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. The Eagle
    Lumbering along for a bit less than two hours, which passes like three, it feels more like a chore than like an adventure.
  2. Strange But True
    The tale is a jolting one, and the superb players do justice to the emotional distress of its characters. But a surer directorial hand might have yielded a more resonant experience.
  3. The Eye of the Storm
    Whether she's lying in bed, her gray hair spilling out around her head, or exalting in existence itself during one of several flashbacks, Elizabeth draws you in, which works for the story and simultaneously unbalances it.
  4. Ultrasound
    There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, Ultrasound is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator.
  5. Some Kind of Wonderful
    It has a light touch, a disarming cast, a well-developed sense of humor and a lot of charm. [27 Feb 1987, p.C17]
    • The New York Times
  6. The Devil All the Time
    Every faded dress looks attentively fitted, each ramshackle house artfully weathered. If the performances are considerably less persuasive it’s partly because Campos shows no interest in the inner lives of his characters. And while Pattinson’s and Keough’s roles are risible, the actors at least show signs of (comic) life.
  7. The Brothers Bloom
    As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.
  8. 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.
  9. Cloud Atlas
    This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket.
  10. Casi divas
    As the film picks up speed it also accrues a socially progressive agenda. If only this were half as well developed as the female leads.
  11. The Attorney
    Mr. Song puts his usual big heart into the character, though there aren’t many layers or nuances to the drama. Every scene does its job, tears flowing on cue.
  12. Lily Topples the World
    No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.
  13. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Genuine sweetness can be found in Emily’s fidelity to her rowdy new best friend. Still, naturalism is hard to fake, and it’s difficult to divorce Clifford from the lines of code that animate him.
  14. Hitchcock
    The movie has its diversions, including Scarlett Johansson's bodacious Janet Leigh and Michael Stuhlbarg's wheedling Lew Wasserman. It's fluff. But while its dim fantasies about Hitchcock and the association of genius with psychosis can be written off as silly, they also smack of spiteful jealousy.
  15. Ordinary World
    Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day is usually pretty appealing when he dabbles in acting, and he’s appealing again in Ordinary World. But after a promising start the script lets him down, and the film turns into a predictable midlife-crisis yarn.
  16. Beyond the Clouds
    Persistent sentimentality — manifested most in the music score by A.R. Rahman — undercuts Beyond the Clouds at almost every turn.
  17. Never Let Go
    Berry is drained of glamour for her role here, and she performs with fierceness; the two boys are also stalwart, but what the movie asks these child performers to do doesn’t add up to effective horror — it’s just opportunistic and gross.
  18. J.T. Leroy
    Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental.
  19. Resurrecting the Champ
    For Mr. Lurie, who specializes in political subjects, Resurrecting the Champ is an encouraging return to film following the rise and fall of his television series "Commander in Chief."
  20. Vice
    Raul Sanchez Inglis directed, but Mr. Tarantino's influence prevails, in the cinematography by Andrzej Sekula of "Dogs"; in the abundant epithets and expletives; and in the climactic "Dogs"-style standoff. The film is also dedicated to Chris Penn, Sean's brother, who was in "Dogs" and died in 2006. But missing, regrettably, is that movie's inventiveness, clarity and wit.
  21. The Canal
    The film’s writer and director, Ivan Kavanagh, and his team pull off a few enjoyable, decently creepy scares, but over all, the action is too cryptic, and the pedestrian dialogue doesn’t help.
  22. I Love You, Daddy
    When I watched I Love You, Daddy a second time, the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder. But for once a filmmaker seemed to be admitting to the misogyny that we know is always there and has often been denied or simply waved off, at times in the name of art.
  23. It's About You
    Because Kurt Markus's Super 8 camera is the cinematic equivalent of a single microphone, the film's look matches the scratchy quality of its ancient (by rock 'n' roll standards) sound. The crudeness brings out the elemental quality of music that digs deeply into the soil of working-class American life in songs that express the defiance, despair and nobility of people who refuse to go down without a fight.
