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. A Perfect Murder
    The story has enough nasty twists and tantalizing clues for its ingenious mechanics to remain engaging.
  2. The Truman Show
    Warm, affecting and refreshingly shtickless, he (Carrey) occupies center stage here through sheer, beguiling force of personality.
  3. Mr. Jealousy
    The film, which is better written than staged, could have been funnier if its actors weren't playing against type.
  4. The Last Days of Disco
    Humorously and fondly, with an entertaining supply of what he has called "prosaic license," Stillman again displays a pitch-perfect ear for both the cattiness and the camaraderie that bind his characters into collective friendship.
  5. Hope Floats
    Hope Floats, which often resembles a rosy commercial, does indulge in too much awkward slow motion, and in occasional embarrassing romps that are meant to signify family fun.
  6. The Opposite of Sex
    What redeems the film's surface bitterness are sharp observations, laceratingly funny dialogue and something Dedee claims to find especially loathsome: a secret heart of gold.
  7. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    The closest sensory approximation of an acid trip ever achieved by a mainstream movie and the latest example of Mr. Gilliam's visual bravura.
  8. Bulworth
    Its best moments come from witnessing the Senator's inspired unraveling, not from watching where it will end.
  9. Godzilla
    Godzilla is so clumsily structured it feels as if it's two different movies stuck together with an absurd stomping finale glued onto the end.
  10. The Horse Whisperer
    Mr. Redford has found his own visually eloquent way to turn the potboiler into a panorama, with a deep-seated love for the Montana landscape against which his rapturously beautiful film unfolds.
  11. Clockwatchers
    Clockwatchers gets many of the details of office life eerily right: the arrogant, smarmy male executives who affect a patronizing jocularity with secretaries whose names they can never remember; the iron-fisted boss who huffs windily about everyone in the company being a "family"; the petty tyrant who doles out pencils as though they were gold bullion.
  12. Quest for Camelot
    The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.
  13. Deep Impact
    Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.
  14. Shooting Fish
    This aggressively whimsical fairy tale about a pair of grown-up orphans who rob from the rich to give to the poor (themselves!) and end up living happily ever after darts forward so quickly that several major plot turns are dispensed with in 10 or 15 seconds of babble.
  15. He Got Game
    Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.
  16. Wilde
    Fry's warmly sympathetic performance finds the gentleness beneath the wit. He conveys the sense of a man at the mercy of forces he cannot control, not least of them his own brittle genius.
  17. Les Misérables
    However turbulent its narrative, this Les Miserables unfolds in a comforting style, serious and intelligent in ways that seem much too quaint today. The essence of Hugo's morality tale remains pure, and so does the value of a vigorous, gripping story, straightforwardly told.
  18. Sliding Doors
    Once the movie throws in a jolting, late-in-the-gameplot twist that could have been borrowed from "City of Angels," it never regains its balance.
  19. The Big Hit
    A high-concept, low-reward hodgepodge that mingles elaborate stunts and shootouts with stereotypical ethnic humor.
  20. Two Girls and a Guy
    Robert Downey Jr.'s Blake Allen is enough of a raging dynamo to find the dark humor and desperate romanticism at the heart of Mr. Toback's ego trip of a premise, and to make Blake sympathetic too.
  21. The Object of My Affection
    Easier to watch than it is to believe.
  22. Suicide Kings
    What hip means in this uneven comic suspense film is maintaining the ironically distanced tone of a deadpan ''Married to the Mob'' or a tongue-in-cheek Coen Brothers caper.
  23. Nightwatch
    Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.
  24. Species II
    In the spring a monster's fancy lethally turns to thoughts of lust. This thought, reduced to a level contemptuous of taste and reasonable intelligence, underlies Species II.
  25. City of Angels
    The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.
  26. 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain
    For most moviegoers over 12, this, the fourth Three Ninjas movie, will be interminably boring. But it's possible that young children will enjoy the film, since it falls into both the action category and the children-are-smart-adults-can't-do-anything-right genre.
  27. Sonatine
    Sonatine, made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit Fireworks by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor.
  28. The Players Club
    Campy moments and a luridly colorful look (with cinematography by Malik Sayeed) may give this no-flair, no-frills B movie a healthy video afterlife some day.
  29. The Spanish Prisoner
    This is his sleekest and most engaging film thus far. If you like a good cat-and-mouse game with a keen ear for language, then go.
  30. Lost in Space
    The film has energy even when it hasn't much sense, in a manner that will strike most non-cultists as exhausting.
  31. Mercury Rising
    Hugely expensive, weakly formulaic.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Barney's Great Adventure
    Although the film is longer than the television and video segments children this age are accustomed to, the pacing is brisk enough to hold them.
  33. The Newton Boys
    If Mr. Linklater is not entirely at ease with action sequences (or with the obligatory having-fun montage once the brothers become successful), he still makes this (after ''Before Sunrise'' and ''Suburbia'') another admirable directorial stretch.
  34. 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.
  35. Primary Colors
    It's a movie struggling with its own identity crisis, and with the obvious constraints created by its subject matter.
  36. Taste of Cherry
    Exquisite.
  37. Wide Awake
    Wide Awake imagines it's a seriocomic "coming of age" film radiating waves of healing sweetness and light. But beneath its suffocating, smug sentimentality, you have to look hard to uncover a single moment of truth and genuine feeling.
  38. Fireworks
    The filmmaker's equal fondness for bright floral paintings and exploding blood bags is sure to keep an audience on its toes, even if some of the effects are as blunt as (quite literally) chopsticks in the eye.
  39. The Man in the Iron Mask
    Beyond its persistent coarseness, Wallace's story often trades yesterday's inspiration (Dumas) for today's (Simpson-Bruckheimer).
  40. Funny Games
    Funny Games observes the family's excruciating terror and suffering with the patient delight of a cat luxuriantly toying with a mouse that it is in the process of slowly killing. Posing as a morally challenging work of art, the movie is a really a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism. You go to it at your own risk.
  41. U.S. Marshals
    A movie that knows how to pace its audience. Watching it is like going for a long and satisfying jog.
  42. Love and Death on Long Island
    John Hurt is simply wonderful -- acerbic, funny and heartbreaking.
  43. The Big Lebowski
    Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.
  44. Hush
    The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.
  45. The Real Blonde
    A lively, well-constructed film with a large and appealing cast.
  46. Senseless
    The gags, like the plotting, have a giddy edge that can be sharp, but just as often they go nowhere.
  47. Palmetto
    The film, adapted from a novel by James Hadley Chase, aspires to out-noir every other film noir that has been lumped under that popular term, including "The Big Sleep" (which it resembles), in plot trickery and steaminess.
  48. Dark City
    So relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns. Although its story doesn't add up when you analyze it afterward, the movie does take you on a visually arresting ride that offers many unsettling surprises right up to a sentimental sunburst of an ending that has a paranoid undertone.
  49. Dangerous Beauty
    No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.
  50. The Wedding Singer
    Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985.
  51. Sphere
    While this is no quick-witted treat on a par with Mr. Levinson's ''Wag the Dog,'' it's a solid thriller with showy scientific overtones.
  52. The Replacement Killers
    The movie they have concocted has the feel of a visual sampler or an elaborate color swatch submitted for a design that remains largely unexecuted.
  53. The Night Flier
    A thuddingly blunt contemporary morality tale devoid of wit and only minimally suspenseful.
  54. Nil by Mouth
    Even for American audiences used to the argot of Mike Leigh films, the accents are thick here and the characters impenetrable at first. But it isn't long before the film begins exerting a powerful hold, once the hard edges of its story begin to emerge.
  55. Blues Brothers 2000
    The movie only really comes alive when the music plays and people sing and dance.
  56. Great Expectations
    Largely because Mr. Cuaron is such a voluptuous visual stylist, this Great Expectations is capable of wonder even when its wilder ideas misfire.
  57. Fallen Angels
    Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.
  58. The Gingerbread Man
    With unexpected success, Robert Altman plays a John Grisham mystery in a seductive new key.
  59. Phantoms
    The movie's computer animation is so cut-rate and its direction (by Joe Chappelle) so slack that the attacks are virtually terror-free.
  60. Spice World
    Disarmingly, the film thus acknowledges the Spice Girls' flash-in-the-pan status and lets them kid around about their frankly synthetic career.
  61. Hard Rain
    A well-cast disaster movie more notable for special effects and stunts than for credible drama.
  62. Half Baked
    Not very funny, intellignet or grippingly plotted, it is likely to appeal only to those who think that anything to do with marijuana - smoking, sharing, stealing or selling - constitutes the Everest of rip-roaring hilarity. [17 Jan 1998]
    • The New York Times
  63. Live Flesh
    A richly detailed tale of passion, perfidy and revenge adapted from a typically tricky Ruth Rendell novel.
  64. Fallen
    With the warmly engaging presence of Mr. Washington to keep it at least half-credible, and with a brooding and literate noir screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, ''Fallen'' was directed by Gregory Hoblit with the same dark intensity of his earlier feature ''Primal Fear.''
  65. The Boxer
    Mr. Day-Lewis, looking wearily rugged and battling his way through several plausible boxing matches, once again breathes fire into the character of a high-minded loner, and his vitality lends real force to the film's moral arguments.
  66. Oscar and Lucinda
    As directed exquisitely by Gillian Armstrong in a headstrong spirit that recalls her debut feature, "My Brilliant Career," this elliptical tale makes up in visual beauty whatever it lacks in universal meaning.
  67. Afterglow
    Even after the film's last half-hour descends into a silly season, Mr. Rudolph writes and directs with obvious affection for his characters and with a deep knowledge of whatever makes them tick.
  68. The Postman
    Every truly awful movie epic has a point of no return, a moment when the accumulated bad lines and bogus sentimentality become so cloying that the best defense against a mounting queasiness is an awed amusement. The Postman, offers a new opportunity for levity every few minutes after its first hour.
  69. Wag the Dog
    Wag the Dog, the poison-tipped political satire that's as scarily plausible as it is swift, hilarious and impossible to resist.
  70. Kundun
    It's all very beautiful, not to mentioned high-minded. But the loftiness comes at a sacrifice.
  71. Jackie Brown
    But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.
  72. Mr. Magoo
    Poor old Mr. Magoo should have been allowed to rest in piece. This film suggests that when you loot a crypt, you're likely to find a corpse.
  73. As Good as It Gets
    Wicked, but it works.
  74. Tomorrow Never Dies
    Despite Mr. Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.
  75. Titanic
    A huge, thrilling three-and-a-quarter-hour experience that unerringly lures viewers into the beauty and heartbreak of its lost world.
  76. Mousehunt
    As the family film least insulting to its audience's intelligence this season, Mouse Hunt has its share of grown-up appeal along with mouse mischief guaranteed to have children giggling.
  77. The Apostle
    Duvall's unobtrusive direction moves the film at a leisurely pace that lets many scenes build the gentle, pleasing rhythms of small-town Southern life. A rare display of spiritual light on screen.
  78. Deconstructing Harry
    This poisonous, brazenly autobiographical comedy shows off the best of Mr. Allen's misanthropic humor.
  79. Scream 2
    Even if you haven't spent as much obsessive time at the video store as these guys have, you might enjoy helping 'Scream 2' laugh all the way to the bank.
  80. Amistad
    Dwarfed by the enormity of what it means to illustrate, the diffuse Amistad divides its energies among many concerns: the pain and strangeness of the captives' experience, the Presidential election in which they become a factor, the stirrings of civil war, and the great many bewhiskered abolitionists and legal representatives who argue about their fate.
  81. Good Will Hunting
    The script's bare bones are familiar, yet the film also has fine acting, steady momentum, a sharp eye and a very warm heart.
  82. Alien: Resurrection
    Tauntingly flirtatious scenes between Ms. Ryder and Ms. Weaver give this film a sexual boldness that the others' action-adventure spirit lacked.
  83. Flubber
    Though Mr. Williams sometimes seems on the verge of "Aladdin"-caliber improvisation with the ever-morphing green flubber, the film bogs him down with a fiancee (Marcia Gay Harden) hellbent on making him remember a wedding date, and with the full Hughes retinue of thugs and bullies.
  84. Welcome to Sarajevo
    Yet this film, for all its apparent immediacy, winds up less affecting than a more poetic or roundabout approach might be.
  85. The Sweet Hereafter
    The filmmaker creates schematic, intuitive images that hauntingly crystallize the characters' situations.
  86. The Rainmaker
    Drawing a parade of colorful performances from a constantly surprising cast, the curiously titled ''John Grisham's 'The Rainmaker' '' is Mr. Coppola's best and sharpest film in years.
  87. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    Yet for all the film's hard work at capturing Savannah's spirit, there is seldom enough context to make these characters seem anything but adorably whimsical to excess.
  88. Anastasia
    A deeply silly movie, but it is sumptuous to look at, and it never stands still. Its creators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, have given the story a lilting rhythm and glittering surface of the most extravagant jewel-encrusted fairy tale.
  89. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
    Here's the lowdown on the latest chapter in Mortal Kombat: deadly dull.
  90. The Jackal
    The Jackal, like most expensive thrillers nowadays, knows how to do gadgets, pyrotechnics, underground subway chases and panicked crowd scenes. But except for Mr. Gere's uphill battle, it has only the vaguest idea of how to do people.
  91. The Tango Lesson
    Stiffly playing a filmmaker with a growing passion for the tango, she makes this a handsome, drily meticulous film with no real fire anywhere beyond its supple dance scenes.
  92. Starship Troopers
    Pretty actors, grisly critters, brains sucked out of skulls, buckets of green slime and a plot that is half beach blanket bingo, half Iwo Jima.
  93. The Wings of the Dove
    Few films have explored the human face this searchingly and found such complex psychological topography. That's why The Wings of the Dove succeeds where virtually every other film translation of a James novel has stumbled.
  94. Bean
    But while rooted in British sensibilities, Bean is not to be confused with a Noel Coward comedy. Not every gag in Bean succeeds, but compared with most comedies, this one is a keeper.
  95. Eve's Bayou
    Louisiana's delta country has never looked more darkly, lusciously sensual than it does in Eve's Bayou, a Southern gothic soap opera, written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, that transcends the genre through the sheer rumbling force of its characters' passions.
  96. Mad City
    But Mr. Costa-Gavras, a galvanizing filmmaker working with a splendid cast, is able to tell this story in style.
  97. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The most powerful and disturbing personal documentary since Crumb, Sick examines the life of the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who died of cystic fibrosis. [14 Nov 1997, p.E24]
    • The New York Times
  98. An American Werewolf in Paris
    A slapdash, poorly acted, paint-by-numbers teen horror comedy, the sequel is too frenetically edited to build any suspense, and its special effects are strictly bargain basement.
  99. Happy Together
    Stylistically brash, pulsing with life.
  100. Gattaca
    A handsome and fully imagined work of cautionary futuristic fiction.
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