The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Inspector Gadget
    In the end the elaborate gimmickry of Inspector Gadget cannot conceal its very ordinary storytelling.
  2. 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.
  3. Lake Placid
    Trouble is, while not trading quips, the characters actually go through the motions of being scared of the croc, menaced by the croc and so on. And since even the gator horror satire is old hat (remember ''Alligator?''), there's no remaining way to make this interesting.
  4. The Wood
    Famuyiwa's dialogue is easygoing and witty, and the warmhearted comic performances mesh beautifully.
  5. Eyes Wide Shut
    Kubrick left one more brilliantly provocative tour de force as his epitaph.
  6. The Blair Witch Project
    A nifty example of how to make something out of nothing. Nothing but imagination, and a game plan so enterprising it should elevate its creators to pinup status at film schools everywhere.
  7. Muppets from Space
    Instead of sending up their cinematic sources, the creators of Muppets From Space rely too much on this spent screen fuel. Frenetic movement and loud music overwhelm warmth and compassion, and the balance of character, plot, irreverent humor and innate decency that made some of the earlier Muppet movies so welcome is lost.
  8. Arlington Road
    While this film's conception of a terrorist threat is apparent early on, its strength lies in a string of ingenious little surprises.
  9. American Pie
    Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.
  10. Late August, Early September
    If Assayas doesn't always transport his film's events beyond the all too commonplace, his understatement can also yield moments of quiet simplicity.
  11. Summer of Sam
    This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.
  12. Wild Wild West
    It cares far more about herding audiences into theaters than about what they hear or see.
  13. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    Very funny, extremely obscene movie spinoff from the popular animated Comedy Central series.
  14. The Dinner Game
    The Dinner Game, which Veber wrote and directed, is one of his better-constructed comedies of errors.
  15. Big Daddy
    It's a flimsy sentimental comedy with more product plugs and fewer laughs than might have been hoped for.
  16. Tarzan
    It proves to be one of the more exotic blooms in the Disney hothouse, what with voluptuous flora, hordes of fauna, charming characters and excitingly kinetic animation that gracefully incorporates computer-generated motion.
  17. An Ideal Husband
    Life at the top has rarely looked or sounded more fabulously elegant.
  18. Run Lola Run
    Tykwer deliberately blows away all traces of the mundane and the familiar, so that not even the closing credit crawl moves in the expected way.
  19. The General's Daughter
    Travolta again carries a film with enjoyable ease, even if this one remains badly diminished by its perverse streak.
  20. The Red Violin
    Wants to make a grand statement about the mystical power (both celestial and demonic) of great music. But give or take some scattered musical moments, the frame in which that message is couched is too kitschy to let that vision catch fire.
  21. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    Several love beads short of its predecessor. Intermittently hilarious comedy.
  22. Buena Vista Social Club
    The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.
  23. Instinct
    The medium is more palatable than the saccharine message because Hopkins and Gooding know how to put on a show.
  24. Limbo
    If this oddly structured film feels like two short stories stuck together, there is enough solid glue joining them that they resonate off one another deeply.
  25. The Thirteenth Floor
    Repackaged as cyberthriller, the old time-travel adventure returns in this stylish but overplotted and ultimately illogical combination of science fiction, mystery and romance.
  26. Notting Hill
    The movie has lots of glossy charm even if Ms. Roberts and Grant seem less like lovers than members of a support group for the desperately attractive.
  27. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    Much of the film is a nearly wordless tone poem that sustains an intense emotional gravity and sexual tension through its mixture of music, beautiful outdoor cinematography and somber, silent acting.
  28. Eternity and a Day
    All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently grandiose Ulysses' Gaze, the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it.
  29. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    It's up to snuff. It sustains the gee-whiz spirit of the series.
  30. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    A parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what.
  31. Tea with Mussolini
    Once you accept the notion that Tea With Mussolini aspires to be little more than a kind of British-Italian ''Steel Magnolias,'' with a patina of World War II-movie uplift, it becomes a pleasure to watch its stars shamelessly hamming it up.
  32. After Life
    After Life becomes a quiet, extraordinarily moving and sometimes funny meditation on the meaning and value of life. It intimates that whatever happiness we may find in life comes from within and is self-created.
  33. The Mummy
    This version of The Mummy has no pretenses to be anything other than a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen.
  34. Pusher
    Mr. Refn may yet have justification for boasting about his natural talent. There is one magnificent scene in Pusher... Maybe Mr. Refn's next film will take us into that emotional territory.
  35. Idle Hands
    Even pretensions toward the humorous and hip cannot save this blood-drenched film from its innate tastelessness.
