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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  1. Terror's Advocate
    It is one of the most engaging, morally unsettling political thrillers in quite some time, with the extra advantage of being true.
  2. Why Did I Get Married?
    More than anything, a Tyler Perry movie is an interactive experience, and Why Did I Get Married? is no exception. At the screening I attended, it was often difficult to hear the dialogue between bouts of enthusiastic applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”
  3. We Own the Night
    The problem with We Own the Night is that it mistakes sentiment for profundity, and takes its ideas about character and fate more seriously than it takes its characters and their particular fates. “I feel light as a feather,” Bobby says in a crucial scene, at which point the movie starts to sink like a stone.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    King Corn
    Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ellis are so pleasantly nondescript that they make no particular impression. As a result, all the time spent on autobiographical detail and personal banter hampers the film’s urgency, and plays like an awkward attempt to justify a format that the filmmakers are too self-effacing to exploit.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Khadak
    A trippy spectacle. It boldly tries to find visuals to describe complex metaphysical and political concepts. But the results often suggest aestheticized eye candy, along the lines of Ken Russell’s “Altered States” or Godfrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” and its sequels.
  6. Laaga Chunari Mein Daag: Journey of a Woman
    A fascinating blend of musical, melodrama and feminist fairy tale, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag shows Bollywood’s moral universe in transition.
  7. Control
    You don’t have to know anything about Joy Division to grasp the mysterious sorrow at its heart.
  8. Golda's Balcony
    Inert yet strangely compelling film.
  9. Feel the Noise
    It’s the subtexts -- about minority kinship and Hispanic self-actualization -- that resound. If only its fable (and leading man) didn’t keep getting in the way.
  10. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    A faux documentary grounded in ethnicity and mired in absurdity, Finishing the Game is a terrific idea still waiting to be fashioned into a real movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    For the Bible Tells Me So
    There is no denying that the film, however inelegant, fills a need. The inevitable DVD should be packaged in a plain cardboard sleeve, so that viewers can carry it in their pockets and, if confronted by a homophobe, hand it over and say, “Watch this, then get back to me.”
  12. The Good Night
    The comedy of male midlife angst dates back at least to “The Seven-Year Itch,” when it was sweet and innocent. Each time it is recycled, it gets more sour and joyless.
  13. The Heartbreak Kid
    Lame, long, ugly joke of a movie.
  14. Michael Clayton
    Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal. It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame.
  15. My Kid Could Paint That
    Mr. Bar-Lev has made an excellent documentary, but it would have been better if he had not made it at all.
  16. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Feels passé and lacks a charismatic lead. Too bad Daniel Radcliffe is an only child.
  17. Strange Culture
    Somewhere between documentary and dramatization, fact and impression, Strange Culture molds one man’s tragedy into an engrossing narrative experiment that defies categorization.
  18. The Girl Next Door
    Gregory M. Wilson, the film’s director, has made the kind of movie that makes you wish you could rinse your brain in bleach, to wash all traces of it from your memory.
  19. Lake of Fire
    One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough.
  20. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity Kurt Cobain About a Son, but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it.
  21. The Darjeeling Limited
    The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.
  22. Trade
    An eagerly prurient dip into the sex-trafficking trough, Trade teeters between earnest exposé and salacious melodrama. Minus the film’s near-visible weight of conscience, success in the second category would have been virtually guaranteed.
  23. Feast of Love
    A more accurate name for Feast of Love might be “Feast of Breasts.” At every opportunity, Mr. Benton turns the camera on his actresses’ gleaming torsos. These beautifully lighted soft-core teases lend an erotic frisson to a movie that in most other ways feels enervated.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Game Plan
    The movie is so likable that it glides over its many plot holes... The film’s direction, by Andy Fickman, is raucous but never crass, and the affable Mr. Johnson is committed to every moment.
    • The New York Times
  25. The Kingdom
    The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down.
  26. Lust, Caution
    Lust, Caution -- a truer title would be “Caution: Lust” -- is a sleepy, musty period drama about wartime maneuvers and bedroom calisthenics, and the misguided use of a solid director.
  27. The Price of Sugar
    Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power.
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    In its modest way, Outsourced may be unique: a charming culture-clash romance that could be taught in business schools.
    • The New York Times
  29. Into the Wild
    Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.
  30. The Last Winter
    Something wicked this way comes in the nifty horror film The Last Winter, crawling through the hallways and howling into the dread night.
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