The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Farmageddon
    Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.
  2. Daylight
    Not one for climactic endings or predictable histrionics, the director, David Barker (who wrote the script with Ms. Meierhans and Mr. Godere), sticks to the stylistic template of his debut feature, "Afraid of Everything," which was filmed in 1999. Preferring the tease over the tell, his films coax us into looking beneath the surface. What we find is mostly up to us.
  3. Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    The impalement is a nice touch. The death by wood chipper, pretty sweet. But the best bit of comedy in the ridiculously gory Tucker and Dale vs. Evil eviscerates the field of psychology with no bloodshed at all.
  4. The Optimists
    It would be comforting to imagine that The Optimists, Goran Paskaljevic's viciously funny gloss of Voltaire's "Candide," was a site-specific satire of this Serbian director's homeland in the post-Milosevic era.
  5. My Joy
    The world of My Joy is grim, though the experience of watching it and piecing together its fragmented story strands is anything but. It's suspenseful, mysterious, at times bitterly funny, consistently moving and filled with images of a Russia haunted both by ghosts and the living dead.
  6. Young Adult
    Shorter than a bad blind date and as sour as a vinegar Popsicle, Young Adult shrouds its brilliant, brave and breathtakingly cynical heart in the superficial blandness of commercial comedy.
  7. Cold Fish
    A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity and dead-eyed manipulation, Cold Fish charts the twisted alliance of two tropical-fish salesmen with baleful glee.
  8. Gravity
    For all of Mr. Cuarón’s formal wizardry and pictorial grandeur, he is a humanist at heart.
  9. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.
  10. Damn!
    Mr. Fisher-Cohen captures Mr. McMillan's transformation from a guy with a funny look and line into someone who believes his own hype and misconstrues his Warholian 15 minutes for widespread popularity and influence. It's a dismaying portrait and, here in the YouTube age, a direct hit.
  11. The Grey
    It's a fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it.
  12. Weekend
    There is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat. Weekend, Andrew Haigh's astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film.
  13. Revenge of the Electric Car
    In the end, Revenge of the Electric Car is a slick, enjoyable valentine to a retooling industry. This optimistic film lacks the outrage of the earlier work, but that's O.K. A movement needs its triumphs too.
  14. Rid of Me
    An ingenious black comedy written and directed by James Westby, comes at you like a horror movie before settling down into something quieter but equally skin crawling.
  15. Benda Bilili!
    Benda Bilili! is brutally real, a document of willpower that shows not only the magic of transcendence - which may be fleeting - but also the transformation of aspiring to it, every struggling step of the way.
  16. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive is anything but the clichéd fantasy of a blissful mother-child reunion. Although there are hints of joy once they reconnect, the wounds are too deep, and the characters too complex.
  17. Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    Though their quarry eventually appears to be a model of paranoia and prejudice, it's the thrill of the hunt that keeps Resurrect Dead compelling.
  18. Love Exposure
    Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.
  19. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    In many respects Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than 1,000 hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign and grim fall of its subject.
  20. The Three Stooges
    Peter and Bobby Farrelly's thoroughly enjoyable paean to Moe, Larry and Curly and the art of the eye poke.
  21. Inni
    The best concert films achieve a marriage of sound and image that feels effortlessly harmonious, and in that regard Inni, a musical portrait of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, leaves most of its genre in the dust.
  22. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    Painfully stark yet utterly magnetic, You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo presents excerpts from the 2003 interrogation of the 16-year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen accused of killing an American soldier during a firefight in an Afghan village.
  23. Boy
    This unpretentious comic tale of a youngster's growing relationship with a long-absent father has a surprising rhythmic genius: joy juxtaposed with humiliation, silliness with sadness, fantasy with reality, and none of it formulaic. The editing feels fresh, as does the film.
  24. Stuck Between Stations
    There are no easy payoffs in Stuck Between Stations, but the chemistry of its stars is reward enough.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In the Family
    Mr. Wang's slow-reveal psychological drama isn't just a showcase for his excellent ensemble cast. Beautifully modulated and stylistically sui generis, In the Family is also one of the most accomplished and undersold directorial debuts this year.
  26. The Lie
    Comprising small, near-perfect scenes played out largely at dinner tables and on couches, The Lie wonders if it's possible to rewrite lives and remake choices.
  27. Letters from the Big Man
    The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.
  28. A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    It is a crowded, complex crime story that is also a tale of sexual awakening and an understated exercise in kitchen-sink realism. In short - or rather at mesmerizing, necessary length - this film has everything, and is well worth a day of your life.
  29. Footnote
    It is a truism that academic arguments are so passionate because the stakes are so small. Footnote, a wonderful new film from the American-born Israeli director Joseph Cedar, at once affirms this conventional wisdom and calls it into question.
  30. The Yellow Sea
    A rush of a movie from South Korea that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood and offers the haunting image of a man, primitive incarnate, beating other men with an enormous, gnawed-over meat bone.
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