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 Ninth Configuration
    It takes on the overtones not of an awful movie, but of an awful play.
  2. The Man with One Red Shoe
    It's mostly just slight, and none of it elicits more than the mildest of chuckles.
  3. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    The premise is disingenuous at best and, in a moment where scores of citizens are calling for widespread police reform, fearmongering at worst. Like Jigsaw offering one of his facile riddles, this film is not as clever as it thinks it is.
  4. Crazy People
    The movie's attitude toward the mentally and emotionally disturbed is even worse. If Crazy People displayed an ounce of real wit, one wouldn't care, but it's so smug in its ignorance that it begins to look elitist.
  5. 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.
  6. Big Top Pee-wee
    An uninspired circus film for children.
  7. Lazy Susan
    The proceedings, which also include Susan falling hard for a smarmy “Jumpoline” proprietor played by Jim Rash, are professionally executed. Yet the movie’s pace seems glacial. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed a bunch of fish into a barrel and didn’t bother to shoot them.
  8. Hooking Up
    With his first feature, the director and co-writer Nico Raineau flips gender stereotypes, giving Darla more sexually aggressive traits and Bailey more timid ones. But even that feels trite.
  9. My Salinger Year
    Muted almost to the point of effacement, this limp adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, only affirms that what might work on the page doesn’t always pop on the screen.
  10. Solarbabies
    There are times when it appears that Solarbabies might be sending itself up. All of the time, it's an embarrassment.
  11. Meatballs Part II
    Pallid writing, awkward acting, familiar situations and tired jokes make the morons, wimps and losers of Meatballs Part II easy to pass up.
  12. Wisdom
    The problem is that Wisdom is aggressively boring, either because one can predict everything that's going to happen and exactly how it will look on the screen or because the concept of the film eventually seems even more confused than the title character.
  13. Troll
    Troll has a knowing tone that's more smart-alecky than clever. And it hovers uncomfortably between comedy and horror, without ever landing decisively in either camp. The film is as funny as it gets in a sequence that has Sonny Bono pretending to be a great ladies' man.
  14. My Chauffeur
    Despite the presence of such performers as E. G. Marshall and Sean McClory and the comedy team of Penn (the hustler) and Teller (the Arab), My Chauffeur remains a victim of low literacy, muddled characterizations, frequently rudimentary acting and unrealized yearnings toward humor.
  15. Oxford Blues
    The scenery, however, is handsome, and Miss Pays is indeed the sort of beauty who might have inspired Fitzgerald. But on the subject of credible motivation, Oxford Blues is likely to have left him depressed.
  16. Firewalker
    It stars Chuck Norris in what his associates describe as ''the first comedy role in his action-packed career.'' How can they tell? Certainly not from the film, which is lightweight without being lighthearted.
  17. 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.
  18. Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
    Mr. Allen, who directed Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and produced it too, is so obviously ill-equipped to stage action scenes in cramped quarters that his audience winds up wishing as fervently as his characters for a chance to see the light of day.
  19. Hamburger: The Motion Picture
    If the Food and Drug Administration labeled movies, the warning on ''Hamburger'' might be that it is likely to cause heartburn...The result is plenty of irreverence but not much fun. Somebody must have told the waitress to hold the laughs.
  20. Inheritance
    This movie aspires to generate the kind of rich-people-you-love-to-hate juice of cable TV series such as “Billions” and “Succession.” Ultimately, Inheritance doesn’t even get to the level of “Dynasty.”
  21. The Believers
    An absurd, especially cheerless movie about child-sacrificing devil-worshippers who've slipped out of Africa and, via East Harlem, have come down into midtown Manhattan to infiltrate the ranks of the white establishment. In addition to everything else that's wrong, The Believers is more than a little bit racist.
  22. The Occupant
    The Occupant gets eyebrow-raisingly nasty without ever getting interesting.
  23. Pirates
    Pirates is a Roman Polanski grossout. There's a rat in the soup and urine in the bath water and corpses all over the place. There's slipping and sliding and colliding, stabbings, bludgeonings and tumbles from the mast. Nothing is left underdone except the hilarity, the one good excuse for such low-jinks on the high seas.
