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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    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time Limit
    What Time Limit has to say is sobering, important and exciting and, though its principals are caught in circumstances that are extraordinary, it meticulously arrives at terrible truths that are timeless and universal.
  2. The Black Scorpion
    The back-lot boys working for producers Frank Melford and Jack Dietz have, for the most part, performed an adequate job. As for the human side of the plot, written by David Duncan and Robert Blees, just forget it.
  3. The Three Faces of Eve
    It is written, produced and directed by Mr. Johnson with a clean documentary clarity, and played with superlative flexibility and emotional power by Joanne Woodward in the main role.
  4. Man of a Thousand Faces
    Thanks to a dandy performance by James Cagney in the role of the great silent-film star, Lon Chaney, there is drama and personality in Man of a Thousand Faces.
  5. 3:10 to Yuma
    A good, lively script has been written by Halsted Welles, and sharp, business-like direction has been contributed by Delmer Daves.What's more, the whole thing is neatly acted.
  6. An Affair to Remember
    Mr. McCarey's direction is unpropitiously and unaccountably slow. Could it be, too, that a brand of make-believe that was tolerable eighteen years ago, before color and CinemaScope and other intrusions, is just a little discomforting now?
  7. Love in the Afternoon
    This grandly sophisticated romance, which Mr. Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond have penned with a courteous nod to a novel by a Frenchman named Claude Anet, is in the great Lubitsch tradition, right down to the froth on the champagne, with a couple of fine additional "touches" that Mr. Wilder may wholly claim.
  8. The Curse of Frankenstein
    This one should be cold-cuts for old-timers who remember Boris Karloff as the get of Frankenstein, but it may tittilate the blissful youngsters.
  9. A Face in the Crowd
    Mr. Schulberg and Mr. Kazan spawn a monster not unlike the one of Dr. Frankenstein. But so hypnotized are they by his presence that he runs away not only with the show but with intellectual reason and with the potentiality of their theme.
  10. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
    It is firmly directed by John Sturges (of Bad Day at Black Rock fame), and it is ruggedly acted by all and sundry—of which there is quit[e] a heap.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    12 Angry Men
    A penetrating, sensitive, and sometimes shocking dissection of the hearts and minds of men who obviously are something less than gods. It makes for taut, absorbing, and compelling drama that reaches far beyond the close confines of its jury room setting.
  12. The Incredible Shrinking Man
    Unless a viewer is addicted to freakish ironies, the unlikely spectacle of Mr. Williams losing an inch of height each week, while his wife, Randy Stuart, looks on helplessly, will become tiresome before Universal has emptied its lab of science-fiction clichés.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wrong Man
    Frighteningly authentic, the story generates only a modicum of drama.
  14. Baby Doll
    Mr. Kazan keeps the courtship bouncing between the emotional and the ludicrous. The nonchalance of the pursuer is its most entertaining grace.
  15. Written on the Wind
    The trouble with this romantic picture—among other minor things, including Mr. Stack's absurd performance and another even more so by Miss Malone—is that nothing really happens, the complications within the characters are never clear and the sloppy, self-pitying fellow at the center of the whole thing is a bore.
  16. Bundle of Joy
    A sadly deficient entertainment when looked at objectively. Its book is an obvious and witless rework of a plot that has gray hairs, and its music and so-called dances are depressingly lacking in class.
  17. Giant
    Thanks to Mr. Stevens' brilliant structure and handling of images, every scene and every moment is a pleasure. He makes "picture" the essence of his film.
  18. Seven Samurai
    On that simple framework and familiar story line, director Kurosawa has plastered a wealth of rich detail, which brilliantly illuminates his characters and the kind of action in which they are involved. He has loaded his film with unusual and exciting physical incidents and made the whole thing graphic in a hard, realistic western style.
  19. Around the World in 80 Days
    It makes like a wild adventure picture and, with some forty famous actors in "bit" roles, it also takes on the characteristic of a running recognition game. It is noisy with sound effects and music. It is overwhelmingly large in the process known as Todd-AO. It runs for two hours fifty-five minutes (not counting an intermission). And it is, undeniably, quite a show.
  20. Julie
    There is one mark of distinction: Mr. Stone has shot much of this film along the beautiful California seacoast in the vicinity of Monterey. That makes it easy to look at. Indeed, it makes it thrilling, at times.
  21. Lust for Life
    Both the script and the performance of this picture have a striking integrity in putting forth the salient details and the surface aspects of the life of van Gogh.
  22. The Bad Seed
    Mervyn LeRoy, who produced and directed, has lost a great deal of the bite of the play. He has done it in a style of presentation that is ostentatious and often insincere.
  23. High Society
    As flimsy as a gossip-columnist's word, especially when it is documenting the weird behavior of the socially elite. And with pretty and lady-like Grace Kelly flouncing lightly through its tomboyish Hepburn role, it misses the snap and the crackle that its un-musical predecessor had.
  24. The King and I
    Every bit of the humor and vibrant humanity that flowed through the tender story of the English school-teacher and the quizzical king is richly preserved in the screen play that Ernest Lehman has prepared.
  25. Moby Dick
    This is the third time Melville's story has been put upon the screen. There is no need for another, because it cannot be done better, more beautifully or excitingly again.
  26. Crime in the Streets
    The production, which Donald Siegel has directed from the screen play of the original author, Reginald Rose, is cramped and flimsy. It matches the rest of the show.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing
    Though The Killing is composed of familiar ingredients and it calls for fuller explanations, it evolves as a fairly diverting melodrama.
  28. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Even in mammoth VistaVision, the old Hitchcock thriller-stuff has punch.
  29. The Searchers
    A rip-snorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come.
  30. Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
    The whole thing is in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff.
  31. The Harder They Fall
    It's a brutal and disagreeable story, probably a little far-fetched, and without Mr. Schulberg's warmest character—the wistful widow who bestowed her favors on busted pugs. But with all the arcana of the fight game that Mr. Yordan and Mr. Robson have put into it—along with their bruising, brutish fight scenes—it makes for a lively, stinging film.
  32. Forbidden Planet
    If you've got an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you'll have a barrel of fun.
  33. Ikiru
    If it weren't so confused in its story-telling, it would be one of the major postwar films from Japan. As it stands, it is a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond.
  34. Richard III
    Of all Olivier's Shakespearean films, Richard III is, to my way of thinking, the most satisfying, the most surprising and - it has to be said - the funniest. [24 Apr 1981, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  35. The Ladykillers
    Perhaps it is slightly labored. Perhaps it does have the air of an initially brilliant inspiration that has not worked out as easily as it seemed it should. Still and all, Mr. Rose's nimble writing and Alexander Mackendrick's directing skill have managed to assure The Ladykillers of a distinct and fetching comic quality.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    Almost 40 years later, Don Siegel's film about the pod people hasn't lost its chill. [02 Dec 1994, p.D18]
    • The New York Times
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Burmese Harp
    This poetically photographed Japanese drama is an earnest but extremely circuitous and overstated antiwar film. It moves like a figure 8, making its point at the middle, then looping around for a second, none-too-convincing hour.
  38. There's Always Tomorrow
    What happens next is cut to order—routine procedure, as they say.
  39. All That Heaven Allows
    Solid and sensible drama plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.
  40. Guys and Dolls
    It's as tinny and tawny and terrific as any hot-cha musical film you'll ever see.
  41. The Man with the Golden Arm
    It is a pretty plain and unimaginative looksee at a lower-depths character with a perilous weakness for narcotics that he miraculously overcomes in the end.
  42. Rebel Without a Cause
    There are some excruciating flashes of accuracy and truth in this film...However, we do wish the young actors, including Mr. Dean, had not been so intent on imitating Marlon Brando in varying degrees. The tendency, possibly typical of the behavior of certain youths, may therefore be a subtle commentary but it grows monotonous.
  43. Oklahoma!
    A full-bodied Oklahoma! has been brought forth in this film to match in vitality, eloquence and melody any musical this reviewer has ever seen.
  44. The Trouble with Harry
    It is not a particularly witty or clever script that John Michael Hayes has put together from a novel by Jack Trevor Story, nor does Mr. Hitchcock's direction make it spin. The pace is leisurely, almost sluggish, and the humor frequently is strained. But it does possess mild and mellow merriment all along the way.
  45. It's Always Fair Weather
    Howling with derision at such recognizable idiocies of TV as singing and slobbering commercials, audience-participation shows, give-away plugs for mundane products and the wise-talking agency boys, Miss Comden and Mr. Green fling some pretty sharp barbs in this bright film.
  46. To Catch a Thief
    To Catch a Thief does nothing but give out a good, exciting time.
  47. The Kentuckian
    Some outdoor scenes in excellent color and the expanse of CinemaScope give a bit of magnificence to a picture that lacks it in every other way.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    It is loaded to the gunwales with screamingly funny scenes which, in several instances, are visual improvements on the play.
  49. The Night of the Hunter
    There is a strong trace of Freudian aberration, fanaticism and iniquity. Credit Mr. Laughton with a clever and exceptionally effective job of catching the ugliness and terror of certain ignorant, small-town types.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We're No Angels
    Generally a slow, talky affair of elephantine roguishness and a few genuine chuckles.
