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. The Incredibles
    Because it is so visually splendid and ethically serious, the movie raises hopes it cannot quite satisfy. It comes tantalizingly close to greatness, but seems content, in the end, to fight mediocrity to a draw.
  2. Farmingville
    Though it has the slight, informal feel of a made-for-television documentary shot on video, Farmingville is an unusually sensitive and sophisticated piece of investigative journalism.
  3. A Silent Love
    Ultimately, A Silent Love transcends its problem-play situation to ponder how the best laid plans for an arranged marriage are no match against the vicissitudes of passion in a romantically besotted culture.
  4. Voices of Iraq
    If this film cannot claim to represent the political "truth" about the war - what film could? - it certainly provides a broad glimpse of daily life in Iraq.
  5. It's All About Love
    A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.
  6. Malevolence
    Malevolence will lead Halloween-inspired viewers into this dark place for some palpitations, but the thrills will come from sheer density of gruesome images, not from frightfully new ideas.
  7. Enduring Love
    Mr. Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.
  8. Birth
    Without Ms. Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.
  9. Saw
    Does a better-than-average job of conveying the panic and helplessness of men terrorized by a sadist in a degrading environment, but it is still not especially scary.
  10. Ray
    While not a great movie, is a very good movie about greatness, in which celebrating the achievement of one major artist becomes the occasion for the emergence of another.
  11. 800 Bullets
    Entirely too well-behaved.
  12. Magnifico
    Modest but engaging Filipino tear-jerker.
  13. Home of the Brave
    Includes familiar film of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and of demonstrators in Birmingham being attacked with fire hoses, but it distinguishes itself with touching film of Jim Liuzzo and his children being interviewed and of political leaders of the day.
  14. Sideways
    Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.
  15. Stella Street
    The concept doesn't translate well to the longer form. The sense of the absurd is watered down.
  16. Fish Without a Bicycle
    Isn't totally without humor or insight.
  17. Happy Hour
    Throughout Happy Hour, observations that mean next to nothing are presented as nuggets of profound enlightenment.
  18. Undertow
    As with the 70's films of Terrence Malick, one of Undertow's producers, the more intoxicated it becomes with rural desolation and fecundity, the more deeply in touch it puts you with its characters' souls.
  19. The Manson Family
    Finally, though, Mr. Van Bebber seems more interested in recreating the grainy look of scratched 1970's film stock than in reflecting on the horrors he depicts, making this a difficult sell for all but the strongest stomachs among connoisseurs of vintage gore.
  20. Lightning in a Bottle
    Remarkable concert documentary.
  21. Postmen in the Mountains
    It is an endearing, likable film, though its benign surface may cover some subtle propaganda on behalf of China's centralized government.
  22. The Machinist
    May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.
  23. The Grudge
    Less scary than creepy, The Grudge may have lost some oomph in the translation from Japanese to English, and the desire for a PG-13 rating probably muted the violence and perhaps the scares.
  24. Surviving Christmas
    As you watch the comedy lurch along, the woozy, sinking sensation it produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of that spiked eggnog.
  25. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    Less savvy propagandists than Mr. Moore, the Celsius 41.11 filmmakers apply their thesis with a trowel.
  26. Sex Is Comedy
    The result is a minor, meandering film.
  27. P.S.
    What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense.
  28. The Final Cut
    The core of the movie is a satirical political thriller that juxtaposes dual points of view that could be described in cinematic terms as "It's a Wonderful Life" versus "Chinatown." The digressions should have been pared away.
  29. Moolaadé
    To skip Moolaade would be to miss an opportunity to experience the embracing, affirming, world-changing potential of humanist cinema at its finest.
  30. Eulogy
    The screenplay is closer in tone to an uneasy mixture of post-"Seinfeld" bile and unfocused Altmanesque satirical misanthropy. Partly because the story's structure is so haphazard, most of the jokes land with a thud.
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