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. Cropsey
    Its straggling, true-crime narrative, leaping hither and yon like a dog chasing butterflies, is not what holds the film together; the real glue is the emergence of a parallel between location and suspect, between literal dumping ground and figurative. This is so effective that there was no need for the directors to conduct a handheld, "Blair Witch"-y foray into the nighttime woods -- their film is creepy enough in broad daylight.
  2. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    The extent of the need around the world is so enormous and overwhelming that the efforts of the doctors in this sobering film seem both vitally necessary and woefully inadequate.
  3. Finding Bliss
    Except for the usual double entendres in which titles of mainstream Hollywood hits are twisted into salacious puns, Finding Bliss (Bliss is the name of the company's resident star) isn't especially funny. Nor is it sexy, despite flashes of nudity and fleeting glimpses of Grind's works in progress.
  4. Raajneeti
    Raajneeti, with its large cast of characters and wealth of subplots, is often a mess, but an interesting one.
  5. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead
    A toothless satire whose targets include vampire mania, low-rent theater, indie romantic comedies, Scorsese, Shakespeare and “Law & Order,” it plays like a Web series expanded to feature length, or an adaptation of one of the Naked Angels’ staged serial soap operas.
  6. Whiz Kids
    Tom Shepard's quietly observant documentary tracks its stressed-out subjects through an array of personal and scholarly challenges.
  7. Burzynski
    Clogged with court transcripts, medical records and repetitive (if moving) patient testimony, Burzynski tickles the mind only at the cost of trampling the eyes.
  8. Double Take
    Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, Double Take, as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television.
  9. Convention
    Some of this is awfully pedestrian, but there are moments of both high comedy and high drama.
  10. Mademoiselle Chambon
    This small, nearly perfect film is a reminder that personal upheavals are as consequential in people's lives as shattering world events.
  11. Micmacs
    There is no question that the heart of Micmacs is in the right place, but the movie is also a little thin.
  12. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    For the most part this is perfectly painless mush. The movie is irrepressibly silly -- what were you expecting? -- but a few hours of Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering his long lashes has its dumb-fun appeal.
  13. Survival of the Dead
    Placidly photographed and lacking in urgency, "Survival" shows us the living flailing at fate and the dead just flailing.
  14. Father of My Children
    A tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!). Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.
  15. Agora
    A bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.
  16. The Juche Idea
    The Juche Idea is meant to be a comedy, one that cuts two ways: mocking the strictures placed on moviemakers in both Communist and capitalist systems. Viewers who don’t share the radical-nostalgist sensibility of Mr. Finn, who teaches at Emerson College in Boston, may find the humor both too rarefied and too obvious.
  17. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema.
  18. Sex and the City 2
    The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.
  19. Shrek Forever After
    What fortifies Shrek Forever After are its brilliantly realized principal characters, who nearly a decade after the first “Shrek” film remain as vital and engaging fusions of image, personality and voice as any characters in the history of animation.
  20. MacGruber
    The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being.
  21. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    Never forgetting the rush of the game, the directors regularly serve up fleet footage of the team’s highs and lows, allowing the rhythms of the field to set the film’s volatile beat.
  22. Holy Rollers
    Mr. Eisenberg and particularly Mr. Bartha give appropriately twitchy, live-wire performances, and the film tells its basically bleak story lucidly and with touches of dark humor.
  23. John Rabe
    John Rabe, has its visceral moments. But it is also burdened by manipulative clichés of a screenplay in which exposition outweighs character development. Inspired by Rabe’s diaries, from which short excerpts are read, it tells the story almost exclusively from a Western point of view.
  24. Kites
    The result is a lovers-on-the-lam blast of pure pulp escapism, so devoted to diversion that you probably won’t even notice the corn.
  25. Perrier's Bounty
    A poor man’s “In Bruges” that frantically chases itself in circles.
  26. Racing Dreams
    One of the rare documentaries you leave wishing it was a little bit longer.
  27. Solitary Man
    A sharp, small-scale comedy of male misbehavior that turns out to be one of this dreary spring’s pleasant cinematic surprises.
  28. Two in the Wave
    Two in the Wave honors that collaboration by carefully recounting its details and arguing for its significance. The films of Truffaut and Mr. Godard stand or fall by themselves, but together they made history.
  29. Robin Hood
    If only the story were leaner and more nimble -- but then again this is a Ridley Scott film, so you go in expecting bombast and bloat in the service of leaden themes.
  30. Daddy Longlegs
    He (Lenny) is completely appalling, and also completely himself, a kind of mad, disturbing integrity that is both matched and mitigated by the honesty of this lovely, hair-raising film.
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