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. Just Before I Go
    Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.
  2. 24 Days
    Mr. Arcady’s reliance on heavy-handed melodrama, on screaming women and on worried-looking men, winds everything so tightly that the anguish plateaus and the characters begin to seem like chess pieces in an argument.
  3. Because I Was a Painter
    As crude as many of these works are, they exert an eerie cumulative power.
  4. The Great Museum
    The Great Museum, in comparison, feels like a cursory guided tour.
  5. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — “art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages” — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.
  6. Misery Loves Comedy
    Misery Loves Comedy, Kevin Pollak’s survey of the opinions of a bunch of professionally funny people, is an evident labor of love and also a work of grating amateurism.
  7. The Water Diviner
    You don’t have to be a historian to wonder about the timing of the opening or a critic to regret that Mr. Crowe has signed onto a preposterous, would-be sweeping historical romance that’s far too slight and silly to carry the weight of real history.
  8. Laugh Killer Laugh
    Laugh Killer Laugh is a tired parody that seems to have been constructed from received notions of noir and mob movies. Even the jazzy score sounds like an affectation.
  9. Kung Fu Killer
    Mr. Chen, who teamed with Mr. Yen for the superior “Bodyguards and Assassins,” scatters references to Hong Kong martial arts classics. But while he has impressive fists of fury in both Mr. Yen and Mr. Wang, Kung Fu Killer lacks the brio and spice of its ancestors.
  10. Adult Beginners
    The three leads remain watchable, but only the sourness in Jake’s face when he moves into Justine’s house hints at the kind of true and complex emotions that, bromide by bromide, this movie insistently denies.
  11. The Forger
    Preposterousness is not necessarily a vice, and plausibility is a weak virtue. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock. So to say that the conceits of The Forger (directed by Philip Martin) are ridiculous isn’t really saying much. It’s also dull, incoherent and drab to look at.
  12. The Age of Adaline
    The director Lee Toland Krieger is good with actors, especially in the expression of a low-key, unforced intimacy.
  13. Little Boy
    The steady performances of Tom Wilkinson, playing a kindly priest, and Emily Watson, an angelic mother, in Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy do little to offset the cloying sweetness of a movie that has the haranguing inspirational tone of a marathon Sunday-school lesson.
  14. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    Mr. Pirozzi’s film is an unsparing and meticulous reckoning of the effects of tyranny on ordinary Cambodians. It is also a rich and defiant effort at recovery, showing that even the most murderous totalitarianism cannot fully erase the human drive for pleasure and self-expression.
  15. 1915
    There might be an engaging film buried beneath the severe dialogue, portentous music and ominous shadows of 1915. But a relentless and heavy-handed script makes the effort to find it seem futile.
  16. Emptying the Skies
    A thoughtful bit of filmmaking, one that at heart is not really about birds at all.
  17. Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2
    You won’t find much offensive in Kevin James’s slick, innocuous vehicle Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. You won’t find much prompting an emotional reaction in general, so familiar are the jokes and situations. If Mr. James’s character thinks of safety first, so does this movie, to its extreme detriment.
  18. Salad Days
    An enlightening documentary.
  19. The Human Experiment
    It may leave many bases uncovered (a section on groundbreaking European legislation is inadequately explained), but it will also leave you looking a lot more closely at what you put on your skin, in your mouth and underneath your sink.
  20. True Story
    The real story of Christian Longo and Michael Finkel might be a fascinating and disturbing tale of crime, curiosity and journalistic ethics, but that’s not what this movie is.
  21. Tangerines
    The film, beautifully shot and cleanly edited, has the economy of a short story, unfolding in a mood of slightly sentimental masculine stoicism.
  22. Alex of Venice
    What’s missing here is the sting of revelation, something less comforting than the story’s melodramatic turns and more worthy of Ms. Winstead’s performance, which is as natural as life.
  23. Child 44
    The most floridly enjoyable voices belong to Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, last seen together speaking Brooklynese in “The Drop.” In that film, Mr. Hardy dropped his r’s like a champ. Here he lands heavily on the aitches and contracts the words “it is” into the letter Z. “Zimpossible,” he says. “Zdifficult.” As for Child 44: Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.
  24. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    Antarctic Edge illustrates its points effectively, providing vivid evidence of how shrinking ice at the South Pole affects climates across the globe.
  25. Below Dreams
    Ms. Bradley’s debut feature flutters along with inoffensive lyricism and a kindly eye, but it’s not enough to bring off a full-fledged portrayal that holds together.
  26. Beyond the Reach
    Any wilderness ordeal has to help some character clarify something, and for Ben it’s his relationship with his girlfriend (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence), which gives the film a modest side interest. But mostly this one is for fans of desert scenery and of Mr. Douglas in cranky, crazy mode.
  27. The Dead Lands
    As it dives into this infrequently depicted culture, Mr. Fraser’s film is caught shuttling uneasily between speeches and action.
  28. Félix And Meira
    Tiny advances in seduction — like a direct gaze, or the eventual removal of that wig — assume the power of full-on sexual collisions, and Ms. Yaron, with her restlessly darting eyes, easily conveys Meira’s sensual deprivation.
  29. Closer to the Moon
    Mr. Caranfil never manages to negotiate the thickets of ambiguity, tragedy and bleak comedy, although the problem may be that someone behind the scenes just didn’t see the profit in a no-exit narrative.
  30. Monkey Kingdom
    It’s hard to imagine what message children will take away from this film other than that monkeys are just like characters in a fictional Disney movie, which they are not.
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