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
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hell Night
    Hell Night is not so bad as it might be. It is not so good as it might be, either, but remember that it is a horror film. As the popular culture declines, the horror film declines with it, and whereas the horror film was once spooky, now it is nauseating, measured by the barf, rather than the shiver. Hell Night, however, is only about half a barf, an improvement, therefore, over its kind.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Private Lessons
    Private Lessons is soft core -breasts, garter belts, heavy panting -with a touch of Walt Disney. There is a comic car chase, a funny fat boy and lots of California sunshine. After all, the film, which is based on ''Philly,'' a novel by Dan Greenburg, is supposed to be a comedy. Maybe this is another first, the old porn updated for the new consumer society.
  3. An American Werewolf in London
    When the movie backfires, which it finally does, it's because too much grisly footage has been used too lightly. Mr. Landis's comic detachment, which has been fascinating throughout much of the movie, is something he holds on to even when a deeper response is needed. Eventually it becomes less comic than callow.
  4. Prince of the City
    Prince of the City begins with the strength and confidence of a great film, and ends merely as a good one. The achievement isn't what it first promises to be, but it's exciting and impressive all the same.
  5. They All Laughed
    It's aggressive in its ineptitude. It grates on the nerves like a 78 rpm record played at 33 rpm.
  6. Deadly Blessing
    A better-than-average horror film, in large part because it isn't about terrified coeds being stalked by an ax wielding loon. Its story is more original than that -although where horror-movie ingenuity is concerned, it's only a thin line that separates the original from the bizarre.
  7. An Eye for an Eye
    As martial-arts movies go, it's pretty tame. As movies of any other sort go, tame is putting it nicely.
  8. Student Bodies
    Student Bodies just slowly topples over as you watch it, like a stand-up comedian in the act of failing.
  9. Heavy Metal
    For anyone who doesn't think an hour and a half is a long time to spend with a comic book, Heavy Metal is impressive. Though it owes some slight bit of its toughness and nihilism to Ralph Bakshi, this animated feature is off on its own track, combining science fiction, mysticism, sex, violence and rock music. Much of the time, these elements do what the film makers want them to, and make for a heady mix.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Condorman
    It is painless and chaste, and it has a lot of beautiful scenery and beautiful clothes. There are worse things to watch while you eat popcorn.
  11. Victory
    The beauty of the sport, especially the ultimate grace of a player of Pele's extraordinary caliber, is captured in a series of slow-motion shots that communicates something of the appreciation and excitement that can be experienced only by a true aficionado. The form of the film is conventional, but the manner in which it has been executed is not.
  12. Blow Out
    Yet more important than anything else about Blow Out is its total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium in which, as Mr. De Palma has said along with a number of other people, style really is content.
  13. Wolfen
    Wolfen is so good-looking that one tends to ignore a certain but very real inner vacuity.
  14. 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.
  15. Eye of the Needle
    An ambitious, energetic thriller that stops short of real excitement for reasons that are hard to pinpoint. It's an entertaining movie, and an extremely well-acted one.
  16. Arthur
    Arthur is a terrifically engaging, high-spirited screwball comedy about Arthur's more or less accidental salvation, largely through the love of a good, very poor but equally daffy young woman named Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli).
  17. Endless Love
    Mr. Zeffirelli and his screenwriter, Judith Rascoe, have bitten off so much more than they can chew that their film is virtually unintelligible at times. A great deal happens in the novel, much more than this two-hour movie can contain. But it tries to touch so many bases that its transitions are jolting, its scenes often undeveloped, and the motives of its characters frequently unclear.
  18. Zorro: The Gay Blade
    Zorro, the Gay Blade, which was directed by Peter Medak (''The Ruling Class'' and ''The Changeling'') and written by Hal Dresner, has some of the slapdash bounce of Bob Hope's long-ago Paramount comedies. Though it doesn't have the authoritative timing and leering presence of Mr. Hope, it has its own careless charm and an appealing tolerance for jokes that aren't wildly funny.[24 July 1981, p.16]
    • The New York Times
  19. Escape from New York
    It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season.
  20. The Fox and the Hound
    One of the nicer things that can be said about The Fox and the Hound is that it breaks no new ground whatsoever. This is a pretty, relentlessly cheery, old-fashioned sort of Disney cartoon feature, chock-full of bouncy songs of an upbeatness that is stickier than Krazy-Glue and played by animals more anthropomorphic than the humans that occasionally appear.
  21. The Decline of Western Civilization
    A shrewd and engrossing documentary even for audiences who have absolutely no patience for the music it includes.
  22. S.O.B.
    It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time.
  23. For Your Eyes Only
    Most of the time, though, For Your Eyes Only is a slick entertainment...not the spaced-out fun that "Moonraker" was, but its tone is consistently comic even when the material is not.
  24. Stripes
    The chief thing it counts on is a built-in appreciation of the Murray sense of humor, which is growing ever more refined as Mr. Murray proceeds with his movie career. Mr. Murray hasn't yet reached the point at which his routines can be sustained for more than 10 minutes at a time. But he has achieved a sardonically exaggerated calm that can be very entertaining.
  25. Dragonslayer
    Dragonslayer has pacing problems, and its special effects tend to be more overpowering than helpful. But it also has a sweetness and conviction that amount to a kind of magic.
  26. The Great Muppet Caper
    Here is a thoroughly genial movie, a combination of A.A. Milne, Busby Berkeley and a small bit of Blake Edwards.
  27. Superman II
    A marvelous toy. It's funny, it's full of tricks and it manages to be royally entertaining, which is really all it aims for.
  28. The Cannonball Run
    The highway is alive with the sound of a loud musical score, spectacular car crashes, pursuits, sudden breakdowns and jokes, practical and impractical. Some of it is ingenious, and all of it is breathless...The Cannonball Run is inoffensive and sometimes funny. Because there are only a limited number of variations that can be worked out on this same old highway race, don't bother to see it unless you're already hooked on the genre.
  29. Raiders of the Lost Ark
    One of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made.
  30. Clash of the Titans
    Clash of the Titans is profligate in its use of talented people who are not particularly at home in this sort of film, though they all pay serious attention to their work.
  31. 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.
  32. Nice Dreams
    If marijuana has a way of heightening the hilarious aspects of things that might not otherwise be funny, then this is very much a marijuana movie. But Nice Dreams also has a more general appeal than that. These are high spirits that don't have to do with being high.
  33. The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia
    Kristy McNichol and Dennis Quaid, as a mutually devoted sister and brother, are personable but idle in this largely uneventful tale.
  34. Polyester
    Polyester is not Mr. Waters's ordinary movie. It's a very funny one, with a hip, stylized humor that extends beyond the usual limitations of his outlook.
  35. Bustin' Loose
    Bustin' Loose is not unbearable, though a soft-hearted Richard Pryor is not a terribly funny Richard Pryor.
  36. The Four Seasons
    Mr. Alda's direction is particularly strong for bringing out his actors' humanity, and for developing a comic timing that helps unite the cast.
  37. Outland
    Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won't enlarge one's perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.
  38. Death Hunt
    Nothing in Death Hunt makes a great deal of sense, though the scenery is rugged and the snowscapes beautiful.
  39. 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.
  40. 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.
  41. The Burning
    The Burning makes a few minor departures from the usual cliches of its genre, though it carefully preserves the violence and sadism that are schlock horror's sine qua non.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Friday the 13th Part 2
    FRIDAY the 13th Part II will frighten you, at least for moments, although it will be a close-run thing whether it will be fright, nausea or simple distaste that gets to you first. The movie exists for no other purpose than to shock. The plot is an excuse for joining together horrors, all of the sado-masochist kind, and the acting is rudimentary at best. It probably will make a fortune. [4 May 1981, p.C1]
    • The New York Times
  43. King of the Mountain
    Much of the movie is occupied by people as they race one another down Mulholland Drive, but because most of the races are run at night, they aren't as exciting as they might be.
  44. Ms. 45
    Abel Ferrera...has a tin ear for dialogue and an evident penchant for ludicrous material. But beyond that, he is clearly a talented fellow. One can only hope he finds something else to make movies about very soon.
  45. The Hand
    A suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.
  46. Caveman
    The movie is nicely whimsical, and elaborate in a way that no fantasy film this side of outer space has lately been. It's dopey, but it's also lots of fun.
  47. Knightriders
    Though Knightriders is absurd when you get right down to it, its absurdities are often fun and far less offensive than the solemnities that Mr. Boorman has dished up at far greater expense.
  48. Excalibur
    Mr. Boorman takes these myths very seriously, but he has used them with a pretentiousness that obscures his vision.
  49. Nighthawks
    We've seen movies like Nighthawks before, but we haven't seen one in a while. That may be why this police film, with an international cast and a plot about international terrorism, has so much punch. All of it is standard stuff, and yet Nighthawks has been assembled with enough pep to make it feel fresh. It is particularly helped by the performances of Rutger Hauer, a Dutch actor who makes a startling impression as a cold-blooded fiend, and Sylvester Stallone, from whom less is definitely more.
  50. The Howling
    It's also one of those movies that is itself so lethargic that one welcomes its so-called shock moments not because they are scary but because they indicate that not everyone behind the camera has been napping. You don't dread the possibility of something jumping out from behind the door. You long for it.
  51. This Is Elvis
    This isn't a particularly well-made film, or even a truthful one - as a matter of fact, its fraudulence is its one uncompromising aspect. And yet it is mesmerizing, if not as a drama or documentary, then as an artifact.
  52. Atlantic City
    A rich, gaudy cinema trip.
  53. Thief
    Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple. Time after time scenes start off well and slip into unintentionally comic excess.
  54. The Postman Always Rings Twice
    Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.
  55. The Final Conflict
    In the cast are many, many dogs, who are charmed by Damien in a way no audience is likely to be.
  56. Cutter's Way
    It's the sort of picture that never wants to concede what it's about. It is, however, enchanted by the sound of its own dialogue, which is vivid without being informative or even amusing on any level.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Funhouse
    Mr. Hooper almost persuades us that he is up to more than just gore, creepiness and trauma.
  58. Back Roads
    Less a movie than an extended sketch, and it's to the credit of Mr. Ritt, his stars and Gary Devore, the screenwriter, that the movie is so much fun, even given its occasional soggy patches.
  59. Permanent Vacation
    It's a must-see for anyone who shares the belief that Mr. Jarmusch is the most arresting and original American film maker to come out of the 1980's.
  60. Maniac
    William Lustig is the film's director, and Joe Spinell, who plays the maniac, also collaborated on the screenplay (with C.A. Rosenberg) and wrote the original story. He is terrible in all capacities, though his performance is more immediately objectionable. Watching him act like a psychopathic killer with a mommy-complex is like watching someone else throw up.
  61. The Dogs of War
    It demonstrates the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn't often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd. This is evident as much in what the film doesn't do and say as in what is actually seen on the screen.
  62. American Pop
    American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.
  63. Eyewitness
    A thoroughly delightful but far from plausible mystery melodrama that operates exclusively on high spirits and a no-nonsense intelligence that is never sidetracked by coherence.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    My Bloody Valentine
    My Bloody Valentine probably won't make you shiver with fright, but it's almost certain to make you squirm, first with irritation and then with revulsion.
  65. Fort Apache the Bronx
    A tough-talking street melodrama, both shocking and sorrowful, acted by Paul Newman and a huge cast with the kind of conviction that can't be ignored.
  66. Scanners
    Unfortunately the plot thickens so rapidly and so lumpily that one very soon loses interest in spite of the quite stunning and gory special effects.
  67. Altered States
    The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much.
  68. 9 to 5
    The three actresses make an attractive team, but neither the screenplay, by Colin Higgins and Patricia Resnick, nor the director, Mr. Higgins, uses them very effectively. It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality.
  69. Seems Like Old Times
    The material here is slick and entertaining, and Mr. Sandrich settles for comic simplicity without reaching for anything more. He coaxes the film along at a cheerfully breakneck rhythm. Zany, zany but nice.
  70. 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
  71. Inside Moves
    It's a modest and sentimental movie, but also one that, on its own terms, accomplishes what it means to.
  72. The Mirror Crack'd
    That The Mirror Crack'd never builds up much momentum has less to do with Guy Hamilton's direction and the performances than with the screenplay by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, which promises more sophistication than it ever delivers.
  73. Any Which Way You Can
    Any Which Way You Can is a loose, lighthearted Eastwood vehicle aimed at the good-timey sector of this actor's audience. The real star of this series is Clyde the orangutan, and it looks as if Clyde has another hit on his hairy hands.
  74. Popeye
    Miss Duvall is superb - genteely ladylike one minute, a woman of volcanic passions the next.
  75. Tess
    A lovely, lyrical, unexpectedly delicate movie. [12 Dec 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  76. Stir Crazy
    Stir Crazy is an energetic but spiritless shambles.
  77. 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
  78. Heaven's Gate
    Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening. Heaven's Gate is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster.
  79. Raging Bull
    The entire film is played at such high pitch it may well exhaust audiences that don't come prepared. And, at the heart of the film, there is the mystery of Jake himself, but that is what separates Raging Bull from all other fight movies, in fact, from most movies about anything. Raging Bull is an achievement.
  80. The Idolmaker
    The Idolmaker is a modest, interesting, well-acted movie, more lively than it is exciting.
  81. Alligator
    A very funny meditation on the old ''what happens when you flush the goldfish down the john?'' nightmare. It is also a formula film that simultaneously demonstrates the specific requirements of the formula while sending them up with good humor.
  82. Breaker Morant
    By the time it plays out its hand, this film has become genuinely, surprisingly affecting. And unspeakably sad.
  83. Fade to Black
    The trouble with Fade to Black is that it's supposed to be a thriller. It's much more amusing than it is scary, although the killings are gory enough to be borderline vile. [17 Oct 1980, p.C5]
    • The New York Times
  84. Private Benjamin
    Mr. Zieff demonstrates great skill in keeping the gags aloft and in finding new ways by which to free the laughs trapped inside old routines about latrine duty, war games, forced marches and calisthenics. [10 Oct 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  85. The Elephant Man
    What we eventually see underneath this shell is not the study in dignity that Ashley Montagu wrote about, but something far more poignant, a study in genteelness that somehow supressed all rage. That is the quality that illuminates this film and makes it far more fascinating than it would be were it merely a portrait of a dignified freak. [03 Oct 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  86. Kagemusha
    There is beauty in Kagemusha but it is impersonal, distant and ghostly. The old master has never been more rigorous. [06 Oct 1980, p.14]
    • The New York Times
  87. Somewhere in Time
    The screenplay is priceless (funny) and it's Mr. Reeve who sets the film's tone. Unfortunately, his unshadowed good looks, granite profile, bright naivete and eagerness to please - the qualities that made him such an ideal Superman - look absurd here.
  88. 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
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Terror Train
    The intention here was to make a thriller, a suspense movie about some people trapped on a train, waiting for an unknown killer to strike. The problem is that they don't do very much else except wait.
  90. Gloria
    It has its charms but not for a minute is it believeable, and it's certainly never embarrassingly moving in the schmaltzy way of such slick Hollywood kidflicks as Paper Moon and even The Champ. [01 Oct 1980, p.19]
    • The New York Times
  91. My Bodyguard
    My Bodyguared is a sweet little movie about characters who really seem to be people, and that sort of verisimilitude is rarer than it ought to be nowadays.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Mother's Day
    Low-budget horror films occasionally show the faintest glimmer of talent and are praised out of all proportion to their merits. Others are merely bad. Mother's Day goes beyond that. It is as though the persons responsible for it possess some fearsome power as yet unknown to science called antitalent.
  93. Ordinary People
    A moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them. Not since Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" has there been a movie that so effectively catches the look, sound and temper of a particular kind of American existence.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Beyond the Stars
    There is a lot of stirring music on the soundtrack, and a fair amount of amusement in the audience. The special effects aren't bad, either.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    He Knows You're Alone
    He Knows You're Alone is the latest in a ghouls' parade of cheaply made horror movies by young and unknown film makers. It is the first theatrical film for the 30-year-old director, Armand Mastroianni, who is said to be a cousin of the film star, and it shows in uncertain pacing, halting performances and innumerable technical flaws. [26 Sep 1980, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  96. Scum
    If some of the plot seems familiar, the intelligence with which Mr. Clarke dissects the flaws of Britain’s “borstal” system is not. [15 Jun 2017]
    • The New York Times
  97. Smokey and the Bandit II
    The screenplay, by Jerry Belson and Brock Yates, is not so surreally funny as the one for the first film, but funny lines are not what the picture is about. Smokey and the Bandit II is about movement, action, frustration and destruction, and Mr. Needham, one of Hollywood's most successful stunt artists before he became a director, is very good at this sort of thing. Smokey and the Bandit is entertaining in a brainless way.
  98. Xanadu
    Like The Wiz...Xanadu is desperately stylish without having any real style.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »