The New York Times' Scores

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:
20311 movie reviews
  1. In its jagged style and tone Black Butterflies is as close to an inside-out view of Jonker's tumultuous life as a movie could go without sinking into chaos. Its hues are continuously changing, and the seaside weather around Cape Town reflects her tempestuous emotional life.
  2. Runs out of gas long before its on-the-lam stars.
  3. How did Mr. Panahi do this? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain, to tell you the truth, since my job is to review movies, and this, obviously, is something different: a masterpiece in a form that does not yet exist.
  4. There is honest feeling, genuine humanity and real intelligence in this movie, but there is also a sense of caution, of indecisiveness, that undermines its potential power. Being Flynn is an honorably ambivalent film, finally unsure of what to do with the two strong, complicated characters at its center.
  5. The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.
  6. Good Deeds honors goodness, which isn't at all a bad thing, and it's not without moments of genuine feeling. But by the film's end, after watching a seemingly infinite number of dour close-ups of sober self-evaluation, I felt bludgeoned by thesis-driven dialogue and noble intentions.
  7. Seriously depleting the skanky-villain bin at central casting, the moronic thriller Gone stars Amanda Seyfried as Jill.
  8. There is much more to be explored than this noble documentary, made on a tiny budget, has the resources to examine.
  9. Who knows if anything remotely resembling the culture of Hipsters really existed? It's a musical, after all. In any case this movie, which won the 2009 Nika (the Russian Oscar) for best picture, is an endearing curiosity that, at 125 minutes, is as badly in need of a trim as the hair of its comically coiffed dandies.
  10. This archipelago of maneuvers, however jaw-dropping, never coheres into a real movie.
  11. For every few jokes that hit in this story about a recession-battered New York couple finding themselves on a Georgia commune, one sputters and dies.
  12. An alternately effortless and forced French-language diversion.
  13. Frustratingly, though, perhaps because he is an outsider and was concerned about appearing biased about another culture, about all that Mr. Marston does is chew on this clash, as if the repeated images of teenagers talking on cellphones next to a horse-drawn cart were a substitute for a strong filmmaking point of view.
  14. The film, though, has some redeeming qualities, including the presence of Idris Elba as the obligatory good guy, who encourages Johnny to get Danny into the protective custody of a religious order.
  15. Political menace stalks youthful idealism in Putin's Kiss, a portentous, rather creepy documentary that masks its lack of historical context with an atmosphere of accumulating threat.
  16. Mr. Jeter, who has made his feature-length debut with this film, tries to capture the loose feel of childhood's open-ended summers. But the vocabulary of his imagery feels worn out, and the ambience feels handed down.
  17. Glinting white vistas and endless light blanket On the Ice, a frigid drama that's tough to warm up to.
  18. While Undefeated travels well-tilled inspirational ground, it's also an irresistible story of football, faith and the lust for happily-ever-after black-and-white endings.
  19. Perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you're doing housework.
  20. Thin Ice itself, while not entirely unpleasant, is gnawingly familiar, a slice of room-temperature heartland quirk that tries to blend low-key comedy with violence and mayhem.
  21. Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.
  22. What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.
  23. Part character study, part crime thriller, Bullhead is the impressive but deeply flawed first feature written and directed by Michael R. Roskam.
  24. This coldly compelling film doesn't try to explain Michael's behavior or analyze his disease. As if doing penance for Michael's sins, it eventually metes out unequivocal punishment, but it is small consolation.
  25. Unabashedly polemical and rigorously pessimistic, a sustained Marxian indictment of 21st-century capital. The narration, by Mr. Sekula, is at times lyrical and rarely subtle, but the film is most graceful and moving when its argument slows down or wanders into an interesting tangent.
  26. The happy surprise of Ek Main aur Ekk Tu a Bollywood romcom that bears a vague resemblance to "What Happens in Vegas," is that it's not crude, sniggering or vindictive. Instead it's rather sweet and sometimes even a little unexpected.
  27. You can feel just how jarring and stressful it must be for a soldier to go from the life-and-death adrenaline rush of war to the maddeningly slow world of rehabilitation and forced inactivity.
  28. Looks and feels like a fever dream about an alternate universe. Suffused with a sense of wonder, it hovers, dancing inside its own ethereal bubble.
  29. A wearisome mix of miserableness and dark humor.
  30. What emerges is a poignant commentary on the uneasy commingling of love and fame.

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