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. Frontier(s)
    Although at times Mr. Gens veers dangerously close to the unpardonable, with images that evoke the Holocaust too strongly, Frontier(s) finally works because its shivers are as plausible as they are outrageous.
  2. Noise
    The movie, whose cacophonous soundtrack, when turned up, conjures your worst nightmare of sirens, car alarms, jackhammers and sundry aural assaults, is a one-trick film that rapidly wears out its welcome.
  3. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    Not that Cairo, Nest of Spies is meant to be a thriller, but even as a self-consciously anachronistic knockabout farce it rarely rises to the level of wit, either verbal or physical.
  4. Surfwise
    Doug Pray’s wonderfully engaging look at love and family and the relentless pursuit of happiness, personal meaning and perfect waves.
  5. Turn the River
    Until it transforms into an improbable thriller, Turn the River is a finely observed portrait of a desperate working-class woman who refuses to play by ordinary rules.
  6. What Happens in Vegas
    Because its director, Tom Vaughan, brings nothing of interest to the movie, including filmmaking, there isn't anything to say other than to note its insulting ugliness and ineptitude.
  7. Before the Rains
    Fatal culture clash, imperialist entitlement, forbidden passion between master and servant: the ingredients of the Indian director Santosh Sivan’s period piece Before the Rains may be awfully familiar, but the film lends them the force of tragedy.
  8. A Previous Engagement
    More tired than the fantasy it promotes, A Previous Engagement aims at middle-aged women with the subtlety of a pitch for bladder-control medication.
  9. The Tracey Fragments
    In the hands of a more literal-minded filmmaker The Tracey Fragments might well have been dreary and unbearable, a chronicle of florid self-pity justified by arbitrary cruelty. Instead it is fierce, enigmatic and affecting.
  10. Unsettled
    Adam Hootnick’s Unsettled makes the political personal, drawing a scattershot yet intimate picture of a nation divided.
  11. Vice
    Raul Sanchez Inglis directed, but Mr. Tarantino's influence prevails, in the cinematography by Andrzej Sekula of "Dogs"; in the abundant epithets and expletives; and in the climactic "Dogs"-style standoff. The film is also dedicated to Chris Penn, Sean's brother, who was in "Dogs" and died in 2006. But missing, regrettably, is that movie's inventiveness, clarity and wit.
  12. Battle for Haditha
    Mr. Broomfield maintains a level of cool detachment throughout. That's to the good of the movie, which, though technically exemplary, falters dramatically on occasion, becoming dangerously close to overheated whenever the characters speak for any length.
  13. Iron Man
    Has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.
  14. Fugitive Pieces
    For a tale spiked with so much torment, Fugitive Pieces feels remarkably soothing.
  15. Made of Honor
    Made of Honor retains enough sweetness to satisfy the cotton-candy addicts. For true believers in fairy tales, no romantic fantasy is too extravagant if the heroine is a sweetheart. The rest of us can sit there and roll our eyes.
  16. Mister Lonely
    Mister Lonely, self-enclosed though it may be, nonetheless demonstrates that Mr. Korine, who showed his ability to shock and repel in earlier films, also has the power to touch, to unsettle and to charm. This is undoubtedly a small movie, but it's also more than that: it's a small, imperfect world.
  17. Redbelt
    A satisfying, unexpectedly involving B-movie that owes as much to old Hollywood as to Greek tragedy.
  18. Son of Rambow
    A likable, lightly sticky valentine to childhood, the 1980s and the dawning of movie love, Son of Rambow was written and directed by Garth Jennings and produced by Nick Goldsmith, the duo behind the underappreciated fantasy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
  19. XXY
    If XXY is imagistically too programmatic (a scene of carrots being sliced is typical of its Freudian heavy-handedness) and devoid of humor, it never seems pruriently exploitative. It sustains an unsettling mood of ambiguity that lingers long after the final credits.
  20. The Favor
    A dreary, interminable drama written and directed by Eva Aridjis, is exactly one-third of a good movie. That third is Frank Wood's beautifully modulated and modest central performance.
  21. Viva
    While desperation and a critique lurk under all these garish surfaces, neither emerges because Ms. Biller, finally, adores this milieu too much to tear it apart.
  22. Baby Mama
    The film never comes fully to term, as it were: the visual style is sitcom functional, and even the zippiest jokes fall flat because of poor timing. But, much like the prickly, talented Ms. Fey, it pulls you in with a provocative and, at least in current American movies, unusual mix of female intelligence, awkwardness and chilled-to-the-bone mean.
  23. Deception
    A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest "Basic Instinct" but instead invoke lesser laughers like "Jade" and "Sliver."
  24. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.
  25. Roman de gare
    A thriller, a murder mystery and a somewhat self-conscious literary puzzle. All of that is entertaining enough, if a bit preposterous and overdone, but the twists and convolutions of the film’s beginning and end enable a middle that is dizzying domestic comedy.
  26. Standard Operating Procedure
    A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.
  27. Then She Found Me
    Then She Found Me, a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment.
  28. Up the Yangtze
    An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.
  29. Without the King
    The film, fluidly shot by James Adolphus, remains deeply sensitive to the complexities of a culture whose attachment to monarchy contravenes its best interests. This dilemma is gradually becoming clear to Princess Sikhanyiso, the oldest of the king's 22 children and a student in California. Intelligent, articulate, caring and strong-willed, she could be her country's best hope.
  30. Tashan
    Vijay Krishna Acharya, an accomplished screenwriter making his directing debut, seems eager to show that he can deliver a movie in the high style -- bright, pop and technically sophisticated -- to which Bollywood has become accustomed.
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