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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  1. Thunderball
    [Bond] also has a much better sense of humor than he has shown in his previous films. And this is the secret ingredient that makes Thunderball the best of the lot.
  2. That Darn Cat!
    The color is good and Bobby Darin warbles a song at the start that may be amusing to humans but would probably fill Felix with disgust. Anyhow, it's an entertaining picture.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    King & Country
    King and Country is an uncompromising film. Some of its scenes are so strong they shock. Those who can take it will find it a shattering experience.
  4. Juliet of the Spirits
    Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.
  5. Alphaville
    What it comes to is simply that the dazzle of Mr. Godard's cinematic style is not matched by the hackneyed idea of a robot society that is expounded in the script.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cincinnati Kid
    A respectably packaged drama of a young card sharp, played by Steve McQueen, with a capable enough cast, that pungently projects the machinations and back-room temperatures of the side-street professional gambling world and little else.
  7. Bunny Lake Is Missing
    The movie has its share of logical inconsistencies, although to dwell on them is to ignore its deliberate ambiguities and considerable panache.
  8. Help!
    The boys themselves are exuberant and uninhibited in their own genial way. They just become awfully redundant and—dare I say it?—dull.
  9. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
    Although crudely acted, with laughably inept action sequences and a story that makes little sense, it has the feverish pulse of a classic B movie, boldly angular cinematography and a blaringly cheesy jazz soundtrack.
  10. Darling
    As a slashing social satire and also a devastating spoof of the synthetic, stomach-turning output of the television-advertising age--it is loaded with startling expositions and lacerating wit.
  11. The Ipcress File
    The Ipcress File is as classy a spy film as you could ask to see.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Are the Damned
    Mr. Losey, proceeding with grim logic toward his apocalyptic climax, has made a strong comment about the nuclear age—while arrestingly demonstrating just how much a gifted filmmaker can accomplish with limited means.
  13. The Great Race
    Natalie Wood is on hand as a cheroot-smoking suffragist (with a phenomenal wardrobe), but the movie is largely powered by Lemmon’s energy, roaring like Jackie Gleason as the bombastic Professor Fate and later appearing as his double, the klutzy crown prince of a Ruritanian kingdom.
  14. Cat Ballou
    Cat Ballou does have flashes of good satiric wit. But, under Elliot Silverstein's direction, it is mostly just juvenile lampoon.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sons of Katie Elder
    A good, tough, unpretentious and gory little Western with a professional stamp and a laconic bite.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Variety Lights
    As a straightforward comedy-drama about the vicissitudes of the principals in a small-time tab show or traveling vaudeville troupe, this is wholesome corn. But it is highly palatable fare, which, in its story line, hews more to the type of films subsequently made by Mr. Lattuada.
  17. The Pawnbroker
    Remarkable...[a] most uncommon film, which projects a disagreeable subject with power and cogency.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl Happy
    The saving grace is the steady stream of tunes, as rhythmical as they are unoriginal, belted out by the star and the other youngsters.
  19. Operation Crossbow
    It is a grandly engrossing and exciting melodrama of wartime espionage, done with stunning documentary touches in a tight, tense, heroic story line.
  20. The Train
    It is a vivid melodrama through which Mr. Lancaster bolts with all that straight, strong, American sporting instinct and physical agility for which he is famous.
  21. The Sound of Music
    Miss Andrews, with her air of radiant vigor, her appearance of plain-Jane wholesomeness and her ability to make her dialogue as vivid and appealing as she makes her songs, brings a nice sort of Mary Poppins logic and authority to this role, which is always in peril of collapsing under its weight of romantic nonsense and sentiment.
  22. None But the Brave
    IF the threat of Frank Sinatra as a film director is judged by his first try on "None But the Brave," it is clear that there need be no apprehension among the members of the Screen Directors Guild.
  23. 36 Hours
    What is annoying about this picture is that the set-up for pulling off the plot is just too slick and artificial, too patly and elaborately contrived.
  24. Goldfinger
    What they give us in Goldfinger is an excess of science-fiction fun, a mess of mechanical melodrama, and a minimum of bedroom farce...It is good fun, all right, fast and furious, racing hither and yon about the world as Double-Oh Seven pursues the intrigues of a mysterious financier named Goldfinger.
  25. My Fair Lady
    All things considered, it is the brilliance of Miss Hepburn as the Cockney waif who is transformed by Prof. Henry Higgins into an elegant female facade that gives an extra touch of subtle magic and individuality to the film.
  26. Goodbye Charlie
    George Axelrod's play, "Goodbye, Charlie," was bad enough on the stage. On the screen, it is a bleak conglomeration of outrageous whimsies and stupidities.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Roustabout
    Unfortunately, the very thinnest of stories has been extracted from the colorful world of the carnival. The picture simply ambles around in a circle, getting nowhere.
  28. The Americanization of Emily
    Here is a film that not only gives the charming Miss Andrews a chance to prove herself irresistible in a straight romantic comedy but also gets off some of the wildest brashest and funniest situations and cracks at the lunacy of warfare that have popped from the screen in quite some time.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Woman of Straw
    Despite the fancy trappings laid on by the respected old producer-director team of Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, this handsomely colored exercise is the kind of pseudo-Victorian nonsense that Alfred Hitchcock long ago laid to rest.
  30. Fail-Safe
    It packs a melodramatic wallop that will rattle a lot of chattering teeth.
  31. Mary Poppins
    And a most wonderful, cheering movie it is, with Julie Andrews, the original Eliza of My Fair Lady, playing the title role and with its splices and seams fairly splitting with Poppins marvels turned out by the Walt Disney studio.
  32. Harakiri
    You may not get much satisfaction from the tortured human drama in this film, but you should get an eyeful graphic exercise.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Marnie
    At once a fascinating study of a sexual relationship and the master's most disappointing film in years.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killers
    Donald Siegel, a talented director, is too handicapped by his limited means to do much with the fragments of plot about a fall guy involved with a mail robbery, a devious redhead and double-crosses following in predictable sequence. His actors seem dispirited by the script.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Masque of the Red Death
    The film is vulgar, naive and highly amusing, and it is played with gusto by Mr. Price, Hazel Court and Jane Asher. As for Mr. Corman, he has let his imagination run riot upon a mobile decor singular for its primary color scheme. The result may be loud, but it looks like a real movie. On its level, it is astonishingly good.
  36. A Shot in the Dark
    The whole thing is colorful, gay — and Henry Mancini's music is as sassy and frivolous as the film.
  37. Zulu
    If you're not too squeamish at the sight of slaughter and blood and can keep your mind fixed on the notion that there was something heroic and strong about British colonial expansion in the 19th century, you may find a great deal of excitement in this robustly Kiplingesque film.
  38. The Patsy
    Another moronic mishmash in which Mr. Lewis falls all over himself.
  39. Bedtime Story
    Mark this one down as good, crisp fun.
  40. From Russia with Love
    There's no point in trying to tell you all the mad, naughty things that take place — the meetings with mysterious people, the encounters with beautiful girls, the bomb explosions, the chases, the violent encounter of Bond with a helicopter, a motor boat race. Nor is there any point in trying to locate the various characters in the plot, all of whom are deliciously fantastic and delightfully well played.
  41. The Chalk Garden
    Ronald Neame, who has directed the picture, and John Michael Hayes, who has written the script, present us with a cozy, compact drama that follows a comfortable, sentimental line.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Viva Las Vegas
    Viva Las Vegas is about as pleasant and unimportant as a banana split. And as fetching to look at, it might be added.
  43. An Autumn Afternoon
    A profoundly simple, profoundly moving film.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Evil of Frankenstein
    With the pace held in smooth rein by the director, Freddie Francis, the picture begins to say something about superstition and hypocrisy. Then it simply goes hog-wild (monster gets drunk) and heads for the ash heap, along with Mr. Gushing and his barbecued menace. 