  51. Not as a Stranger
    It is loaded with hospital lore, coldly realistic and compelling, but also it is creeping with ponderous characters. With so much dissecting in his picture—and so much of it being good—it is too bad that Mr. Kramer couldn't have done a little on his characters.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ain't Misbehavin'
    The music is tired and the dances are flaccid repetitions of hundreds of other movie dances. But when the summer nights afflict you like wet wool, and the theatres beckon with their super-cooled zephyrs, Ain't Misbehavin' will fill the double bill. At worst it's a soporific.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Land of the Pharaohs
    While it is impressively sweeping in its eye-filling pageantry, this saga of the building of a colossal pyramid 5,000 years ago is staged on the creaky foundation of a tale of palace intrigue that must have been banal even in the First Dynasty.
  54. Lady and the Tramp
    Not the best he has done in this line. It is a coyly romantic story, done with animals. The sentimentality is mighty, and the use of the CinemaScope size does not make for any less awareness of the thickness of the goo.
  55. Marty
    Marty makes a warm and winning film, full of the sort of candid comment on plain, drab people that seldom reaches the screen.
  56. East of Eden
    In short, there is energy and intensity but little clarity and emotion in this film. It is like a great, green iceberg: mammoth and imposing but very cold.
  57. Blackboard Jungle
    As a straight melodrama of juvenile violence this is a vivid and hair-raising film.
  58. The Racers
    It is something for racing fans to see. But the business that passes for a story in between and among the racing scenes is depressingly unoriginal and banal.
  59. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
    The Disney people naturally have made it as elaborate as it was made by Verne. And they have likewise developed all the other intriguing potentials of the yarn with a joyful exaggeration that is expected in science-fiction films.
  60. The Last Time I Saw Paris
    What is to be said of such a picture? The story is trite. The motivations are thin. The writing is glossy and pedestrian. The acting is pretty much forced.
  61. Carmen Jones
    There is nothing wrong with the music—except that it does not fit the people or the words. But that did not seem to make much difference to Mr. Hammerstein or Mr. Preminger. They were carried away by their precocity. The present consequence is a crazy mixed-up film.
  62. A Star Is Born
    Those who have blissful recollections of David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born as probably the most affecting movie ever made about Hollywood may get themselves set for a new experience that should put the former one in the shade when they see Warner Brothers' and George Cukor's remake of the seventeen-year-old film.
  63. White Christmas
    Everyone works hard at the business of singing, dancing and cracking jokes, but the stuff that they work with is minor.
  64. The Barefoot Contessa
    The story that's told against this background is a curiously empty tabloid tale, and the title performer, Ava Gardner, fails to give it plausibility or appeal.
  65. Sabrina
    In our wistful estimation, the most delightful comedy-romance in years.
  66. Brigadoon
    Vincente Minnelli's direction lacks his usual vitality and flow. Brigadoon on the screen, we must say, is pretty weak synthetic Scotch.
  67. Rear Window
    Mr. Stewart does a first-class job, playing the whole thing from a wheel chair and making points with his expressions and eyes. His handling of a lens-hound's paraphernalia in scanning the action across the way is very important to the color and fascination of the film.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magnificent Obsession
    Playing his first major role, the strapping, manly Mr. Hudson gives a fine, direct account of himself, in the film's only real surprise. Otherwise, Universal has delivered the goods—or good—exactly as prescribed by the doctor.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    A fast, funny and sprightly rustic romp well worth seeing.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Waterfront
    Moviemaking of a rare and high order. (Review of Original Release)
  71. The Caine Mutiny
    The Caine Mutiny, though somewhat garbled, is a vibrant film.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Them!
    Suffice it to say that the combination of three writers, director Gordon Douglas, producer David Weisbart and a cooperative cast have helped make the proceedings tense, absorbing and, surprisingly enough, somewhat convincing.
  73. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    Perhaps "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" extends a bit longer than it should. As such things do, it inclines to repetition. But most of it is good, fast, wholesome fun.
  74. Dial M for Murder
    The thrills come in following a succession of dawnings in people's minds.But Mr. Hitchcock has presented this mental material on the screen with remarkable visual definition of developing intrigue and mood.
  75. Salt of the Earth
    The hard-focus, realistic quality of the picture's photography and style completes its characterization as a calculated social document.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crime Wave
    Mr. de Toth's tour is a brisk, pictorial one, honeycombing the shadowy metropolitan fringes and byways where vigilant police sift a gallery of chameleonic habitués. But this canvas narrows considerably, at times unconvincingly, in appraising the plight of Mr. Nelson.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Creature from the Black Lagoon
    It's a fishing expedition that is necessary only if a viewer has lost all of his comic books.
