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. Dogtooth
    Dogtooth supplies no such explanation and at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it.
  2. Great Directors
    As an interrogator Ms. Ismailos is no Torquemada; she lobs softballs that her subjects genially accept.
  3. Despicable Me
    Despicable Me cannot be faulted for lack of trying. If anything, it tries much too hard, stuffing great gobs of second-rate action, secondhand humor and warmed-over sentiment into every nook and cranny of its relentlessly busy 3-D frames.
  4. The Other Guys
    Raises expectations that it has no real inclination to fulfill. The movie's best bits would stand alone nicely on YouTube, or on Funnyordie.com, the comic video boutique of which Mr. McKay is an owner and where he sometimes dabbles in short-form hilarity.
  5. Ramona and Beezus
    Parents may also be happy to see a movie for children that doesn't involve wizards, vampires or action figures that can be bought in the food court. They should be warned, though, that the price of contemporary realism is a story that includes layoffs, bickering and unpaid bills.
  6. Only When I Dance
    The lack of information about the school, or about any aspect of the two dancers’ lives that doesn’t involve training for and competing in international competitions, can be startling. When another Centro de Dança student, a petite woman, is a winner at the prestigious Prix de Lausanne, we’re stunned. We didn’t even know she was there.
  7. Valhalla Rising
    Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the "Pusher" films and "Bronson" ), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable.
  8. About Baghdad
    The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is distracting. Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.
  9. The Extra Man
    For all its flighty charms, The Extra Man never really lands. It hovers like a hummingbird madly beating its wings to stay aloft.
  10. What's the Matter with Kansas?
    The specific roots of a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement are barely described, as are strategies for liberals seeking to reclaim the state. What's the Matter With Kansas? depicts a groundswell of anger but largely ignores the external forces that helped shape it.
  11. Tales from Earthsea
    Feels a little like a science-fiction Sunday school pageant.
  12. Nanny McPhee Returns
    Neither the dangers of the plot - a dissolute uncle who wants to sell the farm, a father missing in action - nor the forbidding Nanny McPhee herself are as fearsome as they were the first time around.
  13. The Switch
    The first third of The Switch, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is so bizarre that it leads you to wonder if, through some miraculous lack of oversight, the movie will blaze an unpredictable path. No such luck.
  14. RED
    It is possible to have a good time at RED, but it is not a very good movie.
  15. Paranormal Activity 2
    Frozen camera setups and blurry night-vision images raise goose bumps without the assistance of eerie music or showy effects, though the strain of stretching the gimmick to a second movie is palpable.
  16. Down Terrace
    However persuasively acted, this mélange of cinéma vérité, slapstick and murder - whose story has a lot in common with the recent Australian gangster film "Animal Kingdom" - has too many narrative gaps for its pieces to cohere satisfactorily.
  17. Hiding Divya
    While the movie has its heart in the right place, the first-time writer-director Rehana Mirza doesn't yet have the skills to shape the narrative into something moving or revealing.
  18. Daniel and Ana
    This stylistic restraint may help deflect accusations of exploitation (though the film's two pivotal sex scenes both feel uncomfortably extended, the initial crime lasting a squirm-inducing six minutes), but it also impedes our connection with the victims.
  19. The Milk of Sorrow
    The Milk of Sorrow is constrained by a rarefied screenplay and a near-mute central performance.
  20. Bran Nue Dae
    The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.
  21. Devil
    A serviceable burst of high-end hokum, Devil classes up a flimsy, religion-themed plot (by M. Night Shyamalan) with the kind of limber cinematography only someone like Tak Fujimoto can deliver.
  22. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.
  23. Life as We Know It
    It's enough to say that the bland romantic comedy Life as We Know It, in which there is not a single deviation from formula, is well made for its corporate type.
  24. Nowhere Boy
    It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.
  25. Stone
    The results prove disappointing, simultaneously over the top and underwhelming.
  26. Conviction
    It would be easy to dismiss Conviction on the ground that it plays like a made-for-television movie, but the truth is that, as often as not, movies made for the small screen are better than this: braver, darker, more willing to explore odd corners of feeling.
  27. Jackass 3-D
    It just might be that America's favorite jackasses, having played around with sharks in their last big-screen effort ("Jackass Number Two" of course), have this time actually jumped one, and in 3-D no less.
  28. Welcome to the Rileys
    What keeps the film's fragile realism intact are actors who can make even small moments count.
  29. Faster
    Faster, a turgid, ultraviolent parable of revenge and forgiveness, is as muscle-bound as its monosyllabic antihero.
  30. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    A strong filmmaking voice was clearly not called for in an entertainment that has been carefully calibrated for maximum blandness. Mr. Apted is aboard to keep the franchise sailing along or at least afloat, which he does.
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