  24. Hyde Park on Hudson
    Roosevelt was one of the towering figures of the 20th century, but he and his accomplishments scarcely register in this amorphous, bafflingly aimless movie. The story hinges, increasingly to its detriment, on Daisy, a distant cousin to Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor.
  25. I Am Eleven
    Ms. Bailey’s willingness to let the children talk and to let the viewer impose broader meaning elevates it.
  26. Turn the River
    Until it transforms into an improbable thriller, Turn the River is a finely observed portrait of a desperate working-class woman who refuses to play by ordinary rules.
  27. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    As for the man who invented it all, he remains a mystery in the film, living out his days in sybaritic bliss.
  28. Demon Seed
    Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly.
  29. Old
    Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here.
  30. The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
    This wisecracking, tear-jerking, deep-fried decadence is plenty satisfying if you’re in the mood to indulge.
  31. Dark Shadows
    Dark Shadows isn't among Mr. Burton's most richly realized works, but it's very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent.
  32. Purple Rain
    Like many album covers, Purple Rain, though sometimes arresting to look at, is a cardboard come-on to the record it contains.
  33. The Fall of the American Empire
    With its galloping pace and strange criminal bedfellows, this funny and engrossing film sometimes feels like the droll capers of the Ealing studio (maker of “The Lavender Hill Mob” among other small classics). But Arcand packs in a lot of pointed social and political commentary.
  34. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    Seriously, if not always elegantly, the film portrays the great Ip Man as someone trying to survive, which is to say just as often a victim as a victor.
  35. Eagle vs Shark
    Intermittently charming, sometimes tiresome celebration of quirkiness.
  36. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Even at a distance from each other (Washington/Travolta), they conduct a tag-team master class in old-style movie star technique, barreling through every cliché and nugget of corn the script has to offer with verve and conviction. Even when you don't really believe them, they're always a lot of fun to watch.
  37. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    Given the event's size and complexity, it is perhaps inevitable that this documentary feels haphazard and superficial, more tourist's photo album than analysis. Still, the glimpses it offers are never less than fascinating.
  38. Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda
    This crowd-pleasing spectacle is like a series of showstopper sequences from a musical without much attention paid to the story that is supposed to hold it all together.
  39. Porn Theater
    Functions best in its voyeuristic, sociological mode, offering fragmentary glimpses of complicated lives and the complicated social rituals that shape them.
  40. Below
    Has the bad luck to come on the heels of Kathryn Bigelow's beautifully made and politically impassioned "K-19," making this submarine picture -- a relatively modest, low-budget affair -- seem skimpy by comparison.
  41. Camp
    A crude but irresistibly effervescent movie cut from the same sequined cloth as "Fame," Camp couldn't be better timed to ride the coattails of "Chicago" to cult popularity.
  42. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    Tells its glumly bodice-ripping tale with somber sensitivity.
  43. Square Grouper
    The film mixes period footage with visually unappealing contemporary interviews. If you're expecting voluble, outsize personalities with colorful war stories, you'll be disappointed.
  44. Life's a Breeze
    Life’s a Breeze is ultimately about as cutting and memorable as its title.
  45. Street Kings
    It’s easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end.
  46. Union Square
    Union Square has the busy, hemmed-in talkiness of a theater piece, with too much forced to happen in too short a time. But it also has a lively, nervous energy and an expansive sympathy for the mismatched women at its heart.
  47. Money Monster
    Money Monster begins with a jolt of satire, proceeds through a maze of beat-the-clock exposition and lands on a surprisingly gentle, sentimental note.
  48. Yesterday
    Yesterday is more of a novelty earworm than a classic. It’s appealing and accessible in a way that the Beatles never really were. If it took itself — and them — a bit more seriously, it would be a lot more fun. But it wasn’t made to last.
  49. An American Werewolf in London
    When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.
  50. Ambulance
    Bay’s virtuosic flouting of the laws of physics, probability and narrative coherence is meant to catapult you into a zone of sublimity where melodramatic emotion and adrenalized excitement fuse into a whole new kind of sensation.
  51. In Search of Fellini
    The movie can shift unevenly from effusive love letter to travel lust to sentimental moment, but that doesn’t break the fantasy.
  52. The Purge: Election Year
    The Purge: Election Year takes itself just seriously enough to provide the expected measure of fun — a blend of aggression, release and relief. A lot of people die, but no one really gets hurt.
  53. Seven Years in Tibet
    Beyond his struggles with an unwieldy accent and the screenplay's hokum, Mr. Pitt gives a sincere if labored performance enhanced by a sense of genuine struggle.
  54. Forgetting the Girl
    Its characterizations may be overwrought — it is a thriller, after all — and the audience might prefer to have sympathy for a character without being practically told to feel it. But the acting is strong.
  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 Boogeyman
    The Boogeyman, extrapolated from a minor 1970s short story by Stephen King, might conceivably make sense to viewers with no access to proper lighting or functioning windows. For the rest of us, though, this near-indecipherable movie — as murky in plot and payoff as in setting — demands such a total suspension of rationality that its few scary moments struggle to land.
  57. Valmont
    For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.
  58. The Assault
    In place of emotional stakes, we get gleaming, stylized, occasionally slow-motion violence, filmed in such extreme close-ups and cramped spaces that it's impossible to differentiate gunman and victim.
  59. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    There's no escaping that "Dominion" is finally an act of commercial scavenging. You may retrieve the eggshells, coffee grounds and banana peels from your trash and assemble them into a cute, novelty gift basket. But if you bend down and take a whiff, your nose is still met with the scent of garbage.
  60. Love at First Sight
    What are the odds that a premise as unimaginative as this one should emerge as a sturdy little romantic drama?
  61. Wendy
    Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism.
  62. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    The mixture of old-fashioned themes with newfangled techniques makes The Greatest Game Ever Played a canny piece of feel-good entertainment.
  63. Cobra Verde
    Connoisseurs of craziness need wait no longer. Cobra Verde opens today in all its feral, baffling glory. Along with "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo," Cobra Verde completes a trilogy of mayhem and megalomania in hot climates.
  64. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Art executed under the most excruciating conditions deserves a far more searching study than this too short film, which has the structure of a hurried checklist. Even so, a lot of the art shown in the documentary, often side-by-side with photographs of the same places and events, is compelling.
  65. The Juche Idea
    The Juche Idea is meant to be a comedy, one that cuts two ways: mocking the strictures placed on moviemakers in both Communist and capitalist systems. Viewers who don’t share the radical-nostalgist sensibility of Mr. Finn, who teaches at Emerson College in Boston, may find the humor both too rarefied and too obvious.
  66. Far from the Madding Crowd
    The environment is more impressive than the slow, mawkish drama it contains, and the peasants are more assertive and colorful than the main characters. Scenes of sheepherding, farm gatherings, harvest suppers and assemblies at markets and fairs are more energetic and entertaining than the bloodless confrontations of the principals.
  67. 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
  68. The Comancheros
    So studiously wild and woolly it turns out to be good fun.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Barefoot Executive
    In this genial but strained and arch frolic, the one real joke is not only "in" but it wears thin and even frantic.
  70. The Craft
    A surprisingly skittish fable of adolescent powerlessness, grandiosity and the nursing of psychic wounds. As the witchcraft escalates, the movie exchanges its psychological acuity for garish special effects that hammer home a ponderous warning to once and future witches: be good or else.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kidnapped
    Except for the locations, which are real, and the color, which is color, the whole thing suggests the dim listlessness of the late late show edging toward the catatonia of 3 A.M.
  72. Rhapsody in Blue
    The performers are quite naturally restricted by the limitations of the script—and by the purely pedestrian direction that Irving Rapper has given them.
  73. I Walk Alone
    It's a mighty low class of people that you will meet in the Paramount's I Walk Alone—and a mighty low grade of melodrama, if you want the honest truth—in spite of a very swanky setting and an air of great elegance.
  74. The Road to Hong Kong
    Practically every moment spent with Bing and Bob is good for consecutive chuckles and frequent belly-deep guffaws.
  75. Rule Breakers
    The director Bill Guttentag and his cast get the can-do spirit at its core, as well as the societal constrictions that make such perseverance especially impressive, but it’s also a story that could have been told with more concision and subtlety.
  76. Hellion
    Writer and director Kat Candler struggles to shape an undercooked story into compelling drama.
  77. I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    Mr. Perry has his moviemaking machine running smoothly, which is to say somewhat predictably.
  78. Dead of Winter
    The screenplay is inelegant but lively, and the direction gives the material a wicked edge.
  79. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't.
  80. Jackie & Ryan
    It uses a terrific score of bluegrass and old-timey songs, many of them written by Nick Hans, to underscore the connection and to evoke a fundamental American spirit epitomized by traveling musicians with banjos, fiddles and guitars.
  81. Protocol
    Protocol is a breezy, not entirely unpredictable comedy that was made to order for the gifted Goldie Hawn by Buck Henry, the writer, Herb Ross, the director, and Miss Hawn herself, who is the film's executive producer. [21 Dec 1984, p.C25]
    • The New York Times
  82. A Lot of Nothing
    In his feature debut, the director Mo McRae displays a nice way with actors and a gift for visual tension, but in aiming for absurdist humor, he lands on something more vexing. It’s the script — by McRae and Sarah Kelly Kaplan — that’s the problem.
  83. Close to You
    As attentive as Close to You is to family dynamics, its dialogue, which the actors largely improvised, rarely achieves verisimilitude.
  84. The Truth About Charlie
    You may be taken by the director's enormous enthusiasm, but the picture doesn't quite work.
  85. Veronica Guerin
    The end titles and the ones that introduce Veronica Guerin...are the most informative parts of the film, and also the most powerful. What comes between them is a flat-footed, overwrought crusader-against-evil melodrama, in which Ms. Blanchett's formidable gifts as an actress are reduced to a haircut and an accent.
  86. P.S.
    What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense.
  87. Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)
    Ms. Rao gives the city an immediacy it doesn't usually have in films. But she has more feel for mood than for storytelling.
  88. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    The Kids in the Hall's first feature isn't anything more than a sloppy showcase for the group's costume-changing tricks, but sometimes its sheer chutzpah can be amusing. Just as often, flashes of complete plot incoherence or atrocious taste spoil the effect.
  89. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    The highly emotional documentary is narrated by Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter for “Milk,” who, like Mr. Cowan, is gay and grew up in a Mormon household.
  90. 2 Guns
    Mr. Kormakur sets and keeps up a fast rather than frantic pace that never runs the movie off the rails even when the story nearly does.
  91. Legend
    Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy are the reasons to see Legend.
  92. Don't Come Knocking
    Filled with haunting visual panoramas. One of the most resonant is a nighttime shot of the Elko skyline dominated by a glittering casino. Evoking a once and future gold rush, it says more about the Old West and the New West than all of Mr. Shepard's elliptical, stagy dialogue can muster. Such powerful images make Don't Come Knocking well worth contemplating.
  93. About Time
    A flimsy bit of mildly romantic, putatively comic Anglophile bait.
  94. Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown
    The net effect is that of having read the comic strip for an unusually long spell, which can amount to either a delightful experience or a pleasant but slightly wearing one, depending upon the intensity of one's fascination with the basic “Peanuts” mystique.
  95. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    What counts in a movie like this are stars so dazzling that we won't really notice or at least mind the cut-rate writing and occasionally incoherent action. Sometimes Mr. Pitt and Ms. Jolie succeed in their mutual role as sucker bait, sometimes they don't, which is why their new joint venture is alternately a goof and a drag.
  96. Mao's Last Dancer
    The final image - a freeze frame of a pas de deux staged to resemble a triumphal Communist poster - perfectly captures the film's overall effect: it's strenuously brainless.
  97. Safe
    Now, if only someone would offer this actor a project worthy of the full range of his talent.
  98. The Visit
    The director M. Night Shyamalan has a fine eye and a nice, natural way with actors, and he has a talent for gently rap-rap-rapping on your nerves.
  99. Nim's Island
    Sweet but ho-hum adaptation of Wendy Orr’s novel, a comedy-adventure that never quite finds its tone.
  100. Megalopolis
    In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.
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