The New York Times' Scores

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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
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    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    This second time around for Harper is a lackluster workout despite its colorful settings, occasional tension and a cast that includes Joanne Woodward (Mrs. Newman). As a convoluted caper it generates action rather than character and surface mystery rather than meaning.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Apple Dumpling Gang
    Walt Disney started by making movies in which animated drawings played the parts of people or animals who stood for people. Later he turned to making movies in which people or animals play the parts of animated drawings. They bound, they double-take, they simper when moved and quack when angry. Their disasters—crashes, plunges through space, explosions—are weightless. The Apple Dumpling Gang is a fair example.
    • 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.
  4. 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    It's not funny at all and, not being funny, it becomes, instead, frivolous.
  6. Bite the Bullet
    A big, expensive Western that doesn't contain one moment that might be called genuine.
  7. Jaws
    If you think about Jaws for more than 45 seconds you will recognize it as nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun, if you like to have the wits scared out of you at irregular intervals.
  8. Nashville
    A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.
  9. Lancelot of the Lake
    What's missing from the film is any urgent interior meaning, and this it may be because of the distractions of the exterior details. It may also be because the conflicts that rage within Lancelot — between duty and desire, courtly love and physical love — simply aren't complex enough to bring out the best in Mr. Bresson.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bug
    Bug is decidedly poisonous. It is not simply a scary picture, nor simply a violent one. It is a cruel picture.
  11. The Wind and the Lion
    An elaborate, expensive‐looking, ludicrously jingoistic historical‐adventure that comes out so firmly in favor of Teddy Roosevelt's “Big Stick” policy, 70 years later, that it could also be a put‐on.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Eiger Sanction
    The Eiger Sanction is a long, foolish but never boring suspense melodrama about a college art professor named Jonathan Hemlock (Clint Eastwood), who has a passion for French Impressionists and mountain climbing and an underground reputation as the best assassin in the international spy business.
  13. The Return of the Pink Panther
    The screenplay is funny but even better are the sight gags that are a kind of inventory of everything Clouseau has been unable to master in his long, irrelevant career.
  14. French Connection II
    The concerns of French Connection II are not much different from those of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen in jeopardy and then figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in the quality of the supermen and in their predicaments.
  15. The Fortune
    It's a marvelous attempt to recreate a kind of farce that, with the notable exceptions of a handful of films by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, disappeared after World War II.
  16. Smile
    It's an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.
  17. The Day of the Locust
    Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death Race 2000
    In the end, it reveals itself to have nothing to say beyond the superficial about government or rebellion. And in the absence of such a statement, it becomes what it seems to have mocked—a spectacle glorifying the car is an instrument of violence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dolemite
    Dolemite remains the Citizen Kane of kung fu pimping movies. [26 May 2002, p.1]
    • The New York Times
  20. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail...is a marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor.
  21. Supervixens
    It's full of the old Meyer preoccupations — insatiable women, impotent men, lonely desert landscapes in which the promise of sex is the only reliable compass. Yet something has been lost. Could it be innocence?
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Unfortunately, Mr. Wayne's first film trip to London doesn't appear to have been necessary. He and his busy company only serve to make Brannigan a commonplace crime caper.
  23. Escape to Witch Mountain
    Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.
  24. Tommy
    Mr. Russell's Tommy virtually explodes with excitement on the screen. A lot of it is not quite the profound social commentary it pretends to be, but that's beside the point of the fun.
  25. Night Moves
    An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.
  26. Shampoo
    In Shampoo Ashby shows that he has a good memory for a couple of decades of cinematic clichés. He gives us an unnecessary motor race and some obligatory slow motion, but he misses most of the opportunities offered him.
  27. The Great Waldo Pepper
    Its moods don't quite mesh and its aerial sequences are so vivid—sometimes literally breathtaking—that they upstage the human drama, but the total effect is healthily romantic. It's the kind of movie that enriches dreams even though its story seems sort of strung-out, like a first draft, and includes moments that slip into bathos.
  28. The Wilby Conspiracy
    The best thing about the movie, flimed mostly in Kenya, is its performances, funny and hip and self-assured in the manner of television personalities working in front of loving audiences. Mr. Caine and Mr. Poitier are never unaware that their material may not be the greatest, but that doesn't spoil their good spirits, and when a good line comes along they get maximum results without stomping on it or us.
  29. The Strongest Man in the World
    A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Man with the Golden Gun
    Mr. Moore functions like a vast garden ornament. Pedantic, sluggish on the uptake, incapable of even swaggering, he's also clumsy at innuendo. If you enjoyed the early Bond films as much as I did, you'd better skip this one.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Considering the ersatz tension and plotting, Black Christmas is hardly worth the efforts of all concerned.
  32. The Front Page
    Even though the mechanics and demands of movie-making slow what should be the furious tempo, this Front Page displays a giddy bitterness that is rare in any films except those of Mr. Wilder. It is also, much of the time, extremely funny
  33. The Towering Inferno
    Movies like The Towering Inferno appear to have been less directed than physically constructed. This one is overwrought and silly in its personal drama, but the visual spectacle is first rate. You may not come out of the theater with any important ideas about American architecture or enterprise, but you will have had a vivid, completely safe nightmare.
  34. Young Frankenstein
    As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.
  35. The Godfather: Part II
    The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was...Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing, and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.
  36. Messiah of Evil
    The film melds a “California Girls” sensibility (the Beach Boys song, to be clear) with boho fashion and depraved supernatural horror in a way that’s feminine, mesmerizing and lurid. There’s no other horror film quite like it.
  37. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an American comedy of the sort of vitality that dazzles European film critics and we take for granted. It's full of attachments and associations to very particular times and places, even in the various regional accents of its characters. It's beautifully written (by Robert Getchell) and acted, but it's not especially neatly tailored. [29 Jan 1975]
  38. Lenny
    One-fourth of the film is so brilliant—and so brilliantly acted by Dustin Hoffman—that it helps cool one's impatience with the rest of the film, which is much more fancily edited and photographed but no more profound than those old movie biographies Jack L. Warner used to grind out about people like George Gershwin, Mark Twain and Dr. Ehrlich.
  39. Murder on the Orient Express
    Like the lovely, extravagantly overemphasized nineteen-thirties' costumes and production designed by Tony Walton, Murder on the Orient Express is much less a literal re-creation of a type of thirties movie than an elaborate and witty tribute that never for a moment condescends to the subject.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Woman Under the Influence
    The movie didn't need to be 2 hours and 35 minutes long: there's too much small talk, which doesn't really reveal character. Still, the most frightening scenes are extremely compelling, and this is a thoughtful film that does prompt serious discussion.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Earthquake
    For those who have a soft spot for calamity pictures, there's a sense of ritual cleansing afterward. And for some reason, it also made me hungry.
  42. Phantom of the Paradise
    Phantom of the Paradise is an elaborate disaster, full of the kind of facetious humor you might find on bumper stickers and cocktail coasters.
  43. Airport 1975
    A silly, jumbo-size sequel to the original film adaptation of Arthur Hailey's Airport.
  44. The Gambler
    Mr. Caan is generally convincing, except in those classroom scenes, but all of the other actors, with the exception of James Sorvino who plays a sympathetic bookie, seem defeated by the quality of the material.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Early Spring
    This modest classic also conveys the claustrophobia of office life better than any other film I've seen.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Bad Mama
    As Wilma McClatchie, the widow who, along with her two teenage daughters, heads into a life of crime with nary a trace of regret, Ms. Dickinson is at her most gloriously sexy.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Phase IV
    In making his feature directorial debut after a succession of distinguished film titles, graphics and short subjects, Saul Bass, with the aid of special insect photography by Ken Middleham (Hellstrom Chronicle), has fashioned a pictorially persuasive adventure.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Longest Yard
    Though The Yard is a terrible picture, I'll admit to having unwillingly enjoyed some of the football practice and parts of the final game —even though it's much too long.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    The narrative of this sympathetic movie wobbles on the edge of sentimentality, though there are only a few sticky moments. But—unlike the novel, which moved swiftly—it has been directed at far too slow a pace, which means that the comic possibilities and the social comment have been diminished.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    The movie's main problem is that the protagonist - the dead head - is a bore.
