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. The film's realism is a point of entry rather than the whole point of the exercise. Its setting is finally subordinate to the main character, as memorable and vivid a heroine as you are likely to see on screen this season.
  2. Absorbing and amusing for as long as it looks back at those Hollywood westerns, recounting their sins against American Indians.
  3. Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.
  4. Mr. Farrell and Mr. Doyle continue to hold your gaze, even as Mr. Jordan's screenplay sets your mind to wandering. There is, as noted, a wisp of a tale tucked into this film, one that, as the story wears on, becomes ponderously weighed down with melodramatic filler and even some halfhearted genre action.
  5. Mr. Natali, whose earlier films include “Cube,” hasn’t reinvented the horror genre. But with Splice he has done the next best thing with an intelligent movie that, in between its small boos and an occasional hair-raising jolt, explores chewy issues like bioethics, abortion, corporate-sponsored science, commitment problems between lovers and even Freudian-worthy family dynamics.
  6. Get Him to the Greek displays the bawdy-sweet mixture that is the signature of the Judd Apatow school of screen comedy.
  7. Unless you’re trapped on an airplane or enjoying movie night at the penitentiary, you have no excuse for watching Killers. A brain-deadening collision of high concept and low standards.
  8. These cinematic feats are accomplished with meat-cleaver editing and awkward, jittery computer-generated imagery. The well-cast voices for the expressionless animals are at least good for a few smirks.
  9. Its straggling, true-crime narrative, leaping hither and yon like a dog chasing butterflies, is not what holds the film together; the real glue is the emergence of a parallel between location and suspect, between literal dumping ground and figurative. This is so effective that there was no need for the directors to conduct a handheld, "Blair Witch"-y foray into the nighttime woods -- their film is creepy enough in broad daylight.
  10. The extent of the need around the world is so enormous and overwhelming that the efforts of the doctors in this sobering film seem both vitally necessary and woefully inadequate.
  11. Except for the usual double entendres in which titles of mainstream Hollywood hits are twisted into salacious puns, Finding Bliss (Bliss is the name of the company's resident star) isn't especially funny. Nor is it sexy, despite flashes of nudity and fleeting glimpses of Grind's works in progress.
  12. Raajneeti, with its large cast of characters and wealth of subplots, is often a mess, but an interesting one.
  13. A toothless satire whose targets include vampire mania, low-rent theater, indie romantic comedies, Scorsese, Shakespeare and “Law & Order,” it plays like a Web series expanded to feature length, or an adaptation of one of the Naked Angels’ staged serial soap operas.
  14. Tom Shepard's quietly observant documentary tracks its stressed-out subjects through an array of personal and scholarly challenges.
  15. Clogged with court transcripts, medical records and repetitive (if moving) patient testimony, Burzynski tickles the mind only at the cost of trampling the eyes.
  16. Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, Double Take, as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television.
  17. Some of this is awfully pedestrian, but there are moments of both high comedy and high drama.
  18. This small, nearly perfect film is a reminder that personal upheavals are as consequential in people's lives as shattering world events.
  19. There is no question that the heart of Micmacs is in the right place, but the movie is also a little thin.
  20. For the most part this is perfectly painless mush. The movie is irrepressibly silly -- what were you expecting? -- but a few hours of Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering his long lashes has its dumb-fun appeal.
  21. Placidly photographed and lacking in urgency, "Survival" shows us the living flailing at fate and the dead just flailing.
  22. A tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!). Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.
  23. A bit of a puzzle. This is a good thing, since most movies plop down in easily recognizable categories and stay there, troubling neither their own intellectual inertia nor that of the audience.
  24. The Juche Idea is meant to be a comedy, one that cuts two ways: mocking the strictures placed on moviemakers in both Communist and capitalist systems. Viewers who don’t share the radical-nostalgist sensibility of Mr. Finn, who teaches at Emerson College in Boston, may find the humor both too rarefied and too obvious.
  25. What holds the film together, more or less, is the steady stream of mostly slapstick clips from early cinema.
  26. The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.
  27. What fortifies Shrek Forever After are its brilliantly realized principal characters, who nearly a decade after the first “Shrek” film remain as vital and engaging fusions of image, personality and voice as any characters in the history of animation.
  28. The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being.
  29. Never forgetting the rush of the game, the directors regularly serve up fleet footage of the team’s highs and lows, allowing the rhythms of the field to set the film’s volatile beat.
  30. Mr. Eisenberg and particularly Mr. Bartha give appropriately twitchy, live-wire performances, and the film tells its basically bleak story lucidly and with touches of dark humor.

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