The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,268 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 4.3 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: 9,377 out of 20268
  2. Mixed: 8,427 out of 20268
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20268
20268 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Invictus
    It’s an exciting sports movie, an inspiring tale of prejudice overcome and, above all, a fascinating study of political leadership.
  2. Avatar
    Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
  3. Crazy Heart
    A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.
  4. The Hurt Locker
    The best nondocumentary American feature made yet about the war in Iraq.
  5. A Serious Man
    The story is at once hilarious and horrific, its significance both self-evident and opaque. The same could be said of most of the Coen brothers’ movies, in which human existence and the attempt to find meaning in it are equally futile, if also sometimes a lot of fun. (For us, at least.)
  6. Sita Sings the Blues
    And the ingenuity of “Sita” — is dazzling. Not busy, or overwhelming, or eye-popping. Just affecting, surprising and a lot of fun.
  7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    It’s a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement.
  8. Where the Wild Things Are
    With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.
  9. Killer of Sheep
    The result is an American masterpiece, independent to the bone.
  10. Pan's Labyrinth
    A swift and accessible entertainment, blunt in its power and exquisite in its effects.
  11. The Damned United
    The rare sports movie that deals with -- indeed positively relishes -- humiliation and disappointment.
  12. Ponyo
    The latest masterwork from Hayao Miyazaki, places emphasis on the natural world, its tumults and fragility.
  13. There Will Be Blood
    The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.
  14. No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.
  15. Summer Hours
    In spite of its modest scale, tactful manner and potentially dowdy subject matter, is packed nearly to bursting with rich meaning and deep implication.
  16. Goodbye Solo
    Grace is also what defines Mr. Bahrani's filmmaking. I can't think of anything else to call the quality of exquisite attention, wry humor and wide-awake intelligence that informs every frame of this almost perfect film.
  17. WALL-E
    The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E -- in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen -- is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.
  18. Synecdoche, New York
    To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.
  19. Children of Men
    Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.
  20. The Lives of Others
    The easy, complacent distance that informs much historical filmmaking is almost entirely absent from this supremely intelligent, unfailingly honest movie.
  21. Ratatouille
    A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.
  22. The Headless Woman
    Brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie.
  23. Brokeback Mountain
    Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn.
  24. Knocked Up
    An instant classic, a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.
  25. Letters from Iwo Jima
    A few scenes serve as hinges joining this movie to "Flags of Our Fathers." While Letters From Iwo Jima seems to me the more accomplished of the two films -- by which I mean that it strikes me as close to perfect -- the two enrich each other, and together achieve an extraordinary completeness.
  26. Million Dollar Baby
    With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.
  27. The Queen
    A sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.
  28. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.
  29. Duplicity
    Superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time.
  30. The Bourne Ultimatum
    Mr. Greengrass knows how to do his job, and there’s no one in Hollywood right now who does action better, who keeps the pace going so relentlessly, without mercy or letup, scene after hard-rocking scene.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »