The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Hammett
    Hammett, the first major American movie by Wim Wenders, isn't quite the mess one might expect, considering the length of time it's been in production and the number of people who seem to have contributed to it. It's not ever boring, but heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made. One answer would serve both questions.
  2. Zapped!
    ZAPPED! is a half-baked, rather retarded parody of Carrie and a number of other films that, using the awesome power of their ignorance, drove telekinesis into the ground.
  3. Human Highway
    Mr. Young’s slapdash style, which suggests a Roger Corman movie crossed with dinner theater, extends to the clanking sound effects and flagrantly fake backdrops.
  4. The Beastmaster
    It's meant as a tiny bit of praise to say that the movie, which was made in southern California, looks as if it had been shot in Spain or Yugoslavia. It looks both big and cheap.
  5. Class of 1984
    Class of 1984 is sort of crudely funny. The movie's idea of punk culture is also picturesque. But it quickly gets worse and worse until it achieves a degree of awfulness that, though rare, isn't much fun.
  6. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
    There's a lot to make [Heckerling's] film likeable, but not much to hold it together.
  7. Friday the 13th Part III
    As in each of the other recent 3-D movies, of which this is easily the most professional, there is a lot of time devoted to trying out the gimmick. Titles loom toward you. Yo-yos spin. Popcorn bounces. Snakes dart toward the camera and strike. Eventually, the novelty wears off, and what remains is the now-familiar spectacle of nice, dumb kids being lopped, chopped and perforated.
  8. Tempest
    Experiencing it is like watching a 10-ton canary as it attempts to become airborne. It lumbers up and down the runway tirelessly, but never once succeeds in getting both feet off the ground at the same time. The spectacle is amusing in isolated moments but, finally, exhausting.
  9. Pink Floyd: The Wall
    His The Wall is a good-looking film, and it has no shortage of nerve. When he puts an entire schoolchildren's choir on a conveyor belt leading into a meat grinder as they sing, ''We don't need no education,'' he is being nothing if not bold. These effects, while some are individually powerful, are dwarfed by the towering selfimportance of The Wall and by its lack of focus.
  10. The Pirate Movie
    The Pirate Movie stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins in a cut-rate kiddie version of Gilbert and Sullivan, laced with synthetic pop ballads and leavened with infantile dirty jokes.
  11. Things Are Tough All Over
    Cheech and Chong have a good time with Things Are Tough All Over, and you will, too.
  12. Tex
    An unexpected but certainly major force in movies at the moment, S.E. Hinton (with four of her novels being adapted for the screen), created in Tex an utterly disarming, believable portrait of a small-town adolescent. Tim Hunter's film version captures Miss Hinton's novel perfectly.
  13. Night Shift
    This is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second.
  14. The Last American Virgin
    The best things about the movie are probably its amusingly modish outfits and hairdos, which demand that the audience keep its eyes open, and the music, which doesn't.
  15. An Officer and a Gentleman
    Undeniably, there's an element of corniness to this. But that doesn't keep An Officer and a Gentleman from being a first-rate movie - a beautifully acted, thoroughly involving romance.
  16. The World According to Garp
    If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one.
  17. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
    This film lacks even the inadvertently buoyant awfulness that makes some bad movies fun. It's just plain dull.
  18. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
    Its light classical manner and its happyish ending. Whatever Mr. Allen is doing in constructing this pretty, slight, gently entertaining movie, he isn't doing the thing he does best. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy gives the impression of someone speaking fluently but formally in a language not his own.
  19. The Secret of NIMH
    Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.
  20. Six Pack
    If you've never seen anyone wear a gold chain with a sweatshirt, then by all means go see Kenny Rogers in Six Pack. If that is not your idea of originality, the good-natured but none-too-interesting Six Pack won't strike you as anything new.
  21. TRON
    It is beautiful -spectacularly so, at times - but dumb. Computer fans may very well love it, because Tron is a nonstop parade of stunning computer graphics, accompanied by a barrage of scientific-sounding jargon. Though it's certainly very impressive, it may not be the film for you if you haven't played Atari today.
  22. Blade Runner
    THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned.
  23. The Thing
    The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.
  24. Série Noire
    Serie Noire,' adapted by Mr. Corneau and Georges Perec from ''A Hell of a Woman'' by the late Jim Thompson, takes itself much too seriously, as is the way with humorless French adapters of American fiction of this sort.
