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. Dogs in Space
    The background is energetic; too bad the foreground is just as chaotic...Mr. Lowenstein - whose work includes many rock videos and ''Strikebound,'' a film about Australian miners - prefers sensory overload to coherence.
  2. The Concorde... Airport '79
    Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.
  3. Double Impact
    As it turns out, two Jean-Claude Van Dammes are pretty much the same as one. Fans who like their action unadulterated by story, character or acting know where to find it.
  4. The Wrong Missy
    Though the gags are retrograde groaners, Lapkus embarrasses herself with confidence. Her full-throttle verve transcends the script like a water skier leaping over a Great White.
  5. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    With no real thesis or through-line, the movie winds up being little more than a series of revue-style blackout sketches, lengthy digressions and dead ends.
  6. Castle in the Ground
    We’ve seen it before: Faces, substances and locations may change, but the self-destructive behavior and dreary vibe are pretty much constants.
  7. The Man from Toronto
    In The Man From Toronto, directed by Patrick Hughes, the vague sense of location is typical of a broader lack of effort. Although Hart, as the broadly comic version of the classic Hitchcockian Wrong Man, has a certain goofball charm, his frantic coward routine gets old quickly, with no appreciable change as the action-flick danger continues to escalate.
  8. Tesnota (Closeness)
    This movie, which Balagov, a Nalchik native, states in an onscreen text is based on a true story, has a whole lot of “slow” and one very nasty burn.
  9. 7500
    One thing Vollrath does well is create a credibly claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere. Then again, when you restrict your camera to the inside of a cockpit, you’d have to be pretty incompetent not to.
  10. A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps
    The documentary maintains an uncritical and even hagiographic view of the program’s stated premise, barely interrogating its ethics or on-the-ground efficacy.
  11. Meteor
    As it is, the suspense is sludgy and the character development nil; even the inadvertent comedy is spotty.
  12. More American Graffiti
    More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.
  13. A Little Romance
    A Little Romance is a movie that seems to have melted the minds of everyone of any stature connected with it.
  14. Unhinged
    While Derrick Borte’s filmmaking is bluntly efficient — and the vehicular stunt work impressive — the character is a windup toy, a dumb and dirty symbol of male grievance.
  15. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    More tribute than parody, this over-egged farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.
  16. The Kissing Booth 2
    If The Kissing Booth, stacked with regressive relationship dynamics, is Victorian in its views, The Kissing Booth 2 progresses to the midcentury.
  17. Stage: The Culinary Internship
    Cooking that makes diners uncomfortable hasn’t inspired comparable creativity of cinematic form. “Stage” makes you want to eat, not watch.
  18. Run Sweetheart Run
    Bursts of experimental style feel at odds with the movie’s core: a simplistic parable of pervasive sexism.
  19. Wild Strawberries
    This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.
  20. Man Bites Dog
    A grisly sick joke of a film that some will find funny, others simply appalling. On one level, it is an in-joke about movie making, since one reason given for Ben's rampage is the need to steal enough money to make the documentary. On another level, the film satirizes real-life television shows that purport to take viewers into the thick of the action. It suggests how profoundly the presence of the camera affects events, and thumbs its nose at the very notion of documentary objectivity.
  21. Parkland Rising
    Parkland Rising passes the low bar of not undermining the people it covers, but by avoiding both research and conflict, it fails to provide a reason for its own existence.
  22. Romance on the High Seas
    As a brash little night-club singer who is supposed to act like a swell, Miss Day is most plainly the victim of the writers' unutterable ennui. Furthermore, Michael Curtiz's direction of her and the rest of the cast is as slapdash and void of distinction as it can professionally be. Not only has he let the young lady spread noisiness all over the place, but he has wasted the few minor talents that he had in a most provoking way.
  23. Mikey and Nicky
    Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.
  24. The Walrus and the Whistleblower
    Frustratingly, the documentary declines to probe Demers’s evolving relationship to his activism and newfound fame.
  25. Finch
    Finch is sweet, yet disappointingly uneventful.
  26. Scavenger Hunt
    A broad, low comedy full of speech defects and pratfalls.
  27. Retaliation
    Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.
  28. The Horn Blows at Midnight
    The script is neither satire nor good, fresh, fanciful corn. It is a batch of old-fashioned nonsense put together without distinct charm.
  29. Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
    It proceeds dryly and largely chronologically through her life, sometimes with an awkward sense of proportion.
  30. All I Can Say
    The movie will be most profitably consumed by fans — people who believe Hoon earned the tribute. While one does not want to be cruel, one is obliged to be frank.
  31. Rhapsody in Blue
    The performers are quite naturally restricted by the limitations of the script—and by the purely pedestrian direction that Irving Rapper has given them.
  32. Summerland
    A thumb to suck in troubled times, Summerland offers a digit of nostalgia that many viewers will latch onto with something approaching relief.
  33. Olympia
    At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.
  34. Never Too Late
    While it’s generally a pleasure to see stalwarts like Cromwell, Weaver and Jack Thompson (as one of the old gang) at work, one also wishes they had found, well, better work.
  35. A Girl Missing
    As he proved in his 2017 drama, “Harmonium,” Fukada excels at unfurling near-hysterical narratives in restrained, sometimes icily sterile scenes. But while the earlier film pulled us in, this one repels, its cloudy colors and depressing mood making us long for a single moment of joy.
  36. Tito
    Tito is a better achievement in sound and visuals than plot or character. The sheer strangeness of the film may be mesmerizing at first, but even the slim 70-minute run time eventually feels tedious when so little happens.
  37. Project Power
    The humanity of the leads fills up the hollowness, putting flesh, or at least charm and attitude, on their archetypes.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Leaves a viewer with the happy thought that she now can get back to nursing and away from films like Coffy.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Creature from the Black Lagoon
    It's a fishing expedition that is necessary only if a viewer has lost all of his comic books.
  40. The Bay of Silence
    There is less to The Bay of Silence than meets the eye.
  41. The Promise
    The members of the cast are undercut by both material and direction.
  42. Imitation of Life
    This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.
  43. The Raven
    If The Raven is the best that Universal can do with one of the greatest horror story writers of all time, then it had better toss away the other two books in its library and stick to the pulpies for plot material.
  44. The Outside Story
    The film, which was written and directed by Casimir Nozkowski, sets an easy pace to match Charles’s mild ennui. The only problem is that the movie doesn’t supplement its lack of stakes with style or substance.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The House of the Seven Gables
    Dreary and slightly stale fare.
  46. Lady on a Train
    It's an empty and careless little fable, intended to be a mystery farce, about the wholly incredible mix-up of a debutante in a murder plot.
  47. Measure for Measure
    Glancing social commentary — like the difficulties of cultural assimilation and the invisible wounds of war — is welcome, but the script (by Ireland and Damian Hill, who died in 2018) is too cluttered for it to resonate and too mired in a muddle of sin and redemption.
  48. Hubie Halloween
    Occasionally, the nostalgic back-patting makes way for a few good jokes.
  49. I'm Your Woman
    The movie’s vagueness wants to appear purposeful, reflecting Jean’s disorientation, but it’s mostly confounding. Brosnahan, when she’s not playing panicked, largely enacts Jean as an irritated cipher.
  50. Marry Me
    Marry Me is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.
  51. A Chef's Voyage
    Mostly the movie is a drizzle of platitudes.
  52. Nocturne
    Contrivances are par for the course in this genre, but Nocturne lacks the stylistic flair to make them fun.
  53. The Prom
    The story unwinds with histrionics and homilies, jazz hands and twinkle toes, overly busy camerawork and hookless lung bursters.
  54. Deep Water
    Like Vic’s snails, who must be starved before they can be consumed, Deep Water feels like a movie that’s had everything of interest well and truly sucked out.
  55. The Incredible Shrinking Man
    Unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés.
  56. The Devil Has a Name
    Clearly well-intentioned, The Devil Has a Name means to deliver an inspirational lesson about the depravity of big industry and the power of the little guy. But it’s mostly a muddle.
  57. The Craft: Legacy
    Zoe Lister-Jones’s The Craft: Legacy, produced by Blumhouse (“Get Out”), is a disappointing distillation of the original that’s mostly devoid of personality.
  58. The Keeper
    It’s contrary to the movie’s spirit to judge Bert, but the evasive treatment of his wartime experiences plays like a dodge: His past exists as a kind of amorphous trauma, reduced to shorthand in shamelessly placed flashbacks.
  59. Honest Thief
    It’s an inoffensive movie, full of such familiar tropes, it hardly matters if you can keep your eyes open to the end.
  60. The 355
    The filmmaking deserves credit for refusing to leer as the ladies convincingly kick and punch — all focus is on the stunts, not on sex appeal. Yet there’s a sense that “The 355” felt forced to pick between being sincere or being fun. It chose solemnity. As a result, it’s flat-footed even when the setups yearn to be playful.
  61. Husbands
    Like Faces, which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense. Husbands, however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long.
  62. Fatman
    Waffling between anger and pathos, dry humor and dead-eyed violence, Fatman feels tonally befuddled.
  63. Rogue City
    Violent, law-defying cops would be a tough sell at any time, but “Rogue City” is oblivious to the changed context surrounding their stories. They don’t hold much romantic allure nowadays.
  64. Wild Mountain Thyme
    It is also a romantic comedy/drama whose tone ping-pongs from grave to lyrical to absurdist willy-nilly, and hits all those registers at fortissimo volume.
  65. The Man with the Golden Arm
    It is a pretty plain and unimaginative looksee at a lower-depths character with a perilous weakness for narcotics that he miraculously overcomes in the end.
  66. High Society
    As flimsy as a gossip-columnist's word, especially when it is documenting the weird behavior of the socially elite. And with pretty and lady-like Grace Kelly flouncing lightly through its tomboyish Hepburn role, it misses the snap and the crackle that its un-musical predecessor had.
  67. Spell
    Laden with references to race, class and the legacy of slavery, Spell, directed by Mark Tonderai from a script by Kurt Wimmer (a pen on the “Point Break” and “Total Recall” remakes), is stronger on maintaining suspense and a macabre atmosphere than it is at following through on its ideas, which give it a thin veneer of topicality.
  68. Vanguard
    Tong is not a stickler for verisimilitude. Hence, this movie’s ridiculous computer generated lions; hence also, its solid-gold sports cars.
  69. The Russia House
    As directed by Fred Schepisi and written by Tom Stoppard, The Russia House is confused and dim, far less complex, and even far less fun, than almost any le Carre work yet brought to the screen, excluding The Little Drummer Girl.
  70. No Man's Land
    Strangled by good intentions and teachable-moment clichés, Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land turns the border between Texas and Mexico into a gateway to racial empathy.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Woman of Straw
    Despite the fancy trappings laid on by the respected old producer-director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, this handsomely colored exercise is the kind of pseudo-Victorian nonsense that Alfred Hitchcock long ago laid to rest.
  72. Earwig and the Witch
    For one, it’s the abundance of red herrings in this fleeting 82-minute feature; connections and relationships are implied (and a plot point about a witchy rock band flies by) but end up leading to dead ends, making the journey feel incomplete. But the most regrettable part is the animation.
  73. DragonHeart
    Dragonheart joins Mission: Impossible in wasting the talents of charismatic European actors, and in cobbling together exciting-looking ads that are much better than the finished film.
  74. Shawn Mendes: In Wonder
    “In Wonder” wants so much to be a humanizing portrait, but it doesn’t go deep enough to crack Mendes’s polished love-crooner veneer, nor does it say anything new about fame that hasn’t been said in other pop-star docs of recent years.
  75. Malcolm & Marie
    A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.
  76. Godmothered
    Is the film trapped in Disney orthodoxy? If the shoe fits.
  77. Wrong Is Right
    Mr. Brooks has a couple of major defects to be successful in this kind of project. He is a man with no great feeling for comedy of any sort, and his reactions to the lunacies of contemporary life are trivial.
  78. Medicine Man
    Medicine Man transports a lot of Hollywood-style hot air to the remote jungle outpost where Dr. Campbell has accidentally stumbled upon a cancer-reversing formula.
  79. Team Marco
    Marco’s sourness curdles the confection and his undercooked complaints clack against the movie’s warm tone, sending its simple pleasures into a scatter.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A New World
    Feeble in concept and conventionally (if smoothly) executed.
  81. The Mauritanian
    Trapped for the most part in featureless rooms, a stellar cast — including Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — deliver dull speeches and sift through redacted documents, brows furrowed and lips compressed.
  82. Tove
    The soft-focus cinematography is beautiful but drippy, and this general tendency toward mushy melodramatics presents an unflattering contrast to the sharp-lined vivacity that Jansson brought to the page.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Legend of Hell House
    If John Hough, the director, and his small, willing cast maintain mild tension during their harried visit to this haunted "hell house," the few chills they provide are of little help.
  84. Miss Firecracker
    A superficial and sporadically witty piece aimed at such easy targets as family squabbles, small-town folk and beauty contests. The film is not actively awful; just dull and banal. [28 Apr 1989, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  85. Super Mario Bros.
    This bizarre, special effects-filled movie doesn't have the jaunty hop-and-zap spirit of the Nintendo video game from which it takes -- ahem -- its inspiration. What it has instead are a weird, jokey science-fiction story, "Batman"-caliber violence and enough computer-generated dinosaurs to get the jump on "Jurassic Park."
  86. A Glitch in the Matrix
    “A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation.
  87. The Marksman
    Predictable to a fault, the movie coasts pleasurably on Neeson’s seasoned, sad-sweet charisma — an asset that’s been tragically imprisoned in mopey-loner roles and generic action thrillers.
  88. Dogfight
    The film wants to be honest (and in its cruelties, it is), but the operative sensibility is that of a sitcom world. The characters aren't necessarily idealized, but they are flat and uninteresting. The material is lugubrious. The only seemingly spontaneous moment comes at the very end, which is too late.
  89. Hunted
    Adding a fairy-tale cast to a generic horror setup is of no benefit to Hunted, Vincent Paronnaud’s unpleasant merger of slasher movie and survival thriller.
  90. Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets
    The movie gets so drunk on its stylistic affectations (and unfunny attempts at cerebral comedy) that by the time it sobers up to take James’s mental health seriously, it’s too little, too late. And also too bad, as it’s only in the last quarter that the viewer gets to appreciate the range of the movie’s appealing lead players.
  91. Airborne
    Slackly directed and thinly written, "Airborne," which opened yesterday, exists mainly for its scenes of the big race, in which two teams rocket down a series of winding hills, jumping over cars, scooting under trucks and bouncing down stairs. The camera work in this extended sequence has a nice gliding energy, but the participants are so thickly encased in helmets, goggles and padding that it is impossible to see how the two sides are doing as they elbow each other around the course's hairpin turns.
  92. Switch
    Nothing in Switch is that plausible or compelling. Any movie that depends on the presence of either the Devil or God is asking for trouble, and Switch has them both.
  93. Bad Tales
    The story is both overwrought and underdeveloped, with potentially important plot details insufficiently explained or left out altogether.
  94. Simple Passion
    While keeping a stalwart female perspective, Simple Passion follows an arc so standard it could be called banal.
  95. True Colors
    As directed by Mr. Ross, True Colors is dreary, humorless, heavy-handed and self-important.
  96. Crimes of the Heart
    As adapted by Miss Henley and directed by Bruce Beresford, this Crimes of the Heart has been turned into a majestic, totally humorless star turn for three individually splendid, collectively lost actresses -Diane Keaton (Lenny), Jessica Lange (Meg) and Sissy Spacek (Babe).
  97. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
    A film bursting with enthusiasm for a fresh, appealing fantasy has been replaced by one most eager to maintain the status quo.
  98. Francesco
    Judged strictly as a movie, Francesco comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.
  99. Moxie
    Unfocused and too often unbelievable, Amy Poehler’s Moxie feels like a battle between two competing visions: go-girl crowd-pleaser and serious high-school harassment drama. Neither wins.
  100. Yes Day
    Though Yes Day does not lack for energy, the jokes are too broad and the mishaps too safe for the movie to emerge as an honest or imaginative journey through family conflict and compromise.
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