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. Explorers
    OF all the Spielberg-inspired fantasy films afoot at the moment, Joe Dante's Explorers is by far the most eccentric. It's charmingly odd at some moments, just plain goofy at others.
  2. Silverado
    Silverado is sufficiently modern to make its landscapes bigger, its people smaller and its moral polarities less powerfully distinct than those of simpler, more starkly beautiful westerns gone by.
  3. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    This film has showier stunts than its predecessors, and a better sense of humor. It also has Tina Turner, in chain-mail stockings.
  4. Back to the Future
    Mr. Zemeckis is able both to keep the story moving and to keep it from going too far. He handles Back to the Future with the kind of inventiveness that indicates he will be spinning funny, whimsical tall tales for a long time to come.
  5. Red Sonja
    Mr. Fleischer brings absolutely no playfulness to what might, at least, have been enjoyably light. And he brings out the worst in a cast that was ill-chosen to begin with. The most memorable thing about the film is the costume/production design by Danilo Donati, which is genuinely demented. Even the horses wear too much junk jewelry.
  6. Pale Rider
    This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.
  7. 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.
  8. Return to Oz
    The inventiveness that has gone into this, and into turning Oz into a land of lavish special effects, will be lost on anyone with a fondness for the 1939 musical classic. That film will always enchant adults and children alike. This joyless new Return to Oz isn't likely to appeal to the former, and may give many of the latter a good scare. Children are sure to be startled by the new film's bleakness.
  9. Cocoon
    Mr. Howard brings a real sweetness to his subject, as does the film's fine cast of veteran stars; he has also given Cocoon the bright, expansive look of a hot-weather hit. And even when the film begins to falter, as it does in its latter sections, Mr. Howard's touch remains reasonably steady.
  10. Lifeforce
    Lifeforce shows off Mr. Hooper's way with a whirling mass of protoplasm, just as Poltergeist did. But its style is shrill and fragmented enough to turn Lifeforce into hysterical vampire porn.
  11. Prizzi's Honor
    From start to finish, this exhilarating adaptation of Richard Condon's phantasmagorical and witty novel -set inside the world of the Mafia - ascends, plunges and races around hairpin curves, only to shoot up again and dive over another precipice. [14 June 1985, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  12. Secret Admirer
    The film's sole ray of sunshine is Fred Ward, who reveals an unexpected flair for comedy in the role of Deborah Ann's father, a police detective with a very hot temper and a vein in his forehead that visibly throbs.
  13. The Goonies
    It has crooks, bats, cobwebs, skeletons, a lovable monster, an underground grotto and a treasure hidden by some of the most considerate, clue-loving pirates who ever lived. Their ghostly ship is the movie's piece de resistance.
  14. Perfect
    Too superficially knowing to be a camp classic, but it's an unintentionally hilarious mixture of muddled moralizing and all-too-contemporary self-promotion.
  15. Fletch
    An enjoyable paperback of a film, a lightweight, breezy experience that, by never pretending to be anything more than what it is, disarms criticism.
  16. A View to a Kill
    As lavishly escapist as they are, the latest James Bond films have become strenuous to watch, now that the business of maintaining Bond's casual savoir-faire looks like such a monumental chore.
  17. 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.
  18. Brewster's Millions
    The film does nothing to accommodate Mr. Pryor's singular comic talents...It keeps the crazy premise but does away with such essential ingredients as funny material and antic timing.
  19. Gotcha!
    Gotcha is about as devoid of personality as it's possible for a narrative movie to be.
  20. Code of Silence
    Code of Silence, as directed by Andy Davis, has a slick look and adequate pacing, though its action sequences tend to fizzle as they end.
  21. The Purple Rose of Cairo
    I'll go out on a limb: I can't believe the year will bring forth anything to equal The Purple Rose of Cairo. At 84 minutes, it's short but nearly every one of those minutes is blissful.
  22. Just One of the Guys
    Familiar but likable, thanks largely to Mr. Jacoby's irrepressible clowning and Miss Hyser's good-sport manner.
  23. Stick
    Through all this, Mr. Reynolds displays little understanding of the very good reasons why audiences usually like him. He is at his most ponderous here, with none of his trademark resiliency or sardonic humor.
  24. Moving Violations
    An especially weak teen- age comedy even by today's none-too- high standards. Everything about it is either second best or second hand.
  25. The Company of Wolves
    It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.
  26. Cat's Eye
    Cat's Eye is pop movie making of an extremely clever, stylish and satisfying order.
  27. Desperately Seeking Susan
    Desperately Seeking Susan, based on a good screenplay by a new writer named Leora Barish, is a terrifically genial New York City farce in which the lives of two very different young women become tangled in an Orlon web of lies, half-truths and cross purposes. Full of funny, sharply observed details, reflected in Santo Loquasto's witty production design as well as in all of the dozens of individual performances. The cast is virtually a Players Guide to the variety of performing talent available in New York.
  28. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    Helen Hunt is a real scene-stealer as a girl who wears things like toy dinosaurs in her hair, in keeping with the film's relentlessly silly mood. The audience at the National Theater seemed giddy enough in its own right.
  29. Ladyhawke
    Mr. Donner has obvious difficulty coordinating the various elements of the overall vision.
  30. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment
    Police Academy 2 isn't as funny as its predecessor, but as sequels go it's certainly amusing. [31 Mar 1985, p.55]
    • The New York Times
  31. The Slugger's Wife
    It's a shock to find Neil Simon's name attached to something as resoundingly unfunny as The Slugger's Wife.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Care Bears Movie
    This endearing movie's mottoes are: never stop caring. And: the best way to make friends is to be a friend yourself.
  33. 1984
    This 1984 is not an easy film to watch, but it exerts a fascination that demands attention even as you want to turn away from it. That the Orwell tale still works so well - and this version works far better than the 1956 film adaptation - also makes it apparent that the novel was always more cautionary in its intentions than prophetic.
  34. Mask
    All of the performances are limited by the material and, in the case of Mr. Stoltz, by Michael Westmore's quite spectacular makeup. The exception - and the film's best sequence - occurs when Rusty's very middle-class, well-meaning parents, played by Estelle Getty and Richard Dysart, come to visit. In these few, brief minutes, Mask becomes specific and interesting. Otherwise it's the kind of story that would work better as a television feature.
  35. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
    This one, set in a bucolic halfway house for disturbed children, is not entirely without Grand Guignol humor, but almost. It appears to have been paced by a metronome - a joke followed by a murder followed by a joke followed by a murder, until all but one of the featured played have been exterminated...It's worth recognizing only as an artifact of our culture.
  36. Porky's Revenge
    Porky's Revenge proceeds with the kind of comic pacing that has the audience laughing way ahead of each joke. Some of it is funny, but it's also entirely predictable.
  37. The Last Dragon
    Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.
  38. He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword
    The Secret of the Sword is a Saturday morning kiddie cartoon stretched out to feature length, which by some lights is an awfully long time.
  39. 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.
  40. The Sure Thing
    The Sure Thing is glowing proof of two things: Traditional romantic comedy can be adapted to suit the teen-age trade, and Mr. Reiner's contribution to ''This Is Spinal Tap'' was more than a matter of humor.
  41. Into the Night
    A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms.
  42. The Breakfast Club
    The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towardS which The Breakfast Club forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone.
  43. Lost in America
    A yuppie mid-life crisis is in the offing, and Albert Brooks has made it the basis for Lost in America, an inspired comedy in his own drily distinctive style.
  44. Vision Quest
    Movies are not like people who, if they're basically nice and decent, can be liked even if they're not very stimulating company. Movies of that order wear one down. They demand attention without giving much in return - amiability is not enough. This is Vision Quest.
  45. Turk 182
    A movie with a sloppily sentimental heart that's as big as the city in which its story takes place.
  46. The Mean Season
    Philip Borsos, who directed ''The Grey Fox,'' builds the suspense of The Mean Season slowly and, for the most part, very effectively.
  47. Witness
    It's not really awful, but it's not much fun. It's pretty to look at and it contains a number of good performances, but there is something exhausting about its neat balancing of opposing manners and values.
  48. The Falcon and the Snowman
    A very curious though effective entertainment, a scathing social satire in the form of an outrageously clumsy spy story told with a completely straight face.
  49. Mischief
    IF Norman Rockwell had wanted to make ''Porky's,'' he might have come up with something like Mischief.
  50. Heaven Help Us
    The director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into.
  51. The Killing Fields
    Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.
  52. A Passage to India
    Mr. Lean's Passage to India, which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.
  53. Fandango
    Kevin Reynolds, who wrote and directed Fandango, is for the most part making just another coming-of-age film. But at its best, his debut feature has an appealing boisterousness, and it successfully walks a fine line between sensitivity and swagger.
  54. Blood Simple
    BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's Blood Simple a directorial debut of extraordinary promise.
  55. Ghoulies
    This one is a cut-rate Gremlins, about some small, nasty creatures brought forth by a young man dabbling in the occult.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The New Kids
    A teen-age revenge melodrama that is both sadistic and wimpish.
  57. Tuff Turf
    Enough visual bravado to overpower the peculiarities of its class pretensions.
  58. The River
    The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality.
  59. Johnny Dangerously
    Johnny Dangerously winds down as it moves along, eventually descending to a lowest common denominator of dopey adolescent gags that overpower the parody. Still, even at its thinnest, it remains good-humored and intermittently entertaining.
  60. Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    Breakin' 2 slights dramatic matters to concentrate exclusively on dancing. The movie contains so much of it that it's exhausting even to watch, but at least the choreography isn't being executed by John Travolta.
  61. The Flamingo Kid
    Even if The Flamingo Kid comes out of sit-com country, the character and the performance effortlessly rise above their origins.
  62. Birdy
    Mr. Modine's performance is exceptionally sweet and graceful; Mr. Cage very sympathetically captures Al's urgency and frustration. Together, these actors work miracles with what might have been unplayable.
  63. Micki + Maude
    The director, the star and the writer make a fine team in this often riotous tale.
  64. Protocol
    Protocol is a breezy, not entirely unpredictable comedy that was made to order for the gifted Goldie Hawn by Buck Henry, the writer, Herb Ross, the director, and Miss Hawn herself, who is the film's executive producer. [21 Dec 1984, p.C25]
    • The New York Times
  65. Starman
    Starman provides him with a role that, played by anyone else, might seem preposterous. In Mr. Bridges' hands it becomes the occasion for a sweetly affecting characterization - a fine showcase for the actor's blend of grace, precision and seemingly offhanded charm.
  66. Runaway
    Runaway doesn't stint on the gizmos, and its inventiveness in that respect is its best feature; it comes up with, among other things, foot-long metallic spiders with a deadly sting and heat-seeking bullets that can be programmed to track specific human targets.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cotton Club
    The Cotton Club is not a complete disaster, but it's not a whole lot of fun. It just runs on and on at considerable length, doing obligatory things, being photographically fancy but demonstrating no special character, style or excitement.
  68. Dune
    SEVERAL of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie.
  69. 2010
    A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'
  70. City Heat
    Overdressed and overplotted as it is, City Heat benefits greatly from the sardonic teamwork of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. Without them the film would be eminently forgettable, but their bantering gives it an enjoyable edge.
  71. Beverly Hills Cop
    Beverly Hills Cop finds Eddie Murphy doing what he does best: playing the shrewdest, hippest, fastest-talking underdog in a rich man's world.
  72. Supergirl
    Supergirl arouses some initial curiosity about the differences between the two cousins; for instance, that Supergirl can't change in phone booths and is much the better flier of the two. However the film, as directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Odell, quickly loses its novelty.
  73. Falling in Love
    Falling in Love is not a bad movie by any means. It's not stupid or gross or cheap. It's been done with taste, but it's the sort of production that, even when it works, which it frequently does, seems too small and trite to have had so much care taken on it.
  74. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    A Nightmare on Elm Street puts more emphasis on bizarre special effects, which aren't at all bad.
  75. Night of the Comet
    A good-natured, end-of- the-world B-movie, written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, a new film maker whose sense of humor augments rather than upstages the mechanics of the melodrama.
  76. Missing in Action
    A simple, bullet-riddled, crowd-pleasing action movie.
  77. Oh, God! You Devil
    The material is extremely slight, but at least it's benign.
  78. No Small Affair
    As directed by Jerry Schatzberg from a screenplay by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy, the film stays snappy much of the way.
  79. Paris, Texas
    Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.
  80. A Soldier's Story
    Mr. Jewison, filming mainly at Fort Chaffee, Ark., has opened up the play by using such interiors as the bar where the troops hang out and exteriors on and around the base. But perhaps most commendably, he has let Mr. Fuller's drama speak for itself, applying the skills of a film maker to polish the facets that lent such substance to the drama.
  81. The Terminator
    A B-movie with flair.
  82. Body Double
    It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film ("Vertigo"), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.
  83. The Gods Must Be Crazy
    The Gods Must Be Crazy is so genial, so good-natured and, on occasion, so inventive in its almost Tati-like slapstick routines, that it would would seem to deny the existence of any racial problems anywhere.
  84. Firstborn
    It is to the credit of Mr. Apted, and to a cast including some very believable young actors, that Firstborn moves swiftly and smoothly enough to dispel much nitpicking about plot points, at least for a time.
  85. The Little Drummer Girl
    What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.
  86. Crimes of Passion
    FOR all their extravagance, Ken Russell's films have never lacked exuberance or humor, which makes the flat, joyless tone of Crimes of Passion a surprise. Much of this is attributable to a screenplay by Barry Sandler filled with smutty double-entendres and weighty ironies. Only intermittently does Mr. Russell break through with the kind of manic flamboyance that is so singularly and rudely his own.
  87. The Razor's Edge
    Slow, overlong and ridiculously overproduced.
  88. Stop Making Sense
    Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own.
  89. Songwriter
    Though Songwriter is an original, it recalls the director's earlier Roadie in its choppiness, its knowing view of show business, and its humor, which tends to be exuberantly rude.
  90. Places in the Heart
    Robert Benton has made one of the best films in years about growing up American.
  91. Teachers
    Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.
  92. Eureka
    There are enough plots here for several movies, but not enough for this one.
  93. The Wild Life
    Something like a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are different, but the perspective on teen-age Americana, West Coast-style, is very much the same. This time around, though, the material is less funny.
  94. Irreconcilable Differences
    Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.
  95. Threads
    Clearly, Threads is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful. [12 Feb 1985, p.42]
    • The New York Times
  96. All of Me
    If this, the best American comedy since Tootsie, doesn't have you in stitches, check your vital signs: you may be in as much trouble as Edwina Cutwater, the dying dowager Miss Tomlin plays.
  97. The Evil That Men Do
    Mr. Bronson is stony as ever, and a little more nattily dressed.
  98. The Brother from Another Planet
    The Brother From Another Planet, set in major part in Harlem, means to be fantastic as well as funny and satiric, and from time to time, it is each of these things. Mostly, though, it's a nice, unsurprising shaggy-dog story that goes on far too long.
  99. Amadeus
    Mr. Forman has preserved the fascinating heart of Mr. Shaffer's play, and made it available to millions who might never enter a legitimate theater. Well done.
  100. C.H.U.D.
    C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious theses about government or the environment. It is meant to be light commercial entertainment, and in the category of horror films it stands as a praiseworthy effort.
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