The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Return
    You may see scarier movies this year, but none so redolent of decomposition.
  2. Stranger Than Fiction
    While Stranger Than Fiction traffics in a bit of darkly funny existential anxiety, it also finds room for romantic fantasy and sentimental uplift.
  3. Iraq in Fragments
    From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.
  4. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    Fur is a folly, though not a dishonorable one.
  5. Come Early Morning
    An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.
  6. Color of the Cross
    Though the film's final, disturbing image forces race to the forefront and belatedly raises wider issues of persecution, its most controversial suggestion is not that Jesus might have been black but that he might have been a really terrible actor.
  7. The Cave of the Yellow Dog
    The dog is cute, the children are adorable, and the earth and the sky seem to stretch on without limit in The Cave of the Yellow Dog. Unfortunately, so does the slight story.
  8. Copying Beethoven
    Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.
  9. Captive
    The middle section of the film has some of the superficiality of a made-for-Lifetime drama of female distress and resilience, a bit too eager to make its points and solve its dramatic problems at the cost of the messiness that would bring the story fully to life.
  10. Fuck
    Is this evidence of cultural decline? It's hard to think of a short answer that wouldn't be made more vivid by the insertion of the forbidden word. So skip it. No, not the movie. What, are you kidding me? No way. Go. Help yourself.
  11. Coffee Date
    Leaving no cliché unturned, Coffee Date provides cheesy music, chats about "gaydar" and the obligatory are-you-looking-at-mine? urinal scene.
  12. Linda Linda Linda
    The irritations and tedium of high school life are staged with refreshing simplicity, while the performers interact with an age-appropriate naturalness the American teenage movie rarely achieves.
  13. The Magic Gloves
    A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title.
  14. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.
  15. Flushed Away
    It is a relief to encounter such exuberant and infectious silliness.
  16. The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
    One of the good things about bad movies is that when someone sneers about the unworthiness of a perfectly mediocre film like, say, "Crash," you can turn to a seriously unworthy film like, say, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and laugh. Ho. Ho. Ho.
  17. Volver
    Volver, full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. It is in some ways a smaller, simpler film than either "Talk to Her" or "Bad Education," choosing to tell its story without flashbacks or intricate parallel plots, but it is no less the work of a master.
  18. Shottas
    Cess Silvera, the film's writer and director, doesn't find any of the humanity or inner demons that would allow the characters to rise above B-movie exploitation.
  19. Wondrous Oblivion
    Form and content fight to the death in Wondrous Oblivion, Paul Morrison's defiantly gauzy tale of racial friction in 1960s England.
  20. Commune
    A breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.
  21. Unknown
    After a whole lot of buildup, and a real letdown of a payoff, the only enigma left is why we should care.
  22. The Great Warming
    A straightforward, quietly persuasive primer on the climate-change crisis.
  23. En soap
    So sensitively acted you can almost buy its premise that love (in this case, neighborly affection and dependence) might rewire sexuality.
  24. Deeper Than Y
    For $600, it turns out, you can make a short documentary about aging recreational swimmers that has just enough winning moments in it to let viewers forgive that it's little more than a glorified home video.
  25. As the Call, So the Echo
    Keir Moreano’s muted yet moving record of his father's experience as a volunteer doctor in Vietnam, documents a journey that's substantially more philosophical than medical.
  26. Romántico
    This modest, unassuming documentary about an illegal Mexican immigrant living in San Francisco is a case study of a life defined by poverty.
  27. Babel
    In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.
  28. Catch a Fire
    It’s a film that wants to play as if it were ripped from today’s headlines, but has been shredded into near incoherence.
  29. Saw III
    The most depressing thing about this series is not the creativity of the bloodletting but the bleak view of human nature.
  30. Climates
    This film paints a haunting portrait of existential solitude, one in which the images speak louder and often more forcefully than do any of the words.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »