The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The Toxic Avenger
    The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.
  2. Pope Francis - A Man of His Word
    The interview sections are fascinating, and scenes of the pope’s travels, during which he frequently washes the feet of those who come to him, are moving.... Less welcome are Mr. Wenders’s brief attempts at depicting the life of St. Francis himself.
  3. For the Love of Benji
    The card announcing the film's G rating was roundly booed by the youngsters though at almost every sight of the dog they screamed with mouth-filled delight.
  4. The Secret of NIMH
    Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.
  5. Earth Girls Are Easy
    With a scatter-shot style that includes lengthy, often lame song-and-dance parodies, as well as special effects, slapstick and satire, the film can't begin to sustain its lunatic premise. But during the lulls between witty scenes, there is always something amusing to look at. Mr. Temple and his collaborators create a near-California so cartoonish and crayon-colored that the film comes to seem like Aliens in Toyland.
  6. White Fang
    A scenic and enveloping nature film about a young man and his beloved pet. But it is by no means strictly a children's film, and it certainly isn't Lassie.
  7. The Last Boy Scout
    Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.
  8. The Wilby Conspiracy
    The best thing about the movie, flimed mostly in Kenya, is its performances, funny and hip and self-assured in the manner of television personalities working in front of loving audiences. Mr. Caine and Mr. Poitier are never unaware that their material may not be the greatest, but that doesn't spoil their good spirits, and when a good line comes along they get maximum results without stomping on it or us.
  9. Book Club
    These women — Ms. Fonda, Ms. Keaton, Ms. Steenburgen and Ms. Bergen, that is — have nothing to prove. Each one brings enough credibility and charisma to Book Club to render its weaknesses largely irrelevant.
  10. 2010
    A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'
  11. Mask
    All of the performances are limited by the material and, in the case of Mr. Stoltz, by Michael Westmore's quite spectacular makeup. The exception - and the film's best sequence - occurs when Rusty's very middle-class, well-meaning parents, played by Estelle Getty and Richard Dysart, come to visit. In these few, brief minutes, Mask becomes specific and interesting. Otherwise it's the kind of story that would work better as a television feature.
  12. The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
    Even those who would never, without the urging of wild horses, dream of attending a film about the seamy world of heavy-metal music are sure to find Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years of unexpected interest.
  13. Raw Deal
    Though the language is vulgar, the macho posturing absurd and some of the plotting inscrutable, Raw Deal has a kind of seemliness to it. It delivers every punch it promises.
  14. The Devil and Father Amorth
    If this documentary celebrates a crackpot, Mr. Friedkin is his match. The director’s blabbermouth tendencies and wry manner make him an enjoyable M.C.
  15. Heartbreak Ridge
    As the gritty, raspy-voiced sergeant, Mr. Eastwood's performance is one of the richest he's ever given. It's funny, laid-back, seemingly effortless, the sort that separates actors who are run-of-the-mill from those who have earned the right to be identified as stars.
  16. No Light and No Land Anywhere
    In the scenes that break with banality, there is a zing not only of originality, but of daring.
  17. Don't Leave Home
    Don’t Leave Home is a frustratingly befuddled movie that’s nevertheless fascinating.
  18. Cocote
    This is a straightforward story that Mr. de Los Santos Arias, making his fictional feature debut, tells in an ever-changing style, shooting in color and black and white. He also alternates the shape of the frame, mostly toggling between a boxy frame and the wider one most mainstream movies are shown in. Whatever effect was hoped for, this viewer just saw affectation.
  19. The Heart of Nuba
    The film is worth seeing because it’s a moving and remarkable story and it represents a great cause. Mr. Carlson often puts a directorial foot wrong.
  20. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    The director, Richard Lanni, whose biography also cites work as a battlefield tour guide, manages a fair amount of wit, particularly with a postcard montage of Stubby’s first trip to Paris.
  21. A Simple Favor
    Mr. Feig handily manages the mood and scene shifts, using regular laughs to brighten the deepening dark. By far his smartest move was to give Ms. Kendrick and Ms. Lively room to create a prickly intimacy for their characters, a bond that’s persuasive enough to push the story through its more forced moments.
  22. Bad Times at the El Royale
    Goddard keeps everything smoothly, ebbing and flowing as the characters separate and join together, but at some point during this logy 2-hour-and-21-minute exercise you want something more substantial than even Hemsworth’s admittedly mesmerizing snaky hips.
