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. Experiment in Terror
    It takes more than two hours to come to a solution of the problem in this film. They would do it in one hour on TV, and it would probably be every bit as good.
  2. Sweet Bird of Youth
    Sweet Bird of Youth, for all its graphics and the vigorous performance of its top roles, has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that's all.
  3. Through a Glass Darkly
    It has a simple, straight cinematic form, unifying a little tangle of experience within a modest frame. It may strike one as slight and disappointing alongside the intellectual magnitude of such as his film "The Seventh Seal." But it suggests a new mood of its author—introspective, troubled, cold.
  4. Lover Come Back
    One of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.
  5. Victim
    As a straight piece of blackmail melodrama, it is a good bit below the British par. But as a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold.
  6. The Children's Hour
    It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman's famous stage play, The Children's Hour, could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three decades as it looks in the new film version.
  7. Judgment at Nuremberg
    On the point of the fundamental issue in the Nazi war guilt trials that were held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II, Stanley Kramer, the producer-director, has pinned a powerful, persuasive film. The major weakness, perhaps, of the whole thing is that it is inevitably compressive and sometimes glib. The strength and wonder of it is that it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.
  8. One, Two, Three
    That's about the nature of the picture. It is one with which you can laugh--with its own impudence toward foreign crises--while laughing at its rowdy spinning jokes.
  9. El Cid
    It is hard to remember a picture in which the sheer pictorial punch was greater than it is in this three-hour exhibition of kings and warriors in medieval Spain.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    This time, Mr. Disney, true to himself in his own fashion, has constructed a garden of dreams to delight every child, with the aid of a few of the noted Herbert melodies, a spate of new ones, a cast of photogenic kids and willing grown-ups and sets as stylized as those of any Disney cartoon.
  11. West Side Story
    What they have done with West Side Story in knocking it down and moving it from stage to screen is to reconstruct its fine material into nothing short of a cinema masterpiece...In every respect, the recreation of the Arthur Laurents-Leonard Bernstein musical in the dynamic forms of motion pictures is superbly and appropriately achieved.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blue Hawaii
    Mild, nonsensical and harmless.
  13. The Comancheros
    So studiously wild and woolly it turns out to be good fun.
  14. Splendor in the Grass
    Miss Wood has a beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breakfast at Tiffany's
    Like that storied novella by Truman Capote from which it stems, it is a completely unbelievable but wholly captivating flight into fancy composed of unequal dollops of comedy, romance, poignancy, funny colloquialisms and Manhattan's swankiest East Side areas captured in the loveliest of colors.
  16. Paris Blues
    Paris Blues is a small movie with large ambitions.
  17. The Hustler
    Under Robert Rossen's strong direction, its ruthless and odorous account of one young hustler's eventual emancipation is positive and alive. It crackles with credible passions. It comes briskly and brusquely to sharp points.
  18. Yojimbo
    As in most Westerns, the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese. Kurosawa is here showing more virtuosity than strength. Yojimbo is a long way (in the wrong direction) from his brilliant Rashomon.
  19. Scream of Fear
    Though clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, Scream of Fear is closer to Orson Welles in its baroque visual design and delight in style for style's sake. [21 Oct 2008, p.C4]
    • The New York Times
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
    Good color, handsome photographic effects and a submarine to end them all make Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea a mildly diverting but far from memorable screen plunge.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    Even though the picture runs more than two hours and a half, it moves swiftly and gets where it is going. J. Lee Thompson has directed it with pace and has seen to it that the actors give the impression of being stout and bold.
  22. La Dolce Vita
    A brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary upon the tragedy of the overcivilized. (Review of Original Release)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blast of Silence
    Molly McCarthy, however, is deceptively unaffected as the heroine, and her spirited attack on her two big scenes has the quality of the film as a whole—over-eager, unsuccessful, but worth watching.
  24. Breathless
    Say this, in sum, for "Breathless": it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life.
  25. The Misfits
    Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Impostor
    An amusing, and occasionally fascinating, comedy-drama about the career of one of the most amazing—and likable—contemporary charlatans, Ferdinand W. Demara Jr.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    A generally cozy and sentimental little yarn about a nice young English couple, their brood of dogs and a lady dognapper who collects Dalmatians to make coats. It's a rather clever idea, if a bit unsettling.
  28. Where the Boys Are
    Inspired by the novel of Glendon Swarthout, which one reviewer described as "a highly carbonated elixir of sex, sun-shine and beer," it has been patterned into a movie by the glib script writer, George Wells, so that it looks and sounds like a chummy dramatization of the Kinsey reports.
  29. The Grass Is Greener
    Miss Kerr and Miss Simmons look attractive and Mr. Grant and Mr. Mitchum try hard to create the illusion of being moved by love and passion. But they both appear mechanical and bored. [24 Dec 1960, p.8]
    • The New York Times
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swiss Family Robinson
    The Robinsons, their island and Mr. Disney have made a real Christmas contribution for any family.
  31. Exodus
    A dazzling, eye-filling, nerve-tingling display of a wide variety of individual and mass reactions to awesome challenges and, in some of its sharpest personal details, a fine reflection of experience that rips the heart.
  32. The Sundowners
    A sense of outdoor living and a tingle of open-air adventure are the breath of life in this film.
  33. Butterfield 8
    The dialogue is rough. Let's say O'Harrowing. And the ending is absurd. But so is most of it for that matter. It's the living it up that gets you in this film.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Seven
    A gifted director like Mr. Sturges (who also produced) can't be held entirely responsible for this endless dawdling prologue, since William Roberts' scenario increasingly flattens the action with philosophical talk on all sides and some easy clichés.
  35. Spartacus
    It is a spotty, uneven drama in which the entire opening phase representing the basic-training program in a gladiatorial school is lively, exciting and expressive, no matter how true to history it is, and the middle phase is pretentious and tedious, because it is concerned with the dull strife of politics.
  36. Midnight Lace
    It's always nice to have a mystery melodrama, no matter how implausible it may be, that takes place amid elegant surroundings and involves people who are beautiful and rich. It makes one feel so luxurious to be there with the diamonds and champagne, enjoying the heat on the rich folks and knowing that you are not going to be burned.
  37. The Hidden Fortress
    This is not to say that the action is not vivid, exciting and tense, or that Kurosawa's camera is any less graphic than it usually is. This is simply to say that The Hidden Fortress is essentially a superficial film and that Kurosawa, for all his talent, is as prone to pot-boiling as anyone else.
  38. The Entertainer
    It works out to a fascinating picture, for one reason because of its superior illustrative performance and, for another, because of its striking mise en scène.
  39. Sunrise at Campobello
    A well-done, moving biographical film.
  40. Psycho
    The consequence in his denouement falls quite flat for us. But the acting is fair. Mr. Perkins and Miss Leigh perform with verve, and Vera Miles, John Gavin, and Martin Balsam do well enough in other roles.
  41. The Brides of Dracula
    Here is but another repetition of the standard tale of the vampire bugaboo who likes to sink his oversized dentures into the necks of pretty girls.There is nothing new or imaginative about it.
  42. Ocean's 11
    Lewis Milestone's direction suits the movement of Harry Brown's and Charles Lederer's script, which is entirely centripetal, focusing exclusively on Mr. Sinatra and his gang. Young people are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.
  43. The Time Machine
    The drama, for all its invention, is creaky and a bit passé. (Apparently there has still been no contact with other planets in 800,000 A. D.) And the mood, while delicately wistful, is not so flippant or droll as it might be in a fiction as fanciful and flighty as this one naturally is.
  44. Inherit the Wind
    One of the most intelligent, respectable and entertaining motion pictures of this year.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bellboy
    A generous—some might even say gratuitous—proportion of the anecdotes are devoted to mild shaggy dog jokes, with a subdued audience chuckle as the kindest response. Mr. Lewis' devotees may find the comedian disappointingly restrained.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    13 Ghosts
    It's too bad Mr. Castle, in serving up his ghosts, didn't simply have some cartoonists draw, 'em on in full view.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darby O'Gill and the Little People
    Overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories, fantasy and romance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    House of Usher
    Under the low-budget circumstances, Vincent Price and Myrna Fahey should not be blamed for portraying the decadent Ushers with arch affectation, nor Mark Damon held to account for the traces of Brooklynese that creep into his stiffly costumed impersonation of the mystified interloper.
