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. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    The actor Michael Rapaport (Brad Pitt's roommate in "True Romance"), in his feature directorial debut, does an admirable job recounting the group's formation and dissecting its dissolution.
  2. Farmageddon
    Nonetheless, the film's homespun quality (Ms. Canty, whose childlike voice provides intermittent narration, simply describes herself in the publicity notes as "the mom of four kids") works in its favor, as does its maker's agitated sincerity.
  3. Fading of the Cries
    "How are we going to get out of here?" Sarah squawks at one point, a question that Mr. Dourif ought to have asked his agent long before the cameras began to roll.
  4. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Sprawling and sometimes confusing, but its premise is charming and not at all far-fetched.
  5. Summer of Goliath
    Carrying far more weight than their screen time would warrant, the "interviews" with actors playing young children are the best part of the film.
  6. Zookeeper
    It's hard to completely dislike a movie in which Mr. James makes like Fay Wray, hitching a ride on the back of his gorilla pal, Bernie (voiced by Nick Nolte), as Bernie clambers up a bridge.
  7. The Ward
    Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.
  8. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.
  9. The Ledge
    The Ledge, it should be noted, is not dumb. What undoes it is its mechanical structure: a stale dramatic formula of the sort taught in elementary playwriting classes.
  10. Ironclad
    Ironclad alternately feels, plays and sounds like an abridged television mini-series and a feature-length video game.
  11. Project Nim
    There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.
  12. The Sleeping Beauty
    The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.
  13. Septien
    A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.
  14. Rapt
    A solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.
  15. Flying Fish
    The intertwining of the narratives, along with the somewhat elliptical, or perhaps rudimentary, storytelling, makes for a confusing experience. But the stories are mainly an excuse for pretty pictures, some quite striking, of poverty and oppression, and for a closing frenzy of bloodletting.
  16. Horrible Bosses
    The laughter is mean but also oddly pure: it expels shame and leaves you feeling dizzy, a little embarrassed and also exhilarated, kind of like the cocaine that two of the main characters consume by accident.
  17. Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema
    Between Mr. Ziman's music-video skills and his close approximation of the kinetic style of Michael Mann (a scene from Mr. Mann's "Heat" has a key role in the plot), it's easy to overlook the formulas and just enjoy the ride.
  18. Welcome
    Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.
  19. Love Etc.
    That things tend not to end, or bode, well doesn't detract from the overall Hallmark vibe.
  20. Delhi Belly
    It also shows, perceptively and often sweetly, a broader slice of young, urban, educated life in India as the three deal with careers, love and happiness.
  21. Crime After Crime
    Recording every success and setback, the wrenching documentary Crime After Crime favors the personal over the political, creating a no-frills portrait of a stoic and remarkably unembittered woman.
  22. Small Town Murder Songs
    Compellingly acted from top to bottom. As the raw passions of its hard-bitten characters seep into you, the songs hammer them even more deeply into your consciousness. The film's only flaw - a big one - is its brevity.
  23. The Perfect Host
    Like Warwick himself, the movie begins to run amok after a taut and tantalizing first act. Not even Mr. Hyde Pierce's best efforts can make sense of a character who by the end of the film seems to be a completely different person with the same name.
  24. Terri
    What lifts Terri above its peers is not the plight of its protagonist or the film's sympathy for him, but rather the care and craft that the director, Azazel Jacobs, has brought to fairly conventional material.
  25. Monte Carlo
    Cheery, corny and perhaps calculatingly unoriginal, this is packaged entertainment so familiar it feels like a remake and so wholesome you could swear Sandra Dee starred in the 1959 original. Think of it as "No Sex and the City" for tweeners.
  26. Larry Crowne
    A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.
  27. Polytechnique
    It is neither floridly melodramatic nor showily minimalist. The virtue - and also the limitation - of this movie is that it confronts senselessness and insists on remaining calm and sane.
  28. Aurora
    A quiet, steady burn filled with stretches of unsettlingly reverberant silence cleaved in half by a midpoint eruption of violence. Here there is before, and then there is after.
  29. Double Dhamaal
    Unless your idea of a good joke is a golf ball thwacked into an unsuspecting crotch or the old frying-pan-in-the-kisser gag, you probably won't like this movie.
  30. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Nothing you see makes any sense at all, but the sensations are undeniable, and kind of fun in their vertiginous, supercaffeinated way.
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