The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,268 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 4.3 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: 9,377 out of 20268
  2. Mixed: 8,427 out of 20268
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20268
20268 movie reviews
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  1. Invictus
    It’s an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.
  2. Avatar
    Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
  3. Crazy Heart
    A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.
  4. The Hurt Locker
    The best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq.
  5. A Serious Man
    The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.)
  6. Sita Sings the Blues
    And the ingenuity of “Sita” — is dazzling. Not busy, or overwhelming, or eye-popping. Just affecting, surprising and a lot of fun.
  7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.
  8. Where the Wild Things Are
    With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.
  9. Killer of Sheep
    The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.
  10. Pan's Labyrinth
    A swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects.
  11. The Damned United
    The rare sports movie that deals with -- indeed positively relishes -- humiliation and disappointment.
  12. Ponyo
    The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.
  13. There Will Be Blood
    The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.
  14. No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.
  15. Summer Hours
    In spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.
  16. Goodbye Solo
    Grace is also what defines Mr. Bahrani's filmmaking. I can't think of anything else to call the quality of exquisite attention, wry humor and wide-awake intelligence that informs every frame of this almost perfect film.
  17. WALL-E
    The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E -- in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen -- is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.
  18. Synecdoche, New York
    To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.
  19. Children of Men
    Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.
  20. The Lives of Others
    The easy, complacent distance that informs much historical filmmaking is almost entirely absent from this supremely intelligent, unfailingly honest movie.
  21. Ratatouille
    A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.
  22. The Headless Woman
    Brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie.
  23. Brokeback Mountain
    Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn.
  24. Knocked Up
    An instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.
  25. Letters from Iwo Jima
    A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to "Flags of Our Fathers." While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films -- by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect -- the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness.
  26. Million Dollar Baby
    With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.
  27. The Queen
    A sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.
  28. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.
  29. Duplicity
    Superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time.
  30. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.
  31. Sugar
    It is both sad and hopeful, but the film's sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.
  32. A History of Violence
    A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year.
  33. Land of the Dead
    One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in Land of the Dead. One thing is for sure: You won't go home hungry.
  34. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    Audiard's superb remake improves on the original significantly, investing it with aesthetic grandeur and emotional depth.
  35. Last Days
    One of this year's indisputably great films.
  36. 2046
    Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.
  37. Grizzly Man
    Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.
  38. King Kong
    The rapport between Ms. Watts and Mr. Serkis is extraordinary, even though it is mediated by fur, latex, optical illusions and complicated effects. Mr. Serkis, who also played Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, is redefining screen acting for the digital age, while Ms. Watts incarnates the glamour and emotional directness of classical Hollywood.
  39. In Cold Blood (re-release)
    Excellent quasidocumentary, which sends shivers down the spine. (Review of Original Release)
  40. Repulsion (re-release)
    An absolute knockout of a movie in the psychological horror line has been accomplished by Roman Polanski in his first English-language film. (Review of Original Release)
  41. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    A thorny masterpiece.
  42. Army of Shadows
    This film, which was never released in America and will now be making its way across the country in limited release, has been immaculately restored and features new subtitles. You can get lost in the blackness of its heart and its shadows. You might never come back.
  43. Gabrielle
    Together with his extraordinary performers, Mr. Chéreau breathes life into characters who long ago set a course for death.
  44. Old Joy
    A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Camden 28
    Scene for scene, The Camden 28 is a brilliant merger of political outrage and filmmaking chops, and the most suspenseful movie in theaters right now.
  46. Summer Palace
    In Summer Palace Lou nonetheless succeeds in finding a cinematic language that does more than summarize the important events of a confusing decade. He distills the inner confusion -- the swirl of moods, whims and needs -- that is the lived and living essence of history.
  47. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme -- I am tempted to say evil -- genius.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    U2 3D
    Not merely a technical landmark -- shot entirely in digital 3D -- but also an aesthetic one, in that it’s the first Imax movie that deserves to be called a work of art.
  49. Paranoid Park
    A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.
  50. Alexandra
    A film of startling originality and beauty -- feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here.
  51. Up the Yangtze
    An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.
  52. A Christmas Tale
    A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty -- marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche -- and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.
  53. Milk
    Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.
  54. A Woman in Berlin
    That the film manages to be understated, calm and intelligent in spite of its wrenching subject matter is perhaps its most impressive accomplishment. In avoiding sensationalism, it feels very close to the truth.
  55. Bliss
    This consistently gripping, visually intoxicating film stands as a landmark of contemporary Turkish cinema.
  56. You, the Living
    The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.
  57. A Prophet
    One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices.
  58. Taxidermia
    Belongs to a school of Central European surrealism that marries nightmarish horror with formal beauty.
  59. Hot Tub Time Machine
    The movie itself is a nonstop barrage -- somewhere between a riot and an orgy -- of crude, obnoxious gags and riffs. If you are a connoisseur of sexual, scatological or just plain stupid humor, you will find your appetite satisfied, even glutted.
  60. Marooned in Iraq
    If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.
  61. Les Destinées
    Like a good novel, Les Destinées is many things: a family chronicle, a series of psychological portraits, a sumptuous re-creation of the past. But the film is also a pointed tribute to the French tradition of quality and distinction, a tradition in which it clearly includes itself.
  62. Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    One of the most purely enjoyable films ever made.
