The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,336 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: 9,413 out of 20336
  2. Mixed: 8,455 out of 20336
  3. Negative: 2,468 out of 20336
20336 movie reviews
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  1. What on Earth?
    It's the film's geometrists who enthrall most, revealing that many of the shapes - one of which famously made the cover of a 1990 Led Zeppelin album - hold entirely new answers to Euclidean problems.
  2. That's What I Am
    Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.
  3. The Robber
    The Robber may have less on its mind than its sheen of seriousness would suggest, but the view is gorgeous.
  4. True Legend
    After a stirring opening battle, however, the fights in True Legend become pretty routine. And beyond some lovely mountain scenery and a tiny cameo by a radiant Michelle Yeoh, there isn't much else to look at.
  5. Louder Than a Bomb
    The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.
  6. The Whistleblower
    For all its high-mindedness, The Whistleblower has a choppy, fumbling screenplay (by Ms. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan) that lurches between shrill editorializing and vagueness while sorting through more characters than it can comfortably handle or even readily identify.
  7. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    It's all very sweet and lightly comedic. After it's over, you half expect a statement to appear on the screen promising, "No humans were traumatized during the making of this film."
  8. Janie Jones
    It feels mostly authentic until a contrived ending that leaves a saccharine taste.
  9. Vito Bonafacci
    Effectively a tutorial on some basic Catholic rituals, this isn't a great film - too many scenes are static or clumsily acted - but it is elevated by the touches of neorealist style in its small-bore focus and its soundtrack of classical compositions and Italian music from the 12th and 13th centuries.
  10. The Colors of the Mountain
    Mr. Arbeláez cites Iranian film as an influence, and it's evident in his movie's subdued lyricism and its focus on the boys, whose games and projects - they keep trying to rescue the ball - are treated with a sweetness that steers clear (mostly) of sentimentality.
  11. The People vs. George Lucas
    Frenetic, paper-thin but entertaining documentary.
  12. Poltergeist
    All in all there’s not much to complain about here, except that — as with a lot of revisited classics — the story’s not as revolutionary as you remember it. For veterans of the 1982 Poltergeist, it’s more like scary but pleasant nostalgia.
  13. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    The overall mood is of warm reassurance, and some of it is even pretty funny.
  14. Life 2.0
    Whether you're predisposed to seeing Second Life as liberating or creepy, Life 2.0 would have been more interesting and original if it, like its subjects, had dwelled more in the virtual world, and if it had told us more about that world's mechanics and folkways.
  15. Empire of Silver
    This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.
  16. United Red Army
    The stilted and awkward physical and vocal performances in combination with the visually flat cinematography bring to mind the look, sound and visual texture of American daytime soaps, an association that perversely makes the movie more and more watchable.
  17. Mr. Nice
    An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.
  18. One Lucky Elephant
    Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.
  19. Hotel Transylvania
    For the first half of the film, amusing monster humor keeps things interesting; some monsters, it turns out, are better at party games than others.
  20. An American Werewolf in London
    When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.
  21. Film Socialisme
    In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque.
  22. Turkey Bowl
    A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"
  23. Hunter Killer
    However nutty its geopolitics, Hunter Killer does its job as popcorn thriller with brisk efficiency.
  24. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    There are, once again, too many busy, uninterestingly staged battles that lean heavily on obvious, sometimes distracting digital sorcery. But there are also pacific, brooding interludes in which the actors — notably Mr. Freeman, an intensely appealing screen presence — remind you that there’s more to Middle-earth than clamor and struggle.
  25. Man of Steel
    At once frantically overblown and beautifully filigreed, Man of Steel will turn on everyone it doesn’t turn off.
  26. Leap Year
    Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.
  27. Halloween
    This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.
  28. Polytechnique
    It is neither floridly melodramatic nor showily minimalist. The virtue - and also the limitation - of this movie is that it confronts senselessness and insists on remaining calm and sane.
  29. Singham
    More and more, Bollywood movies are urban tales for urban audiences. What feels most backward-glancing about Singham is its uncomplicated, even cartoonish insistence on the benefits of village soil over city dirt for cultivating bedrock Indian values.
  30. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Sprawling and sometimes confusing, but its premise is charming and not at all far-fetched.
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