  49. The Apartment
    Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pollyanna
    Like its sub-teen, "Glad Girl" heroine, this visit with Pollyanna is pleasant and unlikely to hurt or excite even the small fry.
  51. Private Property
    This tense and upsetting film has more psychological depth and empathy than the comparable sensationalist fare of its time, and shudder-inducing cinematic style to spare. Private Property qualifies as a genuine rediscovery.
  52. The Cranes Are Flying
    Thanks to Mr. Kalatozov's direction and the excellent performance Tatyana Samoilova gives as the girl, one absorbs a tremendous feeling of sympathy from this film—a feeling that has no awareness of geographical or political bounds.
  53. Suddenly, Last Summer
    Joseph L. Mankiewicz' direction is strained and sluggish, as is, indeed, the whole conceit of the drama. It should have been left to the off-Broadway stage.
  54. On the Beach
    Mr. Kramer has brilliantly directed a strong and responsive cast, headed by Gregory Peck as the submarine commander and Ava Gardner as the worldly woman who craves his love. Miss Gardner is remarkably revealing of the pathos of a wasted life. Fred Astaire is also amazing as the cynical scientist, conveying in his self-effacing manner a piercing sense of the irony of his trade.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mummy
    For a superior version of a nearly identical horror yarn, with a little style and imagination, catch the 1932 Boris Karloff version of The Mummy now floating around on television. The new one just lumbers.
  56. Ben-Hur
    The artistic quality and taste of Mr. Wyler have prevailed to make this a rich and glowing drama that far transcends the bounds of spectacle. His big scenes are brilliant and dramatic—that is unquestionable. There has seldom been anything in movies to compare with this picture's chariot race.
  57. Shadows
    Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.
  58. Pillow Talk
    One of the most lively and up-to-date comedy-romances of the year.
  59. Look Back in Anger
    The fury and hate that John Osborne was able to pack into a flow of violent words in his stage play, Look Back in Anger, are not only matched but also documented in the film that the original stage director, Tony Richardson, has made from that vicious play.
  60. The Magician
    This picture is full of extraordinary thrills that flow and collide on several levels of emotion and intellect. And it swarms with sufficient melodrama of the blood-chilling, flesh-creeping sort to tingle the hide of the least brainy addict of out-right monster films.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    North by Northwest
    The lines and the expert manipulation of the principals are tributes to the outstanding talents of Messrs. Lehman and Hitchcock.
  62. The Nun's Story
    From Kathryn Hulme's novel The Nun's Story, which gives an amazing account of a young Belgian woman's experiences in becoming and being a nursing nun, screen writer Robert Anderson and director Fred Zinnemann have derived an equally amazing motion picture of an extraordinary dedicated life.
  63. Anatomy of a Murder
    It is the best courtroom melodrama this old judge has ever seen.
  64. Porgy and Bess
    Almost a quarter of a century after its initial performance on the stage (and seventeen years after the revival that really established it), this most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait.
  65. Wild Strawberries
    This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.
  66. Too Many Crooks
    Too Many Crooks is strictly of that surface order, but it's a good, crazy, brisk farce comedy.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rio Bravo
    Despite its slickness, virility, occasional humor and, if it may be repeated, authentic professional approach, it is well-made but awfully familiar fare.
  68. Room at the Top
    Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Some Like It Hot
    Let's face it. Two hours is too long a time to harp on one joke. But Billy Wilder, who produced, directed and collaborated with I. A. L. Diamond on this breeziest of scripts, proves once again that he is as professional as anyone in Hollywood. Mr. Wilder, abetted by such equally proficient operatives as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, surprisingly has developed a completely unbelievable plot into a broad farce in which authentically comic action vies with snappy and sophisticated dialogue.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    The picture races into a wild chase of a climax that is pure bunk.
