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. St. Elmo's Fire
    St. Elmo's Fire is most appealing when it simply gives the actors a chance to flirt with the camera, and with one another. When it attempts to take seriously the problems of characters who are spoiled, affluent and unbearably smug, it becomes considerably less attractive.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Commando
    Two-thirds of this 90-minute film is mayhem unrelieved by humor and untouched by humanity.
  3. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
    While not exactly an actress picture, The Final Chapter takes pains to make its characters a little more personable than the horror- movie norm. This is unfortunate, since there is nothing to do during the second half of the film but watch them die.
  4. Fireworks
    The unrealized potential makes the rote line style and stagnant backdrops seem all the blander.
  5. Boundaries
    Self-satisfied and too slick by half, Boundaries projects a sheen of artifice that deflects any genuine engagement with the story.
  6. Meatballs
    With far fewer high spirits than “Animal House,” and only two characters of any interest, Meatballs reveals itself to be a loud, offkey cry for conformism of a most disappointing sort. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing.
  7. For a Few Dollars More
    The fact that this film is constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers, to emphasize killer bravado and generate glee in frantic manifestations of death is, to my mind, a sharp indictment of it as so-called entertainment in this day.
  8. ...and justice for all.
    With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.
  9. Krystal
    At 93 minutes Krystal feels chaotic and thin, like a pilot that was also forced to be a series finale.
  10. Every Which Way But Loose
    The slackest and most harebrained of Mr. Eastwood's recent movies. It is overlong and virtually uneventful, even though there are half a dozen cute characters and woolly subplots competing for the viewer's attentions.
  11. Dog Days
    On the whole, this picture, which could just as well be titled “Dog, Actually,” is sweeter-than-average treacle.
  12. Kodachrome
    If this earnest and forgettable road movie represents a meaningful tribute to taking pictures, we ought to go back to cave drawing.
  13. The Hit
    The Hit' is a disappointing English underworld movie directed by Stephen Frears. Less a film noir than a film gris, partly because almost all of it takes place in sun- drenched Spain and because the characters talk too much. These guys don't have to use guns. All they have to do is open their mouths and bore each other to death.
  14. The Cleanse
    The Cleanse” embarks on an allegorical journey with only the vaguest notion of a destination. As a result, the movie feels frustratingly repetitive — a single joke repeated ad nauseam.
  15. The Grudge
    The remake remains cursed by a fatally hokey concept.
  16. Little Pink House
    Palely photographed and anchored by a quiet, rather weary performance from Ms. Keener, Little Pink House is a peculiarly enervated affair. The structure is choppy, and there are odd moments of tonal dissonance.
  17. Social Animals
    The lack of chemistry between the two leads is less damaging than Ms. Bennett’s inability to commit to a tone.
  18. The Brady Bunch Movie
    The movie manages to be painless and pointless in equal measure.
  19. Rambo: First Blood Part II
    To anyone who doesn't share the camera's adoration, this sort of behavior becomes so comic that Rambo turns into something of a camp classic.
  20. See How They Fall
    The script, which he wrote with Alain Le Henry, is as confusing and tiresome as the direction. What is meant to be a touching, comic relationship between Marx and Johnny is simply flat.
  21. Penguins
    [A] beautiful but frustratingly shallow Disneynature documentary.
  22. Hover
    Hover is reasonably resourceful for its first hour, during which it appears to have turned budget restrictions into an asset, keeping the focus on ideas instead of effects. The last act, though, is a total whiff — too rushed, too riddled with plot holes and too incongruously hopeful to take seriously.
  23. Here and Now
    It all adds up to a film aiming to be a moving character study (and an ostensible homage to Agnés Varda’s “Cléo From 5 to 7,” a far more vivid exploration of existentialism), but instead feels adrift.
  24. Zoe
    In Zoe, the characters, all in their 30s at least (except for the robots, I know, but bear with me), still believe that 100-percent glitch-free everlasting love is a reasonable life goal. It’s this component, even more than the poorly realized sci-fi trappings, that finally make the movie a little insufferable.
  25. The Kissing Booth
    As cinema either theatrical or televisual is concerned, The Kissing Booth is negligible. It is fascinating, though, as a study in the semiotics of the high school movie, especially in the ways it’s been recodified since “young adult” became a real genre.
