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. The Driver
    Written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, Hard Times, with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.
  2. The Heavenly Kid
    Guardian angel movies almost always have a little charm, but The Heavenly Kid has none.
  3. Looker
    The premise, though, is the only satisfying thing about Looker, which Mr. Crichton has directed from his own original, stupifyingly nonsensical screenplay.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    A movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say.
  5. The Golden Glove
    Akin may deserve credit for not flinching from the grotesque; other serial-killer-adjacent entertainments, like “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Zodiac” or “Mindhunter,” tend to concentrate on the cerebral mechanics of crime solving. But sordid details, undermined by snickers, aren’t in themselves illuminating.
  6. 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.
  7. Possession
    It's a movie that contains a certain amount of unseemly gore and makes no sense whatsoever.
  8. Villains
    Despite some committed performances, particularly from a refreshingly natural Maika Monroe, Villains is a hackneyed farce rich in gimmicks and poor in substance.
  9. 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.
  10. Stuck
    When the characters are singing, you can’t wait for them to get back to talking. And when they’re talking, you can’t wait for them to get back to singing. After a while, you start wishing you were watching that TV ad with a bunch of people on a bus, singing about how they have a structured settlement but they need cash now.
  11. Naples in Veils
    A tedious muddle.
  12. Thriller
    Some early, halfhearted attempts at social relevance aside, Thriller is an act of quotation and little else. It’s less a movie than a mix tape.
  13. Dreamland
    It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.
  14. The Place of No Words
    It’s sweet, personal and tedious.
  15. Murder Mystery
    Aniston and Sandler have a goofy, relaxed rapport that is often amusing despite the film’s best efforts to smother any sign of verve.
  16. A Regular Woman
    A film that feels exploitative, not enlightened.
  17. My Son
    An endorsement of milquetoast vigilantism that’s not nearly as knotty as it presumes to be, the French thriller “My Son” is so reserved in its storytelling and vague in its details that all it elicits is a yawn.
  18. Daughter of the Wolf
    With facile plotting — you could fashion a pretty deadly drinking game out of all the scenes in which someone gets knocked out, or is conveniently left for dead — and humdrum action, the lack of depth or dimension becomes fatal.
  19. Being Frank
    It’s a period movie with little style and a family flick wholly lacking in charm or warmth.
  20. David Cross: Oh Come On
    With the possible exception of his jokes about fatherhood, which are sharp, unsentimental and more economical than the rest of his digressive 70 minutes, Cross’s labored new special picks easy targets.
  21. Liberté
    Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.
  22. The Professor
    Depp’s turbocharged archness is basically the whole show.
  23. Bringing Up Baby
    After the first five minutes of the Music Hall's new show - we needed those five to orient ourselves - we were content to play the game called "the cliche expert goes to the movies" and we are not at all proud to report that we scored 100 per cent against Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde and Howard Hawks, who wrote and produced the quiz. Of course, if you've never been to the movies, Bringing Up Baby will be all new to you - a zany-idden product of the goofy farce school. But who hasn't been to the movies?
  24. The Art of Racing in the Rain
    Enzo is a bad dog, and his antics play worse for the film’s lack of discipline.
  25. Vita & Virginia
    Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.
  26. Cold Blood
    If Petitjean’s dialogue is problematic, its delivery is no less so: at times, the discord between a character’s words and lip movements suggests that some line readings had to be dubbed.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The New Kids
    A teen-age revenge melodrama that is both sadistic and wimpish.
  28. Bad Trip
    However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone.
  29. Zeroville
    A raft of marquee names — including Seth Rogen, James Franco and Will Ferrell — can’t save Zeroville, a maddeningly surreal head trip through Hollywood history and movie-fan insanity.
  30. The Bedroom Window
    The only thing The Bedroom Window seems to be about is movie making - that is, it's about putting pieces of film together to create momentary effects that needn't signify anything at all. Sometimes this is called ''pure cinema.'' Sometimes, in fact, it's pure nonsense.
  31. Hot Pursuit
    Hot Pursuit is just what you'd expect from such a stale formula: a misadventure in paradise that makes ''Gilligan's Island'' look like ''The Night of the Iguana.''
  32. Lady Beware
    A denouement as clunky as the title.
  33. Johnny Be Good
    But mostly the satire is as dated as the recruiters' plaid jackets, as lame as the Johnny Walker joke.
  34. DeepStar Six
    Even the fish lack personality in Deepstar Six, a film that makes the exotic undersea world not much more interesting than the average bedroom closet.
  35. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    The film uses the superficial markers of Asian culture and filmmaking without presenting anything unique in its Marvel take on that tradition.
  36. Blackbird
    The characters are so flimsy, and so wearyingly familiar . . . that Michell is incapable of giving their conflicts life.
  37. A Score to Settle
    Not even John Newman’s distressingly awful dialogue can slow Cage’s roll to a histrionic finish.
  38. Our Friend
    This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.
  39. Saaho
    The movie is crisply, sometimes stylishly shot (Madhie did the cinematography), but it’s too muddled to be slick and too lacking in charm to establish any emotional stakes.
  40. The Package
    The Package is a feeble attempt to keep the old-fashioned cold-war thriller alive in this era of glasnost...Mr. Davis has directed what may be the worst movie Gene Hackman has ever made.
  41. Greener Grass
    A deadpan take on suburban hell — I hesitate to call it a comedy, black or otherwise — the movie takes competitiveness to such excruciatingly surreal lengths that every would-be joke feels agonizingly strained.
  42. 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.
  43. Slam Dance
    Put them all together and you have complete confusion, a movie without any identity whatsoever.
  44. The Fearless Vampire Killers
    This beautifully produced, superbly scenic and excitingly photographed spoof of old-fashioned horror movies is as dismal and dead as a blood-drained corpse.
  45. Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood
    Vampires aren't the only things in Bordello of Blood that can't stand up to daylight. Neither can the plot.
  46. Edie
    Hancock is wasted here, as are the meaty dramatic threads that Elizabeth O’Halloran’s formulaic screenplay never bothers to pull.
  47. Maniac Cop
    The acting is stiff, the dialogue is stiffer and the action scenes are laborious. Even the presence of professionals like Sheree North and Richard Roundtree, in small roles, tend to diminish them rather than improve the film.
  48. Navy Seals
    It might have helped if the film makers had had the humor to see they were turning out ''Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Seals.'' As it is, they take their explosives and their silly roles much too seriously.
  49. Underwater
    It’s a challenge to keep action coherent and build suspense in the submerged environment simulated in “Underwater,” but Eubank doesn’t meet it, instead falling back on stale shocks that are not credibly buttressed by swelling bass effects on the soundtrack.
  50. The Woman in the Window
    The result is something that intermittently looks and sounds like a good movie without ever actually being one.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Naked Prey
    A poor and tasteless motion-picture entertainment, redeemed somewhat by its authentic African setting and its effective use of tribal drums and native music as the accompaniment for a primitive jungle chase.
  52. Lionheart
    Van Damme, who has nonetheless made eight films in six years, including "Bloodsport," "Cyborg" and "Kickboxer." His looks are memorable but his acting skills stunningly limited, confined mostly to the flexing, seething and pouting realm. Should anyone be in the market for an all-new Hercules, Mr. Van Damme might at the very least take a number. But when it comes to even the minimally dramatic events of Lionheart, he's in over his head.
  53. Hot Air
    The film feints at comedy with background gags and an occasional broad performance or two, but it’s primarily a dramatic story — and not a focused one at that.
  54. American Skin
    Instead of lending immediacy, the padded-out documentary conceit only spotlights the stiltedness, and Parker falls short of building credible drama out of urgent issues.
  55. Mary
    Narrative ellipses and a slew of visual clichés — like vague shapes, ghostly footprints and disorienting flashes of light — make Mary (the name shared by the ship and the couple’s younger daughter) a particularly unsatisfying possession yarn.
  56. Ága
    The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.
  57. Revenge
    A flaccid movie version of Jim Harrison's slightly less flaccid 1979 novella...The movie is soft and aimless. Revenge is the kind of film in which subsidiary characters and events are more interesting than anything the movie is supposed to be about. Even the brutality has no shock effect.
  58. She's Out of Control
    Anyone who has watched television for even a night will be able to predict every scene in She's Out of Control with total accuracy. It is an extended version of familiar, bland sitcom situations, with Mr. Danza playing a smoother-edged version of his character on the endlessly running hit ''Who's the Boss?''
  59. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Gross, unfunny...In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original.
  60. Jungleland
    The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.
  61. The Warrior Queen of Jhansi
    An unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai.
  62. Best Defense
    It really isn't easy to make a movie as mind-bendingly bad as Best Defense. It takes hard work, a very great deal of money and people so talented that it matters when they fail with such utter lack of distinction.
  63. House II: The Second Story
    It means to be funny, with a cast including several talented young comedians (among them Bill Maher, as a record business exectuvie), but it's not.
  64. Race with the Devil
    This is a ridiculous mishmash of a movie for people who never grew up, which is not so say it's for children. One would think that Mr. Fonda and Mr. Oates had better things to do, but perhaps not. American movie production is in a bad state.
  65. Drop Dead Fred
    Drop Dead Fred wants to be an offbeat cross between "Harvey" and "Beetlejuice," but it is more like a shrill, interminable episode of "I Dream of Jeannie."
  66. The Turning
    It’s the movie’s open-endedness and literary vestiges that sit uneasily with its repetitive goosings, which manifest in exceedingly familiar ways.
  67. Shivers
    It's apparent that someone connected with They Came From Within has an impertinent sense of humor even though the film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it's difficult to stay with it.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    The picture races into a wild chase of a climax that is pure bunk.
  69. Radioflash
    At fault is a threadbare, irritatingly vague script (by the director and artist Ben McPherson) that simply strings together a series of generic setups and forgettable characters.
  70. Cubby
    Whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe-worthy minutes.
  71. A Kid in King Arthur's Court
    Sluggish and low-energy.
  72. Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
    The sequel suffers from a lame, saccharine premise and a fatally earnest manner.
  73. Crown Vic
    Souza’s feature plays like an amalgam of the tropes of numerous TV and movie police procedurals.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Night of the Lepus
    The film relies almost entirely on slow-motion shots of ordinary rabbits running through miniaturized settings or in front of scaled-down back projections. It is this technical laziness as much as the stupid story or the dumb direction that leaves the film in limbo and places it in neither one camp nor the other.
  75. Blumhouse's Fantasy Island
    This is all interesting from a pro-am cinema semiotics perspective, but none of it is in the least bit scary. This, really, is what happens when you take all the wrong lessons out of film school.
  76. Witchboard
    The very best I can say is that Witchboard should encourage struggling film makers. Watch it and think, ''I can do better than that!''
  77. Leprechaun
    The title character in the new horror film titled Leprechaun is supposed to be fiendish but, though the movie's body count is respectable, he seems to be no more than dangerously cranky. That may be because the setting is rural North Dakota, which doesn't suit leprechauns, or because the screenplay and direction are amateurish, which doesn't suit films of any kind. [09 Jan 1993, p.17]
    • The New York Times
  78. Antebellum
    Written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, and propelled by the charisma of Janelle Monáe, it lines up moments of possible insight and impact and messes up just about all of them.
  79. Body of Evidence
    Body of Evidence ranks with the Edsel. It's not going anywhere. As a movie, it looks as if it wanted to be Basic Instinct, though it winds up more like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Terminal Man
    The picture moves as slowly as a glacier—an image that's reinforced by the repetitive shots of long, white hospital corridors, white bathrooms and home décor—in fact, it's a white-on-white movie. There's no suspense; the only frightening moments occur when you fear it may last forever, especially during the seemingly endless operation and an interminable manhunt.
  81. The Great War
    It simply does not have the budget or craft for the scale it requires.
  82. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    “Sponge on the Run” may take us back under the sea, but this sponge is all dried up.
  83. Dabangg 3
    Dabangg 3 is earnest, and it earnestly wants to deliver thrills. To do so, though, it would have to provide that other essential Bollywood ingredient: emotion. What’s missing are the tears. The movie hardly leaves a trace.
  84. A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby
    Although it offers a dungeon, a curse and a shocking theft, this flat, anodyne movie is unlikely to join the pantheon of holiday classics, so keep a rein on your expectations and accept that you’ll need something more to salvage the evening.
  85. The Swarm
    Mr. Allen might just as well have devoted his talents to man-eating goldfish, poodles on the rampage or carniverous canaries.
  86. VHYes
    Even when the ghost of a point materializes — that recording ephemera can be a self-soothing behavior — VHYes is too unsophisticated to develop it.
  87. The Lovebirds
    Rae and Nanjiani do their best, but neither the dialogue nor the direction serves their talents adequately.
  88. Three for the Road
    The director, B. W. L. Norton, and the writers, Richard Martini, Tim Metcalfe and Miguel Tejada-Flores, display no idea whatsoever of how to keep a film moving or how to hold an audience's interest. Listlessness and sloppiness on this scale are truly depressing.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Futureworld
    A film about robots and, evidently, for robots. It is as much fun as running barefoot through Astroturf.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Fall from Grace
    Ultimately, nothing is much of a surprise in a story that fails to untether itself from Perry’s longest lasting trope: the sad black woman.
  91. The Sonata
    Bedazzled or otherwise, clichés are still clichés, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them.
  92. John Henry
    This first feature from Will Forbes is a big slice of ham.
  93. Paradise
    Paradise is The Blue Lagoon with camels.
  94. Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway
    If it’s annoying to watch a follow-up snark at itself while implicitly snarking at viewers for buying tickets to a crass-ified Peter Rabbit, the conceit offers evidence that things might have been worse. At least Gluck doesn’t send Peter into space.
  95. Death Warrant
    All of the performances are terrible, but Joseph Porro's costume design is arresting. Mr. Van Damme and the other prisoner look as if they had been outfitted by an upscale outlet of a Banana Republic-type men's boutique.
  96. Rebecca
    This Rebecca can’t really suffer in comparison to its predecessor. To suffer it would need nerves, a pulse, a conscience, or at least some idea of its reason for being.
  97. The Forever Purge
    Words like “colonialism” and “the American dream” are thrown around, to little avail. This movie ultimately cares more about monotonous shootouts than making points about border relations
  98. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
    Another elaborately produced, brutal, all-too-jocular adventure film, which cost so much money that it's difficult to take it as lightly as it means to be taken. There's something deeply unpleasant about seeing this many millions of dollars being spent to such paltry purpose.
  99. King Solomon's Mines
    And that's the problem. Despite strenuous efforts by Herbert Lom and John Rhys-Davies as a pair of comical villains who can't decide whether they are supposed to be funny or menacing, the story is lost in the effects. As Mr. Chamberlain remarks at one threatening moment, ''Boy, looks like they've thought of everything.''
  100. 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.
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