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. A startlingly beautiful documentary by Bong-Nam Park that is also devastatingly sad.
  2. Sex in this film looks so nonecstatic that a better title might have been "3D Sex and Zen: Zero Child Policy."
  3. The fall-off in sexiness, soulfulness and wittiness from Ms. Gugino and Antonio Banderas, the parents in the first three "Spy Kids" films, to Ms. Alba and Joel McHale is whiplash steep.
  4. Full of indie mannerisms - compulsive swearing, jokey violence, quirk-laden characters - Flypaper can't quite manage to find a style or a comic groove of its own.
  5. Fusty research, aging interviewees and decades-old advertising campaigns offer background to the uninitiated, but Mr. Warrick's muddled, undisciplined approach destroys even the possibility of a cogent overview.
  6. Viewed simply as a horror movie, A Horrible Way to Die is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it's devastating.
  7. Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented, The Last Circus views Franco-era Spain through the crazed eyes of two clowns doing battle for the love of one magnificent woman.
  8. Nannerl, the subject of at least three novels also titled "Mozart's Sister," is in this film meant to be something more than a chapter in her brother's biography though it's not exactly clear what. Somewhat frustratingly if reasonably, Mr. Féret never settles on whether she was a genius, a martyr, a feminist cause, a disappointed daughter, a resigned woman or all of the above.
  9. Mr. Park's screenplay, pedestrian direction and stolid performance don't set us up to care.
  10. At times The Hedgehog suggests a Gallic "Harold and Maude," with an intellectual gloss as it celebrates the life force passed from an older generation to a younger. But its concept of vitality isn't the popular cliché of kicking up your heels, breathing deeply and gorging on ice cream. It is an aesthete's ideal of pursuing moments of ecstatic perfection in art and companionship.
  11. Mr. Kwanten, meanwhile, best known for playing the sweet, dim Jason Stackhouse on the HBO show "True Blood," gives Griff the delicate, ethereal affect of a man who's an alien in his own world except when he's running down an alley in a disguise. He's a pleasure to watch.
  12. The movie is a continuous barrage of explosions, sneak attacks, chases, life-and-death face-offs, and amazing rescues that are as far-fetched as they are exhilarating. The cheap thrills are compounded by Mikko Alanne and David Battle's screenplay, a wallow in old-time Hollywood boilerplate, some of which you can't believe is being recycled yet again.
  13. The old "Fright Night" was both self-aware and effectively scary, and if this one seems to prefer gruesome digital effects to old-fashioned bump-in-the-night spookiness, it still succeeds in keeping the audience both tickled and anxious.
  14. Mr. Momoa has some awfully big biceps to fill. He rises to that task with a pumped physique made for ogling. Thankfully, he also shows glints of self-awareness that can make hypermasculine blowouts like these more watchable and were largely missing from Mr. Schwarzenegger's wide-eyed turn in the first "Conan the Barbarian" (1982).
  15. Amigo is a well-carpentered narrative, fast-moving and emphatic, stepping nimbly from gravity to good humor.
  16. Her (Ms. Scherfig) eccentric eye and offbeat rhythm sustain One Day through its stretches of banality and mitigate some of its flaws.
  17. For all the hardship they endure, this intimate dual portrait, directed by Lynn True and Nelson Walker, with Tsering Perlo, suggests that their lives are neither more nor less fulfilled than those of any highly stressed upper-middle-class Americans.
  18. Mr. Murray creates a beguiling, visually rich canvas.
  19. It's significantly smaller and more casual than "Mystery Train" or "Lost in Translation," movies its premise calls to mind, but in some ways it's more layered and complex.
  20. A new wrinkle in how the killings spool out actually makes the film even more predictable, and the deaths, which tend to be squirmy rather than explosive, are so perfunctory and lazily jokey that they leave a decidedly bad aftertaste.
  21. Subtle it ain't and subtle it needn't be. It is, though, mostly involving (if Bollywood long, at 2 hours 45 minutes) and even occasionally stirring.
  22. Mr. Fisher-Cohen captures Mr. McMillan's transformation from a guy with a funny look and line into someone who believes his own hype and misconstrues his Warholian 15 minutes for widespread popularity and influence. It's a dismaying portrait and, here in the YouTube age, a direct hit.
  23. Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.
  24. There is a paradox at the heart of the film. It strains to celebrate diversity and individualism, while its processed music exemplifies strict corporate teamwork.
  25. If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.
  26. As a personality profile, Senna is sketchy at best. Born into a well-to-do family in São Paulo, Brazil, Senna pursued the sport from a young age with a maniacal zeal. He comes across as a fatalistic daredevil and as a man of the people, his wealthy background aside.
  27. The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.
  28. Save for Ms. Davis's, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs.
  29. The Harvest, in its modest way, calls to mind "The Grapes of Wrath" but with no glimmer of a New Deal or a union, or even of better economic times ahead.
  30. The depictions of cosmopolitan Germans and mostly avaricious, bestial Czechs are likely to stir strong emotions among some viewers, but over all Habermann is more potboiler than political or historical statement.

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