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. Jennifer 8
    One of the most surprising things about Jennifer 8, a strikingly atmospheric film even when not an entirely convincing one, is a running time that is in excess of two hours. Losing 20 minutes would almost certainly have heightened the film's sense of purpose, which is sometimes in danger of drifting away.
  2. Stay Tuned
    A cleverly plotted movie that offers ample opportunity for spoofing anything and everything that can be found on television. Unfortunately, most of its takeoffs -- of a black-and-white gangster film, a spaghetti western and a period swashbuckler -- show no feel for genre and no genuine wit.
  3. Q & A
    The dialogue is often brutally comic, and individual scenes cut deep. Yet the narrative finally becomes almost impenetrable. The focus that the director would have demanded of another writer is lacking here.
  4. The Water Man
    The keen affinity the actor David Oyelowo has for his fellow performers is the best thing about The Water Man.
  5. Madhouse
    To his credit, Mr. Ropelewski comes up with fairly novel forms of mayhem and makes an effort to tie up most of the loose ends when the film is over.
  6. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    Fellowes manages to navigate Downton Abbey to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries.
  7. 8 Billion Angels
    The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption.
  8. Take Me Out to the Ball Game
    For all its high spots, however, the show lacks consistent style and pace, and the stars are forced to clown and grimace much more than becomes their speed. Actually, the plotted humor is conspicuously bush-league stuff. Don't be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.
  9. Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
    It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.
  10. Last Letter from Your Lover
    In short, it too efficiently glosses over multiple plotlines to have much of an emotional impact. What remains are mostly generic beats. Still, the formula is engrossing enough, and its midcentury vintage appeal — the pillbox hats, headscarves and swanky soirees — is particularly seductive.
  11. Old
    Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here.
  12. The Boy from Medellín
    Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.
  13. The Last Mercenary
    The fight scenes have wit and Van Damme delivers his lines with just the right amount of weary good humor.
  14. Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm
    This stuff is best appreciated by rock mavens. Many of the other bands telling their stories (including the Boo Radleys and the Charlatans) didn’t have much of an impact in the States, so Anglophilia helps, too.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Condorman
    It is painless and chaste, and it has a lot of beautiful scenery and beautiful clothes. There are worse things to watch while you eat popcorn.
  16. Chasers
    But Mr. Berenger, grousing steadily, and Mr. McNamara, in a boyish Ricky Nelson mode, are likably matched. Ms. Eleniak, who also made a playful and picturesque Elly May Clampett in "The Beverly Hillbillies," succeeds here in rising above the cheesecake level.
  17. No Sudden Move
    The schematic for No Sudden Move remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    The aphoristic style, combined with Winner's unwavering visual instinct for crushingly obvious detail, helps to push Scorpio out of low dullness into vertiginous absurdity.
  19. Playing with Sharks
    Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.
  20. Catch the Fair One
    The nexus of racism, patriarchal power and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.
  21. No Man of God
    For anyone who has heard audio of Bundy, Kirby’s impersonation will sound chillingly close to the real killer’s deadened, yet at times disturbingly raffish, cadence. Wood is persuasive, too, although Kit Lesser’s script writes the character as a cliché.
  22. Les Nôtres
    The film’s drama wrestles itself to a standstill (along with leaving some characterization sketchy, like that of a concerned social worker). Yet Leblanc might come closer to the sensation of concealed trauma than movies with more familiar storytelling beats.
  23. Ahead of the Curve
    The film’s subjects are overwhelmingly earnest, but the movie suffers for its substitution of enterprise over entertainment.
  24. Vice Versa
    The film's best scenes are those between the goofily nonchalant Mr. Reinhold and the precociously stern Mr. Savage, however bluntly these moments call attention to the craziness of the premise.
  25. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is closer to a curiosity than to a triumph, though its conception is certainly ambitious.
  26. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    A film unintentionally stuck in its own kind of adolescence, “Mutant Mayhem” has plenty of charms but tries so hard to be cool, funny and relevant — so totally online — that it forgets to kick back with a slice, some buds and just, you know, vibe.
  27. Titane
    For all its reckless style and velocity, Titane doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.
  28. Hold Me Tight
    For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.
  29. Aline
    The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.
  30. The River Wild
    [Hanson] does another deft job of conveying a heroine's secret anxieties, at least during the first half of his story.
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