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. Carlos Castaneda: Enigma of a Sorcerer
    It becomes hard to tell just what Castaneda was advocating, apart from the liberal use of psychedelic drugs.
  2. Bukowski: Born into This
    Definitive and engrossing documentary.
  3. Soul Plane
    Not everyone will be thrilled by the movie, which is one long dirty (and occasionally very funny) joke.
  4. Saved!
    It has a bright young cast and a clever, eclectic soundtrack, but the tone veers unsteadily from mockery to preachiness, and the story loses its breath, hopping from one clumsily paced scene to the next.
  5. The Mother
    The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.
  6. Baadasssss!
    Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.
  7. The Day After Tomorrow
    The glacierization of half of the world's inhabited land is contemplated with barely a hint of horror. In fact, it looks kind of cool.
  8. Union Square
    Mr. Szklarski doesn't seem to have a strong point of view on his material. Too often, the film drifts into a kind of passive voyeurism, offering the unhappy spectacle of these wasted lives without perspective and without hope.
  9. Wake
    Instantly forgettable film.
  10. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Good-natured, mildly appealing video feature.
  11. The Five Obstructions
    Watching The Five Obstructions is at once like witnessing two chess masters playing dominoes and like spying on a series of therapy sessions. Mr. von Trier clearly sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst.
  12. Raising Helen
    A soft-hearted, squishy-minded prototype for a network sitcom, is mildly ingratiating but never laugh-out-loud funny. Even Ms. Hudson's intrepid radiance can't camouflage the premise's leaky foundation.
  13. My Mother Likes Women
    As My Mother Likes Women gallops along, it picks up speed and takes its characters on a whirlwind tour of Prague before rushing back home. As it accelerates, its texture thins and its story turns strained and eager to please. But it never loses its cheeky sense of humor about love and the havoc it can wreak.
  14. Stateside
    An unsalvageable mess.
  15. Love Me If You Dare
    Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.
  16. Control Room
    Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.
  17. Twist
    In both Twist and "Idaho," the act of placing a larger-than-life literary figure in a constrained, narrowly naturalistic environment merely strips the characters of their scale and interest.
  18. The Youth
    Mr. Ratnam is a dynamic, natural filmmaker who happily uses every device at his disposal, from rapid-fire MTV editing to sped-up action scenes that recall silent serials, to keep his lengthy film moving at a brisk pace. The film flags only when Mr. Ratnam must turn his attention to the soggy romantic subplots.
  19. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    Mr. Rithy Panh makes telling use of a survivor whose ability to communicate lends itself to the subject. The tragedy is that Mr. Vann Nath's powers are used to illuminate these horrors.
  20. Shrek 2
    Certainly Shrek 2 offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.
  21. With All Deliberate Speed
    Mr. Gilbert wants a movie with both a golden glow and a corrosive center, something he has not quite achieved here.
  22. Carandiru
    Exudes a throbbing flesh-and-blood intensity so compelling that it's impossible to avert your eyes.
  23. Breakin' All the Rules
    The actor's (Jamie Foxx) deft touch lends the flighty story of mistaken identities and romantic mix-ups among mostly African-American characters in Los Angeles the kind of saucy bounce that Cary Grant lent to similar roles six decades ago.
  24. A Slipping-Down Life
    A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.
  25. Strayed
    It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.
  26. Springtime in a Small Town
    As Mark Li Ping-bing's beautiful cinematography observes the change of season, the movie becomes a broader meditation on rebirth, and how, in the language of T. S. Eliot, April, the month that stirs such hopes for the future, is also "the cruellest month" for awakening such keen desire.
  27. The 24th Day
    Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.
  28. Coffee and Cigarettes
    The implication that beauty and meaning can be found in odd places at unlikely, idle moments resonates through this lovely film.
  29. Troy
    For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.
  30. The Mudge Boy
    Depending on your choice, the film is either an unpleasantly masochistic fantasy or an unpleasantly sadistic one.
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