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. How About You ...
    Appeal[s] to the delicate palates of an audience that craves the movie equivalent of tea and biscuits: stiff upper lips conceal hearts of gold, and all psychological conflicts are resolved with tearful confessions of vulnerability.
  2. Delhi-6
    Delhi-6 can be maddeningly vague, which robs its ending -- a finale as joltingly (melo)dramatic as any in Bollywood -- of the impact it intends.
  3. Explicit Ills
    It's a beautiful message: surely there's no arguing with "Hey, hey, ho, ho, poverty has got to go!" But there is much to argue with, and much to regret, about a film whose director thinks he needs to drop an anvil on our heads when art would suffice.
  4. Lifelines
    Starts promisingly, with a sharp comedic bite and genuine compassion for this fraught family dynamic, but soon gives way to the kind of compressed, schematic psychodrama endemic to (if no more welcome on) the stage.
  5. Offshore
    Though not without its charms -- the scenes in Mumbai are comically chaotic -- Offshore might have raised more chuckles when it was made, in 2006, than in the economic chill of 2009. And not only in Michigan.
  6. Unmistaken Child
    The beauty of the landscape and the monk’s sweetness, humility and good humor evoke a plane of existence, at once elevated and austere, that is humbling to contemplate. That said, Unmistaken Child offers no scholarly perspective on Tibetan Buddhism and leaves fundamental questions unanswered.
  7. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Perhaps because the music is so good, with its purity of tone and dazzling rhythmic precision, the flaws of the surrounding movie become all the more obvious.
  8. Off Jackson Avenue
    The lives of Olivia, Tomo, Milot and Joey converge in a climactic chase sequence as frantic as a Keystone Cops movie. By this time, grim realism has curdled into bleakly absurdist farce.
  9. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
    It’s disappointing, though, to see that his work, while it’s become more polished, has remained essentially self-indulgent and superficial despite the big themes of racism and identity that it takes on.
  10. Casi divas
    As the film picks up speed it also accrues a socially progressive agenda. If only this were half as well developed as the female leads.
  11. Tickling Leo
    The film’s rich performances, in which every shade of every character’s emotions registers, can go only so far to camouflage the glaring lapses in a drama that often confuses hints and allusions with coherent storytelling.
  12. The Painter Sam Francis
    It’s a well-meaning mishmash that wouldn’t pass muster as an episode of “American Masters.”
  13. Fatal Promises
    It lacks focus and adds little to the awareness of the subject that even a casual follower of the news has already acquired.
  14. Fuel
    If you can resist the urge to run for the exit, you may leave the theater feeling a lot more hopeful than when you went in.
  15. Harmony and Me
    Despite the film’s sketchy aesthetic and barely animate lead, its tone is carefully contrived: I’ll wager no one in your circle is as dryly funny or spontaneously surreal as Harmony’s nonsupport group.
  16. Chelsea on the Rocks
    An enraptured fantasia of high times at the hotel, the film is so intoxicated with the Chelsea’s bohemian mystique it virtually consumes itself.
  17. Adventures of Power
    Sprinkled with moderately amusing comic moments, but basically your enjoyment of this film will be proportional to your tolerance for the one-joke phenomenon of air drumming.
  18. Peter and Vandy
    More a designer frame for actors than nourishing entertainment. Like the Chinese food the leads are always arguing over, the story leaves you hungry for more.
  19. Bam gua nat
    Korean director Hong Sang-soo unleashes yet another emotionally stunted antihero in Night and Day, a rambling study of male arrested development.
  20. Killing Kasztner
    The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.
  21. Skin
    Alas, Mr. Fabian, directing his first feature-length fiction film, uses a club whenever a feather would do. He also mishandles the actors, in particular Mr. Neill and Ms. Okonedo, both of whom have been incomparably better elsewhere.
  22. Turning Green
    Ends up stranded in the wilderness between comedy and rushed, halfhearted melodrama.
  23. Oh My God
    The film, which Mr. Rodger directed, wrote, produced and photographed on location in nearly two dozen countries, is the documentary equivalent of a spiritually angled coffee-table book of world travels
  24. Mammoth
    Mr. Moodysson has never met a pleasure he didn’t want to punish.
  25. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    While watching Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done you might be tempted to murmur, “My Werner, My Werner, What Have Ye Done.”
  26. Ricky
    The deeper Ricky plunges into allegory, the shakier its grasp of the material.
  27. Tano da morire
    An inexplicable multiple award winner, To Die for Tano left me more perplexed than pleased. But then I don’t really get Roberto Benigni either.
  28. Blood Done Sign My Name
    A curious, somewhat ungainly movie. But it is also rich and fascinating. At times you think you are watching a clumsy stage pageant superimposed on a documentary; it’s so stiff, and yet at the same time so real.
  29. Kimjongilia
    These harrowing tales are reason enough to see the movie. But Ms. Heikin wants to provide a total experience, so she adds in propaganda films, her own animated presentation of Korean history and, most noticeably, a pair of female dancers… It’s as bad an idea as it sounds.
  30. Dancing Across Borders
    Offered only hints of life away from the barre or of Sy’s relationship with his coolly poised benefactress, viewers will see either a very fortunate young man or a beautiful protégé, dancing as fast as he can to please everyone but himself.
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