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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    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lawman
    A potent but curiously exasperating Western.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Omega Man
    Peppered with some sharp, even amusing dialogue, the story temporarily shelves the heavy allegory and slips into good, slam-bang suspense. But it doesn't last.
  3. Willard
    Willard, which is otherwise a dull movie of no major consequence, is a rather astonishing footnote to a major urban problem.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Night Digger
    It begs for empathy for its tortured principals, but despite the clearly dedicated contributions of Patricia Neal, Roald Dahl, her scenarist-husband; Pamela Brown and a young newcomer, Nicholas Clay, the strain on credibility is a good deal more notable than the impact on the emotions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    Despite the false bid for suspense in its framing device and its several ritual claims to excitement, it finally lacks even the interest of its own events. For this, I think the director is very much at fault.
  6. On Any Sunday
    The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium.
  7. The Devils
    It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    It is a nightmare world view, but it is a world view, and The Panic in Needle Park never pretends that it is subject to moral condemnations, or to easy cure or the insights of urban sociology.
  9. Two-Lane Blacktop
    Two-Lane Blacktop is a far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker.
  10. Shaft
    Shaft is not a great film, but it's very entertaining.
  11. Carnal Knowledge
    More than any other film Nichols has made, Carnal Knowledge reminds me of his stage work at its best, particularly of the highly stylized Luv in which low comedy techniques were employed to illuminate material that might otherwise seem too cruel, or too anti‐heroic for a dramatic medium.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Klute
    Pakula, when he is not in dulging in subjective camera, strives to give his film the look of structural geometry, but despite the sharp edges and dramatic spaces and cinema presence out of Citizen Kane, it all suggests a tepid, rather tasteless mush.
  13. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    I don't automatically object to contemporary allusions, but I prefer to find them myself, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is so busy pointing them out to us that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Le Mans
    Dramatically, the picture is a bore. And neither the oblique approach to these time-out sequences nor a ripe score by Michel Legrand manages to juice things up.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Anderson Tapes
    In Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes the quality of professionalism appears in rather lovely manifestations to raise a by no means perfect film to a level of intelligent efficiency that is not so very far beneath the reach of art.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Horror of Frankenstein
    It's not only painless but also fun.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    This shrill, heavy-handed exercise only makes us appreciate "Rosemary's Baby" all over again.
  18. They Might Be Giants
    A mushy movie with occasional, isolated moments of legitimate comedy, all provided by Mr. Scott with an assist by Mr. Goldman, whose sense of humor seems to surface in peripheral incidents only.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Jake
    Jogs along fairly tediously on the rescue trail, with the star being his laconic self, plus conventional spurts of violence, likewise the saddle humor.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Escape from the Planet of the Apes
    Nobody is going to believe it, but I must say anyway that Don Taylor's Escape From the Planet of the Apes is one of the better new movies in town, and better in a genre—science-fiction—that at the crucial middle level where the history of movies is made, if not written, has recently been not so much bad as invisible.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cat o' Nine Tails
    Only blindly abject devotees of the whodunit should discover catnip in The Cat O'Nine Tails. Any simple souls who expect large dollops of probability and authentic excitement are cautioned that they're in short supply in the concoction of slayings and sleuthing that is dished up here.
  22. Plaza Suite
    In the case of Plaza Suite, I don't have the feeling that anything much has been lost, but rather that nothing much was ever there.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Billy Jack
    The whole picture nicely conveys a Southwestern atmosphere. But much too often, at the cost of plain credibility, it stacks its cards, characters and even credo like any rootin', tootin' Western.
  24. Bananas
    Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.
  25. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.
  26. Summer of '42
    Robert Mulligan's Summer of '42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don't think you'll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The House That Dripped Blood
    Moves in many directions, but never too far from the mechanics of the high school play.
  28. The Beguiled
    I must say that I found it interesting (even when it approached the ludicrous) because of its place in relation to other Siegel films and because I have nothing but appreciation for the performers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Carter
    Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one's mouth out with soap than recommend it. Yet it is so finely acted and crafted—and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre—that as a lover of movies one feels practically diity‐bound to sing its praises.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Barefoot Executive
    In this genial but strained and arch frolic, the one real joke is not only "in" but it wears thin and even frantic.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    A movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Andromeda Strain
    Despite all the drama of the situation (United States threatened with biological destruction from outer space, etc.) nothing very exciting goes on in The Andromeda Strain. Since nobody greatly feels or acts, we are left with the drama of people tensely sitting around in chairs, twisting dials and watching TV monitors. From time to time, somebody gets up and paces the room.
  33. Bleak Moments
    The best that can be said for Bleak Moments is that it earns its name. The film, while it has been handsomely photographed, seems entirely given over to pained, wordless interludes. [23 Sep 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  34. There Was a Crooked Man...
    There Was A Crooked Man . . . is really a duel between two men, one good, one bad, and it's these smaller, more civilized confrontations, done with irony and wit, that make the film one of the more pleasant things you're likely to see this season.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Aristocats
    As funny, warm and sweet an animated, cartoon, package as ever gave a movie marquee a Christmas glow.
  36. Little Big Man
    The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.
  37. Brewster McCloud
    Attempts to be a kind of all American, slapstick Orpheus Ascending, a timeless myth about innocence and corruption told in the sort of outrageous and vulgar terms that Brian De Palma and Robert Downey do much better.
  38. Wuthering Heights
    The screenwriter, who often uses bits of dialogue from the novel, doesn't hesitate to add new material that is completely inappropriate.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    El Topo
    El Topo is a good deal more interesting and a good deal less hung up on its own pretensions than all my most intelligent friends had led me to believe.
  40. Love Story
    It looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.
  41. Husbands
    Like Faces, which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense. Husbands, however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long.
  42. Scrooge
    It is absurd, sentimental, pretty, never quite as funny as it intends to be, but quite acceptable, if only as a seasonal ritual.
  43. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is comparatively mild Billy Wilder and rather daring Sherlock Holmes, not a perfect mix, perhaps, but a fond and entertaining one.
  44. The Conformist
    The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film. (Review of Original Release)
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Vampire Lovers
    The Vampire Lovers, praise be, does manage to be a departure from a hackneyed, bloody norm. It also is professionally directed, opulently staged and sexy to boot.
  46. The Great White Hope
    The Great White Hope is one of those liberal, well-meaning, fervently uncontroversial works that pretend to tackle contemporary problems by finding analogies at a safe remove in history.
  47. Tora! Tora! Tora!
    From the moment you read the ads for Tora! Tora! Tora! ("The Most Spectacular Film Ever Made!”), you are aware that you're in the presence of a film possessed by a lack of imagination so singular that it amounts to a death wish.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    At first appears to be rich with a quantity of felt life, but on reflection seems both more carefully studied and more coldly casual than profoundly understood.
  49. The Wild Child
    Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.
  50. La Piscine
    Pretty people behaving poorly in beautiful settings is something we don’t see as much of in cinema as we used to. This is a master class in the subgenre, and one of unusual depth.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Bullet for Pretty Boy
    The film looks a little as if they had taken the members of the cast of, say, "Beach Blanket Bingo" and put them in costume and given them old cars to drive and told them to play it for real. For real it isn't.
  52. Take the Money and Run
    Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.
  53. Catch-22
    The most moving, the most intelligent, the most humane--oh, to hell with it!--it's the best American film I've seen this year.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kelly's Heroes
    Not without its problems. But it is very largely without viable solutions to them. Not without resources—it is full of resources, natural and mostly untapped—but with out that resourcefulness necessary to persuade us that comedy, any comedy, is worth the time of day.
  55. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn't—which is not to say it is any good.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Mules for Sister Sara
    I'm not sure that it is a great movie, but it is very good, and it stays and grows in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Watermelon Man
    Watermelon Man demands complete surrender and gives absolutely nothing in return except embarrassment.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Getting Straight
    A brilliant, mercurial performance by Elliott Gould steadies and vivifies but cannot save Getting Straight. Even with such sideline brilliance as the sad-funny performance of young Robert F. Lyons almost matching Gould's, the picture ends as a cop-out of its own professed principles and initial honesty.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    The very helter‐skelter, unstudied nature of the picture provides a revealing close‐up of the world's most famous quartet, playing, relaxing and chatting.
  60. A Man Called Horse
    Silverstein has elected to tell the story of Lord John's survival largely in terms of Sioux rituals relating to such things as wars, weddings, deaths, and even spiritual deliverance. I must admit that I found all this interesting, although I'm the sort of Indian buff and tourist who gets a kick out of watching contemporary Navajos do their rain dances in tennis shoes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mandabi
    As a comedy dealing with life's miseries, it displays a controlled sophistication in the telling that gives it a feeling of almost classic directness and simplicity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloody Mama
    What hoists the picture into real substance toward the home stretch is an eerie and fascinating by credible sequence with the Barker clan holding as captive a blindfolded millionaire, strongly played by Pat Hingle.
  63. The Boys in the Band
    Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense.
  64. Airport
    Airport, the film version of Arthur Hailey's novel, is the sort of movie most people mean when they say Hollywood doesn't make movies the way it used to. This isn't just because Airport resembles any number of old Grand Hotel movies. Rather it's because it evokes our nostalgic feelings, not only for the innocence of old movies but also for the innocent old times in which we saw them.
  65. Patton
    A huge, initially ambivalent but finally adoring, Pop portrait of one of the most brilliant and outrageous American military figures of the last one hundred years.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Magic Christian
    A superb realization of the book.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Honeymoon Killers
    Within the limits of its type it is one of the best and, curiously, most beautiful American movies in recent years.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Molly Maguires
    Realism without much reality, enormous care for the wrong details, historical accuracy and spineless dramaturgy, The Molly Maguires vacillates among intentions and settles finally for ponderous spectacle and easy irony.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MASH
    Although it is impudent, bold, and often very funny, it lacks the sense of order (even in the midst of disorder) that seems the special province of successful comedy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Reivers
    Mark Rydell's direction conveys a zestful spirit, as do the film's turn-of-the-century look and picaresque minor characters.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
    This "Computer" isn't I.B.M.'s kind but it's homey, lovable, as exciting as porridge and as antiseptic and predictable as any homey, half-hour TV family show.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    On Her Majesty's Secret Service
    He's tall, dark, handsome and has a dimpled chin. But Mr. Lazenby, if not a spurious Bond, is merely a casual, pleasant, satisfactory replacement. For the record, he plays a decidedly second fiddle to an overabundance of continuous action, a soundtrack as explosive as the London Blitz, and flip dialogue and characterizations set against some authentic, truly spectacular Portuguese and Swiss scenic backgrounds, caught in eyecatching colors.
  73. Topaz
    Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cactus Flower
    The picture moves around comfortably in nice color, against some authentic Manhattan exteriors. But it is primarily the verve and skill of the performances, the pungent air of sexual chemistry and the peppery good humor that make the movie so diverting.
  75. Hello, Dolly!
    Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Marooned
    If Marooned falls short as a soaring blockbuster, it does keep both feet on the ground.
  77. Z
    An immensely entertaining movie -- a topical melodrama that manipulates our emotional responses and appeals to our best prejudices in such satisfying ways that it is likely to be mistaken as a work of fine -- rather than popular -- movie art.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Downhill Racer
    In appreciating that world, its pathos, its narcissism, its tensions, and its sufficient moments of glory, Downhill Racer succeeds with sometimes chilling efficiency. Within the limits imposed by the tangential nature of its insights, it is a very good movie.
  79. Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.
  80. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
    The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.
  81. Battle of Britain
    These sequences—the dogfights over Dover, the disintegration of planes in mid-air, the graceful tactics of evasion—are more than just technically stunning. They also are beautiful, in the completely impersonal way that the spectacle of machines—working well and seemingly with wills of their own—can be beautiful. Unfortunately, something less than one-third of the film takes place in the air.
  82. The Sterile Cuckoo
    Quite clearly, Pookie Adams is a marvelous role, full of tough-sweet humor, and Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and the late Judy Garland, turns it into one of the most appealing performances of the season, a triumph limited only by the squashy movie that encases it.
  83. Paint Your Wagon
    An amiable, $20-million musical. That's a high price to pay for something that is more an expression of good intentions than evidence of sustained cinematic accomplishment. However, because amiability is never in over abundant supply, especially in Hollywood super-productions, the movie can be enjoyed more often than simply tolerated.
  84. The Italian Job
    The film is technically sophisticated and emotionally retarded.
  85. Medium Cool
    A film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Rain People
    [Coppola] has made a relentlessly good-looking, accurate-feeling movie without the patronizing paranoia toward the American heartland and its natives that is so much in fashion these days.
  87. Easy Rider
    With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Death Rides a Horse
    As usual, the clutter of clichés is exceeded only by the excessive sound and fury.
  89. The Wild Bunch
    Very beautiful and the first truly interesting, American-made western in years.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Eye of the Cat
    The plot is an overstated, reworked and all too familiar one.
  91. True Grit
    A marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters, noble characters and virtuous rewards.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The April Fools
    The April Fools is not a comic masterpiece, but it has a nice, understated sense of the absurd.
  93. Midnight Cowboy
    Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42d Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers, and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Winning
    Probably the best-rounded and most appealing personalized film of this kind ever made.
  95. Mackenna's Gold
    The structure of the movie is so loose that a narrator (Victor Jory) must be employed from time to time to explain the plot, as if it were a serial. Most surprising in a movie that obviously cost a good deal of money is the sloppy matching of exterior and studio photography with miniature work for special effects.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Death of a Gunfighter
    The general tone, and point — festering hatred — is simply not enough to make the picture matter, although Mr. Widmark almost single-handedly does. Tough, laconic, squinty-eyed and moving around deceptively like a tired, middle-aged panther, he gives this characterization a scorching vibrancy.
  97. Salesman
    It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verite or direct cinema.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    100 Rifles
    It is a loud, churning and triumphantly empty exercise.
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