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. Dark Streets
    Diverting enough as a series of music videos, Dark Streets strikes postures in place of drama.
  2. Delgo
    Too leaden for adults and too baffling for kids.
  3. What Doesn't Kill You
    It tells a good story well, and in the process quietly says a little something about what it means to look at the American dream from the bottom up.
  4. Where God Left His Shoes
    Although Mr. Leguizamo wisely underplays a role that is just short of saintly, the character is still a filmmaker's bogus, bleeding-heart contrivance in a movie that is much less truthful than it pretends to be.
  5. While She Was Out
    Embracing outraged victimhood the way Angelina Jolie embraces a close-up, Ms. Basinger, doing double duty here as an executive producer, appears oblivious to the script's idiocies.
  6. The Reader
    The film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.
  7. Wendy and Lucy
    What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy -- and to Lucy -- matters a lot, which is to say that Wendy and Lucy, for all its modesty, matters a lot too.
  8. Hunger
    The brutality in the film is pervasive and often stomach turningly graphic, but what is perhaps most unnerving is the tact, patience and care with which Mr. McQueen depicts its causes and effects.
  9. Cadillac Records
    This movie is crowded and sprawling, and if it rambles sometimes, that's just fine. Like those big, boxy Caddies (and like Howlin’ Wolf, if he did say so himself), it's built for comfort, not for speed. It hums, it purrs and it roars.
  10. Nobel Son
    An aggressively noisy exercise in style over substance about nasty people doing nasty things to one another in (sigh) Southern California.
  11. Punisher: War Zone
    Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to?
  12. Frost/Nixon
    Stories of lost crowns lend themselves to drama, but not necessarily audience-pleasing entertainments, which may explain why Frost/Nixon registers as such a soothing, agreeably amusing experience, more palliative than purgative.
  13. The Black Balloon
    Ms. Collette’s Maggie is the film's prime mover. This wonderful Australian actress, who hasn't a shred of vanity, virtually disappears into the complicated characters she plays, and Maggie is one of the strongest.
  14. Let Them Chirp Awhile
    This sort of thing was indulgent enough the first time around; transplanted to the mumblecore milieu, it's intolerable.
  15. Four Christmases
    Refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.
  16. Milk
    Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.
  17. Transporter 3
    Though the car chases have grown more banal as the franchise has started to run on fumes, the smackdowns have retained their zing.
  18. Twilight
    Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in Twilight, notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down.
  19. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.
  20. Special
    Either way, it doesn’t quite go far enough as psychological study or cultural commentary.
  21. Bolt
    What keeps Bolt fresh is an unaffected exuberance, a genuine sense of fun, that is expressed above all through obsessive attention to craft.
  22. Lake City
    Feels like a movie whose story was slapped together during filming. Its three phases -- Southern pastorale, Sudsville and Kablooie -- don’t really connect.
  23. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.
  24. Australia
    A testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion.
  25. Quantum of Solace
    The violence in his (Craig's) first outing, "Casino Royale," was notably intense, and while Quantum of Solace is not quite as brutal, the mood is if anything even more grim and downcast.
  26. A Christmas Tale
    A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty -- marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche -- and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.
  27. Eden
    A picture so modest and minor-key that the emotional bruise it leaves may take days to develop.
  28. House of the Sleeping Beauties
    Not even the august presence of Maximilian Schell can dispel the odor of fusty smut that clings to House of the Sleeping Beauties, a clammy meditation on sex, death and the endless fascination of unclothed innocence.
  29. We Are Wizards
    Amusing if unfocused documentary peek at some of the more engaged fans (and opportunists) circulating in the Harry Potter world.
  30. The Dukes
    Plods along in its sloppy, joshing way, it tastes like pasta sauce that has sat on the shelf long after the expiration date on the can.
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