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    Between his stylish handling of sensational nonsense and Mr. Marton's turgid floundering around a serious theme, Mr. Fuller's wild little movie has a decided edge.
  46. The Pink Panther
    There is one thing about this picture that is clever and joyous, at least. That is a cartooned pink panther that runs through the main titles at the start making mischief with the lettering, insistently getting in the way. He is so blithe and bumptious, so sweet and entirely lovable, that he's awfully hard to follow. It's questionable whether the picture does.
  47. The Servant
    Its account of patrician degradation will cause you to blink your eyes. Although it is only fiction, it wafts a thick and acrid air of smoldering truth.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead Ringer
    Uncommonly silly little film, but it is great fun to watch.
  49. Seven Days in May
    The whole thing achieves a tingling speed and irresistible tension under John Frankenheimer's direction, which deftly lifts some of the tricks of pictorial and musical emphasis from the old Nazi "Blitzkrieg" films.
  50. Sunday in New York
    Well, the extent of the film's disconcertion and delight for a viewer will depend upon how prone one may be to a juvenile quandary and to the nimble performing of a pleasant cast.
  51. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    The ultimate touch of ghoulish humor is when we see the bomb actually going off, dropped on some point in Russia, and a jazzy sound track comes in with a cheerful melodic rendition of "We'll Meet Again Some Sunny Day." Somehow, to me, it isn't funny. It is malefic and sick.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Children of the Damned
    A dull, pretentious successor to that marvelous little chiller of several seasons ago, "Village of the Damned." What a comedown.
  53. The Sword in the Stone
    The picture makes an eye-filling package of rollicking fun and thoughtful common sense. The humor sparkles with real, knowing sophistication.
  54. America America
    Mr. Kazan catches the poetry of immigrants arriving in America. With some masterfully authentic staging and a fitly hard-focus camera, he gives us as fine an understanding of that drama as the screen has ever had.
  55. Charade
    There's a lot to be said for it as a fast-moving, urbane entertainment in the comedy-mystery vein.
  56. High and Low
    A sizzling, artistic crackerjack and a model of its genre, pegged on a harassed man's moral decision, laced with firm characterizations and tingling detail and finally attaining an incredibly colorful crescendo of microscopic police sleuthing.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Incredible Journey
    About as gentle, warm and lovely a color movie as any pet owner could wish at least, for the kids.
  58. McLintock!
    If the film doesn't quite come off, it is not for lack of effort. Mr. Wayne is in there swinging all the way, as a reactionary old cattle baron coping with encroaching homesteaders, discontented Indians, a marriageable daughter and a rebellious wife.
  59. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
    It's a wonderfully crazy and colorful collection of "chase" comedy, so crowded with plot and people that it almost splits the seams of its huge Cinerama packing and its 3-hour-and-12-minute length.
  60. Knife in the Water
    Using his naturalistic camera as though it were an outsized microscope set up to observe the odd behavior of three people completely isolated for 24 hours aboard a weekend pleasure boat, Mr. Polanski evolves a cryptic drama that has wry humor, a thread of suspense, a dash of ugly and corruscating evil — and also a measure of tedium because of the purposeful monotony of its pace.
  61. Tom Jones
    One of the wildest, bawdiest and funniest comedies that a refreshingly agile filmmaker has ever brought to the screen.
  62. The V.I.P.s
    The V.I.P.s is, gratifyingly, a lively, engrossing romantic film cut to the always serviceable pattern of the old multi-character Grand Hotel, and some of the other people in it are even more exciting than the two top stars.
  63. The Haunting
    So it looks as though this film simply makes more goose pimples than sense, which is rather surprising and disappointing for a picture with two such actresses, who are very good all the way through it, and produced and directed by the able Robert Wise.