  26. The Cable Guy
    A grim, sour Jim Carrey comedy that erases the boundary between anarchic humor and sociopathic malice.
  27. The Sound of Music
    Miss Andrews, with her air of radiant vigor, her appearance of plain-Jane wholesomeness and her ability to make her dialogue as vivid and appealing as she makes her songs, brings a nice sort of Mary Poppins logic and authority to this role, which is always in peril of collapsing under its weight of romantic nonsense and sentiment.
  28. The Deep
    The story, as well as Peter Yates's direction of it, is juvenile without being in any attractive way innarcent, but the underwater sequences are nice enough, alternately beautiful and chilling. The shore‐based melodrama is as badly staged as any I've seen since Don Schain's “The Abductors” (1972), which is to remember incompetence of stunning degree.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Zardoz
    More confusing than exciting even with a frenetic, shoot‐em‐up climax.
  30. I Had Nowhere to Go
    What it conveys is not so much Mr. Mekas’s experience as Mr. Gordon’s will, and his cheap sadistic hostility to the audience. It makes this film a vexed experience.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Johnny Got His Gun
    Insistent virtue, without ideas, becomes demagoguery.
  32. Sauvage / Wild
    It’s tough to build a character study around an unconvincing character.
  33. The Getaway
    The action and the violence of The Getaway are supported by no particular themes whatsoever. The movie just unravels.
  34. Let the Corpses Tan
    A formalist experiment that soon devolves into a mannerist indulgence.
  35. The Doctor from India
    To seek proof is distinctly human, and, in this case, a dose of skepticism is surely healthy.
  36. The Aftermath
    An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.
  37. Phenomena
    The gore starts spattering in earnest too late to save Creepers, a dim-witted horror movie.
  38. Convoy
    The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.
  39. Hot to Trot
    While the movie makes a winning case for the passion of its subjects, it bears hints of smoothed-over complexities.
  40. I Am Not an Easy Man
    As it happens, this movie is an expansion of Ms. Pourriat’s 2010 short film, “Oppressed Majority,” which was a punchier, and not particularly comedic, allegory of sexual assault. That picture can be found on YouTube; I don’t think it’s good either, but it’s more genuinely thought-provoking than its expansion.
  41. Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel
    "Heading Home” is not a movie with much interest in geopolitics. It roots, roots, roots for its home team — and does little more.
  42. Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
    Special effects in which the actors appear repeatedly in black outline and occasionally distorted perspective; and an assortment of tricks (rearing up on hind wheels, blushing and blinking his lights) that possesses a somewhat limited power to captivate...Reluctant adults marched off to "Herbie" by tiny press gangs may take what consolation they can from the scenery, featuring France and Monaco.
    • The New York Times
  43. Herbie Rides Again
    The problem with comedies as witless as this is that the villains are much more appealing than the good guys. One winds up rooting for the fellows who would tear down the Plaza to put up a 100‐story, glass‐andbrass breadstick.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Police Academy 6: City Under Siege
    There are some witty moments, as when the straight man, Proctor, played as usual by Lance Kinsey, uses a squeaky rubber squeegie to wash a window while his partner, Harris (G. W. Bailey), holds a stethoscope to the window to eavesdrop on a conversation taking place on the other side. But most of what takes place in Police Academy 6, from the flying billiard balls to the exploding cigars, are things you have seen someplace before. [3 March 1989, p.1-17]
    • The New York Times
  45. Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach
    But the formula is pretty long in the tooth by now, and all the extra turns of plot can't disguise that.
  46. Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol
    The Police Academy series seems to shoot for an ever younger crowd. The optimum viewer for Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol would be a 10-year-old boy. Even better, it would be a whole pack of them. That's not to say the film isn't funny; it means only that the sense of humor being addressed is very specific. Stay away if drawing room farce is what you're after.
  47. RoboCop 3
    Where the director Paul Verhoeven infused the original Robocop with an attitude of mock solemnity, Robocop 3 has the energy and style of a cartoon free-for-all. [05 Nov 1993, p.C29]
    • The New York Times
  48. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles was directed by Steve Barron, who has a number of music videos to his credit, and shows off the skills of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, without which there would have been no film at all.
  49. 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.
  50. Jungle Cruise
    Jungle Cruise is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.
  51. The Prodigy
    The movie’s occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that’s left aggravatingly vague.
