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. Cleopatra
    Forget the length of time it took to make it and all the tattle of troubles they had, including the behavior of two of its spotlighted stars. The memorable thing about this picture is that it is a surpassing entertainment, one of the great epic films of our day. By virtue of brilliant staging, Mr. Mankiewicz keeps this well-known tale moving with visual excitements that increase the dramatic flow and give extraordinary insights into the characters.
  2. The Beautiful Game
    The Beautiful Game is a model of a modern “nice” movie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    Laid back and affectionate, “Cheese” is the movie version of a dear friend you could spend all day with.
  4. The Devil's Advocate
    The film uses morphing and Rick Baker's monster effects strikingly, but it also keeps its gimmicks well tethered to reality.
  5. SPECTRE
    There’s nothing surprising in Spectre, the 24th “official” title in the series, which is presumably as planned. Much as the perfect is the enemy of good, originality is often the enemy of the global box office.
  6. Femme Fatale
    The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.
  7. Quality of Life
    A minor movie, modestly made, that develops to a counterculture beat but ends with a status quo conundrum: Is selling out the new keeping it real?
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    It achieves the documentary format’s basic goal of illuminating history while also demonstrating, through filmmaking choices, how an artist’s style reveals his or her personality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Radiant City
    The cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin's eerie, sometimes monumental images italicize the experts' statements, making the suburbs seem like an asphalt-and-Sheetrock dreamscape where democracy goes to die.
  10. Asphalt Zahov
    The inhospitability of the land emphasizes the spare precision of the narratives and helps to give them an atavistic power, as if they were tales that had been handed down since the beginning of time.
  11. 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.
  12. Luminous Motion
    It's a bit like "The Sixth Sense," but without the melodramatic comfort of the supernatural.
  13. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so - in a much more dignified, documented way - does Mr. Greenwald.
  14. WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Unfortunately, his (Schechter) uneven, unpolished documentary, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, takes on far too many antagonists.
  15. Lustre
    Lustre is a post-Sept. 11 love letter to a New York past that Mr. Jones clearly mourns.
  16. Headshot
    A dreamy, elliptical neo-noir about a cop turned killer turned something else altogether.
  17. Iraqi Odyssey
    Watching it is like slowly leafing through a giant scrapbook whose contents include the individual stories of a large extended family.
  18. The Pink Panther Strikes Again
    Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Edwards delight in old gags, and part of the joy of The Pink Panther Strikes Again is watching the way they spin out what is essentially a single routine, such as one fellow's trying, unsuccessfully, to help another fellow out of a lake.
  19. Quincy
    The movie alternates between the present, with Mr. Jones on the go, and a retrospective of his life and career, narrated by the man himself. His hardscrabble early years on the South Side of Chicago are scary; his triumphs from the earliest points of his career onward are exhilarating; the racism he is obliged to endure throughout is infuriating.
  20. The Invisibles
    Hearing from these survivors is vitally important. But by smushing together two distinct styles of narrative, The Invisibles risks draining the power from both.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Lightning
    A fairly awful movie that keeps producing good things—scenes, performances, moments of insight—that seem connected to better ideas than anything suggested in the film's larger intentions.
  22. Genesis 2.0
    While the sights and sounds here are unique, the movie seems frustratingly torn about whether to buy the futurism and mysticism it’s selling.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Shaggy D.A.
    As the sequel to "The Shaggy Dog," Walt Disney's 1959 moneymaker, The Shaggy D.A. is a farce with all the witless energy of an unrestrained Great Dane puppy and, thankfully, a cast and director who generally avoid taking themselves or the free-wheeling plot seriously.
  24. Millie Lies Low
    In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.
  25. Tin Cup
    Bright, stylish, ridiculously alluring.
  26. Ghostbusters
    Sliding into theaters on a river of slime and an endless supply of good vibes, the new, cheerfully silly Ghostbusters is that rarest of big-studio offerings — a movie that is a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Them
    The movie is scarier if you know nothing about it going in. It has no larger agenda. It’s not an allegory, a satire or a commentary. It’s just a modestly relentless suspense picture that propels its characters through a series of dreamscapes.
  28. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    There isn’t much of a love story here. There isn’t much of anything, even as there’s too much of everything.
  29. From Beyond
    The symbolism here is dream-book basic.
  30. Freakier Friday
    By the middle of the film, the narrative also begins to stutter, set piece after set piece, caper after caper, loping toward the inevitable moment of collision and resolution, without always maintaining the narrative tension to keep things interesting. Since we know where this is going, these bits need to be really funny, not just broadly perfunctory jokes about how generations don’t understand each other.
  31. Sheriff
    Sheriff may have a point to make about the impact of family, roots and religion on the changing face of rural America, but the film, while admirably restrained and competently made, is too polite to clarify that.
  32. Trouble
    Trouble makes a whole lot of noise without saying very much. The direction is wooden and the cinematography dull, leaving the solid cast (including Julia Stiles as a daffy clerk and Jim Parrack as her knuckle-dragging boyfriend) to shoulder the weight.
  33. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    Therein lies the essence of this simple, bluntly effective movie. Its principal selling point - the supreme watchability of dogs, especially working dogs - is undeniably powerful.
  34. All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997)
    The film excels when it harnesses the wistful thrill of a bygone era, reminding us of a rich, creative past that deserves ample recognition.
  35. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Beyond the arty trappings and flamboyant showmanship that are typical of Mr. Greenaway, 73, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a brazen provocation.
  36. Our Idiot Brother
    A thin, unconvincing movie made likable by the charm and skill of its cast and by a script peppered with wit and insight.
  37. Son of the South
    Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.
  38. The Great Waldo Pepper
    Its moods don't quite mesh and its aerial sequences are so vivid—sometimes literally breathtaking—that they upstage the human drama, but the total effect is healthily romantic. It's the kind of movie that enriches dreams even though its story seems sort of strung-out, like a first draft, and includes moments that slip into bathos.
  39. +1
    The movie’s boldness and horrifying logic get under your skin.
  40. The Brink's Job
    As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.
  41. Night Falls on Manhattan
    But Night Falls on Manhattan is also oddly listless. It doesn't often live up to the doomy eloquence of its title.
  42. 9
    Every effort to expand the range of feature-length animation beyond the confines of cautious family fare is to be welcomed, and budding techno and fantasy geeks are likely to be intrigued and enthralled.
  43. Where Do We Go Now?
    At heart, this jolly, galumphing crowd-pleaser, which won the audience award at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a raucous sitcom about scrappy little boys whose canny mamas conspire to keep them out of trouble.
  44. The Guys
    What limits The Guys -- what makes it an exercise in art therapy rather than a work of art -- is its decorous refusal to probe deeply into its characters, or to exploit any of the dramatic potential their accidental relationship might contain.
  45. 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.
  46. Overnight
    Any movie that makes you root against the underdog, though, is cause for suspicion, and Mr. Smith and Mr. Montana, perhaps aware of this, try belatedly to restore Mr. Duffy's status as a victim.
  47. Eat This New York
    The directors Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack may not be great filmmakers -- it's hard to tell, based on this bare-bones picture -- but they know a great story, and more important, how to tell it.
  48. Jagged Edge
    Jagged Edge has harsh lighting, blunt performances, and artless, no-nonsense dialogue relieved by the occasional bit of excess color.
  49. See How They Run
    With a sprightly wit and an all-star cast to bring it to life, the movie manages to be a loving parody of theater gossips, postwar London and Christie’s murder mysteries all at once.
  50. 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.
  51. The Delta
    A film that's alternatingly intriguing and frustrating and that leaves too many loose ends dangling.
  52. Kill the Messenger
    The visual choices in the movie, including all the close-ups of Gary’s face as it lightens and darkens, help create the sense that something deeply personal is at stake.
  53. Good Ol' Freda
    Good Ol’ Freda celebrates an intensely private witness to four of the most public lives in pop-culture history.
