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. City Island
    Softened by some sweet, low-key moments between Vince and a fellow acting student (a very good Emily Mortimer) and by Mr. Garcia’s embodiment of disappointed middle age.
  2. The Killing Jar
    A cheapie hostage drama with a lot more swagger than substance, The Killing Jar strains to wring tension from a tired premise and an airless script.
  3. Kimjongilia
    These harrowing tales are reason enough to see the movie. But Ms. Heikin wants to provide a total experience, so she adds in propaganda films, her own animated presentation of Korean history and, most noticeably, a pair of female dancers… It’s as bad an idea as it sounds.
  4. Neil Young Trunk Show
    As concert documentaries go, both “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” (2006) and the new Neil Young Trunk Show are luxury goods.
  5. Vincere
    A sustained, alternatingly exhausting and aesthetically exhilarating howl of a film.
  6. Shutterbug
    Intermittently beautiful but frustratingly leaden, Shutterbug labors ineffectually to promote authenticity over artifice. A heavily stylized paean to undoctored images, the movie never quite clicks as a succession of moving ones.
  7. Mid-August Lunch
    A slender Chekhovian vignette about the joys and regrets of old age and the pleasures of sociability.
  8. The Exploding Girl
    The Exploding Girl can also make you feel bad about wishing that she were just a little more interesting.
  9. She's Out of My League
    If you’re going to make a romantic comedy called She’s Out of My League about a schlubby nice guy and a pneumatic blonde, the last thing you want is for the audience to be left thinking: “He’s right. She’s way out of his league.”
  10. Green Zone
    When Mr. Greengrass made "United 93," his 2006 reconstruction of one of the Sept. 11 hijackings, some people fretted that it was too soon. My own response to Green Zone is almost exactly the opposite: it's about time.
  11. Mother
    The hard-pounding heart of Mother, Ms. Kim is a wonderment. Perched on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy, her delivery gives the narrative -- which tends to drift, sometimes beguilingly, sometimes less so -- much of its momentum.
  12. Our Family Wedding
    Alternately rancid and ridiculous, strident and sickly sweet, Our Family Wedding”offers plenty that’s old, borrowed and blue; it’s the something new that’s missing.
  13. Remember Me
    It’s hard to know what the director Allen Coulter could have done to improve Will Fetters’s absurdly contrived, yakky script about love and loss, largely set in the summer of 2001. But Mr. Coulter doesn’t help matters by infusing the movie with grave self-importance.
  14. Delta
    Unfolding like a medieval horror movie, Delta is sometimes laughable but often admirable.
  15. Severe Clear
    At its most provocative, Severe Clear pungently evokes a heroic Marine Corps mystique.
  16. Children of Invention
    A modestly scaled, quietly effective independent movie about a struggling single mother and her two children.
  17. Stolen
    Plays like a middling episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” drawn out an extra half-hour and embellished with pretentious literary and cinematic flourishes.
  18. Alice in Wonderland
    Busy, garish and periodically amusing.
  19. Brooklyn's Finest
    Like Tango, Sal and Eddie, Mr. Fuqua and Mr. Martin dig themselves into a pulpy predicament, and then find themselves unable to do anything but shoot their way out. The movie is wounded, but it’s also too tough to kill.
  20. The Secret of Kells
    It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.
  21. Harlem Aria
    Missing no stops on the road from cloying to annoying, Harlem Aria has waited more than 10 years for domestic release. Maybe its destiny has been written.
  22. Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess
    Only ends up skimming the surface. But even the skimming is largely interesting and thought-provoking, and of course very bleak.
  23. Cop Out
    It’s a phoned-in, gutless piece of hack work that reminds you of other, better films in the same vein.
  24. A Prophet
    One of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices.
  25. The Crazies
    Mr. Romero is executive producer of the new film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have his style or sense of humor.
  26. The Yellow Handkerchief
    If Mr. Hurt gives a meticulously detailed performance, he is still so innately refined that Brett never quite registers as an authentic blue-collar type, either vocally or in his body language. Ultimately, men like Brett are just not in Mr. Hurt’s DNA, and you are left with the impression of observing a silk purse artfully (but only partially) disguised as a sow’s ear.
  27. Easier with Practice
    A tale about appearances in which not everything is as it seems, Easier With Practice tries to use phone sex as a way to explore contemporary alienation.
  28. The Art of the Steal
    One weakness is the too-brief, tantalizing peeks inside the Barnes. Yet, like the movie as a whole, this limitation comes with dividends: it made me want to hop on a plane to Philadelphia as soon as possible to see the original before it’s emptied.
  29. Formosa Betrayed
    Mr. Van Der Beek, manlier than in his “Dawson Creek” days, gives an able performance in a movie whose Asian actors tend to overplay the intrigue in an exaggerated 1940s style, exchanging sinister meaningful looks and, in general, hamming it up.
  30. Prodigal Sons
    A tale of two siblings -- one basking in memories, the other fleeing them -- Prodigal Sons grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry. In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance.
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