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. The Cats of Mirikitani
    The result is a movie that evolves naturally from the filmmaker's compassion for her subject; as much as possible, she remains off camera, and her immense act of charity is never permitted to become the film's focus. Instead this remarkable documentary offers a brief but satisfying look at a defiantly self-sufficient life.
  2. Black Snake Moan
    In spite of Amelia Vincent's toothsome cinematography and the down-home locations, the movie often has the lumbering, literal-minded rhythms of a second-rate stage play -- not a moan or a howl, but a slow, anxious groan.
  3. Into Great Silence
    I hesitate, given the early date and the project's modesty, to call Into Great Silence one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.
  4. Wild Tigers I Have Known
    Like "Twelve and Holding," another film from last year's New Directors series, Wild Tigers achingly sympathizes with the desperate lengths an obsessed adolescent will go to in pursuit of love. As you watch the movie, you pray that, in the language of "Tea and Sympathy," the future teachers of Logan's life lessons will "be kind."
  5. The Astronaut Farmer
    The opening shots, of Farmer on horseback in his space suit, hint at a strangeness that the rest of the movie never quite lives up to, but it does have a visual freshness that makes the bromides and clichés palatable.
  6. Reno 911!: Miami
    What feels amusingly anarchic on the small screen feels underdeveloped and disjointed on the big screen, perhaps because instead of commercials gluing the jokes together there’s dead air.
  7. The Abandoned
    After a while, Mr. Cerdà exhausts his repertory of spooky effects -- too many dark hallways and illogical, foreboding point-of-view shots -- and you begin to hunger for exposition, always a bad sign in a horror film. Even worse is that, by the time the explanations arrive, you no longer care.
  8. Amazing Grace
    The overall effect is part BBC-style biography, part Hollywood-like hagiography, and generally pleasing and often moving, even when the story wobbles off the historical rails or becomes bogged down in dopey romance.
  9. Gray Matters
    Compared to Gray Matters, even a Nora Ephron bonbon has the weight of urban neo-realism.
  10. Starter for 10
    Starter for Ten offsets its rite-of-passage clichés with relaxed performances and an extremely likable lead.
  11. The Taste of Tea
    A bit of patience is required to get through The Taste of Tea, but patience is often rewarded, and it certainly is by this droll and oddly touching film.
  12. The Wayward Cloud
    It feels willed, aggressive and unconvincing -- clammy rather than cool -- in a way that suggests artistic frustration rather than discovery. The water shortage may be a metaphor for the director’s creative desiccation, which his admirers can only hope is temporary.
  13. Cocaine Angel
    Harnessing the twin virtues of drollness and economy, Mr. Tully keeps scenes brief and melodrama on the margins.
  14. Breach
    One of the strengths of Breach, a thriller that manages to excite and unnerve despite our knowing the ending, is how well it captures the utter banality of this man and his world.
  15. Bridge to Terabithia
    Consistently smart and delicate as a spider web, Bridge to Terabithia is the kind of children’s movie rarely seen nowadays. And at a time when many public schools are being forced to cut music and art from the curriculum, the story’s insistence on the healing power of a nurtured imagination is both welcome and essential.
  16. Ghost Rider
    This dissociation leaves the supporting cast to its own devices, with no one suffering more than the appealing Eva Mendes as Johnny's true love, Roxanne. If Ms. Mendes ever finds a director willing to allow her to perform with her shirts fully buttoned, there will be no stopping her.
  17. Antibodies
    As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason.
  18. Avenue Montaigne
    Avenue Montaigne is a bonbon, not a bouillabaisse. But because this is finally a film about desire, it carries a bittersweet tang.
  19. Close to Home
    The movie, written and directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalia Hager, is really a study of people coping with excruciating boredom and the absurd aspects of military life.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Boy Who Cried Bitch: The Adolescent Years
    The film is so clumsily written and directed, and the performances so one-note, that any potential for enlightenment is suffocated.
  21. Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
    Throughout Grbavica the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads. At Sara’s school the psychological wounds of the war are being handed down to her generation through the separation of heroes and nonheroes. Fathers pass their weapons down to their sons. Even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.
  22. Eklavya: The Royal Guard
    The main tribute in Guard, however, is to Mr. Bachchan, an aging Bollywood monument (and father of the rising actor Abhishek Bachchan), whose sunken, heavy-lidded eyes, grizzled countenance and noble bearing indisputably convey the presence of a seasoned star.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Daddy's Little Girls
    As a director, Mr. Perry has his strong points, including a genuine interest in showing the resilience of African-American life and traditions (including church sermons and blues music, which are accorded equal significance here). But those aspects get lost in this turgid and ungainly film.
  24. Music and Lyrics
    While there is not much chemistry between Mr. Grant and Ms. Barrymore, they are professional enough to work with the movie's conceit while sending flickers of idiosyncratic charm off the screen.
  25. Bamako
    Bamako is something different: a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.
  26. Hannibal Rising
    Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris's screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.
  27. Norbit
    Not exactly uproarious. But Mr. Murphy, going back at least to his Gumby and Buckwheat days on "Saturday Night Live," has always had the ability to turn broad caricature into something stranger and more inventive.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Sin Eater
    Handsomely produced, earnestly performed and 100 percent irony-free, The Last Sin Eater is religious art for mainstream consumption.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Friday
    Epic and raw, Black Friday is cut from the same bloody cloth as "Salvador" and "Munich."
  30. Notes on Marie Menken
    Notes on Marie Menken shines a quavering if welcome ray of light on a largely forgotten figure in the American avant-garde film scene of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
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