The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Christy
    This fierce contest of genres — in this corner, sports-saga triumph; in this corner, too-real female endangerment — is the director David Michôd’s point.
  2. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    The film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes.
  3. Splinter
    A diverting if not terribly original on-the-cheap horror film.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Getting Straight
    A brilliant, mercurial performance by Elliott Gould steadies and vivifies but cannot save Getting Straight. Even with such sideline brilliance as the sad-funny performance of young Robert F. Lyons almost matching Gould's, the picture ends as a cop-out of its own professed principles and initial honesty.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blue Hawaii
    Mild, nonsensical and harmless.
  6. Body Parts
    Ironically, the film mirrors the callow cinematic dynamics it critiques: It titillates, even as it scolds.
  7. Wicked Little Letters
    The movie is full of goofy side characters and one-liners, yet elevated occasionally to genuine complexity by Colman and Buckley, who are consistently the best thing about any movie they’re in.
  8. (Untitled)
    If “(Untitled)” shrewdly hedges its bets about the value of it all, it is ultimately on the side of experimental music and art and their champions, no matter how eccentric. For that alone this brave little movie deserves an audience.
  9. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    The animation is competent, and some of the gags are quite funny, but Jonah never shakes the oppressive, morally superior good-for-you quality that almost automatically accompanies didactic entertainment.
  10. The Trench
    What lifts The Trench above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust.
  11. The Safety of Objects
    With the help of an ensemble that is nearly flawless, she (Troche) assembles the damaged human elements of Ms. Homes's world with patience and precision, and more often than not chooses dry understatement over easy satire or obvious sentiment.
  12. Session 9
    The film, too artfully conceived to deliver many overt shocks, often feels long and aimless.
  13. Shanghai Knights
    With Shanghai Knights, he (Chan) has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.
  14. Gozu
    Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.
  15. Man on the Moon
    What is missing here, though it might have been the first thing expected from an ostensible film biography, is an answer to the simplest question: Who was Andy Kaufman, and how did he get that way?
  16. Butterfly
    While instructive on environmental concerns about the impact of logging, Butterfly does not reward those who seek dispassionate psychological insight into the zealous Ms. Hill.
  17. Seems Like Old Times
    The material here is slick and entertaining, and Mr. Sandrich settles for comic simplicity without reaching for anything more. He coaxes the film along at a cheerfully breakneck rhythm. Zany, zany but nice.
  18. Populaire
    The best scenes are the contests in which the competitors hammer away, executing the kind of grand flourishes with each return of the carriage that Liberace exhibited at the piano.
  19. Men in Black III
    It manages, in the end, to be touching as well as hectic and whimsical, and to send a few interesting thematic bubbles into the air, having to do with lost fathers, obscure regrets and racial reconciliation.
  20. Big Fish
    The most curious thing about this magical-realist fable...is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.
  21. Wrong
    Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.
  22. Bat*21
    It's hard to imagine what the film might have been with anyone other than Mr. Hackman in this role, for this actor's quintessential decency and ordinariness have never seemed more affecting. It's precisely the lack of bravado in Hambleton that makes him an interesting character, and a poignant anti-Rambo.
  23. Snowden
    Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.
  24. Hello Lonesome
    Adam Reid's smart, poignant trilogy of interwoven vignettes, manages the considerable feat of creating six fully human characters who are quirky enough to transcend the stereotypes found in a typical indie film.
  25. Lawless
    There are too many action-movie clichés without enough dramatic purpose, and interesting themes and anecdotes are scattered around without being fully explored. This is weak and cloudy moonshine: it doesn't burn or intoxicate.
  26. Raging Dove
    Bruising but illuminating documentary.
  27. Kid-Thing
    The film is, if nothing else, an interesting meditation on how a child who grows up without guidance might react to a situation that requires judgment.
  28. Jobriath A.D.
    It’s cruel but must be said: Presented in hushed, reverent tones, Jobriath A.D. often comes across as mockumentary material; each ghastly career move is followed by another. Hampered by limited video of Jobriath, the film lacks a sense of him or his music.
  29. Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
    It’s a pleasure to spend 80 minutes in Mr. Berry’s company.
  30. The Escape Artist
    The Escape Artist represents a lot more talent than is ever demonstrated on the screen.
  31. Skin
    A blistering story of rage and redemption that never fully illuminates the journey from one to the other.
  32. Brothers
    A smart, well-meaning project -- never quite pulls itself together. It has a vague, half-finished feeling, as if it had not figured out what it was trying to do. Which may amount to a kind of realism -- an accurate reflection of where we are in Afghanistan.
  33. 20 Centimeters
    A brash, vivacious concoction of dark comedy, light drama and musical performance.
  34. The Red Chapel
    The product - sloppy even by guerrilla filmmaking standards - has no revelations to offer that are worth the slog of watching it.
  35. Julia
    Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.
  36. Nocebo
    This movie has plenty going for it: excellent actors (Fonacier has a knack for coiled tension), stylish camerawork by the director Lorcan Finnegan and a point to make about economic exploitation. What’s missing is any sense of surprise.
  37. A Hologram for the King
    It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.
