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. Everest
    Though it assembles a first-rate cast in a story taken from reality, Everest feels icebound and strangely abstract, lacking the gravity of genuine tragedy or the swagger of first-rate adventure.
  2. Masterminds
    The full-on goofiness is not reliably buoyant; this is an intermittently enjoyable but often choppy comic ride.
  3. For No Good Reason
    For No Good Reason is less revealing than a standard hourlong television tribute might have been... But there is enough of the man and artist here to rekindle interest and appreciation in his often disturbing pictures and an understanding of what motivated them.
  4. Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America
    Despite the glorious singing heard in archival footage from various periods of her career, the film is frustratingly sketchy.
  5. God Help the Girl
    Belle and Sebastian fans will be fully sated; everyone else might feel as if they’d consumed a meal consisting entirely of meringue.
  6. The Interview
    The Interview is pretty much what everyone thought it would be before all the trouble started: a goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce, propelled not by any particular political ideas but by the usual spectacle of male sexual, emotional and existential confusion.
  7. Knight of Cups
    In Knight of Cups, as in “To the Wonder,” the deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.
  8. Aloha
    Aloha has too much story and yet not quite enough, and its rhythms are rushed and pokey. It skips like a record playing in the bed of a pickup truck.
  9. They Came Together
    Mr. Wain, who made a delightful comedy with “Role Models” and a cult favorite with “Wet Hot American Summer,” has opted to deliver a series of hit-and-miss sketch-comedy bits rather than a fully realized movie that might have gutted contemporary rom-com clichés rather than just weakly aping them.
  10. Generation War
    As television drama, Generation War is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.
  11. Life After Beth
    Written and directed by Jeff Baena, this first feature feels sloppily plotted and uncertain of its destination. Seasoned actors are left to yell pointlessly at one another, while Beth and the zombie angle slowly decompose.
  12. The Killing Fields
    Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.
  13. The Pretty One
    The Pretty One is intermittently charming, occasionally touching and entirely lacking in credibility.
  14. Band of Sisters
    A sweeping but disorganized and sometimes monotonous exploration.
  15. Hellion
    Writer and director Kat Candler struggles to shape an undercooked story into compelling drama.
  16. HairBrained
    Unfortunately, the movie lacks strong enough players to fill in subtext to Mr. Kent’s formulaic setups, and the story flounders once Ms. Posey is out of the picture.
  17. Odd Thomas
    At once comic, tragic and goofily romantic, and resting too often on Odd’s clarifying narration, this young-adult lark breaches the nonsense barrier with some regularity.
  18. Repentance
    A movie of modest means that nevertheless offers a fairly cohesive story and at least one standout performance. It may underplay an idea laden with potential, but at least that notion is present.
  19. Rob the Mob
    Vividly painting Queens in the early 1990s as a landscape of crack and graffiti, the filmmakers go on to smother any menace with a swoony-upbeat soundtrack and an “oh, those kooky kids” tone.
  20. 13 Sins
    13 Sins is occasionally inventive but mostly uninvolving.
  21. Life is Strange
    [A] useful, if slightly redundant, oral history.
  22. Better Living Through Chemistry
    Better Living Through Chemistry never becomes a full-fledged film noir. It reads as an unabashedly positive infomercial for gorging on the apparently risk-free, liberating products of Big Pharma.
  23. Alive Inside
    Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.
  24. Cooties
    Though Cooties has a reasonable amount of laughs and frights, and though real teachers may find it an apt allegory for the zombielike charges in their classrooms, it’s not really funny enough to achieve grown-up cachet, and it’s too ugly and violent for younger viewers.
  25. Hank: 5 Years from the Brink
    It’s informative but not enlightening, and Mr. Berlinger packs in chattering news clips and a score that’s audible under the interview.
  26. The Fault in Our Stars
    Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy.
  27. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.
  28. The Postman Always Rings Twice
    Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.
  29. Alphaville
    What it comes to is simply that the dazzle of Mr. Godard's cinematic style is not matched by the hackneyed idea of a robot society that is expounded in the script.
  30. The Attorney
    Mr. Song puts his usual big heart into the character, though there aren’t many layers or nuances to the drama. Every scene does its job, tears flowing on cue.
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