  54. White Snake
    The forbidden romance has its will-they-or-won’t-they thrills, but this first feature by the directors Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, becomes a basket of tangled snakes when Blanca faces far too many obstacles.
  55. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    The ending is also a test of the audience's openness to the kind of fantasy mocked, at the outset, by everyone in Jeff's life, including the filmmakers. They want to make us believe in something, though it's also possible that they are only fooling.
  56. Breathe In
    What distinguishes Breathe In from countless similar movies about marital discontent and disruption is the restraint with which the story is handled, the subtlety of its performances and its almost perverse refusal to turn into a prurient, heavy-breathing examination of adultery and its consequences.
  57. Actor Martinez
    Some movies about making movies (Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” for one) are charming. The self-references here, while intriguing, approach a comic navel-gaze. Actor Martinez has a saving grace, however: Ms. Burdge.
  58. Johnny Handsome
    Because Johnny Handsome is a film by Walter Hill (The Warriors, Streets of Fire), it crams the following things into its first five minutes: gunfire, screeching brakes, a drug-popping hoodlum, a moll in black leather, a violent robbery, one murder, sinister masks, shattering glass. But because this is Mr. Hill's work, these ingredients are slapped together with high style.
  59. Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer
    The various excuses made for The Enquirer’s ethics undermine Landsman’s efforts to portray the paper as splashy, all-American fun.
  60. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    Cheerful, giddy fun.
  61. Young Rebels
    Though it could do with fewer talking-head interviews and more extended clips from these impassioned live performances, Young Rebels is essential viewing for anyone interested in rap music, free speech issues or the youth culture of contemporary Cuba.
  62. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
    Julian P. Hobbs directs by getting out of the way of his star's soulful eyes and considerable talent, allowing Mr. Mays to feed on the tension between the rationality of his character's courtroom argument and the utter lunacy of his beliefs.
  63. Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story
    Viewers unfamiliar with artists like Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller will find themselves agreeably challenged. And stirred.
  64. Wild City
    The crisscrossing pursuers and pesky police suggest a watered-down version of the treacheries in “City on Fire.” But the cluttered, unfolding dynamism of Mr. Lam’s action scenes remains resilient when gunplay or knife fights are thrust into street life.
  65. Saludos Amigos
    As always in Mr. Disney's pictures, the quality of the humor is bright and sly, with touches of gentle satire laced in with jovial fun.
  66. Hinterland
    If only the story of Hinterland felt as engrossing and alive as its setting.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Bad Mama
    As Wilma McClatchie, the widow who, along with her two teenage daughters, heads into a life of crime with nary a trace of regret, Ms. Dickinson is at her most gloriously sexy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gone to Earth
    Powell and Pressburger have hammered the ingredients with blunt, unyielding strokes, seasoned with vague psychological clangings and only remotely tempered with humor and real perception.
  69. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    The most gripping scene in this near-perfect little sports comedy is a fraternal arm-wrestling contest that reaches apoplectic intensity.
  70. Wolfs
    The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, Wolfs, written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.
  71. The Angry Birds Movie 2
    The hoops our heroes jump through become increasingly surreal and hilarious.
  72. Midwinter Break
    The saving grace of Midwinter Break is the pair of stellar leads, who would be appealing to watch just fumbling for their reading glasses. That also happens to be the pinnacle of action, however, within this prosaic drama.
  73. Daybreak
    If Daybreak weren't so powerfully acted, its accumulating anguish would be too much to bear. As it is, all three couples, especially Knut and Mona, verge on caricature.
  74. Meatballs
    With far fewer high spirits than “Animal House,” and only two characters of any interest, Meatballs reveals itself to be a loud, offkey cry for conformism of a most disappointing sort. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing.
  75. American Casino
    The lesson of this story: if enough money is involved, greed trumps morality.
  76. Braid
    Peirone’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink directing does tend to head butt her thin writing, but the movie eventually coalesces as a sly, bitter parable against chasing-your-dreams optimism.
