The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    “Dawn” is more than a bunch of occasionally thrilling action sequences, emotional gut punches and throwaway jokes arranged in predictable sequence. It is technically impressive and viscerally exciting, for sure, but it also gives you a lot to think, and even to care, about.
  2. The Untouchables
    Hollywood's latest big-budget, high-concept, mass-market reworking of material not entirely fresh, has more endings than Beethoven's Fifth, but it's also packed with surprises, not the least being that it's a smashing work. It's vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.
  3. IMAX: Hubble 3D
    Dazzling to look at of course. But such ponderous, cliché-heavy narration.
  4. Kokomo City
    Most important, Daniella, Koko, Liyah and Dominique provide a record of their own extraordinary lives, one that resonates with clarity and compassion.
  5. Trolösa
    This attenuated two-and-a-half-hour reflection on marriage, adultery, parenthood and the casualties of sexual warfare unfolds like a brooding autobiographical epilogue to Mr. Bergman's much stormier 1973 masterpiece, "Scenes From a Marriage."
  6. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    Its subject matter is intrinsically upsetting.
  7. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    The access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable, and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant of the 20th century.
  8. Affliction
    Succeeds in finding something larger than one man's misery. It turns dark truthfulness into the cinematic sentiment most worth celebrating this season.
  9. Praise
    Praise will stick with you. It's more than worthy of its title.
  10. Hold Back the Dawn
    An amazingly poignant picture, rich in humor, heart and subtle ironies.
  11. Ghost Elephants
    Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.
  12. Hustlers
    The spirit of Hustlers is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.
  13. Let the Sunshine In
    Ms. Binoche, effortlessly charismatic and ruthlessly unvain, has no investment in the character’s likability. She and Ms. Denis could not care less what you think of her. Let the Sunshine In commits itself to taking Isabelle on her own terms. The challenge, for her and for the audience, is to figure out what those terms are.
  14. Life of Pi
    The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes - or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all.
  15. Let Me In
    The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.
  16. 108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Patiently photographed by Carlos Vásquez, who bestows the same gentle attention on grainy snapshots and the beautifully ruined face of an aging drag queen, 108 peels back layers of delusion and dishonesty.
  17. Metalhead
    It taps into something universal, and very precious, about loss, art and adolescent rebellion.
  18. Return to Dust
    China’s leadership has a history of suppressing art that spotlights the failings of its ruling class and ideology, which is exactly what Li’s film does, with a script that feels only occasionally overwritten. That he succeeds without making it feel like homework — which is to say beautifully, humanely — is presumably what made the film so threatening.
  19. Fences
    Even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — Fences is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play.
  20. Chats perchés
    One can never get enough of this prodigiously talented octogenarian artist and his bestiary.
  21. Kimi
    However scary that world and however freaky Angela’s situation, Soderbergh never lets the movie get too heavy. Even as the vibe shifts and the atmosphere grows more ominous, he maintains a lightness of touch and a visual playfulness that keeps the movie securely in the realm of pop pleasure.
  22. The Witness
    A re-creation of the night, with an actress playing the screaming victim while Mr. Genovese observes, is harrowing.
  23. Twinless
    Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.
  24. Miss Bala
    A first-rate art-house thriller, Miss Bala tells the strange, seemingly impossible story of a Mexican beauty queen who becomes the accidental pawn of a drug cartel. It's an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren't so deadly serious.
  25. Conclave
    With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.
  26. Mother
    The hard-pounding heart of Mother, Ms. Kim is a wonderment. Perched on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy, her delivery gives the narrative -- which tends to drift, sometimes beguilingly, sometimes less so -- much of its momentum.
  27. Free Willy
    How each frees the other is the stuff of Free Willy, which is as engaging as such films can be without offering rude surprises.
  28. Keep the Lights On
    Its subject is not addiction or ambition, or even love in a conventional romantic sense, but rather the more elusive and intriguing matter of intimacy: how it grows, falters and endures over time.
  29. Fill the Void
    What the film makes clear, with unfailing sensitivity and wry humor, is that for Shira and her family the ordinary arrangements of living are freighted with moral and spiritual significance.
  30. Hermia & Helena
    The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.
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