The New Yorker's Scores

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For 3,482 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 61% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Fiume o morte!
Lowest review score: 0 Bio-Dome
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,940 out of 3482
  2. Mixed: 1,344 out of 3482
  3. Negative: 198 out of 3482
3482 movie reviews
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  1. The Edge of Heaven
    I prefer to think of Akin, however, not as a forger of patterns but as an ironist who understands that bad luck is a crucible, in the heat of which we are tested, burned away, or occasionally transformed. The Edge of Heaven is about something more exasperating than crossed paths; it is about paths that almost cross but don't, and the tragedy of the near-miss.
  2. Speed Racer
    Though the film is not as criminally poor as "V for Vendetta," which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.
  3. Noise
    Bean's touch is unsteady, and Noise is certainly odd, but the movie is alive with the creative madness of New York.
  4. Turn the River
    Skip the coda to this movie, with its tiny upswing of hope, and remember the days at the tables, as dim and endless as nights, and the click of the dialogue.
  5. Iron Man
    [Downey] can make offhandedness mesmerizing, even soulful; he passes through the key moments in this cloddish story as if he were ad-libbing his inner life.
  6. Baby Mama
    There are gags and scraps of action that give the movie fits of buoyancy, and these tend to come not so much from the younger, eager performers as from the old hands.
  7. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    They are Abbott & Costello with dirty mouths--indomitable, ungovernable, and possibly immortal.
  8. Roman de gare
    The air of mystery here is appealing, because the secrets behind it seem to matter both a great deal and not at all--rather like love, which has been Lelouch’s subject ever since he made "A Man and a Woman."
  9. Then She Found Me
    With the screenwriters Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, Hunt adapted the story from a 1990 novel by Elinor Lipman, and has turned the material into a fine, tense, unpredictable comedy of mixed-up emotions and sudden illuminations.
  10. 88 Minutes
    Compare 88 Minutes with "Sea of Love," another murder mystery that Pacino made, in 1989, and you find him sporting the same loud ties, but everything else has leached away: suspense, credibility, wit, and the lost art of flirtation.
  11. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    The boyfriend, one Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), a Brit rocker and professional sex god, turns out to be the best thing in the movie.
  12. Smart People
    These small-scale, intelligent movies can fall into a trap: it’s hard to achieve a satisfactory dramatic climax when observation is your principal dramatic mode.
  13. Shine a Light
    At times, the cutting shifts from the hasty to the impatient to the borderline epileptic, and, while never doubting Scorsese’s ardor for the Stones, I got the distinct impression of a style in search of a subject.
  14. Stop-Loss
    Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war.
  15. Boarding Gate
    It’s time for this talented man (Assayas) to pull himself together. He may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he’s caught somewhere between insight and exploitation.
  16. Funny Games (2008)
    The new movie wears an air of old hat. I would absolutely defend Haneke’s right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he’s not keeping up with the times; he’s behind them.
  17. The Bank Job
    The actual robbery that the picture is based on is shrouded in mystery, and the screenwriters, Dick Clement and Ian La Fresnais, have engaged in a fair amount of entertaining invention.
  18. Be Kind Rewind
    A comedy without one foot on the ground is no more than a flight of fancy, as directionless as a balloon; the master clowns of silent cinema knew that, and so does Mr. Fletcher, the gravid elder statesman of this film. As he says to Mike and Jerry, “I appreciate your creativity, but let’s be realistic for a second.” Be kind. Erase.
  19. The Counterfeiters
    The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile. Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music--seductive, insolent, triumphant.
  20. The Duchess of Langeais
    The Duchess is enragingly elusive and possibly mad; the General is very direct and also possibly mad.
  21. Vantage Point
    Is it art? Not remotely. But, up to the final scenes, it’s a tremendous piece of engineering. After all, the narratives have to synch up visually, which can’t be easy to manage. And the hurtling force of Vantage Point is fun to watch.
  22. Definitely, Maybe
    In serious roles, Weisz can be stiff-backed and righteous, but here, doing comedy, she appears to be a major actress eager to reveal everything she’s been holding inside.
  23. Jumper
    The result is more or less a remake of the great scene in “Sherlock Jr.,” where a dozing Buster Keaton dreams himself through a shuffled sequence of backgrounds. Jumper is ten times as brutal, maybe a thousand times more costly, and eighty-four years late, but it’s a start.
  24. The Band's Visit
    As the film concludes with his upraised hand, conductor’s fingers unfurling against a blue sky, you do feel that you have witnessed a small victory of wisdom over indifference and ennui. When in doubt, strike up the band.
  25. In Bruges
    No one wants a movie that tiptoes in step with political correctness, yet the willful opposite can be equally noxious, and, as In Bruges barges and blusters its way through dwarf jokes, child-abuse jokes, jokes about fat black women, and moldy old jokes about Americans, it runs the risk of pleasing itself more than its paying viewers.
  26. The Witnesses
    Téchiné is unusually adroit at manipulating a complex set of relations within a very mixed group of people. This movie is easy to take--chatty and sociable, with a brightly lit, even sunshiny gloss and an open sensuality.
  27. How She Move
    A rudimentary but thoroughly enjoyable step musical.
  28. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Mungiu’s pacing is so sure, however, in its switching from loose to taut, and the concentration of his leading lady so unwavering, that the movie, which won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, feels more like a thriller than a moody wallow.
  29. Summer Palace
    In truth, I’ve never seen so much lovemaking in an aboveground film, but the revelation, and great triumph, of Lou’s work is that these scenes are never pornographic--that is, never separated from emotion.
  30. Cassandra's Dream
    Ewan McGregor’s bright-eyed Ian, following in the footsteps of characters in Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point,” is a study in guilt-free violence. But Colin Farrell’s Terry is something new. Terry is a decent guy with many weaknesses, and, after the crime is committed, Farrell gives him a piteous self-loathing that is very touching.
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