The New York Times' Scores

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:
20335 movie reviews
  1. The dialogue in the film, directed by Anne Renton from a screenplay by Claire V. Riley and Paula Goldberg, has the loud, mechanical clicketyclack of a 40-year-old episode of "All in the Family."
  2. A cringe-inducing romantic comedy turned cancer tragedy turned inspirational hosanna about living in the moment, embracing your bliss and other clichés.
  3. However frustrated they may be by political paralysis, corporate trickery or plain human stupidity, none of them seem inclined to give up. When they do, we really will be screwed, and we won't have or need movies like this to tell us so.
  4. An appealing, largely upbeat documentary about young ballet dancers duking it out.
  5. This leisurely paced two-hour movie is a reasonably tasty banquet for the same Anglophiles who embrace "Downton Abbey."
  6. Whatever it intends, Jesus Henry Christ is not especially funny. There are witticisms galore in both the thematically recurrent imagery and the dialogue, but very few qualify as jokes, and any laughter is hard to come by. Willfully zany would be a more apt description.
  7. The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.
  8. Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.
  9. A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.
  10. Mr. Dosunmu seems to have directed all his actors to pause before delivering lines, giving a languor to the film that comes to feel studied.
  11. The talented Mr. Ross makes Dre's panic and adrenaline-fueled behavior all too believable. You watch as he sees his horizons dim. What could be sadder?
  12. More grounded in simple observation than in fanciful theories, this effortlessly engaging story of sudden tragedy and halting recovery wisely focuses on the facts and leaves the wonder to the audience.
  13. Alas, dance films like Wim Wenders's innovative, kinetic "Pina" have now set a high barre, and by comparison the traditional talking-head style of this documentary seems primed for showings on public television.
  14. As black comedy, the film is crude and downright sloppy when compared with the clockwork machinations of the Coen brothers' creations, as it has been since its premiere. Brown's panic is capably rendered, but his ordeals are not worth enduring to the bitter end.
  15. Despite the movie's considerable visual splendor, the pacing of Warriors of the Rainbow is clumsy, its battle scenes chaotic and its computer effects (especially of a fire that ravages the Seediq hunting forest) cheesy.
  16. Quietly powerful but dispiriting documentary, which compares the world's oldest profession as practiced from place to place.
  17. Mr. De Felitta's moody, well-rounded film is a kind of excavation and investigation of Mr. Wright's actions as a piece of civil rights history.
  18. A smart, effectively unsettling movie about the need to believe and the hard, cruel arts of persuasion.
  19. In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.
  20. Gaudily vibrant, at times morbidly funny.
  21. The Raven tries to blend all of these motley genres together, and though the effort is valiant, the result is a mess. I suspect Poe's review of it would have been much more savage than mine.
  22. The Five-Year Engagement dutifully hits the marks of its genre, but it is also about the unpredictability of life and the everyday challenges of love. The sensitivity and honesty with which it addresses those matters is a pleasant surprise.
  23. The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.
  24. Now, if only someone would offer this actor a project worthy of the full range of his talent.
  25. You can't help feeling that the movie owed its subject - and its audience - a bit more.
  26. Inventing Our Life is a fascinating introduction to a movement scrambling to adjust enough to guarantee a future, without severing all ties to its principled past.
  27. The filmmakers have no patience for details, either basic or telling. Their elliptical method starts to seem lazy, and Jean's plight, a journey from bad to bad, starts to seem a stacked deck. Through it all Mr. Genty holds your attention with his sober dignity. Too bad the filmmakers frequently let that slip into pathos.
  28. The bloody chaos can be suitably overwhelming, but you're too aware of the whizzing camerawork, helter-skelter editing and bombastic score.
  29. Based on a novel by Andy Zeffer and directed by Casper Andreas, Going Down falls well short of compelling, either as a coming-of-age film, a satire or a romance.
  30. The threat of global warming to their habitat is spelled out simply in the narration, delivered by Meryl Streep. Otherwise, To the Arctic is a little dry.

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