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. Viva Riva!
    Repackaging the revenge thriller in parakeet colors and distinctive African beats, the Congolese writer and director Djo Tunda Wa Munga gives Viva Riva! a playful sensuality that goes a long way toward disguising formula.
  2. Reversion
    The film does a pretty good job of conveying the bleakness and pointlessness Eva and her fellow mutants feel, but it's as if Ms. Trachinger were reluctant to take the premise any deeper for fear of being accused of imitating "Memento" or "Groundhog Day" or any number of other trapped-in-time films.
  3. Road to Nowhere
    If Mr. Hellman's movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere.
  4. Bride Flight
    Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.
  5. Agrarian Utopia
    The mood is not one of misery, but of quiet, weary endurance punctuated with moments of joy.
  6. The Trip
    As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery).
  7. Super 8
    Like his (Abrams) previous features, "Mission: Impossible III" and "Star Trek," Super 8 is an enticing package without much inside.
  8. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    It's also a pretty familiar story, and "Reindeer," despite Mr. Neuvonen's verve and Jani's charisma, can drag. Like a lot of addiction stories, it starts to mirror the monotony and self-absorption of the addict's life.
  9. One Lucky Elephant
    Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.
  10. Empire of Silver
    This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.
  11. Some Days Are Better Than Others
    As a meditation Some Days has its virtues - if you're in the market for a picture-postcard bummer - but it will leave your mellowed mind pretty quickly.
  12. Love, Wedding, Marriage
    A movie that feels like punishment for a crime you can't remember committing.
  13. Turkey Bowl
    A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"
  14. The Last Mountain
    If Mr. Haney sometimes struggles to find focus, he has no trouble locating heroes, including the doggedly energetic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a slew of stalwart locals and fearless outsiders. And the black heart of coal country - and, as the film shows, our national energy debate - has never seemed so in need of white knights.
  15. !Women Art Revolution
    These interviews form the backbone of !W.A.R., and like the film, they're passionate, contentious, funny, sincere, politically attuned.
  16. Mr. Nice
    An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.
  17. Beautiful Boy
    A kind of apocalyptic 21st-century "Ordinary People," Beautiful Boy, directed by Shawn Ku from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Armbruster, is so high-mindedly determined to avoid sensationalism that it sidesteps critical dramatic content and sabotages its own ambitions.
  18. Film Socialisme
    In typical Godardian fashion the film manages to be both strident and elusive, argumentative and opaque.
  19. Submarine
    This is the kind of story, as Oliver himself would admit, that we have already seen dozens of times. But Mr. Ayoade's keen visual wit and clever, knowing touches keep it surprising and nimble, especially in the quick, lurching early scenes, which are startlingly funny.
  20. Rejoice and Shout
    Your religion or lack of one doesn't matter. At some point while watching the film, you may feel that music IS God, or if not, a close approximation of divinity.
  21. X-Men: First Class
    With its spy-on-spy globetrotting, old-fashioned villains, flirty but prematurely swinging minis and fan-boy bits (look for an eye-blink-fast tribute to "Basic Instinct" and a cameo from the cult actor Michael Ironside), the whole enterprise has an agreeable lightness, no small thing, given its rapidly moving parts.
  22. Beginners
    In wistful tone and mood, Beginners at times hazily evokes the films of Wong Kar-wai, including "Chungking Express," a different kind of memory piece.
  23. Spork
    As uplifting stories of tolerance and self-discovery go, Spork has a messy appeal, but it's no "Hairspray."
  24. We Are the Night
    A love triangle with fangs but no bite, the German import We Are the Night is mostly infatuated with its own stylish excesses.
  25. Puzzle
    Although Puzzle is a much smaller, less ambitious film without the ominous political subtext of Ms. Martel's masterwork, its story of a woman discovering her special gift and rejoicing in it has implications about sexual inequality in Argentina's middle class.
  26. Hello Lonesome
    Adam Reid's smart, poignant trilogy of interwoven vignettes, manages the considerable feat of creating six fully human characters who are quirky enough to transcend the stereotypes found in a typical indie film.
  27. United Red Army
    The stilted and awkward physical and vocal performances in combination with the visually flat cinematography bring to mind the look, sound and visual texture of American daytime soaps, an association that perversely makes the movie more and more watchable.
  28. Tied to a Chair
    Insulting several nationalities and most of the filmgoing public, Tied to a Chair lurches through acting atrocities, continuity glitches and narrative gaps with grating insouciance.
  29. The Abduction of Zack Butterfield
    A cringingly awkward tale of sexual predation and female lunacy.
  30. The Tree of Life
    With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication The Tree of Life ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them.
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