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. For a Good Time, Call...
    Doesn't aspire to be more than a broad, sloppy, old-fashioned sitcom with a sexy gimmick. But it is quite funny.
  2. Side by Side
    For a film geek this movie is absolute heaven, a dream symposium in which directors, cinematographers, editors and a few actors gather to opine on the details of their craft. It is worth a year of film school and at least 1,000 hours of DVD bonus commentary.
  3. The Day
    The Day cycles through bursts of horrific violence only to end much as it begins: static, hollow and vague.
  4. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    Hallie's dad said it was Rocky Horror for toddlers whatever that is. Me and Hallie are 7 and we thought it was for babies.
  5. Little Birds
    I don't think Mr. James intended to make a creepy, exploitative movie about teenage runaways - or, for that matter, a moralistic, cautionary tale of girls gone bad. But those are the default categories that Little Birds stumbles toward, perhaps because the filmmaker has not found a cogent way to channel his curiosity or his empathy.
  6. The Ambassador
    Mr. Brugger's portrait of shameless, routine collusion between exploitative foreigners and dysfunctional dictatorships is depressing and undeniable. Unless, that is, The Ambassador is even more of a hoax than it seems to be. This strikes me as plausible, since somebody having this much fun in such proximity to horror may not be completely trustworthy.
  7. Lawless
    There are too many action-movie clichés without enough dramatic purpose, and interesting themes and anecdotes are scattered around without being fully explored. This is weak and cloudy moonshine: it doesn't burn or intoxicate.
  8. The Apparition
    At one point Ben helpfully looks under the house to see what might be causing the ruckus. "Watch out for spiders!" Kelly says. Actually, Ben - and the filmmakers - have a lot more to worry about.
  9. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    The first interactions between human and animal are fascinating, as the trainers often apply different approaches. As the horses learn to trust their trainers, connections grow into deep bonds.
  10. General Education
    Among the problems with the humorless comedy General Education is that the lead character's sister is more interesting than he is, and she spends much of her screen time as a mute mime.
  11. Knight Knight
    This comedy, the first feature by Ms. Bucher, suffers from technical limitations, perhaps imposed by a tough nine-day shooting schedule. The recording sounds muted; the whimsical musical score oversells the jokes; and the lackluster visuals fail to match the pungency of the language.
  12. The Victim
    Told with multiple flashbacks and minimal taste, this exuberantly scuzzy thriller - shot in less than two weeks with a budget as micro as the women's skirts - pits sleazy cops against fun-loving disrobers in the middle of scraggly foliage.
  13. Death by China
    It is also unabashedly one-sided and is short on solutions, other than the usual "Call your Congressional representatives." But its message, despite the hyperbole, certainly warrants examination and discussion.
  14. Somewhere Between
    Somewhere Between presents an effortlessly moving but superficial profile of four bright Chinese girls and their adoptive American families.
  15. The Revenant
    A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior's Revenant toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs.
  16. Sleepwalk with Me
    These episodes, some staged as surreal dream sequences, inject this otherwise prosaic-looking movie with a visual pizazz that makes Sleepwalk With Me more than just a glorified stand-up act.
  17. Little White Lies
    With the exception of Marie Little White Lies focuses mostly on the men: whiny, strutting little boys whose exasperated, tight-lipped wives put up with their bad behavior and sometimes have to act like mommies.
  18. Samsara
    A spool of arresting, beautifully composed shots without narration or dialogue, Samsara is an invitation to watch closely and to suspend interpretation (another notion Sontag might have approved).
  19. Neighboring Sounds
    With his sound designer, Pablo Lamar, Mr. Mendonça has created the aural landscape of a horror movie. And, for much of its running time, a thriller without a plot.
  20. Premium Rush
    Stuffed with zingers and zippy stunts, it comes with pretty young things of all hues and hair types - few prettier than its lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - and start-to-finish clever special effects, none more clever or special than Michael Shannon.
  21. Teddy Bear
    Mr. Matthiesen has a way of consistently and gently upending expectations, sometimes with humor.
  22. Hit and Run
    The movie feels like a grown-up version of little boys making whooshing noises and staging collisions while playing with toys on a living room floor. It belongs to the same star-and-his-pals-cutting-up genre as the lesser comedies by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.
  23. 2016: Obama's America
    Mr. D'Souza stumbles when interviewing George Obama, the president's half-brother, an activist who voluntarily lives amid squalor in Nairobi, Kenya. "Obama has not done anything to help you," Mr. D'Souza says. "He's taking care of me; I'm part of the world," George Obama replies.
  24. The Matchmaker
    The efficient approach and tendency toward broad strokes prevent the movie from taking a deep hold, and Mr. Shafir is a hesitant young actor to have at the center. But, like the title character, Mr. Nesher demonstrates a practical intelligence for making basic connections.
  25. True Wolf
    Having devoted much of their lives to combating lupine myths by introducing Koani to wonder-struck schoolchildren, Mr. Weide and Ms. Tucker are ill served by a director who reduces the anti-wolf lobby to caricature and the debates over reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies to grossly biased clips.
  26. Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    That said, this deliciously nutty love story - sample dialogue: "Let me eat this heart, then we can pick azaleas together" - is blindingly gorgeous to look at and exceptionally well acted, at least by the women.
  27. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    The whole enterprise has a get-off-my-lawn feel; it tries to pass off whining and a rose-colored-glasses view of the past as insight.
  28. The Awakening
    Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.
  29. Compliance
    A slow-motion punch to the groin. As such, it's fitting that one of our first sights is a large "NO" stenciled in the parking lot of a fast-food joint in suburban Ohio: as the film progresses, the word becomes a silent mantra for viewers who can't quite believe what they're seeing.
  30. The Green Wave
    By turns frustrating and moving, Ali Samadi Ahadi's documentary The Green Wave, about the Green Revolution in Iran, gets a jolt from footage shot by the people for the people on the people's cellphones.
  31. Sparkle
    In many ways Sparkle is a bumpy ride. The editing is haphazard, the cinematography too dark, and there are holes in the story. If the new songs on the soundtrack are effective Motown pastiches, most of them pale beside their prototypes. But diluted Motown is better than none.
  32. Beloved
    Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.
  33. Chicken with Plums
    The result is captivating, but not exactly moving: Nasser-Ali's grand passion is posited rather than communicated, in spite of Mr. Amalric's exquisitely soulful performance.
  34. ParaNorman
    Far more than Norman's adventure, which takes him from home to a cemetery and deep into his town's history, what pulls you in, quickening your pulse and widening your eyes, are the myriad visual enchantments - from the rich, nubby tactility of his clothes to the skull-and-bones adorning his bedroom wallpaper.
  35. Why Stop Now
    Once Why Stop Now? has exhausted its bag of tricks, there is a screeching of brakes as it approaches the edge of the cliff. Having expended all that stamina, the film collapses from exhaustion and settles for an abrupt, feel-good ending that is as perfunctory as it is preposterous.
  36. Robot and Frank
    Frank Langella plays so many variations on cute and crotchety and with such suppleness - he's by turns a charming codger, a silver fox and a wise graybeard - that his performance comes close to a saving grace.
  37. The Expendables 2
    Mr. Norris arrives just as the blood baths and leaden dialogue are beginning to grow tedious, and his deadpan self-parody is pretty darn funny. More important, it gives you permission to laugh at the rest of this mindless movie, which is the only way to choke it down.
  38. Cosmopolis
    A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.
  39. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    The ghastliness of this damp and squishy comedy is the byproduct of a confused and earnest sentimentality, a willful devotion to wide-eyed wonder that confuses simplicity with simple-mindedness.
  40. The Lion of Judah
    It's not bad enough to be offensive, and the movie's act of affirmation - for all its self-absorption and high levels of pretrip ignorance - addresses an unimpeachable, moving subject and is undertaken with decency.
  41. Max and the Junkmen (1971)
    Max et les Ferrailleurs, adapted from a novel by Claude Néron, has the matter-of-fact look and careful pace of a precinct-house procedural.
  42. Supercapitalist
    Dry as new bank notes and doggedly uncinematic, Simon Yin's $upercapitalist approaches the seamy side of international finance with a story as stale as the subprime meltdown.
  43. Goats
    If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.
  44. Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is not friendly terrain to traverse; like some sinister version of Proust, it is a prolonged fever dream that ultimately yields madness.
  45. 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.
  46. Red Hook Summer
    Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.
  47. The Campaign
    Too soft and silly to be satire, too upbeat to be a cautionary tale, the film is a fun-house fable that both exaggerates and understates the absurdities of our democracy in this contentious election year.
  48. The Bourne Legacy
    By the time Rachel Weisz, as a scientist called Dr. Marta Shearing, showed up in a lab coat, I stopped trying to parse every plot twist and just went with the action flow.
