The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. The Color of Time
    The film is too sincere an expression of admiration for this poet’s work to feel pretentious, but it’s like a music video for the poems, often literal in its biographical readings.
  2. The Captive
    The Captive seems tailor-made to explore the psychological damage that a child can suffer over a lengthy confinement, but instead leans too heavily on the chilly desolation of Paul Sarossy’s cinematography. What’s going on in the victim’s mind, or anyone else’s, is as invisible as what lies beneath the snow.
  3. After The Fall
    After the Fall belongs to a type of movie that is too lazy to connect the dots and fill in the blanks between its supposedly teachable moments.
  4. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    Exodus is ludicrous only by accident, which isn’t much fun and is the surest sign of what we might call a New Testament sensibility at work. But the movie isn’t successfully serious, either... To be fair, there is some good stuff here, too. Mr. Scott is a sinewy storyteller and a connoisseur of big effects.
  5. Top Five
    In setting Andre on his search for self, Mr. Rock has carved out a third way, in the process creating a black character who’s fully human and a comedy that’s wholly a blast.
  6. The Salt of the Earth
    The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.
  7. Inherent Vice
    Mr. Phoenix’s note-perfect performance flows on the story’s currents of comedy that occasionally turn into rapids, as the funny ha-ha, funny strange back-and-forth abruptly gives way to Three Stooges slapstick.
  8. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.
  9. The Pyramid
    The answers aren’t satisfying, and The Pyramid, despite an unpretentious matinee vibe, is mostly interesting in seeing how little light can be on screen before a bare minimum of suspense and coherence dissipates. There is, truly, not much to see in this movie.
  10. Comet
    The visions (a meteor shower, Paris) are romantic and lovely, and there’s a sense of commitment to the enterprise that pretty much overcomes the near bathos and proves involving.
  11. The Barefoot Artist
    Mr. Holsten, was a maker of the winning 2012 documentary “OC87,” a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder. His gift for portraiture shows only further refinement here.
  12. Uzumasa Limelight
    Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.
  13. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    As filmmaking, “She’s Beautiful” is meat and potatoes: It gets the job done without frills.
  14. Billy Bates
    Ms. DeLia serves it up in fragmentary fashion, with lots and lots of writhing, brooding, meaningfully vacant stares and so on. Several scenes are in danger of being unintentionally comic.
  15. Take Care
    The film’s director, Liz Tuccillo — a former writer for “Sex and the City,” an author of “He’s Just Not That Into You” and now developing a sitcom for Lauren Graham — is predictably facile with comic rhythms, though her dialogue tilts toward the glib, and her characterizations toward the familiar.
  16. Murder of a Cat
    The film, a first feature from Gillian Greene (wife of the director Sam Raimi, a producer here), has to settle for “sometimes amusing comedy” when it was probably aiming for “cult hit.”
  17. Red Knot
    Lacking a formal script, the actors struggle with a plot so elemental that it might have played more persuasively as a silent-screen melodrama.
  18. Dying of the Light
    The notion of an undercover agent with an untrustworthy mind is a great gimmick — and on a commercial level, Dying of the Light sometimes plays as just another high-concept vehicle for a comically overacting Mr. Cage. But Mr. Schrader’s vision is strong enough to rage against the hackier calculations.
  19. Delusions of Guinevere
    This low-budget film is often static and awkward... Smaller scenes, though, like those when Guinevere interacts with her tough-minded lawyer of a sister or an old classmate from high school, have a realness to them.
  20. The Foxy Merkins
    Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.
  21. Pioneer
    Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, who also tapped Norwegian history with his bank robbery re-enactment “Nokas,” doesn’t convey a creeping atmosphere of moral rot so much as an irksome glumness.
  22. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    The film is accessible and often hypnotic on an intuitive level.
  23. Concerning Violence
    The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.
  24. Ungli
    While Mr. D’Silva’s basic structure and pacing are fairly fluid, his movie suffers from Bollywood’s typical kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking.
  25. Still Alice
    The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.
  26. Miss Julie
    Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.
  27. Zero Motivation
    Everything looks authentic, at least on the surface, from the desert dust to the messy desks and the sad, barren barracks. The characters, however, are largely cartoons, and their day-to-day exchanges are as vaguely defined as their interior lives.
  28. Wild
    In its thrilling disregard for the conventions of commercial cinematic storytelling, Wild reveals what some of us have long suspected: that plot is the enemy of truth, and that images and emotions can carry meaning more effectively than neatly packaged scenes or carefully scripted character arcs.
  29. Touch the Wall
    What Touch the Wall lacks is an inventive or compelling presentation. Heavy with platitudes about goals and attitude, it could easily be a short special on ESPN.
  30. Remote Area Medical
    Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.
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