderfully natural performances, 17 Girls doesn't judge anyone's behavior.
  49. About Cherry
    The fatal flaw of this well-acted movie, whose creators are sex industry veterans, is its refusal to examine Angelina's occupation from outside the bubble. You might even call it a recruitment film.
  50. Fred Won't Move Out
    Except for a subplot about a missing cat that suggests that Fred may be considerably dottier than he appears, the movie gets almost everything right about the uncomfortable moment when grown children are forced to be their parents' parents.
  51. Three Stars
    The dishes dazzle in Lutz Hachmeister's documentary Three Stars, a cinematic helping of some of the world's finest restaurants - and of their chefs' opinions.
  52. Doctored
    Unfortunately, in waving the flag for more holistic, naturopathic treatments, the already meandering Doctored loses focus, touching on topics like alternative cancer treatments, autism and vaccination, and genetically modified produce. Mr. Sheehan seems to forget the primary documentarian directive: First, do no harm to your main argument.
  53. Dredd
    Every so often there's a suggestion that a police state may actually be a lousy idea, but this thought dies even faster than the disposable characters.
  54. Backwards
    Pairing a dull romance with an even duller sport (at least as represented here), this cliché-ridden vanity project is more suited to the ABC Family channel than to the inside of a movie theater.
  55. My Uncle Rafael
    My Uncle Rafael stumbles over forced plotting and setups and falls prey to its hero's avuncular mushiness.
  56. End of Watch
    A muscular, maddening exploitation movie embellished with art-house style and anchored by solid performances.
  57. Trouble with the Curve
    Regrettably, it is not a home run or a perfect game, but it isn't a wild throw, an errant bunt or a dropped fly ball either. Trouble With the Curve is either an off-speed pitch that just catches the edge of the strike zone or a bloop single lofted into right field. The runner is safe. The movie is too.
  58. Blinky & Me
    Mr. Magierski patches together the storytelling, delivered at home and during a visit to Poland, rather clumsily. His general effort to take the children's naïve point of view has amateurish and cutesy results.
  59. Hellbound?
    Mr. Miller makes a questionable choice in setting the film against the backdrop of the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, and he lingers too long on an offensive fringe group that hangs out near ground zero with signs saying the terrorist attacks were God's will. But for most of the way, his treatment is substantive and evenhanded.
  60. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    Robert H. Lieberman, a novelist, filmmaker and professor at Cornell University, took three years to shoot documentary footage surreptitiously during assignments for the United States Embassy and a nongovernment organization. The result is eye-opening and insightful.
  61. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    Inner child? Open road? No, this film is actually about Mr. O'Nan and his wan, scruffy innocence.
  62. Knuckleball!
    Maybe that's romanticizing things, but baseball wouldn't be half as beautiful without its mythology.
  63. Switch
    Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."
  64. Tears of Gaza
    Woven together, these monologues of bereavement and confusion, illustrated with images so terrible they repel rational explanation, form a tapestry of human misery that's impossible to shake off.
  65. Radio Unnameable
    The charm of Radio Unnameable is, finally, elegiac. It can make you wish - or, if you're lucky, remember - that you were a sleepless New Yorker in 1967, kept from loneliness by a gentle, soulful voice on the radio.
  66. Resident Evil: Retribution
    Taking place almost entirely inside computer-simulated global locations, "Retribution" moves closer than ever to its airless video game roots.
  67. Snowman's Land
    Despite on-point performances (especially from the hilarious Mr. Wodianka), the story (by Tomasz Thomson, who also directs) is too pitted with holes and loose ends to permit the film a bump from meh to marvelous.
  68. The Manzanar Fishing Club
    The time with these survivors is appreciated, as who knows how much longer we'll have access to this living history. But I'd rather have heard them describe something other than bait, or how their fishing rods advanced from willow to bamboo to items from the Sears catalog.
  69. Step Up To The Plate
    What resonates here are two men, two good men, whose lives have a paradoxically simple and complex bond beyond their profession. Step Up to the Plate asserts how family, in multifarious ways, can be the most deeply affecting of ensembles.
  70. 10 Years
    An unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn't aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like "The Big Chill," "American Graffiti" or "Diner." But it has enough markers - a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar - to suggest an approximate date.
  71. Liberal Arts
    The harder Mr. Radnor strains to make you love his alter ego, the more resistant you become.
  72. Arbitrage
    Instead of digging into the psychology and morality of greed, Mr. Jarecki only glances and lectures in that direction before piling on a lot of melodramatic complications, including a death, an investigation and a cynical detective (Tim Roth). These days, it seems, the illegal manipulation of hundreds of millions of dollars simply isn't enough to incite moral outrage.
  73. The Master
    It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I've seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in.
  74. Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy
    The average viewer might understandably find that pieces in the puzzle of Mr. Lombardi remain missing.
  75. Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution
    This is an excellent story, and Ms. Draper tells it clearly and stylishly, teasing out the interesting angles and repercussions.
  76. I'm Carolyn Parker
    Jacobs, the great 20th-century philosopher-evangelist of urban life, would surely recognize this retired restaurant cook, a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and the subject of Jonathan Demme's marvelous new documentary, as an indispensable "public character."
  77. Francine
    A small gem of bleak, neorealist portraiture.
  78. Mulberry Child
    The film's subject matter is epochal, its delivery less so.
  79. Serving Up Richard
    The story, too, undercuts the actors.
  80. Detropia
    In this visual caress of postindustrial blight, disintegration has never looked so gorgeous.
  81. Las Acacias
    The very definition of modest, Las Acacias articulates emotional transformation with simplicity and grace. Rarely has a film managed to say so much while saying so little.
  82. Branded
    This fantastical fable takes aim at marketing itself with an intriguing if tendentious narrative.
  83. The Cold Light of Day
    A catastrophe worth noting only for the presence of its name cast.
  84. [REC] 3: Genesis
    With slapstick smothering the scares, [REC 3] is further marred by a plot in which the muted Catholicism of its antecedents is turned up to full blast.
  85. Beauty Is Embarrassing
    The creativity grows like kudzu in Beauty Is Embarrassing, Neil Berkeley's enlightening and often hilarious portrait of the Los Angeles artist Wayne White. And it yields a thousand blossoms.
  86. 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.
  87. The Inbetweeners Movie
    The movie is apparently the most popular British comedy in history. I guarantee that its success has nothing to do with the quality of the actual movie.
  88. The Eye of the Storm
    Whether she's lying in bed, her gray hair spilling out around her head, or exalting in existence itself during one of several flashbacks, Elizabeth draws you in, which works for the story and simultaneously unbalances it.
  89. Toys in the Attic
    The movie should be manna for anyone who likes animated fantasias without wisecracks, commercials and overwrought warbling about self-actualization, meaning that it's suitable for those who will grow up either to be the next Tim Burton or simply to enjoy his movies.
  90. Keep the Lights On
    Its subject is not addiction or ambition, or even love in a conventional romantic sense, but rather the more elusive and intriguing matter of intimacy: how it grows, falters and endures over time.
  91. Bachelorette
    Bachelorette is more tartly written, better acted and less forgiving than male-centric equivalents like the "Hangover" movies.
  92. The Words
    A clever, entertaining yarn that doesn't bear close scrutiny.
  93. Hollywood to Dollywood
    The optimism and good humor of John Lavin's crude, endearing documentary Hollywood to Dollywood are so unquenchable that its disturbing underlying theme - growing up gay in the South is no picnic - is partly obscured by its openheartedness.
  94. For Ellen
    Rather than finding an interesting, resonant ambiguity in his experience, Ms. Kim and Mr. Dano settle for a kind of suggestive vagueness, losing the thread of their character in the snow, steam and cigarette smoke that provide the film's main visual motif and perhaps also its dominant metaphor.
  95. Girl Model
    That stink, like iffy contracts and child labor laws, remains unexplored. Filled with blind eyes and unspoken agreements, Girl Model opens a can of worms, then disdains to follow their slimy trails.
  96. The Tall Man
    Ultimately his story draws more energy from class than from criminality: awash in sludgy browns and rotting greens - the colors of poverty and decomposition - this unpredictable oddity is a little bonkers but a lot original.
  97. The Possession
    Even if you resist the film's claims of being based on one family's actual experiences, The Possession is eerily enjoyable pulp. Perched somewhere between "The Exorcist" and "The Amityville Horror" - and with a dash of "The Unborn" - the story benefits from an unusually restrained sound design and special effects that enhance but never obliterate its troubled-family center.
  98. The Good Doctor
    Ultimately, even after momentarily falling apart in a fit of paranoia, Martin remains a cipher in a movie that never fulfills its potential as melodrama. If The Good Doctor isn't a bad movie, it tells only half the story.
  99. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Surprisingly old-fashioned. It seems to be having an argument with itself: the dazzling but often antiseptic immersiveness of the viewing experience is countered by storytelling suffused with nostalgia for a simpler, messier, livelier period in Chinese film.
  100. Breathing
    As a collaboration Breathing owes much to the balanced compositions, lucid imagery and judicious use of color executed by Mr. Gschlacht, who brought a similarly clear gaze to morally fraught work by other Austrian directors (Götz Spielmann's "Revanche," Jessica Hausner's "Lourdes," Michael Glawogger's "Slumming").
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