  38. Happy Death Day
    Niftily paced and tight as a chokehold, the script (by the comic-book writer Scott Lobdell) delivers just enough variation to hold our interest.
  39. The High Note
    The High Note is pleasant enough but disappointingly timid and thoroughly implausible.
  40. Miss Firecracker
    A superficial and sporadically witty piece aimed at such easy targets as family squabbles, small-town folk and beauty contests. The film is not actively awful; just dull and banal. [28 Apr 1989, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  41. Stepmom
    To its credit, the film doesn't sugarcoat its women too monstrously, and it lets real conflicts and opinions occasionally creep in.
  42. Thunderheart
    A film this intent on authenticity might easily grow dull, but this one doesn't; Mr. Apted is a skillful storyteller. He gives Thunderheart" a brisk, fact-filled exposition and a dramatic structure that builds to a strong finale, one that effectively drives the film's message home.
  43. Police Beat
    A delicately funny tale about everyday surrealism.
  44. Vanishing Waves
    This Lithuanian love story from Kristina Buozyte offers a discomfiting blend of visual ecstasy and narrative sterility.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    Compared to its 1940 predecessor, One Million B.C., which the other film follows very closely, the new grunt-and-groaner isn't as effective with its trick photography, even with color added.
  46. Geronimo: An American Legend
    The real flavor of Davis's account, and of the ferocity that earned Geronimo his place in history, is nowhere evident on screen.
  47. Eden
    It’s a little surprising that these proceedings are led by the director Ron Howard, since this subject matter is more perverse than anything he has set his sights on before. The actors are up to the task, however.
  48. Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating
    A slight, amusing documentary.
  49. Penance
    Mr. Kurosawa expertly modulates an uncanny flow of energies between shame and grief, between venal urges and high-minded moral demands. The women’s travails suggest something that’s part curse, part mythic cycle of guilt and part kaleidoscopic dread.
  50. The Moving Creatures
    Mr. Gotardo uses long, slowly unfolding shots and extended close-ups to aid our familiarity with each set of characters — almost by osmosis, we grasp their domestic dynamics, the rhythm of their routines.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cat from Outer Space
    The Cat From Outer Space, is likely to keep the under-14's amused, at least if supplemented by plenty of popcorn.
  52. Romance on the High Seas
    As a brash little night-club singer who is supposed to act like a swell, Miss Day is most plainly the victim of the writers' unutterable ennui. Furthermore, Michael Curtiz's direction of her and the rest of the cast is as slapdash and void of distinction as it can professionally be. Not only has he let the young lady spread noisiness all over the place, but he has wasted the few minor talents that he had in a most provoking way.
  53. Prime
    All of this makes the movie pleasant, but not very memorable - a pale mirror image of "Shopgirl," which touches on some similar themes.
  54. The Rock
    Seldom is it clearer that a film is nothing more than high-gloss jokey escapism, or that when visual cliches are this relentless they become weirdly fascinating in their own right.
  55. Jimmy P.
    This is a calm film about strong emotions, but it does find a reservoir of intensity in the two central performances, in particular Mr. Del Toro’s.
  56. Knives and Skin
    It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.
  57. Jumanji: The Next Level
    It’s perhaps unfair to call this a turkey. It’s got some sweet moments, and the cast, as it did in the previous picture, enjoys itself at least semi-infectiously. But the action sequences are lifeless; the lessons valid but arguably stale; and the trimmings, mere bloat.
  58. Moana 2
    Squint your eyes against the specifics, and the odyssey tends to deliver a mood that fluctuates along a scale of benign to bright.
  59. Rising from Ashes
    Rising From Ashes has the phantom limbs of missed opportunities.
  60. Mean Girls
    It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.
  61. Roving Mars
    If many of the scenes are fake, however, the thrill of the project is not, and what we do see of the surface - hyperclear photographs on the scale of 100-by-180 feet - is out of this world.
  62. Tortilla Soup
    As predictable as a fast-food restaurant. The actors' exuberance goes a long way, but not far enough.
  63. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    Extremely well acted. But as frequently as The Farewell touches on politics, it is essentially an excoriating (and sometimes grimly amusing) domestic drama of a latter-day king and his concubines.
  64. ZigZag
    Might have been richer and more observant if it were less densely plotted. The characters would resonate more if there were fewer of them, and if they were not pushed through so many contrived dramatic incidents.
  65. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    The movie keeps you at a distance; it is visually sweeping, and the history is fascinating, but the drama is rarely stirring.
  66. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
    It is billed as a "restored version," though the sound is still fuzzy and the image only occasionally rises to the level of murk.
  67. Risk/Reward
    The moderately arresting Risk/Reward suffers from a lack of resources and is writ small, suggesting that it may play better on television.
  68. I Am Chris Farley
    The story of dependence and excess is sadly familiar — and as with most of its material, I Am Chris Farley doesn’t find a fresh way to tell it.
  69. Ask the Dust
    More than anything else, Ask the Dust feels like a compendium of desires - for a city, for a woman, for youth.
  70. Licence to Kill
    For all its clever updatings, stylish action and witty escapism, Licence to Kill is still a little too much by the book. Mr. Dalton is perfectly at home as an angry Bond, and as a romantic lead and as an action hero, but he never seems to blend any two of those qualities at once.
  71. Lost in Beijing
    In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power.
  72. Back to the Outback
    However generic this movie is in premise, there is wit to be found in its details, and warmth in its message.
  73. First Snow
    A noirish thriller that revels in ominous visual moods, deepened by Cliff Martinez's spare, shivering guitar score, this heartland "Appointment in Samarra" is a mind-teaser that speaks the flat, evasive language of its seedy characters.
  74. The Kill Room
    While the supporting cast is replete with performers we like to see — Debi Mazar, Larry Pine, and Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, as a feminist artist — the script, in the end, does little to support them.
  75. Our Son
    A simple yet engaging melodrama.
  76. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    It’s all kind of cute. Maybe a little too cute, but it does have a nice circle-of-life ending. And along the way, Mr. Byington shows a knack for observational humor, slipping in sly jokes that force you to keep paying attention despite the slim plot. Droll and interesting; just not very substantial.
  77. Ramen Heads
    Over-narrated and self-serious, this documentary allows its good intentions to pave the way to a tepid tale.
  78. The Cat Rescuers
    While The Cat Rescuers movingly portrays the unique individuals committed to helping these cats, it doesn’t quite tackle the full complexity of this subject. Still, no animal lover should be surprised to find themselves holding back tears while watching this documentary.
  79. The Birthday Cake
    Giannopoulos might be inexperienced, but he’s canny with mood and unafraid to experiment with the rhythms of violence. I, for one, am keen to see what he does next.
  80. The Equalizer 3
    Washington is unsurprisingly the primary reason to watch “Equalizer 3,” which is basically a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and light up the screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly beautiful town on the Amalfi coast.
  81. Hope Gap
    While you’ve seen this portrait before, and better, Nighy and Bening are so in tune with their characters that such rote renderings are easily forgiven.
  82. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    Tolkien's inventive, episodic tale of a modest homebody on a dangerous journey has been turned into an overscale and plodding spectacle.
  83. Memories of My Father
    Perhaps Colombian audiences don’t need the history lesson, but skimping on the context in this case also makes the film’s mawkish impulses more glaring and grating, especially as Trueba shifts his observant domestic drama into something of a political rallying cry — a tepid one, at that.
  84. Southbound
    These are fragments more than complete stories, and the incompleteness is its own kind of creepiness.
  85. Shrek the Third
    Shrek the Third seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter.
  86. The Finest Hours
    The Finest Hours is a moderately gripping whoosh of nostalgia that shamelessly recycles the ’50s cliché of the squeaky-clean all-American hero.
  87. Riddle of Fire
    Razooli wants us to see the fantastical narratives children conjure to manage real-world uncertainties, but his vision lacks focus.
  88. Somm
    Somm, though an entree into a little-known world, rarely finds a second dimension.
  89. Rough Cut
    To watch it is to try to put together the pieces from three different jigsaw puzzles. Not everything fits. [19 June 1980, p.19]
    • The New York Times
  90. The Three Faces of Eve
    It is written, produced and directed by Mr. Johnson with a clean documentary clarity, and played with superlative flexibility and emotional power by Joanne Woodward in the main role.
  91. Aurora Borealis
    The fixation of independent movies on the arrested development of bourgeois dullards may have less to do with the relevance of the topic than the class of people who get to make movies. Whatever the case, James Burke directs from a screenplay by Brent Boyd.
  92. The Trust
    The script, by Adam Hirsch and Benjamin Brewer, is full of both humor and menace, giving the actors plenty to work with. That makes for an enjoyably slow buildup to an unexpected ending.
  93. Sharky's Machine
    Mr. Reynolds's third and best directorial effort - the first two were Gator and The End - is an unexpectedly accomplished cop thriller. There is, as is often the case with movies of that genre, less here than meets the eye: the plot has its unreasonable spots, and the story doesn't come to much in the end. But one measure of the success of Sharky's Machine is that it's too fast and exciting for those considerations to count until after the movie is over.
  94. Green Card
    That understated style at times makes Green Card seem too stiff and vacuous, as if Mr. Weir were inspired by the surface of a Jane Austen work and left out the wicked social observations. But the film is magnificently redeemed by Mr. Depardieu.
  95. Explorers
    OF all the Spielberg-inspired fantasy films afoot at the moment, Joe Dante's Explorers is by far the most eccentric. It's charmingly odd at some moments, just plain goofy at others.
  96. The Hummingbird Project
    As the geological, financial and personal barriers the cousins face grow increasingly absurd, the movie works up a satisfying sweat.
  97. J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    This warm, sorrowful film plays like a downbeat variation on an old World War II picture from Hollywood.
  98. The Thrill of It All
    I don't want to give you the impression that The Thrill of It All is a great film. I just want to tell you it is loaded with good, clean American laughs.
  99. The Tree
    The movie is truly a tree-hugger's delight (I confess to being one such hugger) that makes the most of its metaphors without straining toward supernatural schmaltz.
  100. The Seagull
    The cast is great. The play is great. But this is still a bad movie, because it has no clear or coherent idea of how to be one.
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