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. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    The result is a frustratingly superficial look at a smart, driven and sometimes frightened young man who always felt as though he were "racing against time."
  2. The FP
    The film has an effective synthesizer score by George Holdcroft. It also offers some funny bits (a hokey prechampionship workout montage, a ridiculous gunfight), but not enough. And for such a film, its bargain-basement production values and lack of wit unexpectedly prove a greater liability than an asset.
  3. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Heist feels rushed. Many of its points could use elaboration. Its final section is a to-do list delivered in the tone of a high school civics teacher.
  4. Patriocracy
    Brian Malone's documentary Patriocracy feels as if it were made by someone who had been out of the country since the Clinton administration and upon re-entering was shocked at the polarized, dysfunctional state of the federal government.
  5. We the Party
    Other Van Peebleses also populate the movie, and all are serviceable enough as actors; it would be nice to see them in less earnest, more original material.
  6. Surviving Progress
    Like too many short documentaries, it can't do justice to its complex topic or finally to those of us watching. Because, while Surviving Progress puts forth a lot of general advice (stop the deforestation of the Amazon), it offers little in terms of real, practical, graspable solutions. People need hope; moviegoers do too.
  7. Darling Companion
    If you found "Benji the Hunted" unbearably intense or "Marley & Me" a bit too hard-edged, then Darling Companion may be the dog movie for you. On the other hand, if you like to watch cute pooches doing cute stuff on screen, you may be a little disappointed.
  8. Elles
    In case you have forgotten, all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns.
  9. Headhunters
    As black comedy, the film is crude and downright sloppy when compared with the clockwork machinations of the Coen brothers' creations, as it has been since its premiere. Brown's panic is capably rendered, but his ordeals are not worth enduring to the bitter end.
  10. Payback
    You can't help feeling that the movie owed its subject - and its audience - a bit more.
  11. God Bless America
    Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.
  12. Apart
    A brief appearance by Joey Lauren Adams adds a welcome warmth to the standard therapist role, but otherwise all is bewilderment and repetition.
  13. Restless City
    Mr. Dosunmu seems to have directed all his actors to pause before delivering lines, giving a languor to the film that comes to feel studied.
  14. Delicacy
    It's a lightweight romance that occasionally shows a sense of humor but seems afraid to turn it loose.
  15. Pray for Japan
    If making a decent movie required only good intentions, then Pray for Japan would be off and running. As it is, though, this muddled collage of random impressions and personal histories, emerging from last year's destruction of the Tohoku coastline by the earthquake and tsunami, doesn't document a tragedy so much as repeat a mantra.
  16. Jesus Henry Christ
    Whatever it intends, Jesus Henry Christ is not especially funny. There are witticisms galore in both the thematically recurrent imagery and the dialogue, but very few qualify as jokes, and any laughter is hard to come by. Willfully zany would be a more apt description.
  17. 300: Rise of an Empire
    The naval collisions and melees play out in panel-like renderings that are bold and satisfying for the first half-hour but lack the momentum and bombastic je ne sais quoi of “300.”
  18. Four Lovers
    Too lazy and too scared to say anything pertinent about love, society and the human condition, Four Lovers is content to be a pleasant, mildly titillating divertissement with no meaning at all.
  19. God Save My Shoes
    The film takes 70 minutes and a lot of silly chatter to conclude what every woman well knows: wearing hooker heels will have most men eating out of her hand. Or, if she's lucky, licking her aching feet.
  20. The Beat Hotel
    The arts documentarian Alan Govenar takes his turn at burnishing the legend with The Beat Hotel, a mild-mannered primer centered on the cheapo Paris boardinghouse.
  21. Artificial Paradises
    When a small drama sputters to life at the end, it's too late. You've already been lulled into dreamland.
  22. The Face of Love
    That Mr. Posin and Mr. McDuffie have stacked the deck against Nikki would be more irritating if Ms. Bening didn’t immediately make this woman come so satisfyingly alive, breathing believable vitality and at times contradictory emotions into what might have otherwise registered as a blur or cliché.
  23. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Given how little creative wiggle room there is in properties like The Winter Soldier, it’s a minor triumph that the Russos imprint any personality on the movie, which is less a stand-alone work than a part of an ever-expanding multimedia enterprise.
  24. Kids of Today
    This bid to connect clubbing elders with their young counterparts, though, is undercut by a nostalgic insistence that the partying was a lot more fun, wild and meaningful back in the day.
  25. Late Bloomers
    As more characters, including the couple's three children - enter the picture, Late Bloomers loses its narrative thread and becomes so choppy that you have the sense that it was butchered during the editing process. What remains is the skeleton of a story that leads to an abrupt, icky-cute ending.
  26. Madea's Witness Protection
    A comedy that's too late to the Ponzi-scheme party to be topical, and not outrageous enough to take advantage of its own setups.
  27. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    It would be odd not to feel something about Hana and the Brady family, but Inside Hana's Suitcase feels more like a historical teaching aid than like a great movie.
  28. Citizen Gangster
    A good-looking but passionless affair that remains stubbornly aloof from its audience.
  29. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Pleasantly charming but instantly forgettable.
  30. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    Alas, dance films like Wim Wenders's innovative, kinetic "Pina" have now set a high barre, and by comparison the traditional talking-head style of this documentary seems primed for showings on public television.
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