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. Stander
    Loses some its bearings once it turns into a caper movie. The movie hardly bothers to explain the mechanics of the jailbreak or of the robberies themselves, which take place in a flurry of disguises and stickups that has a Keystone Kops flavor.
  2. Code 46
    The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.
  3. Little Black Book
    Offering few laughs and a climactic scene of breathtaking cruelty, this plot-heavy movie, directed by Nick Hurran from a screenplay by Melissa Carter and Elisa Bell, draws you into its malignant force field against your will.
  4. Open Water
    The sharks are scary, and the ocean is vast and indifferent, but the most effective parts of Open Water, which is ultimately too modest to be very memorable, evoke a deeper terror, one that can chill even those viewers who would never dream of putting on a wet suit and jumping off a boat.
  5. Collateral
    Pitched between interludes of anxious intimacy and equally nerve-shredding set pieces, Collateral scores its points with underhand precision.
  6. L'autre monde
    Working in broad, often melodramatic strokes, Mr. Allouache paints a deeply pessimistic portrait of his native country.
  7. Festival Express
    To watch the biggest stars of their time in casual conversation, trading riffs and passing bottles, without benefit of publicists, handlers and security goons is to relive an innocent, anarchic time in the entertainment business when music, not marketing, was at the center of the enterprise.
  8. Gozu
    Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.
  9. Gender Bias
    Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.
  10. Thunderbirds
    A standard, gadget-crazed exercise in whiz-bang adventure with its tongue lodged deep inside its cheek.
  11. The Village
    The film's ridiculousness would not be so irksome if Mr. Shyamalan did not take his sleight of hand so seriously, if he did not insist on dressing this scary, silly, moderately clever fairy tale in a somber cloak of allegory.
  12. Intimate Strangers
    Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.
  13. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    The chemistry between the two is as old as Abbott and Costello. Harold is the sensible worried one, and Kumar zany and reckless. The movie's funniest moments, set at Princeton University, caricature and then demolish the image of Asian-Americans as nerdy, sexless bookworms incapable of fun.
  14. The Manchurian Candidate
    A political thriller that manages to be at once silly and clever, buoyantly satirical and sneakily disturbing, but he (Demme) has recovered some of the lightness and sureness of touch that had faded from his movies after "The Silence of the Lambs."
  15. Proteus
    Tricked up with an elaborate flashback structure, subtitled dialogue in three languages and as many gratuitous aesthetic touches as the traffic will bear, Proteus emerges as a heavy, pretentious and derivative film.
  16. Daughters of the Sun
    With her shaved head and staring eyes, Aman actually looks as if she had been stripped entirely of her sexuality, like a Holocaust victim. What does seem certain is that a bootleg print of "Yentl" is still making its way through Iran's filmmaking underground, leaving a wide trail of influence behind it.
  17. She Hate Me
    Spike Lee carries his political exasperation beyond outrage into chaos. The carelessness with which he hurls his feelings about hot-button topics onto the screen is the filmmaking equivalent of last-ditch marketing: grab everything in sight, roll it up into a big messy mud ball, and hurl it against the wall, hoping that something sticks.
  18. Garden State
    Small, smart, off-kilter comedy.
  19. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.
  20. Orwell Rolls in His Grave
    Less a formal documentary than a rambling screed.
  21. Catwoman
    A howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless style.
  22. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Smoothly incorporates archival material, including scenes of Mr. Zinn's public appearances, interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Berrigan and Alice Walker (his student at Spelman). Matt Damon also reads well-chosen excerpts from Mr. Zinn's writing.
  23. A Home at the End of the World
    In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.
  24. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.
  25. Ju-on: The Grudge
    Because there is a new hero to identify with every 10 minutes, the viewer isn't drawn into a sustained suspense, but is merely subjected to a series of more or less foreseeable shocks.
  26. The Bourne Supremacy
    This is high-speed action realism carried off with the dexterity of a magician pulling a hundred rabbits out of a hat in one graceful gesture. The crowning flourish is an extended car chase through the streets and tunnels of Moscow that ranks as one of the three or four most exciting demolition derbies ever filmed.
  27. Free Radicals
    Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.
  28. Nola
    A movie that pits a substantial actor like Mary McDonnell, playing a New York madam, against a bogus story that crossbreeds noirish affectations and romantic comedy into an unpalatable mush that suggests strawberry ice cream slathered with beer.
  29. Make a Wish
    If Make a Wish is meant to be a parody, it lacks one essential element: humor. If it's meant to be a horror movie, it lacks the corresponding qualities of shock and suspense. It's almost enough to make "Friday the 13th" look like a masterpiece. Almost.
  30. Zhou Yu de huo che
    Comes to seem less a movie than a memory of movies -- or, at worst, a commercial Frankenstein's monster, sewn together to fill a perceived gap in the market.
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