The New York Times' Scores

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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
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shotgun Stories
    The film is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Drillbit Taylor
    So ploddingly directed (by Steven Brill) and lazily written that it adds up to little more than a diffuse collection of second-hand gags and jokes, few of them funny.
  3. The Grand
    The actors certainly look as if they’re having a good time, and if you’re in the right mood, you might too.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hammer
    Rambling and disorganized. At the same time, though, The Hammer also has dry wit and unforced working-class swagger, and hits some surprising emotional notes.
  5. Shelter
    Coming out has rarely looked so pretty.
  6. Meet the Browns
    What he serves up -- a mixture of moralism and forgiveness, semibawdy humor and cautionary drama, mockery and affection -- may sometimes lack coherence, but never integrity.
  7. Shutter
    The director, Masayuki Ochiai, conjures textbook J-horror miasma: clammy clinical interiors; overcast skies; diffuse cityscapes. He also gives Alfred Hitchcock a nod, with a sequence nakedly stolen from “Psycho,” and draws unease from Jane’s disorientation in a foreign city. Tokyo, in fact, may be the movie’s most fascinating player.
  8. Boarding Gate
    Even in Boarding Gate, a modestly scaled, self-consciously tawdry exercise in genre appropriation, Mr. Assayas manages to say more about what it is to be human -- to desire, to fear, to be alone -- than most filmmakers say in a lifetime.
  9. Love Songs
    The girl-boy-girl threesome, which turns out to be short-lived, is perhaps the most straightforward emotional configuration in this odd, witty, touching film.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    From moment to moment, Planet B-Boy is fun, sometimes thrilling and packed with illuminating details and striking personalities.
  11. Irina Palm
    Irina Palm is, for the most part, a phony trifle, but at its heart, somehow, is a real and fascinating person.
  12. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    This is screenwriting by numbers. Unlike, say, Ken Loach’s marvelous “Bread and Roses,” Under the Same Moon is too busy sanctifying its protagonists and prodding our tear ducts to say anything remotely novel about immigration policies or their helpless victims.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Doomsday
    In terms of story, “The Descent” and Doomsday are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, Doomsday is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.
  14. Horton Hears a Who!
    There are aspects of “Horton,”... that are fresh and enjoyable, and bits that will gratify even a dogmatic and orthodox Seussian.
  15. Never Back Down
    The movie speeds up and slows down as though controlled by a director in the grip of competing medications. For those who make it to the final beatdown, however, the only pill worth taking is the one that makes you forget.
  16. Sleepwalking
    As Mr. Maher, in his feature directing debut, brings in surreal touches and puts on literary airs, the film’s grip loosens, and its vernacular turns increasingly wooden.
  17. Heartbeat Detector
    The rather lost-looking Mr. Amalric, most recently seen on screens giving his left eyeball a furious workout in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” maintains a suitably funereal mien throughout.
  18. City with No Mercy
    Flash Point”attaches coldly professional visuals to a narrative so baffling that it’s rarely clear who is pounding on whom or why.
  19. Funny Games (2008)
    The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sputnik Mania
    The movie lets parallels between that time and the post-9/11 era emerge organically, in the manner of a fable that subtly illuminates your own life.
  21. Hacia la oscuridad
    Antonio Negret's sloppily executed film plays like a car commercial and a military-recruitment promo.
  22. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.
  23. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    Crammed with colorful interviews, digital animation and live performances, this frisky and forthright film by Dean Budnick chronicles a vision of financing social progress with really great tunes.
  24. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain is a reminder that art sometimes keeps the truth alive far better than the news.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise
    In Search of Paradise portrays Meat Loaf as an obsessive, self-punishing performer, striving in vain to put on a live show that matches the visions in his head.
  26. 10,000 BC
    The big, climactic fight, complete with an epic snuffleupagus rampage, is decent action-movie fun. And as a history lesson, 10,000 BC has its value. It explains just how we came to be the tolerant, peace-loving farmers we are today, and why the pyramids were never finished.
  27. The Bank Job
    The workmanlike title The Bank Job is a nice fit for this wham-bam caper flick.
  28. College Road Trip
    Eyes popping and mouths agape, Martin Lawrence and Raven-Symoné mug their way through College Road Trip as if it were a silent movie -- which, come to think of it, would have been a lot less irritating.
  29. Married Life
    This is the sort of gallows humor that Hitchcock relished drawing out in cruelly amusing cat-and-mouse games, not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of Married Life. The murder plot is not to be taken any more literally than the lethal games of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
  30. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    How light is this movie? So buoyant that even an air raid warning, signaling that this whole world is about to crumble under the blitz, can’t dampen its giddy spirits.
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