The New York Times' Scores

For 20,324 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:
20324 movie reviews
  1. It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.
  2. Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.
  3. What Mr. Hanson has done with 8 Mile is make a pop movie instead of a movie about pop. There's nothing disreputable about this.
  4. Veers between the light naturalism of American television and the pulsing melodrama of Bollywood entertainment.
  5. The story, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is pretentious and banal, closer to "Vanilla Sky" than "Notorious." But Mr. De Palma proves that, in the absence of insight or ideas, some amazing things are possible. It is possible, for instance, to be entranced by a movie without believing it for a second.
  6. Loaded down with rhetorical devices -- writer and director, Marco Amenta, drowns it in a flood of sentimental effusions.
  7. Polished, well-structured film.
  8. The filmmakers build an argument that is both intellectual and emotional, concentrating as much on the forensic evidence as on Ms. Rosario's passionate commitment to finding justice for her son.
  9. The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.
  10. There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.
  11. The movie's unhurried rhythm eventually works a quiet spell, and after a while you find yourself settling back, adjusting to the film's bucolic metabolism and appreciating its eye and ear for detail.
  12. A listless and desultory affair.
  13. May not be a great piece of filmmaking, but its power comes from its soul's-eye view of how well-meaning patronizing masked a social injustice, at least as represented by this case.
  14. Captures the true spirit of the holiday. It's mildly sentimental, unabashedly consumerist (with anything-but-subliminal advertisements for McDonald's hamburgers and Nestlé candy tucked inside), studiously inoffensive and completely disposable.
  15. Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's.
  16. Like a soft drink that's been sitting open too long: it's too much syrup and not enough fizz.
  17. It is best appreciated as an immersion in a three-dimensional toyland outfitted with enough whimsical gadgetry to fill a thousand playrooms.
  18. Tossed by successive waves of floridity and biliousness, Food of Love finally washes up on the shores of camp.
  19. The upshot is a whopper of an ending that is as silly as it is satisfying.
  20. Rarely has a movie worked so hard to be so inconsequential.
  21. At its best when it forsakes earnest psychological exposition for magic realism, when, instead of trying to explain Kahlo's life, it conjures the moods and sensations that fed her art.
  22. The essential humanity of the characters shines through, giving face and form to a subculture the movies have largely neglected.
  23. You may be taken by the director's enormous enthusiasm, but the picture doesn't quite work.
  24. An unpretentious, sociologically pointed slice of life.
  25. All the drinking, arguing and brooding, which in lesser hands might have produced oppressive and unvarying dreariness, somehow adds up to a tableau of extraordinary vividness and variety.
  26. One of the juiciest male characters to pop up in an independent film this year.
  27. So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.
  28. Like a documentary version of "Fight Club," shorn of social insight, intellectual pretension and cinematic interest. It also offers a supremely literal-minded version of slapstick.
  29. The adoring and adorable documentary on the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
  30. This is bad cinema and bad history. Ms. Bravo is unstinting in her praise for the omelet and her admiration of the chef, but she refuses to admit that she's walking on eggshells.

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