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 1.7 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. State of Grace
    Joanou has an intricate, beautifully built script to work from (David Rabe did a lot of uncredited rewriting) and he unfolds his charged story of violence, fratricide, and betrayal with masterly assurance. [17 Sep 1990, p.54]
    • Newsweek
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Hunter Black Heart
    Eastwood is climbing peaks as a director that Eastwood the actor can't scale. Perhaps it's time to cut the rope. [01 Oct 1990, p.70D]
    • Newsweek
  3. After Dark, My Sweet
    Like a hot Santa Ana wind, this sexy, unsentimental thriller makes your senses tingle. [03 Sep 1990, p.66]
    • Newsweek
  4. Presumed Innocent
    Presumed Innocent is a slow fuse of a movie. It never quite explodes with the resonance Pakula intends. It tries too hard to be important. But the story it tells is a good one, and once it's got its hooks in you, there's no turning away. [30 July 1990, p.56]
    • Newsweek
  5. The Freshman
    The Freshman has a preposterous plot even the writer's mother couldn't believe, and it strains and creaks down the runway, but when this baby gets off the ground, we're talking seriously funny.
  6. Arachnophobia
    It pushes the audience's buttons with Pavlovian finesse, manufacturing industrial-strength adrenaline. First-time director Frank Marshall has long been Steven Spielberg's producer, and he's learned the master's lessons well.
  7. RoboCop 2
    Kershner's accomplishment in the first half of RoboCop 2--which offers up the original's mixture of crunching action, dystopian satire and depraved villainy--is the genuine pathos this conflicted tin man evokes. But a curious thing happens to this sequel. It forgets what it's about. In the last third of the movie, the character of RoboCop vanishes behind his visor, the script loses its focus, and the special effects take over.
  8. Dick Tracy
    Dick Tracy is a class act: simple, stylish, sophisticated, sweet.
  9. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    Gremlins 2 has its horror-movie side, but the grisly is definitely subordinate to the gags. Only a snob could resist such a generous level of lunacy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Back to the Future Part III
    It's a little late to be spoofing Westerns, and most of the high-noonery in BTTF III falls flat. [4 June 1990, p.82]
    • Newsweek
  11. Cadillac Man
    Watching Robin Williams's new movie, Cadillac Man, spin hopelessly out of control, you know intuitively that there was no single storyteller at the wheel, but a committee of back-seat drivers inflating a small, decent idea into an incoherent, opportunistic concept. Trying desperately to speak to everyone, these star packages have no voice of their own. They're not really movies -- they're product. [28 May 1990, p.72]
    • Newsweek
  12. Bird on a Wire
    The strenuously improbable finale in an indoor zoo -- incorporating every available lethal animal Hollywood could rent -- will have you on the edge of your seat . . . straining for the exit. Movies don't get much more impersonal than this. [28 May 1990, p.72]
    • Newsweek
  13. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    While this accomplished film holds you in its grip, it doesn't convince. The revelatory urgency that made Selby's book a literary scandal is long gone. [14 May 1990, p.75]
    • Newsweek
  14. Wild Orchid
    Rourke, a good actor, is reduced to doing his whispering-wacko shtik. Supermodel Otis has a marvelous face and can smile and breathe heavily at the same time. Only Jacqueline Bisset gives a real performance, as Claudia, a fiscal whiz who gets her real kicks not form the carnal but the commercial. [7 May 1990]
    • Newsweek
  15. Q & A
    Q & A is an uncommonly ambitious thriller, but it rarely goes solemn -- it's a raw, rude Cook's tour of the New York underworld, from transvestite bars to precinct offices to Mafia mansions -- with a violent side trip to San Juan thrown in. [07 May 1990, p.65]
    • Newsweek
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miami Blues
    The performance is a toure de force: Baldwin manages to make Junior very funny without sacrificing the character's scary, unpredictable edge. Quirkiness, not square-jawed heroism, seems to bring out the best in Baldwin,confirming Jonathan Demme's observation that "he's not a victim of his handsomeness." [23 Apr 1990, p.66]
    • Newsweek
  17. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    The overall effect of Grenaway's film is mixed: disturbing, too schematic to be entirely convincing, unforgettable as few movies are. A key element is the powerful acting of a distinguished cast. [23 Apr 1990, p.73]
    • Newsweek
  18. Bad Influence
    Lowe and Spader are quite good as alter egos of the moral shallows. But the film goes from shallow to callow. Director Curtis Hanson and writer David Koepp have turned out a glossy but hollow film noir that makes virtue and decadence equally vapid. [26 Mar 1990, p.53]
    • Newsweek
  19. The Handmaid's Tale
    The heavy-handed direction by Volker Schlondorff doesn't help to make the movie convincing or dramatically effective. [16 Mar 1990, p.54]
    • Newsweek
  20. Revenge
    Inflated to more than two hours, spiced up with lyrical pseudeo-erotic sex scenes, Scott's Revenge is long on candlelight and billowing white curtains and short on emotional potency. [26 Feb 1990, p.66]
    • Newsweek
  21. Always
    Spielberg doesn't differentiate between the good ideas in the script and the bad ones: everything is given an emphatic, production-number treatment... His ultraslick, seductive technique can be a pleasure to watch in itself, but it can't disguise the fact that "Always" is a decidedly uneternal fantasy. [1 Jan. 1990, p.60]
    • Newsweek
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Roger & Me
    In the end, Roger & Me says less about GM than it does about the human toll of corporate restructuring. Behind all the sarcasm, Moore manages to convey the dark side of the Reagan boom years. But broad humor, cheap shots and all, it does serve as a useful reminder that the '80s weren't just about glamorous Wall Street deals. [15 Jan 1990, p.52]
    • Newsweek
  23. We're No Angels
    Though Penn and a heavily mugging De Niro earn their share of chuckles, you leave this comedy scratching your head at the nutty incongruity of the endeavor. What were these talented people thinking? [25 Dec 1989, p.74B]
    • Newsweek
  24. Blaze
    A tale this outrageous would seem to demand a more freewheeling style, but Shelton never really lest his hair down. His movie peaks too early: it feels over when Long loses the gubernatorial election; the last half hour seems redundant. But if Blaze isn't quite the movie it could have been, it's much too good a tale to pass up. [18 Dec 1989, p.68]
    • Newsweek
  25. She-Devil
    Director Seidelman thrashes about in search of a tone: there's no weight to her images; the plot twists seem arbitrary and contrived. By the end you've lost interest in Ruth's revenge and can't wait until Streep gets back on screen. Watching her prod her face into new shapes in the mirror, contemplating a face-lift, you momentarily forget you're watching a mediocre movie and marvel at real comic witchcraft. [11 Dec 1989, p.88]
    • Newsweek
  26. Back to the Future Part II
    Director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale assume you've seen the original and are ready to swallow whatever zany time-travel notion they offer. They're not wrong. As unapologetically broad and silly as this sequel it, it's also a good deal of fun, and its relentless velocity is part of the joke. [4 Dec. 1989, p.78]
    • Newsweek
  27. Steel Magnolias
    The densely populated movie, pumped up with unnecessary crowd scenes and a handful of utterly extraneous male characters, is as garish and busy as a TV game show. As directed by Herbert Ross, it is so intent on persuading the audience that it is having a heartwarming emotional experience you almost expect TelePrompTers to flash in the theater, instructing you to laugh and cry. [27 Nov 1989, p.92]
    • Newsweek
  28. 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
  29. Fat Man and Little Boy
    Fat Man and Little Boy casts a wide net, but it never really traps its subject. The screenplay simply isn't up to the job. Only in the last half hour, as Trinity approaches, does dramatic fission occur. [30 Oct 1989, p.75]
    • Newsweek
  30. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    Kloves doesn't want to play by conventional romantic comedy rules, but he hasn't quite figured out what to replace them with. After the first seductive hour, which dances on the edge of comedy and melancholy, The Fabulous Baker Boys grows increasingly frustrating. The audience is enjoying Klove's hip, knowing update of romantic conventions, but the director seems to think he's making "realism": he misjudges the gravity of his story, and his touch becomes more ponderous. [23 Oct 1983, p.84]
    • Newsweek
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