The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,312 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: 9,400 out of 20312
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20312
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20312
20312 movie reviews
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  1. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.
  2. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    There is a paradox at the heart of the film. It strains to celebrate diversity and individualism, while its processed music exemplifies strict corporate teamwork.
  3. 30 Minutes or Less
    If you tune out the dialogue, which is packed with raunch that has neither rhyme nor story reason, there are passable moments. The interludes of Nick shifting gears as he tries to beat the clock on another pizza run are nicely managed and say something about a character whose talent behind the wheel is a kind of grace note.
  4. Senna
    As a personality profile, Senna is sketchy at best. Born into a well-to-do family in São Paulo, Brazil, Senna pursued the sport from a young age with a maniacal zeal. He comes across as a fatalistic daredevil and as a man of the people, his wealthy background aside.
  5. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    The camera movements are graceful, almost ethereal, yet the objects themselves - with their impastos of organic and inorganic materials, their metaphoric resonances, historical allusions and intimations of war - feel unmistakably weighty.
  6. The Help
    Save for Ms. Davis's, however, the performances are almost all overly broad, sometimes excruciatingly so, characterized by loud laughs, bugging eyes and pumping limbs.
  7. The Harvest/La Cosecha
    The Harvest, in its modest way, calls to mind "The Grapes of Wrath" but with no glimmer of a New Deal or a union, or even of better economic times ahead.
  8. Habermann
    The depictions of cosmopolitan Germans and mostly avaricious, bestial Czechs are likely to stir strong emotions among some viewers, but over all Habermann is more potboiler than political or historical statement.
  9. Protektor
    Dipping in and out of luminous black and white, Protektor has a distancing glamour that prevents the story from digging in. Burdened by a central relationship so lacking in passion that its fate becomes negligible, the film's narrative feels trivialized by jaunty musical fragments and repetitive cycling and rowing motifs that belabor Emil's metaphorical treadmill of appeasement.
  10. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    An exhausted pileup of rock-movie clichés, The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll presents artistic self-destruction with the solemnity of a movie that has invented a spanking-new genre.
  11. Cold Fish
    A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity and dead-eyed manipulation, Cold Fish charts the twisted alliance of two tropical-fish salesmen with baleful glee.
  12. Gun Hill Road
    A strangely bifurcated film, Gun Hill Road comes to life only when focused on Michael, and Ms. Santana (who was just beginning her own gender transition when she won the role) holds the screen like a pro.
  13. The Whistleblower
    For all its high-mindedness, The Whistleblower has a choppy, fumbling screenplay (by Ms. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan) that lurches between shrill editorializing and vagueness while sorting through more characters than it can comfortably handle or even readily identify.
  14. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Made for European television and originally divided into six one-hour episodes, the movie now runs an absorbing, astonishingly fast four and a quarter hours.
  15. The Change-Up
    The body-swapping premise, which is stale to begin with, isn't explored with any depth, unless you find meaningful Freudian subtext in the movie's relentless anal fixation. But the premise at least sets up a farce that surpasses "The Hangover" in gleeful crudeness and profanity.
  16. Bellflower
    There's more here than initially meets and sometimes assaults the eye, including the hyperbolic dudeness of it all.
  17. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    It's good, canny-dumb fun.
  18. Magic Trip
    Magic Trip is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.
  19. The Mouth of the Wolf
    The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.
  20. Good Neighbors
    Swerving from bland to brutal, endearingly coy to shockingly explicit, the Canadian import Good Neighbors finds pitch-black comedy among white-bread lives.
  21. All She Can
    Worse, you never root for Ms. Calderon's Luz, who goes from sullen to more sullen to a bit less sullen. She has discipline - to lift, she has to keep her weight down and train constantly - but not much compassion and no joy.
  22. House of Boys
    A gay tragedy in three acts and more than a dozen excellent songs, House of Boys conveys an emotional honesty that overrides its dated style.
  23. Golf in the Kingdom
    Everyone spouts nicely turned baloney elevating golf to the level of a religious experience, which grows tedious fairly quickly. The film almost works, though, if you view the whole thing as a very, very dry comedy.
  24. Sleep Furiously
    Intermittently absorbing, if deliberately stripped of drama.
  25. The Optimists
    It would be comforting to imagine that The Optimists, Goran Paskaljevic's viciously funny gloss of Voltaire's "Candide," was a site-specific satire of this Serbian director's homeland in the post-Milosevic era.
  26. Life in a Day
    It's a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled.
  27. Point Blank
    I can't recall another thriller that has maintained this kind of velocity without going kablooey and losing its train of thought.
  28. Attack the Block
    This fabulously inventive debut feature, written and directed by the British comedian Joe Cornish, never flags.
  29. The Smurfs
    Sure, Smurfs are blue, but who knew that they actually work blue?
  30. The Guard
    There's a story, in case you're looking for one, though it's almost an afterthought, just the thin glue holding everything together, including the fine cast, the sense of broody place and the fatalism that seems to come with it. Mostly there's Mr. McDonagh's playful, sometimes overly cute language, which serves the actors and also threatens to upstage them.
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