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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    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vincent Wants to Sea
    The principal characters can be reduced to a handful of tics, and the entire story line is immaculately devoid of incidental detail. It's like sitting in a padded cell for about 90 minutes.
  2. The Best and the Brightest
    If you are going to be this mean-spirited, you had better deliver the jokes, but the film's attacks on pretentious parents - not to mention put-downs of hardworking immigrants - consistently come off as more hateful than humorous.
  3. Beginning of the Great Revival
    It demonstrates that mainstream Chinese cinema can be as guilty of self-indulgent overstatement as anything out of the West.
  4. General Orders No. 9
    Yet the urban images he presents are missing the thing that makes any city come alive: human beings. You begin to suspect that Mr. Persons hates humanity. This makes General Orders No. 9, for all its sheen of sophistication, rather simplistic: people bad, nature good.
  5. Leap Year
    Making sadomasochism appear less erotic than stamp collecting, Leap Year is a slow flare of emotional agony.
  6. A Love Affair of Sorts
    The real problem here, though, is that noting the it's-all-about-me nature of modern life already feels like a point that no longer needs making. Yeah, we're self-absorbed and shallow; so what else is new?
  7. Raw Faith
    Despite these flaws, it's refreshing to see a documentary about a normal grown-up who is struggling with problems of life and love, just as so many invisible others do.
  8. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    The loggerhead turtle is a threatened species, and one day all we may have left are its computer-generated analogues. Its fight for existence is plenty dramatic already, and is a story worth telling honestly.
  9. The Names of Love
    For all the potentially dangerous subjects it glosses, above all the tangled legacies of the Holocaust and the Algerian war, The Names of Love dances away from any uncomfortable provocation. Even when sticking out its tongue, it is finally just an airy comedy riding on one cheeky, incandescent performance.
  10. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    If Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is consistently watchable, it isn't especially funny, nor does it give any deeper insight into its star than you might get from seeing his late-night shows.
  11. A Better Life
    As is sometimes the case with movies that take on civil and political rights without force-feeding the audience,A Better Life" plays the human interest angle hard. It tries to put a lump in your throat and a tear on your cheek (it succeeds), pumping your emotions doubtless in an attempt to look nonpartisan.
  12. Cars 2
    It is not entirely without charm or wit. Directed by John Lasseter (with Brad Lewis credited as co-director) from a script by Ben Queen, Cars 2 lavishes scrupulous imaginative attention on its cosmopolitan settings.
  13. Bad Teacher
    Ms. Diaz has found her down-and-dirty element in the kind of broad comedy that threatens to get ugly and more or less succeeds on that threat.
  14. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    The film's sobriety and carefully balanced arguments make it an exemplary piece of reporting, although its emotional heat rarely rises to a boil.
  15. Passione
    While Passione praises the spirit of its subjects, it also attends to the discipline and tenacity that makes them worth noticing.
  16. Angel of Evil
    Angel of Evil is bloody, yes, but loaded with generic action sequences, shouting matches and blustery sentiment. To borrow Robert Evans's famous quotation about "The Godfather," you can smell the spaghetti, but less sauce might have helped.
  17. Jig
    Jig begins light on its feet but soon becomes leaden. Legs pinwheel, and fake ringlets fly, but competitive tension is sacrificed to repetition and an unnecessary focus on complicated numerical scoring.
  18. Battle for Brooklyn
    A documentary about the unending mess that is the Atlantic Yards project, is unabashedly slanted and as a result will probably be dismissed by those it portrays unflatteringly. That's unfortunate, because this film should be discouraging and dismaying for people on all sides of the project, for what it says about oversize expectations and missed opportunities.
  19. Kidnapped
    Starting as a coldly realistic thriller, this film eventually loses its bearings as the director Miguel Ángel Vivas succumbs to a fit of nihilism, transforming Kidnapped into gruesome tit-for-tat torture porn.
  20. R
    Isn't as hellish as the situation behind bars is portrayed in American movies, some of which are so gory they qualify as prison porn. But it is awful enough.
  21. The Art of Getting By
    There is also much in The Art of Getting By that is worth praising, and if you can grade on a curve - setting the standard at "The Wackness" rather than "The Squid and the Whale" - you may find yourself touched, tickled and occasionally surprised.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    The movie's main theme, no surprise, is the struggle of The Times to survive in the age of the Internet. But it does little to illuminate that struggle, preferring instead a constant parade of people telling the camera how dreadful it would be if The Times did not survive. True, of course, but boring to the point of irritation after five or six repetitions.
  23. Buck
    In some sense it was beauty that saved Mr. Brannaman, that of his conscience and that of horses, which, having been tied to humans long ago, became companions, workers and for some, as this lovely movie shows, saviors.
  24. Green Lantern
    Green Lantern is bad. This despite Mr. Reynolds's dazzling dentistry, hard-body physique and earnest efforts.
  25. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    There is nothing new here, but Mr. Waters, as he showed with the smarter and more daring "Mean Girls" and "Freaky Friday," knows how to keep things buzzing along.
  26. The Lips
    Woven throughout is a deeply rewarding recognition of the sustaining power of female companionship.
  27. Trollhunter
    One of the many pleasures of the Norwegian director André Ovredal's clever and engaging mock documentary Trollhunter is the way it plays with the idea of the supernatural rule book.
  28. Just Like Us
    A laudable if lightweight argument for broader minds and thicker skins.
  29. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    Mr. Siegel is no Cassandra: retaining the waggish tone of his previous documentary, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" (released in 2007), he balances the doom-talking heads with cute animation and characters like Yvon Achard, a French "bee historian" who caresses the swarm with his elaborately styled facial hair.
  30. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The whole film is a celebration of messy, colorful, vigorous creativity, echoed in Cynthia Charette's gloriously cluttered hodgepodge production design, with barely a product placement in sight.
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