  64. Lord of the Flies
    A curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original.
  65. The Thrill of It All
    I don't want to give you the impression that The Thrill of It All is a great film. I just want to tell you it is loaded with good, clean American laughs.
  66. The Great Escape
    There are a few moments when Richard Attenborough as the chief engineer of the whole project demonstrates some impressive strength and poise. But for much longer than is artful or essential, The Great Escape grinds out its tormenting story without a peek beneath the surface of any man, without a real sense of human involvement. It's a strictly mechanical adventure with make-believe men.
  67. King Kong vs. Godzilla
    The one mild surprise of this cheap reprise of earlier Hollywood and Japanese horror films is the ineptitude of its fakery.
  68. 8½
    It has no more plot than a horse race, no more order than a pinball machine, and it bounces around on several levels of consciousness, dreams and memories as it details a man's rather casual psychoanalysis of himself. But it sets up a labyrinthine ego for the daring and thoughtful to explore, and it harbors some elegant treasures of wit and satire along the way.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jason and the Argonauts
    This absurd, unwieldy adventure — if that's the word—is no worse, but certainly no better, than most of its kind.
  70. The Mouse on the Moon
    Sensitive music by Mr. Pintoff and some wonderfully wry dialogue, subtly laced with motivations, top off this animated jewel.
  71. Cleopatra
    Forget the length of time it took to make it and all the tattle of troubles they had, including the behavior of two of its spotlighted stars. The memorable thing about this picture is that it is a surpassing entertainment, one of the great epic films of our day. By virtue of brilliant staging, Mr. Mankiewicz keeps this well-known tale moving with visual excitements that increase the dramatic flow and give extraordinary insights into the characters.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Donovan's Reef
    This running account of Pier 6 brawls, miscegenation, romance and religion that disrupt the idyllic life on a post-World War II South Sea island paradise is sheer contrivance effected in hearty, fun-loving, truly infectious style.
  73. Irma la Douce
    Mr. Lemmon is little short of brilliant — vigorous, incisive and deft.
  74. Hud
    Ugly, powerful drama. [28 May 1963]
    • The New York Times
  75. Dr. No
    This lively, amusing picture is not to be taken seriously as realistic fiction or even art, any more than the works of Mr. Fleming are to be taken as long-hair literature. It is strictly a tinseled action-thriller, spiked with a mystery of a sort. And, if you are clever, you will see it as a spoof of science-fiction and sex.
  76. Sanjuro
    This is a mischievous, sly, good-humored presentation of a crusty old samurai caught between two groups of plain incompetents, with a playful satiric point.
  77. The Birds
    Making a terrifying menace out of what is assumed to be one of nature's most innocent creatures and one of man's most melodious friends, Mr. Hitchcock and his associates have constructed a horror film that should raise the hackles on the most courageous and put goose-pimples on the toughest hide.
  78. How the West Was Won
    With little or no imagination and, indeed, with no pictorial style, despite the fact that the three directors were Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford, they have fashioned a lot of random episodes, horribly written by James Webb, into a mat of outdoor adventure vignettes that tell you nothing of how the West was really won.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Young Racers
    Somehow, as the film progresses, its superficial protagonists grow more complex and assume added dimensions, until they unexpectedly emerge as interesting people.The result, though not a picture that many filmgoers would take special pains to see, still provides an agreeable hour for those who do. It is enough to make a viewer wonder what Mr. Corman might be able to accomplish with a better project and adequate means.
  80. Days of Wine and Roses
    It is a commanding picture, and it is extremely well played by Mr. Lemmon and Miss Remick, who spare themselves none of the shameful, painful scenes. But for all their brilliant performing and the taut direction of Blake Edwards, they do not bring two pitiful characters to complete and overpowering life. [18 Jan 1963, p.7]
    • The New York Times
  81. To Kill a Mockingbird
    Their charming enactments of a father and his children in that close relationship that can occur at only one brief period are worth all the footage of the film.
  82. Mutiny on the Bounty
    Has its ups and downs. Bronislau Kaper has provided a highly chromatic musical score that is consistent with the size, the sweeping romance and the eventual lumpishness of this film.
  83. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    The feeble attempts that Mr. Aldrich has made to suggest the irony of two once idolized and wealthy females living in such depravity and the pathos of their deep-seated envy having brought them to this, wash out very quickly under the flood of sheer grotesquerie. There is nothing particularly moving or significant about these two.
  84. Period of Adjustment
    Isobel Lennart's screenplay adds a few mild embellishments and George Roy Hill has directed in a nice, clear, uncomplicated way.
  85. The Manchurian Candidate
    The film is so artfully contrived, the plot so interestingly started, the dialogue so racy and sharp, and John Frankenheimer's direction so exciting in the style of Orson Welles when he was making Citizen Kane and other pictures that the fascination of it is strong. So many fine cinematic touches and action details pop up that one keeps wishing the subject would develop into something more than it does.
  86. The Longest Day
    It is hard to think of a picture, aimed and constructed as this one was, doing any more or any better or leaving one feeling any more exposed to the horror of war than this one does.
  87. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Another French film that fairly glitters with photographic and cinematic "style," yet fails to do more than skim the surface of a cryptic dramatic theme.
  88. The Miracle Worker
    The absolutely tremendous and unforgettable display of physically powerful acting that Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke put on in William Gibson's stage play The Miracle Worker is repeated by them in the film made from it by the same producer, Fred Coe, and the same director, Arthur Penn.
  89. Tales of Terror
    Tales of Terror is still lots of fun; Price is paired with Peter Lorre for an adaptation of The Black Cat that veers almost immediately into The Cask of Amontillado.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Birdman of Alcatraz
    A thoughtful yet powerful portrait that cleaves to the heart and mind despite its omissions.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hell Is for Heroes
    An unusually well-made film.
  92. Boys' Night Out
    Michael Gordon's direction is not as nimble as it was on "Pillow Talk."
  93. The Music Man
    It's here, and the rich, ripe roundness of it, the lush amalgam of the many elements of successful American show business that Mr. Willson brought together on the stage, has been preserved and appropriately made rounder and richer through the magnitude of film.
  94. Lolita
    This is not the novel Lolita, but it is a provocative sort of film.
  95. The Road to Hong Kong
    Practically every moment spent with Bing and Bob is good for consecutive chuckles and frequent belly-deep guffaws.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    Take two cornbelt veterans like Mr. McCrea and Mr. Scott, give them a taut, tangy script (by N. B. Stone Jr.) a trim supporting cast and a good director (Sam Peckinpah), and you have the most disarming little horse opera in months.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn, Witch, Burn
    This low-budget, British import, with Janet Blair and a small cast, is quite the most effective "supernatural" thriller since Village of the Damned.
  98. Jules and Jim
    To put it quickly and crisply, it is charming, exciting and sad.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    Mr. Ford, who has struck more gold in the West than any other film-maker, also has mined a rich vein here. He is again exposing the explosive forces involving the advent of law, in the shape of Mr. Stewart, on the raw denizens of a lawless frontier town. When legend becomes fact, a newspaper editor tells Mr. Stewart, print the legend. In Liberty Valance, there is too much of a good legend.
  100. Cape Fear
    Technically, it's a good job. Mr. Webb has prepared a tough, tight script and Mr. Thompson has directed in a steady and starkly sinister style. There is no waste motion, no fooling. Everything is sharp and direct. Menace quivers in the picture like a sneaky electrical charge. And Mr. Mitchum plays the villain with the cheekiest, wickedest arrogance and the most relentless aura of sadism that he has ever managed to generate...But this is really one of those shockers that provokes disgust and regret. There seems to be no reason for it but to agitate anguish and a violent, vengeful urge that is offered some animal satisfaction by that murderous fight at the end.
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