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. Take Care
    The film’s director, Liz Tuccillo — a former writer for “Sex and the City,” an author of “He’s Just Not That Into You” and now developing a sitcom for Lauren Graham — is predictably facile with comic rhythms, though her dialogue tilts toward the glib, and her characterizations toward the familiar.
  2. Red Knot
    Lacking a formal script, the actors struggle with a plot so elemental that it might have played more persuasively as a silent-screen melodrama.
  3. Remote Area Medical
    Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.
  4. Match
    The movie pulls the rug out from under the audience several times, but in the end there is not much underneath.
  5. The Foxy Merkins
    Behind its transgressive affectations, The Foxy Merkins is a sweet, playful divertissement.
  6. Murder of a Cat
    The film, a first feature from Gillian Greene (wife of the director Sam Raimi, a producer here), has to settle for “sometimes amusing comedy” when it was probably aiming for “cult hit.”
  7. The Historian
    The film ultimately lands uneasily on the line between inside and insular, recalling an old saw about universities: The fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small.
  8. Little Accidents
    The net effect of the messy bedroom sheets, the marital squabbling and lachrymose, emotional bloodletting is to turn a tragedy into an atmospheric backdrop for three isolated souls, all of whom might have started out considerably less lonely if the movie had a firmer grasp on the world in which they live.
  9. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Employing bursts of Bach and English-language narration, this lulling, informative documentary never fully grapples with its topic’s complexity.
  10. The Intern
    Mr. De Niro owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth, and is staring into the camera and right at you.
  11. Kidnap
    The greatest strength of Kidnap is that it casts the maternal instinct as a primordial will to enact violence.
  12. The Jungle Book
    While this The Jungle Book is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment.
  13. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    The movie has a nationalistic, didactic flavor and a tiresome devotion to spectacle. Even the climax is staged two ways.
  14. Black November
    There’s a go-for-broke vigor to the way Mr. Amata cuts to the conflict in most scenes, but the heavy-handedness across the board imposes some significant limitations. Mr. Amata, though, pulls no punches with his ending.
  15. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    The film delivers the standard upbeat message about family, along with one particularly outstanding and incongruous cameo that — sorry — won’t be spoiled here.
  16. Deli Man
    This documentary goes heavy on the schmaltz, in all senses.
  17. Ode to My Father
    Little more than an archipelago of historical set pieces linked by a syrupy causeway of sentiment, JK Youn’s Ode to My Father may have slain them in South Korea, but its packaged pain and bullet-point structure are likely to leave Western audiences cold.
  18. Effie Gray
    The cinematic equivalent of a Brazilian wax, the movie omits much of the story’s most interesting material to create something that’s been smoothly denatured.
  19. The Wrecking Crew
    Mostly, it’s hagiography, with stars like Cher and Brian Wilson used as character witnesses to the players’ greatness.
  20. Pete's Dragon
    This sentimental, nearly genteel movie demonstrates there’s a world of difference between invoking magic and conjuring it.
  21. 20 Once Again
    Mining deeper emotions from the fanciful premise doesn’t work out for the film, which gets tied down to a generic musical-contest subplot. It’s a workable comedy that’s sunk by its attempts to impersonate something else too.
  22. All the Wilderness
    Mr. Johnson doesn’t give fateful weight to the breadcrumbs that guide James forward. Glancing encounters and faltering conversations unfold lightly and with a visual seductiveness that the cinematographer, Adam Newport-Berra, crescendos in the film’s drifting, transformative middle section.
  23. Concussion
    While Concussion has some fine things going for it, notably science and Will Smith, it lacks the exciting, committed filmmaking that rises to the level of its outrageous topic.
  24. Rings
    This film doesn’t find any fresh ways to make you jump out of your seat. Ms. Lutz is appealing, though, and fans of the franchise will probably be pleased with the elaboration. Too many horror sequels are content merely to recycle what worked the first time.
  25. I Am Michael
    While intellectually laudable, Mr. Kelly’s determined objectivity is so distancing that it takes an inherently intriguing story (based on a 2011 article in The New York Times Magazine) and sucks the life out of it.
  26. The Summer of Sangaile
    It’s all very heady and voluptuous, but it’s also painfully superficial.
  27. October Gale
    Ms. Clarkson and Mr. Speedman do what they can with their underwritten and overly contrived roles... Late in the game, Tim Roth boats in as Tom, a local with a grudge, and shocks the movie to life by throwing some lightning bolts of his own.
  28. 5 to 7
    The city doesn’t need to be real in a romantic movie, but the feelings must be. Although Mr. Levin tends to embrace clichés and overstatement (Brian’s parents, Arlene and Sam, played by Glenn Close and Frank Langella, are straight out of Yiddish vaudeville), he can also surprise you with delicate touches, a pained look, a wince of recognition.
  29. People Places Things
    As the movie fizzles, Mr. Clement’s endearing performance breathes what little life is left into a movie that, much like the insufferable Charlie, can’t make up its mind about where to go or how to get there.
  30. On the Way to School
    On the Way to School never wavers in its bland uplift.
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