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. Firefox
    Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.
  2. Police Academy 3: Back in Training
    The plot, which more or less prompts the gags without interfering with them, has something to do with a competition between the two police academies to see which one will survive a state-decreed budget cut. It's perfectly serviceable.
  3. Swamp Thing
    Wes Craven's Swamp Thing wants desperately to be funny and, from time to time, it is. However, you might wish it would trust the audience to discover the humor for itself.
  4. My Science Project
    A cheerful teen-age adventure film that in its snappier moments resembles a far less clever and less expensive Back to the Future. Despite a plot that has few interesting twists and a shoestring budget, the film glimmers with moments of drollery.
  5. The Manhattan Project
    Mr. Brickman, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay (with Thomas Baum), has a real gift for eccentric comedy and characters. The Manhattan Project, with its vaguely populist leanings, isn't crazy enough. Mr. Brickman fails to make big issues comprehensible. He just makes them small.
  6. Three Fugitives
    This comedy has the earmarks of humor and even a few genuine laughs, but it also has a prefabricated, automatic-pilot feeling.
  7. The Forgiven
    When the movie can stay out of its own way, it delivers some powerful scenes, including one in which Blomfeld faces down a would-be assassin (Nandiphile Mbeshu, superb) in a prison shower room. But beyond that, the movie offers conventional gratifications and no surprises.
  8. Ramen Heads
    Over-narrated and self-serious, this documentary allows its good intentions to pave the way to a tepid tale.
  9. The Nun
    The franchise has proved to be a reliable if variably elegant “boo” machine; the same applies here. Specters and hallucinations appear without consistent narrative logic. Characters veer off separately when teamwork might reduce brushes with demons or death.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    This second time around for Harper is a lackluster workout despite its colorful settings, occasional tension and a cast that includes Joanne Woodward (Mrs. Newman). As a convoluted caper it generates action rather than character and surface mystery rather than meaning.
  11. Harper
    The action is swift and the mystery fetching in this handsomely made color film. But eventually it seems a bit too obvious, imitative, old-fashioned and, worst of all, stale.
  12. Kings
    The first English-language film from the Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven (her 2015 movie “Mustang” was a foreign language Oscar nominee) is well-acted across the board, and contains more than a few outstanding, unpredictable scenes. But in tying its story to this particular moment in American history, the movie bites off more than it can coherently chew.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hawmps!
    Hawmps is a long march on light provisions. Based on a tiny historical curiosity—an experimental use of camels by the United States cavalry in Texas in the mid-19th century—it should have been a nice small movie. Instead it stretches into an underpopulated two hours and five minutes.
  14. Sadie
    Lynskey and Schloss are well matched as mother and daughter, and Griffiths builds a relationship between them as this far-from-innocent teenager navigates her world. That rough journey is worth watching even when this film falls short.
  15. Yardie
    John Conroy’s cinematography hustles and heaves, straining to inject a vitality that the story too often lacks. Yet whether in the kaleidoscopic warmth of Jamaica or the gray chill of London, Yardie’s sunlight-filled songs will make your toes twitch.
  16. Sister Act
    Sister Act was screened on Wednesday night for an audience of 300 nuns who found a lot of it funny, especially a closing gag about the Pope. Secular audiences aren't likely to be so charitable.
  17. The Hanoi Hilton
    An earnest but clumsy tribute to the heroism of the American servicemen - mostly officers - who were captured and held prisoner by North Vietnam during the long, desperate undeclared war we now refer to simply as Vietnam.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cat o' Nine Tails
    Only blindly abject devotees of the whodunit should discover catnip in The Cat O'Nine Tails. Any simple souls who expect large dollops of probability and authentic excitement are cautioned that they're in short supply in the concoction of slayings and sleuthing that is dished up here.
  19. My Neighbor Totoro
    When My Neighbor Totoro, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is dispensing enchantment, it can be very charming. Too much of the film, however, is taken up with stiff, mechanical chitchat.
  20. Bad Boys
    Bad Boys is a suspenseful movie, but it's also an extremely brutal one. It begins with someone's brains spattered on a wall, and ends with a particularly bloody battle. In between, there's a lot more of the same.
  21. Night Shift
    This is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second.
  22. Krull
    Krull is a gentle, pensive sci-fi adventure film that winds up a little too moody and melancholy for the Star Wars set, though that must be the audience at which it is aimed.
