The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,323 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: 9,408 out of 20323
  2. Mixed: 8,448 out of 20323
  3. Negative: 2,467 out of 20323
20323 movie reviews
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  1. Starting Out in the Evening
    What is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.
  2. Everything's Cool
    Just below the movie’s attitude of pep-rally cheer is a mood that approaches despair. Mr. Gelbspan has probably amassed as much hard evidence of climate change as anyone alive.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midnight Eagle
    Izuru Narushima’s film is a personal and political melodrama with perfunctory gunplay and explosions.
  4. August Rush
    To describe August Rush as a piece of shameless hokum doesn’t quite do justice to the potentially shock-inducing sugar content of this contemporary fairy tale.
  5. Enchanted
    The film works its magic largely by sending up, at times with a wink, at times with a hard nudge, some of the very stereotypes that have long been this company’s profitable stock in trade.
  6. Hitman
    Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah -- action movies for bored dummies.
  7. I'm Not There.
    Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.
  8. The Mist
    Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he’s saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie, The Mist isn’t half bad.
  9. This Christmas
    Boisterous and bittersweet, the film is not dull, but it does feel hopelessly overstuffed, with scant time to devote to any one story line.
  10. Nina's Heavenly Delights
    A lesbian-foodie fairy tale that keeps its appetites well under control. The title may hint at naughty pleasures, but the director, Pratibha Parmar, is more interested in pappadams than passion.
  11. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    The film is by turns cranky, funny, wistful and resolute.
  12. Beowulf
    The 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of Beowulf doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes.
  13. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Faithful to the outline of the novel but emotionally and spiritually anemic, it slides into the void between art and entertainment, where well-intended would-be screen epics often land with a thud.
  14. Margot at the Wedding
    Frequently brilliant, finally baffling film.
  15. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    If the concept is ingenious, its execution is erratic.
  16. Redacted
    Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    Despite its laid-back script, “Smiley Face” is as prankishly political as Mr. Araki’s “Doom Generation,” evincing a deep unease with the media-saturated capitalist nation that Jane crawls inside her bong to escape.
  18. What Would Jesus Buy?
    At the very least, the documentary What Would Jesus Buy? might make a viewer think twice about that next purchase at the Gap.
  19. Southland Tales
    Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.
  20. No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.
  21. Fred Claus
    Neither here nor there, the film is “Elf” without the goofy jokes, Will Ferrell or heart, “Bad Santa” without the smut, Billy Bob Thornton or spleen.
  22. Lions for Lambs
    It tells us everything most of us know already, including the fact that politicians lie, journalists fail and youth flounders. Mostly it tells us that Mr. Redford feels really bad about the state of things. Welcome to the club.
  23. P2
    Swift and stealthy P2 is a canny exploitation of one of the urban woman’s greatest fears: the after-hours parking garage. Throw in a car that won’t start, a creepy security guard and a filmmaking team with perfect synchronicity, and the result is a minimalist nightmare.
  24. Saawariya
    The experience is visually enchanting, cloyingly sweet, at once utterly chaste and insanely erotic, and finally exhausting. Aficionados will not settle for less.
  25. War Dance
    War/Dance, in spite of its slickness, is an honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance in an African tribal culture.
  26. Holly
    There’s a riveting story lurking inside Holly, a documentary-fiction hybrid about sex trafficking in Cambodia. It’s just not the one the filmmakers want to tell.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Life of Reilly
    Built around “Save It for the Stage,” a one-man stage show by Charles Nelson Reilly, a showbiz gadfly and Tony Award-winning theater director.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Steal a Pencil for Me
    What makes Ms. Ohayon’s movie special is its recognition that epic horrors don’t erase private dramas.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Named after one of his albums and built around snippets of audio interviews with Mr. Ayler, it attempts and often achieves a fresh, playful style that’s equally informed by jazz traditions and Mr. Ayler’s urge to shatter them.
  30. Fat Girls
    Ends up stranded between two concepts, either of which might have yielded a more satisfying film.
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