  25. Megaforce
    Mr. Needham's secret weapon is Mr. Reynolds, and Mr. Reynolds isn't here. Without his overriding friendliness and humor on hand, there is too much opportunity to notice the weak spots in Mr. Needham's direction.
  26. Annie
    It's big, colorful, slightly vulgar, occasionally boring and full of talent not always used to its limits.
  27. Firefox
    Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.
  28. Author! Author!
    Hiller makes this warm, friendly and sometimes cute, but he doesn't make it move very quickly.
  29. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    "E.T." is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it's full of the timeless longings expressed in children's literature of all eras.
  30. Grease 2
    Less a sequel than a retread...Dizzy and slight, with an even more negligible plot than its predecessor had. This time the story can't even masquerade as an excuse for stringing the songs together.
  31. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    The second Star Trek movie is swift, droll and adventurous, not to mention appealingly gadget-happy. It's everything the first one should have been and wasn't.
  32. Poltergeist
    Poltergeist often sounds as if it had been dictated by an exuberant twelve-year-old, someone who's sitting by a summer campfire and determined to spin a tale that will keep everyone else on the edges of their knapsacks far into the night.
  33. Chan Is Missing
    Chan Is Missing is not only an appreciation of a way of life that few of us know anything about; it's a revelation of a marvelous, completely secure new talent.
  34. Burden of Dreams
    One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work.
  35. Rocky III
    It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.
  36. The Escape Artist
    The Escape Artist represents a lot more talent than is ever demonstrated on the screen.
  37. The Road Warrior
    In its stripped-down, cannily cinematic way, it's one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country. It has no pretensions to do anything except entertain in the primitive, occasionally jolting fashion of the first nickelodeon movies, whose audiences flinched as streetcars lumbered silently toward the camera.
  38. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    A genial, gently mocking, brilliantly executed spoof that may offend the purists but which should delight the buffs.
  39. Conan the Barbarian
    Conan the Barbarian is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past.
  40. 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.
  41. Paradise
    Paradise is The Blue Lagoon with camels.
  42. The Sword and the Sorcerer
    A nonsensical, Hollywood-made, R-rated adventure-fantasy set in a primeval past about usurped kingdoms, erring knights, recently awakened ogres, distressed princesses and various hangers-on.
  43. The Chosen
    Certainly, this is a gently evocative movie, with its glimpses of a strict and self-contained culture, and its memories of a time gone by.
  44. Diva
    Though it means to be a romantic suspense-thriller, it has the self-consciously enigmatic manner of a high-fashion photograph, the kind that's irresistible to amateur artists who draw mustaches on the perfectly symmetrical faces of pencil-thin models in sables.
  45. Chariots of Fire
    Unashamedly rousing, invigorating but very clear-eyed evocat ion of values of the oldfashioned sort that are today more easily satirized than celebrated...It's an exceptional film, about some exceptional people.
  46. Cat People
    Miss Kinski and Mr. McDowell are most effective - eerie and damned -and Mr. Heard is stalwart and self-effacing as the mere human who stumbles onto the truth and forever guards the secret.
  47. Some Kind of Hero
    A very engaging, loose-limbed sort of comedy. It's written, directed and acted with amiability, which doesn't disguise the bitterness immediately beneath the surface but, like Eddie himself, absorbs it.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Silent Rage
    [Norris] is a kind of whitebread Bruce Lee, with no screen presence to speak of, but nothing terribly offensive working against him, either. He is just sort of there...Silent Rage may be trying to say something here about wealthy technicians and the popular culture, but then the psychopath or Mr. Norris appear and the thought gets lost.
  49. The Long Good Friday
    The Long Good Friday charts a perilous course through a world of powerful people, ghastly acts of vengeance and ominously shifting fortunes.
  50. Out of the Blue (1980)
    The theme music, from Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps" album, is a haunting accompaniment to Mr. Hopper's sometimes stunning imagery. The best moments of "Out of the Blue" have both the beauty and the banality of found art.
  51. Savage Hunt of King Stakh
    The story it tells, of 19th-century ghosts and scoundrels in Byelorussia, is potentially of some interest. But the tale is presented in a drab and confusing fashion by film makers with only the faintest command of their craft.
  52. Eating Raoul
    It is full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly.
  53. Porky's
    A portion of the audience will be strongly offended by Porky's, just as another portion will find it filthy but fun. However, there is no debating the success of Mr. Clark's casting, for he has assembled a cheerful, likable bunch of actors, most of them unknowns.
  54. Victor Victoria
    It stars Julie Andrews, Robert Preston and James Garner, each giving the performance of his and her career in a marvelous fable about mistaken identity, sexual roleplaying, love, innocence and sight gags, including one that illustrates the dangers of balancing yourself on a champagne bottle on one finger within the range of a singing voice that shatters glass.
  55. Missing
    Missing is Mr. Costa-Gavras's most beautifully achieved political melodrama to date, a suspense-thriller of real cinematic style, acted with immense authority by Jack Lemmon, as Charles Horman's father, Ed Horman, and Sissy Spacek as Charles's wife, Beth.
  56. Diner
    Diner isn't lavish or long, but it's the sort of small, honest, entertaining movie that should never go out of style, even in an age of sequels and extravaganzas.
  57. Evil Under the Sun
    Evil Under the Sun, the latest Agatha Christie whodunit to be given the all-star screen treatment, has nothing but style, but its style goes a long way.
  58. The Loveless
    The Loveless, a pathetic homage to the 1950's, has been made by two writer-directors, Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery, who share an unmistakable longing for that era. But their nostalgia expresses itself no more interestingly than through a lot of silly, lifeless posturing, plus the use of colors like chartreuse.
  59. Death Wish II
    Even more foolish, more tacky and more self righteously inhumane than the 1974 melodrama off which it has been spun by the none-too-nimble fingers of Michael Winner, who directed the original film.
  60. Swamp Thing
    Wes Craven's Swamp Thing wants desperately to be funny and, from time to time, it is. However, you might wish it would trust the audience to discover the humor for itself.
  61. Shoot the Moon
    At its best, Shoot the Moon is as spare and as sharp in its detail as fine prose and as continuously surprising.
  62. Barbarosa
    The best western in a long while is Barbarosa, a film that uses one American legend, Willie Nelson, to create another.
  63. Quest for Fire
    Quest for Fire is more than just a hugely enterprising science lesson, although it certainly is that. It's also a touching, funny and suspenseful drama about prehumans.
  64. The Border
    Although it has been made with intelligence, is well directed and acted and is in touch with the ways of lower-middle-class American life, it has the sort of predictable outrage and shape of a made-for-television movie. It has suspense but little excitement.
  65. Cannery Row
    The only people who emerge from this precious nonsense smelling good are Richard MacDonald, the English production designer, and Sven Nykvist, the Swedish cameraman.
  66. The Beast Within
    Philippe Mora is the director, but the only name really worth noting is that of Tom Burman, who did the frequently grotesque special effects.
  67. Das Boot
    Das Boot is yet another moving testament to the wastefulness of battle.
  68. Personal Best
    It's also full of lyrical slow-motion footage of women athletes' training - jogging, sprinting, running the high hurdles, throwing the shot, broad jumping and high jumping. These sequences are accompanied by not-great pop music that has been poured over the images in a way that suggests fudge sauce on top of fried chicken.
  69. The Seduction
    An often comically inept, unsuccessfully vicious nonthriller about a beautiful young woman, her live-in lover and the crazy Peeping Tom who pursues the young woman neither wisely nor well.
  70. Pennies from Heaven
    Miss Peters is funny and charming lip-synching Helen Kane's I Want to Be Bad, and Mr. Martin is something of a revelation as a danceman. The movie, though, is not easy to respond to. It's chilly without being provocative in any intellectual way.
  71. Taps
    Considering the dreary circumstances, the performances are quite good, especially those of Mr. Scott, who can do this sort of thing before breakfast; Timothy Hutton, an Oscar winner for Ordinary People; Sean Penn, as the one cadet at Bunker Hill with a grain of sense; Tom Cruise, as a murderously gung-ho cadet, and Evan Handler, as a cadet who remains a humane civilian at heart.
  72. Reds
    Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' as well as a commercial movie with a rare sense of history.
  73. Modern Problems
    TWENTIETH Century-Fox knew exactly what it was doing when it decided to open Modern Problems at theaters all over New York on Christmas Day, without advance screenings for the press. It's not that Modern Problems is so bad, though it is incredibly sloppy.
  74. Absence of Malice
    Even when the action seems wrongheaded—and it frequently does—the movie is richly textured and well played.
  75. Sharky's Machine
    Mr. Reynolds's third and best directorial effort - the first two were Gator and The End - is an unexpectedly accomplished cop thriller. There is, as is often the case with movies of that genre, less here than meets the eye: the plot has its unreasonable spots, and the story doesn't come to much in the end. But one measure of the success of Sharky's Machine is that it's too fast and exciting for those considerations to count until after the movie is over.
  76. Neighbors
    The situation that Neighbors starts off with is funnier than anything that grows out of it, at least the version of the tale by Mr. Avildsen's and Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter. While Mr. Berger's novel has an aspect of the mysterious to keep it going, the film is solely devoted to hijinks, and the hijinks have nowhere to go.
  77. Rollover
    The dramatic possibilities of the material are weak at best, and its satirical underpinnings are nowhere to be found. As for the characters, they are either deeply unsympathetic or, when they resort to technical jargon for very long periods of time, incomprehensible.
  78. On Golden Pond
    Mr. Fonda gives one of the great performances of his long, truly distinguished career. Here is film acting of the highest order, the kind that is not discovered overnight in the laboratory, but seems to be the distillation of hundreds of performances.
  79. Ragtime
    The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Road Games
    Jamie Lee Curtis plays the jiggly hitchhiker he picks up, which is one reason he calls her Hitch. Another reason, according to a pretentious statement by the director, Richard Franklin, is to pay tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, who should be twirling.
  81. Time Bandits
    Time Bandits is a cheerfully irreverent lark - part fairy tale, part science fiction and part comedy. It's a fantastic though wobbly flight through history and legend in the company of a small boy named Kevin and six dwarfs named Randall, Fidgit, Wally, Og, Stutter and Vermin.
  82. Halloween II
    There's some variety to the crimes, as there is to the characters, and an audience is likely to do more screaming at suspenseful moments than at scary ones. The gore, while very explicit and gruesome, won't make you feel as if you're watching major surgery. The direction and camera work are quite competent, and the actors don't look like amateurs.
  83. Looker
    The premise, though, is the only satisfying thing about Looker, which Mr. Crichton has directed from his own original, stupifyingly nonsensical screenplay.
  84. Saturday the 14th
    It's an unfunny horror-filmparody with a cast headed by Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss and Severn Darden , directed and written by Howard R. Cohen, who shouldn't be trusted to park the cars of such people, much less make a movie with them.
  85. Quartet
    Almost always entertaining to watch and infuriatingly wrong in several important ways, chief among these being the casting of Miss Adjani as Marya.
  86. The French Lieutenant's Woman
    The film's beauty is dazzling. It stands with—or perhaps a little ahead of—Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Roman Polanski's Tess, but it also must be conceded, quickly and without too stern a reproach, that there is less to The French Lieutenant's Woman than meets the dazzled eye.
  87. My Dinner with Andre
    It's the achievement of Mr. Malle, the director of Atlantic City, Pretty Baby and a lot of other very fine, conventional movies, that he has successfully turned his two real-life personalities into actors capable of representing themselves.
  88. Rich and Famous
    The movie can't make up its mind whether it's about a tumultuously difficult but rewarding friendship or whether it's a sendup of the contemporary literary scene. It fails as both.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead & Buried
    Fairly standard and cynical stuff, with enough threatening incidents to satisfy the most jaded horror-film buff.
  90. The Watcher in the Woods
    A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.
  91. Paternity
    With the exception of Miss D'Angelo and Lauren Hutton and Elizabeth Ashley, who make cameo appearances, almost everything in Paternity is tired and perfunctory. This is especially true of Mr. Reynolds.
  92. Mommie Dearest
    Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another.
  93. Southern Comfort
    Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.
  94. True Confessions
    Marvelously well-acted...Quite simply it's one of the most entertaining, most intelligent and most thoroughly satisfying commercial American films in a very long time.
  95. So Fine
    Its comic episodes are nicely controlled, and the movie has a consistent zany style.
  96. The Disappearance
    Mr. Cooper's abrupt, stylized direction can't tease much delicacy or meaning out of the material, though delicacy is all that might recommend it. John Alcott's handsome cinematography is most effective, but the beauty it imparts is skin-deep.
  97. Continental Divide
    Mr. Apted has made this a sweet, engaging movie that audiences will very much want to see end well.
  98. Raggedy Man
    Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.
  99. The Haunting of Julia
    Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia manages to draw on every horror movie cliche imaginable and still make very little sense.
  100. Gallipoli
    Mr. Weir's work has a delicacy, gentleness, even wispiness that would seem not well suited to the subject. And yet his film has an uncommon beauty, warmth and immediacy, and a touch of the mysterious, too.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »