The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Why We Fight
    Mr. Jarecki forcefully, if not with wholesale persuasiveness, argues that our business is specifically war.
  2. Big Momma's House 2
    Inconsequential sequel for the undemanding moviegoer.
  3. When a Stranger Calls
    Jake Wade Wall's screenplay does deserve a word of praise. It has managed to incorporate the advent of cellphones, the *69 command and caller ID, which could have easily made the entire story impossible.
  4. A Good Woman
    When put into the mouths of American actors with no feel for Wilde's high-toned repartee, they simply hang in the air and die.
  5. The Tenants
    The message about race relations in America conveyed by The Tenants, a small, serious, but choppy and psychologically cauterized screen adaptation of Bernard Malamud's 1971 novel, is dire.
  6. Firewall
    Manages to entertain mildly only because it traffics in all the familiar action-movie clichés, giving moviegoers ample opportunity to test their action-movie I.Q.
  7. Eight Below
    Eight Below is Grade A pooch porn, an orgy of canine cuteness.
  8. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    Like Mr. Lee's hit-and-miss effort ("Bamboozled"), Mr. Willmott's alternative history takes its inspiration and its rage from an America that has come both a long way and not nearly far enough. But while the filmmaker's anger is palpable it's not very inspired.
  9. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.
  10. Winter Passing
    Its familiar story of an embittered child's homecoming and confrontation with a parent throws off dramatic sparks, but they never flare into a blaze.
  11. Madea's Family Reunion
    Both Ms. Angelou and Ms. Tyson deliver powerful, touching messages. Just as they're sinking in, the film turns into an unabashed chick flick with a painfully gaudy wedding that includes live angels hanging on wires from the ceiling.
  12. Running Scared
    Even a talented lead couldn't save Mr. Kramer from himself. As a writer, he may have fashioned a genre-busting screenplay, one that has its postmodern cake and eats it, too, but as a director he proves himself as blood simple, if generally less adept, as any Hollywood hire.
  13. Home
    Home accumulates a blurry, on-the-fly atmosphere spiked with moments of unexpected sweetness. The movie, though, is most successful when the dialogue mutes and our attention is focused on Jonathan Wolff's gliding camera; in those moments, the brownstone is the most interesting character of all.
  14. Merry Christmas
    If the film's sentiments about the madness of war are impeccably high-minded, why then does Joyeux Noël, an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film, feel as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth?
  15. Game 6
    A tale of one man's meltdown that ought to have an expiration date of Oct. 27, 2004, stamped on every frame.
  16. Neighbour No. 13
    Suffering its own split personality, The Neighbor No. Thirteen is an art house exploitation film neither arty nor exploitative enough.
  17. Shadow: Dead Riot
    This berserk little B-movie is obviously the greatest zombie flick ever set in an experimental women's prison, easily the underground treat of the season, and totally off its rocker.
  18. American Gun
    If American Gun avoids the most obvious kinds of sensationalism, it has the flaw common to many editorial broadsides of overstuffing its episodes with melodrama and symbolism.
  19. Ice Age: The Meltdown
    The animation is uninspired (with so much ice, the creatures need to be twice as good-looking), and the story is humdrum. (The saber-toothed tiger learns to swim!)
  20. Brick
    It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.
  21. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    As for the authorial conceit - assembling the movie from giddy, spastic, amateur photography captured from every part of the arena - at best it yields energetic perspectives on the show, at worst it looks like a cellphone video camera having an epileptic seizure.
  22. Take the Lead
    Take the Lead, despite its nifty concept and fiery leading man, feels sloppy and rushed.
  23. Scary Movie 4
    The fun of Scary Movie 4 is that it isn't a movie at all. Organized on the principle of parody, not plot, driven by gags and cultural feedback, it's an exercise in lowbrow postmodernism, a movie-movie contraption more nuts than Charlie Kaufman's gnarliest fever dream. It's cleverly stupid.
  24. Look Both Ways
    Bogged down by the stylistic gimmickry of bustling montages and jarring animated segments, Look Both Ways aims for existential drama but succeeds only in reminding us that misery loves company.
  25. Metal: A Headbanger's Journey
    Mr. Dunn and his colleagues dig up some interesting information during their inquiry, like the origins of the devil-horns hand signal, metal's signature salute, but their insider love of the music finally proves as big an obstacle to the film as their ploddingly pedagogic approach.
  26. Mission: Impossible III
    Mr. Hoffman enlivens Mission: Impossible III, which otherwise droops, done in both by the maudlin romance and by Mr. Abrams's inability to adapt his small-screen talent -- evident in his capacity as the television auteur behind "Alias" and "Lost" -- to a larger canvas.
  27. The Da Vinci Code
    I certainly can't support any calls for boycotting or protesting this busy, trivial, inoffensive film. Which is not to say I'm recommending you go see it.
  28. The Lost City
    In its groggy way The Lost City holds your attention. Incoherent, but splendidly panoramic and drenched in wonderful Cuban music, it has the texture of a vivid, intoxicating dream that seems to mean something until you wake up and feel it slipping away. All that remains are feelings and impressions connected by a mood.
  29. Hoot
    This sweet-natured but plodding adaptation of a young-adult novel by Carl Hiaasen could have used a little less broad satire of corporate greed and a few more, well, owls.
  30. One Last Thing...
    Shrewdly divided against itself. What begins as a small, cleareyed drama about a teenager with terminal cancer morphs into a gauzy tear-jerker.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »