The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Turner & Hooch
    It isn't [Hanks's] fault that the five writers don't come up with five funny lines or one exciting scene.
  2. Three O'Clock High
    The film jabs so relentlessly at the viscera that the audience is never allowed to notice anything independently; if Mr. Joanou wants you to spot a license plate, for instance, he drives the car right into a floor-level camera.
  3. An Innocent Man
    More than enough sadism to go around. But the net effect is less excitement than overkill. The screenplay, by Larry Brothers, has a tendency to forget old plot elements as it picks up new ones.
  4. Bad Samaritan
    The Bad Samaritan director, Dean Devlin, handles the proceedings like Adrian Lyne (who directed “Fatal Attraction”) on HGH supplements (and divested of over a third of Mr. Lyne’s visual elegance, such as it is).
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Spinning Man
    A few moody flashbacks and daydreams are presumably intended to add to the noirish sense of uncertainty and unease, but instead of intensifying the mystery, they dissipate it.
  6. Serenity
    More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone. Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight.
  7. The Hitcher
    Existential terror, in the case of Robert Harmon's Hitcher, means an unmotivated viciousness that's as cryptic at the story's end as it was at the beginning.
  8. Sonic the Hedgehog
    Other than product placement, the movie’s primary goal seems to be delivering 1990s nostalgia.
  9. Shirley Valentine
    Banality is precisely the problem with Shirley Valentine, the one-woman stage play that has been turned into a misguided, fully cast film.
  10. The Way West
    What they have to go through to reach Oregon is nothing to compare to what an old Western fan has to go through to keep from getting up in the middle and walking out.
  11. Chasing Great
    For a movie that revolves around a notoriously violent sport, Michelle Walshe and Justin Pemberton’s profile takes a soft, superficial approach. It makes a rote installment of ESPN’s “30 for 30” look like Pulitzer-worthy muckraking.
  12. Mercury Rising
    Hugely expensive, weakly formulaic.
  13. The Crow
    Ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.
  14. Private School
    Movies like Private School usually make money, no matter how sleazy or derivative they happen to be.
  15. Life Itself
    Unreliability is a fascinating and tricky conceit for novelists and filmmakers. It should not be confused with bad writing. There is a lot of that here, and also, to confuse matters further, a lot of good acting.
  16. Running Scared
    Still another, thoroughly depressing demonstration of the extent to which television now dictates the style and the manners of so many of the movies we see in theaters.
  17. Mannequin
    In place of a real story, there is just the spectacle of stock characters being put through their paces to fill up the time.
  18. 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.
  19. Sudden Impact
    The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood's direction of it primitive, which is surprising because he has shown himself capable in such films as ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' and ''The Gauntlet.''
  20. The Escape of Prisoner 614
    A pastiche of western tropes too tongue-in-cheek to sell its dramatic intentions, but just sincere enough to smother any intimations of parody, The Escape of Prisoner 614 never commits to a consistent tone. Or even a consistent setting, really.
  21. Modern Life Is Rubbish
    Britpop is a musical genre I had neutral feelings toward before sitting through Modern Life Is Rubbish, a uselessly nostalgic movie named after Blur’s 1993 album. After it, I wondered whether I had been too generous.
  22. Mapplethorpe
    Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.
  23. Tarzan the Ape Man
    As an actress (Derek) displays the sort of fausse naivete that is less erotic than perfunctorily calculated, in the manner of an old-fashioned, pre-porn-era stripteaser who might have started her act dressed like Heidi. This isn't Tarzan, the Ape Man. It's ''Little Bo Peep.''..The kind of movie that might seem funny when seen after several martinis. Viewed stone-sober, it's a movie of more squirms than screams.
  24. Orca
    If it were medically possible to overdose on claptrap, Orca would be compelled to carry a warning from the Surgeon General.
  25. Harold and Maude
    As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.
  26. Set It Up
    The expectation that a female-written, female-directed effort would yield something refreshingly different is scotched within the first few minutes.
  27. Destination Wedding
    All right, then, let’s rip off the Band-Aid: Destination Wedding is torture. And not just because this would-be romantic comedy is grating, cheap-looking and a mighty drag: it also turns two seasoned, likable actors into characters you’ll want to throttle long before the credits roll.
  28. Girls of the Sun
    Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.
  29. City of Lies
    The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Last House on the Left
    The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven.
  31. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Content to be yet another great-man biopic, the movie would rather sanitize than probe.
  32. The Valley
    As an awareness tool, The Valley feels simple-minded. As a drama, it feels exploitative.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Siberia
    [A] leaden thriller.
  34. The Bad News Bears Go to Japan
    The Bad News Bears Go to Japan isn't the sort of bad movie that angers you. It's sad in the way of something that's been abandoned. It deserved better from the people involved.
  35. The Next Karate Kid
    The Next Karate Kid doesn't even try to achieve surface credibility. Under the patient ministrations of Miyagi, Julie metamorphoses from an angry tomboy into a loving, disciplined beauty in a matter of weeks. [10 Sep 1994, p.14]
    • The New York Times
  36. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
    Despite a few lighter touches, the film is still a gory waste of time that plays its murders for all the blood and guts they're worth. There are plenty of cliched reaction shots of faces in terror, more than enough frames filled with bloody knives and severed heads. There is not, however, any suspense about Jason or his victims. He stalks, they scream, he kills. None of it is enough to make you jump out of your seat, though it may be enough to make your stomach churn. [2 Aug 1986, p.9]
    • The New York Times
  37. The Night Eats the World
    The makeup design and chase scenes are rote, and the little dramatic conflict — arguments over where to hide — traffic in the oldest clichés in the genre.
  38. Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
    The New Blood only wishes it had something really new to add to the formula...There is a lot less blood, less screaming, less energy in this installment, as if Jason has become rather bored with his job.
  39. 3 Ninjas Kick Back
    A hectic free-for-all with no point at all.
  40. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    You don’t wait long to be disappointed.
  41. Hot to Trot
    Although Michael Dinner's direction is noticeably better than the material, the film aims consistently for the lowest common denominator.
  42. Joker
    To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. Joker, an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that.
  43. Blue Iguana
    In absence of either good humor or good set pieces, Blue Iguana is a heist gone bust.
  44. Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie
    Five-year-olds who have read their Shakespeare will recognize that Turbo is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
  45. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
    Noisy and meant for children only. A bored grown-up's only consolation is that the Rangers' popularity has probably peaked, and the next kiddie phenomenon must be on the way.
  46. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
    It’s hard to care for characters when what they do and say rings so false. The result plays like the kind of sleazy exploitation movie that the first one so studiously avoided becoming.
  47. Where Hands Touch
    The stridently theatricalized violence is horrific only because it’s so abjectly manipulative. By the end of the movie, my jaw felt unhinged from dropping so often.
  48. Screwballs
    Screwballs establishes that - in the absence of talent - teen-age prurience, old Thunderbirds, rock music and hula hoops do not add up to entertainment.
  49. A Whale of a Tale
    A Whale of a Tale is a rambling blend of complaint, tourism and straw-men arguments. What it’s not is persuasive.
  50. Spring Break
    Each beer-guzzling marathon inevitably leads to one of those bathroom scenes that provide the film with just about its only jokes.
  51. Summer '03
    Vacant in emotion and in cinematic perspective, the movie looks back 15 years but struggles to make an impression longer than 15 minutes.
  52. Second-Hand Hearts
    Second Hand Hearts needs far more than a change of title to save it from oblivion. It needs a screenplay that doesn't treat its characters as if they were waste baskets to be filled with prose that any self-respecting writer would hide from his best friend.
  53. 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.
  54. Viking Destiny
    A bit of low-budget Nordic nonsense that only makes you appreciate the visual finesse and rowdy discipline of the History channel’s “Vikings.”
  55. The Last Suit
    An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.
  56. Donnybrook
    Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing.
  57. Out of Blue
    Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.
  58. 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.
  59. Navajo Joe
    The latest of a succession of super-bloody Westerns made by Italians and Spaniards in Spain with Italian, Spanish and American actors, this time led by Burt Reynolds, as the American titular superhero who dispatches troops of villains singlehanded. Shot in color but decidedly colorless.
  60. 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.
  61. Exorcist II: The Heretic
    Exorcist II begins by looking foolish and slowly becomes a straightfaced film of the absurd.
  62. The Chaperone
    Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.
  63. The Final Conflict
    In the cast are many, many dogs, who are charmed by Damien in a way no audience is likely to be.
  64. Night Hunter
    Caught between a hero with no personality and a villain with way too much (Fletcher’s slobbering performance has to be seen to be believed), Raymond comforts himself with shots of people gazing pensively at clues and pulling grisly things from drains.
  65. King Kong Escapes
    The Toho moviemakers are quite good in building miniature sets, but much of the process photography—matching the miniatures with the full-scale shots—is just bad.
  66. Lords of Chaos
    Akerlund, a veteran music-video director who intersperses Lords of Chaos with mildly surrealistic bursts, never establishes a coherent or interesting point of view. The tone unproductively veers from the goofy to the creepy, which creates a sense that he was still figuring it out in the editing.
  67. Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
    The whole thing is in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff.
  68. Antlers
    The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.
  69. Miss Bala
    This version, in the dreariest Hollywood-remake tradition, turns a grim, morally ambiguous story into a fable of empowerment. That might be kind of fun if it didn’t feel so tired and timid.
  70. Pimp
    Lousy with stereotypes and filthy language, the sordid Pimp wraps 21st-century blaxploitation in a lesbian love story as unconvincing as every other relationship on screen.
  71. Talk Radio
    A mess of a movie that comes complete with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and long, spongy flashbacks...a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play.
  72. 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.
  73. Song of Back and Neck
    What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.
  74. Between Worlds
    While fragments of past, present and who-knows-what events flash past, Cage, bless him, fully commits to the nuttiness.
  75. Annabelle Comes Home
    Burdened neither by fresh ideas nor common sense, Gary Dauberman’s lethargic screenplay (he also directed, an inauspicious debut) takes so long to get moving that Annabelle herself should demand a do-over.
  76. The Jazz Singer
    This movie has nothing but foolishness to carry it along. At least it is foolishness that pretends, however unsuccessfully, to be grand. [19 Dec 1980, p.C18]
    • The New York Times
  77. Oh, God! Book II
    The mirthless follow-up to a film that wasn't all that funny in the first place. [03 Oct 1980, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  78. The Delta Force
    The 1986 film all others will have to beat for sheer, unashamed, hilariously vulgar vaingloriousness.
  79. Invasion U.S.A.
    Though in his last movie, Code of Silence, Mr. Norris, the karate champion-turned-movie actor, seemed on the verge of becoming a kind of benign Clint Eastwood character, he loses all credibility in this awful film.
  80. The Iron Orchard
    This lovingly made homage to avarice feels strangely limp. Instead of gushing, it trickles.
  81. The American Meme
    The American Meme is a polemic as shallow and artificial as it thinks its subjects are.
  82. The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
    The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, the writing-directing feature debut of Henry Dunham, strands seven actors in a warehouse to bark exposition at one another. Listening closely is necessary: The monotonously dark visuals barely function to carry the story on their own.
  83. The Villain
    Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that's not after laughs but heehaws, which in any case it doesn't get.
  84. The Aspern Papers
    Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the The Aspern Papers, based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.
  85. The Last Laugh
    The picture’s single saving grace is Chase’s co-star Dreyfuss, who deploys all of his considerable charisma. He shines, but not brightly enough to bring this moribund project to life.
  86. I'm Not Here
    While the film aspires to a clipped complexity, it comes across as gimmicky and amateurish — a chain of miseries passed off as tough truths.
  87. The Hunter
    An exceptionally clumsy, unpleasant action-melodrama. [1 Aug 1980, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  88. 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.
  89. Enemy Mine
    A costly, awful-looking science-fiction epic with one of the weirdest story lines ever to hit the screen.
  90. The Passage
    The performances are very, very bad, and the mountains boring.
  91. Above the Law
    Come the end of the year, Above the Law may well rank among the top three or four goofiest bad movies of 1988.
  92. Flowers in the Attic
    The scary thing about this movie, written and directed for minimum impact by Jeffrey Bloom, is that the book Flowers in the Attic was followed by four other horticultural horror shows, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns Seeds of Yesterday and Garden of Shadows. There may be bitter fruit to come.
  93. Untogether
    There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.
  94. The Dirt
    Plays like an ill-advised remake of “This Is Spinal Tap” — one in which all the laughs are unintentional.
  95. Two Moon Junction
    A breast-and-buttock show for the soft-porn set...What these repellent people have in common are their great chests and abundant hair. ''You excite me so much I can't help myself,'' says Perry. ''This has never happened to me before,'' says April.
  96. Sliver
    Nobody could shine in the listless atmosphere created by Phillip Noyce's perfunctory direction. And nobody could do much with a line like "Zeke, I want to have a real relationship." Or "Listen, do you work out?"
  97. Honey Boy
    One could watch Honey Boy musing that it must be nice to have someone finance a movie of your 12-step qualification. That assessment is actually too generous.
  98. History of the World: Part I
    The movie is so sour that its humor is often undermined, because so many of the jokes are either mean-spirited or scatological, or both. Women are either explicitly predatory or stupidly decorative, and homosexuals are made fun of regularly. Bathroom jokes are everywhere. Flamboyantly bad taste, which Mr. Brooks raised to the level of supreme wit in his ''Springtime for Hitler'' number in ''The Producers,'' is this time just bad.
  99. 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.
  100. Happy Birthday to Me
    As written by a gang of three totally confused writers and directed, without apparent style, by J. Lee Thompson, it's a mystery-horror movie with a fatal flaw - the denouement, in which a half-dozen grisly murders are explained, requires almost as much footage as the murders themselves.
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