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. White Fang
    A scenic and enveloping nature film about a young man and his beloved pet. But it is by no means strictly a children's film, and it certainly isn't Lassie.
  2. The Garden
    Mr. Jarman's visual sense easily eclipses his conceptual talents. And The Garden has a burning, kaleidoscopic energy to compensate for the facile nature of some of its more unavoidable thoughts.
  3. Green Card
    That understated style at times makes Green Card seem too stiff and vacuous, as if Mr. Weir were inspired by the surface of a Jane Austen work and left out the wicked social observations. But the film is magnificently redeemed by Mr. Depardieu.
  4. Lionheart
    Van Damme, who has nonetheless made eight films in six years, including "Bloodsport," "Cyborg" and "Kickboxer." His looks are memorable but his acting skills stunningly limited, confined mostly to the flexing, seething and pouting realm. Should anyone be in the market for an all-new Hercules, Mr. Van Damme might at the very least take a number. But when it comes to even the minimally dramatic events of Lionheart, he's in over his head.
  5. Not Without My Daughter
    It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.
  6. Warlock
    Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.
  7. The Godfather: Part III
    One of this film's greatest accomplishments is its making an audience believe that the Corleones and their various partners in crime have been entirely in character during the intervening decades, but have simply neglected to turn up on screen.
  8. Alice
    Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making.
  9. Kindergarten Cop
    No one laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger better than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. In Kindergarten Cop, he plays off the Schwarzenegger image more gleefully and successfully than ever before. That is not quite enough to save the movie from its lame, predictable script.
  10. The Long Walk Home
    The Long Walk Home offers a careful, dispassionate, finally moving evocation of its setting. In attempting to present segregated Southern society matter-of-factly, it avoids shrillness and keeps its potential for preachiness more or less at bay.
  11. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Gross, unfunny...In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original.
  12. 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.
  13. Awakenings
    Awakenings both sentimentalizes its story and oversimplifies it beyond recognition. At no point does the film express more than one idea at a time. And the idea expressed, more often than not, is as banal as the reality was bizarre.
  14. Mermaids
    A terribly gentle if wisecracking comedy about the serious business of growing up.
  15. Edward Scissorhands
    Like a great chef concocting an exquisite peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, Mr. Burton invests awe-inspiring ingenuity into the process of reinventing something very small.
  16. The Rookie
    The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.
  17. The Grifters
    The Grifters moves with swift unsentimental resolve toward a last act as bleak as any in recent American screen literature. In a less skillful work, it would be a downer. The Grifters is so good that one leaves the theater on a spellbound high. [5 Dec 1990]
    • The New York Times
  18. Cyrano de Bergerac
    With its screenplay adapted from Rostand by Mr. Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere, the movie is really memorable, though, only for the Depardieu performance, and for the chance it gives us to hear the original French verse.
  19. Misery
    It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster. Misery is just good enough that one wishes it were far better. The ideas are there, but they become lost in the heavy-handed treatment.
  20. Eating
    Food assumes near-religious importance in Mr. Jaglom's portrait of needy, anxious women who spend an entire day playing upon one another's insecurities, and waxing rhapsodic about well-remembered culinary thrills.
  21. Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is wise and funny and just a little bit scary. Though it's an adaptation, it has the manner of a true original.
  22. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    A sunny, exuberant confection and an enjoyably skillful one.
  23. Rocky V
    Rocky V takes him out of his gilded cage and back to the director (John G. Avildsen), the settings and the underdog's outlook that made him famous in the first place. It's a smart move. There's life in the old boy yet.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Home Alone
    Kevin has the potential to be the mawkish child or the obnoxious little adult so common on screen, but he is neither. Played with great glee by Macaulay Culkin, he is a totally endearing, up-to-the-minute little boy.
  25. The Rescuers Down Under
    The mice themselves are enjoyably dowdy, comfortable throwbacks to a time before earth-shattering conquests were the sine qua non of children's entertainment. The film's action sequences, on the other hand, provide the dizzying heights and spectacular exploits to which live-action audiences are by now well accustomed, and they seem derivative despite the ingenuity of the animators.
  26. Dances with Wolves
    Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.
  27. The Krays
    Gary Kemp, as the more commanding and peculiar Ron Kray, makes an especially scary impression, particularly once the Krays' perfect control has begun to unravel. In a series of events set off by Reg's marriage, the Krays are seen on a downhill spiral that Mr. Medak conveys with great and effective understatement.
  28. Child's Play 2
    Vicious as Chucky is, it's hard to be scared by anything that kicks its little feet helplessly every time it flings itself upon a full-sized human target.
  29. My Twentieth Century
    My 20th Century, a new Hungarian film written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, is a number of wondrous things. It's a bracing combination of wit, invention, common sense and lunacy. It's a gravely comic meditation on civilization at the turn of this century. It's also about light and shadow and electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, movies and what it's like to be Hungarian in a world where no one is quite sure where Hungary is.
  30. Jacob's Ladder
    The ending of Jacob's Ladder, when it finally arrives, is, like much of the film, both quaint and devastating.
  31. Vincent & Theo
    The enjoyment in Vincent and Theo comes more from the director's attention to art history than from his ability to interpret it anew.
  32. Graffiti Bridge
    Prince's direction is on a par with his acting, roughly equivalent to his aptitude for Presidential politics. Nonetheless, the film has a lively style, a galvanizing score and some dance numbers in which the star truly shines.
  33. Graveyard Shift
    As directed by Ralph S. Singleton, Graveyard Shift works better above ground than below. The early scenes that allow the actors a little color are more fun than the all-basement episodes, which are visually monotonous despite the fact that the film's monster plot is a multi-media affair.
  34. Night of the Living Dead
    [A] witty, entertaining remake.
  35. White Palace
    No more convincing on screen than it was on the page. But it is greatly helped by the presence of Mr. Spader, who was apparently born to play life-denying, icy-veined young heroes, and especially Ms. Sarandon, who has made a career out of coaxing such characters out of their buttoned-down ways.
  36. Quigley Down Under
    The director, Simon Wincer, makes Quigley Down Under an unapologetic homage to the formula western at its most pokey, complete with Wagon Train-style score. All things considered, this could be a lot worse.
  37. Avalon
    A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.
  38. Reversal of Fortune
    What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]
    • The New York Times
  39. The Hot Spot
    The Hot Spot, his film noir set in a small, sex-starved Texas backwater, is the closest Mr. Hopper has yet come to working within the bounds of a familiar genre. Nevertheless, The Hot Spot bears the film maker's idiosyncratic stamp all the way.
  40. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
    Though ''Roxy Carmichael'' is never as fresh or powerful as it might have been, it is a sweetly engaging film in the Barry Levinson school: just when you think it might fall into a bottomless pit of sentimentality, it stops short.
  41. Memphis Belle
    The direction by Michael Caton-Jones, the Englishman whose first theatrical feature was Scandal, is undistinguished here, but the material is not great.
  42. Mr. Destiny
    While Mr. Destiny is not technically a remake of anything, it's hard to find a glimmer of originality, much less wit or emotion.
  43. Miller's Crossing
    Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.
  44. Marked for Death
    As directed by Dwight H. Little, Marked for Death lacks much visual interest or suspense.
  45. Henry & June
    The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.
  46. Desperate Hours
    What has been lost is more than Bogart's gritty presence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    An Angel at My Table
    For all of the casual brutality of the hospital scenes, An Angel at My Table seems a very gentle film about a woman of such a passionate nature.
  48. King of New York
    Mr. Walken, as Frank, does a memorable job of taking a fanciful projection of corruption, greed and complacency, giving it intelligence, and making it flesh and blood.
  49. Pacific Heights
    Pacific Heights deserves a little credit for originality, and a little more for remaining within the realm of realism until a contrived, violent ending becomes overdue. Thanks to its three stars and a well-chosen supporting cast, the film remains sly fun even when its characters begin making silly mistakes.
  50. Texasville
    There are times when Texasville, like the Larry McMurtry novel on which it is based, seems top heavy with eccentrics. Everybody is tirelessly and (worse) lovably oddball. The snappy dialogue occasionally exhausts. Yet also like the book, the movie becomes seriously involving, a cockeyed acknowledgment of an especially American kind of inarticulate despair.
  51. Narrow Margin
    Though the story evokes old movie formulas - from Strangers on a Train to the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, which inspired it - this film does not reinvent them. It dully echos their conventions.
  52. State of Grace
    With coolly expressive cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and an insinuating Ennio Morricone score, State of Grace has a somber and chilling tone that is only occasionally breached.
  53. Death Warrant
    All of the performances are terrible, but Joseph Porro's costume design is arresting. Mr. Van Damme and the other prisoner look as if they had been outfitted by an upscale outlet of a Banana Republic-type men's boutique.
  54. White Hunter Black Heart
    This material marks a gutsy, fascinating departure for Mr. Eastwood, and makes it clear that his directorial ambitions have by now outstripped his goals as an actor.
  55. Hardware
    Hardware is a sci-fi-horror film of such dopiness that it seems certain to become a cult classic somewhere. Movies that are so insistently silly often have the effect of seeming to expand the mind after midnight, which may have something to do with metabolism if not with controlled substances.
  56. Postcards from the Edge
    Postcards From the Edge seems to have been a terrifically genial collaboration between the writer and the director, Miss Fisher's tale of odd-ball woe being perfect material for Mr. Nichols's particular ability to discover the humane sensibility within the absurd.
  57. The Killer
    The scenes of gore and destruction are even more spectacular than Hong Kong's fog-shrouded skyline. The director repeatedly places the viewer at the center of the crossfire and turns the gyrating camera into the next best thing to a lethal weapon.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Opera
    Inspired by Argento’s own frustrations with directing a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, Opera replaces the supernatural with the sexual, leaving room for a conversation about the link between sexual and artistic impotence. [25 Oct 2018]
    • The New York Times
  59. Darkman
    Darkman sustains mild interest throughout, but it never takes off, partly because a real-estate scam, gangland shootouts, city corruption and a love story clutter up the sad story of Westlake's strange mutation.
  60. After Dark, My Sweet
    James Foley's After Dark, My Sweet is a brisk, entertaining contemporary melodrama about the kind of sleazy characters who populated California crime literature 35 years ago. That's no surprise, since the screenplay, adapted by Robert Redlin and Mr. Foley, is based on Jim Thompson's novel, published in 1955.
  61. Men at Work
    A good-natured lowbrow farce about two southern California garbage men who dream of opening their own surf shop.
  62. The Witches
    The Witches resembles a brilliantly told bedtime story, though the teller of this children's tale may well be the slightly cracked relative who can't judge when scary stories become nightmares.
  63. Pump Up the Volume
    Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, Pump Up the Volume succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.
  64. My Blue Heaven
    It is apparent that through most of My Blue Heaven, Steve Martin's talent is tossed away on this sketchy outline of a howlingly funny idea.
  65. The Exorcist III
    This may sound like heresy, but The Exorcist III is a better and funnier (intentionally) movie than either of its predecessors.
  66. Taking Care of Business
    This is the old, old trading places gag, and while a good idea can always be reinvented, invention is precisely what Taking Care of Business lacks.
  67. Wild at Heart
    This time, though, Mr. Lynch's conceits are less often pleasurably disorienting than out of focus.
  68. Air America
    This muddled film about a secret C.I.A. project in Laos in 1969 fails on every possible level: as action film, as buddy film, as scenic travelogue and even, sad to say, as a way to flaunt Mel Gibson's appeal.
  69. Flatliners
    Flatliners is a stylish, eerie psychological horror film laced with wit, a movie that thrives on its characters' guilty secrets and succeeds on the strength of the director Joel Schumacher's flair for just this sort of smart, unpretentious entertainment.
  70. Mo' Better Blues
    From characters to camera angles, this story of a self-absorbed jazz trumpeter is one long cliche, the kind that might make his most loyal admirers wince and wonder, Spike, what happened?
  71. Young Guns II
    Young Guns II concentrates principally on the drawing power of the post-adolescent heartthrobs in its cast. This approach has its appeal in limited doses, but it makes for a western that's smaller than life.
  72. Problem Child
    As directed by the actor Dennis Dugan, everyone seems to be yelling their lines and making huge hand gestures instead of acting.
  73. Presumed Innocent
    Alan J. Pakula has directed an intense, enveloping, gratifyingly thorough screen adaptation of Mr. Turow's story. Mr. Pakula, who also co-wrote the film with Frank Pierson, is well suited to the job of conveying both the story's suspense and its underlying sobriety.
  74. The Unbelievable Truth
    Mr. Hartley and his director of photography, Michael Spiller, have made a film that is visually and verbally much richer than its low budget.
  75. The Freshman
    The visual style of The Freshman isn't always up to its verbal wit, but then the writing sets an exceptional standard.
  76. Navy Seals
    It might have helped if the film makers had had the humor to see they were turning out ''Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Seals.'' As it is, they take their explosives and their silly roles much too seriously.
  77. Arachnophobia
    The specifics of the spider rampage have been very enjoyably executed by Mr. Marshall and particularly well played by Mr. Daniels, whose dryly self-deprecating manner and underlying decency make him an irresistible hero. Arachnophobia falters only when it becomes too broad, as in a dopey nod to Psycho that captures none of Hitchcock's formal elegance, and in various minor characters who serve as comic grotesques, like the town's potato-chip-munching mortician. 
  78. Ghost
    Nothing if not earnest. It's also eccentric enough to remain interesting even when its ghost story isn't easy to believe.
  79. Quick Change
    In films like Quick Change, he is bogged down by scripts that don't begin to match his comic imagination. Even though he chose and developed Quick Change himself, Bill Murray deserves better than this clunky, stereotypical comedy.
  80. No Picnic
    It is impossible to separate Mr. Hartman's writing and direction from Mr. Horton's smooth, sophisticated camera work, which offers a broad view of the cluttered streets and also peers up narrow stairwells to suggest Mac's claustrophobic life. However their collaboration worked, ''No Picnic'' does not look or sound quite like any other film, and that's more than you can say about most movies of any size.
  81. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
    Renny Harlin, who did a much better job directing ''Die Hard 2,'' displays no sense of humor and takes the film's nonsensical action scenes much too seriously, at one point even blowing up a beach house in the process.
  82. Jetsons: The Movie
    Jetsons: The Movie will appeal only to small children, and only to the most patient among them.
  83. Die Hard 2
    It will surprise no one who saw the first ''Die Hard'' that the heart and soul of the new film is Bruce Willis, who this time is even better.
  84. Days of Thunder
    Tony Scottmdoes his utmost to pump up the audience's adrenaline at all times, which means that the film's big moments - the races, the crashes, the news that someone needs brain surgery - don't seem that different from the small ones.
  85. Betsy's Wedding
    Julie Bovasso as Mr. Alda's Italian mother and Joe Pesci as his sleazy brother-in-law infuse their roles with as much life as possible, but they can't overcome the dullness of Mr. Alda's wedding.
  86. Dick Tracy
    Dick Tracy has just about everything required of an extravaganza: a smashing cast, some great Stephen Sondheim songs, all of the technical wizardry that money can buy (plus the knowledge of how and when to use it), and a screenplay (credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.) that observes the fine line separating true comedy from lesser camp.
  87. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    Gremlins 2: The New Batch speaks to the gleeful hell-raising monster in each of us, and it speaks with much more verve, cleverness and good humor than the film on which it is based. Add this to the very short list of sequels that neatly surpass their predecessors.
  88. Another 48 Hrs.
    Though the body count is high, all of the people killed are faceless or only minor characters, until the end. It's as if the movie were saying that lethal violence is acceptable (and fun) as long as the victims - like the victims of guided missiles and high-altitude bombing - remain anonymous. Any comedy that allows the mind to ponder high-altitude bombing is in deep trouble.
  89. Total Recall
    Mr. Verhoeven is much better at drumming up this sort of artificial excitement than he is at knowing when to stop.
  90. Back to the Future Part III
    Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.
  91. Fire Birds
    Fire Birds has one director (David Green), two writers (Nick Thiel and Paul F. Edwards) and many laughs, all of them unintentional.
  92. Cadillac Man
    Cadillac Man does not stay long in territory pioneered by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Mr. Levinson. It turns, rather awkwardly, into a hostage-situation comedy featuring a cuckolded young man named Larry (Tim Robbins).
  93. Class of 1999
    Class of 1999 is the paranoid student's dream movie, full of absurd battle scenes and failed attempts at dark humor.
  94. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    Mr. Almodovar's comic invention runs out too soon, leaving the audience to giggle weakly in anticipation of the big laughs and disorienting shocks that never arrive.
  95. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Nothing about Tales From the Darkside is likely to give anyone much of a scare. But thanks to casting that is savvier than the horror norm, and to direction by John Harrison that is workmanlike and sometimes even witty, at least it's fun.
  96. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac.
  97. Wild Orchid
    Early in his career, at the time of ''Diner,'' Mr. Rourke managed to do this sort of thing very seductively, with a charming nonchalance. This time he seems puffy, sleazy and sadly ineffectual, well over the edge into self-parody.
  98. The Guardian
    A confused horror film custom-designed for those who prefer their scares set in a clean, comfortable, architecturally correct atmosphere, rather than the usual Gothic settings.
  99. Q & A
    The dialogue is often brutally comic, and individual scenes cut deep. Yet the narrative finally becomes almost impenetrable. The focus that the director would have demanded of another writer is lacking here.
  100. Spaced Invaders
    Spaced Invaders should have been funnier than it is. It rambles and has too many poorly defined characters. Also, because most of it takes place at night, it's not easy to tell what is going on sometimes, which will confuse the audience for which it is intended.
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