  24. Grizzly
    Grizzly is not only clumsily plotted, photographed and edited, it is also downright rude when it insists on showing us the bear lopping off an arm or decapitating a horse. Because it's not good enough to earn the right to scare us, I would hope intelligent adults would avoid it and that parents would give it a personal X.
  25. Revenge of the Ninja
    A sadistic, bloody, foul-mouthed action movie.
  26. Almost Love
    The aimless characters in Almost Love like to talk through their feelings, their aspirations, their disappointments, but there is little substance in their epiphanies, and the comedy is too low key to make up for its absence.
  27. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity.
  28. The Wizard
    Video-addicted kids may well find this exciting, but for anyone old enough to stay out later than 9 P.M. it's a distinct bore.
  29. Cyborg
    The movie's endless action sequences are so stylized and overedited that they lack any visceral punch. And Mr. Van Damme's Gibson is so opaque that he makes Mel Gibson's Mad Max seem weepy by comparison.
  30. Four Kids and It
    Though the Psammead grants the children’s wishes . . . they come with a catch: a set up for an unimaginative moral lesson and nearly two hours of lukewarm familial bonding.
  31. A Fine Mess
    Mr. Edwards, who on happier occasions gave us the Pink Panther movies, piles on the pileups until you may suspect that he is trying to distract the audience from the absence of a diverting story or dialogue.
  32. Abe
    This is a maudlin and predictable film, with oversimplified, kid-friendly takes on complex political issues. It’s also a surprisingly joyless production, lacking the stylistic and emotional flair to deliver even on the cheesy, feel-good promise of the setup.
  33. Infinite
    Infinite muddles around with some wishy-washy Eastern philosophy, and has mostly charmless actors (with the exception of Ejiofor, magnetic against the odds) duel and drive while mouthing exposition that lacks even a wisp of subtext.
  34. Capone
    The fantasy sequences are duller than the campy images from the present action.
  35. Stardust
    The director, Gabriel Range, who wrote the movie with Christopher Bell, opted to press on, even after he was denied permission to use Bowie’s songs. They might not have helped much, however.
  36. Ricochet
    The screenplay, by Steven E. de Souza (whose credits include the Die Hard movies), contains many glib, obscene wisecracks, plus the misinformation that Anna Karenina was Tolstoy's first book.
  37. Rising High
    Other than its misogyny, the movie, stacked with try-hard hedonism, fails to provoke more than mild annoyance.
  38. Not Without My Daughter
    It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.
  39. Nothing But Trouble
    A charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap.
  40. Come Play
    Come Play feels secondhand in its overarching conceit, its scare tactics and even its sentimentality.
  41. Blood and Money
    As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, Blood and Money suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses.
  42. Body Cam
    Despite the ripeness and flammability of its material, the movie feels oddly distant, the screenplay marred by weak scares, graceless plotting and dashed-off characters.
  43. The Crush
    Never succeeds in becoming either torrid or scary. It does generate a few chuckles in its depiction of what are supposedly the workings of a chic and hard-hitting magazine...The Crush is for the most part grindingly predictable and mechanically played.
  44. Survive the Night
    It’s possible to imagine a tight, suspenseful version of this home invasion chestnut, but Survive the Night is paced to run out the clock.
  45. The Power of One
    The film's facile treatment of racial issues may be enough to bring back the practice of throwing tomatoes at the screen.
  46. You Should Have Left
    Koepp and Kehlmann’s screenplay fails to properly set the groundwork for the film’s final twist, instead dropping egregious and poorly incorporated hints on the sluggish march to a telegraphed conclusion. And the direction, too, feels languid, almost mechanical, with rote terrors and tones robbed from horror movies past.
  47. The Singing Nun
    It takes a soft heart and a strong stomach to absorb the amount of saccharine that is studiedly and shamelessly dished up in Henry Koster's The Singing Nun.
  48. Viena and the Fantomes
    The Mexican-born Naranjo, best known for the showy 2011 thriller “Miss Bala,” here depicts the toxic gender relations of young louts — culminating in assault, forced drugging, and general grossness and incoherence — with a stoic grimness that wants to look like resigned wisdom. It’s not.
  49. Tom & Jerry
    The de rigueur slapstick scenes for the title characters don’t even play, as the integration of animation and live action is so clunky that it feels like we’re watching special effects demonstrations rather than gags.
  50. The Rental
    Featuring one of the most dissatisfying, anticlimactic endings in genre memory, this paranoid thriller (the directing debut of Dave Franco) turns an isolated seaside villa into a slaughterhouse.
  51. The Patsy
    Another moronic mishmash in which Mr. Lewis falls all over himself.
  52. Secret Society of Second Born Royals
    The most polished superpower on display in the defiantly unexciting Secret Society of Second-Born Royals is the ability to say its title without spitting.
  53. Flannery
    This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.
  54. The Tax Collector
    LaBeouf, like his castmates — in particular, the talented Chelsea Rendon from the STARZ drama, “Vida” — is constrained throughout by the weight of the stereotyping and dialogue that doesn’t stand a chance against the violence.
  55. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    For an ostensible action hero, Henry Golding in the title role does an awful lot of standing around and looking tense. The mayhem is frantic yet forgettable.
  56. The 24th
    This stultifyingly earnest movie makes its points with such a heavy hand that its horrors struggle to resonate.
  57. The Secrets We Keep
    An exploitation film that proceeds as if it were a solemn memorial, The Secrets We Keep doesn’t do right by the Holocaust history it invokes — or much else.
  58. The Sleepover
    As The Sleepover juggles the genres of heist movie, action thriller, scavenger hunt and teen/tween comedy, it never finds an identity which it slips into effortlessly, the way a good thief can.
  59. The Lie
    This is a whiffed effort at an all too familiar subgenre: the ostensibly dark, searing human drama undercut by the fact that all the humans in it are boorish idiots.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Eye of the Cat
    The plot is an overstated, reworked and all too familiar one.
  61. Holidate
    Far worse than these characters’ grating personalities are the regressive strains underpinning their flirtation.
  62. Books of Blood
    It’s a mess — and I’m not just talking about the close-up of a bleeding, ghost-gratified fingernail.
  63. American Pie Presents: Girls' Rules
    The original “American Pie” was tasteless; this version is flavorless.
  64. Skin Deep
    Mr. Ritter is an engagingly comic actor, but the women in his life are so uncharacterized, in the writing, casting and the playing, that the comedy fizzles. All that's left is a movie about a seriously alcoholic writer making a mess of things.
  65. Chimes at Midnight
    A confusing patchwork of scenes and characters.
  66. Kindred
    A derivative, irritating thriller.
  67. Mortal
    Mortal isn’t really a movie proper as it is ponderous scene-setting for a potential sequel.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Devil's Rain
    The Devil's Rain is ostensibly a horror film, but it barely manages to be a horror. The quality of writing, acting and direction give a general and routine witlessness to this movie.
  69. Operation Christmas Drop
    Much of the film feels not light and breezy, but like a self-conscious chore, unwilling to deviate from an established blueprint.
  70. Let Them All Talk
    Despite the talented actors onscreen, Soderbergh’s mannered direction lacks charisma and the characters lack chemistry.
  71. The Next Man
    A suspense melodrama made by people whose talent for filmmaking and knowledge of international affairs would both fit comfortably into the left nostril of a small bee.
  72. Scream
    Throttled by a corrosive self-awareness, the latest Scream is a slasher movie with resting smug face, so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else.
  73. Memories of Me
    A film that assumes it's up to the job of dealing with life and death and love, but is not even up to dealing with lobsters.
  74. Bundle of Joy
    A sadly deficient entertainment when looked at objectively. Its book is an obvious and witless rework of a plot that has gray hairs, and its music and so-called dances are depressingly lacking in class.
  75. Minor Premise
    When a movie that feels this scientifically far-reaching lacks heart, the viewing experience is a dreary, soulless one.
  76. If Not Now, When?
    It doesn’t take long to notice that these are earnest, even humorless, women. They are too busy contemplating their daily turmoil to play or crack a joke. As a result, their chemistry never coheres, and the movie flounders under the weight of lifeless sincerity.
  77. Outside the Wire
    Grainy establishing shots of the skirmish offer little visual information other than its location on an expressway. Without viewers knowing where, and at whom, the soldiers are firing, the onscreen action is rendered indecipherable. Mackie’s quirky performance — Leo ends every order to Harp with an uncomfortable smile — is likewise baffling.
  78. Mortal Kombat
    While the carnage demonstrates some imagination (can ice cauterize wounds? Did a hat just turn into a table saw?), the rules, extending even to whether death is permanent, are so arbitrary that nothing matters. Test … your patience.
  79. The Mack
    Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.
  80. Palmer
    That Palmer eventually embraces Sam as an ally in misfitdom is inevitable. So is the annoyance inspired by this prosaic masculine melodrama.
  81. Locked Down
    The best that Locked Down has to offer, at least while we remain in the throes of a deadly crisis, is a window into a luxurious space to quarantine.
  82. Jade
    Though the combination of Linda Fiorentino, Chazz Palminteri and David Caruso promised Jade some fire, it winds up with no more spark than a doused campfire.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Death Rides a Horse
    As usual, the clutter of clichés is exceeded only by the excessive sound and fury.
  84. Bliss
    Bliss fails to engage the senses, resulting in cinematic disappointment.
  85. Don't Tell a Soul
    A plot twist saves (that might not be the word for it) Don’t Tell a Soul from being absolutely oppressive, merely by injecting a scintilla of “what happens next” appeal — and letting the always-interesting Wilson stretch a bit.
  86. Blithe Spirit
    Surplus buffoonery and a new ending add nothing to the original, leaving us with a movie that obsesses over death while showing all too few signs of life.
  87. The Perfect Weapon
    A macho fantasy of physical control, grace and invincibility in which women are all but absent.
  88. Cool as Ice
    All it really wants to be is a hiphop answer to one of Elvis Presley's sillier vehicles. But the movie, which was directed by David Kellogg and written by David Stenn, fails to deliver an ounce of musical energy.
  89. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Bakkers were many things to many people: appalling, inspiring, laughable, sad. This movie succeeds in making them dull.
  90. Honeydew
    Food — its preparation, consumption and just what the hell its ingredients are — figures in a minimal plot that the filmmakers inflate in a variety of slick but ultimately unimpressive ways (particularly in the editing).
  91. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    Hope isn’t manufactured. It can’t be limited to a shadow of a gesture or shouldered by one man whose extraordinary abilities are heralded in the “super” of his name. And it’s definitely not in the cinematic equivalent of a four-hour-long cut scene.
  92. Getting Even with Dad
    Both Mr. Danson and Mr. Culkin make the film's predictable ending far more effective than it might have been. They are warm without being sappy. It's too bad that the audience, parents and children, are likely to have grown restless long before then.
  93. Untamed Heart
    Untamed Heart is to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it.
  94. Sniper
    As written, directed and played, Miller is as much of a nonentity as Beckett. Their initial enmity and subsequent reconciliation have no more dramatic impact than the battle scenes, which look as if they were planned by amateurs. The two central characters remain as vague as their targets, who are briefly seen at a distance through gun sights.
  95. Young Hearts
    Imagine mumblecore with actual mumbling and no wit, even though those lo-fi auteurs, the Duplass brothers, are executive producers.
  96. The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter
    Made with great effort and no charm, this mirthless fantasy film returns its young hero, Bastian Balthazar Bux (Jonathan Brandis), to the land of Fantasia, which when first glimpsed here appears to be made entirely of cellophane.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    Nagging thoughts are not supposed to arise in horror pictures—last summer Mr. Winner predicted that this picture would be extremely horrifying — but The Sentinel has long stretches where there is nothing to do but notice things.
  98. Mac and Me
    With its cardboard family and familiar aliens, MAC and Me would seem like the generic version of E. T. if it were not so full of brand-name commercials.
  99. A Week Away
    This is a film as tidy, transparent and kid-friendly as a square of Jell-O salad, and so squishily eager-to-please that it doesn’t engage with its religious themes so much as tuck them into song lyrics to hover in the narrative like grapes.
  100. Love Potion #9
    Given the premise, which is said to be inspired by the song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, virtually everything that happens can be predicted from the opening frame.
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