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. Abendland
    It's impossible to know from the movie whether Mr. Geyrhalter believes this paradise needs protecting or whether something in his words - irony, fury, laughter - was lost in translation.
  2. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The fluidity and convenience of digital moviemaking tools explain some of its freshness, as does Ms. Klayman's history as a budding documentarian. It's clear from watching both the feature and its earlier iterations that, while she was learning about Mr. Ai, she was also learning how to tell a visual story. It's easy to think that hanging around Mr. Ai, a brilliant Conceptual artist and an equally great mass-media interpolater, played a part in her education.
  3. Searching for Sugar Man
    A hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing.
  4. Killer Joe
    Mr. Friedkin, a director with a talent for kinetic screen violence, never finds his groove with Killer Joe, which lurches from realism to corn-pone absurdism and exploitation-cinema surrealism.
  5. Planet of Snail
    Above all, this beautifully photographed documentary is a poetic meditation on refined sensory perception.
  6. Ruby Sparks
    Ruby Sparks doesn't try to pretend to be more than it is: a sleek, beautifully written and acted romantic comedy that glides down to earth in a gently satisfying soft landing.
  7. 30 Beats
    Beyond its eye candy, this wisp of a movie, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde," offers only hints of the complicated personalities behind the characters' sleek, well-toned surfaces.
  8. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    More moving than shocking, it proceeds slowly and gracefully, and the few scenes of bloodshed are emotionally intense rather than showily sensational.
  9. Wagner's Dream
    Awesome also describes this 16-hour, four-opera masterwork about the creation and destruction of the world, a work that Wagner considered unstageable in his time.
  10. The Well Digger's Daughter
    There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.
  11. The Queen of Versailles
    Schadenfreude and disgust may be unavoidable, but to withhold all sympathy from the Siegels is to deny their humanity and shortchange your own. Marvel at the ornate frame, mock the vulgarity of the images if you want, but let's not kid ourselves. If this film is a portrait, it is also a mirror.
  12. The Dark Knight Rises
    Believable and preposterous, effective as a closing chapter and somewhat of a letdown if only because Mr. Nolan, who continues to refine his cinematic technique, hasn't surmounted "The Dark Knight" or coaxed forth another performance as mesmerizingly vital as Heath Ledger's Joker in that film.
  13. Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    This 2 ½-hour film, which is described by Mr. Tiravanija as "not a documentary and not a narrative" but "more of a portraiture," rewards concentration once you adjust to its glacial pace and its radically minimalist aesthetic. It has no screenplay or story line.
  14. Ponies
    A riveting piece of work full of unpleasant characters whom you're glad you've met but never want to see again.
  15. It's the Earth Not the Moon
    The film's leisurely pace seems to capture the rhythms of island life. Though often random in its organization - Mr. Tocha slides from contemplative seascapes and misty meadows to a slaughterhouse and the Corvo landfill - this portrait is still much more than a snapshot.
  16. Family Portrait in Black and White
    Leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is frustrating, but it gets high marks for honesty.
  17. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    Commendably, the film, narrated by John Leguizamo, sugarcoats nothing, and the people involved - the players, their trainers, their parents, the scouts - are remarkably forthright.
  18. Red Lights
    Before Silver hijacks the plot, Rodrigo Cortés's smart, talky screenplay and tense direction hold our attention, as much for the unpredictability of the story as the ease with which Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy slide into their roles.
  19. Grassroots
    Although it only glosses the mechanics of local politics, it exudes an endearingly scruffy charm.
  20. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Like "My Architect," Nathaniel Kahn's film about his father, Louis I. Kahn, this documentary is a son's attempt to forge a posthumous bond with an elusive parent.
  21. The Imposter
    One of the most entertaining documentaries to appear since "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film similarly obsessed with role playing and deception.
  22. Union Square
    Union Square has the busy, hemmed-in talkiness of a theater piece, with too much forced to happen in too short a time. But it also has a lively, nervous energy and an expansive sympathy for the mismatched women at its heart.
  23. Alps
    Like "Dogtooth," Alps works by systematically unsettling our sense of what is normal and habitual in human interactions.
  24. Farewell, My Queen
    Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch.
  25. Trishna
    Life is suffering, as the Buddha said (including in Hardy's emotionally grinding novels), but it's more complex and contradictory than the ginned-up realism Mr. Winterbottom delivers here.
  26. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Continental Drift, like its predecessors, is much too friendly to dislike, and its vision of interspecies multiculturalism is generous and appealing.
  27. Easy Money
    In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.
  28. Invisible
    The insensitivity of the news media and law enforcement is an implicit acknowledgment of the gap between men and women on the issue; in the film's view men just don't get it. And the submerged rage that wells up in Nira and Lily is boiling hot. The film is less successful in depicting their personal lives.
  29. China Heavyweight
    Illustrating the film's rags-to-ring narrative with panoramic mountain views and compact shots of young bodies punching their way up the food chain, Mr. Sun straddles ancient and modern, tranquillity and turmoil, with equal sureness.
  30. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    And by exploring the lighter side of communal action - the camaraderie and cruising that turned weekly meetings into what one member calls "a combination of serious politics and joyful living" - he uncouples the gravity of the cause from the perceived humorlessness of advocacy. Foot soldiers for the dying, the members of Act Up never forgot how to live.
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