  23. Beautiful Boy
    It is hard not to be touched by the testing of paternal love, or by Nic’s fragility. But Beautiful Boy, rather than plumbing the hard emotional depths of its subject, skates on a surface of sentiment and gauzy visual beauty.
  24. Overlord
    As seen in the film’s terrifying opening and its gruesome climax, Avery deftly orchestrates some grisly, intense set pieces. He delivers on the thrills, even if the story leaves something to be desired.
  25. Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    Breakin' 2 slights dramatic matters to concentrate exclusively on dancing. The movie contains so much of it that it's exhausting even to watch, but at least the choreography isn't being executed by John Travolta.
  26. The Pick-up Artist
    The film roams from the Upper West Side to Coney Island to Atlantic City, maintaining a lighthearted style that doesn't quite match the hints of obsessiveness in Mr. Toback's screenplay.
  27. When a Stranger Calls
    The gimmick behind When a Stranger Galls is a scary one, but it's been played for more than it's worth.
  28. The Gospel According to André
    The director, Kate Novack, has delivered a film that’s detailed and affectionate, but also frustratingly static, making a point not to get in its subject’s way.
  29. ACORN and the Firestorm
    Although the documentary makes clear how some accusations proved false or overblown, perhaps its biggest flaw is that it’s too eager to hand-wave any actual mistakes that Acorn made.
  30. That Summer
    That Summer, a new documentary directed by Goran Hugo Olsson, sheds further light on the Beales with footage shot before the making of “Grey Gardens.”
  31. Child's Play
    Child's Play has some limp dialogue among the clever touches. Its appeal is clearly for upscale horror fans rather than a general movie audience. Yet it is a fitting successor to the classic television horror stories it takes off from.
  32. The Judge
    Though voices both welcoming and hostile to women judges are represented, Ms. al-Faqih’s likely Sisyphean battle to reach her position feels insufficiently underlined.
  33. Hotel Artemis
    Mr. Pearce is also well-versed in staging and shooting decent action scenes, and building suspense enough to keep Hotel Artemis diverting in its overstuffed ambition. Add to that Ms. Foster’s welcome return to big-screen acting after a five-year layoff and you’ve got a movie almost worth seeing.
  34. Clash of the Titans
    Clash of the Titans is profligate in its use of talented people who are not particularly at home in this sort of film, though they all pay serious attention to their work.
  35. Feral
    Methodical and efficient, the script (by Mr. Young and Adam Frazier) gets some mileage from its generic setting and zombie-infection theme, even if the croaking order is easily predicted.
  36. A Very Brady Sequel
    This carefree comedy film does its best with material that would have been totally ephemeral in a less Brady world.
  37. Castle in the Sky
    Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.
  38. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    The movie depicts Mr. Ducasse’s sweeping streak — he prepares food for the homeless in Brazil and concocts a deluxe restaurant at Versailles — competently if not brilliantly. A screening of the film accompanied by a tasting menu afterward, though — that would be something.
  39. All About Nina
    It’s hard not to root for Nina, even if this prickly, intriguingly difficult character becomes considerably less interesting as the story progresses and the dialogue veers toward the therapeutic
  40. Stockholm
    Drowsy in feel and muted in color, Stockholm is lightly amusing and watchable — mostly thanks to Hawke — but never makes the case that this is a story that needed to be told, with or without laughs.
  41. Shock and Awe
    At a time when the current president routinely dismisses the accuracy of reporting, Shock and Awe feels more timely than it might have. It also captures an aspect of journalism not often portrayed: the fear of being wrong when the conclusions of your reporting break from those of your competitors.
  42. Archangel
    From its flickering, inky cinematography to its wavering late 1920's-style sound track, to Veronkha's kohl-eyed vampish look, the movie is an expert parody of a period movie style.
  43. Tales from the Gimli Hospital
    It is a strange piece of work.
  44. Ibiza
    The most interesting thing about Ibiza, not to get too highfalutin, is its positive treatment of female desire.
  45. Careful
    If the central performances in Careful approached the earnest intensity of some of its early-1930's inspirations, the movie would probably be twice as funny.
  46. The Most Unknown
    The Most Unknown works best as inspiration to delve deeper into these disciplines, and as a celebration of science. And when the film comes up short, it still functions like an intriguing experiment: It doesn’t have to be entirely successful for you to learn something.
  47. Bernard and Huey
    Devoted Feifferites, not to mention fans of Mr. Rash and Mr. Koechner, who get to flex their muscles nicely here, will be well sated.
  48. Real Genius
    What the film needs, instead of these familiar teen-movie trappings, is a cleverness and eccentricity to match that of its characters. For the most part, these are qualities that it lacks.
  49. The Year of Spectacular Men
    It is the movie’s saving grace that its family acting troupe faces the gobbledygook with openhearted silliness and sincerity.
  50. Climax
    Even though the techniques are immersive — plunging you into a disorienting reality that mirrors the drug-fueled frenzy you are witnessing — the effect is also curiously distancing.
  51. Deliverance
    An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.
  52. At War
    To this viewer, it is a spectacular whiff.
  53. Yomeddine
    Yomeddine makes its strongest impression through the direction and performances; at times, the story is rather flimsy.
  54. Dogman
    Social realism in a symbolist key, Dogman is at times more pleasurable to look at than to experience.
  55. Light of Day
    As in Blue Collar and Hardcore, Mr. Schrader shows himself capable of launching the action in a powerhouse style. Once again, that forcefulness deteriorates as the film progresses.
  56. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    Mr. Day-Lewis, Miss Binoche and Miss Olin (who was spectacular in Ingmar Bergman's ''After the Rehearsal'') are surprisingly fine -both modest and intense as lovers whose private lives are defined by public events.
  57. Pet Sematary
    But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.
  58. Five Feet Apart
    Richardson, previously wonderful with good material (“Columbus,” “Support the Girls”), here cements her genius status by finding depths beyond the contrived screenplay.
  59. Sirens
    Sirens is best watched as a soft-core, high-minded daydream about the liberating sensuality of art. Its bubble tends to burst whenever the nymphs are asked to make clever dinner-table conversation, but the mood is nicely lulling anyhow.
  60. Like Father
    Directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, it’s a predictable comedy of reconciliation. But it boasts substantial pleasures, largely on account of the performers.
  61. The Gauntlet
    It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time.
  62. A Star Is Born
    Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.
  63. Half the Picture
    The stories that Ms. Adrion elicits may be infuriatingly recognizable to women who work in many fields. But if there is a missing element in her analysis, it is the effect that sexism has on these women’s artistry, not only their livelihoods.
  64. Spiral
    Spiral is best in smaller-bore moments, showing how everyday lives are affected by prejudice.
  65. The Hustle
    Comedy is in a weird place right now, and The Hustle deserves some credit for fulfilling its own modest, escapist ambitions. Unlike a lot of what we see these days, in movies and elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like a rip-off or a scam. It’s downright innocent.
  66. Path of Blood
    Watching Path of Blood is frequently a queasy experience, and given the bewildering array of names and complications, not always an illuminating one. But it commands attention as an object lesson in the banality of evil.
  67. American Chaos
    It was a prescient plan. Mr. Stern, a longtime Democrat, vowed to listen closely, and he seems to have kept his word. Though he doesn’t mask his expressions — usually astounded, though never mocking — he’s a genial interviewer, empathic, he says, even if he can’t be sympathetic.
  68. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Working with the cinematographer Yunus Pasolang, Ms. Surya gives “Marlina” a stark, steady, captivating look that keeps you largely engaged even when the story and your attention drift.
  69. Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers
    There is a nonstop series of cheerfully low jokes that, as usual, are best when in very poor taste, about beautiful women, body functions and minorities, including homosexuals.
  70. The Karate Kid Part II
    Even as sequels go in this era of movie mega-series, The Karate Kid Part II peters out faster than most.
  71. Herbie Goes Bananas
    A cheerful, four-cylinder children's movie, though its car jokes aren't good for much mileage. Herbie the Volkswagen, last seen in Monte Carlo, is now in South America, as the title may or may not indicate. This allows him to get into a bullfight, for the movie's most inspired episode, and to fall into the sea and get rusty, for its saddest. His adventures aren't much more far-flung than this, but fortunately they move fast. [12 Sept 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  72. The Hate U Give
    Ms. Stenberg, Mr. Hornsby and others in the ensemble (including Regina Hall as Starr’s mother, Lisa) are more than capable of exploring their characters’ depths, but a wonky script gets them only so far.
  73. Our House
    While Mr. Burns hasn’t fully digested his influences, he has learned from them. Our House distinguishes itself with its purposeful pacing — the first real jump scare arrives more than a third of the way through — its use of sound and crosscutting, and its wit with household objects, from a turntable to a mechanical calendar.
