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. Mr. Mom
    Mr. Mom would be funny if it had jokes. That's not so self-evident as it sounds, because it's not a claim that every failed comedy can make. The actors here, Mr. Keaton and Teri Garr, are likable and bright, and the situation has possibilities. Very little is made of them, except for such predictable developments as Jack's going to the supermarket with the kids in tow, and knocking over soup cans and fruit.
  2. Miles
    It’s hard to root for a protagonist who is focused only on his own narrow needs and seems indifferent to the broader issues his tale raises.
  3. The Lawnmower Man
    The Lawn Mower Man depends mostly on a lot of colorful video-game-like special effects. They are very loud but, after a while, the noise and the lights induce a torpor that is quite soothing.
  4. Creepshow
    The best things about Creepshow are its carefully simulated comic-book tackiness and the gusto with which some good actors assume silly positions. Horror film purists may object to the levity even though failed, as a lot of it is.
  5. Pet Sematary
    The movie fails mostly because it doesn't trust the audience to do any of the work. What the dialogue doesn't carefully explain or predict is explained or predicted by ominous music and special effects. The movie seems to be playing to itself.
  6. Stand by Me
    Some of their horsing around, 1950ish style, is comical, but too much of what they do is only too plainly imposed by the movie makers. Rob Reiner's direction hammers in every obvious element in an obvious script.
  7. Creepshow 2
    The episodes are marginally interesting, but each is a little too long. And each could be fully explained in a one-sentence synopsis.
  8. Memoirs of an Invisible Man
    As directed by John Carpenter, Memoirs of an Invisible Man does much more with special effects than it does with character, and even the visual tricks begin to seem commonplace when they've been repeated too often. [28 Feb 1992, p.C17]
    • The New York Times
  9. Pet Sematary II
    Mary Lambert, who directed the original Pet Sematary, has returned for the sequel, which, like its forerunner, is much better at special effects than at creating characters or telling a coherent story.
  10. Proud Mary
    Ms. Henson, ever simmering, takes Mary’s moral conundrum very seriously. Her expressive eyes and nuanced body language work well for the character; she can put across a major change in attitude just by shifting a hip. The script, though, doesn’t give her a whole lot of material with which to credibly enact her character’s crisis.
  11. Souvenir
    The story is as predictable as they come, played out at such a low emotional temperature as to be practically ignorable. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it offered something else worth paying attention to. Something else besides the endlessly watchable lead actress, that is.
  12. Dead Calm
    Disturbing for all the wrong reasons.
  13. Coma
    Plausibility is not always important, but in a film as bereft of distinctive style and wit as Coma, it helps to believe in something. It can even help if one is offended. The aftereffect of Coma is a catlike yawn, benign and bored.
  14. Back to Burgundy
    Mr. Klapisch lingers his camera lovingly over shots of grapes being harvested and stomped, all the while employing story mechanics and flashbacks indelicate enough to suggest the churn of a factory juicer.
  15. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    Ms. Henson does what she can with a role that keeps her anger at a low simmer until requiring her to go full banshee within basically one scene. You can’t accuse her or Acrimony of being boring, but the film falls short of a design for living.
  16. A View to a Kill
    As lavishly escapist as they are, the latest James Bond films have become strenuous to watch, now that the business of maintaining Bond's casual savoir-faire looks like such a monumental chore.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Man with the Golden Gun
    Mr. Moore functions like a vast garden ornament. Pedantic, sluggish on the uptake, incapable of even swaggering, he's also clumsy at innuendo. If you enjoyed the early Bond films as much as I did, you'd better skip this one.
  18. Fun Mom Dinner
    All four actresses have a natural chemistry and manage to give some inner dimensions to these otherwise archetypal characters.
  19. License to Drive
    Anyone old enough to have a license is probably much too old to be amused by License to Drive. Though the plot and action never get better than a television movie of the week, the engaging cast brings much more style to the material than it deserves. [06 July 1988, p.C17]
    • The New York Times
  20. Up the Academy
    Up the Academy sets out to offend almost everybody, including women, blacks, homosexuals, Arabs, the military, and so on, but they've all been more efficiently offended by other, better movies.
  21. Dawn of the Dead
    I was able to sit through only the first fifteen minutes of Dawn of the Dead.
  22. The Crazies
    An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.
  23. Imperfections
    Most of the movie’s pleasures come from Ms. Kull, a better actress than the one she plays, and the convolutions of the plot, which has a few good feints and dodges.
  24. Wonder Woman 1984
    Patty Jenkins is behind the camera again, but this time without the confidence. Certainly some of the problems can be pinned on the uninterestingly janky script, a mess of goofy jokes, storytelling clichés and dubious politics.
  25. The Leisure Seeker
    It’s hard to imagine other performers bringing so much to this setup. They give a true impression of two people who have spent their lives together and know how to talk each other.
  26. 9 to 5
    The three actresses make an attractive team, but neither the screenplay, by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick, nor the director, Mr. Higgins, uses them very effectively. It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality.
  27. Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey
    The question of whether the couple will consummate their relationship isn’t a sufficient source of tension.
  28. Rebel in the Rye
    While Rebel in the Rye isn’t quite as bad as its pile-of-bricks-clunky title suggests, it’s both simple- and literal-minded, less concerned with Salinger’s consciousness or sensibility than with his ostensible ontological status as a Tortured Creative Giant.
  29. 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.
  30. Holmes & Watson
    There is still intermittent joy to be found in their autumnal bromance.
  31. Oh Heavenly Dog
    Oh Heavenly Dog is diverting enough for its dog tricks - I like dog tricks, don't get me wrong - but it otherwise shows few signs of life, and many signs of depressing modernism.
  32. Sea of Love
    Sea of Love is a lugubrious imitation of a second-rate television movie, over-produced and over-cast. Mr. Pacino tears into a role made out of rice paper, for messy results, while Miss Barkin does her level best to seem simultaneously sexy, homicidal and innocent, which is not easy.
  33. 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.
  34. Jesús
    One feels the filmmaker trying hard to work out the inner struggles of his sad but largely unsympathetic characters. But his movie is as miserable and ultimately confounding as it is earnest.
  35. Mrs. Hyde
    Whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration — or education, or any number of issues — it backs off or bogs down. It’s so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.
  36. Jungle
    Slow to get moving and dramatically slack, Jungle cares only about Yossi, whose solo suffering and speed-enhanced hallucinations dominate the narrative.
  37. The Lodgers
    Working with an uneven cast and an undercooked story, Mr. O’Malley hits the horror beats just fine (slam, creak, squeak) without putting a sinister spin on the assorted strange doings. For all the genre exertions, none of this feels the least bit spooky.
  38. I Love You, Daddy
    When I watched I Love You, Daddy a second time, the jokes no longer landed; its shocks felt uglier, cruder. But for once a filmmaker seemed to be admitting to the misogyny that we know is always there and has often been denied or simply waved off, at times in the name of art.
  39. Papillon
    Mr. Hunnam isn’t yet a movie star, and given current industry trends (big-studio cartoons, superhero flicks, etc.) might never get that chance. His talent is for quiet, unshowy moments, not leading-man grand gestures and important speeches.
  40. Tragedy Girls
    Tragedy Girls might add group texts to its instruments of death alongside marauding table saws and falling barbells, but the movie’s gender stereotypes keep it chained to the past.
  41. Never Here
    Ms. Enos is a credibly fraying voyeur, all anxious looks and nervous starts, but “Never Here” is too emotionally antiseptic to engage.
