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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    Clearly, the director was awash in his fantasies about lesbianism.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mother and the Whore
    Watching The Mother and the Whore, you find that you're back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties, when a number of mediocre French films focused on sub-Sagan characters: numb, semi-paralyzed creatures who hardly had the calories to drag themselves through the day.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    A simply marvelous cinematic experience.
  4. High Plains Drifter
    Part ghost story, part revenge Western, more than a little silly, and often quite entertaining in a way that may make you wonder if you have lost your good sense. The violence of the film (including a couple of murders by bull-whipping) is continual and explicit. It exalts and delights in a kind of pitiless Old Testament wrath.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    The picture is expertly made and well‐meshed; it moves like lightning and brims with color.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Graffiti
    American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place. Although it is full of the material of fashionable nostalgia, it never exploits nostalgia. In its feeling for movement and music and the vitality of the night—and even in its vision in white—it is oddly closer to some early Fellini than to the recent American past of, say, The Last Picture Show or Summer of '42.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Lightning
    A fairly awful movie that keeps producing good things—scenes, performances, moments of insight—that seem connected to better ideas than anything suggested in the film's larger intentions.
  8. The Day of the Jackal
    The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.
  9. Cleopatra Jones
    The movie seems to want to be a James Bond sort of adventure in black drag, but it's more reminiscent of Batman.
  10. Cahill U.S. Marshal
    Cahill, United States Marshal was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Perhaps recognizing the new limitations of their star, they spend a good deal of time trying to turn a conventional Western into a children-in-peril movie.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sssssss
    Toned down, without the final fireworks, the picture would have emerged as a real sleeper for thriller fans, who should catch it anyway. It's certainly original.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Live and Let Die
    There is a marvelous escape from an alligator farm (deadly reptiles are rather a motif in this movie), a superb collection of grotesque ways of killing, and a fine sense of pace and rhythm.
  13. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    The Friends of Eddie Coyle is so beautifully acted and so well set (in and around Boston's pool halls, parking lots, side-streets, house trailers and barrooms) that it reminds me a good deal of John Huston's Fat City. It also has that film's ear for the way people talk—for sentences that begin one way and end another, or are stuffed with excess pronouns.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scream Blacula Scream
    Despite all its blood-letting, Scream Blacula Scream fails for lack of incident, weakness of invention, insufficient story.
  15. Playtime
    Jacques Tati's most brilliant film, a bracing reminder in this all-too-lazy era that films can occasionally achieve the status of art.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dillinger
    In making his debut as a director, Mr. Milius gives us a "Dillinger" that is fascinating for its speed, action and firepower. But as character studies of decidedly interesting types out of explosive history, "Dillinger" shoots blanks most of the time.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Legend of Hell House
    If John Hough, the director, and his small, willing cast maintain mild tension during their harried visit to this haunted "hell house," the few chills they provide are of little help.
  18. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
    Pat Garrett and Billy the kid suggest either that he (Peckinpah) has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.
  19. The Offence
    The revelations explode predictably, like the ingredients of a 24-hour cold capsule, but the dramatic impact is real while one is watching it.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Soylent Green
    Unfortunately, the script, direction and the principals involved in this struggle for survival often are as synthetic as Soylent Green.
  21. Paper Moon
    Peter Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted Joe David Brown's novel, have set out to make a bittersweet comedy that is both in the style of thirties movies and about the thirties. They evoke the time (1936) and the place (rural Kansas and Missouri) so convincingly that their rather sweet formula story seems completely inadequate, even fraudulent.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Leaves a viewer with the happy thought that she now can get back to nursing and away from films like Coffy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    The aphoristic style, combined with Winner's unwavering visual instinct for crushingly obvious detail, helps to push Scorpio out of low dullness into vertiginous absurdity.
  24. Season of the Witch
    Hungry Wives has the seedy look of a porn film but without any pornographic action. Everything in it, from the actors to the props, looks borrowed and badly used. [12 Dec 1980, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  25. Scarecrow
    It all goes decisively wrong when Jerry Schatzberg, the director, and Garry Michael White, who wrote the screenplay, decide to saddle the pair with a poetic vision that suddenly makes everything needlessly phony.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Theater of Blood
    Douglas Hickox's wry romp spotlights a vengeful Shakespearean ham (Vincent Price) and his helpful daughter (Diana Rigg). It's gory and funny. [14 Apr 1996, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  27. The Mack
    Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.
  28. Sisters
    A good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."
  29. Godspell
    I like its music, its drive and its determination, even when it's pretending to a kind of innocence and naiveté that I never for a second believe.
  30. The Crazies
    An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.
  31. The Long Goodbye
    It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.
  32. Walking Tall
    Valiant Southern sheriff. Effective, unsurprising.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emitaï
    It is a cool, balanced, proportionate spirit, affectionate but unillusioned, and wonderfully suited to the intricacies (and the idiosyncracies) of the subject matter. Sembene does not grab you; he engages you.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Train Robbers
    As an exercise in pleasantness, The Train Robbers is an interesting addition to the late history of the traditional unpretentious Western.
  35. Last Tango in Paris
    Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is a beautiful, courageous, foolish, romantic, and reckless film.
  36. The Heartbreak Kid
    The Heartbreak Kid occasionally goes for laughs without shame (which is what has always bothered me about Simon's brand of New York comedy), but behind the laughs there is, for a change, a real understanding of character — which is something that I suspect, can be attribued to Miss May.
  37. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
    It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.
  38. The Getaway
    The action and the violence of The Getaway are supported by no particular themes whatsoever. The movie just unravels.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Poseidon Adventure
    Though tensions slacken and credibility is strained here, realistic technical effects make the stricken ship and the efforts of its survivors to escape a fairly spellbinding adventure.
  40. Trafic
    For all of the laughter in "Traffic," there are moments when the banal utilitarianism of the super-highway is seen as a work of extraordinary art.
  41. The Mechanic
    I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.
  42. Lady Sings the Blues
    The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fist of Fury
    The action here is as black-and-white and as pleasantly, if naively, diverting as that in any western even though it was all shot in vivid colors.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Last House on the Left
    The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounder
    And if Sounder, an intelligent enough movie, avoids all the major pitfalls of its type, it also lacks the excitement that may have come from plumbing greater depths and discovering a few tougher, less accessible insights.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Way of the Dragon
    Unlike its predecessor, Enter the Dragon, which was praised as a well-made movie, this picture is dreadfully slow and feeble whenever the cast isn't fighting. So you yearn for each battle, just as you wait impatiently for the songs or dances in a tedious musical.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    This sprightly, clever and hilarious treat—all that a comic strip should be on the screen—is even better than "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," which began the series.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    The film's gut pleasures are real, and there are a lot of them. But, they always connect with one another in a world so precisely, cruelly, excitingly balanced that there is no movement without countermovement, no pressure without a greater pressure in return.
  50. Fat City
    A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston.
  51. Deliverance
    An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.
  52. Late Spring (1949)
    Ozu's recognition of the wall of skin separating the mind of the character from the viewer is an integral part of his philosophy. It amounts to a profound respect for their privacy, for the mystery of their emotions. Because of this—not in spite of this—his films, of which Late Spring is one of the finest, are so moving.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joe Kidd
    For perhaps its first half-hour, John Sturges's new Western, Joe Kidd, looks surprisingly good. It seems restrained, relaxed, unfashionably out of the current mode in its commitment to people and horses rather than to sadistic monsters and machines. Nothing remarkable, but modestly decent—a feeling that persists, with continually diminishing assurance, almost until the climax, when everything is thrown away in a flash of false theatrics, foolish symbolism and what I suspect is sloppy editing.
  54. Le Samouraï
    Delon is fine and the movie has the cool delicacy and preci sion one ordinarily associates with something no more philosophical than a Swiss watch. Melville, however, is a philosopher and “The Godson” is as much parable as fascinating melodrama.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hannie Caulder
    Hannie Caulder, which begins cruel and comic, gradually becomes gentler and more serious; and by the time its spirit of outrage has subsided into something like elegy, the film has turned into a fairly moving study of what it means to be cursed by having to pursue a mission instead of a life.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
    It's not bad, as apes and 20th Century-Fox go, at least hand in hand.
  57. The Candidate
    One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.
  58. Frenzy
    Watching Frenzy is like riding a roller coaster in total darkness. You can never be quite sure when you're going to start a terrifying new descent or take a sudden turn to the left or right. The agony is exquisite.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    The thoughtful, ironic script by Joyce H. Corrington and John William Corrington thins only toward the middle and the whole thing has been beautifully directed by Mar tin Scorsese, who really comes into his own here.
  60. Duck, You Sucker
    The resultant mix of dreaminess, violence and politics is a bit unwieldy, but it sticks to your ribs. You'll savor pieces of Duck, You Sucker in your head much later: the mark of a work by a true voluptuary, the overspill in whose craft comes as much from enthusiasm as arrogance.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    The rest of the costumed crew, led by that veteran horror hand, Peter Cushing, as the twins' witchhunting uncle, who chases the fanged Count and his retinue, hardly give Twins of Evil a good name.
  62. The Other
    Thomas Tryon, the actor (The Cardinal), wrote the screen adaptation of his best-selling novel, which is in almost every way more precise, more complex and less ambiguous than the "Summer of '35" sort of movie Robert Mulligan has made from it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeremiah Johnson
    There are momoments of great beauty and terror and deeply earned pathos. There are as well such not-so-incidental pleasures as John Rubinstein's lovely and serviceable musical score, and a cast of excellent supporting actors.
  64. Play It Again, Sam
    Even when he's not in an anarchic mood, Woody Allen is still the funniest neurotic in American movies today and Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross from Allen's screenplay, will probably remain the funniest new movie around this summer until another Allen work shows up.
  65. Buck and the Preacher
    Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier's first film as director as well as star, is a loose, amiable, post-Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience.
  66. Fritz the Cat
    A low, bawdy cartoon feature that hasn't forgotten that there still can be something uniquely funny in animated films that exaggerate human actions and emotions (in this case, love, rage, compassion and, especially, lust) to the extraordinary extents available only in cartoons.
  67. The Godfather
    One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment. [16 Mar 1972]
    • The New York Times
  68. Slaughterhouse-Five
    A wild, noisy, sometimes very funny film that eventually becomes as unstuck in its own exuberance as its hero, Billy Pilgrim, the Illium, N. Y., optometrist, is unstuck in time.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    Even on the basis of a limited exposure to his work, the story seems archetypal Ozu.
  70. Frogs
    Frogs, which is not to be confused with The Birds for an instant, is an end-of-the-world junk movie, photographed rather prettily in Florida and acted by Milland as if he were sight-reading random passages from the dictionary.
  71. Silent Running
    Silent Running is no jerry-built science fiction film, but it's a little too simple-minded to be consistently entertaining.
  72. What's Up, Doc?
    It has a soul of its own, which reflects the changes, for good and evil, in American life in the last 40 years.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cabaret
    Cabaret is one of those immensely gratifying imperfect works in which from beginning to end you can literally feel a movie coming to life.
  74. Pocket Money
    A fragmented, far from‐great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice.
  75. The Cowboys
    So flecked with minor dishonesties that you come to recognize it as a sort of Formica Western, something that amounts to a parody of the real thing.
  76. Dirty Harry
    The pleasures of this movie are abundant. The pacing is as swift as a speeding bullet. There are wonderfully evoked lived-in San Francisco locations... And there are splendid set pieces that showcase the perpetually-underrated Don Siegel's great skill a director. This film is efficient, unpretentious and much wittier and more stylish than your average cop movie.
  77. Straw Dogs
    It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.
  78. Mary, Queen of Scots
    Because both Miss Redgrave and Miss. Jackson possess identifiable intelligence, Mary, Queen of Scots is not as difficult to sit through as some bad movies I can think of. It's just solemn, well-groomed and dumb.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kidnapped
    Except for the locations, which are real, and the color, which is color, the whole thing suggests the dim listlessness of the late late show edging toward the catatonia of 3 A.M.
  80. Minnie and Moskowitz
    Mr. Cassavetes's use of exaggerated slapstick gestures to underscore the loneliness and fears of his characters is more interesting in theory than funny or moving in actual fact.
  81. A Clockwork Orange
    It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at... Because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual--and disorienting--movie experience.
  82. Harold and Maude
    As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.
  83. Diamonds Are Forever
    Diamonds Are Forever is great, absurd fun, not only because it recalls the moods and manners of the sixties (which, being over, now seem safely comprehensible), but also because all of the people connected with the movie obviously know what they are up to.
  84. The Hospital
    Although Mr. Chayefsky has written a very contemporary melodramatic farce, his political sympathies have their roots in the liberalism of 20 years ago.
  85. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
    A tricky, cheerful, aggressively friendly Walt Disney fantasy for children who still find enchantment in pop-up books, plush animals by Steiff and dreams of independent flight.
  86. Nicholas and Alexandra
    The problem with "Nicholas and Alexandra" is not inflation, but deflation, the attempt to cram too big a picture into too small a frame.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born to Win
    Too theatrically phony and too predictably conventional, and the comedy — though in a few cases genuinely funny — is too mechanical for its function.
  88. Brian's Song
    The film's only concession to contemporary cinematography was in the cliché of lyrical slow motion, with extended sequences of the two football players, one white and the other black, running together through sylvan glades. More than that, though, the basic story is moving.
  89. Duel
    Mr. Spielberg's 1971 television film Duel took advantage of the very narrowness of its premise, building excitement from the most minimal ingredients and the simplest of situations.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Play Misty for Me
    It is not simply that the movie fails to make sense. A lot of good movies are weak on sense—though they don't often require a leading man to be quite so dense for quite so long in interpreting the behavior of a psychotic leading woman. But they must not be weak in sensibility, in that logic of emotional response that is the real motive power of the atmospheric thriller.
  91. 200 Motels
    200 Motels is not all bad, but because it's a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting—in actual effect, soporific.
  92. Fiddler on the Roof
    They want to show us everything, to give us our money's worth. In so doing, they've not just opened up the play, they've let most of the life out of it.
  93. The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's fine second film, The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, has the effect of a lovely, leisurely, horizontal pan-shot across the life of Anarene, Tex., a small, shabby town on a plain so flat that to raise the eye even 10 degrees would be to see only an endless sky.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    Subtle, stately, stunningly colored and exquisitely directed by Belgium's young Harry Kumel, the coscenarist, this is far and away the most artistic vampire shocker since the Franco-Italian Blood and Roses 10 years ago.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    The French Connection is a film of almost incredible suspense, and it includes, among a great many chilling delights, the most brilliantly executed chase sequence I have ever seen. [8 October 1971]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Murder of Fred Hampton
    Although it is unabashedly biased and it is flawed in technical execution, it emerges as a disturbingly somber illustration of some of the ills that beset us and our social system.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Skin Game
    Garner and Gossett seem like originals out of American humor, and in a better movie they might have continued that way. But Skin Game is neither written nor directed with enough toughness, or enough compassion, to realize its potential.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black God, White Devil
    At once, one of the most visually effective and artistic examples of the work of Glauber Rocha, a leading light among Cinema Novo's young directors. But as a contemporary allegory fulminating darkly against miseries inflicted on the poor by landowners and the Government, it is more mystically stylized than moving.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Although a disappointment generally, there are several things going for it; among them, the pleasantly aggressive title, which has, as is proper, only the most casual relation to the movie.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Johnny Got His Gun
    Insistent virtue, without ideas, becomes demagoguery.
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