The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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:
  1. Positive: 9,408 out of 20324
  2. Mixed: 8,449 out of 20324
  3. Negative: 2,467 out of 20324
20324 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Salvation Army
    For a film rooted in a personal story, Salvation Army feels awfully remote.
  2. Against the Sun
    Against the Sun is a groaningly tedious survival story that will at least leave you with a renewed commitment to wearing sunscreen.
  3. Killers
    At heart a repulsive slash-and-bash with philosophical pretensions, Killers is classed up considerably by strong acting, a multi-strand plot and a tone that’s both nihilistic and mournful.
  4. The Humbling
    The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.
  5. Cake
    It’s the sort of well-intentioned independent effort that can make criticism feel like overkill. There’s nothing to hate, nothing to love. The movie’s greatest virtue is that it gives Ms. Aniston a little room to play against the somewhat sardonic tough-cookie type that she deploys in vulgar comedies.
  6. Son of a Gun
    Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.
  7. R100
    Mr. Matsumoto, as if realizing that viewers might need to wake up, stuffs a ball gag in a child’s mouth and throws in some reflexive nonsense involving an old director and some critics who seem to be watching the same movie you are. They think it’s terrible and finally it’s hard to disagree.
  8. Strange Magic
    At once disarming and calculated, Strange Magic is a film of commodified feelings, evoking memories of other experiences — whether of Shakespeare, the original songs or authentic enchantment.
  9. The Boy Next Door
    Mr. Cohen, no stranger to delivering pulp product, employs visual clichés as if they were flash cards; no exposed thigh or made-you-jump reveal goes unexploited.
  10. Mortdecai
    What a frantically dull spectacle this vanity project is.
  11. Manny
    The narrative has been fashioned mostly in Mr. Pacquiao’s favor, although there are mentions of overwork, infidelity and gambling. Banal, stentorian narration by Liam Neeson (“Once victory is stolen from you, what are you left with?”) mostly gives the sense that it’s the viewer being carried around the ring.
  12. Black Sea
    The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched.
  13. The Duke of Burgundy
    In the end there is nothing especially campy about “The Duke of Burgundy,” which neither mocks its heroines nor the breathless, naughty screen tradition to which they belong. It’s a love story, and also a perversely sincere (and sincerely perverse) labor of love.
  14. Mommy
    To take Mommy as an undisciplined outpouring of aggression and angst is to underestimate its artistry. [Mr. Dolan] has both advanced beyond the romanticism of “Heartbeats” and “Laurence Anyways” and regressed toward a more primal and confrontational mode of storytelling. Mommy may seem out of control, but it knows exactly what it’s doing.
  15. Mille soleils (A Thousand Suns)
    Heartbreaking and thought-provoking, Mille Soleils traces connections between Senegal’s past and present, and reflects on a cinematic legacy that remains insufficiently appreciated, in the West and perhaps also in Africa.
  16. The Guitar Mongoloid
    Mr. Ostlund’s 2004 debut, begins as a free-floating portrait of mischief and compulsion — a cousin to Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” that comments obliquely on fascism and violence.
  17. Play
    It is provocative simply in showing how trust is gained and kept, even after the swindled kids have understood their robbers’ motives.
  18. Involuntary
    The bitterly funny, multistrand Involuntary, from 2008, is a step forward in the director’s ambition.
  19. 20 Once Again
    Mining deeper emotions from the fanciful premise doesn’t work out for the film, which gets tied down to a generic musical-contest subplot. It’s a workable comedy that’s sunk by its attempts to impersonate something else too.
  20. Vice
    Evidencing more bullets than brains, Vice — a bit of ephemeral science-fiction twaddle directed by Brian A. Miller — has absolutely nothing to recommend it.
  21. Still Life
    As the pace picks up, whatever spell the movie cast is shattered, and Still Life melts into a heap of sentimental slush.
  22. Spare Parts
    The movie’s setup has underdog appeal in spades. But it’s all for naught in a screenplay, by Elissa Matsueda (working from Joshua Davis’s 2005 article in Wired magazine), that plays down intellect in favor of corn and cliché.
  23. Northern Borders
    Mr. Dern is fine in his crotchety-old-man mode, but the rest of the acting is labored, and the story is an unfocused mishmash.
  24. Medeas
    Capturing the poetry of bodies at rest and a landscape frozen in time (filming was done primarily in the Santa Clarita area of California), Chayse Irvin’s exquisite 35-millimeter photography is dreamy and sometimes devastating.
  25. Loitering with Intent
    The movie has no apparent destination in mind; it ends with a complacent shrug having barely reached feature running time. Ms. Tomei, Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Geraghty get stray laughs, but “Loitering With Intent” mostly plays like an excuse for its makers to hang out.
  26. The Wedding Ringer
    Mr. Hart tells wild tales, Mr. Gad is humiliated, and most everyone else gets to dish out or receive abuse. But the laughs are not a sure thing.
  27. Life Inside Out
    This low-key drama so insistently resists epiphanies that it verges on bland.
  28. Joy of Man's Desiring
    As with his other features, brevity — in this case, 1 hour 10 minutes — has a way of making the film seem minor. It’s a little diffuse, but it suggests that Mr. Côté is trying out a sketch, with more experiments to come.
  29. Gangs of Wasseypur
    Although the narrative contains echoes of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” — and perhaps “Casino,” in that much of it is structured as a flashback from an assassination attempt — “Gangs” lacks the poetry and character interest of those films.
  30. Appropriate Behavior
    For all its disorganization and lack of an ending or even a sense of direction, Appropriate Behavior is alive. The screenplay is packed with smart remarks, clever and unpredictable turns of phrase that knock you off balance.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »