The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,313 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: 9,401 out of 20313
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20313
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20313
20313 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
    In a movie that avoids examining Mr. Walker’s personal history, there are hints of a man struggling with chronic depression and problems with alcohol, but they are only hints. No major personal relationships are mentioned or even alluded to. The music speaks for itself.
  2. Gran Torino
    Mr. Eastwood is also an adept director of his own performances and, perhaps more important, a canny manipulator of his own iconographic presence.
  3. Che
    Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale.
  4. Timecrimes
    The Spanish writer and director Nacho Vigalondo has audacity to spare. Constructing a looping, economical plot and directing like a fire marshal in a flaming building, he conjures urgency and disorientation from the thinnest of air.
  5. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    Any movie that awards a former Monty Python cast member a Nobel Prize in anything cannot be all bad. And The Day the Earth Stood Still could be worse.
  6. Doubt
    Mainstream moviemaking, with its commercial directives and slavish attachment to narrative codes isn't particularly hospitable to ambiguity...which may help explain why Mr. Shanley's film feels caught between two mediums and why Ms. Streep appears to be in a Gothic horror thriller while everyone else looks and sounds closer to life or at least dramatic realism.
  7. Nothing Like the Holidays
    The only distinguishing characteristic of this mildly agreeable variation of a worn-out formula is that the boisterous family under examination is Puerto Rican, and the screenplay includes a smattering of Spanish.
  8. Adam Resurrected
    The film is so flat that it leaves you wondering if Mr. Kaniuk's book is ultimately untranslatable to the screen.
  9. Dark Streets
    Diverting enough as a series of music videos, Dark Streets strikes postures in place of drama.
  10. Delgo
    Too leaden for adults and too baffling for kids.
  11. What Doesn't Kill You
    It tells a good story well, and in the process quietly says a little something about what it means to look at the American dream from the bottom up.
  12. Where God Left His Shoes
    Although Mr. Leguizamo wisely underplays a role that is just short of saintly, the character is still a filmmaker's bogus, bleeding-heart contrivance in a movie that is much less truthful than it pretends to be.
  13. While She Was Out
    Embracing outraged victimhood the way Angelina Jolie embraces a close-up, Ms. Basinger, doing double duty here as an executive producer, appears oblivious to the script's idiocies.
  14. The Reader
    The film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.
  15. Wendy and Lucy
    What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy -- and to Lucy -- matters a lot, which is to say that Wendy and Lucy, for all its modesty, matters a lot too.
  16. Hunger
    The brutality in the film is pervasive and often stomach turningly graphic, but what is perhaps most unnerving is the tact, patience and care with which Mr. McQueen depicts its causes and effects.
  17. Cadillac Records
    This movie is crowded and sprawling, and if it rambles sometimes, that's just fine. Like those big, boxy Caddies (and like Howlin’ Wolf, if he did say so himself), it's built for comfort, not for speed. It hums, it purrs and it roars.
  18. Nobel Son
    An aggressively noisy exercise in style over substance about nasty people doing nasty things to one another in (sigh) Southern California.
  19. Punisher: War Zone
    Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to?
  20. Frost/Nixon
    Stories of lost crowns lend themselves to drama, but not necessarily audience-pleasing entertainments, which may explain why Frost/Nixon registers as such a soothing, agreeably amusing experience, more palliative than purgative.
  21. The Black Balloon
    Ms. Collette’s Maggie is the film's prime mover. This wonderful Australian actress, who hasn't a shred of vanity, virtually disappears into the complicated characters she plays, and Maggie is one of the strongest.
  22. Let Them Chirp Awhile
    This sort of thing was indulgent enough the first time around; transplanted to the mumblecore milieu, it's intolerable.
  23. Four Christmases
    Refreshingly tart and lean, forgoing the usual schmaltz and syrup.
  24. Milk
    Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.
  25. Transporter 3
    Though the car chases have grown more banal as the franchise has started to run on fumes, the smackdowns have retained their zing.
  26. Twilight
    Though Edward and Bella reach certain heights in Twilight, notably during a charming scene that finds them leaping from piney treetop to treetop against the spectacular wilderness backdrop, the story’s moral undertow keeps dragging them down.
  27. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.
  28. Special
    Either way, it doesn’t quite go far enough as psychological study or cultural commentary.
  29. Bolt
    What keeps Bolt fresh is an unaffected exuberance, a genuine sense of fun, that is expressed above all through obsessive attention to craft.
  30. Lake City
    Feels like a movie whose story was slapped together during filming. Its three phases -- Southern pastorale, Sudsville and Kablooie -- don’t really connect.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »