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. Anatomy
    The movie, which is crudely dubbed into English, lacks the raucous, anything-for-a-shock carnival humor of its American prototypes. After it's over, the only question worth asking is whether dear, cozy old Heidelberg can survive the slander.
  2. Driven
    Even fans of open-wheel racing, the high-speed, high-stress pastime that is the subject of Renny Harlin's hectic new film, may walk away from it more logy than exhilarated.
  3. Rosenstrasse
    There's something unsettling when fiction exploits this history to such puny, self-interested ends.
  4. Freddy vs. Jason
    This dumb, only intermittently (though sometimes even intentionally) funny sequel presumes that since almost everything else from the 1980's has come back, why not the cynosures of the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Friday the 13th" movies?
  5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    Rather than exhilaration, this bilious film offers only entrapment and despair. It's about as much fun as sitting in on an autopsy.
  6. Tomorrow Never Dies
    Despite Mr. Brosnan's best efforts to be lethally debonair, the Bond franchise has sacrificed most of what made this character unique in the first place, turning the world's suavest spy into one more pitchman and fashion plate. This latest film is such a generic action event that it could be any old summer blockbuster, except that its hero is chronically overdressed.
  7. Jawbreaker
    The film's bright look and visual energy are much more liberating than the machinations of its teen queens.
  8. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.
  9. A Fish Called Wanda
    The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  10. Secret Window
    This movie is a suspense thriller whose only suspense comes from an audience wondering if the picture will hit its promised 97-minute running time.
  11. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
    The lip movements of the animated figures are slightly slow, so you feel as if you're watching a badly dubbed Japanese creature feature from the 1960's. The dialogue is almost as stilted, and after a while you drift into that half-dream state that inert movies can create.
  12. Merci Docteur Rey
    Strains to be the ne plus ultra of arch, hyper-sophisticated fun, but the laughs are few.
  13. Signs & Wonders
    Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven
  14. Better Than Sex
    Imagine "Last Tango in Paris" remade as a wan, low-budget romantic comedy.
  15. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
    Sitting through the lavish and dumb action spectacular Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is about as much fun as watching someone else play a video game.
  16. The Hot Chick
    Rob Schneider runs an obstacle course of taste and emerges remarkably unsullied, considering the choices he faces.
  17. Catwoman
    A howlingly silly, moderately diverting exercise in high, pointless style.
  18. Timeline
    Doesn't have a genuinely human moment.
  19. Molly
    (Shue's) sweetly likable performance is the only coherent element in a film that has the impersonal feel of a television drama slapped together in a rush.
  20. Tears of the Sun
    Unfortunately, the movie's real setting is a sentimental fantasy world, and its story is a spectacularly incoherent exercise in geopolitical wish fulfillment.
  21. I Spy
    Even the handful of moments that are amusing feel recycled from old sketches of Mr. Murphy's.
  22. Ghost Ship
    So preoccupied with delivering its effects that it doesn't bother to make sense of its story.
  23. Testosterone
    Makes no psychological sense. Even within the convoluted realm of film noir, the development of the relationships defies any logic.
  24. Daredevil
    Tacky and disposable.
  25. The Girl Next Door
    Offers a view of pornography that is nonjudgmental, even celebratory, but at the same time its premise -- that Danielle must be rescued from the shame and degradation of her old job -- suggests a more traditional, disapproving point of view. Instead of addressing this contradiction, the movie is happy to wallow in it, which would be fine if it had any real pleasure to offer.
  26. Gods and Generals
    A lumpy three-and-a-half-hour glob of Civil War history.
  27. The Whole Ten Yards
    At least it isn't a remake -- though given how slovenly and forced this movie is, maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad idea.
  28. The Punisher
    Its lack of subtlety is clearly a point of pride, and Mr. Hensleigh's flat-footed, hard-punching style has a blunt ferocity that makes "Kill Bill" look like "In the Bedroom."
  29. Godsend
    The picture, which fails to achieve its ambitions or to fulfill our expectations, is ultimately worse than a violent piece of hack work, in which the director isn't interested in displaying his integrity -- or taste. You'd be better off downloading the trailer: a much more convincing piece of storytelling.
  30. The Family Man
    A piece of moldy wax fruit if ever there was one.
  31. The Iron Ladies
    As flimsy and manipulative as the shallowest Hollywood fantasy.
  32. The Out-of-Towners
    Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin are appealing performers, but none of the energy, professionalism and gameness they display -- can surmount the mess that surrounds them in this misguided comedy.
  33. Envy
    Squandered in foolish horseplay and on a story that zigzags so far out of control that it feels as if the screenwriter, Steve Adams, pasted together a bunch of zany notions in a frantic search for confusion.
  34. Along Came Polly
    The spectacle of two mature stars forced to grovel in the bathroom for cheap laughs is pathetic.
  35. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    Mr. Allen's work is compromised by an apparent inability to match his shots in a spatially coherent fashion. It's never easy to tell who is chasing whom and in which direction, a needless confusion that dampens many of the thrills and scuttles quite a few gags.
  36. Vampires
    Ridiculous without being awful enough to be hilarious.
  37. It's All About Love
    A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.
  38. Recess: School's Out
    The unfortunate thing is that children will probably waste their summers indoors watching "Recess" over and over again.
  39. How High
    Many of the faces that emerge through the murk appear bug-eyed. And much of the dialogue, which is frequently shouted, is only semi-intelligible.
  40. Exorcist: The Beginning
    The risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid.
  41. Eulogy
    The screenplay is closer in tone to an uneasy mixture of post-"Seinfeld" bile and unfocused Altmanesque satirical misanthropy. Partly because the story's structure is so haphazard, most of the jokes land with a thud.
  42. Masked and Anonymous
    An unholy, incoherent mess.
  43. White Chicks
    Credibility, of course, wouldn't matter if the gags were good enough, which they are not. The film quickly falls back on the gross-out jokes that have made recent American comedies such a challenge to the digestive tract.
  44. Gender Bias
    Mr. Girod is a fish out of water in the after-hours clubs and deserted industrial districts that constitute the sexual underworld of Brussels. His film feels more like what one would see from the top of a double-decker tourist bus than the work of someone who has immersed himself in a sexual subculture and its particular values.
  45. From Justin to Kelly
    They play cotton candy effigies of themselves named Kelly and Justin, and the best that can be said is that they don't embarrass themselves.
  46. Gothika
    Proves to be both too much and not enough: yet another slick, empty package of ersatz entertainment.
  47. A Man Apart
    A series of gun battles follow, none staged with quite enough verve or imagination to break through the pervasive torpor.
  48. Ted Bundy
    Disturbingly superficial in its approach to the material.
  49. Any Given Sunday
    For much of the movie, the kinetic furor of the game sequences helps camouflage the weaknesses of a screenplay that is a mechanically contrived series of power struggles.
  50. The Salton Sea
    Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.
  51. Resident Evil
    The movie has a frantic staccato style that is more game-oriented than cinematic.
  52. Seven
    Not even bags of body parts, a bitten-off tongue or a man forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh keep it from being dull.
  53. Taxi
    A bland, half-finished film that seems to have been conceived as off-peak cable fodder.
  54. Adored
    He's (Marco Filiberti) his own best audience, and Adored is best left to his own enjoyment.
  55. Max Keeble's Big Move
    This clunky juvenile comedy lurches among multiple story lines without fully realizing the comic potential of any.
  56. Dawn of the Dead
    The eventual video game is bound to be a lot more fun -- and less slowed down by bad dialogue -- than this "Dead."
  57. Man on Fire
    This is a time-tested movie con, but rarely has it been deployed so contemptibly.
  58. The Price of Milk
    The guiding philosophy of The Price of Milk seems to be that if you throw something on the screen and call it a fairy tale, it has to mean something. But it doesn't.
  59. Out Cold
    A ski party movie in which the clothes are a little more revealing than they were 35 years ago, the practical jokes are a little more tasteless, and the uncertainty over sex is pretty much nonexistent.
  60. The Aryan Couple
    The problem, as it is so often in well-intentioned movies of this kind, is that rather than illuminate the enormity of Nazism, The Aryan Couple trades upon our knowledge of it for emotional impact.
  61. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one.
  62. They Live
    Mr. Carpenter has directed the film with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap. And his screenplay (written under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) makes the principals sound even more tongue-tied than they have to. [4 Nov 1988, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  63. Scary Movie 2
    This crude comedy delivers on the "No Shame, No Mercy" threats from the original. Unfortunately, it all adds up to "No Good."
  64. A Walk to Remember
    Proves that a movie about goodness is not the same thing as a good movie.
  65. The Forgotten
    In the preposterous thriller The Forgotten, a pseudospiritual, mumbo-jumbo, science-fiction inflected mess, the director Joseph Ruben does not just fail to tap into Ms. Moore's talent; he barely gets her attention.
  66. A Cinderella Story
    Even for a fairy tale, A Cinderella Story, directed by Mark Rosman from a screenplay by Leigh Dunlap, fails to make sense.
  67. Alexander
    This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him.
  68. The 24th Day
    Mr. Piccirillo's direction reflects a basic knowledge of stagecraft but no discernable sense of filmmaking. The dull television-style close-ups march relentlessly across the screen, leaving only the ghostly trails of badly transferred video images behind.
  69. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    It's one of the rare films for which a blooper reel would be redundant.
  70. The Life of David Gale
    Tries to show it has its heart in the right place, but it's such a crude undertaking that it doesn't actually seem to have a heart at all.
  71. The One
    So narratively garbled and its screenplay so underwritten that you have to strain to piece together the story.
  72. The Polar Express
    A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology.
  73. Surviving Christmas
    As you watch the comedy lurch along, the woozy, sinking sensation it produces suggests a movie slapped together after the consumption of far too many gallons of that spiked eggnog.
  74. The United States of Leland
    The real question raised by The United States of Leland is not why, but how. How, that is, did so many talented actors find their way to this dreary and derivative study in suburban dysfunction?
  75. Without a Paddle
    Pushes its ugly humor further than most.
  76. Cheaper by the Dozen
    A bubbling crockpot of farcical mush to warm the tummies of anyone who really and truly misses "The Brady Bunch," and I mean really and truly.
  77. Miller's Crossing
    Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.
  78. The Phantom of the Opera
    Lord Lloyd Webber's thorough acquaintance with the canon of 18th- and 19th-century classical music is not in doubt, but his attempt to force a marriage between that tradition and modern musical theater represents a victory of pseudo-populist grandiosity over taste - an act of cultural butchery akin to turning an aviary of graceful swans and brilliant peacocks into an order of Chicken McNuggets.
  79. Kazaam
    Memo to Shaquille O'Neal: Don't give up your night job.
  80. Kingpin
    The team that gave the world "Dumb and Dumber" returns with something feeble and feebler.
  81. Sleepers
    As directed by Barry Levinson and acted by an incredible collection of male stars, Sleepers settles the authenticity question by allowing not a whiff of real life into its universe.
  82. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.
  83. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
    Instead, Mr. Carrey turns up in a sloppy second Ace Ventura film that's little more than an echo of the first. A two-minute trailer wouldn't miss many of its highlights.
  84. Valmont
    For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.
  85. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    One of the many problems with Gus Van Sant's tortured, worked-over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is that Sissy Hankshaw talks like a novel, and a dated one at that.
  86. It Takes Two
    Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.
  87. Conan the Barbarian
    Conan the Barbarian is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past.
  88. The Fan
    The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical flash.
  89. Educating Rita
    The essentially two-character play has been opened up to the point that it includes a variety of settings and subordinate figures, but it never approaches anything lifelike.
  90. 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.
  91. 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.
  92. Little Big Man
    The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.
  93. Newsies
    Newsies is a long, halfhearted romp through what is made to seem a not terribly compelling chapter in New York City's history.
  94. The Secret Agent
    The movie, which imagines its principal characters as metaphorically ticking time bombs, never convincingly portrays their passions.
  95. The Dead Pool
    The Dead Pool, possesses a couple of good jokes, but nothing can disguise the fact that it's a mini-movie in the company of a mythic figure.
  96. Twins
    Twins turns out to be, among other things, sad evidence that witty direction is becoming a dying art.
  97. Nightwatch
    Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.
  98. Cool World
    The plot of Michael Grais's and Mark Victor's screenplay is even more nonsensical than it needs to be. [11 Jul 1992]
  99. Flash Gordon
    The best things in the production are the garishly absurd sets. The costumes, including the gold lame athletic supporters worn by the members of Ming's palace guard, suggest an adolescent's fever dream. The pacing is so funereal that this Flash Gordon seems far longer and far less funny that the 15-chapter serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), which starred Buster Crabbe. [05 Dec 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  100. Twilight Zone: The Movie
    The film, which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, is composed of a prologue, written for the movie, plus four separate stories, each of them either based directly on a script from the television series or suggested by one. A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs.
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