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. Lost & Found
    A rancid little nothing of a movie that baldly recycles plot elements of "There's Something About Mary."
  2. Gaudi Afternoon
    What should be a soufflé of gender-bending mischief is more like a bowl of oatmeal.
  3. The Battle of Shaker Heights
    May lead to a new axiom: success has many fathers, but failure has "Project Greenlight."
  4. Daddy Day Care
    You can't get more high-concept, or less plotted, than this, and Daddy Day Care is proof.
  5. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (re-release)
    The film falls far short of its goals, but it is a classic of sorts. It belongs in that Blockbuster on Mount Olympus, where pristine new copies of "I Changed My Sex," "Dracula's Dog," "Blackenstein" and "Battlefield Earth" play constantly.
  6. Final Destination
    Even by the crude standards of teenage horror, Final Destination is dramatically flat.
  7. Death to Smoochy
    There are a few laughs, but I'm not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what "Smoochy" does.
  8. Don't Say a Word
    Confuses an empty and derivative stylistic bravura with formal cleverness, and a sterile, mechanistic sensationalism with emotional intensity.
  9. Impostor
    The ending is meant to be clouded with ambiguity, but really it is unequivocally happy because it means the movie is over.
  10. Detroit Rock City
    The cast never has much chance to shine. And the main attraction is kept all too understandably under wraps.
  11. Rat Race
    It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit.
  12. Sweet November
    The film's last half-hour -- or do I mean its final two weeks? -- is meant to keep the audience sniffling and sobbing uncontrollably, but the only thing likely to elicit tears is the sight of Mr. Reeves dressed in a white dinner jacket crooning "Time After Time."
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    3 Strikes
    Feels like a very long late-night comedy sketch that occasionally veers beyond tastelessness toward something worse.
  14. Chooch
    Nice, but that doesn't mean the film is worth anyone's time besides those of their families, friends, neighbors and the nice man from Connecticut who let them use his restaurant.
  15. Dead Alive
    Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]
    • The New York Times
  16. View from the Top
    Ms. Paltrow is not the only star in the film who tries gamely to churn this cinematic glass of diluted skim milk into something resembling butter.
  17. Swordfish
    Turns into a meticulously choreographed bang-by-the-numbers action fantasy that I would accuse of peddling evil if the film weren't so dumb and incoherent.
  18. I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
    An empty, farcical blood bath that's virtually shock-free except for one preposterous plot twist.
  19. Never Again
    The movie, like its lovers, is really two films smushed together in the faint hope that sheer incongruity can grind out laughter.
  20. Stateside
    An unsalvageable mess.
  21. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Completed before the release of "American Beauty," this contrived, puffed up little picture nonetheless seems like a ripoff, perhaps because it mines the same tired assumptions and unexamined stereotypes about suburban family life.
  22. Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
    Return of the Jedi doesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film...is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot.
  23. Hulk
    The movie is bulky and inarticulate, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and incoherence.
  24. First Daughter
    Plays more like a nightmare than a dream, and an exceedingly unnerving one at that. Sam isn't just a prisoner of her parents' ambitions; like nearly everyone else in this film, she's a zombie, sleepwalking through life while Rome burns.
  25. P.S.
    What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense.
  26. The Center of the World
    In a culture apparently defined by lap dancing, ersatz architectural sublimity and the virtual contact of cyberspace, how do we know what is real? The Center of the World, for example, is as phony as can be.
  27. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    Juvenile comedy targets a gallery of imperfect women.
  28. Double Take
    A shell game passing as entertainment.
  29. Suspect Zero
    Finally, a serial-killer movie so preposterous, so garnished with accidental laugh lines and absent essential narrative logic it may actually put a permanent kibosh on this tediously overworked crime subgenre. Here's hoping, at any rate.
  30. The Hillside Strangler
    Relentlessly unpleasant film.
  31. Corky Romano
    As Corky, Mr. Kattan never finds an appealing perspective on his character. Sweetness is not this gifted comedian's strong suit, and in its place Mr. Kattan offers a desperate eagerness to please, a far less charming quality.
  32. Halloween: Resurrection
    Spectators will indeed sit open-mouthed before the screen, not screaming but yawning.
  33. Gigli
    Buried in the slow, talky, inanities that the two stars exchange are some potentially interesting ideas about female sexual self-assertion and male surrender, but neither the actors nor the filmmakers have any notion about how to explore them.
  34. Happy Hour
    Throughout Happy Hour, observations that mean next to nothing are presented as nuggets of profound enlightenment.
  35. Thirteen Ghosts
    All it has in common with the original is a few dumb fun scares. In the new version, what we're left with after the scares is just plain dumb.
  36. The Haunted Mansion
    The film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors.
