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. Billy Preston: That's the Way God Planned It
    As tough a life as Preston had, the music that buoys this chronicle is a constant source of joy.
  2. A Poet
    The writer and director Simón Mesa Soto skewers with knowing precision a kind of devotion to the creative life — without much of the creating — that renders one useless in the real world. The allure of the image of the tortured artist can be so enticing that it obscures the actual art.
  3. Shuffle
    While some institutions are legitimate, Shuffle, a shocking and confounding new documentary directed by Benjamin Flaherty, lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media “scouts” who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.
  4. Fiume o morte!
    The re-enactment approach may not be as novel as it once was, but it’s still a heady, creative way to excavate layers of buried history in a location that has more than its share.
  5. Exit 8
    Exit 8 is a pip and as fun to watch as it is to mull over.
  6. Wuthering Heights
    It is Goldwyn at his best, and better still, Emily Brontë at hers. Out of her strange tale of a tortured romance Mr. Goldwyn and his troupe have fashioned a strong and somber film, poetically written as the novel not always was, sinister and wild as it was meant to be, far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it.
  7. Lumiere, Le Cinema!
    It’s funny and beautiful and lively.
  8. Departures
    Departures is still tender and winsome, with graphic-novel-style animation lightening the load, but is ultimately punishing in tone. It lives by a truth that might ring familiar for gay men particularly: Humor that cuts deep is a form of survival.
  9. Been Here Stay Here
    Time is slipping away for Tangier Island, just like its shoreline. Been Here Stay Here beautifully captures what it is right now, then asks us to consider what will probably be lost soon.
  10. Up in the Air
    One of the pleasures of Up in the Air is that its actresses share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props
  11. An Education
    If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.
  12. A Single Man
    While A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story.
  13. District 9
    In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).
  14. Police, Adjective
    So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.
  15. A Perfect Getaway
    A B-movie-style throwback that’s consistently diverting and blissfully free of morals and messages, A Perfect Getaway is just the thing for the summertime movie blahs: it’s a genuinely satisfying cheap thrill.
  16. Drag Me to Hell
    Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.
  17. Adventureland
    Somehow the story of a young man's coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.
  18. Let the Right One In
    There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film's most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen.
  19. The Departed
    What helps make The Departed at once a success and a relief isn't that the director of "Kundun," Mr. Scorsese's deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what's at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director's epic importance.
  20. Séraphine
    The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.
  21. The Best of Youth
    Full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel.
  22. Julie & Julia
    Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity -- is easy to miss.
  23. World's Greatest Dad
    With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media's cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death.
  24. Iron Man
    Has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.
  25. Life Is Beautiful
    Benigni effectively creates a situation in which comedy is courage. And he draws from this an unpretentious, enormously likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously. Piety has no place here, nor do tears until the final reel. Life is Beautiful plays by its own rules
  26. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Above all, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a triumph of technique.
  27. Murderball
    The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.
  28. Little Miss Sunshine
    Tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America.
  29. Babel
    In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.
  30. House of Flying Daggers
    A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving.
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