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. The Well Digger's Daughter
    There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.
  2. Rites of Spring
    The cinematographer, Carl Herse, knows his way around genre staples like claustrophobic cornfields, animal carcasses, porcelain-doll heads, voyeur perspectives, decrepit interiors and, of course, the time-honored serial-killer wall, with thumbtacked clippings and photographs about old murders. Nevertheless, Rites of Spring yields a slender bounty.
  3. Assassin's Bullet
    For the thickheaded thriller Assassin's Bullet the Bulgarian actress Elika Portnoy dreamed up a story with three roles for herself and fails to convince in any of them.
  4. Why Stop Now
    Once Why Stop Now? has exhausted its bag of tricks, there is a screeching of brakes as it approaches the edge of the cliff. Having expended all that stamina, the film collapses from exhaustion and settles for an abrupt, feel-good ending that is as perfunctory as it is preposterous.
  5. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    The whole enterprise has a get-off-my-lawn feel; it tries to pass off whining and a rose-colored-glasses view of the past as insight.
  6. Little White Lies
    With the exception of Marie Little White Lies focuses mostly on the men: whiny, strutting little boys whose exasperated, tight-lipped wives put up with their bad behavior and sometimes have to act like mommies.
  7. 2016: Obama's America
    Mr. D'Souza stumbles when interviewing George Obama, the president's half-brother, an activist who voluntarily lives amid squalor in Nairobi, Kenya. "Obama has not done anything to help you," Mr. D'Souza says. "He's taking care of me; I'm part of the world," George Obama replies.
  8. Bringing Up Bobby
    Despite Ms. Janssen's fine taste in music - it's lovely to hear Jorma Kaukonen's "Genesis" on the soundtrack - her film's downfall was ensured by a leading lady who will always be more credible chasing zombies than the American dream.
  9. The Oranges
    How could a movie starring Hugh Laurie, Oliver Platt, Allison Janney and Catherine Keener go so wrong? That is the mystery behind The Oranges, a dysfunctional-family comedy - excuse the cliché - that backs away in terror from its potentially explosive subject.
  10. Vamps
    Aging is probably the real theme here, but it's approached sidelong and has no punch. Still, only the nostalgia has any real conviction.
  11. The Day
    The Day cycles through bursts of horrific violence only to end much as it begins: static, hollow and vague.
  12. [REC] 3: Genesis
    With slapstick smothering the scares, [REC 3] is further marred by a plot in which the muted Catholicism of its antecedents is turned up to full blast.
  13. Serving Up Richard
    The story, too, undercuts the actors.
  14. Last Vegas
    If you approach Last Vegas expecting an emotionally engaging, in any way surprising, moviegoing experience, you will be disappointed. But if you want the equivalent of an old-fashioned television variety show — a Very Special Evening with Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, Michael Douglas and Kevin Kline — you might not have such a bad time.
  15. Backwards
    Pairing a dull romance with an even duller sport (at least as represented here), this cliché-ridden vanity project is more suited to the ABC Family channel than to the inside of a movie theater.
  16. Mulberry Child
    The film's subject matter is epochal, its delivery less so.
  17. Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy
    The average viewer might understandably find that pieces in the puzzle of Mr. Lombardi remain missing.
  18. Divergent
    Ms. Roth’s prose style is good enough and Tris appealing enough that, at least in the book, it’s easy to breeze past the plot holes. It’s harder to ignore those flaws in the movie, partly because the director, Neil Burger (“Limitless”), gives you little to hang onto — beauty, thrills, a visual style.
  19. Blinky & Me
    Mr. Magierski patches together the storytelling, delivered at home and during a visit to Poland, rather clumsily. His general effort to take the children's naïve point of view has amateurish and cutesy results.
  20. Switch
    Exhaustive and exhausting, the new energy documentary Switch is so monotonous it makes "An Inconvenient Truth" look like "Armageddon."
  21. The Yakuza and the Mermaid
    If wallowing in the creative hiccups of tortured scribblers is your moviegoing goal, there are much better options.
  22. Heroine
    Pulpy but attenuated, Heroine tries to do too much: deliver an exposé of the back-stabbing film business while also drawing a portrait of a woman caught in its vice.
  23. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    Unable to shape these events into a dramatic structure, the director, Camilo Vila, resorts to a meandering tale of random indignities suffered by a lead so bland he comes across less as principled than as stupendously naïve.
  24. Trade of Innocents
    Part infomercial, part public-service announcement, Trade of Innocents carries such a suffocating human-rights burden that it never had much chance of becoming an actual movie. Yes, child trafficking is horrific; but embedding your raise-the-alarm mission in a film this inept runs the risk of arousing more amusement than activism.
  25. The Double Steps
    It's never clear how Mr. Lacuesta, whose use of other art-cinema conventions (like nonprofessional performers) risks cliché, sees these parts working together or what he wants you to take from them. He's so committed to non-transparency as a principle that he locks you out.
  26. Avé
    No one can really run away - that's the animating principle of the Bulgarian film Avé, which is placid and unchallenging, with tiny eruptions of striking purpose.
  27. Special Forces
    Dedicated to French servicemen and wartime journalists, Special Forces aims to inspire but ends up wallowing in melodrama.
  28. Gayby
    Inoffensive and low-key, Gayby is too diffuse to have much pop when it comes to the topics at hand: love and friendship, and how unconventional modern permutations might help rewrite the script of romance.
  29. Hotel Noir
    To succeed as more than a study in artifice, a film - especially one steeped in fatalism - needs to feel real.
  30. Least Among Saints
    Though both actors deliver performances more credible than the plot that frames them, their authenticity only highlights the script's affection for improbable coincidences and an ending even Garry Marshall might consider too pat.
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