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 Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.
  2. Ironclad alternately feels, plays and sounds like an abridged television mini-series and a feature-length video game.
  3. There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.
  4. The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.
  5. A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.
  6. A solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.
  7. The intertwining of the narratives, along with the somewhat elliptical, or perhaps rudimentary, storytelling, makes for a confusing experience. But the stories are mainly an excuse for pretty pictures, some quite striking, of poverty and oppression, and for a closing frenzy of bloodletting.
  8. The laughter is mean but also oddly pure: it expels shame and leaves you feeling dizzy, a little embarrassed and also exhilarated, kind of like the cocaine that two of the main characters consume by accident.
  9. Between Mr. Ziman's music-video skills and his close approximation of the kinetic style of Michael Mann (a scene from Mr. Mann's "Heat" has a key role in the plot), it's easy to overlook the formulas and just enjoy the ride.
  10. Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.
  11. That things tend not to end, or bode, well doesn't detract from the overall Hallmark vibe.
  12. It also shows, perceptively and often sweetly, a broader slice of young, urban, educated life in India as the three deal with careers, love and happiness.
  13. Recording every success and setback, the wrenching documentary Crime After Crime favors the personal over the political, creating a no-frills portrait of a stoic and remarkably unembittered woman.
  14. Compellingly acted from top to bottom. As the raw passions of its hard-bitten characters seep into you, the songs hammer them even more deeply into your consciousness. The film's only flaw - a big one - is its brevity.
  15. Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.
  16. What lifts Terri above its peers is not the plight of its protagonist or the film's sympathy for him, but rather the care and craft that the director, Azazel Jacobs, has brought to fairly conventional material.
  17. Cheery, corny and perhaps calculatingly unoriginal, this is packaged entertainment so familiar it feels like a remake and so wholesome you could swear Sandra Dee starred in the 1959 original. Think of it as "No Sex and the City" for tweeners.
  18. A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.
  19. 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.
  20. A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.
  21. Unless your idea of a good joke is a golf ball thwacked into an unsuspecting crotch or the old frying-pan-in-the-kisser gag, you probably won't like this movie.
  22. Nothing you see makes any sense at all, but the sensations are undeniable, and kind of fun in their vertiginous, supercaffeinated way.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The principal characters can be reduced to a handful of tics, and the entire story line is immaculately devoid of incidental detail. It's like sitting in a padded cell for about 90 minutes.
  23. If you are going to be this mean-spirited, you had better deliver the jokes, but the film's attacks on pretentious parents - not to mention put-downs of hardworking immigrants - consistently come off as more hateful than humorous.
  24. It demonstrates that mainstream Chinese cinema can be as guilty of self-indulgent overstatement as anything out of the West.
  25. Yet the urban images he presents are missing the thing that makes any city come alive: human beings. You begin to suspect that Mr. Persons hates humanity. This makes General Orders No. 9, for all its sheen of sophistication, rather simplistic: people bad, nature good.
  26. Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.
  27. The real problem here, though, is that noting the it's-all-about-me nature of modern life already feels like a point that no longer needs making. Yeah, we're self-absorbed and shallow; so what else is new?
  28. Despite these flaws, it's refreshing to see a documentary about a normal grown-up who is struggling with problems of life and love, just as so many invisible others do.
  29. The loggerhead turtle is a threatened species, and one day all we may have left are its computer-generated analogues. Its fight for existence is plenty dramatic already, and is a story worth telling honestly.

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