  71. The Diary of Anne Frank
    Mr. Stevens has done a superb job of putting upon the screen the basic drama and shivering authenticity of the Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett play, which in turn caught the magnitude of drama in the real-life diary of a Jewish girl.
  72. Imitation of Life
    This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.
  73. Sleeping Beauty
    A crisply stylized fairyland, where the colors are rich, the sounds are luscious and magic sparkles spurt charmingly from wands.
  74. Some Came Running
    It is all very complex and confused. Indeed, it is so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end.
  75. Separate Tables
    The characters here are all misfits—people who have not quite been able to adjust their own inadequacies and terrors to the hard realities of life. And it is in the revelation of these people to a more or less brilliant extent that the fascination and satisfaction of this picture lie.
  76. My Uncle
    Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.
  77. The Seventh Seal
    A piercing and powerful contemplation of the passage of man upon this earth. Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough—and rewarding—a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year.
  78. The Old Man and the Sea
    Whatever allegorical intimations there may be in it are not conveyed to any sensible degree in a voice narration that breaks in occasionally or in the mumblings of the old man.
  79. The Big Country
    For all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude.
  80. The Defiant Ones
    A remarkably apt and dramatic visualization of a social idea—the idea of men of different races brought together to face misfortune in a bond of brotherhood — is achieved by Producer Stanley Kramer in his new film, The Defiant Ones.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blob
    It is truly providential that a new horror melodrama called The Blob is so woodenly presented on the whole, for a little astute showmanship applied to such a plot would have been enough to scare the quills off a porcupine.
  82. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform!
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fly
    Believe it or not, The Fly happens to be one of the better, more restrained entries of the "shock" school. As produced and directed by the late Kurt Neumann, with an earnest little cast headed by Al Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price, this is a quiet, uncluttered and even unpretentious picture, building up almost unbearable tension by simple suggestion.
  84. Gigi
    Charming entertainment.
  85. Vertigo
    Believe us, that secret is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched, that we wouldn't want to risk at all disturbing your inevitable enjoyment of the film.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror of Dracula
    Perhaps the constant hunt for hemoglobin is slowing our villain down, for this time there are strong indications that the once gory plot is showing definite signs of anemia.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The One That Got Away
    If not a milestone, The One That Got Away adds up to a consistently good tingler.
    • The New York Times
  88. Run Silent Run Deep
    A better film about war beneath the ocean and about guys in the "silent service" has not been made.
  89. Witness for the Prosecution
    For a courtroom melodrama pegged to a single plot device--a device that, of course, everybody promises not to reveal--the Arthur Hornblow Jr. film production of the Agatha Christie play "Witness for the Prosecution" comes off extraordinarily well. This results mainly from Billy Wilder's splendid staging of some splintering courtroom scenes and a first-rate theatrical performance by Charles Laughton in the defense-attorney role.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Touch of Evil
    Mr. Welles' is an obvious but brilliant bag of tricks. Using a superlative camera (manned by Russell Metty) like a black-snake whip, he lashes the action right into the spectator's eye. [22 May 1958, p.25]
  91. The Tarnished Angels
    Mr. Faulkner's faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.
  92. Paths of Glory
    Mr. Kubrick has made it look terrific. The execution scene is one of the most craftily directed and emotionally lacerating that we have ever seen. But there are two troubling flaws in this picture, one in the realm of technique and the other in the realm of significance, which determine its larger, lasting worth.
  93. Old Yeller
    In this very lean and sensible screen transcription of Fred Gipson's children's book, adapted by himself and William Tunberg, a warm, appealing little rustic tale unfolds in lovely color photography. Sentimental, yes, but also sturdy as a hickory stick.
  94. The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Brilliant is the word, and no other, to describe the quality of skills that have gone into the making of this picture, from the writing of the script out of a novel by the Frenchman Pierre Boulle, to direction, performance, photographing, editing and application of a musical score.
  95. Peyton Place
    Except that they take a long time at it, Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes and Director Mark Robson construct a drama of personal tensions and incongruities that has something of the irony and terror of the film version of "An American Tragedy."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    Presley fans may not like the idea of his being a churlish, egotistical wonder boy of television and the screen for a good half of the picture.
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