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. Sparkle
    In many ways Sparkle is a bumpy ride. The editing is haphazard, the cinematography too dark, and there are holes in the story. If the new songs on the soundtrack are effective Motown pastiches, most of them pale beside their prototypes. But diluted Motown is better than none.
  2. Beloved
    Beloved is at once whimsical and heartfelt, alive to the absurdity and perversity of amorous behavior and also to the gravity and intensity of human emotions.
  3. Chicken with Plums
    The result is captivating, but not exactly moving: Nasser-Ali's grand passion is posited rather than communicated, in spite of Mr. Amalric's exquisitely soulful performance.
  4. ParaNorman
    Far more than Norman's adventure, which takes him from home to a cemetery and deep into his town's history, what pulls you in, quickening your pulse and widening your eyes, are the myriad visual enchantments - from the rich, nubby tactility of his clothes to the skull-and-bones adorning his bedroom wallpaper.
  5. Why Stop Now
    Once Why Stop Now? has exhausted its bag of tricks, there is a screeching of brakes as it approaches the edge of the cliff. Having expended all that stamina, the film collapses from exhaustion and settles for an abrupt, feel-good ending that is as perfunctory as it is preposterous.
  6. Robot and Frank
    Frank Langella plays so many variations on cute and crotchety and with such suppleness - he's by turns a charming codger, a silver fox and a wise graybeard - that his performance comes close to a saving grace.
  7. The Expendables 2
    Mr. Norris arrives just as the blood baths and leaden dialogue are beginning to grow tedious, and his deadpan self-parody is pretty darn funny. More important, it gives you permission to laugh at the rest of this mindless movie, which is the only way to choke it down.
  8. Cosmopolis
    A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.
  9. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    The ghastliness of this damp and squishy comedy is the byproduct of a confused and earnest sentimentality, a willful devotion to wide-eyed wonder that confuses simplicity with simple-mindedness.
  10. The Lion of Judah
    It's not bad enough to be offensive, and the movie's act of affirmation - for all its self-absorption and high levels of pretrip ignorance - addresses an unimpeachable, moving subject and is undertaken with decency.
  11. Max and the Junkmen (1971)
    Max et les Ferrailleurs, adapted from a novel by Claude Néron, has the matter-of-fact look and careful pace of a precinct-house procedural.
  12. Supercapitalist
    Dry as new bank notes and doggedly uncinematic, Simon Yin's $upercapitalist approaches the seamy side of international finance with a story as stale as the subprime meltdown.
  13. Goats
    If Mr. Neil had the tonal mastery of Wes Anderson, Goats could have been so much more than an episodic sequence of whimsical little psychodramas.
  14. Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is not friendly terrain to traverse; like some sinister version of Proust, it is a prolonged fever dream that ultimately yields madness.
  15. 2 Days in New York
    The film, which is about a chaotic 48 hours in Marion's life, succumbs to the chaos it depicts, and so undermines its best intentions. It is, all in all, a likable mess.
  16. Red Hook Summer
    Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.
  17. The Campaign
    Too soft and silly to be satire, too upbeat to be a cautionary tale, the film is a fun-house fable that both exaggerates and understates the absurdities of our democracy in this contentious election year.
  18. The Bourne Legacy
    By the time Rachel Weisz, as a scientist called Dr. Marta Shearing, showed up in a lab coat, I stopped trying to parse every plot twist and just went with the action flow.
  19. Hope Springs
    The movie is an awkward cross between a domestic comedy and a marital tragedy that's laced with laughs, soggy with tears and burdened by a booming, blunt soundtrack that amplifies every narrative beat.
  20. Meet the Fokkens
    Why the sisters felt that prostitution was their best alternative remains unclear, either because they aren't interested in revealing that part of themselves, or the filmmakers didn't know how to get them to talk. Or maybe Ms. Provaas and Mr. Schroder weren't interested, for political or personal reasons, in making what, despite the laughter, they ended up with: another sad story about whores.
  21. Nitro Circus: The Movie
    Only a couple of times do the stunts have that extra ingredient - wit - that makes this kind of thing amusing to watch.
  22. Soldiers of Fortune
    For the cast, shooting the movie (in Ukraine) may have been a working vacation, but for viewers, watching it is an excruciating sentence of hard labor.
  23. Sushi: The Global Catch
    As storytelling, "The Global Catch" often falls short. It has too much to cover to be comprehensive and can seem a bit random. As a consciousness raiser, the film fares much better.
  24. Assassin's Bullet
    For the thickheaded thriller Assassin's Bullet the Bulgarian actress Elika Portnoy dreamed up a story with three roles for herself and fails to convince in any of them.
  25. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
    This friendly, colorful documentary from Pip Chodorov is not the last word on all the shapes, sizes and languages of experimental film, but rather an introduction brightened by a companionable enthusiasm and an apposite sense of community.
  26. Dreams of a Life
    For all its subtext about identity and London's social fabric, Dreams of a Life leaves too many blanks and is ultimately more frustrating than rewarding.
  27. Mosquita y Mari
    Ms. Pineda and Ms. Troncoso give wonderfully natural performances in which they convey the impulsiveness and insecurity of adolescence. You are uncomfortably reminded of what it feels like to be 15.
  28. The Babymakers
    Delivered with sloppy, gleeful confidence, the movie is smarter than most gross-out comedies but isn't afraid to inspire an "Ewww."
  29. 360
    There's no way to know what went wrong with 360 and whether it was this uninvolving and shallow from the start.
  30. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    The film is more a patched-together collection of anecdotes than a coherent story, and some of Greg's tribulations, like fear over a high dive and an amusement-park ride, don't seem age-appropriate for a boy who has just finished seventh grade.
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