The New York Times' Scores

For 20,324 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:
20324 movie reviews
  1. A movie so hopelessly late to the coming-out party that you want to haul everyone connected with it into the 21st century.
  2. The story of dependence and excess is sadly familiar — and as with most of its material, I Am Chris Farley doesn’t find a fresh way to tell it.
  3. A Lego Brickumentary might be a resounding cheer for a brand, but it’s an eye-opener, too.
  4. The title of this biopic, Paulo Coelho’s Best Story, is apt: His own life might well be his greatest work. A pity, then, that the film, directed by Daniel Augusto, doesn’t chronicle his evolution better, leapfrogging among decades instead.
  5. 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.
  6. Mr. Gameau’s breezy blend of computer imagery, musical numbers, sketches and offbeat field trips makes the nutrition lessons easy to digest.
  7. Is this chronicle of their combat an occasion for nostalgia or a cautionary tale? The film’s perfectly sensible, not entirely satisfying answer is “both.”
  8. The Kindergarten Teacher — the film as well as the character — yearns for different values, for intensity, beauty and meaning. Its sobering lesson is that the search for those things is most likely to end in madness, confusion and violence.
  9. It’s ultimately a movie — one of the most rigorous and thoughtful I’ve seen — about the ethical and existential traps our fame-crazed culture sets for the talented and the mediocre alike.
  10. Sleek and bloated, specific and generic, “Rogue Nation” is pretty much like most of the “Impossible” movies in that it’s an immense machine that Mr. McQuarrie, after tinkering and oiling, has cranked up again and set humming with twists and turns, global trotting and gadgets, a crack supporting cast and a hard-working star.
  11. While its subject means that "Listen to Me” is easy to like, Mr. Riley’s shaping of Brando’s words can make the movie, every so often, difficult to fully embrace.
  12. Strengthening of brotherly and marital bonds is the real agenda, of course, but happily the movie never stays on these laugh-killing themes long.
  13. Even knowing the secret of A Gay Girl in Damascus doesn’t make this documentary any less tense. That’s a testament to Sophie Deraspe, a director who understands how to let a plot unfold.
  14. The trouble lies in Tyler Hisel’s script, which teems with wheezy conventions.
  15. Big Significant Things is a cute idea in search of substance.
  16. The director Mark Neveldine deploys queasy lighting and a trembling score, but his best choice is to let Ms. Dudley stare at us. She conveys unnerving shifts in self-awareness and sinister intent with her eyes.
  17. The nuanced performances of Ms. Smulders and Ms. Bean are flawless. Yet the movie’s calm levelheadedness is a subtle detriment. Everything is a little too easy.
  18. The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
  19. This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.
  20. The indecipherable motivations and half-baked subtexts present formidable challenges to the cast and the audience.
  21. With songs about shoes and dogs, Lucky Stiff couldn’t be sillier, but Mr. Marsh and especially Ms. James make it an enjoyable curiosity for fans of musical theater.
  22. The movie isn’t especially well made, yet because Tucker is such a gloriously rich figure — immigrant turned runaway mother turned vaudevillian turned superstar — she renders its formal and aesthetic shortcomings (mostly) irrelevant.
  23. Never less than intriguing, coolly intelligent and flawlessly paced, Phoenix often feels trapped in the logic of its conceit.
  24. Only You is served very well by Ms. Tang (a star of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”). Whether playing elated, sorrowful, coy or petulant, she consistently provides the spark the movie could use more of.
  25. In the end, what makes Q such a deceptively tricky literary creation — his averageness — is the very thing the filmmakers struggle with, partly because movies of this commercial scale and bottom-line ambition rarely know what to do with ordinary life.
  26. Mr. Toledano and Mr. Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. That comes in handy when their points about French identity miss the mark, or when the main characters share special moments without really acquiring depth.
  27. Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.
  28. it’s not as original as it wants to be, despite having the able Chris Columbus in the director’s chair.
  29. The plotting is somehow both flat-footed and operatic in its absurdity. Character arcs are tangled, flattened and foreshortened. Common sense is knocked silly. But Mr. Fuqua has never been a director to let ridiculousness get in the way of visceral action.
  30. The film has too many fits of uncontrolled laughter and other awkwardness that suggest an unedited home movie, but, in general, Twinsters makes for a heartfelt alternative to a traditional documentary approach.

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