  51. Together Brothers
    Street-wise older children might find it to their taste; but all the new trappings cannot disguise the fact that "Together Brothers" is an old story, being retold perhaps wisely, but not exceptionally well.
  52. California Split
    A fascinating, vivid movie, not quite comparable to any other movie that I can immediately think of. Nor is it easily categorized.
  53. Death Wish
    Death Wish is so cannily fabricated that it sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger. Yet it's a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where the Red Fern Grows
    There is nothing pretentious or particularly ambitious about Where the Red Fern Grows, but it is a nice film about a boy and his dogs in a peaceful time long ago. [17 Mar 1985, p.28]
    • The New York Times
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    That's Entertainment!
    The pleasures are abundant: Gene Kelly squelching sublimely through puddles in Singin' in the Rain; Judy Garland singing Get Happy over a series of clips of her faces at all ages—the result is a joyful obituary.
  56. Chinatown
    Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirites-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep." Others may not be as finicky. [21 June 1974]
    • The New York Times
  57. The Parallax View
    The movie, which directed by Alan J. Pakula, never rewards the attention we give it with anything more substantial than a few minor shocks.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Seduction of Mimi
    In "Mimi," politics and sex are so well balanced that all the raw emotions and the devastating jokes ring true.
  60. Herbie Rides Again
    The problem with comedies as witless as this is that the villains are much more appealing than the good guys. One winds up rooting for the fellows who would tear down the Plaza to put up a 100‐story, glass‐andbrass breadstick.
  61. My Name Is Nobody
    My Name Is Nobody is terribly knowing. It has the manner of a buff who knows absolutely everything about a subject most other people haven't time for, but it's also very entertaining.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
    Not so hot. Try again, boys.
  63. Daisy Miller
    Daisy Miller transfers to the screen simply and elegantly. Very little is lost that isn't regained through the always unpredictable conjunction of performers with material.
  64. Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is as aimless as its dimly seen characters, who talk a lot of dreadful, cute-tough dialogue but are never recognizable except as the actors who play them. Even that factor isn't much help in enjoying the film.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Black Windmill
    Michael Caine's exasperating cool robs this very well‐made movie of some of its potential excitement.
  66. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
    The film, written by John Elder and directed by Terence Fisher, is not without its intentional giggles. Compared with "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," however, it is very straight and solemn, chock full of the old horror film values we don't see much of any more.
  67. The Lords of Flatbush
    This study of the growing pains of the leather jacket‐bobby soxer Brooklyn high school set of 1957 is, by turns, cheerful, confused, juvenile and never fully realized.
  68. Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII
    It is a glimpse into a vanished era, of self-indulgence mixed with wide-eyed experimentation, to watch ''A Saucerful of Secrets'' - with the band banging wildly at its instruments above Nick Mason's drumbeat - as musicians and director take everything very, very seriously. [13 May 1984, p.32]
    • The New York Times
  69. The Conversation
    Mr. Coppola, the writer as well as the director, has nearly succeeded in making a great film but has, instead, made one that is merely very good.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sugarland Express
    The movie has a casual craziness that seems especially native.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Foxy Brown
    Miss Grier is obviously durable but, unfortunately, is fast becoming a bore despite all the sex, brawls and gore in Foxy Brown.
  72. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    Children who revel in clean-cut heroes, villains given to spells and incantations and the kind of special effects that breathe life into mandrake root, ships' figure-heads, centaurs, griffins and statues of Kali (always a deity beloved of evil forces) will probably find it a happy concoction for passing a rainy afternoon.
  73. Dark Star
    There are some funny routines here, though Mr. Carpenter doesn't seem to have cared much about integrating or sustaining them. Mr. Carpenter makes his amateurishness unmistakable, especially when it comes to the film's four actors. Only one of them can act even crudely (fortunately, his is the largest role). The other three, neither photogenic nor particularly extroverted, look like well-meaning fraternity brothers helping out a pal with his class project.
  74. The Great Gatsby
    Nothing that Mr. Clayton does with the actors or with the camera comes close to catching the spirit of Fitzgerald's impatient brilliance. The film transforms "Gatsby" into a period love story that seems to take itself as solemnly as "Romeo and Juliet."
  75. The Three Musketeers
    Mr. Lester's interpretation of The Three Musketeers looks like an evening in a bump-o-car arena, with magnificently costumed people in place of cars. The adventures are less swashbuckle than slapstick.
  76. Thieves Like Us
    Thieves Like Us is such an engaging, sharply observed account of a long-lost time, and of some of the people who briefly inhabited it, that I hope it doesn't get confused with other films that seem, superficially anyway, to have covered the same territory.
  77. Blazing Saddles
    Much of the laughter Mr. Brooks inspires is hopeful, before-the-gag laughter, which can be terribly tiring...Blazing Saddles has no dominant personality, and it looks as if it includes every gag thought up in every story conference. Whether good, bad, or mild, nothing was thrown out.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Zardoz
    More confusing than exciting even with a frenetic, shoot‐em‐up climax.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    Miss Jane Pittman fulfilled my deepest expectations. I did not look for a miracle nor did I view it with malice. That the show will spawn another film depicting other blacks in other experiences is unquestioned. That it was a triumph of and for the enduring strength of black people is also beyond doubt.
  80. The Exorcist
    The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.
  81. The Sting
    A lot of the other period details aren't too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magnum Force
    The movie is a muddle of morality.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    A number of bit performances, including actual police squads and a team of emergency-room doctors, lend vivid local color and authenticity to an engrossing and adult crime caper.
  84. The Day of the Dolphin
    The Day of the Dolphin is not a movie with much personality of its own.
  85. Sleeper
    There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.
  86. Papillon
    A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.
  87. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.
  88. Don't Look Now
    A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.
  89. Serpico
    It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. (Review of Original Release)
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    This is highly engrossing science-fiction, a French-Czechoslovak co-production in animation.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Stereo mainly proves that you can't successfully spoof psychology merely by making it dull.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Holy Mountain
    Mr. Jodorowsky’s movie is a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and the exploitation of third world cultures by the West. It unfurls like a hallucinogenic daydream.
  93. Westworld
    Crichton the director seems to have had more fun with the film than Crichton the writer, whose screenplay can offer us no better explanation for the sudden, bloody robot rebellion than an epidemic of "central mechanism psychosis."
  94. Robin Hood
    The visual style is charmingly conventional, as gently reassuring as that of a Donald Duck cartoon, sometimes as romantically pretty as an old Silly Symphony.
  95. The Iceman Cometh
    From the opening frames of John Frankenheimer's film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, you get the feeling that you're being taken on a guided tour of one of the greatest American plays ever written, instead of seeing a screen adaptation with a life of its own.
  96. The Way We Were
    By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.
  97. Charley Varrick
    Siegel has decorated the movie with a lot of colorful bit characters including a chatty, sex‐obsessed old woman, but the action sequences give the film its content as well as style.
  98. The Paper Chase
    It takes a long while for The Paper Chase to disintegrate, and there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés.
  99. Badlands
    One may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent. Badlands is a most important and exciting film.
  100. Mean Streets
    No matter how bleak the milieu, no matter how heartbreaking the narrative, some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter. Such a film is Mean Streets.
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