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. Dog Sweat (the title is slang for alcohol) is surprisingly polished, the young actors warmly believable despite being restricted by the film's narrow focus.
  2. The best concert films achieve a marriage of sound and image that feels effortlessly harmonious, and in that regard Inni, a musical portrait of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, leaves most of its genre in the dust.
  3. There are a few funny moments in Jack and Jill, most of them celebrity cameos that also serve to affirm what a cool, connected celebrity Mr. Sandler is. The most sustained of these is the appearance of Al Pacino as himself, falling for Jill and giving the film a jolt of genuine zaniness. I'm sorry to say that this may be Mr. Pacino's most convincing performance in years.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Immortals is the latest disaster of post-conversion 3-D, a projected spectacle so dark it is literally hard to see. This is an ugly, burlap sack of a film, stitched with jagged seams and overstuffed with computer-generated chintz, gold-lamé leotards and fetishistic headgear.
  4. Captured mostly in gorgeous black and white, The Love We Make is alternately trite, touching, funny and fascinating.
  5. The movie, which begins with Mr. Sarkozy's election-night victory in May 2007, only intermittently rises above the tone of an arch, sniping drawing-room comedy peopled with mild caricatures.
  6. The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.
  7. The carnage, although explicit and frequent, is not grotesquely overdone. But except for Mr. Moura's Nascimento, the movie doesn't have the same richness of characters. Psychologically he is the whole show; the rest are stereotypes.
  8. Into the Abyss superficially resembles the kind of titillating, moralizing true-crime shockumentary that is a staple of off-hours cable television. But the grim ordinariness of the narrative makes its Dostoyevskian dimensions all the more arresting.
  9. Melancholia is emphatically not what anyone would call a feel-good movie, and yet it nonetheless leaves behind a glow of aesthetic satisfaction.
  10. Mr. Eastwood doesn't just shift between Hoover's past and present, his intimate life and popular persona, he also puts them into dialectic play, showing repeatedly how each informed the other.
  11. This is not to say that Charlotte Rampling: The Look is a complete washout. A tease is more like it, an examination of the surface. Ms. Rampling is presented as an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx. But we knew that already.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mr. Wang's slow-reveal psychological drama isn't just a showcase for his excellent ensemble cast. Beautifully modulated and stylistically sui generis, In the Family is also one of the most accomplished and undersold directorial debuts this year.
  12. There are no easy payoffs in Stuck Between Stations, but the chemistry of its stars is reward enough.
  13. Seamlessly dovetailing style and subject, Dragonslayer, a poetic and affectionate portrait of the professional skateboarder Josh Sandoval.
  14. Mr. Quandour's utopian vision may seem improbable - that fairy tale quality again - but his odd, guileless, folkloric movie doesn't feel cloying so much as something from a different world.
  15. What could have been a moderately entertaining short film is yanked to intolerable lengths in Killing Bono, a shapeless rock-music caper that, like its deluded antihero, just doesn't know when to stop.
  16. For a mockumentary to work, the writing has to be spot on. But the script by Alan Grossbard, who shows a fond familiarity with, if not great insight into, the racing milieu, has too many half-baked characters and goes soft just when it should get sharp.
  17. N.P.H, as he's often called in these films, does indeed return, singing and dancing. And talking dirty. He, that stoned baby and a stunning riff on the tongue-stuck-to-a-pole scene in "A Christmas Story" will, for fans of this franchise, make this a blissful holiday season indeed.
  18. Although there's more romance in "Buck," a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in Pianomania the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he's a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.
  19. The Son of No One self-destructs in a ludicrous, ineptly directed anticlimactic rooftop showdown in which bodies pile up, and nothing makes a shred of sense.
  20. Mr. Maggio's strengths here are his people (not their stories), a sense of intimacy and textured place rather than the generic hoops he forces the characters to jump through.
  21. Mr. Fehling, tumbling from puppy dog eagerness into weepy, inky self-pity, never quite rises to the requirements of the role, which may be hopelessly incoherent in any case.
  22. Tower Heist could and should have been much more. Mr. Ratner goes for the safe bet and the easy score.
  23. A drippy ending erases all the hopes you've built up and forces you to conclude that this wasn't such a well-thought-out film after all.
  24. What begins as an amusing fluff piece ("Daddy's messed up," mumbles one woozy subject after dropping his gurgling infant) slowly emerges as a compelling and often touching peek at punk paternity.
  25. Especially in the early footage, Chogyal Namkhai Norbu is an engaging, charismatic figure; by the end, Yeshi is finding his own footing, able to relate to a young, wired-in audience. My Reincarnation makes a pretty strong case: when the family business is enlightenment, listen to your dad.
  26. Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.
  27. Mr. Miller is far too leisurely - and takes far too much time - with a story largely blind to the sometimes fatal cost of fanaticism.
  28. It feels mostly authentic until a contrived ending that leaves a saccharine taste.

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