  77. Sweet Bean
    The movie, beautifully shot and acted, earns its ultimate sense of hope by confronting real heartbreak head-on, and with compassion.
  78. The Kill Team
    While the leads are credible, the filmmaking (including a hacky score) adds a sheen of macho familiarity to a narrative that was eerily matter-of-fact in doc form.
  79. Juice
    The film winds up taking a clear anticrime stance, and Mr. Epps ably conveys Q's trepidation about his friends' behavior. But Juice also revels in the flash, irreverence and tough-guy posturing to which the film's violence can ultimately be traced.
  80. Burn Country
    Mr. Rains, Ms. Leo and Mr. Franco are all so interesting that you wish they had more to bite into. But the film has a transfixing quality nonetheless.
  81. The Perfection
    This is a filmmaker aware of the conventions, who wields them with wit and precision and knows his audience is on the gag as well. In many ways, The Perfection amounts to little more than a bag of tricks. But no one is pretending otherwise. And they’re good tricks.
  82. Trumbo
    It’s impossible to tell if the filmmakers don’t trust the audience or simply don’t have the chops, guts or heart to do this story justice.
  83. Everybody's Famous!
    With its likable blue-collar characters and its unpretentious exuberance, Everybody's Famous is reminiscent of recent British comedies like "Brassed Off" and "The Full Monty."
  84. The Importance of Being Earnest
    For all its distractions and additions, The Importance of Being Earnest is still a reasonably entertaining costume comedy. Wilde's satirical voice may be muffled, but at least it is audible.
  85. Together
    Together may not be overtly political, but its vision of contemporary Beijing, where brazen, fashion-crazed gold diggers like Lili bait their hooks to snare arrogant, slippery wheeler-dealers who end up playing her for a sucker, has bite.
  86. Reconstruction
    Mr. Boe keeps a safe distance from his characters' inner lives, he does succeed in conjuring an atmosphere of elegant melancholy and metaphysical anxiety.
  87. Signs & Wonders
    Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven
  88. The Clearing
    Mr. Brugge has perhaps succeeded in avoiding vulgar melodrama, but he has hit on something far worse -- a bloodless melodrama, with bottled water running in its veins.
  89. Massoud, the Afghan
    I was struck by how personal this movie is, and by the delicate symbiosis that develops between biographer and subject. Mr. Ponfilly's presence in the film (mostly on the soundtrack and once or twice on camera) does not overshadow Massoud so much as filter our understanding of him.
  90. XY Chelsea
    What’s left is a touching and tragic portrait of a vulnerable work in progress, one that for now might only be visible through a clouded lens.
  91. The Line
    The film is at its strongest when it focuses, in its more understated scenes, on a distressing human tendency: to create distance between ourselves and those who know us best.
  92. Human Factors
    The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut.
  93. The Many Saints of Newark
    In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.
  94. Oranges and Sunshine
    Rona Munro's screenplay for Oranges and Sunshine is unnecessarily flighty. As the story ricochets between Britain and Australia, the film often loses track of time and becomes fragmented as it struggles to integrate too many subplots. What holds it together is Ms. Watson's calm, sturdy performance.
  95. The Last Five Years
    In Mr. Jordan’s portrayal of Jamie, this handsome talented musical theater performer (“Newsies”) goes for the jugular in taking down his character and making him insufferable.
  96. Any Day Now
    An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants Marco.
  97. The Exception
    The Exception is a diverting and occasionally exciting film, though it is rarely disturbing or thought-provoking in ways the material might require.
  98. Mary Queen of Scots
    It looks beautiful and moves swiftly but never quite takes full imaginative flight.
  99. Gorky Park
    On the whole, Mr. Apted's approach to the material is archly effective, making for a crisp, intricate thriller, well able to hold an audience's interest.
  100. Stealing Beauty
    This film maker's supremely tactile, sensual style and his taste for exoticism are captivatingly on display in Stealing Beauty, even if the film's philosophizing sometimes lacks the intellectual heft of a cotton puff.
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