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. Strange Culture
    Somewhere between documentary and dramatization, fact and impression, Strange Culture molds one man’s tragedy into an engrossing narrative experiment that defies categorization.
  2. The Girl Next Door
    Gregory M. Wilson, the film’s director, has made the kind of movie that makes you wish you could rinse your brain in bleach, to wash all traces of it from your memory.
  3. Lake of Fire
    One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough.
  4. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity Kurt Cobain About a Son, but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it.
  5. The Darjeeling Limited
    The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.
  6. Trade
    An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film’s near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.
  7. Feast of Love
    A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    The movie is so likable that it glides over its many plot holes... The film’s direction, by Andy Fickman, is raucous but never crass, and the affable Mr. Johnson is committed to every moment.
    • The New York Times
  9. The Kingdom
    The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down.
  10. Lust, Caution
    Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.
  11. The Price of Sugar
    Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power.
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    In its modest way, Outsourced may be unique: a charming culture-clash romance that could be taught in business schools.
    • The New York Times
  13. Into the Wild
    Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.
  14. The Last Winter
    Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film The Last Winter, crawling through the hallways and howling into the dread night.
  15. Good Luck Chuck
    The main audience for this dim little sex comedy has no particular interest in seeing Ms. Alba act. They want to see her in her underwear and also to confront one of the central cultural questions of our time: will she take her top off?
  16. Sydney White
    Ms. Bynes, with her cherubic face, expressive eyes and comic timing, helps create a positive, pleasing diversion that caters to the geek in all of us.
  17. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.
  18. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.
  19. The Man of My Life
    The Man of My Life is a sumptuously illustrated but shallow fable of the grass-is-greener conflict between freedom and commitment.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beauty Remains
    The story seems to be occurring in a China of the imagination, an airless place at once sensually ripe and icily formal. Like “Far From Heaven,” it denies its characters and viewers the ecstatic release they crave.
  21. Across the Universe
    Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.
  22. December Boys
    A coming-of-age tale so treacly it doesn’t just tug your heartstrings, it attempts to glue them to your ribs.
  23. Dragon Wars: D-War
    It is such a breathless, delirious stew, it’s impossible not to be entertained, provided -- this is crucial -- you have a sense of humor.
  24. Eastern Promises
    The rigor of Mr. Cronenberg’s direction sometimes seems at odds with the humanism of Mr. Knight’s script, but more often the director’s ruthless formal command rescues the story from its maudlin impulses. Mr. Knight aims earnestly for your heartstrings, but Mr. Cronenberg insists on getting under your skin. The result is a movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time.
  25. In the Valley of Elah
    However you judge the movie’s politics, and whatever its flaws, there is something inarguable, something irreducibly honest and right, about Mr. Jones’s performance.
  26. Ira & Abby
    Though playing at times like an extended sitcom, Ira & Abby radiates a breathless charm, due in no small part to Ms. Westfeldt’s sharp dialogue and engagingly unmannered performance.
  27. King of California
    King of California may look and feel realistic, but it is really a Don Quixote-like fable about nonconformity and pursuing your impossible dream to the very end.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mr. Woodcock
    It’s “The Great Santini” remade as a sitcom.
  29. Silk
    Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.
  30. The Brave One
    Don’t be fooled. The Brave One, though well cast and smoothly directed, is just as crude and ugly as you want it to be.
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