  36. The Winslow Boy
    Mamet's handsome, stately adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy does not embellish upon its source material. Instead it skillfully pares the play down to its essentials, arriving at a faithful but tighter version of this drama.
  37. Entrapment
    Combine two stars of this wattage with a lot of techno-talk and elaborate heist plotting and you get plenty of good reasons to pay attention.
  38. Pushing Tin
    Newell's ensemble timing and breezily sardonic style make it work better than might be expected.
  39. Lost & Found
    A rancid little nothing of a movie that baldly recycles plot elements of "There's Something About Mary."
  40. eXistenZ
    Its name, the film's title, is pronounced "eggs is tense" and meant to have a whiff of the philosophical, even if its intellectual ambition seems mostly limited to spelling affectations.
  41. Election
    Election is a deft dark comedy with a resemblance to "Rushmore." It's smart no matter what.
  42. Life
    Lawrence and Murphy make an entertaining team. And they are surrounded by a supporting cast that makes the prison setting more pleasant than it has any right to be.
  43. SLC Punk!
    Likable for its outlandishness, less so when it shows a self-important streak.
  44. Shuang long hui
    High-spirited entertainment .
  45. Go
    He (Liman) creates a film that lives up to the momentum of its title and doesn't really need much more.
  46. Never Been Kissed
    So hopelessly cartoonish and wrongheaded in its details that there's not even a semblance of reality.
  47. Metroland
    Its strongest assets, aside from a performance by Ms. Watson that pierces through the nonsense, are Mark Knopfler's fine, expressive score and the attractiveness of its star.
  48. Cookie's Fortune
    Captivating.
  49. The Out-of-Towners
    Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin are appealing performers, but none of the energy, professionalism and gameness they display -- can surmount the mess that surrounds them in this misguided comedy.
  50. Following
    The usual elements of scheming and deception are well represented here, but they are made all the knottier by shifting time frames.
  51. 10 Things I Hate About You
    If it's all very clever for a teen-age film, it also feels terribly forced.
  52. The Matrix
    The martial arts stunts that are its single strongest selling point.
  53. Edtv
    With down-to-earth comic instincts, it simply invests its story with a loud ring of truth.
  54. The Mod Squad
    Torturously boring.
  55. A Walk on the Moon
    Even when it turns turbulent, the film sustains its warm summer glow, and makes itself a conversation piece about the moral issues it means to raise.
  56. Forces of Nature
    The film shows off Ms. Bullock to amusing if overly frenetic advantage. It also leaves Affleck without enough of a Cary Grant aura to play his wimpier character with style.
  57. Ravenous
    A potentially strong cast makes its way in deadly earnest through material that's often better suited to a Monty Python skit.
  58. The King and I
    The animation is done in rich, jewel-like colors, but it seems strangely flat. The overall film does, too, although the glorious Rodgers and Hammerstein music makes up for a lot.
  59. True Crime
    Directed by Eastwood with righteous indignation and increasingly strong momentum.
  60. Wing Commander: Space Will Never Be the Same
    The film is painfully boring and funny in the wrong places.
  61. The Deep End of the Ocean
    Grosbard mercifully avoids melodrama -- the only real false notes are musical ones, from a score by Elmer Bernstein that turns familiar and trite when the film does not.
  62. Trekkies
    It is probably hopeless in the presence of Trekkies to do anything but sit back -- amused, bemused and astonished -- and watch the devotions of fans of the various incarnations of "Star Trek."
  63. The Rage: Carrie 2
    Uninspired Update, Unintentional Laughs.
  64. Baby Geniuses
    One way to get through Baby Geniuses is to think about whether it really is the worst movie you've ever seen. Probably not, but pretty darn close.
  65. The Corruptor
    The movie may be a conventional story of police corruption, temptation and conflicting loyalties, but it never loses its smarts.
  66. With Friends Like These...
    Originally released seven years ago on home video, is only now surfacing as a theatrical release. Although it's no classic, it's a cut or two smarter than the average Hollywood comedy. At its best, it plays like a less acerbic, less Jewish triple episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (review of re-release)
  67. Analyze This
    As he demonstrated in "Groundhog Day," Ramis knows how to handle a high-concept story with unusual cleverness, and he does it again here. It helps to no end that De Niro and Crystal, despite their obvious differences, are perfectly in tune.
  68. Cruel Intentions
    You have the queasy sense that the whole thing is just an elaborate stunt, and in this case an exploitative one.
  69. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    The punchy little flourishes that load this English gangster film with attitude are perfectly welcome, because there's no honest, substantial part of the movie they can hurt.
  70. The School of Flesh
    Watching this handsomely filmed, deftly edited but rather dry movie, you keep imagining the juice that a director like Pedro Almodovar could have squeezed out of the same story.
  71. 20 Dates
    It must be said that Berkowitz's shamelessness and persistence aren't inevitably irresistible.
  72. 200 Cigarettes
    Gathers a partyful of young players and barely gives them enough of a story line to puff on, but it gets by on personality anyhow.
  73. The Other Sister
    What redeems the film…are its three outstanding performances.
  74. 8MM
    Schumacher almost invariably breathes more life into his material than he has here. It's a lot easier to tick off the forced, farfetched touches in Eight Millimeter than to count the ones that ring true.
  75. Office Space
    It has the loose-jointed feel of a bunch of sketches packed together into a narrative that doesn't gather much momentum. Its conspiratorial eager beavers are so undeveloped that they could hardly even be called types. You don't care for a second what happens to them.
  76. October Sky
    Despite its "based on a true story" opening credit, this earnest, nostalgic film has a way of seeming too good to be true.
  77. Jawbreaker
    The film's bright look and visual energy are much more liberating than the machinations of its teen queens.
  78. Blast from the Past
    Fortunately, the Webber shelter is a jaunty monument to kitsch, and the Webbers themselves are an appealingly batty crew.
  79. Message in a Bottle
    Garret is played by Kevin Costner, who should avoid all future roles that call for overalls and goggles and who this time crosses the line from teasingly laconic to stodgy.
  80. 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.
  81. Simply Irresistible
    It is a measure of the shortcomings of this genial, well-meaning but ultimately unenchanting film that scene after scene is stolen by the second bananas.
  82. Payback
    What one word might best describe Payback? How about "loathsome"?
  83. She's All That
    She's All That is essentially a formulaic comedy, but it has enough glimmerings of originality and wit to make you wish it were much bolder and funnier than it turns out to be.
  84. Gloria
    A smoother, funnier, more suspenseful and more endearing version of the 1980 John Cassavetes film of the same title.
  85. Children of Heaven
    In Children of Heaven, life is sweet despite countless hardships, and no reality beyond the economic intrudes upon a fairy tale atmosphere. Only through heavy-handed emphasis does the quest for new sneakers take on any greater meaning.
  86. Playing by Heart
    For all its artificiality, Playing by Heart percolates with an earnest charm.
  87. Virus
    As long on adrenaline and special effects as it is short on genuine novelty and intellectual content.
  88. Varsity Blues
    A paint-by-numbers story that offers no surprises and a hero and villain etched in white and black with few shades of gray.
  89. At First Sight
    The pace is so plodding and the dialogue so unwaveringly banal … that the film can't rise to the extraordinary sensations it means to capture.
  90. The Thin Red Line
    One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.
  91. Forever Mine
    Everyone on screen is relentlessly gloomy, as if parched for a drop of wit, which isn't forthcoming.
  92. Affliction
    Succeeds in finding something larger than one man's misery. It turns dark truthfulness into the cinematic sentiment most worth celebrating this season.
  93. Hilary and Jackie
    One of the most insightful and wrenching portraits of the joys and tribulations of being a classical musician ever filmed.
  94. The Faculty
    This mediocre sci-fi horror film about an Ohio high school being taken over by thirsty space aliens intent on world domination breaks no new ground. But it has an engaging cast.
  95. Stepmom
    To its credit, the film doesn't sugarcoat its women too monstrously, and it lets real conflicts and opinions occasionally creep in.
  96. A Civil Action
    It tells a finely nuanced tale of right, wrong and the gray area in between.
  97. Patch Adams
    Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak.
  98. Mighty Joe Young
    Mighty Joe Young, directed by Ron Underwood from a screenplay by Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, is saddled with dialogue so wooden that Mr. Paxton and Ms. Theron almost seem animatronic themselves. Little children won't notice. In Joe, they can identify with the biggest, cuddliest simian toy a 6-year-old could ever hope to own.
  99. Down in the Delta
    The movie, which often threatens to disappear into a tub of soapsuds, is elevated immeasurably by the calm, stately performances of Mary Alice and Mr. Freeman.
  100. The Theory of Flight
    The novelty of hearing Ms. Bonham Carter spew four-letter words fades quickly. So does the sight of Mr. Branagh elaborately rehearsing how to rob a bank. This versatile actor has many strengths, but as his wooden turn in ''Celebrity'' has already demonstrated, comedy isn't one of them.
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