The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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:
  1. Positive: 9,401 out of 20313
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20313
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20313
20313 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. They
    Sensation, not sense, is the point of this exercise, and what it lacks in originality it makes up for in effective if cheap moments of fright and dread.
  2. Extreme Ops
    Ops is too brain-dead to play the incognito war criminal segment for comedy, although when Will is seen thumbing through the pages of a newspaper called USA Daily, the picture has inadvertently tumbled down a Mad magazine wormhole.
  3. Solaris
    Retooled into a sleek pop fable that doesn't bother to connect all its dots, the movie aspires to fuse the mystical intellectual gamesmanship of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the love-beyond-the-grave romantic schmaltz of "Titanic," without losing its cool. It's a tricky balancing act that doesn't quite come off.
  4. Eight Crazy Nights
    Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with.
  5. Die Another Day
    Perhaps the most satisfying Bond movie since "The Spy Who Loved Me."
  6. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller's canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.
  7. The Emperor's Club
    Carefully sets itself up as an obvious, transparent morality play, and then just as deliberately refuses the easy payoff. This is both impressive and a little disingenuous: the film is in effect congratulating itself for refusing to offer a neat and tidy view of life without offering much else.
  8. The Quiet American
    Fowler may be the richest character of Mr. Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness.
  9. Phantom
    Both grueling and dull. Imagine (if possible) a Pasolini film without passion or politics, or an Almodóvar movie without beauty or humor, and you have some idea of the glum, numb experience of watching O Fantasma.
  10. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    A searching and wide-ranging debate has unfolded about America's response to terrorism and, more broadly, about the history and future of its role in the world. Mr. Junkerman's film is best understood as a necessary, if partisan, text in that continuing argument.
  11. Talk to Her
    When it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart.
  12. Friday After Next
    The trouble with movies like those in the "Friday" series is that their success can lead to a need to inflate their importance, inviting pretentious descriptions like "folkloric" when "Friday" is much closer to chitlin circuit comedy.
  13. Better Housekeeping
    As broad and cartoonish as the screenplay is, there is an accuracy of observation in the work of the director, Frank Novak, that keeps the film grounded in an undeniable social realism.
  14. Hell House
    As a director, Mr. Ratliff wisely rejects the temptation to make fun of his subjects, most of whom seem to believe sincerely that they are doing the work of God.
  15. The Way Home
    The story, touching though it is, does not quite have enough emotional resonance or variety of incident to sustain a feature, and even at 85 minutes it feels a bit long. The premise, too, is a little thin.
  16. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    So good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment.
  17. Interview with the Assassin
    Mr. Burger has a performer who can dart between stentorian self-assurance and cringing pathos, maintaining his character's ambiguity until the final sequence of this resourceful and ingenious entertainment.
  18. Half Past Dead
    After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible.
  19. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    A suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them.
  20. Revolution #9
    An unadorned, unsparing chronicle of a young man's descent into a nightmare of delusion, paranoia and self-destructive behavior.
  21. Ararat
    Until its final moments this almost great movie feels as if it's racing against itself in a neck-and-neck battle between its troubled heart and its egg-shaped head. The heart wins by a nose.
  22. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    By the end, instead of feeling stirred to a high pitch of anxiety and excitement, you may feel battered and worn down. But not, in the end, too terribly disappointed.
  23. Hush!
    Rambling, occasionally very funny reflection on the meaning of family in contemporary Japan.
  24. The Rising Place
    This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.
  25. Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    The cinematic equivalent of sampling goodies from a spartan tastings menu in which the entrees, desserts and appetizers are confusingly jumbled together.
  26. Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite
    If these two can figure out a way to love each other, maybe it isn't necessary for us to like them very much.
  27. The Bread, My Sweet
    Pretty much of a mess, full of narrative gaps and characters who arbitrarily appear and disappear. But it is at least a sweet, good-natured mess, with none of the overcalculation and condescending cynicism the same material would almost certainly bring out in a Hollywood production.
  28. Far From Heaven
    It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.
  29. 'R Xmas
    Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window.
  30. 8 Mile
    What Mr. Hanson has done with 8 Mile is make a pop movie instead of a movie about pop. There's nothing disreputable about this.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »