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. Prom Night
    The movie offers less gore than the average Band-Aid commercial and fewer scares than the elimination episodes of "Dancing With the Stars."
  2. Holding Trevor
    This portrait of 20-something gay men and their straight friends is a joyless exploration of middle-class deadbeats (with the exception of Ephram) lost in a torpid funk of low self-regard. Because they’'e not rich, there is no sleazy zing of "Less Than Zero"-worthy glamor.
  3. Disaster Movie
    Does little more than congratulate its audience on recognizing the source of its riffs. "High School Musical" -- ha ha ha!
  4. Forever Strong
    A mawkish drama hobbled by a thoroughly unpleasant and uncharismatic lead performance.
  5. Nobel Son
    An aggressively noisy exercise in style over substance about nasty people doing nasty things to one another in (sigh) Southern California.
  6. Punisher: War Zone
    Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to?
  7. Lake City
    Feels like a movie whose story was slapped together during filming. Its three phases -- Southern pastorale, Sudsville and Kablooie -- don’t really connect.
  8. Good
    In Good, the anemic screen adaptation of C. P. Taylor's play about a respectable "good German" who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda, Viggo Mortensen, miscast and ineptly directed by Vicente Amorim, plays John Halder, a liberal, mild-mannered literature professor who becomes a Nazi.
  9. The Lodger
    Prostitutes are not the only things butchered in The Lodger, a spooky story ruined by lumpen dialogue, cloddish performances and a director and writer (David Ondaatje) oblivious to both.
  10. The Ugly Truth
    A cynical, clumsy, aptly titled attempt to cross the female-oriented romantic comedy with the male-oriented gross-out comedy that is interesting on several levels, none having to do with cinema.
  11. Spinning Into Butter
    Less a movie than an essay.
  12. Crank: High Voltage
    Boorish, bigoted and borderline pornographic.
  13. Death in Love
    Death in Love hasn't a drop of humor or hope. Its dull, smudged look makes every environment appear joyless and claustrophobic.
  14. Homecoming
    Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.
  15. The Collector
    Offers agony in a vacuum, a villain without a motive and a hero with more personal problems than lines of dialogue.
  16. St. Trinian's
    A stunningly witless revival of the infamous British film series about a girls’ boarding school.
  17. Eating Out: All You Can Eat
    The sex (of which there isn’t much) isn’t sexy, and the humor isn’t funny.
  18. Breaking Point
    After a particularly brutal, attention-grabbing start, Breaking Point quickly devolves into a flavorless stew of murder, corruption, blackmail and baby tossing.
  19. Harlem Aria
    Missing no stops on the road from cloying to annoying, Harlem Aria has waited more than 10 years for domestic release. Maybe its destiny has been written.
  20. Black Knight
    A movie that knows its audience. Its underlying philosophy might be: why try harder when this is all they expect?
  21. Biker Boyz
    The movie is so sloppily written and directed that its bits of bluster never cohere.
  22. Fidel
    This is bad cinema and bad history. Ms. Bravo is unstinting in her praise for the omelet and her admiration of the chef, but she refuses to admit that she's walking on eggshells.
  23. Love, Honor and Obey
    Terminally scatterbrained gangster farce.
  24. J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche
    Brain-dead.
  25. The Wolves of Kromer
    Silly, heavy-handed film.
  26. Fast Food Fast Women
    Almost creates a sense of dread as you sit watching its raft of aimless, self-absorbed neurotics clang into one another.
  27. Texas Rangers
    This violent meatball western deserves to be forgotten quickly.
  28. Passion of Mind
    It's hard to take Passion seriously because it brings to mind the kind of shallow psychology that wouldn't be out of place in a history short about Sigmund Freud on "ABC Schoolhouse Rock."
  29. Eye of the Beholder
    Impenetrable mess of a movie.
  30. Bats
    Cause for fright in only one respect: the possibility that it could spawn sequels.
  31. Backstage
    Backstage isn't as good as the rap documentaries "Rhyme and Reason" and "The Show," but it still casts a keen, observant eye...on this world.
  32. Price of Glory
    In films, as in the ring, heart and will without exceptional talent don't produce winners.
  33. Knockout
    One long, 1980s-style inspirational cliche.
  34. Money Buys Happiness
    About 20 minutes in, it is clear that the couple will emerge as nothing more than crabby yuppies whose articulation of their pouts sounds like the same argument over and over again.
  35. Intern
    Ultimately as sycophantic as it is needling.
  36. The Rising Place
    This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.
  37. The Story of Us
    Though it sets out to explain why this marriage is worth saving, The Story of Us could prompt even single members of the audience to file for divorce.
  38. Running Free
    Vacillates between cutesy Disney-style anthropomorphism and "Born Free" exoticism.
  39. The Real Cancun
    All its 89 minutes of fast cuts, swooping overhead shots, sun, surf, song, sunburn and sex cannot obscure the extent of its shallowness.
  40. Harrison's Flowers
    A stupefying mix of action, politics and melodrama.
  41. Lost Souls
    It's the central story that's lacking.
  42. Trixie
    Despite its occasional flashes of brilliance (every Rudolph film has them), this unsavory stew never comes to a boil.
  43. The Body
    If the film were a fight, they'd have stopped it.
  44. The Monkey's Mask
    Instead of suspense, there is confusion; instead of intrigue, a lot of inexplicable confrontation among characters whose significance is not so much enigmatic as obscure.
  45. The Weekend
    You have to admire the effort its attractive cast expends pumping life into stilted, flowery dialogue that confuses pretentious attitudinizing with profound insight.
  46. Bad Company
    Like many of the nonpolitical terrorist-as-villain spectaculars that have been held back after Sept. 11, has the whiff of something gone stale. Though it may have sat on the shelf for a while, this project had gone bad long before it was released.
  47. 20 Dates
    It must be said that Berkowitz's shamelessness and persistence aren't inevitably irresistible.
  48. Play It to the Bone
    Are they fools or heroes? Because the movie can't decide, neither can we. And without an emotional payoff, Play It to the Bone ends up stranded in serio-comic limbo.
  49. Knockaround Guys
    When it comes to father, sons and mob life, stick to "The Godfather."
  50. Original Sin
    Everything in this film is forgettable, right down to bongos pounding on the soundtrack to indicate a quickening of the pulse.
  51. Wannabes
    Doesn't really know how to end. But if its melodramatic final moments are ludicrous, they don't seriously dilute the acidity of the sour little swatch of urban sociology that has come before.
  52. Half Past Dead
    After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible.
  53. Stardom
    Stardom makes its metaphor of 15 minutes seem like a lifetime.
  54. Supernova
    Light on originality and low on suspense though high on design and special effects.
  55. Rollerball
    The current version, however, like its predecessor, fails as entertainment. Mr. McTiernan's remake may be lighter on its feet -- the sober-minded original was as graceful as a tap-dancing rhino -- but it is just as boring and as obvious.
  56. The Fantasticks
    The movie version overflows with affection and good intention, but unwittingly turns a bauble of cheerful fakery into something that mostly feels phony.
  57. Highlander: Endgame
    The action is the best thing in the picture.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Snow Day
    Fails both as arrested-development farce and as teen-age romantic comedy.
  59. Two Ninas
    In this elongated, formula-ridden sitcom posing as a movie, the date-weary Manhattan singles exchanging acerbic banter suggest the tougher, far less intellectual offspring of Woody Allen characters drenched in a whiny Seinfeldian dyspepsia.
  60. Love in the Time of Money
    A listless and desultory affair.
  61. Collateral Damage
    Manages to squeeze in several different endings — like a bad pop song that doesn't know when to fade out. But as Mr. Schwarzenegger's stature as an action figure diminishes, his effort to retain a piece of the market is touching.
  62. Domestic Disturbance
    Jettisoning any ambition toward thrillerhood, Domestic Disturbance becomes a plodding, obvious angry-dad melodrama, ambling toward the final, fatal showdown between parent and usurper.
  63. Full Frontal
    The aesthetic of Full Frontal is as rough and grainy as the off-the-rack digital video in which much of it was shot.
  64. Alex & Emma
    There's so little chemistry between Mr. Wilson and Ms. Hudson that you begin to look back on what now seems like the halcyon time of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days."
  65. Willard
    The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud.
  66. Vampire's Kiss
    The film is dominated and destroyed by Mr. Cage's chaotic, self-indulgent performance. He gives Peter the kind of sporadic, exaggerated mannerisms that should never live outside of acting-class exercises.
  67. Haiku Tunnel
    Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no.
  68. Idle Hands
    Even pretensions toward the humorous and hip cannot save this blood-drenched film from its innate tastelessness.
  69. The Order
    A murky ecclesiastical horror film, may be the nadir of the subgenre that produced "The Exorcist" (at its high end) and "Stigmata" (at its middle-to-low end).
  70. The Glass House
    The Glass House is hardly insane, just absurd, and the only damage it does is to itself.
  71. Phone Booth
    Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending.
  72. All the Queen's Men
    Rarely has a movie worked so hard to be so inconsequential.
  73. 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag
    The heads may be dead, but at least they have a comical look.
  74. Lucky Numbers
    A weak-witted comedy.
  75. Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    Mr. Baldwin's attack -- there's no better way to put it -- is unforgettable. He's the first shrunken narrator with a serial killer's swagger.
  76. The Hunted
    The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one.
  77. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Ottman doesn't have the firm grasp of tone necessary to make his deliberate ambiguities seem other than simple confusion, nor the sense of humor necessary to turn the deliberate clichés into effective satire.
  78. Soul Survivors
    There is an explanation for everything, but it is a long time coming and not worth the wait.
  79. The Very Thought of You
    The story is a clever sitcomy contraption, the dialogue is pedestrian.
  80. 54
    Years from now, if Mark Christopher's timid, meandering film 54 is spoken of at all, it will probably be lumped together with Whit Stillman's ''Last Days of Disco'' as one of two movies released in 1998 to bungle the same opportunity.
  81. Eban and Charley
    The picture is so predictable that the bad acting becomes a distraction.
  82. Bringing Down the House
    High-school cafeteria soup has more flavor than this bland, tepid throwback.
  83. Here on Earth
    Still never having to say you're sorry.
  84. 15 Minutes
    It's fleet- footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff.
  85. The Jungle Book 2
    Drab and unenticing.
  86. Serving Sara
    With the dog days of August upon us, think of this dog of a movie as the cinematic equivalent of high humidity.
  87. Stigmata
    (Patricia Arquette's) irritated reactions to her dire situation have all the force of a pet owner's whiny complaints when her feline refuses to use the cat box.
  88. Looking for an Echo
    Corny, suds-drenched movie. The kindest way of looking at this roughly patched-together story is as the cinematic equivalent of the music it memorializes.
  89. Tomcats
    Desperately, depressingly in thrall to the Farrelly formula.
  90. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    Succumbs to its blockbuster ambitions and turns into a noisy, bloated mess.
  91. Bless the Child
    A supernatural soap opera.
  92. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    This bloated spectacle has all the get-up-and-go of one of the legendary late-era Elvis Presley concerts. The picture feels longer than Presley's career and as irrelevant as he was by the end.
  93. Loser
    In the end, Loser disappoints.
  94. Species II
    In the spring a monster's fancy lethally turns to thoughts of lust. This thought, reduced to a level contemptuous of taste and reasonable intelligence, underlies Species II.
  95. Make a Wish
    If Make a Wish is meant to be a parody, it lacks one essential element: humor. If it's meant to be a horror movie, it lacks the corresponding qualities of shock and suspense. It's almost enough to make "Friday the 13th" look like a masterpiece. Almost.
  96. Third World Cop
    Shot in smeary video, it sports the static, by-the-book camera work of a daytime soap-opera.
  97. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    As the movie methodically plods forward on a screenplay (by Shawn Slovo) consisting entirely of clichés and watered-down exposition, it becomes sadly apparent that its only reliable asset is the gorgeous view.
  98. Dead or Alive
    A soulless compilation of thrills.
  99. A Guy Thing
    Most of the meager charms of the chaotic romantic farce A Guy Thing spring from the deft comic contortions of Hollywood's ultimate nerdy sidekick, Jason Lee.
  100. Cabin Boy
    All this is bizarre without being funny. [7 Jan 1994, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
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