The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,313 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: 9,401 out of 20313
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20313
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20313
20313 movie reviews
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  1. Killing Bono
    What could have been a moderately entertaining short film is yanked to intolerable lengths in Killing Bono, a shapeless rock-music caper that, like its deluded antihero, just doesn't know when to stop.
  2. A Novel Romance
    Steve Guttenberg is probably supposed to be a lovable loser in A Novel Romance, a drab, clumsy film by Allie Dvorin, but he can manage to be merely annoying. Mr. Guttenberg, though, deserves only part of the blame for this unrewarding movie.
  3. Lawless
    There are too many action-movie clichés without enough dramatic purpose, and interesting themes and anecdotes are scattered around without being fully explored. This is weak and cloudy moonshine: it doesn't burn or intoxicate.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps
    Rosenmeier's tendency to insert herself at the center of the story - awkwardly drifting into the frame as she interviews local social workers, carefully inspecting institutions as if she were a high-profile ambassador - at first seems slightly immodest. Gradually, it suggests a deeply unsettling level of self-involvement.
  5. Seducing Charlie Barker
    An intermittently interesting but fatally clichéd comedy of personal and professional suicide.
  6. Red Hook Black
    Red Hook Black crawls forward by means of stilted conversations and vacuous exchanges.
  7. The Pill
    This might be more entertaining if any of the three main characters were at all likable.
  8. The Flowers of War
    Mr. Bale, turning in a respectable if oddly chipper performance under the circumstances, has the unfortunate task of playing a character who doesn't really add up.
  9. Don't Go in the Woods
    The actors are all natural, but no character is developed enough for you to care who is killed next. There's not much suspense, no inventive pacing, no wink-wink irony, no cinematic gimmicks, not much mystery and no awful gore.
  10. Domain
    You really can't hang a drama on a mathematical theory and expect it to serve as a shortcut for storytelling.
  11. Brake
    Brake is a full-scale paranoid nightmare with back-to-back double-whammy endings.
  12. Musical Chairs
    This mawkish rom-com mines class, ethnic and ambulatory boundaries for cheap laughs and cheap-looking visuals.
  13. Bad Fever
    Mr. Defa and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, are united in their disdain for information over mood: as the camera skitters spastically around its troubled schlub, the film becomes a muddy, minimalist moan of desperation.
  14. Reuniting the Rubins
    It's the kind of stuff an amateur screenwriter reaches for when he has nothing original to say, because he's seen it work in other movies. It sure doesn't work here.
  15. Seeking Justice
    Mr. Donaldson has proven deftness with panting plots and knife-edge tension, but this cobbled-together noir does him no justice at all.
  16. Mammuth
    A wearisome mix of miserableness and dark humor.
  17. A Warrior's Heart
    A Warrior's Heart is factory-issue jingoism, yielding no surprises and frightfully few insights.
  18. Sinister
    A twitchy Mr. Hawke builds a persuasive portrait of desperation with little help from the script and despite playing a character who makes so many mistakes he might as well be on a suicide mission.
  19. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    The result is a movie that feels more like a free-market sales pitch than like a critical look at one weapon in the poverty-fighting arsenal that may or may not offer long-term hope.
  20. Putin's Kiss
    Political menace stalks youthful idealism in Putin's Kiss, a portentous, rather creepy documentary that masks its lack of historical context with an atmosphere of accumulating threat.
  21. The Samaritan
    His (Jackson) doleful revenant is in almost every scene, and this hardworking actor seems to know that the film around him should be a light-footed caper instead of a grim noir with a side order of deviance.
  22. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    You can admire what he does without really enjoying it, and two hours and 46 minutes of pulverized architecture is a lot to endure. But in every Michael Bay movie there are at least a few moments of inspired, kinetic absurdity.
  23. Killing Them Softly
    In spite of the golden presence of Brad Pitt as the killer, a level-headed professional named Jackie Cogan, the movie has an agreeably scuzzy, small-time feeling.
  24. The Woods
    With a sturdy indie vibe and pacing that feels like "Portlandia" this film, a series of related sketches, maintains a laconic, deadpan tone that's a nice break from the usual high-volume comedy. But it simply offers endless variations on the same joke.
  25. Blue Like Jazz
    Through it all Mr. Allman, who played the skeevy Tommy on "True Blood," is a pleasant presence but blank. And Don's crisis of faith, which should be the movie's core and engine, is never really convincing. It's spelled out but dramatically inert, lost among the yuks of the Reed kookiness.
  26. High School
    Once the plot has sprung into action, High School is a bumpy ride that takes a few amusing dives but never coheres into anything special.
  27. My Way
    The bloody chaos can be suitably overwhelming, but you're too aware of the whizzing camerawork, helter-skelter editing and bombastic score.
  28. Jack and Diane
    Jack & Diane offers a glaring example of a writer and director, Bradley Rust Gray, unable to trust in the simple strength of his material.
  29. 360
    There's no way to know what went wrong with 360 and whether it was this uninvolving and shallow from the start.
  30. Jack Reacher
    Apart from the car chase, the only real fun in Jack Reacher comes from Mr. Herzog and Robert Duvall, called in near the end for some marvelously gratuitous scenery chewing as a gruff former Marine. They enliven the movie's atmosphere of weary brutality for a few moments, but they also call attention to the dullness of their dramatic surroundings.
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