The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Naked Lunch
    For the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.
  2. Daughters of the Dust
    For all its harsh allusions to slavery and hardship, the film is an extended, wildly lyrical meditation on the power of African cultural iconography and the spiritual resilience of the generations of women who have been its custodians.
  3. Grand Canyon
    [Grand Canyon] eventually pulls its punches, taking an unconvincingly beatific look at the problems and dangers that have been so persuasively outlined in what has come before. But until it hits that false note, Mr. Kasdan's film is at least as fascinating as it is amorphous.
  4. The Prince of Tides
    The Prince of Tides marks Ms. Streisand's triumphantly good job of locating that story's salient elements and making them come alive on the screen.
  5. Until the End of the World
    The longer it gets, the loopier it gets. [19 Jan 1992, p.13]
    • The New York Times
  6. High Heels
    High Heels has no real mirth and not even enough energy to keep it lively.
  7. Father of the Bride
    The screenplay represents recycling at its best. The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film's most memorable moments have been preserved.
  8. JFK
    The movie, which is simultaneously arrogant and timorous, has been unable to separate the important material from the merely colorful.
  9. Bugsy
    Allen Daviau's camera work and Albert Wolsky's costumes help to forge the film's high style, as does Ennio Morricone's score. But much of its elan comes from Mr. Levinson's obvious affection for the time and place that are his film's backdrop, and from the flair with which he stages even minor episodes.
  10. The Last Boy Scout
    Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.
  11. Night on Earth
    With this, his fourth commercially released feature, Mr. Jarmusch again demonstrates his mastery of comedy of the oblique. He seems to see his characters through a telescope, while attending to their talk with some kind of long-range listening device. Everything that is seen and heard is vivid and particular, but decidedly foreign. Meanings are elusive. Themes can be supplied by others. He's also becoming an increasingly fine director of actors.
  12. Hook
    Hook is overwhelmed by a screenplay heavy with complicated exposition, by what are, in effect, big busy nonsinging, nondancing production numbers and some contemporary cant about rearing children and the high price paid for success.
  13. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
    There are no signs of waning energy here, not even in an Enterprise crew that looks ever more ready for intergalactic rocking chairs. The principals' enthusiasm for their material has never seemed to fade. If anything, that enthusiasm grows more appealingly nutty with time.
  14. My Girl
    As directed by Howard Zieff, My Girl has a bizarrely light tone and an awkward pace, in part because it's hard for the director to keep track of the story's many half-developed subplots.
  15. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
    There have been few sharper portraits of the film maker as alchemist than Hearts of Darkness: A Film Maker's Apocalypse, in which Francis Ford Coppola is seen struggling with hellish logistical problems, wild-card actors, freak accidents and other unseen demons, then ultimately pulling a miracle out of his hat.
  16. The Double Life of Veronique
    The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time.
  17. Beauty and the Beast
    With Beauty and the Beast, a tender, seamless and even more ambitious film than its predecessor, Disney has done something no one has done before: combine the latest computer animation techniques with the best of Broadway.
  18. The Addams Family
    The film's aimlessness and repetitiveness eventually become draining. And its small touches often work better than its more elaborate ones, like an extended party sequence that seems awkward and largely unnecessary.
  19. Kafka
    Kafka is opaque without ever being mysterious, frightening or suggestive of anything but movie making. Its chases through dark narrow streets don't create suspense, since nothing is at stake.
  20. Little Man Tate
    As directed by Ms. Foster, the film has a kind of purity of purpose and control that is very rare in mass-market movies. It avoids a lot of sentimental nonsense. It is also sparely (and well-) written by Scott Frank.
  21. The People Under the Stairs
    Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny.
  22. Life Is Sweet
    Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.
  23. My Own Private Idaho
    The film itself is invigorating - written, directed, and acted with enormous insight and comic elan. [27 Sept 1991]
    • The New York Times
  24. Cool as Ice
    All it really wants to be is a hiphop answer to one of Elvis Presley's sillier vehicles. But the movie, which was directed by David Kellogg and written by David Stenn, fails to deliver an ounce of musical energy.
  25. Frankie and Johnny
    Mr. Pacino has not been this uncomplicatedly appealing since his Dog Day Afternoon days, and he makes Johnny's endless enterprise in wooing Frankie a delight. His scenes alone with Ms. Pfeiffer have a precision and honesty that keep the film's maudlin aspects at bay.
  26. Homicide
    Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.
  27. Ricochet
    The screenplay, by Steven E. de Souza (whose credits include the Die Hard movies), contains many glib, obscene wisecracks, plus the misinformation that Anna Karenina was Tolstoy's first book.
  28. 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.
  29. The Man in the Moon
    Until its final reel, when it strains badly to accommodate an almost biblical stroke of retribution, The Man in the Moon is a small, fond film that achieves a kind of quiet perfection.
  30. Necessary Roughness
    If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."
  31. The Fisher King
    What emerges, in the end, are a clever premise that has been allowed to go awry and several performances that are lively and unpredictable enough to transcend the confusion. Mr. Bridges, always a fine intuitive actor, has never displayed a greater range.
  32. The Indian Runner
    Loose, rambling and sometimes rudderless as it is, The Indian Runner has a fundamental honesty that gives it real substance.
  33. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
    Mr. Englund, playing the Halloween favorite whom audiences love to hate, now delivers lines like this with the broadness of a latter-day Jimmy Durante. But he sustains Freddy's peculiar charm even when appearing without ghastly makeup in scenes of Freddy's early years.
  34. The Commitments
    Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style. [14 Aug 1991, p.C11]
    • The New York Times
  35. Child's Play 3
    Child's Play 3, directed by Jack Bender, misses the sharpness and dark humor that the director and co-writer Tom Holland brought to the original.
  36. Dead Again
    A big, convoluted, entertainingly dizzy romantic mystery melodrama.
  37. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
    Mr. Rourke and Mr. Johnson handle their roles with more ease and humor than can be accommodated by a movie so stuffed with mindless fistfights, gunfights, helicopter chases, explosions and leaps from tall buildings.
  38. Barton Fink
    An unqualified winner. Here is a fine dark comedy of flamboyant style and immense though seemingly effortless techniqe...It's an exhilarating original. [21 Aug 1991]
    • The New York Times
  39. Pure Luck
    Martin Short can do anything, it seems, except find the right movies to star in.
  40. 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.
  41. Doc Hollywood
    The screenplay, by Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman and Daniel Pyne, is occasionally sharp-tongued but more often pleasantly knee-deep in rustic corn. Mr. Fox also seems a shade more substantial this time, possibly because he is seen making life-or-death decisions when not fielding comic lines.
  42. Paris Is Burning
    Miss Livingston's interviews reveal a way of living that is both highly structured and self-protective.
  43. Trust
    Though Mr. Hartley's films are richly detailed, there are no frills or grace notes. Such work risks being too blunt, but Trust comes through.
  44. Life Stinks
    Even more dispiriting than the film's silly moments are its pious ones. Only at rare moments does Life Stinks offer much in the way of surprise or grace.
  45. Archangel
    From its flickering, inky cinematography to its wavering late 1920's-style sound track, to Veronkha's kohl-eyed vampish look, the movie is an expert parody of a period movie style.
  46. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
    Amusing but sloppy and overcomplicated.
  47. Boyz n the Hood
    The film's strength is that it sustains an intimate and realistic tone. Mr. Fishburne, who is called upon to deliver several lectures, manages to do so with enormous dignity and grace, and makes Furious a compelling role model, someone on whom the whole film easily pivots.
  48. Point Break
    Point Break, though it's anything but watertight where plotting is concerned, again reveals Ms. Bigelow's real talents as a director of fast-paced, high-adrenaline action. Whenever the flakiness of Point Break threatens to become lulling, Ms. Bigelow wakes up her audience with a formidable jolt.
  49. Regarding Henry
    A good deal more tolerable than any such gimmick movie has a right to be.
  50. Slacker
    The members of Mr. Linklater's cast, most of whom are non-professionals, are so amazingly effective that it's hard to believe they didn't make up their own lunacies.
  51. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    Mr. Cameron has made a swift, exciting special-effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense and greatly improves upon the first film's potent but rudimentary visual style. He has also broadened his initial idea to encompass better developed characters (after all, the first Terminator was barely verbal), a livelier wit and a more ambitious, if nuttier, message.
  52. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear
    The enthusiastic Zucker, Zucker & Abrahams style of movie parody is too rarely seen to prompt much head-shaking about gags that don't work. The entire film is justified by those gags that do succeed, beginning with a pre-credit sequence that is possibly one of the most blithely hilarious six or seven minutes of film stock ever exposed to light.
  53. The Rocketeer
    A benign adventure saga that has attractive stars, elaborate gimmicks and nice production values -- everything it needs except a personality of its own.
  54. 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.
  55. City Slickers
    A comedy that's cheery, earnest, harmless and almost totally lacking in bite. City Slickers ambles along lackadaisically, incorporating birth, death, casual wisecracks and a running gag about two ice-cream moguls who pride themselves on knowing the right flavor for any occasion. Each of these things seems to be given equal weight.
  56. 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.
  57. Soapdish
    Soapdish, directed with good-natured zest by Michael Hoffman, has as serious a split-personality problem as any of its characters, perhaps because its screenplay is the work of Robert Harling (who wrote the story) and Andrew Bergman, two screenwriters with decidedly different comic sensibilities.
  58. Backdraft
    While Mr. Howard ably maintains a strong forward momentum, Backdraft often feels directionless beneath its overlay of frantic activity. One clear story line would have been worth more than a series of subplots and tangents.
  59. Thelma & Louise
    It reimagines the buddy film with such freshness and vigor that the genre seems positively new.
  60. Hudson Hawk
    A colossally sour and ill-conceived misfire.
  61. Truly Madly Deeply
    Truly, Madly, Deeply should be enchanting, but it isn't. Everyone pushes too hard, especially Mr. Minghella, the writer and director. There are a few amusing lines and a lot of terrible ones, including Nina's overwrought response, early in the film, when her sister wants to borrow Jamie's cello: "It's like asking me to give you his body!"
  62. Drop Dead Fred
    Drop Dead Fred wants to be an offbeat cross between "Harvey" and "Beetlejuice," but it is more like a shrill, interminable episode of "I Dream of Jeannie."
  63. Only the Lonely
    Thanks in large part to Mr. Candy, who gives an honestly touching performance in what might have been a cloying role, this story does have its simple charms.
  64. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    Truth or Dare is at the very least a potent conversation piece. It can also be seen as a clever, brazen, spirited self-portrait, an ingeniously contrived extension of Madonna's public personality and a studied glimpse into what, in the case of most other pop luminaries, would be at least a quasi-hidden realm.
  65. What About Bob?
    What About Bob? does work as comedy for a while, thanks to the fortuitous teaming of Mr. Dreyfuss and Mr. Murray.
  66. Stone Cold
    Once the movie gets down to business, the muscle and pyrotechnics take over. The action -- especially the motorcycle chases through the marble government halls -- pack a fairly good visceral charge.
  67. Mannequin: On the Move
    This film has enough new characters and independent spirit to have a light, cheery style of its own.
  68. F/X2
    As long as it is fixated on gadgetry, FX2 is reasonably entertaining. But when the movie focuses on plot and character, it turns quite dotty in an amiable way.
  69. 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.
  70. Europa Europa
    This film includes several remarkable episodes illustrating the strange events that shaped Mr. Perel's destiny and the full force of his terror and sorrow.
  71. Toy Soldiers
    Toy Soldiers is a crisp, suspenseful thriller well tailored to the tastes of teen-age audiences, who will doubtless appreciate such touches as the equivalent microchips found in one student's radio-controlled airplane and the chief terrorist's detonator, which is rigged to blow up the entire school.
  72. A Kiss Before Dying
    A Kiss Before Dying is not Crime and Punishment. It is pop movie making to be enjoyed without guilt.
  73. Oscar
    Mr. Stallone displays an unexpected gameness, even a flair, for the kind of broadly durable comedy that is the television sitcom's specialty. It works a lot better than might have been expected. Mr. Stallone may not be a comic genius, but he's definitely a sport.
  74. Mortal Thoughts
    Mortal Thoughts has a good cast and a lot to recommend it, but what it doesn't have is the kind of dramatic payoff that makes so much extended buildup and explanation seem worthwhile.
  75. The Object of Beauty
    The Object of Beauty might have been practically perfect escapist entertainment if the screenplay had been as smooth as the cast. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg has written some attractive characters and a lot of bright lines, but he needs a script doctor. He has let the plot confuse things.
  76. Out for Justice
    It really would be unfair to take such a narrow view of Mr. Seagal's appeal. In fact, he combines street-smart swagger and a flair for wisecracks with a martial arts background and the pampered look of a Hollywood eminence, all of which makes for a lively mix. [13 Apr 1991, p.12]
    • The New York Times
  77. Poison
    Poison, which won the grand prize as the best fiction work at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is an imaginative film that, like the infectious Tom Graves, is eventually overwhelmed by its ambitions. The movie needs to evoke more than the ghost of Genet to give it resonance.
  78. Defending Your Life
    Within the larger context of the Brooks oeuvre, this pleasantly mortifying arrangement makes perfect sense. [22 Mar 1991, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  79. The Comfort of Strangers
    Mr. Schrader is a director of great rigor and discipline. The movie is fascinated by the baroque behavior it observes, but without imitating it.
  80. Ju Dou
    Ju Dou is an intellectually and artistically brave film. Asking for dramatic power and psychological depth as well may be expecting too much.
  81. Career Opportunities
    Mr. Whaley has to work too hard to be antic in the early, Ferris Bueller-type scenes, but he gets much better in more easygoing moments. The gorgeous Ms. Connelly is more model than actress, but by those standards she is relatively lively.
  82. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
    If the Turtles insist on remaining a mainstream box-office attraction, at least they've now had the decency to make a mainstream movie.
  83. Class Action
    Class Action won't put you to sleep. Yet it vanishes from the memory as fast as anything dreamed in the conventional manner.
  84. Guilty by Suspicion
    A stirring and tragic evocation of terrible times.
  85. The Perfect Weapon
    A macho fantasy of physical control, grace and invincibility in which women are all but absent.
  86. True Colors
    As directed by Mr. Ross, True Colors is dreary, humorless, heavy-handed and self-important.
  87. The Dark Backward
    Mr. Rifkin's direction does display, in addition to an appreciation of Mr. Lynch and perhaps John Waters, a promising eye for design and a taste for the unusual. With less noxious material and a less patronizing manner, those talents would amount to a lot more.
  88. La Femme Nikita
    The film, like Nikita herself, becomes more conventionally sleek and less interestingly bizarre as it moves along.
  89. New Jack City
    The film's flamboyant portrait of Nino may be stereotypical, but Mr. Snipes makes it chilling.
  90. The Doors
    It is made by a Morrison groupie for other groupies, a film that leaves the rest of us locked outside wondering what the fuss is about.
  91. Bride of Re-Animator
    Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.
  92. Nothing But Trouble
    A charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap.
  93. Cadence
    Cadence, which is the first feature Martin Sheen has directed, allows the director and his son Charlie ample opportunity to grapple with one another, as well as with questions of racial harmony and with another of Mr. Sheen's sons, Ramon Estevez. The result is well meaning and at times even gently likable.
  94. The Silence of the Lambs
    All sorts of macabre things have gone on, and are still going on just offscreen, in Jonahan Demme's swift, witty new suspence thriller.[14 February 1991]
    • The New York Times
  95. L.A. Story
    Basically decent, intelligent and sweet. It's a fanciful romantic comedy whose wildest and craziest notion is that Los Angeles, for all of its eccentricities, is a great place to live.
  96. Sleeping with the Enemy
    Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.
  97. The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter
    Made with great effort and no charm, this mirthless fantasy film returns its young hero, Bastian Balthazar Bux (Jonathan Brandis), to the land of Fantasia, which when first glimpsed here appears to be made entirely of cellophane.
  98. Popcorn
    A horror film that is less mindless than most in that it is both funny and gross.
  99. Hamlet
    Mel Gibson's Hamlet is strong, intelligent and safely beyond ridicule.... He is by far the best part of Mr. Zeffirelli's sometimes slick but always lucid and beautifully cinematic version of the play.
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