The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,335 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: 9,412 out of 20335
  2. Mixed: 8,455 out of 20335
  3. Negative: 2,468 out of 20335
20335 movie reviews
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  1. Mendy
    Ms. Dias gives the role an understated allure, and Mr. Sandomire is as good as his character's inconsistencies allow. Their performances and Mr. Vardy's ability to be reverent when he wants to be are the film's strengths.
  2. Coastlines
    A larger problem is the film's attempt to piece together a hard-boiled crime drama with a soft-boiled soap opera, ultimately giving precedence to the suds and adding a sickly lemon scent.
  3. The Road to Guantanamo
    While far from a great movie, nonetheless effectively dramatizes a position that has been argued, by principled commentators on the left and the right, for several years now: that the abuse of prisoners, innocent or not, is not only repugnant in its own right.
  4. The Great Yokai War
    Narrative coherence is perhaps not among the film's virtues, but its loopy, cluttered story is part of the fun. And a clearer, simpler plot might have required the sacrifice of some delightful grace notes and visual marvels, like the elastic-necked geisha or the one-eyed ambulatory umbrella.
  5. Shadowboxer
    A gaudy thriller saturated in sex and violence, is an extravagance that leaves you with your mouth hanging open - partly in admiration of its audacity and partly in disbelief at its preposterousness.
  6. Darshan: The Embrace
    Filling our heads with pretty pictures and not much else, Darshan: The Embrace is likely to leave audiences enchanted but unenlightened.
  7. 13 Tzameti
    With its icy cynicism and desolate settings, the film evokes the work of the young Roman Polanski in his sadistic trickster mode.
  8. Shock to the System
    A sly, refreshingly grown-up gay entertainment, though rather less satisfying as a thriller.
  9. Conversations with Other Women
    None of it is quite believable -- the film is too studied, too forward in its conceits to be entirely satisfying -- but Mr. Eckhart and Ms. Bonham Carter approach their roles with intelligence and conviction.
  10. Step Up
    The story is as old as Mickey Rooney but its appeal is eternal, and Step Up cleaves to the template with significantly more rigor than originality. For a director who is also a choreographer, Anne Fletcher is strangely reluctant to step out of line.
  11. The Ordeal
    Calvaire is pompous, but not without talent or shivers.
  12. LOL
    Authentic in texture if narrow in scope, LOL is a movie about the way we live -- or rather about the way white, urban, heterosexual circuit boys are failing to live.
  13. How to Eat Fried Worms
    Nicely directed, the film version proves refreshingly free of the customary blights that affect most modern children's movies, notably adult condescension. But, man, is it mean.
  14. Invincible
    Invincible counters its predictably inspirational trajectory with close attention to historical detail and blue-collar hardship.
  15. Queens
    The most remarkable thing about Queens, a silly but generous Spanish farce from the writer and director Manuel Gómez Pereira, is its unadulterated worship of middle-aged women.
  16. Red Doors
    This agreeable, lightweight movie, written and directed by Georgia Lee, turns the malaises of a suburban family into bittersweet farce that teeters between cheeky humor and surface pathos.
  17. Train Man
    Though clearly aimed at teenagers, this unashamedly heartstruck movie is neither obsessed with sex nor driven to humiliate its characters. Compared to those of the average American teen movie, its ambitions are so innocent they’re almost childlike.
  18. The Guardian
    An action movie, a basic training movie, a swaggering sea adventure, a home front melodrama and an inspiring tough-love heroic teacher fable. If the aggregate of all these movies is exhausting and occasionally overwrought, some of the parts are stirring and effective, though not exactly fresh.
  19. Tales of the Rat Fink
    Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, Tales of the Rat Fink will convince you that Mr. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth.
  20. Nearing Grace
    There's nothing remotely surprising in the entire film. But the generally winning -- and freakishly good-looking -- cast, endowed by Jacob Aaron Estes's script with intelligent, if occasionally overwritten dialogue, makes for viewing that is easy on the eyes and the ears.
  21. A Touch of Spice
    It does have some sweet touches and a droll sense of humor.
  22. Flicka
    An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”
  23. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
    Of course, while your brain is fritzing out, you're trying to figure out how the cinematic trick was done and what the implications might be for other old films. Scary, disturbing, intriguing, all at once.
  24. Come Early Morning
    An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.
  25. Bobby
    When you hear his (Robert Kennedy's) patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Mr. Estevez set out to make -- the one you may wish you were watching.
  26. The Holiday
    Ms. Meyers, whose ambitions are telegraphed by her film's title, which directly invokes George Cukor's lovely 1938 romp "Holiday," has created a cumbersome vehicle by saddling Iris with a flamboyantly glamorous Los Angeles double, Amanda. As played by Cameron Diaz with oodles of charm and not an ounce of persuasion, Amanda doesn’t as much mirror Iris's love troubles as throw them into wincing relief.
  27. Dreamgirls
    The problem with “Dreamgirls” -- and it is not a small one -- lies in those songs, which are not just musically and lyrically pedestrian, but historically and idiomatically disastrous.
  28. Screamers
    Part rockumentary, part howl of outrage, Screamers would have benefited from less concert film and more historical background.
  29. The Good Shepherd
    The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.
  30. Notes on a Scandal
    The actors in Notes on a Scandal are equally distinguished: Ms. Dench and Ms. Blanchett are among the finest on the market today, and each can deliver expert performances, even when, as is the case here, their roles are false and hollow. The performers sell the goods, but the goods are cheap.
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