  52. Jetsons: The Movie
    Jetsons: The Movie will appeal only to small children, and only to the most patient among them.
  53. My Father the Hero
    Katherine Heigl, playing the teen-age daughter who is mistaken for Mr. Depardieu's girlfriend, parades about in skimpy bathing suits, displaying almost everything but a sense of humor.
  54. Once Upon a Crime...
    The cast of Once Upon a Crime performs energetically, as if the material was funny, although most of the time it is not. As a general rule, films whose plots revolve around lost dogs are apt to be short on comic inspiration, and this one is no exception.
  55. Leave It to Beaver
    Leave It to Beaver is the sort of movie that could be described as good clean fun if it happened to be good or fun.
  56. Richie Rich
    If Richie Rich has the ingredients for a sweet-natured fantasy of ultimate childhood bounty, the movie, directed by Donald Petrie, lacks any sense of wonder. Its visual perspective is decidedly grown-up and demystified.
  57. Flipper
    Ought to please an undemanding kiddie audience, but Flipper offers little else in the way of excitement or plot.
  58. The Little Rascals
    The main trouble is that The Little Rascals is caught in a time warp, lost between the ingenuous ragamuffins of the early talkies and the more willfully streetwise children of today. So even working the title into the screenplay becomes a strain.
  59. Angels in the Outfield
    A big dripping scoop of marshmallow sentiment topped with whipped-cream spirituality. [15 July 1994, p.C10]
    • The New York Times
  60. A Walk in the Clouds
    Here, instead, is Keanu Reeves in one of his off roles, sleepwalking dutifully but seeming to share the audience's bewilderment over how he wound up in this awkward, slow-moving story.
  61. Larger Than Life
    Although the screenplay by Roy Blount Jr. comes up with some potentially sidesplitting situations, the director, Howard Franklin, who shepherded Mr. Murray through the equally limp Quick Change six years ago, methodically subverts them.
  62. The Swan
    Director Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir never displays the passion that her characters suggest in their stories. If her film ever diverged from its ubiquitous images of misty mountains or its plodding piano score, perhaps its characters’ incessant mythmaking would convey deeper mysteries, inner worlds that are not visible to the eye.
  63. Bel Canto
    A movie that, for all its operatic allusions and actorly expertise, feels dismayingly passionless.
  64. The After Party
    The movie is relentlessly fluffy.
  65. Phantom of the Paradise
    Phantom of the Paradise is an elaborate disaster, full of the kind of facetious humor you might find on bumper stickers and cocktail coasters.
  66. What Men Want
    While What Men Want starts off as a stinging critique, it undermines that message with one of Hollywood’s favorite idiotic subplots.
  67. Iceman
    Randau’s script, though, is an implacable plod from one bashing to another.
  68. Strange Brew
    A movie that's barely there. The McKenzies are genial enough, and once in a while they're vaguely funny. But their film is so ephemeral that you may hardly be aware of watching it, even while it's going on.
  69. Distant Constellation
    Said to be intended as a reflection on shifts in Turkish history and identity, it is too diffuse and withholding to add up to a cogent result.
  70. Southern Comfort
    Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Longest Yard
    Though The Yard is a terrible picture, I'll admit to having unwillingly enjoyed some of the football practice and parts of the final game —even though it's much too long.
  72. No Retreat, No Surrender
    The karate blows sound good but never seem to make contact. But then nothing else makes contact either. The advice from this corner: Retreat.
  73. The Oath
    It was said by many after the 2016 election that the Trump administration would yield great satirical art. This is not an example of that.
  74. A Paris Education
    Mr. Civeyrac leads Étienne into anxious imitations of the past, and the possibility of making art fueled by the present never materializes.
  75. The Front Runner
    Reitman uses Altmanesque sound design and serpentine camera movements to convey the chaos and kineticism of a process in constant, frantic motion. But after a while, once we’ve met the principal players, the speechmaking starts and a potential comedy of political manners turns into a pious, tendentious morality play.
  76. Galveston
    With shadowy imagery that pushes the boundaries of visibility and a mumbly lead performance from Ben Foster that strains the limits of intelligibility, Galveston goes past film noir and lands at film murk.
  77. Strangers on a Train
    Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support.
  78. Cats
    Generally, Hooper pulls away from loony-tunes excess, tries for sexy rather than freaky, and plucks at heartstrings, a reflex that pulls the story into mawkishness, particularly when he cuts to Victoria.
  79. Cold Pursuit
    I can’t deny that the glum, resentful, not-giving-a-damn masculine vibe of Cold Pursuit has its appeal, as does Moland’s blunt knack for efficient screen violence.
  80. Midway
    It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.
  81. The Kentuckian
    Some outdoor scenes in excellent color and the expanse of CinemaScope give a bit of magnificence to a picture that lacks it in every other way.
  82. Saboteur
    To put it mildly, Mr. Hitchcock and his writers have really let themselves go. Melodramatic action is their forte, but they scoff at speed limits this trip.
  83. Amityville 3-D
    The third in a 3-D series, as in Jaws 3-D or now Amityville 3-D, simply isn't a good idea. Once the first two films in a series have exhausted most opportunities for action, the third is liable to average half a dozen exposition scenes for every eventful episode. And 3-D exposition is the stuff of which headaches are made.
  84. Bride of Chucky
    The novelty of a bloody horror film built around a malevolent doll carrying the soul of a serial killer has worn thin.
  85. Caniba
    The filmmakers, who made “Leviathan,” the striking 2012 immersion into commercial fishing, seem to be arguing that Sagawa needs to be understood beyond moralistic preconceptions. Caniba did not make the case for me. I consider Sagawa repellent, and the movie an exercise in intellectualized scab-picking.
  86. Critters
    It's commercially calculated to have something for everyone - suspense, humor, even a bounty hunter from the krites' planet who poses as a rock star. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have the humor or the budget to match any of these goals.
  87. Critters 2
    Critters 2 piles up every stock movie idea you can remember about small-town heroism, macho sheriffs and alien invaders. But whenever it shows a glimmer of wit about those cliches, it leaps back to its safe, dull, derivative style.
  88. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Like other big-studio exercises in pseudo-subversion (very much including “Deadpool”), Birds of Prey is happy to play at provocation with swear words and violence while carefully declining to provoke anything like a thought.
  89. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
    No matter how adeptly Chainsaw 2 was put together, it would remain just another exploitation flick for fans who get a tingle from watching blades slash into flesh and innards peep out.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Son of Kong
    The film does offer some witty opening scenes depicting Carl Denham hounded by creditors following Kong's Gotham rampage. But the remainder of the film is sometimes laughably bad, and much of the dialogue is dated in a way that is not charming at all. [20 Sept 1987, p.36]
    • The New York Times
  91. King Kong Lives
    King Kong Lives, which was directed by John Guillerman, has a dull cast and a plot that's even duller, but the ape himself is in good form.
  92. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    Though the script for Hellbound is related to the Barker story, the film drops its plot whenever a fake-looking monster walks on the screen. Ogling strange creatures is the film's true reason for being.
  93. Rambo: Last Blood
    While the killings (replete with beheadings, dismemberments and more) are zestfully depicted — the director Adrian Grunberg has a way with pace and bloody impact to be sure — the picture overall is rote, mechanical.
  94. Aladdin
    The movie itself, while not entirely terrible — a lot of craft has been purchased, and even a little art — is pointless in a particularly aggressive way.
  95. Song of the South
    Apparently the Disney wonder-workers are just a lot of conventional hacks when it comes to telling a story with actors instead of cartoons.
  96. Marfa Girl 2
    Clark likes to linger on close-ups of intertwined naked bodies, and he seems to admire these characters’ freedom. But ultimately, it all feels whisper thin: The film, already quite short, doesn’t offer enough about any of these people for us to care genuinely about what happens to them.
  97. Lady and the Tramp
    Not the best he has done in this line. It is a coyly romantic story, done with animals. The sentimentality is mighty, and the use of the CinemaScope size does not make for any less awareness of the thickness of the goo.
  98. The Last American Virgin
    The best things about the movie are probably its amusingly modish outfits and hairdos, which demand that the audience keep its eyes open, and the music, which doesn't.
  99. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
    A numbing torrent of largely unidentified film clips and poorly labeled commentary, Rob Garver’s overstuffed tribute to the life and work of America’s best-known — and most written about — film critic is at times barely coherent.
  100. Miss Dalí
    Relentless, spell-it-all-out dialogue is wedded to a clunky visual approach that’s pretty much the cinema equivalent of a wikiHow entry.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »