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. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burning Annie
    A thoroughly professional comedy, well paced, attractively photographed and smartly acted.
  3. The Decomposition of the Soul
    This kind of glance at history is a poor substitute for a hard, steady and expansive examination.
  4. Because I Said So
    A mild exercise in deliberate mediocrity, with chuckles and heartwarming moments distributed as carefully as nuts in a factory-made brownie. The movie's lack of ambition is hardly surprising, but both Ms. Moore and Ms. Keaton, who can wring flustered comedy out of the mildest provocation, deserve better.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Messengers
    Like too many horror pictures, The Messengers becomes more boringly prosaic as it goes along, and there's an 11th-hour plot twist so dumb and poorly articulated that it destroys the movie. That's a shame, because shot for shot, the Pangs might be the most terrifying filmmakers alive.
  6. The Situation
    Exploitation cinema of the most narcoleptic kind.
  7. Fired!
    Feels like a desperate attempt to stretch a flimsy half-hour made-for-cable concept into a feature film.
  8. Puccini for Beginners
    It all looks easy when it's carried off this smoothly. But as any number of stilted duds can attest, applying a Philip Barry or Woody Allen sensibility to 21st-century New Yorkers in their 30s is as delicate a craft as diamond cutting.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Constellation
    If earnestness equaled skill, Constellation would be a classic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    East of Havana
    So much of American pop thrives on a bratty facsimile of courage that when you see the real deal, it's a revelation. East of Havana is the real deal.
  11. In the Pit
    With In the Pit [Rulfo] isn't advancing any totalizing theory, a treatise on transportation or an argument about alienation; he is, rather simply and elegantly, revealing the secret human face of a seemingly inhuman world.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tazza: The High Rollers
    Bet on Tazza to entertain; you can't lose.
  13. An Unreasonable Man
    Its ideological leanings are evident and unsurprising, but more screen time for Mr. Nader's pre-2000 (or pre-post-2000) adversaries would have made a richer film.
  14. Room 314
    Like most films of this type, Room 314 demands a great deal from its performers, not all of whom withstand the intense scrutiny. Fortunately, the action is bookended by four of the best.
  15. Blood and Chocolate
    Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is "Romeo and Juliet" with fewer manners and more exotic dentition.
  16. Catch and Release
    Although I find the term "chick flick" odious, I imagine that Columbia Pictures regards Catch and Release as exactly that, although there are signs that Ms. Grant was reaching for something more layered and subtle than the usual fairy-tale formula
  17. Epic Movie
    The humor is coarse and occasionally funny. The archly bombastic score, by Edward Sheamur, is the only thing you might call witty. But happily, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard show up, as the White Bitch and Aslo the Lion, to add some easy, demented class.
  18. Smokin' Aces
    A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others.
  19. Seraphim Falls
    Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shockproof
    While Shockproof”will inspire more groans than gasps, it's essential viewing for fans of Mr. Fuller and Mr. Sirk.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    G.I. Jesus
    May be a mixed bag, but it is so impressive in so many ways that it demands to be taken seriously. It's a black comedy about a returning Iraq war veteran named Jesús (Joe Arquette) that aims for an absurd, satirical tone (think "Dr. Strangelove" by way of "Coming Home") but rarely hits the mark.
  22. From Other Worlds
    A limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous.
  23. China Blue
    A heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China.
  24. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    If it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, "a typical German story," the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Hitcher
    The movie genuflects toward pop depth in a scene where Grace sprawls on a motel bed watching Alfred Hitchcock’s "Birds," another thriller about implacable, undefined evil, but there’s a difference between refusing to give viewers the answers and having nothing to say. For all its death-metal vigor, The Hitcher falls into the latter camp.
  26. The Italian
    There is something slightly magical about the lighting, almost as if this were a fantasy land from which Vanya might actually make an escape. This sense of unreality, of magical thinking and wishing, carries the story and Vanya through a remarkable journey.
  27. Mafioso [re-release]
    The movie is at once a giddy mixture of farce, satire and opera buffa and a closely observed drama of social dislocation and cultural confusion.
  28. Regular Lovers
    While the film’s desperately sad finale indicates that Philippe Garrel knows the truth of '68 better than most and might have suffered a crisis in faith in the years since, this magnificent film is itself proof that all was not lost.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alone with Her
    In the end, the characters seem less archetypal than vague, and aside from its sophisticated presentation, Alone With Her doesn't differ all that much from its template: the late-’80s and early-’90s Fill-In-the-Blanks-From-Hell movies that followed in the wake of "Fatal Attraction," many of whose elements (including the heroine’s inquisitive, doomed best friend) Mr. Nicholas revives almost verbatim.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Mr. Jacobs's approach is descended from a long line of minimalist filmmakers, from Jacques Tati ("Monsieur Hulot's Holiday") up through Jim Jarmusch ("Mystery Train"), but The GoodTimesKid dances, like Diaz, in its own sweet style. It doesn't get to the point because getting there is the point.
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