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. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    The story is deepened with a distinctively European political subtext as the increasingly grandiose Mesrine engages in a running dialogue with various characters about the differences between gangsters and revolutionaries.
  2. Going the Distance
    Romantic comedies nowadays tend to be either aggressively coarse or artificially sweet, and Going the Distance finds a workable middle ground.
  3. Machete
    For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.
  4. Last Train Home
    Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.
  5. The Winning Season
    Gets lost in a fog of indecision and compromise.
  6. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    The director Zhang Yimou honors the unlikely affinity between himself and Joel and Ethan Coen with a remake of their movie "Blood Simple."
  7. Prince of Broadway
    The movie is sharp, charismatic and so light on its feet we never know which way it will turn.
  8. White Wedding
    Wedding chaos has been heavily mined by both film and stage comedies, but Jann Turner, the director here, keeps this story fresh, aided by the effortless interplay between Mr. Nkosi and Mr. Seiphemo (who are credited with Ms. Turner as writers). The goat helps too.
  9. Max Manus
    Buffed to an expensive-looking gloss and dressed in period-perfect finery, Max Manus has an old-fashioned sincerity that entertains without engaging.
  10. The American
    It is a reasonably skillful exercise in genre and style, a well-made vessel containing nothing in particular, though some of its features - European setting, slow pacing, full-frontal female nudity - are more evocative of the art house than of the multiplex.
  11. Takers
    There is plenty of nonsense, a great deal of stylish posturing and clothes-horsing, and a few action sequences that manage to be both gripping and preposterous.
  12. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    It makes for continuously riveting, visceral entertainment that evokes a Gallic "Scarface" without the drugs.
  13. The Last Exorcism
    An unusually restrained and genuinely eerie little movie perched at the intersection of faith, folklore and female puberty.
  14. Centurion
    The real message: Life's ultimate pleasure lies in extreme fighting - to the death.
  15. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    Diverting, hectic entertainment, which refuses to take anything too seriously, staking out a middle ground between melodrama and farce.
  16. Daniel and Ana
    This stylistic restraint may help deflect accusations of exploitation (though the film's two pivotal sex scenes both feel uncomfortably extended, the initial crime lasting a squirm-inducing six minutes), but it also impedes our connection with the victims.
  17. The Milk of Sorrow
    The Milk of Sorrow is constrained by a rarefied screenplay and a near-mute central performance.
  18. Make-Out with Violence
    Filled with clear, bright images and moments of skewed genius, this delicate debut effortlessly evokes those languid summer doldrums, when even a rotting girlfriend is better than no girlfriend at all.
  19. Baghdad Texas
    The premise had promise, but Baghdad, Texas, a clumsy comedy directed by David H. Hickey, quickly disappoints with an inconsistent tone and painful overacting.
  20. Piranha 3-D
    The entertainment formula behind this short and nasty movie - devised according to someone's idea of what teenage boys with the guile, the facial hair or the "guardian" to gain admission to an R-rated movie are likely to enjoy - is sloppy and simple.
  21. Lottery Ticket
    The prevailing presence in this crowd-pleaser is Ice Cube, whose evolution from hip-hop threat to screen paterfamilias is now complete.
  22. Mao's Last Dancer
    The final image - a freeze frame of a pas de deux staged to resemble a triumphal Communist poster - perfectly captures the film's overall effect: it's strenuously brainless.
  23. Nanny McPhee Returns
    Neither the dangers of the plot - a dissolute uncle who wants to sell the farm, a father missing in action - nor the forbidding Nanny McPhee herself are as fearsome as they were the first time around.
  24. The Switch
    The first third of The Switch, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is so bizarre that it leads you to wonder if, through some miraculous lack of oversight, the movie will blaze an unpredictable path. No such luck.
  25. The Tillman Story
    This devastating film persuasively portrays them (Tillman family) as finer, more morally sturdy people than the cynical chain of command that lied to them and used their son as a propaganda tool.
  26. Hiding Divya
    While the movie has its heart in the right place, the first-time writer-director Rehana Mirza doesn't yet have the skills to shape the narrative into something moving or revealing.
  27. The Army of Crime
    Was it all for naught? Only weeks after the 23 partisans were arrested (and all but two promptly executed), Paris was liberated. Army of Crime is a passionate act of remembrance.
  28. Soul Kitchen
    Its insistent zaniness makes Soul Kitchen very different in spirit from Mr. Akin's two previous films, "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven," which established him as a major European filmmaker. Seriously silly, it evokes the same high-spirited, pan-European multiculturalism in which people of all ages and backgrounds blithely traverse national borders as they aggressively pursue their destinies.
  29. A Film Unfinished
    Remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach.
  30. Vampires Suck
    This pointless parody dumps us in the fictional town of Sporks, Wash., a location lousy with vampires and werewolves.
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