  78. The Wild One
    Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam.
  79. Knights of the Round Table
    Don't look for something in the mood of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" or Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" in this extraordinarily eye-filling film. The poetic eloquence and grandeur of those distinctly literary works have been replaced by a sweep of graphic action and romantic symbols that is straight Hollywood.
  80. The Living Desert
    Mr. Disney's earnest people have done a remarkable job of collecting some extraordinary footage and his editors have assembled it well for excitement and fascination, more than for education.
  81. Calamity Jane
    In Technicolor, it looks good enough to eat. But the voracity with which Miss Day has at it and wolfs it down is unnerving to see. David Butler, who directed, has wound her up tight and let her go. She does everything but hit the ceiling in lashing all over the screen.This is not altogether entrancing.
  82. Mogambo
    In the advancement of the romance, which itself is hot stuff, for what it is, several capable actors do entertaining jobs.
  83. A Lion Is in the Streets
    A headlong and dynamic drama about a back-country champion of the poor who permits his political ambitions to pull him down a perilously crooked road.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    From Here to Eternity
    Out of "From Here to Eternity," a novel whose anger and compassion stirred a post-war reading public as few such works have, Columbia and a company of sensitive hands have forged a film almost as towering and persuasive as its source...Stands as a shining example of truly professional moviemaking.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Roman Holiday
    It is a contrived fable but a bittersweet legend with laughs that leaves the spirits soaring.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The War of the Worlds
    The War of the Worlds is, for all of its improbabilities, an imaginatively conceived, professionally turned adventure, which makes excellent use of Technicolor, special effects by a crew of experts and impressively drawn backgrounds.
  87. The Caddy
    For the most part, this scatter-brained fiction, in which Mr. Lewis is teamed with his popular partner, Dean Martin, is a cut-to-size Martin-Lewis farce, wherein the two playmates lightly fancy that they are a golf contestant and his caddy, respectively.
  88. The Band Wagon
    Joined with the equally nimble talents of Fred Astaire. Jack Buchanan and Cyd Charisse and some tunes from the sterling repertory of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, this literate and witty combination herein delivers a show that respectfully bids for recognition as one of the best musical films ever made.
  89. Lili
    [Caron] helps "Lili" to be a lovely and beguiling little film, touched with the magic of romance and the shimmer of masquerade.
  90. Stalag 17
    A humorous, suspenseful, disturbing and rousing pastime.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It Came from Outer Space
    Merely mildly diverting, not stupendous.
  92. House of Wax
    The major causes for anxiety presented by this film are in the savagery of its conception and the intolerable artlessness of its sound. It is thrown and howled at the audience as though the only purpose was to overwhelm the naturally curious patron with an excess of brutal stimuli.
  93. Shane
    Shane contains something more than beauty and the grandeur of the mountains and plains, drenched by the brilliant Western sunshine and the violent, torrential, black-browed rains. It contains a tremendous comprehension of the bitterness and passion of the feuds that existed between the new homesteaders and the cattlemen on the open range.
  94. I Confess
    Even though moments in the picture do have some tension and power, and the whole thing is scrupulously acted by a tightly professional cast, the consequence is an entertainment that tends to drag, sag and generally grow dull. It is not the sort of entertaiment that one hopefully expects of "Hitch."
  95. Ivanhoe
    Production of this picture in England endowed it with a rich, distinctive air. It is a grand picture, told in what Sir Walter himself called his "big bow-wow style."
  96. Peter Pan
    A wholly amusing and engaging piece of work within the defined limitations of the aforementioned Disney style. The Disney inventions are as skillful and clever as they have ever been.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Niagara
    The producers are making full use of both the grandeur of the Falls and its adjacent areas as well as the grandeur that is Marilyn Monroe. The scenic effects in both cases are superb.
  98. The Bad and the Beautiful
    It is a crowded and colorful picture, but it is choppy, episodic and vague.
  99. Road to Bali
    Quite simply, "Road to Bali" is a whoopingly hilarious film, full of pure crazy situations and deliciously discourteous gags, all played with evident relish and split-second timing by the team.
  100. The Star
    Even though redundant and familiar, as this performance inevitably is, with its obviously patterned reproduction of a caustic and vanity-ridden dame, Miss Davis still makes it sizzle with stinging sarcasm and feminine fire, so that it gives the illusion of emerging as a shaft of withering light from Hollywood.
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