  37. Saving Silverman
    Does occasionally rise out of the sewer of its self-imposed idiocy, ascending in brief moments from utter witlessness to half-witlessness, mostly thanks to the loose comic byplay between Mr. Black and Mr. Zahn.
  38. House of the Dead
    Does little more than add another title to the very long list of movies influenced by George Romero's 1968 horror classic, "Night of the Living Dead."
  39. The Sixth Sense
    Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz.
  40. American Virgin
    As tightly plotted as a standard French farce.
  41. The Master of Disguise
    A film so family-safe it feels sheathed in plastic Bubble Wrap. Unfortunately, it's not even as much fun as popping the bubbles. It doesn't matter that the film is less than 90 minutes. It still feels like a prison stretch.
  42. Payback
    What one word might best describe Payback? How about "loathsome"?
  43. Digimon: Digital Monsters
    Comes off as noisy and ill conceived, long on morphing monsters, short on storytelling talent and uneven in its efforts at animation.
  44. Turn It Up
    Deteriorates into a gory shoot-'em-up gangster movie with a quick-fix ending that leaves many threads dangling. It could have been something more.
  45. Basic
    You might be tempted to say, "Huh?" Or, if you're in the theater, to leave. But wait -- there's less.
  46. Treasure Planet
    The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.
  47. Jersey Girl
    Sadly, Mr. Smith has made a movie so false and blatantly icky that it's the film equivalent of making goo-goo noises and chucking a baby under the chin for 103 minutes. At the end, all you're left with is drool and a mountain of baby powder.
  48. Queen of the Damned
    "Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster.
  49. Mr. Deeds
    Mr. Deeds is mostly terrible, a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news crew.
  50. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
    While "Dumb and Dumber" possessed a bracing, genuine vulgarity, this new film is more often merely disgusting as it piles up jokes involving various bodily discharges and the unpleasant things that can be done with them.
  51. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    Unfortunately, all of these supremely expressive vehicles come equipped with drivers, principally a pair of crash-test dummies played by Paul Walker and Tyrese, whose low-gear dialogue makes the whine of engines sound like the highest poetry.
  52. God, Sex & Apple Pie
    There's not much for the viewer to do during God, Sex & Apple Pie except check off the obligatory plot points -- taking comfort in the thought that as each cliché appears, the film is one step closer to the blessed relief of its closing credits.
  53. Beyond Borders
    All hope is lost for those trapped in theaters with this picture.
  54. John Q
    So lacking in shame that it finally seems laughable.
  55. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    So clogged with kooky gadgetry and special effects and glitter and goo that watching it feels like being gridlocked at Toys "R" Us during the Christmas rush.
  56. 9 Dead Gay Guys
    The film strains mightily to be flashy and hip but finishes more in the realm of the merely distasteful.
  57. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    Man, does this one make the first movie look like a masterpiece. What was Renée Zellweger thinking? It can't have been fun to put on all that weight, especially for a film as ghastly as this.
  58. The Cat in the Hat
    A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy.
  59. Flight of the Phoenix
    A moth-eaten stranded-in-the-desert yarn that throws in every cheap trick in the manual to pump up your heartbeat, is so manipulative that the involuntary jolts of adrenaline it produces make you feel like a fool.
  60. Joe Dirt
    Relentlessly softheaded and softhearted.
  61. Ladder 49
    What makes this nonsense more galling than usual is that while Ladder 49 might have started out as a heartfelt attempt to honor those in the line of literal fire, it weighs in as an attempt to exploit their post-Sept. 11 symbolism.
  62. National Treasure
    If National Treasure mattered at all, you might call it a national disgrace, but this piece of flotsam is so inconsequential that it amounts to little more than a piece of Hollywood accounting.
  63. Say It Isn't So
    All you really need to know about Say It Isn't So,the latest flatulent noisemaker from the Farrelly Brothers' gross-out comedy factory, is that late in the movie, Chris Klein punches a cow from behind and finds his arm stuck inside.
  64. The Life: What's Your Pleasure?
    A tedious, not-at-all titillating exploitation film.
  65. Garfield
    That Garfield speaks in the supercilious, world-weary drawl of Bill Murray is some small consolation, as are a few of the animal tricks.
  66. Love Actually
    A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish.
  67. Swept Away
    There is no credible feeling here, no comedy, no eroticism.
  68. Spawn
    But after 15 minutes, this yellow-orange vision of spiraling circles of hell, snorting devils and demonic shapes continually morphing out of one another, begins to seem redundant and conceptually impoverished.
  69. Unconstitutional
    Use experts and eyewitnesses to less rousing effect than Michael Moore has. Sometimes their arguments inspire unintended doubts about the alleged abuses.
  70. Staying Alive
    This one is clumsy, mean spirited and amazingly unmusical.
  71. The Outsiders
    It is spectacularly out of touch, a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters purloined from a ''young-adult'' novel by S.E. Hinton, the woman who wrote the novel on which ''Tex'' was based.
  72. Cocktail
    Cocktail, which opens today at the Cinema 2 and other theaters, is ''Saturday Night Fever'' without John Travolta, the Bee-Gees and dancing. It is an inane romantic drama that only a very young, very naive bartender could love. How it got that way is difficult to understand.
  73. Harlem Nights
    Harlem Nights is not the disaster some people might have been expecting. Mr. Murphy has appeared in far worse films written and directed by people much more experienced.
  74. Russian Doll
    Blends the least of Woody Allen with a plot complication out of "Love, American Style," stuck together with sitcom glue.
  75. Ouch
    "Ouch!" is also what you might exclaim as you pinch yourself to stay awake through the film's slow, labored contrivances.
  76. Miss Wonton
    The director has fallen into the common first-timer's trap of biting off more than he can chew, stitching together an unwieldy, disorganized story out of subplots and flashbacks, without paying enough attention to the basic requirements of character and narrative.
  77. Group
    It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama.
  78. Emerald Cowboy
    Though Mr. Hayata seems convinced that he is a colorful, romantic figure, the movie itself is crushingly mundane and unlikely to attract any audience beyond close relatives.
  79. Jersey Guy
    Monotonously paced and too long, Jersey Guy also suffers in its early scenes from attempts at humor that probably read better on the page than they play on the screen.
  80. Alma
    Begins to seem not so much an examination but an exploitation.
  81. Bob, Verushka & the Pursuit of Happiness
    A cross-cultural clunker.
  82. Straight-Jacket
    Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour.
  83. A Hole in My Heart
    Mr. Moodysson may believe that he can stick it to the audience politically by sticking it to his characters. But like most film directors who commit to this strategy, his tactics come across as both naïve and wildly self-indulgent, while his fascination with the spectacle of the corrupt and the cruel is simply tedious.
  84. Walking on the Sky
    A modern-day "Big Chill" wannabe without the subtlety, humor, memorable soundtrack, strong performances or convincing dialogue.
  85. The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat!
    Messy, unfunny and unforgivably dull.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Boy Who Cried Bitch: The Adolescent Years
    The film is so clumsily written and directed, and the performances so one-note, that any potential for enlightenment is suffocated.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Miriam
    The title role is played by Ariana Savalas, daughter of Telly. She's good, but not inventive enough to rescue Miriam, which is hobbled by flatly lighted video imagery, unconvincing period details and an inclination to wallow in atrocity.
  88. Funny Games (2008)
    The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.
  89. The Dukes
    Plods along in its sloppy, joshing way, it tastes like pasta sauce that has sat on the shelf long after the expiration date on the can.
  90. Let Them Chirp Awhile
    This sort of thing was indulgent enough the first time around; transplanted to the mumblecore milieu, it's intolerable.
  91. House of Numbers: Anatomy of an Epidemic
    Trafficking in irresponsible inferences and unsupported conclusions, the filmmaker Brent Leung offers himself as suave docent through a globe-trotting pseudo-investigation that should raise the hackles of anyone with even a glancing knowledge of the basic rules of reasoning.
  92. The Last Airbender
    The problem -- the catastrophe -- of The Last Airbender is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there.
  93. Charlie St. Cloud
    You are not, in a movie like this, supposed to think too much; you are supposed to be transported beyond skepticism on a wave of pure, tacky feeling. Instead, in this case, you drown in sentimental, ghoulish nonsense.
  94. To Age or Not to Age
    Robert Kane Pappas’s documentary about scientific experiments in life extension, makes a digressive, disorganized hash of a fascinating topic.
  95. Baghdad Texas
    The premise had promise, but Baghdad, Texas, a clumsy comedy directed by David H. Hickey, quickly disappoints with an inconsistent tone and painful overacting.
  96. The Roommate
    Substituting sex for suspense and pop music for ideas, the director Christian E. Christiansen drags The Roommate from limp beginning to lame conclusion.
  97. Satan Hates You
    Best appreciated drunk or otherwise impaired, Satan Hates You is the kind of horror movie that appears to have been shot in someone's basement using a box of old Halloween costumes.
  98. Water for Elephants
    Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.
  99. The Darkest Hour
    Really, how slovenly is it to use invisible aliens? If you're going to tease us with nothing but pinwheels of light for three-quarters of the film, you'd better have one heck of a reveal up your sleeve.
  100. Piranha 3DD
    The director, John Gulager, has no idea how to mix his ingredients to create a savvy self-parody.
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