The New York Times' Scores

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:
20312 movie reviews
  1. It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.
  2. A thoroughly dreary, by-the-numbers exercise.
  3. May be a busy trifle, but it has its good-natured charms and agreeable gross-outs.
  4. Inside Job, a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma.
  5. Letters transforms a picture-postcard location and odd-couple narrative into a pretty, and pretty predictable, snooze. Yet the acting is flawless, the tone gentle and observational, and Leila's transformation, when it occurs, is unforced and unaccompanied by pious lecturing.
  6. Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.
  7. Several varieties of creepy run through As Good as Dead, a gruesomely alluring tale of long-simmering revenge.
  8. Regrettably, the film, almost devoid of music, is drastically undermined at its end by an inadvertently comic rap tribute by the Kansas City performance artist to the "American citizen with Palestinian blood."
  9. Radiating a distinctly retro vibe, this throwaway thriller from the German director Christian Alvart tosses a bone to Renée Zellweger, who chews it to a nub as Emily Jenkins, a harried social worker.
  10. When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.
  11. The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.
  12. The jocular screen adaptation of the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is a shallow but diverting alternative to the book.
  13. The title may be mildly provocative in its vulgarity, but the most striking feature of this movie is its dullness.
  14. Swift and amusingly brainless, Hatchet II more than delivers on splatter expectations.
  15. Over all, the film is a prime exhibit in the relentless and regrettable shift away from a natural, allusive, romantic Hong Kong style and toward a mainland studio aesthetic that is stagebound, literal, overstuffed and sentimental - like the big-budget Hollywood weepies of the '60s or the '80s.
  16. Here, a contemporary French white woman who yearns for liberté, égalité and fraternité is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as women were once upon a time and still are in some cultures, though truly it's all the clichés in this film that make her a captive.
  17. Do they have date movies in China? Probably, and Hot Summer Days, an enjoyable concoction of loosely intertwined stories of love and obsession, is just right for that purpose.
  18. A tired mash-up of every men-behaving-badly sitcom ever to grace a third-tier television network, Speed-Dating tries to coax laughs from characters so dated even Eddie Murphy would balk.
  19. And yet something vital here works. There are, come to think of it, a lot of little things.
  20. There is not a laugh to be found in this rancid, misogynistic revenge comedy.
  21. Legend of the Guardians may be a hoot, but for all its pyrotechnics, it fails to soar.
  22. In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity.
  23. There is no pat resolution here, but the sight of a mother finally able to connect with her child across autism's chasm is more than stirring.
  24. Not quite a biopic, not really a documentary and only loosely an adaptation, Howl does something that sounds simple until you consider how rarely it occurs in films of any kind. It takes a familiar, celebrated piece of writing and makes it come alive.
  25. With beauty, mild and sharp jolts, and mesmerizing camerawork, he (Gaspar Noe) tries to open the doors of perception.
  26. By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.
  27. For the most part, everyone struggles through, with at best mixed success. The audience included.
  28. As is so often the case in modest, aimless little movies like this one, it is the acting that saves Jack Goes Boating from triviality or worse.
  29. Easy A isn't nearly as good a movie as "Clueless," Ms. Heckerling's contemporary pastiche of the Jane Austen novel "Emma." But the one-liner-loaded screenplay has the same insouciant charm.
  30. This talking-animal tale - has old-fashioned backgrounds that occasionally achieve a touch of grandeur, but that's about the best that can be said for it.

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