The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Lake Tahoe
    Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan’s journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.
  2. Lorna's Silence
    Lorna's Silence is engrossing and powerful, which may be just another way of saying it's a film by the Dardenne brothers. If it falls a bit short of the standards of their best work, that is only because it is not quite a masterpiece.
  3. Beeswax
    Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie.
  4. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.
  5. Crude
    Ahead of us lie many more documentaries similar in tone and spirit to this one. We can hope that at least a few of them are as intelligently and artfully made.
  6. Splice
    Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.
  7. Disgrace
    Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.
  8. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    The Nightmare Before Christmas is a major step forward for both stop-motion animation, which is stunningly well used, and for Mr. Burton himself. He now moves from the level of extremely talented eccentric to that of Disney-style household word.
  9. The Sun
    The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.
  10. The Secret of Kells
    It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.
  11. Mother
    The hard-pounding heart of Mother, Ms. Kim is a wonderment. Perched on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy, her delivery gives the narrative -- which tends to drift, sometimes beguilingly, sometimes less so -- much of its momentum.
  12. Mid-August Lunch
    A slender Chekhovian vignette about the joys and regrets of old age and the pleasures of sociability.
  13. Greenberg
    It is the funniest and saddest movie Mr. Baumbach has made so far, and also the riskiest.
  14. Close-Up
    It is Mr. Sabzian's poignancy that makes "Close-Up" much more than a clever reflection on film-versus-life as an endless hall of mirrors.
  15. The Town Is Quiet
    You are left with an overall impression of a movie so full of life that it is almost bursting at the seams.
  16. Bartleby
    Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show."
  17. Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
    In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.
  18. Life and Debt
    Offers the clearest analysis of globalization and its negative effects that I've ever seen on a movie or television screen.
  19. Me You Them
    An unexpected delight, a film that weds the humor and magic of a folk tale with a very modern feel for the psychological dynamics between men and women and for the subtle politics of male rivalry in a macho culture. It has been made and acted with intelligence and evident love, which deserves to be requited.
  20. The Luzhin Defence
    Moves with fluidity and ease through brisk opening conventions to a perfectly poised and balanced endgame.
  21. Down from the Mountain
    If you have any affection at all for traditional American music, the movie itself -- is pretty close to heaven.
  22. La Ciénaga
    As La Ciénaga perspires from the screen, it creates a vision of social malaise that feels paradoxically familiar and new.
  23. Paragraph 175
    At once admirable and deeply unsettling.
  24. Under the Sand
    Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano etude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.
  25. 42: Forty Two Up
    When this hugely ambitious project began, it was a longitudinal study of class divisions among English schoolchildren. But time and persistence have turned it into much more.
  26. Winter Sleepers
    Winter Sleepers has many such breathtaking moments in which sounds and images synergize with an explosive precision.
  27. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    One of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call "Kid" a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective.
  28. Voyages
    This movie operates in the limbo between memory and oblivion that we recognize as daily life. It bears courageous and stringent witness to the impossibility of bearing witness.
  29. The Brothers McMullen
    This modest, enormously likable film, about love and temptation and ties that bind, is about brotherhood most of all. [9 August 1995, p.C9]
  30. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    A fine and loving memorial that preserves his charm, his intellect and his splendid body of work.
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