  49. Hope Springs
    The movie is an awkward cross between a domestic comedy and a marital tragedy that's laced with laughs, soggy with tears and burdened by a booming, blunt soundtrack that amplifies every narrative beat.
  50. Meet the Fokkens
    Why the sisters felt that prostitution was their best alternative remains unclear, either because they aren't interested in revealing that part of themselves, or the filmmakers didn't know how to get them to talk. Or maybe Ms. Provaas and Mr. Schroder weren't interested, for political or personal reasons, in making what, despite the laughter, they ended up with: another sad story about whores.
  51. Nitro Circus: The Movie
    Only a couple of times do the stunts have that extra ingredient - wit - that makes this kind of thing amusing to watch.
  52. Soldiers of Fortune
    For the cast, shooting the movie (in Ukraine) may have been a working vacation, but for viewers, watching it is an excruciating sentence of hard labor.
  53. Sushi: The Global Catch
    As storytelling, "The Global Catch" often falls short. It has too much to cover to be comprehensive and can seem a bit random. As a consciousness raiser, the film fares much better.
  54. Assassin's Bullet
    For the thickheaded thriller Assassin's Bullet the Bulgarian actress Elika Portnoy dreamed up a story with three roles for herself and fails to convince in any of them.
  55. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
    This friendly, colorful documentary from Pip Chodorov is not the last word on all the shapes, sizes and languages of experimental film, but rather an introduction brightened by a companionable enthusiasm and an apposite sense of community.
  56. Dreams of a Life
    For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.
  57. Mosquita y Mari
    Ms. Pineda and Ms. Troncoso give wonderfully natural performances in which they convey the impulsiveness and insecurity of adolescence. You are uncomfortably reminded of what it feels like to be 15.
  58. The Babymakers
    Delivered with sloppy, gleeful confidence, the movie is smarter than most gross-out comedies but isn't afraid to inspire an "Ewww."
  59. 360
    There's no way to know what went wrong with 360 and whether it was this uninvolving and shallow from the start.
  60. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    The film is more a patched-together collection of anecdotes than a coherent story, and some of Greg's tribulations, like fear over a high dive and an amusement-park ride, don't seem age-appropriate for a boy who has just finished seventh grade.
  61. You've Been Trumped
    Mr. Trump comes across as an insensitive, lying bully who will do whatever it takes to realize his dream of creating what he promises will be the world's greatest golf resort.
  62. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    While Celeste and Jesse is decidedly conventional in most respects, it's pretty swell as an exploration of a relationship between a man and a woman that's no longer predicated by mutual desire.
  63. Total Recall (2012)
    This premise contains the seeds of an interesting economic and political allegory, but the ambitions of the filmmakers - lie in the direction of maximum noise and minimum sense.
  64. Burning Man
    Burning Man benefits from the highly watchable Mr. Goode and able players like Rachel Griffiths and Kerry Fox.
  65. Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
    Documenting the vigorous strategies employed by the Dole Food Company to block the release of his 2009 film "Bananas!" - about a lawsuit brought by Nicaraguan workers who suspected the company's use of dangerous pesticides - the Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten gains traction by taking the high road.
  66. Rites of Spring
    The cinematographer, Carl Herse, knows his way around genre staples like claustrophobic cornfields, animal carcasses, porcelain-doll heads, voyeur perspectives, decrepit interiors and, of course, the time-honored serial-killer wall, with thumbtacked clippings and photographs about old murders. Nevertheless, Rites of Spring yields a slender bounty.
  67. Sacrifice
    It's tough to care about characters who spend most of their lives obsessing over the violent deaths of others.
  68. Falling Overnight
    The film's sweetness is endearing but too featherweight to engage.
  69. Klown
    The film, directed by Mikkel Norgaard, somehow manages the difficult trick of going into taboo territory without ever feeling dirty. And Mr. Hvam has a knack for misdirection. Just when you're wanting to give his character a hug and forgive all, off he goes into even more inappropriate behavior.
  70. Step Up Revolution
    Alas, the dancers have to stop sometimes to allow the utterly unoriginal story to be told, and the romance at the center of it inspired Amanda Brody, the screenwriter, to produce dialogue so cheesy as to be laughable.
  71. The Watch
    The movie builds to a human-versus-alien showdown so sloppily staged that it makes little visual sense. The bargain-basement pyrotechnics suggest that much of The Watch was filmed on autopilot on a strict budget.
  72. 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.
  73. Abendland
    It's impossible to know from the movie whether Mr. Geyrhalter believes this paradise needs protecting or whether something in his words - irony, fury, laughter - was lost in translation.
  74. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The fluidity and convenience of digital moviemaking tools explain some of its freshness, as does Ms. Klayman's history as a budding documentarian. It's clear from watching both the feature and its earlier iterations that, while she was learning about Mr. Ai, she was also learning how to tell a visual story. It's easy to think that hanging around Mr. Ai, a brilliant Conceptual artist and an equally great mass-media interpolater, played a part in her education.
  75. Searching for Sugar Man
    A hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing.
  76. Killer Joe
    Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with Killer Joe, which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.
  77. Planet of Snail
    Above all, this beautifully photographed documentary is a poetic meditation on refined sensory perception.
  78. Ruby Sparks
    Ruby Sparks doesn't try to pretend to be more than it is: a sleek, beautifully written and acted romantic comedy that glides down to earth in a gently satisfying soft landing.
  79. 30 Beats
    Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.
  80. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    More moving than shocking, it proceeds slowly and gracefully, and the few scenes of bloodshed are emotionally intense rather than showily sensational.
  81. Wagner's Dream
    Awesome also describes this 16-hour, four-opera masterwork about the creation and destruction of the world, a work that Wagner considered unstageable in his time.
  82. The Well Digger's Daughter
    There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.
  83. The Queen of Versailles
    Schadenfreude and disgust may be unavoidable, but to withhold all sympathy from the Siegels is to deny their humanity and shortchange your own. Marvel at the ornate frame, mock the vulgarity of the images if you want, but let's not kid ourselves. If this film is a portrait, it is also a mirror.
  84. The Dark Knight Rises
    Believable and preposterous, effective as a closing chapter and somewhat of a letdown if only because Mr. Nolan, who continues to refine his cinematic technique, hasn't surmounted "The Dark Knight" or coaxed forth another performance as mesmerizingly vital as Heath Ledger's Joker in that film.
  85. Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    This 2 ½-hour film, which is described by Mr. Tiravanija as "not a documentary and not a narrative" but "more of a portraiture," rewards concentration once you adjust to its glacial pace and its radically minimalist aesthetic. It has no screenplay or story line.
  86. Ponies
    A riveting piece of work full of unpleasant characters whom you're glad you've met but never want to see again.
  87. It's the Earth Not the Moon
    The film's leisurely pace seems to capture the rhythms of island life. Though often random in its organization - Mr. Tocha slides from contemplative seascapes and misty meadows to a slaughterhouse and the Corvo landfill - this portrait is still much more than a snapshot.
  88. Family Portrait in Black and White
    Leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is frustrating, but it gets high marks for honesty.
  89. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    Commendably, the film, narrated by John Leguizamo, sugarcoats nothing, and the people involved - the players, their trainers, their parents, the scouts - are remarkably forthright.
  90. Red Lights
    Before Silver hijacks the plot, Rodrigo Cortés's smart, talky screenplay and tense direction hold our attention, as much for the unpredictability of the story as the ease with which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy slide into their roles.
  91. Grassroots
    Although it only glosses the mechanics of local politics, it exudes an endearingly scruffy charm.
  92. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Like "My Architect," Nathaniel Kahn's film about his father, Louis I. Kahn, this documentary is a son's attempt to forge a posthumous bond with an elusive parent.
  93. The Imposter
    One of the most entertaining documentaries to appear since "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film similarly obsessed with role playing and deception.
  94. Union Square
    Union Square has the busy, hemmed-in talkiness of a theater piece, with too much forced to happen in too short a time. But it also has a lively, nervous energy and an expansive sympathy for the mismatched women at its heart.
  95. Alps
    Like "Dogtooth," Alps works by systematically unsettling our sense of what is normal and habitual in human interactions.
  96. Farewell, My Queen
    Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch.
  97. Trishna
    Life is suffering, as the Buddha said (including in Hardy's emotionally grinding novels), but it's more complex and contradictory than the ginned-up realism Mr. Winterbottom delivers here.
  98. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Continental Drift, like its predecessors, is much too friendly to dislike, and its vision of interspecies multiculturalism is generous and appealing.
  99. Easy Money
    In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.
  100. Invisible
    The insensitivity of the news media and law enforcement is an implicit acknowledgment of the gap between men and women on the issue; in the film's view men just don't get it. And the submerged rage that wells up in Nira and Lily is boiling hot. The film is less successful in depicting their personal lives.
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