The New York Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,412 out of 20335
  2. Mixed: 8,455 out of 20335
  3. Negative: 2,468 out of 20335
20335 movie reviews
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  1. The Happy Poet
    The consistent comic tone of those earlier scenes - a gentle squirm - makes The Happy Poet a promising debut.
  2. The Anchorage
    At several points the depiction of Ulla's isolation takes on slasher-movie overtones, which undercuts the general solemnity but doesn't really add anything to the experience.
  3. Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story
    Viewers unfamiliar with artists like Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller will find themselves agreeably challenged. And stirred.
  4. The Other City
    The film's most vivid presence is seen but barely able to speak: Jimmy, a gay man in his 30s dying at Joseph's House, an AIDS hospice. Anyone who has kept a deathbed vigil will relate to his suffering and his family's, and perhaps arrive at a sense of just how universal this epidemic truly is.
  5. 3 Billion and Counting
    The guy's not much of a filmmaker, but he certainly gets your attention.
  6. Never Let Me Go
    Alas, what's missing is the spark of life, the jolt of the unexpected - something beyond tears - to puncture the falseness of a film world, which, by its insistence on its own beauty, obscures the tragedy that the three characters, by their nature, cannot express.
  7. Kings of Pastry
    The film builds in interest and intrigue as it goes along, helped immeasurably by the directors' choice - canny or fortunate or both - of the astonishingly good-natured and likable Jacquy Pfeiffer, an Alsace-born, Chicago-based chef, as their chief protagonist.
  8. Bran Nue Dae
    The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.
  9. Legendary
    The schmaltzy sports movie Legendary is a kind of contemporary answer to the old Charles Atlas ad in which a 97-pound weakling develops muscles and triumphantly punches out the bully at the beach.
  10. Lovely, Still
    It's beautifully played and will hit home with anyone who has had to struggle with the most difficult aspects of aging.
  11. The Virginity Hit
    Unfortunately, the things that can be funny and even liberating in a movie like "American Pie" end up looking coarse and slightly depressing in the scripted pseudoreality of The Virginity Hit.
  12. Ahead of Time
    Ahead of Time follows Ms. Gruber to speaking engagements and encounters with relatives and old friends. Ever present are her lucid memory and articulate, compassionate bearing. She is an inspiration for career women, certainly, but also for us all.
  13. Heartbreaker
    Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.
  14. Hideaway (Le refuge)
    But while the Pietà imagery startles, it makes increasing sense as the story builds around it. Because as Hideaway deepens and evolves, you understand that the image of Mousse cradling Louis is a manifestation of her love: this was how she held him, with a tender love that in its depth was itself holy.
  15. I'm Still Here
    My guess is that after years of being the trick pony, he wanted to see what it was like to be the ringmaster.
  16. Resident Evil: Afterlife
    This witless installment features the usual ultra-slow-motion mayhem and helpful freeze-frames to allow us to admire the extra dimension. Fans will not be happy, however, to learn that Ms. Jovovich is more decently clothed this time around.
  17. The Romantics
    The other alumni, played by Malin Akerman, Adam Brody, Jeremy Strong and Rebecca Lawrence, are given such short shrift that they come across more as sarcastic commentators than as characters.
  18. Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
    A tour de force of archival research and dogged interviewing, and the portrait it presents is remarkably complete.
  19. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
    The point of it is not, in the end, to explain him or solve the mystery of his life, but rather to spend time in his company and understand why he is someone to be missed.
  20. The Afterlight
    A minimalist mood poem to loss and alienation.
  21. Sequestro: A Story of Kidnapping
    Filming over four years and tracking several cases, the Brazilian director Jorge W. Atalla favors a fevered shooting style that's repetitious and disorienting but also effortlessly dramatic.
  22. Race to Nowhere
    Spurred by the medical and emotional problems of her own three children, Ms. Abeles embarked on a deeply personal inquiry into the insanely hectic lives of too many of our offspring.
  23. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    The story is deepened with a distinctively European political subtext as the increasingly grandiose Mesrine engages in a running dialogue with various characters about the differences between gangsters and revolutionaries.
  24. Going the Distance
    Romantic comedies nowadays tend to be either aggressively coarse or artificially sweet, and Going the Distance finds a workable middle ground.
  25. Machete
    For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.
  26. Last Train Home
    Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.
  27. The Winning Season
    Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.
  28. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    The director Zhang Yimou honors the unlikely affinity between himself and Joel and Ethan Coen with a remake of their movie "Blood Simple."
  29. Prince of Broadway
    The movie is sharp, charismatic and so light on its feet we never know which way it will turn.
  30. White Wedding
    Wedding chaos has been heavily mined by both film and stage comedies, but Jann Turner, the director here, keeps this story fresh, aided by the effortless interplay between Mr. Nkosi and Mr. Seiphemo (who are credited with Ms. Turner as writers). The goat helps too.
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