  74. To Each, Her Own
    The movie insists on a breezy optimism that skirts glibness, then doubles down on it with a having-it-all finale that’s as ridiculous as it is nervy.
  75. Moss
    With its gently twanging score, Moss is a film made in a minor key and its pleasures are minor, too. It passes like a lazy afternoon spent gently high. There’s not much this movie wants to accomplish, but it maintains a mood that sets the mind at ease.
  76. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
    This Ninja Turtles tale is less violent and more scenic than its predecessors, since it gets the title characters out of the sewer and transports them back to feudal Japan.
  77. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex does a brisk, coherent job of articulating what Ginsburg accomplished and why it mattered, dramatizing both her personal stake in feminist legal activism and the intellectual discipline with which she approached it.
  78. Dark Money
    Ms. Reed has taken on a vital story in Dark Money, which is why it’s frustrating that her storytelling isn’t better. Some introductory text or explanatory narration would have better helped historically ground viewers, who need to juggle a lot of information.
  79. The Apparition
    Mr. Lindon, who carries his powerful masculinity with canny reserve, is superb as a man inquiring into a faith he had previously thought had nothing to do with him. But Ms. Bellugi is a real find; she inhabits her character, who, even as she hides her secrets, is so genuinely beatific that you can hear it in her breathing.
  80. Stella
    Ms. Midler's performance manages to be both involving and wildly inconsistent. The story is so full of holes that both she and Ms. Alvarado sometimes experience full personality changes from scene to scene.
  81. Stuart Saves His Family
    Little more than a set of intermittently funny skits strung together by a sketchy nonplot about Stuart's relatives. As directed by Harold Ramis, it's seldom better than just amiable.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Barney's Great Adventure
    Although the film is longer than the television and video segments children this age are accustomed to, the pacing is brisk enough to hold them.
  83. Memoir of War
    Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance.
  84. The Vanishing
    The new film is twice as busy as its quiet predecessor, and perhaps half as interesting (which still places it several notches above run-of-the-mill studio fare).
  85. Notes on an Appearance
    If Mr. D’Ambrose doesn’t quite earn his pretensions, it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker thinking so far outside the box.
  86. Major Payne
    Major Payne takes about an hour and 10 minutes before it wallows in sappiness. That's not a bad record for a formula family comedy in which the ending is clear from the start.
  87. The Beverly Hillbillies
    It is by no means the dopiest thing on the big screen.
  88. 22 July
    Fiction that hews close to fact, the movie is serious and meticulous, yet hollow.
  89. Gavagai
    This is a high-minded and carefully composed film about, among other things, the inability of words in any language to satisfactorily communicate states of being. There are pleasures and intellectual provocations to be had here. But its attempted effects fall flat a little too often.
  90. Sgt. Bilko
    The film is full of gratifying gags, but it also has to strain for newly enlarged scope.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Poseidon Adventure
    Though tensions slacken and credibility is strained here, realistic technical effects make the stricken ship and the efforts of its survivors to escape a fairly spellbinding adventure.
  92. My Favorite Martian
    Travel from Mars to Earth is an amazing feat, but not much more remarkable than reviving a sitcom that had been dead for a third of a century.
  93. Cruise
    Contrary to his delicious downer of a first film, the terrific “Big Fan,” Mr. Siegel doesn’t venture into risky areas here. He’s content to have these characters hang out in cars or at a diner while chewing the scenery and checking their beepers. If you came of age in the 1980s, that’s enough to enjoy.
  94. Green Book
    There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative. And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances.
  95. Eddie and the Cruisers
    Vivid, full of conviction and more than a little foolish at times.
  96. The Philadelphia Experiment
    It's a pleasant but fairly standard movie about a subject that's anything but.
  97. D.C. Cab
    D.C. CAB is a musical mob scene, a raucous, crowded movie that's fun as long as it stays wildly busy, and a lot less interesting when it wastes time on plot or conversation. There's a lot of talent in the large cast, and Joel Schumacher, the director, generally keeps things bustling.
  98. Doctor Detroit
    Entertainingly slapdash.
  99. The Haunting
    This latest special-effects free-for-all from Jan De Bont is a lavish illustration of how to take a fairly modest black-and-white horror film from 1963 and amplify it so relentlessly that the sight of the flying cow in Twister would not be all that amiss.
  100. A Quiet Place Part II
    Though in many respects an exemplary piece of filmmaking, “Part II” remains hobbled by a script that resolves two separate crises while leaving the movie itself in limbo. At least until Part III.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »