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. But Always
    Watching it means waiting for the other shoe to drop: anticipating the moment when this already tacky weepie will resolve itself in horrific, exploitative fashion.
  2. The Congress
    Ari Folman’s genre mash-up The Congress could use a freakier title, something either more appealing or appalling to go with the weird, sometimes wonderful visions flowing through it.
  3. Last Days in Vietnam
    The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage.
  4. Raja Natwarlal
    Mr. Deshmukh’s setup can be overly fussy — some of the con machinations seem needlessly complicated and hard to follow, or maybe not quite worth following — but his payoff works. And his cast, too, hits the right notes and finds an easy rhythm.
  5. Gringo Trails
    The only urgent message in Gringo Trails would seem to be the screamingly obvious one: Visitors should behave themselves.
  6. Rocks in My Pockets
    The bravery of Ms. Baumane’s own coping methods (which some may disagree with) brings her tough-minded film to a cleareyed, forward-looking conclusion that doesn’t lose sight of her demons.
  7. As Above, So Below
    This quivering effort from the director John Erick Dowdle only increases in impenetrability whenever anything mildly curious occurs.
  8. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    For all its gloss, “Kundo” fails to resonate. You appreciate the execution, but the film is hindered by its lack of novelty and metaphorical weight.
  9. Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering
    Having a mild-mannered writer tell this story by sitting in a chair in front of some pretty art in a house museum and just talking seems lackadaisical, but Mr. Moss’s message is clear, shrewdly edited and peculiarly interesting.
  10. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    Enervatingly synthetic, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears slices and dices the images and tropes of Italian giallo-style slasher films into an inert pile of style.
  11. Life of Crime
    As a late-summer caper movie, it hits the spot. The film offers the intriguing contrast of actors and a director (Daniel Schechter) taking a different approach to known material.
  12. The Last of Robin Hood
    The story comes to feel mild (and incomplete) in its tempered nostalgia.
  13. Canopy
    The strength of Canopy is its filmmaking. With this haunting work, Mr. Wilson, joined by the talented cinematographer Stefan Duscio and the sound designers Rodney Lowe and Nic Buchanan, has made a promising debut.
  14. The Calling
    Preposterous as it is, The Calling remains stubbornly suspenseful until near the end.
  15. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    Temperate in tone but screaming with subtext, Jamie Marks Is Dead climbs above the current glut of supernaturally inclined entertainment by dint of a hushed unease that permeates almost every frame.
  16. Last Weekend
    Mostly, Last Weekend is an elegiac ode to affluence.
  17. The Naked Room
    While The Naked Room may raise awareness, it often feels voyeuristic in less productive ways.
  18. The Notebook
    The Notebook is a skillfully made movie, with sequences that may haunt you after you leave the theater. But it lacks the power to turn its virtuosity, or the emotional discipline of its remarkable young leads, into a source of insight.
  19. Shadows from My Past
    The issue of national atonement is a sprawling topic, one ill served by the film’s unfocused and amateurish presentation. At times, the movie seems less like a full-fledged documentary than like a pitch session.
  20. Patema Inverted
    The music is lovely, and the animation is soft and imaginatively detailed. Patema and Age may not know what’s upside down or right-way up, but their director is never in any doubt.
  21. The Damned
    Playing characters with no real substance, the actors struggle to develop a sense of shared peril.
  22. Mardaani
    In her pursuit, Shivani pistol-whips perps, performs a flying tackle on a criminal astride a motorcycle, shoots an assassin at point-blank range and stabs an assailant through the hand. Her final confrontation with Walt is a sweaty aria of hand-to-hand martial arts combat.
  23. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    At times, Mr. Harris’s voice-over narration veers into academic abstraction or lyrical emotionalism in ways that undercut the eloquence of the images, but over all he is a wise and passionate guide to an inexhaustibly fascinating subject.
  24. The November Man
    There is something to be said for a thriller that rips along with no regard for anything other than its own pace, coasting on Mr. Brosnan’s blunter-than-Bond suavity and Ms. Kurylenko’s beauty.
  25. Starred Up
    Though it is, finally, an affecting story of two damaged men bound by blood and something like love (and also a thrillerish catalog of double crosses and shifting allegiances), it is, above all, a study in the patterns of chaos that govern penitentiary life.
  26. Cam2Cam
    For a would-be skin-and-horror treat, though, Cam2Cam is surprisingly prudish. It doesn’t really traffic in sex; the camera mostly averts its gaze from the murders, preferring blood spatter patterns; and the acting is predictably wooden.
  27. The Possession of Michael King
    Dim in wits and lighting, The Possession of Michael King strains our eyes, spits on our intelligence and saps our generosity of spirit. Relatively untaxed, however, is the part of the brain that processes new experiences: There’s scarcely a shot or an idea in this first feature from David Jung that we haven’t seen many times before.
  28. May in the Summer
    The hand-wringing and revelations are familiar from many wedding movies, but May in the Summer gains added potency from its cross-cultural tensions and the drama the characters face in reconciling tradition with modern life.
  29. 14 Blades
    While 14 Blades grinds on perhaps a half-hour too long, its ambitions and energies show that for a fresh take on the western, go east.
  30. To Be Takei
    [Ms. Kroot's] banalizing documentary is self-defeating as it tags along with Mr. Takei and his wonky husband, Brad, on their busy daily schedule.
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