The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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  1. Ex-Girlfriends
    It is cleverly conceived, well acted and seasoned with blips of mildly acidic wit.
  2. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Mr. Bulger, a former boxer and model before he turned to journalism and then filmmaking, does not let "Behind the Music" sensationalism overwhelm the music itself, which is Mr. Baker's great passion and the only reason anyone should take an interest in him.
  3. Otelo Burning
    Ms. Blecher draws fine performances out of the young actors and, to her credit, sugarcoats nothing.
  4. The Gatekeepers
    If you need reassurance or grounds for optimism about the Middle East, you will not find it here. What you will find is rare, welcome and almost unbearable clarity.
  5. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    The backstage commentary circles around the bailiwick of a production designer and frustrations over Mr. Helnwein's literal interpretations. But they are rarely juicy or pursued in depth, and platitudes abound (with the exception of a matter-of-fact lighting designer named Bambi).
  6. The Mystical Laws
    There is also stultifyingly earnest proselytizing and an absolute humor vacuum. Who conceived this ponderous, quasi-evangelical hokum, anyway?
  7. The King (2012)
    An admiring but restrained documentary about Darko Kralj, a Paralympic shot-putter from Croatia. The film is more about what it takes to overcome adversity and recommit to finding meaning in life, terrain that anyone with a disability has to negotiate, athlete or not.
  8. Rust and Bone
    Rust and Bone is a strong, emotionally replete experience, and also a tour de force of directorial button pushing. Mr. Audiard is a canny showman, adept at manipulating the audience's feelings and expectations with quick edits and well-chosen songs.
  9. Hitchcock
    The movie has its diversions, including Scarlett Johansson's bodacious Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg's wheedling Lew Wasserman. It's fluff. But while its dim fantasies about Hitchcock and the association of genius with psychosis can be written off as silly, they also smack of spiteful jealousy.
  10. The Normals
    The satire - about religion, medicine, TV culture - is larded unevenly, the homage overly obvious.
  11. The Central Park Five
    Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It's also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers - from their arrest through their absolution - it fails to add anything substantively new.
  12. Red Dawn
    In his debut the director, Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator with a long list of credits, handles the low-fi action well, which helps divert attention from the bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics.
  13. Rise of the Guardians
    Works so hard at celebrating wide eyes and naïve joy that it comes close to spoiling its own intermittent wonderfulness.
  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. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Relies too much on rehash and preaching to the choir to kindle a broad-based outrage, but it does make you wonder what really happened on May 24, 1990.
  16. Turning
    Onstage the Johnsons perform Mr. Hegarty's agreeably lush, intimate and often melancholy piano-based songs, accompanied by a string section.
  17. 16 Acres
    A documentary that features forthright interviews with major players and gives a good sense of the infighting and pettiness without getting bogged down in it.
  18. Generation P
    Delivers a brave, head-spinning commentary on the potency of advertising and the seduction of the soul.
  19. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    A well-meaning but inexpertly dramatized account of the roundup of 13,000 Parisian Jews in the summer of 1942.
  20. Hitler's Children
    Quiet, simple and soaked in sorrow, Hitler's Children takes a stripped-down approach to an emotionally sophisticated subject.
  21. 28 Hotel Rooms
    At the very least 28 Hotel Rooms, the first feature written and directed by Matt Ross, is an impressively executed acting exercise for Chris Messina and Marin Ireland.
  22. Price Check
    Once Price Check darkens, it loses its comic footing, along with its nerve, and becomes a wishy-washy potpourri of elements that fail to mesh: backing away from its satirical potential, it sputters toward an evasive and unsatisfying ending. Ms. Posey, however, blithely sails above the fray.
  23. The Comedy
    If you can discern any critical distance or interesting perspective here, or even a good reason to spend 90 minutes in such company, I'm afraid the joke is on you.
  24. First Winter
    The glue holding the film together is Adam Newport-Berra's elegant hand-held cinematography, which captures changing shades of winter and the frightened faces in natural light with an astonishing intensity.
  25. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    There is something to be said for a clear and unblinking recitation of facts, and thankfully Mr. Gibney does a lot of that.
  26. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Despite the slow start Mr. Condon closes the series in fine, smooth style. He gives fans all the lovely flowers, conditioned hair and lightly erotic, dreamy kisses they deserve.
  27. Silver Linings Playbook
    For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.
  28. Anna Karenina
    Mr. Wright's Anna Karenina is different. It is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly - wonderfully - crazy terms.
  29. A Man Vanishes (1967)
    Seemingly banal in its conceit, wildly startling in its execution, it tracks a film crew that, like a detective squad, investigates what became of an ordinary man.
  30. Barrymore
    Mr. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for "a line, a line" much as Richard III calls for a horse.
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