The New York Times' Scores

For 20,313 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:
20313 movie reviews
  1. What's oddly appealing about this film is the sweetness that the director, François Velle, manages to extract from Craig Sherman's rather bitter screenplay.
  2. Enough drama, humor and unfiltered nail-biting suspense to put all the thrill-mongering screenwriters in Hollywood to shame.
  3. If Mr. Ghobadi's dominant theme is the devastation of the Kurds, his subdominant tone is one of strength, resistance and fertility.
  4. A sweet, well-intended picture, but like its title character, it is not quite good enough for the big leagues.
  5. All its 89 minutes of fast cuts, swooping overhead shots, sun, surf, song, sunburn and sex cannot obscure the extent of its shallowness.
  6. Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense.
  7. Richly atmospheric and suspenseful.
  8. Has the undiscriminating temperament of a fan, blithely placing Mr. Coppola's magnificently made "Godfather" on the same plane as Mr. Hopper's slapped-together, and today all but unwatchable, "Easy Rider."
  9. The camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.
  10. If Confidence was made by people who have seen too many movies, it seems to be aimed at people who have seen too few. It offers up stale lessons in vocabulary and technique, all of them easily gleaned on a trip to the video store, as if they were choice bits of inside knowledge.
  11. Reasonably well-executed thriller. It suffers not from awkwardness or silliness, which would make it more fun, but rather from its air-brushed, expensive pretentiousness.
  12. Jesse Wigutow's screenplay is one of those marvels of economy, idiomatic facility and well-chosen detail that knows exactly when to cut away from a scene without grinding it into your face.
  13. Would like to think of itself as a film on the edge, a contemporary descendant of "Sweet Smell of Success." But as it dawdles along, it fails to find contemporary corollaries to the super-charged language and caffeine-fueled pace of that grimy 1957 masterpiece.
  14. Not a subtle film; and, most curiously -- to put it mildly -- for a sermon on tolerance, it resorts to history's eternal scapegoat.
  15. Monotonously paced and too long, Jersey Guy also suffers in its early scenes from attempts at humor that probably read better on the page than they play on the screen.
  16. Has the sense of gritty, practical politics of a Japanese samurai epic combined with the high-flying stunt work and magical special effects of a Hong Kong romp. Ultimately this film by Yojiro Takita is satisfying on neither level, but not for lack of trying.
  17. No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.
  18. It may sound facetious, but Winged Migration provides such an intense vicarious experience of being a flapping airborne creature with the wind in its ears that you leave the theater feeling like an honorary member of another species.
  19. One of the few recent movies I have seen that plunged me into that rare, giddy state of pleasurable confusion, of not knowing what would happen next, which I associate with the reading and moviegoing experiences of my own childhood. But there is no reason that children should have a monopoly on this primal, wonderful experience.
  20. The most remarkable achievement of the film is its presentation of Lilya's story as both an archetypal case study and a personal drama whose spunky central character you come to care about so deeply that you want to cry out a warning at each step toward her ruination.
  21. Any movie that lumps Mr. O'Neal, Ms. Derek and Snoop Dogg (as the voice of a gangsta-rap answer to Stuart Little) under the same title can't be all bad.
  22. Lopes along amiably enough, offering a few smiles and the standard bromides about the importance of being yourself and pursuing your dreams. It's tolerable but forgettable.
  23. The emotional impact of Shark Skin Man is negligible.
  24. What lifts the film above many other high-minded documentaries dealing with poverty and the welfare cycle is this filmmaker's astounding empathy for both Diane and Love.
  25. Mr. Guest and Mr. Levy's jokes are sometimes so subtle as to seem imperceptible, until you realize that they are everywhere, from the broadest gestures to the tiniest details of dress and décor.
  26. Too much seriousness can be fatal to a picture like this one, since it impedes the efficient delivery of dumb laughter and easy thrills.
  27. A nonstop underscore of Latin pop, as well as several arbitrarily interpolated dream sequences and animated passages don't do nearly enough to make up for the film's unfocused frenzy and lack of genuine comic invention.
  28. An overdose of morbid sentimentality.
  29. In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.
  30. Held back throughout by the self-conscious, overly explicit dialogue and the judgmental, moralistic undertone that throbs throughout.

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