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. 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.
  2. Being Julia
    Being Julia may not make much psychological or dramatic sense, but Ms. Bening, pretending to be Julia (who is always pretending to be herself), is sensational.
  3. Hair Show
    Ultimately, the coiffure competition serves as a gaudy, cheerful distraction from a plot that becomes plodding and a sister act that makes you wish for some peacekeeping brothers.
  4. Saints and Soldiers
    Thanks to an impressive cast of largely unknown actors, this small-scale, meticulously researched film tells its story with quiet conviction.
  5. Shall We Dance
    An old- fashioned feel-good fantasy that piles on the euphoria.
  6. Team America: World Police
    Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.
  7. In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    A cinematic canonization that presents the 40th president as the 20th century's godsend.
  8. The Scandal
    Given that Untold Scandal is, like its predecessor, an epic story of spreading displeasure, the director's ability to keep it from feeling petty is a major feat.
  9. Vera Drake
    The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.
  10. Around the Bend
    A heavily padded, thinly conceived, well-meaning movie.
  11. Vodka Lemon
    The thicket of relationships that the director, Hiner Saleem, has created and weaves his cast and camera through is so invitingly hotblooded and crowded with hilariously melodramatic incident that the snowbanks are not nearly as forbidding as they initially seem.
  12. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    If the film's old-movie homages are affectionate, they're slavishly imitative and scattershot, and the story is so willfully daffy that not even the hint of a subtext asserts itself. The film rides on the dubious assumption that camp and infantilism are the same thing.
  13. Go Further
    Mr. Harrelson seems appealingly goodhearted, but his naïve idealism leaves him always on the edge of self-parody.
  14. The Hillside Strangler
    Relentlessly unpleasant film.
  15. Silent Water
    Silent Waters is several different movies, and most of them feel negligible and meandering, until the film finally packs a wallop.
  16. Stage Beauty
    As drama, Stage Beauty is both timorous and ungainly, words that might also describe Ms. Danes's performance.
  17. Friday Night Lights
    Uplifting and troubling, partly because it is more honest than most sports movies about the high cost and short life span of high school football glory.
  18. Primer
    At a certain point, Mr. Carruth's fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.
  19. Raise Your Voice
    Ms. Duff's screen presence and the film's infectious high spirits will make this piece of fluff appealing to young moviegoers without conveying any sinister messages
  20. The Child I Never Was
    The film is airless and mirthless, but it's hardly worthless; in fact in many ways it's more purposeful than the snuff-film scenes of an average "CSI" episode.
  21. Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate
    A documentary 10 times as engrossing as the film that is its subject.
  22. Arna's Children
    Has the makings of a great documentary, but a subject as complex as this demands greater rigor, deeper intelligence and a sense of dialectics.
  23. The Card Player
    The film unfolds as a tired, thoroughly conventional police procedural that might as well be titled "CSI: Roma."
  24. Tarnation
    Certainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence.
  25. Taxi
    A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.
  26. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Going Upriver is a small, valuable contribution to the continuing project of sorting out and making sense of Vietnam, a war that, among other things, opened a fissure at the heart of American liberalism that has yet to heal.
  27. Thérèse: The Story of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
    Artistry is not the inevitable outcome, and fluffy costumes and French location shoots are the only production elements that don't seem wholly amateurish.
  28. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Never backing off from big, emotional moments, but also fleshing out the necessary transitions between them, he has realized his finest movie. It's a renaissance for Mr. Schultz, who seems to be speaking with his own voice after all these years.
  29. Dig!
    If universities ever start graduate programs in rock stardom, Dig! will surely be a cornerstone of the curriculum, for it works as both an instruction manual and a cautionary tale.
  30. Shark Tale
    Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.
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