Newsweek's Scores

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For 1,617 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 57% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 40% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Children of a Lesser God
Lowest review score: 0 Down to You
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 952 out of 1617
  2. Mixed: 532 out of 1617
  3. Negative: 133 out of 1617
1617 movie reviews
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  1. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    It's an engrossing tale, and Weir's languid, sun-dappled images are at once seductive and unnerving. Yet there's something hollow at the core, an unearned sense of importance, a reliance on mere mood to suggest mytsical depths. Why does Weir - and why should the audience - so easily accept these vanished schoolgirls as adolescent oracles, some sort of pagan Cassandras? The symbolic burden of Hanging Rock inevitably suggests the use of the Marabar Caves in E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India," but the comparison only points up the shallowness of Weir's conception. His movie is stylish and entertaining, but what he is pushing as metaphysical profundity is closer to metaphysical mush. [5 March 1979, p.105]
    • Newsweek
  2. To Live and Die in L.A.
    Shot with gritty flamboyance by Robby Muller, cast with a fine eye for fresh, tough-guy faces, To Live and Die in L.A. may be fake savage, but it's fun. Friedkin can still cook up a good set piece: there's a tense, comic three-way chase in the L.A. airport, and a bravura car chase designed to evoke memories of "The French Connection." [11 Nov 1985, p.80]
    • Newsweek
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Buena Vista Social Club
    The film is short on biographical details and the history of the music, and long on impressions of the musicians' character and motivations.
  4. Prince of the City
    A heavyweight contender unafraid to take on some of the most harrowing moral and social dilemmas of the day... Prince of the City takes us into the jungle and into the halls of justice, and forces us to see how precarious the line between them is. It's a true horror story. [24 Aug 1981, p.67]
    • Newsweek
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Color of Paradise
    A beautifully told story of a child's innocence and faith, filmed with exquisite detail and stunning cinematography
    • Newsweek
  6. Xala
    The actors are wonderful, especially the women who play El Hadji's first two wives - ladies of magisterial personality, social shrewdness and sexual pride. The wedding sequence in Xala makes the one in "Godfather I" look like a wedding party at McDonald's. This allegory of impotence in the body politic shows Sembene on his way to becoming an African Moliere. [13 Oct 1975]
    • Newsweek
  7. Saraband
    With Saraband, the great writer-director has stepped back into the ring for one last epic wrestle with his demons. There is, as always, no easy outcome. But no one ever fought for higher emotional and spiritual stakes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In the Company of Men
    A brutal black comedy. It asks real questions and takes real chances.
  9. Bugsy
    The spectacle played out in Levinson's lyrical, dark-hued images never achieves the emotional whiplash the movie's after. Levinson's somber elegance and Toback's volatile aggression don't quite mesh: perhaps what this story needed was the fleet, gaudy ferocity of a Sam Fuller. Bugsy never makes the transition from the filmmakers' heads to the audience's gut.
    • Newsweek
  10. Mystery Train
    Jarmusch continues to have a great eye for moody lowlife settings. But his minimalist dramaturgy, so resonant in Stranger Than Paradise, just doesn't give you enough to chew on. His iconoclasm is beginning to look like complacency. It's time this talented filmmaker put more matter in his mannerism. [04 Dec 1989, p.78]
    • Newsweek
  11. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Perfectly reflects the range of this funny, disturbing and complex tale.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Blair Witch Project
    A fairy tale reminding us that childhood fears are deep and tangled as tree roots.
  13. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Noyce uses his Hollywood craft to unfold this primal, powerful story, he has an epic feel for the harshly beautiful Australian landscape and he gets wonderfully natural performances from the three girls. His bold, lyrical images stay in your head, like an unaccountably beautiful nightmare.
    • Newsweek
  14. Whale Rider
    While Whale Rider is a doozy of a female-empowerment fantasy, it’s mercifully free of any feminist smugness.
  15. Minority Report
    Ferociously intense, furiously kinetic, it’s expressionist film noir science fiction that, like all good sci-fi, peers into the future to shed light on the present.
    • Newsweek
  16. Dead Man Walking
    No simple diatribe against capital punishment, it's a strong film, made stronger by two terrific performances.
  17. Children of a Lesser God
    Matlin's performance in her first major role in her first movie is so good -- sensitive, sharp, funny -- that she's likely to be the first deaf actress to get an Oscar nomination. [20 Oct 1986, p.77]
    • Newsweek
  18. North Dallas Forty
    It's not exactly news that pro football is just big business with the cleats showing. But North Dallas Forty brings the news home in fresh, funny and powerful ways. It's a bitter comedy of Sunbelt manners that packs a substantial emotional wallop. Director Ted Kotcheff, who stays faithful to the spirit of the novel by Peter Gent (an ex-Dallas Cowboy), captures the vulgar, born-again spirit of nouveau riche Dallas society, but he never condescends. The cogs caught in this corporate wheel always remain sweatily human - this is a locker-room satire with soul. [6 Aug 1979, p.55]
    • Newsweek
  19. Lorenzo's Oil
    You could trust that Miller would not shoot this tale in the sentimental style of a TV movie of the week, and he hasn't. He has made an impassioned medical thriller as energized as an action movie, as emotionally and stylistically flamboyant as the operas heard on the soundtrack. [04 Jan 1993, p.50]
    • Newsweek
  20. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    It's a passionate, serious, impeccably crafted movie tackling a subject Clooney cares about deeply: the duty of journalism to speak truth to power. It also happens to be the most compelling American movie of the year so far.
  21. Little Miss Sunshine
    This indie, a sweet, tart and smart satire about a family of losers in a world obsessed with winning, is an authentic crowd pleaser. There's been no more satisfying American comedy this year.
  22. Tarzan
    It's a swirling, fluid retelling of the tale that packs an impressive cargo of laughs, thrills and wonders into a watertight 88 minutes.
  23. Frost/Nixon
    Frost/Nixon works even better on screen. Director Ron Howard and Morgan, adapting his own play, have both opened up the tale and, with the power of close-ups, made this duel of wits even more intimate and suspenseful.
  24. Eat Drink Man Woman
    If Ang Lee sometimes piles on the sugar, he has made a truly sweet movie in a bitter time. It leaves a bracing aftertaste. [22 Aug 1994, p.62]
    • Newsweek
  25. Monsters, Inc.
    A terrific piece of work: smart, inventive and executed with state-of-the-art finesse.
    • Newsweek
  26. Time Bandits
    Time Bandits is at once sophisticated and childlike in its magical but emotionally cool logic, and this tone is perfectly captured in young Warnock's appealingly sensible performance. Cleese, Warner, Richardson, Holm and Connery are in great form, and the bandits (David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon and Tiny Ross) are all gifted comic actors. Made on a modest budget, Time Bandits is a wonderful wild card in the fall movie season [09 Nov 1981, p.92]
    • Newsweek
  27. March of the Penguins
    Jacquet's movie is as visually ravishing as "Winged Migration," and more gripping.
  28. An Unmarried Woman
    In snuggling up so close to his heroine, Mazursky sacrifices some of the wild satrical highs we expect from him - the andante pacing could use a little more allegro (and a little less help from Bill Conti's overdone score). But we are more than rewarded by Muzursky's generosity and insight. He's burrowed deeper into the upper middle-class psyche than ever before, and if it's sometimes uncomfortable there, the unease is one we recognize as our own. [13 Mar 1978, p.75]
    • Newsweek
  29. She's Gotta Have It
    She's Gotta Have It, a black-and-white movie made on a shoestring by the 29-year-old black filmmaker Spike Lee, is fresh in both senses of the word -- sassy and original. [08 Sept 1986, p.65]
    • Newsweek
  30. Hotel Rwanda
    Ultimately, one's reservations are overwhelmed by the story's urgency; it's impossible not to be shattered.
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