  42. Anna and the Apocalypse
    Anna and the Apocalypse is more sketch than developed movie. Directed by John McPhail from a script by McHenry and Alan McDonald, the movie is thinly plotted, its pacing slack, its staging uninspired; Anna remains merely an idea for a plucky heroine, despite Hunt’s smile and sweat.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Force 10 from Navarone
    The plot of Force 10 is banally improbable. Guy Hamilton's direction is sluggish and the camera work, by Chris Challis, makes the least of the picturesque locations in the mountains of Montenegro. There is, moreover, an unmistakable air of haste and cost-cutting that suggests that most of the production budget went to pay the high-priced stars.
  44. Hanover Street
    Every now and then a film comes along of such painstaking, overripe foolishness that it breaks through the garbage barrier to become one of those rare movies you rush to see for laughs. The clichés were everywhere, but always just slightly out of place and inappropriate.
  45. The Frisco Kid
    There's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material.
  46. So B. It
    So B. It aims for an inclusive message. But Mama’s artificiality makes it hard to buy the movie’s themes of acceptance.
  47. 3 Ninjas
    The film can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy, a fantasy or an adventure film. Mr. Kingsley's villain gnashes his teeth and snorts, I love being the bad guy. Those who displease him are threatened with the tearing out of a heart or liver. The character ends up being neither scary nor funny, while the boys are so busy demonstrating their superhuman skills that no personalities emerge.
  48. The Arrival
    The Arrival, like so many science-fiction films, begins as a promisingly eerie mixture of pseudo-scientific exposition and chilly paranoia. But once its plot has been bared, it turns into a muddled chase movie filled with glaring inconsistencies.
  49. AL DI QUA
    However worthy or political its intent, Al Di Qua is too overwrought to seem anything but trivializing.
  50. Flesh and Blood
    A dreary pileup of hard-luck monologues and run-down locations, Mark Webber’s Flesh and Blood straddles the line between fact and fiction with exhausting earnestness and a fatal dearth of narrative.
  51. Along for the Ride
    As moving as Mr. de la Manitou’s testimony sometimes is, this movie too often feels like a credulity-straining attempt at hagiography.
  52. Permanent
    As the parents, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Arquette seem just about as tired as the characters they’re playing. As Auralie, Ms. McLean is appealing and fresh-faced and could do well in a better coming-of-age movie in a few years.
  53. Total Eclipse
    Unfortunately, the mad romanticism of Rimbaud's exploits has been made to look preposterous here, despite a cast that should have been magnetic in its own right. Total Eclipse clumsily exaggerates both these characters, from the moment when Rimbaud begins savoring experience in a laughably over-the-top poetic manner.
  54. Oleanna
    Mr. Mamet can be a first-rate film maker, and in works like House of Games and Homicide he trusts language as much as he relies on small, subtle camera movements. Here both the language and Mr. Mamet's film making let him down.
  55. Drawing Home
    A mild film, Drawing Home could use an electrical charge, or an undercurrent of urgency. The pacing is uneven, and the movie feels slow in spots and too long overall, even though it lacks detail that would have enriched it. An internet search offers a fuller idea about the real lives of the subjects.
  56. Out to Sea
    Frankly geriatric, and made without a single gunfight or explosion, the weak but genial romp Out to Sea supplies touristy scenery, familiar players and enough rumba scenes for 10 weddings. Everything about the film is as intentionally dated as its gag about Normandy.
  57. Devil's Gate
    It’s not good, but it could pass muster among midnight-movie enthusiasts or curious stoners.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hellraiser
    Mr. Barker is no more successful in making the big leap from literature to film than Norman Mailer. He's cast his film with singularly uninteresting actors, though the special effects aren't bad - only damp.
  59. Bullet Head
    Is Bullet Head good? In truth, it’s drab, derivative and more than slightly silly, but it’s tough to dislike like a movie that proceeds as if the 1990s cycle of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs never ended and that uses the prospect of gory canine violence in service of loud and persistent pro-dog cheerleading.
  60. The Bounty
    The movie seems to have been planned, written, acted, shot and edited by people who were constantly being overruled by other people. It's totally lifeless.
  61. Acts of Violence
    This dopey action thriller harks back to grindhouse pictures of the ’70s and ’80s, although it’s too tasteful, if that’s the word, to consistently exploit the more lurid implications of its sensationalist scenario.
    • 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.
  63. Please Stand By
    Despite [Fanning's] commitment to the role — and the generally fine supporting performances — this timorous tale sidesteps uncomfortable realities in favor of soothing whimsy and preordained uplift.
  64. Encino Man
    When Stoney explains that Milk Duds belong to one of the four major food groups, the dairy group, that's about as funny as things get. For a film that prides itself on throwing around Pauly-isms like fully (meaning yes), and grindage (food), Encino Man is surprisingly not buff (cool).
  65. Light Sleeper
    At its best, Light Sleeper is merely theoretical. Most of the time, though, it is artificial and laughably unbelievable. Even the dark, gritty Manhattan locations don't add authenticity.
  66. What They Had
    Programmatic and groaningly trite, What They Had, the debut feature from Elizabeth Chomko, would be impossible to swallow without its star-studded cast. Even so, it requires all their considerable skills to stop this soapy family drama from sliding into complete banality.
  67. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Though the new Robin Hood observes all of the classic confrontations that keep the tale alive, the film winds up as a mixture of listless adventure, wispy comedy and what is meant to pass for social realism.
  68. Species
    The director, Roger Donaldson, best known for the Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out, keeps the film moving. But there is only so much suspense he can generate from this stock story and familiar-looking special effects. Species may work best for viewers who don't like to be too scared by horror movies; it's reassuringly familiar.
  69. Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds
    Story clarity and emotional depth tend to evaporate amid the visual pyrotechnics.
  70. Nostalgia
    A soggy string of Hallmark moments designed to interrogate the value of the objects we cherish, the movie is front-loaded with major stars and squelching with sentiment.
  71. Death Wish 3
    There is not a moment of credibility in the movie and the ending is sheer chaos, and anticlimactic at that. Mr. Winner runs out of imagination before Mr. Bronson runs out of ammunition. But that should not detract from its appeal. Along with the pleasure of seeing predators get their due, fans of the Death Wish series may also count on the usual vivid and noisy nature of their disposal and the imperturbability of the disposer.
  72. My Art
    My Art invests far too much in the conceit. (The re-creations look like unfunny “Airplane!” parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene-stealing Parker Posey.
  73. Son of the Pink Panther
    As the movie accelerates out of control into a series of frantically intercut scenes that lack basic continuity, the fun turns into a collection of abrupt non sequiturs.
  74. Not as a Stranger
    It is loaded with hospital lore, coldly realistic and compelling, but also it is creeping with ponderous characters. With so much dissecting in his picture—and so much of it being good—it is too bad that Mr. Kramer couldn't have done a little on his characters.
  75. The Last Movie Star
    The director Adam Rifkin wrote this showcase for Mr. Reynolds, who, like Vic, was a college football player. The Last Movie Star effectively allows the ever-assured actor to score a touchdown on an empty field.
  76. Allure
    The filmmakers seem less concerned with telling a story than in convincing the audience (and maybe themselves) that they can handle this provocative and potentially exploitive material they’ve contrived with what’s conventionally considered “appropriate” sensitivity.
  77. Outlaw King
    Mackenzie does nice, tight work now and again, mostly in more intimate sequences, but too many scenes drag, and his fetishistization of violence proves numbing.
  78. Sunset
    While Nemes’s near-subjective technique can generate genuine tension, it more often yields anxious tedium.
  79. Suspiria
    As the first hour of Suspiria grinds into the second and beyond (the movie runs 152 minutes), it grows ever more distended and yet more hollow. Unlike Argento, who seemed content to deliver a nastily updated fairy tale in 90 or so minutes, Guadagnino continues casting about for meaning, which perhaps explains why he keeps adding more stuff, more mayhem, more dances.
  80. Unicorn Store
    The message here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for adulthood, but the film doesn’t bear it out.
  81. Dear Dictator
    Simultaneously preposterous and dull, Dear Dictator is the kind of movie where music and wardrobe choices — like the mean girls’ stridently visible underwear — substitute for character.
  82. American Animals
    The film, written and directed by Bart Layton, can’t quite decide what it wants to be: a slick, speedy caper; a goofball comedy; or a commentary on the state of the American soul. It’s none of those — a tame and toothless creature that is neither fish nor fowl.
  83. Padmaavat
    Mr. Bhansali is painting with a broad brush.
  84. Double Indemnity
    Such folks as delight in murder stories for their academic elegance alone should find this one steadily diverting, despite its monotonous pace and length...But the very toughness of the picture is also the weakness of its core, and the academic nature of its plotting limits its general appeal.
  85. Above & Beyond Acoustic: Giving Up the Day Job
    The movie, directed by Myles Desenberg and Paul Dugdale, frequently counts down to the Hollywood Bowl show as it chronicles rehearsals and other tour stops, but there’s no real suspense, because the footage from that show is interspersed throughout the movie from the very beginning.
  86. All I Wish
    Both sartorially and cinematically, the seasoned star at the heart of All I Wish deserves a movie with more to offer than knockoff style.
  87. Cannonball Run II
    The fact that Cannonball Run II isn't much good may not prevent it from becoming this summer's best- loved lowest-common-denominator comedy, if only because of the utter absence of any competition.
  88. Shag
    Long before the film is over, one is left frustratedly grasping after characters and an ambiance that have evaporated into formulaic freneticism.
  89. Uncle Drew
    It’s not every day that you can say, “Shaquille O’Neal was the best actor in that movie.” And yet that may well be true in the case of Uncle Drew, a genuinely unusual exercise in screen comedy.
  90. Steel Magnolias
    Steel Magnolias is pop entertainment of an especially condescending, superficial sort. Its bitchiness and greeting-card truisms are made no more palatable by the fact that Mr. Harling probably wrote it with as much sincerity and passion as Mr. Shepard put into "Fool for Love."
  91. Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead
    Miss Applegate is charming when the screenplay allows her to slow down. Working against her is the director, Stephen Herek, who pushes every gag so hard and fast that he seems to be keeping up with a laugh track only he can hear.
  92. Death on the Nile
    Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.
  93. 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.
  94. Who's Harry Crumb?
    In Who's Harry Crumb? Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine. But the result is little more than a weak comedy, one that suggests Mr. Candy is potentially a great deal better than his material.
  95. Dark Crimes
    A good story gets stuck in a puddle of mood in Dark Crimes, a film that strays from its fascinating source — a real-life murder case — into a less successful attempt at noir.
  96. The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter
    One wonders why “Whitetail Deer Hunter” chose such a relatively toothless route, but one doesn’t wonder too long, as it’s the kind of movie you forget about 20 minutes after seeing it.
  97. Strangers on the Earth
    The sensations that Strangers on the Earth means to evoke are not well suited to the cinematic medium, at least not to a documentary that barely runs more than an hour and a half.
  98. Once Upon a Time in America
    It's a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders. [U.S. theatrical release]
  99. Valley Girl
    The characters and their jargon are occasionally amusing, but there's no action, no conflict, no overwhelming satire and nothing to jolt them out of their lethargy.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part 2
    FRIDAY the 13th Part II will frighten you, at least for moments, although it will be a close-run thing whether it will be fright, nausea or simple distaste that gets to you first. The movie exists for no other purpose than to shock. The plot is an excuse for joining together horrors, all of the sado-masochist kind, and the acting is rudimentary at best. It probably will make a fortune. [4 May 1981, p.C1]
    • The New York Times
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