  63. I'm the One That I Want
    Several times while watching the movie I laughed until the tears were running down my face.
  64. Affliction
    Succeeds in finding something larger than one man's misery. It turns dark truthfulness into the cinematic sentiment most worth celebrating this season.
  65. Last Orders
    Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.
  66. The Crying Game
    Mr. Jordan's screenplay... is both efficient and ingenious. The physical production is as lush as the film's romantic longings. [26 Sept 1992]
  67. Apollo 13
    You can know every glitch that made this such a dangerous mission, and Apollo 13 will still have you by the throat.
  68. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    A blazing, unlikely triumph about a man who is nobody's idea of a movie hero. Smart, funny, shamelessly entertaining and perfectly serious too.
  69. Out of Sight
    The film's sleek moodiness and visual sophistication are so effective that there's even a scene here that makes Detroit look like the most romantic city in the world.
  70. Reversal of Fortune
    What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]
    • The New York Times
  71. The Fugitive
    Turns out to be a smashing success, a juggernaut of an action-adventure saga that owes noithing to the past. To put it simply, thi is a home run.
  72. Quiz Show
    A supremely elegant and thoughtful parable.
  73. The Spanish Prisoner
    This is his sleekest and most engaging film thus far. If you like a good cat-and-mouse game with a keen ear for language, then go.
  74. Hamlet
    New York becomes a complex character in this vital and sharply intelligent film.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    From Here to Eternity
    Out of "From Here to Eternity," a novel whose anger and compassion stirred a post-war reading public as few such works have, Columbia and a company of sensitive hands have forged a film almost as towering and persuasive as its source...Stands as a shining example of truly professional moviemaking.
  76. Ran
    Though big in physical scope and of a beauty that suggests a kind of drunken, barbaric lyricism, ''Ran'' has the terrible logic and clarity of a morality tale seen in tight close-up, of a myth that, while being utterly specific and particular in its time and place, remains ageless, infinitely adaptable.
  77. Sweet Smell of Success (re-release)
    Its pleasures are almost obscenely abundant.
  78. High Noon
    Meaningful in its implications, as well as loaded with interest and suspense, High Noon is a western to challenge “Stagecoach” for the all-time championship. (Review of Original Release)
  79. L.A. Confidential
    A tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today.
  80. Howards End
    Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala triumph again with their entertaining, richly textured film. [13 March 1992]
    • The New York Times
  81. Hilary and Jackie
    One of the most insightful and wrenching portraits of the joys and tribulations of being a classical musician ever filmed.
  82. American Movie
    The rare documentary that combines a wildly charismatic subject with an elegant structure...not-to-be-missed.
  83. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    If there's one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is The Fog of War, Errol Morris's sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.
  84. Raiders of the Lost Ark
    One of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made.
  85. The Grifters
    The Grifters moves with swift unsentimental resolve toward a last act as bleak as any in recent American screen literature. In a less skillful work, it would be a downer. The Grifters is so good that one leaves the theater on a spellbound high. [5 Dec 1990]
    • The New York Times
  86. sex, lies, and videotape
    Astonishing... One of the freshest American films of the decade. [4 Aug 1989]
    • The New York Times
  87. The Remains of the Day
    Looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here’s a film for adults. It’s also about time to recognize that Mr. Ivory is one of our finest directors. [5 November 1993, p. C1]
    • The New York Times
  88. To Die For
    An irresistible black comedy and a wicked delight. [27 Sept 1995]
  89. A Mighty Wind
    Mr. Guest and Mr. Levy's jokes are sometimes so subtle as to seem imperceptible, until you realize that they are everywhere, from the broadest gestures to the tiniest details of dress and décor.
  90. Crimes and Misdemeanors
    Mr. Allen's most securely serious and funny film to date.
  91. Lantana
    Astonishingly well acted film, so much so that it seems unfair to single out any of the performances. Mr. Lawrence's camera sense is as sure and unobtrusive as his feel for acting. The movie just seems to happen, to grow out of the ground like a thorny plant, revealing the intricate intelligence of its design only in hindsight.
  92. 24 Hour Party People
    "Print the legend," Mr. Wilson says at one point, both quoting John Ford and laying the foundation for his own often fact-free fabulous fabulism. And this movie is just that -- fabulous.
  93. American Psycho
    A lean and mean horror comedy classic.
  94. Rocco and His Brothers (re-release)
    Neither the neighborhood intimacy of "Mean Streets" nor the grandeur of the "Godfather" movies is imaginable without Visconti's example. Its richness, though, is inexhaustible, and well served by the spotless new 35-millimeter print being shown at Film Forum.
  95. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle.
  96. Glengarry Glen Ross
    The reason the film prompts laughter, and finally elation, is not because it's jolly or has any feel-good words to live by. It's because of the utterly demonic skill with which these foulmouthed characters carve one another up in futile attempts to stave off disaster.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    Sunset Boulevard is that rare blend of pungent writing, expert acting, masterly direction and unobtrusively artistic photography which quickly casts a spell over an audience and holds it enthralled to a shattering climax.
  98. Shakespeare in Love
    Shakespeare meets Sherlock, and makes for pure enchantment in the inspired conjecture behind Shakespeare in Love.
  99. La Dolce Vita
    A brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary upon the tragedy of the overcivilized. (Review of Original Release)
  100. Far From Heaven
    It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.
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