  23. 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Entity
    The Entity offers thrills in short staccato bursts and dull science in long bursts. If your thirst is for horror, it will not be slaked. If your taste runs to psychiatry, it will not be satisfied. If your fancy is for films that keep you riveted to your seat, you may find that you need a restraining belt by third-quarter time.
  25. Conan the Destroyer
    The special effects aren't bad, and there are fewer decapitations than in Conan the Barbarian. Mr. Fleischer seems to want this film to be funnier than was the first one, directed by John Milius, but Mr. Schwarzenegger, a body builder who can lift freight trains, can't easily get his tongue into his cheek.
  26. Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High a.k.a. Vol. 2
    This putrid but at times oddly amiable exercise raised questions of an esoteric nature to this reviewer’s mind, such as “Why do all the female extras look as if they’ve been kidnapped from the post-punk club Coney Island High, since that club closed over 20 years ago?” If you too are apt to be diverted by such concerns, you might be amused by this.
  27. The Gardener
    Overall The Gardener is flat and lacking in soul, a word that comes up many times in the movie.
  28. Supergirl
    Supergirl arouses some initial curiosity about the differences between the two cousins; for instance, that Supergirl can't change in phone booths and is much the better flier of the two. However the film, as directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Odell, quickly loses its novelty.
  29. Wildling
    This creature feature from the director Fritz Böhm is functional but lacks flavor, an imaginative spark that might distinguish it from any number of other I-was-a-teenage-monster movies.
  30. Family
    Thoroughly good-natured and with a handful of decent jokes (like Kate McKinnon as a vulpine suburban mom), Family would be more interesting if, instead of trying to rewire Kate, it just admitted that her harsh honesty and benign neglect were more beneficial to Maddie than her mother’s anxious hovering.
  31. The New Romantic
    Mirroring its green protagonist, The New Romantic presents an image of sophistication while playing with ideas that are out of its depth.
  32. What We Started
    What We Started appears to have been conceived with contradictory audiences in mind. On one hand, it tries to present an accessible history of electronic music, starting with its outgrowth from disco, house and techno and continuing through its commercialization and fusion with pop. On the other hand, a subcultural cliquishness creeps into the movie.
  33. An Ordinary Man
    A head-scratcher that ends with a shoulder-shrug, An Ordinary Man feels like a scene-study exercise in which two actors invest full measures in a script that’s only half finished.
  34. Son of Bigfoot
    The Son of Bigfoot, an English-language production from Belgium, more or less does what it sets out to do, which is to offer enough visual activity and bromides to keep the very young interested. To all others: There is no Bigfoot; there’s nothing to see here.
  35. Death Becomes Her
    Death Becomes Her dares to invent a world of spectacular self-interest and populate that world with two fabulous harridans (Ms. Streep and Goldie Hawn) giving wonderfully spirited performances. But in spite of that, it remains surprisingly tame. A lot of the problem arises from simple -- and inexplicable -- lapses in the screenplay.
  36. SuperFly
    The roomier scenario of this remake has the potential to yield a decent thriller, but Superfly too often prioritizes showy sequences for dubious reasons.
  37. Winter Brothers
    Mr. Palmason’s showy technique, magnetic on its own, ultimately seems like a way of adding mystery to a story that, like Emil, is content with having no place to go.
  38. Caught
    Underwritten and a smidge too long, Caught is marred by an over-excited musical score that browbeats where it should tease. Yet the movie’s bleak and brutal tone works, as does the visitors’ bizarrely unstable behavior.
  39. Masters of the Universe
    If you liked the toy, you'll love the movie.
  40. Over the Top
    One of Mr. Stallone's more muddled efforts but by no means a flop on the order of F.I.S.T. or Rhinestone.
  41. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Johnny English Strikes Again has a few more laughs and far fewer cringes (and stereotypes) than the two films that preceded it. Plus it knows where to steal from. Watching it is like having a good time by proxy.
  42. Night School
    The plot zigs and zags and sometimes accelerates in the direction of genuine hilarity...only to downshift into sloppy, easy jokes and gags.
  43. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    The production design displays a genuine enthusiasm for the decorative kitsch of the Halloween season, and the flashes of giddy craftiness beneath the slick style almost compensate for the toothlessness of the horror.
  44. Second Act
    This is Jenny from the blah.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gator
    Messy little melodrama of Southern corruption. [25 Aug 1976, p.46]
    • The New York Times
  46. Tombstone
    Tombstone is a movie that wants to have it both ways. It wants to be at once traditional and morally ambiguous. The two visions don't quite harmonize.
  47. FernGully: The Last Rainforest
    Ferngully is more run-of-the-mill than its subject matter might indicate. The main characters are disappointingly ordinary, with the exotic Crysta sounding very much like someone who spends time at the mall.
  48. The Howling
    It's also one of those movies that is itself so lethargic that one welcomes its so-called shock moments not because they are scary but because they indicate that not everyone behind the camera has been napping. You don't dread the possibility of something jumping out from behind the door. You long for it.
  49. Prick Up Your Ears
    The film covers the main events of the Orton life in a manner that is nothing less than distracted. One has little understanding of the fatal intensity - and need - that kept Orton and Halliwell together.
  50. The Mechanic
    I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.
  51. Greyhound
    While much of the movie was shot on an actual ship, there is a lot of C.G.I., and a good deal of it is not entirely convincing. “Greyhound” also feels like a movie that was conceived as an epic but could not quite muster the necessary force. As such, it’s ultimately one of Hanks’s most perfunctory pictures.
  52. Always at The Carlyle
    Discretion may be a virtue in the upscale hospitality business, but not in documentary film. If you are going to make a movie that hints at scandal and celebrity gossip and behind-the-scenes glamour, then it’s not too much to ask that some secrets be revealed and a glass or two of juice poured.
  53. Leviathan
    Leviathan compares favorably with the other recent aquatic horror film Deepstar Six but probably not with anything else.
  54. The Monster Squad
    A silly attempt to crossbreed an Our Gang comedy with a classic horror film, which usually means that both genres have reached the end of the line.
  55. Streets of Fire
    For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.
  56. Sleeping with the Enemy
    Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.
  57. Dude
    The movie becomes more involving as it finds its focus.... Ms. Hale does an excellent job portraying a popular overachiever understandably resisting the inevitable.
  58. The Sword and the Sorcerer
    A nonsensical, Hollywood-made, R-rated adventure-fantasy set in a primeval past about usurped kingdoms, erring knights, recently awakened ogres, distressed princesses and various hangers-on.
  59. A Kid Like Jake
    Directed by Silas Howard from a screenplay by Daniel Pearle, who adapted his own stage play, A Kid Like Jake is humane, compassionate and strangely detached, almost to the point of inconsequentiality.
  60. The Legend of Billie Jean
    The Legend of Billie Jean' is competently made, sometimes attractively acted, and bankrupt beyond belief. It's hard to imagine that even the film makers, let alone audiences, can believe in a sweet, selfless heroine who just can't help becoming a superstar.
  61. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Throughout, the writer and director Cordula Kablitz-Post asserts Andreas-Salomé’s commitment to her own independence. But Ms. Kablitz-Post’s focus on Andreas-Salomé’s suitors has the effect of chaining the early feminist’s legacy to exactly the patriarchal conventions she claims to reject.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    A murkily pretentious shocker.
  63. The Rachel Divide
    Basic sympathy is where the usefulness of The Rachel Divide ends. Ms. Brownson hasn’t figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past. Anything Ms. Dolezal says has to be taken with such a large grain of salt that it’s not clear why it’s worth listening.
  64. Bleak Moments
    The best that can be said for Bleak Moments is that it earns its name. The film, while it has been handsomely photographed, seems entirely given over to pained, wordless interludes. [23 Sep 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  65. Woman Walks Ahead
    It’s all ridiculously romanticized and self-serving. But the performances are so good (Mr. Greyeyes, in particular, is a miracle of intelligence and dignity) and Michael Eley’s vistas, shimmeringly shot in New Mexico, are so stunning, it feels churlish to resist.
  66. Meantime
    The first hour is given to aimless glimpses of aimless existences, and the second, in which Colin finds a sort of deliverance, is contrived in concept and awkward in execution.
  67. In a Relationship
    The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.
  68. Jonathan
    The movie, itself somewhat torn in sensibility, permits itself an easy out.
  69. State Like Sleep
    The images serve the dialogue, but they are not given a chance to expand the story, depriving the movie of texture and energy. Danluck dives with Katherine into the depths of grief-stricken obsession, and her film suffocates for want of room to breathe.
  70. The Desert Bride
    A road movie of sorts, it steers clear of melodrama or sentimentality, but it also never risks hitting anything.
  71. The Delta
    A film that's alternatingly intriguing and frustrating and that leaves too many loose ends dangling.
  72. Straight Into a Storm
    What fascinated me most about the movie was its likely inadvertent depiction of the comfortable bubble the band and its fandom seem to have created for each other.
  73. Who's That Knocking at My Door?
    The director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters themselves. The result is a movie that is as precise—and as small—as a contact print.
  74. New York, New York
    It's not that the movie runs out of steam long before it has gone on for two hours and 33 minutes, but that we have figured it out and become increasingly dumbfounded.
  75. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.
  76. Perfect
    Too superficially knowing to be a camp classic, but it's an unintentionally hilarious mixture of muddled moralizing and all-too-contemporary self-promotion.
  77. Nossa Chape
    The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.
  78. Toys
    The film has no consistent vision. Even worse, it's not very funny.
  79. El Angel
    Carlitos’s sole reason for living is moving from one transgression to the next. The same might be said of the movie, which superficially probes his amorality while exploiting it for slick thrills.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Billy Jack
    The whole picture nicely conveys a Southwestern atmosphere. But much too often, at the cost of plain credibility, it stacks its cards, characters and even credo like any rootin', tootin' Western.
  81. Blue Collar
    Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounder
    And if Sounder, an intelligent enough movie, avoids all the major pitfalls of its type, it also lacks the excitement that may have come from plumbing greater depths and discovering a few tougher, less accessible insights.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    At first appears to be rich with a quantity of felt life, but on reflection seems both more carefully studied and more coldly casual than profoundly understood.
  84. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.
  85. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn't—which is not to say it is any good.
  86. Walking Tall
    Valiant Southern sheriff. Effective, unsurprising.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Soylent Green
    Unfortunately, the script, direction and the principals involved in this struggle for survival often are as synthetic as Soylent Green.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Private Lessons
    Private Lessons is soft core -breasts, garter belts, heavy panting -with a touch of Walt Disney. There is a comic car chase, a funny fat boy and lots of California sunshine. After all, the film, which is based on ''Philly,'' a novel by Dan Greenburg, is supposed to be a comedy. Maybe this is another first, the old porn updated for the new consumer society.
  89. Doctor Sleep
    This screen adaptation feels like a clumsy hybrid. It’s a little too long and winding to work as a feature film, especially in the horror genre, and might have worked better as a limited series, with a little more room for the many characters who populate its grimly imagined American landscape.
  90. The Dirty Dozen
    Sadistic, anti-Nazi slaughter mission. Entertaining as a blowtorch.
  91. Coming Home
    Strong, stinging triangle of two Vietnam vets and one wife.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
    Not so hot. Try again, boys.
  93. Poltergeist III
    Poltergeist III suffers from bad casting and from the actors' having been encouraged to behave as if sampling an exciting new toothpaste; everyone smiles unreasonably, except when screaming.
  94. Coneheads
    Coneheads falls flat about as often as it turns funny, and displays more amiability than style.
  95. How It Ends
    it’s a surprisingly O.K. addition to the genre.
  96. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    While you don’t require familiarity with the dozen or so earlier titles to enjoy this one, you do require a sense of humor that’s easily triggered and a gag reflex that isn’t.
  97. Damascus Cover
    As one Syrian character tells another, “Timing is everything in this business,” and timing is only one flawed aspect of this uneven movie.
  98. Neighbors
    The situation that Neighbors starts off with is funnier than anything that grows out of it, at least the version of the tale by Mr. Avildsen's and Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter. While Mr. Berger's novel has an aspect of the mysterious to keep it going, the film is solely devoted to hijinks, and the hijinks have nowhere to go.
  99. Friday the 13th Part III
    As in each of the other recent 3-D movies, of which this is easily the most professional, there is a lot of time devoted to trying out the gimmick. Titles loom toward you. Yo-yos spin. Popcorn bounces. Snakes dart toward the camera and strike. Eventually, the novelty wears off, and what remains is the now-familiar spectacle of nice, dumb kids being lopped, chopped and perforated.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Enforcer
    The action is reasonably fast and competently photographed. The picture doesn't exactly drag. But it is maggoty with non‐ideas.
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