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. Sex and Lucia
    Both refreshing and confusing, the film equivalent of an ice cream headache.
  2. Prisoner of Paradise
    Seems to just drift to a close rather than pronounce an end. This can be a result of wrestling with a daunting subject and not being up to its demands.
  3. The Whole Nine Yards
    Underwhelming, amusing only in fits and starts.
  4. Radio
    Mr. Harris's coach is not a flashy role. But the actor, who effortlessly embodies an all-American ideal of strength and decency, drains as much of the syrup from his character as any actor could hope.
  5. Ravenous
    A potentially strong cast makes its way in deadly earnest through material that's often better suited to a Monty Python skit.
  6. House of 1000 Corpses
    As much as film buffs might enjoy recognizing references to "Motel Hell" and other drive-in classics, Mr. Zombie's encyclopedic approach to the genre results in a crowded, frenzied film in which no single idea is developed to a satisfying payoff.
  7. Incantato
    The film serves up all the splendor of Bologna, and then an ending that is baloney.
  8. Backdraft
    While Mr. Howard ably maintains a strong forward momentum, Backdraft often feels directionless beneath its overlay of frantic activity. One clear story line would have been worth more than a series of subplots and tangents.
  9. The Shape of Things
    Unfortunately, these actors are subject to Mr. LaBute's usual dramatic method, which is to cobble together a preposterous moral outrage and then wave it in front of our faces, asking us to believe that it is a window, or even a mirror.
  10. Evil Dead II
    Its ideal audience would be full of Three Stooges fans with streaks for grotesque humor. [13 Mar 1987, p.C18]
    • The New York Times
  11. Marci X
    This is the kind of comedy in which the characters are construction-paper cutouts whose abrupt changes of heart are dictated entirely by the preposterous plot and not by psychological or social reality.
  12. Conspiracy Theory
    The only sneaky scheme at work here is the one that inflates a hollow plot to fill 2 1/4 hours while banishing skepticism with endless close-ups of big, beautiful movie-star eyes.
  13. Breakin' All the Rules
    The actor's (Jamie Foxx) deft touch lends the flighty story of mistaken identities and romantic mix-ups among mostly African-American characters in Los Angeles the kind of saucy bounce that Cary Grant lent to similar roles six decades ago.
  14. Brother Bear
    This opulent movie, with gorgeous rainbow animation, is heavy on message but light on humor.
  15. The Exorcist
    The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.
  16. Black Hawk Down
    Sitting through the accomplished but meaningless Black Hawk Down is like being trapped in an action film version of "Groundhog Day," condemned to sit through the same carnage over and over.
  17. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Outfoxed will inevitably be discussed in the same breath (or with the same hyperventilating rage) as Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' but it lacks both the showmanship and the scope of that incendiary film.
  18. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    The cast is uniformly high spirited and attractive, and Ms. Beyer's direction, apart from a few over-weighted Wellesian camera angles, is functional.
  19. Mean Machine
    The surface is rough and profane enough, and the acting sufficiently restrained, to cover the sentimental story with a varnish of gritty realism. But stylish bravado and bad-boy performances don't make the film any less predictable.
  20. My Dog Skip
    Works best when it sticks with the gentle humor and pathos of its literary source.
  21. Shaolin Soccer
    So unabashed in its cheesiness that it could be spread on crackers; it may spike your cholesterol levels
  22. Tigerland
    Beneath the rough vérité exterior beats the same slick, corny heart.
  23. Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    If the film's old-movie homages are affectionate, they're slavishly imitative and scattershot, and the story is so willfully daffy that not even the hint of a subtext asserts itself. The film rides on the dubious assumption that camp and infantilism are the same thing.
  24. Love & Sex
    Slight but bright and charming.
  25. The Rundown
    The director, Peter Berg ("Very Bad Things"), keeps the predictable story line on course without developing a truly compelling momentum in the action sequences or finding anything fresh in the interaction of the stock characters.
  26. Iris
    Rarely does a movie feel as leaden-footed as Iris, especially when it tries to bounce back and forth. The audience is transported between two very obvious stories and becomes slightly irritated by the grinding inevitability of both of them. As a result, Iris Murdoch gets lost in the shuffle.
  27. Cruel Intentions
    You have the queasy sense that the whole thing is just an elaborate stunt, and in this case an exploitative one.
  28. Vanity Fair
    Vanity Fair has a deeper conceptual confusion. In mixing satire and romance, the movie proves once again that the two are about as compatible as lemon juice and heavy cream.
  29. The Card Player
    The film unfolds as a tired, thoroughly conventional police procedural that might as well be titled "CSI: Roma."
  30. Crutch
    Self-conscious but nicely structured drama.
  31. Love Me If You Dare
    Whether you find its dual resolution hopelessly pretentious or profound depends on your tolerance for a certain strain of Gallic sentimentality that takes itself more seriously than it lets on.
  32. S1m0ne
    Because the material gives off such a delicious vibe, even though the movie itself feels a little old, you want to like Simone. It would be easier if it were a more forceful comedy. But Mr. Niccol's style is that of reticence -- as a director, he's a little coquettish.
  33. Home Room
    The lead performances of Home Room go a long way toward camouflaging the severe flaws of this exceedingly earnest movie.
  34. The Big Bounce
    The usual double-crosses and convolutions ensue, but the narrative is so haphazard that the whole thing -- both the caper and the movie that contains it -- seems to have been hastily improvised.
  35. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    Perhaps not since "Steel Magnolias" has Hollywood turned out a movie so resolutely for and about women.
  36. Incident at Loch Ness
    These blatantly comic characters undercut the credibility established by Mr. Herzog's naturalistic performance, and sink the horror premise as quickly as it surfaces.
  37. Gloomy Sunday
    The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.
  38. Sex Is Comedy
    The result is a minor, meandering film.
  39. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.
  40. The Hunting of the President
    In a misguided attempt to break up the monotonous flow of talking heads, the filmmakers have inserted oddly chosen clips from newsreels and public-domain features, meant to illustrate abstract concepts (like eavesdropping or government) while generating some low-level laughs.
  41. Spy Game
    The problem lies in the calculating pretentiousness of using human misery to make shallow entertainment seem serious. It's worth comparing Spy Game with "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman's far superior exercise in post-cold-war spycraft.
  42. Stella Street
    The concept doesn't translate well to the longer form. The sense of the absurd is watered down.
  43. Paycheck
    Surprisingly . . . ept given that it is basically a dumb movie about smart people. This smooth but bland thriller may be the best we could expect from such a collaboration.
  44. Serendipity
    The cinematic equivalent of a plate made of spun sugar.
  45. Romance
    Hovers between passion and philosophical argument without fully achieving its ambition to fuse the two.
  46. Session 9
    The film, too artfully conceived to deliver many overt shocks, often feels long and aimless.
  47. Happy Accidents
    As impressive as it is in the abstract, all the detail ultimately drags the movie down and lengthens it unnecessarily.
  48. Saved!
    It has a bright young cast and a clever, eclectic soundtrack, but the tone veers unsteadily from mockery to preachiness, and the story loses its breath, hopping from one clumsily paced scene to the next.
  49. A Slipping-Down Life
    A Slipping-Down Life has a worn, scruffy feeling. It gazes lovingly at vintage clothes and battered old cars as if they were the visible signs of authenticity, wishing that its morose, disconnected inhabitants could somehow be touched with the same elusive quality.
  50. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    A sequel whose sugar-rush absurdity almost defeats the forces of logic, taste and conventional narrative. It is a defect that might undermine a lesser movie but that in this case proves to be as cheerfully, enjoyably humid as the first blast of summer light and heat.
  51. Rick
    The belated sentimentality of the movie is as thudding as its fire-and-brimstone moralism; they're really two sides of the same counterfeit coin.
  52. Bangkok Dangerous
    Some of the nonstop commotion of Bangkok Dangerous is funny and inventive -- but much more of it is simply irritating and obfuscating.
  53. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    This may be the greatest picture ever made for 14-year-old boys. Mr. Smith may have hit his target, but he aimed very low.
  54. Waterworld
    It lacks the coherent fantasy of truly enveloping science fiction, preferring to concentrate on flashy, isolated stunts that say more about expense than expertise. [28 July 1995]
  55. Proof of Life
    What ultimately sinks this stylish but heartless film is a flat lead performance by the eternally snippy Meg Ryan.
  56. Changing Lanes
    It is so dishonest that the title Changing Lanes can just as well refer to the cheaply contrived turns in the film.
  57. Blow
    Depp's witty, spare performance gives the picture a poignancy -- a depth of feeling, if you'll allow the pun -- that Mr. Demme's hectic direction and the hurried script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes don't quite earn.
  58. Mulan
    A film that not only breaks the cross-dressing barrier but also ratchets up the violence level for children's animation.
  59. Chelsea Walls
    Yet the movie sustains a mood. It passionately believes in itself and in the value of the messy artistic lives it glosses, and some of that belief rubs off on you.
  60. Levity
    The actors, too, bring more realism -- more gravity, if you will -- to the film than its wobbly premise deserves.
  61. Dancer in the Dark
    Both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion.
  62. Bandits
    Guilty of behaving like a petty thievery corporation; it steals from so many other sources that we're forced to realize that it has little of its own to offer. As such, it can't help but fail to meet expectations, given the talents involved.
  63. Brother to Brother
    Filled with ideas and some nice acting, particularly from Mr. Mackie and Mr. Robinson, both of whom hold the screen easily, Mr. Evans has crammed a great deal of thought and a lot of obvious feeling into his first dramatic feature.
  64. Drive Me Crazy
    When it comes to an ending, Drive Me Crazy offers no surprises, but it arrives there in amiable, sensible style.
  65. Total Recall
    Mr. Verhoeven is much better at drumming up this sort of artificial excitement than he is at knowing when to stop.
  66. When Will I Be Loved
    The structure of When Will I Be Loved seems deliberately flimsy, and many of its details don't add up. But as a contemporary fable about getting and spending in the new gilded age, When Will I Be Loved strikes a chord that echoes.
  67. Waking the Dead
    Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.
  68. Jeepers Creepers II
    You don't have to be a horror-movie scholar to know that nothing significant is going to happen in any movie with "2" in the title; the creature has to stay around long enough at least to complete a trilogy and fill out a nice boxed set of DVD's.
  69. A Home at the End of the World
    In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.
  70. The Manson Family
    Finally, though, Mr. Van Bebber seems more interested in recreating the grainy look of scratched 1970's film stock than in reflecting on the horrors he depicts, making this a difficult sell for all but the strongest stomachs among connoisseurs of vintage gore.
  71. Snatch.
    Mr. Ritchie seems to be stepping backward when he should be moving ahead.
  72. Sleepover
    A wispy pubescent comedy.
  73. The Kid
    Surprisingly enough, it often soars to heights of not bad.
  74. Seed of Chucky
    Most of the humor falls flat. One of the film's little joys is John Waters in a small part as a sleazy photographer who ends up having his face melted off with sulfuric acid.
  75. Under the Tuscan Sun
    The story of self-discovery through which the writer and director Audrey Wells leads Frances is eminently superficial, although Ms. Wells keeps the movie going with a steady, commanding hand and casts it with an actress who can deftly downshift from serene to sodden.
  76. Paper Clips
    Inspiring, but also, as a film, a little tedious, without enough narrative or exploration to justify its feature length.
  77. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    This new version is mindless hot-rodding fun, especially for those with a weakness for vintage cars hurtling down city streets, a group whose members include -- sigh -- me.
  78. Malevolence
    Malevolence will lead Halloween-inspired viewers into this dark place for some palpitations, but the thrills will come from sheer density of gruesome images, not from frightfully new ideas.
  79. Stealing Harvard
    Together, Mr. Lee and Mr. Green have a daft comic energy, and they are assisted by game performances from the rest of the cast.
  80. Show Me Love
    The film has some charm and a winning simplicity but not an iota of depth.
  81. Raising Helen
    A soft-hearted, squishy-minded prototype for a network sitcom, is mildly ingratiating but never laugh-out-loud funny. Even Ms. Hudson's intrepid radiance can't camouflage the premise's leaky foundation.
  82. Anything But Love
    A pleasant, good-natured picture that struggles, gallantly if vainly, to recapture the style and sensibility of a studio musical on the severely limited budget of an independent film.
  83. Bush's Brain
    Whether or not Bush's Brain makes its case against Mr. Rove, the movie leaves you with the sickening feeling that it's no longer possible in American politics to stay out of the gutter unless, of course, you want to lose. Dirty politics work.
  84. Nico and Dani
    Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.
  85. Kiss the Girls
    Mr. Freeman projects a kindness, patience and canny intelligence that cut against the movie's fast pace and pumped-up shock effects. His performance is so measured it makes you want to believe in the movie much more than its gimmicky jerry-built plot ever permits.
  86. Van Helsing
    Despite the rococo obsessiveness of its special effects and its voracious sampling of past horror movies, Van Helsing is mostly content to offer warmed-over allusions and secondhand thrills.
  87. King Arthur
    Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag.
  88. The Clearing
    Mr. Brugge has perhaps succeeded in avoiding vulgar melodrama, but he has hit on something far worse -- a bloodless melodrama, with bottled water running in its veins.
  89. EuroTrip
    The mildly xenophobic humor includes one of the few inventive mime insults seen in a movie; Eurotrip may be stupid, but it's not dumb.
  90. Noi the Albino
    After a while the movie spins its wheels, unable to find much emotional traction in the icy bleakness.
  91. Old School
    Like a half-empty glass of Coke that's been sitting out for a couple of days; sure, it looks like cola, but one sip tells you exactly what's missing.
  92. Party Monster
    His (Culkin's) performance is earnest and brave, but also mannered when it should be un-self-conscious, and awkward when grace is called for.
  93. The Perfect Storm
    The Perfect Storm is no "Titanic."
  94. Shark Tale
    Reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.
  95. Signs
    Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.
  96. WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Unfortunately, his (Schechter) uneven, unpolished documentary, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, takes on far too many antagonists.
  97. The American Astronaut
    Soars as much as it crashes.
  98. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Modest, mildly engaging film.
  99. BASEketball
    Essentially two movies stuck together like chewing gum on a subway platform. One is a dumber-than-dumb teen comedy crammed with farcical sight-gags and raunchy adolescent humor, the other a no-holds-barred satire of professional sports, and the greed, egotism and pomposity surrounding them.
  100. Michael Jordan to the Max
    The format and the purposeful blandness of the script make Jordan seem remote, more icon than human being.
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