The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Aquamarine
    Ms. Paxton isn't quite as magnetic as a movie mermaid ought to be, but the two buddies are a treat to watch, especially Ms. Roberts, showing the genes of her Aunt Julia.
  2. Trial by Fire
    Expertly acted throughout...the movie’s raw facts are sufficient to rouse viewer indignation. But the material arguably calls for a more proactively provocative approach.
  3. My Date with Drew
    As his movie-in-progress goes along, his pursuit of a childhood dream looks increasingly like an excuse by a canny aspiring filmmaker to create a work sample.
  4. The Face of Love
    That Mr. Posin and Mr. McDuffie have stacked the deck against Nikki would be more irritating if Ms. Bening didn’t immediately make this woman come so satisfyingly alive, breathing believable vitality and at times contradictory emotions into what might have otherwise registered as a blur or cliché.
  5. God's Pocket
    As this strained, foul-mouthed exercise in gallows humor proceeds, God’s Pocket sustains a facade of meanspirited deadpan comedy. But there are no laughs, not even smirks to be had.
  6. Everyone's Hero
    Everyone's Hero enters multiplexes already shadowed by tragedy. And while that may not be the best start for a kiddie feature, the movie's sentimental provenance could earn it a critical pass it doesn't deserve.
  7. The Final Countdown
    The footage dealing with the mechanics of the Nimitz is, in fact, interesting, and there is one quite comic sequence in which several of the Nimitz's jet fighters take on two, totally baffled World War II-vintage Japanese Zeros. As an entertainment film, though, the movie is utter nonsense. [01 Aug 1980, p.C3]
    • The New York Times
  8. Go Back to China
    The biggest trouble here is in the writing. By the time the film gets around to showing what a character has felt, they have already told the audience twice — and most likely another character has explained as well, just in case anyone missed the memo.
  9. Susie Searches
    Susie Searches is more than comfortable drawing on the staid tropes of its genre, particularly those that paint mental illness as a path to depravity. But despite its narrative shortcomings, the film builds a tense and mischievous mood that acts as its hook.
  10. Irreversible
    Though Mr. Noé; displays prodigious filmmaking technique, his punk-operatic meditation on life, love, anger and -- most important -- guilt is superficially inventive, but singularly adolescent.
  11. The Wrath of Becky
    The subsequent slaughters are inventive, the pacing lively and the cat-and-mouse structure entertaining; but the rodents themselves are — aside from their suave leader, played by Seann William Scott — such misogynistic morons that Becky’s predominance is never in doubt.
  12. Risen
    If you drink every time you’re reminded of Monty Python’s 1979 Judean jaunt, “Life of Brian,” you might just make it through to the end.
  13. Dolly Parton’s Christmas On the Square
    It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.
  14. Transporter 3
    Though the car chases have grown more banal as the franchise has started to run on fumes, the smackdowns have retained their zing.
  15. The Song of Names
    There is much to admire in the fluidity of Girard’s storytelling, in the music (Ray Chen did the violin solos) and in the complicated questions raised about social obligations. Still, the movie never quite justifies the contrivance of its puzzle-box construction.
  16. Meet Me in Montenegro
    Though Mr. Holdridge and Ms. Saasen feel genuine, they lack acting chops, and their screenplay’s self-consciousness about romantic clichés plays like a cliché itself.
  17. Jaws 2
    Some of the action sequences have been well staged, but they've been dropped into the film so indiscriminately that Jaws 2 never builds to a particular climax. It simply drones on and on and on, like a television movie.
  18. In a Relationship
    The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.
  19. Saint Ralph
    This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch.
  20. DysFunktional Family
    There is a blueprint here for what should be the next wave of comedy-concert movies, but the filmmaking team has only used part of it.
  21. The Road to El Dorado
    Little more than a sanitized blend of nonsense and adventure and just a teeny bit of romance, interspersed with the occasional pop song.
  22. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    As goofy and throwaway as the "Brady Bunch" movies, but it has the same winking appreciation of vintage kitsch.
  23. Left Luggage
    So intent on pushing its virtuous agenda that its characters often sound like mouthpieces parroting predigested attitudes.
  24. What Lies Beneath
    Glazes over faster than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and neither is very flavorful after sitting around for a while.
  25. The Liberator
    Perhaps most impressive are the resources deployed in shooting this production. As if the film’s ostentatious aerial vistas, merely functional scene-writing and score weren’t distracting enough, Mr. Sexton’s dialogue freezes dead any simulation of the period with tone-deaf lines amid Bolívar’s impassioned rhetoric.
  26. Nobody Walks
    It would be tempting to dismiss Nobody Walks as a trivial erotic divertissement, even more so because it doesn't apply the kind of symbolic gloss found in a '60s film of serial seduction, like Pasolini's "Teorema." Banal as its situation may be, it picks at every scab you may have left over from wounds suffered during the mating games of your youth.
  27. The Song of Sway Lake
    The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.
  28. Casino Jack
    The plot has so many moving parts - so many envelopes of money, dropped names, half-explained schemes and hasty flights - that it quickly becomes more frustrating than illuminating.
  29. The Grinch
    The filmmakers keep the visuals merry and popping bright. Benedict Cumberbatch, voicing the Grinch, opts not to compete with Karloff at all, which is smart, and speaks in an American accent, sounding rather like Bill Hader, which is confusing.
  30. The Empire in Africa
    A forest of talking heads and pointing fingers, The Empire in Africa is a noble but failed attempt to explicate the tragedy of the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone.
  31. In Our Nature
    Is the movie psychologically accurate? Yes. But that doesn't keep it from being a little dull.
  32. My Brothers
    If the actors playing the brothers show little fraternal similarity, their performances are convincingly natural.
  33. That Demon Within
    Pulp done with passion can be its own reward, as the veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Dante Lam shows with his feverish cop thriller That Demon Within.
  34. Poison Ivy
    A B movie with a vengeance, one that offers a wickedly feminine (though hardly feminist) view of nominally happy family life and its failings.
  35. Nightride
    The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel.
  36. Wild Things
    Predicated on two ideas -- that human nature is rife with perfidy and that it's important to get the cast into hot cars or bathing suits whenever possible -- Mr. McNaughton and the cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (''Top Gun,'' ''True Romance'') give a decadent gloss to this far-fetched, quintuple-crossing tale.
  37. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot
    There is something admirably perverse about a movie that treats the killings of Hitler and Bigfoot as secondary to a character study of a crusty old man and his regrets, but that doesn’t make the film less dull or deflating to watch.
  38. Summer Storm
    Directed by Marco Kreuzpaintner like a barely legal pornography flick with extra plot, the movie is a perfect storm of clichés.
  39. The Walker
    By the end of The Walker a movie that begins as a dazzling round of charades has deteriorated into a plodding game of Clue.
  40. Better Off Dead...
    Some of the gags in Better Off Dead have a lot more cleverness than the material - just another silly story about a lovesick high school boy and the cute, annoying habits of his friends and family - might warrant.
  41. A Five Star Life
    Narratively and emotionally, this weirdly becalmed trifle by Maria Sole Tognazzi ends up almost exactly where it started.
  42. Finding Amanda
    If the title "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" didn’' already belong to Hunter S. Thompson, it would perfectly fit Peter Tolan's viciously funny satire, Finding Amanda.
  43. The Pill
    This might be more entertaining if any of the three main characters were at all likable.
  44. 11 Minutes
    You could call Mr. Skolimowski, who is 77, an old dog, and while the multistranded, chronologically intricate narrative conceit of 11 Minutes isn’t exactly a new trick, it’s one he pulls off with devilish panache and startling impact.
  45. Cabrini
    It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.
  46. Dumbo
    Ho-hum until it takes a turn toward the fascinatingly weird, the movie is a welcome declaration of artistic independence for Burton...Watching him cut loose (more recklessly than his flying baby elephant) is by far the most unexpected pleasure of this movie, which dusts off the 1941 animated charmer with exhilaratingly demented spirit.
  47. Rough Night
    It’s all blithely formulaic and would be more irritating if the performers — who include Zoë Kravitz and Illana Glazer — weren’t generally so appealing.
  48. Criminal Activities
    It doesn’t feel like a mere imitation; it has too much wit and too many striking performances for that.
  49. Lost Transmissions
    The movie’s strongest feature is its depiction of a male-female friendship that matter-of-factly abjures any romantic component. Temple and Pegg, when their characters aren’t falling apart (and even sometimes when they are), convey intelligence and mutual regard with refreshing straightforwardness.
  50. Peter Rabbit
    Its story line is clean; the live-action actors, particularly Rose Byrne (as Bea, an artist who paints portraits of the bunnies), bring their onscreen-appeal A game; and the computer-generated animals are charming, albeit lacking in the particular gentle winsomeness of Potter’s originals.
  51. Blind Date
    The self-consciousness of the premise and the playlike structure of Blind Date clash with the naturalism of Mr. Tucci and Ms. Clarkson’s acting styles, and the film never lifts itself above its origin as a well-meaning, underdeveloped exercise.
  52. Late Phases
    The plot favors simplicity over rationality with a cheerful insouciance that’s hard to dislike.
  53. What Just Happened
    The lampooning is sometimes funny and occasionally offers up a tidbit of small truth. But much of it is awfully familiar.
  54. The Mosquito Coast
    In spite of its authentic scenery (it was filmed in Belize), this Mosquito Coast is utterly flat.
  55. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    Though it includes some moderately funny snippets of actual performances, Wild West Comedy Show is not a concert film. We never see a complete performance or even a quarter of one.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Doomsday
    In terms of story, “The Descent” and Doomsday are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, Doomsday is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.
  57. The Hard Word
    Amusingly gamy, an anecdotal crime film that's an antidote to the pile of overly slick robbery pictures of the past few years.
  58. Johnny English
    Unlike most movies of this kind, which run out of steam and ideas as they go along, Johnny English gains momentum, nudging you along from a few stray giggles to helpless, giddy laughter.
  59. Journey to Western Xia Empire
    The landscape photography is magnificent...But its stereotypical characters, melodramatic plotting and audience-pleasing close-ups of adorable children all suggest the profound limitations of filmmaking by committee, whether that committee meets in Beijing or Burbank.
  60. White Irish Drinkers
    Because Mr. Thurston and Mr. Wigdor lack the hard shells necessary to make their characters credible, White Irish Drinkers feels synthetic. Mr. Lang and the older cast members fare better, but they can't save a movie that runs on clichés.
  61. Mademoiselle C
    The filmmaking has some of the wit and irreverence of its subject, but goes on meandering tangents rather than having a cohesive vision or tone.
  62. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    Amusing and sleepy pretty much describe this movie.
  63. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    The silly premise is one that a better Ritchie film could, with some charm, style and wit, have turned into a workable romp. But everything here is stuck on autopilot.
  64. Death Wish
    Death Wish is so cannily fabricated that it sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger. Yet it's a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.
  65. Stanleyville
    The contest intentionally lacks meaningful rewards, an obvious metaphor for life’s arbitrary stakes. But as cinema, the lack of purpose becomes a test of patience.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead Reckoning
    For those with a taste for rough stuff "Dead Reckoning" is almost certain to satisfy.
  67. Woman in Gold
    Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.
  68. The Promotion
    As this sweet, ineffectual comedy follows two sad sacks competing for the job of manager at a new branch of a Chicago grocery chain, it pointedly avoids the raucous bad-boy clowning of the typical Everyguy farce. Think of it as a polite, tightly muzzled "Clerks."
  69. Quigley Down Under
    The director, Simon Wincer, makes Quigley Down Under an unapologetic homage to the formula western at its most pokey, complete with Wagon Train-style score. All things considered, this could be a lot worse.
  70. Private Peaceful
    With its fusty air and glumly earnest performances, this unnecessary reminder of Steven Spielberg’s soppy 2011 staging of another of Mr. Morpurgo’s novels, “War Horse,” is about as entertaining as trench mouth.
  71. My Bloody Valentine
    A strange synergy of old and new, My Bloody Valentine 3D blends cutting-edge technology and old-school prosthetics to produce something both familiar and alien: gore you can believe in.
  72. Savage Grace
    Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.
  73. Creation
    What we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama.
  74. Father of the Bride
    The screenplay represents recycling at its best. The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film's most memorable moments have been preserved.
  75. Look Who's Talking
    Cute is the operative word for the movie, which stars some good actors doing material that is not super.
  76. Mad Cowgirl
    A demented jag of blasphemy, multicultural weirdness, splatter-movie tropes and inchoate meat metaphors, Mad Cowgirl is an underground movie with little sense of grounding; the point is an aggressive pointlessness.
  77. No Small Affair
    As directed by Jerry Schatzberg from a screenplay by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy, the film stays snappy much of the way.
  78. A Man Called Otto
    A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.
  79. Me Before You
    This floppy British romance, directed by Thea Sharrock and adapted by Jojo Moyes from her best-selling novel, sits at the point where tedium, ridiculousness and heartfelt sentiment converge, separated by an all-but-imperceptible distance.
  80. Free Zone
    If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.
  81. The Fountain
    The problem, though, is that its techniques run too far beyond its ideas, which are blurry and banal, rather than mysterious and resonant. The Fountain is something to see, but it is also much less, finally, than meets the eye.
  82. Any Which Way You Can
    Any Which Way You Can is a loose, lighthearted Eastwood vehicle aimed at the good-timey sector of this actor's audience. The real star of this series is Clyde the orangutan, and it looks as if Clyde has another hit on his hairy hands.
  83. Moog
    At the very least, Moog should persuade you that the history of music over the last century is as much a story of technology and sound as a family tree of stylistic influences. It's a very useful reminder.
  84. Wounds
    The lack of local color notwithstanding, the movie more than fulfills its promise to unsettle and to incite shivers — and it doesn’t quit.
  85. Eros
    Lovely though it is to look at, it does not reveal very much. Sampling the works of three prominent directors in one sitting may be what gives anthology films like this one their appeal, but the experience is often more frustrating than fulfilling.
  86. Karate Kid: Legends
    There is at once a roughshod, zippy energy coupled with a sedateness here that results from the simple fact that the film never quite knows how to square the pure awkwardness of two teachers — two stars from different eras of a franchise — instructing a karate kid at once.
  87. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    Watching Izzy’s frenzied pratfalls often feels like watching a documentary of Ms. Davis — always great — running a hamster wheel that powers uninspired comic material.
  88. Cowboys & Angels
    The coming-of-age story about the corruptions of the big city has been done a few thousand times, but at least this one offers a fresh mix of open-minded intelligence and a heartfelt point of view.
  89. All the Little Animals
    Would seem hokey if it didn't have powerful, extraordinary central performances and cinematography that lends the English landscape around Cornwall a mythical cast.
  90. 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Barbarella
    The movie, written by Terry Southern and seven other writers and based upon a comic strip, rapidly becomes a special kind of mess. All the gadgetry of science fiction—which is not really science fiction, since it has no poetry or logic—is turned to all kinds of jokes, which are not jokes, but hard-breathing, sadistic thrashings, mainly at the expense of Barbarella, and of women.
  92. Heavy Metal
    For anyone who doesn't think an hour and a half is a long time to spend with a comic book, Heavy Metal is impressive. Though it owes some slight bit of its toughness and nihilism to Ralph Bakshi, this animated feature is off on its own track, combining science fiction, mysticism, sex, violence and rock music. Much of the time, these elements do what the film makers want them to, and make for a heady mix.
  93. The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
    With its strained, quasi-poetic language that fitfully tries to soar, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is a significant, though less than monumental feat of reclamation.
  94. Ishtar
    The worst of it is painless; the best is funny, sly, cheerful and, here and there, even genuinely inspired.
  95. The Accountant
    The movie, directed by Gavin O’Connor (“Tumbleweeds”), makes little sense. The screenplay, by Bill Dubuque, is so determined to hide its cards that when the big reveal finally arrives, it feels as underwhelming as it is preposterous.
  96. I Think We're Alone Now
    A haunting first half can’t offset the absurd ending of I Think We’re Alone Now, a post-apocalyptic tale with a late plot twist that feels as if it comes out of left field. And right field. And center field, the stands and the dugout, too.
  97. Jim Brown: All American
    At its most provocative, the movie explores the masculine mystique and the myth of the black stud.
  98. Ice Castles
    It's too bad that Mr. Wrye's bungling renders the story sob-proof, because injured-athlete sagas are usually so hard to resist.
  99. Trolls World Tour
    While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor, the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.
  100. Oyster Farmer
    This darkly humorous, sometimes even raunchy film mostly eludes a typical cutesy, feel-good formula.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »