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. Super Troopers
    Bad and tasteless. You laugh neither with it nor at it but rather sit counting the minutes while the movie laughs, for no good reason, at itself.
  2. The Butterfly Effect
    Inhabited by a genuine spirit of cruelty, both toward its characters and its audience.
  3. Eight Crazy Nights
    Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with.
  4. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    To imagine the life of Harry Potter as a martial arts adventure told by a lobotomized Woody Allen is to have some idea of the fate that lies in store for moviegoers lured to the mediocrity that is Kung Pow: Enter the Fist.
  5. Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
    The character designs are flat and derivative, the backgrounds crude and uninviting, and the movements jerky and minimal. It's a sad excuse for a movie, but then, it isn't really meant to be one. It's a commercial with a ticket price.
  6. Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell is more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who, having stripped down to the nitty-gritty once too often, may finally have nothing left to show.
  7. House on Haunted Hill
    All the special effects in the world cannot compensate for an inability to generate tension, establish and sustain pace or create any character whose survival is worth rooting for.
  8. Darkness
    The real mystery is why such a mangled film was not junked altogether.
  9. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
    Here's the lowdown on the latest chapter in Mortal Kombat: deadly dull.
  10. Carpool
    Wide-eyed and mirthlessly peppy, Mr. Arnold soon wears out his welcome as a bumbling would-be bank robber who commandeers a group of young hostages.
  11. Fair Game
    The only heat that rises from the movie is mechanical.
  12. Mixed Nuts
    Staged as pure fluff without an ounce of ballast, Mixed Nuts succeeds only in getting its cast into Halloween-caliber crazy costumes by the time it's over.
  13. Beverly Hills Cop III
    Beverly Hills Cop III is a generic action movie, an Eddie Murphy film with only a trace of Eddie Murphy.
  14. Pee-wee's Big Adventure
    Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is the most barren comedy I've seen in years, maybe ever.
  15. The NeverEnding Story
    The Neverending Story is a graceless, humorless fantasy for children, combining live actors and animated creatures in mostly imaginary settings.
  16. Let It Ride
    The movie is so witless and confused in tone that its seedy racetrack clientele only emerge as dim, inarticulate cartoons.
  17. The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
    Renny Harlin, who did a much better job directing ''Die Hard 2,'' displays no sense of humor and takes the film's nonsensical action scenes much too seriously, at one point even blowing up a beach house in the process.
  18. Sex and the City 2
    The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.
  19. Killers
    Unless you’re trapped on an airplane or enjoying movie night at the penitentiary, you have no excuse for watching Killers. A brain-deadening collision of high concept and low standards.
  20. Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras
    Amateurish and incoherent.
  21. Rocky Road
    The whole business has a breathless, determined, student-film quality that makes it especially hard to watch. Mr. Cunningham and his cast are clearly trying to do something they feel is important, and there is no pleasure in watching them do it so ineptly.
  22. Followers
    Suffers from clumsy exposition and uneven acting, except in the case of Eddie T. Robinson.
  23. Mail Order Bride
    Might have generated a laugh or two had it not forced the actors into uncomfortable extremes of caricature.
  24. 7 Year Zig Zag
    Quickly moves beyond the oppressive into the cruel and unusual.
  25. L.A. Twister
    Barely watchable.
  26. Dischord
    The story is so crowded with incident and implication as to be both nonsensical and impossible to act, so the actors, when they are not bursting into fits of temper, smile mysteriously.
  27. Toro negro
    An unflinching look at bullfighting and debasement in the Yucatán Peninsula - will entail witnessing animal torture and death. And that's not the worst of it.
  28. They're Just My Friends
    Hands down the most excruciatingly inept film to creep its way into theaters in some time.
  29. The Trouble with Romance
    Unlike Michael Knowles's similarly plotted and vastly superior "Room 314," The Trouble With Romance is visually stagnant and tonally bewildered.
  30. A Beautiful Life
    This laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism and hardscrabble survival replaces story with outline and characters with place holders.
  31. Eulogy for a Vampire
    Someone really needs to take away Patrick McGuinn’s camera equipment. A few years ago he made a spectacularly bad gay-sex movie called “Sun Kissed,” and now he has made another, Eulogy for a Vampire.
  32. Labor Day
    The result is, more than anything else, a slickly produced 76-minute commercial for the union; to call it a documentary is to stretch the term almost beyond meaning.
  33. Sucker Punch
    There is nothing here to enjoy, beyond the tiny satisfaction in noting that the movie lives up to its name.
  34. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    This may be the worst movie Pauly Shore has ever been in. Think about that.
  35. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    In place of novelty we have dank interiors (shades of "Saw") and black-and-white photography (à la "Eraserhead"). Still missing is that lingering subtext, leaving only a lurid, splattery wallow in grime, blood and excrement.
  36. I Melt with You
    When a sheriff's deputy (Carla Gugino) visits the house, I Melt With You turns into a ludicrous, cheap horror thriller that sheds any claims to integrity. By the end, you feel nothing, not even contempt.
  37. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.
  38. Passion Play
    You might reasonably assume that any movie starring Mr. Rourke and Mr. Murray would have to have something to recommend it. But aside from a haunting musical interlude, in which Mr. Rourke, with pathetic ineptitude, mimes playing a trumpet, Passion Play is barely palatable.
  39. Love, Wedding, Marriage
    A movie that feels like punishment for a crime you can't remember committing.
  40. Man on a Ledge
    Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.
  41. Upside Down
    Did I mention that Upside Down is simply awful?
  42. The Family Tree
    The only reason I can think of to watch Vivi Friedman's flat, satirical farce The Family Tree - and it's not a good enough reason - is the opportunity to play a game of spot the semi-star.
  43. The Big Wedding
    To say that Justin Zackham’s farce The Big Wedding takes the low road doesn’t begin to do justice to the sheer awfulness of this star-stuffed, potty-mouthed fiasco.
  44. Gangster Squad
    His (Fleischer) first feature, "Zombieland," was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies.
  45. After Fall, Winter
    The lovebirds' dialogue has the sophistication of a junior high school romance, and Mr. Schaeffer appears to have pasted his story together from the button-pushing plotlines of other films.
  46. Battle of the Year
    The miracle of the new 3-D dance film Battle of the Year is how it can be so relentlessly boring while there is so much frenetic activity on screen.
  47. The Hangover Part III
    The Hangover Part III, directed by Todd Phillips from a screenplay he wrote with Craig Mazin, is a dull, lazy walkthrough that along with "The Big Wedding" has a claim to be the year's worst star-driven movie.
  48. The Tortured
    Veering from ridiculous to revolting, The Tortured would like to be about more than singed nipples and seared skin. And it is: It's also about cracked toes and lanced eardrums.
  49. Kick-Ass 2
    The writer and director, Jeff Wadlow, can’t obscure the movie’s misogyny, and he also has a tough time staging a scene and selling a joke. His worst offense is that he has no understanding of the power, gravity and terrible beauty of violent imagery, which means he has no grasp of cinema.
  50. The Mystical Laws
    There is also stultifyingly earnest proselytizing and an absolute humor vacuum. Who conceived this ponderous, quasi-evangelical hokum, anyway?
  51. Girls Against Boys
    Men are pigs, and women are sick of it, says Girls Against Boys, a dumb, dreary, let's-get-back-at-them slasher in which pulverized genitals pass for feminist critique.
  52. The Other Side of the Ice
    This tedious chronicle has the interest level of a home movie of a vacation with bickering and yammering left intact.
  53. Silver Circle
    It also offers cold, sterile, cheap-looking computer animation vastly inferior to that of most video games. Ron Paul acolytes, help yourself. Everyone else, stay away.
  54. Generation Um...
    What does it add up to? Um ... I have no idea and don’t really care. Just because the characters waste their time doesn’t mean you should waste yours watching them circle the drain.
  55. Evidence
    Neither suspenseful nor even comprehensible, John Swetnam’s dashed-off script (carelessly directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi) throws up plenty of red herrings — and a stupendously idiotic ending — but not a single character worth caring about.
  56. That Awkward Moment
    A vile, witless sex comedy.
  57. Problem Child
    As directed by the actor Dennis Dugan, everyone seems to be yelling their lines and making huge hand gestures instead of acting.
  58. Horrible Bosses 2
    What Horrible Bosses 2 lacks in nasty repartee, it tries to make up for in poorly staged comedy chases and break-ins. It is the Hollywood equivalent of a rambunctious little boy pointing to the toilet and squealing, “Mommy, look what I made!”
  59. Walter: Lessons from the World's Oldest People
    The documentary is not really about these older people but about this couple.
  60. Charlie Countryman
    This catastrophe of a movie zigzags drunkenly between action-adventure and surreal comedy with some magical realism slopped over it like ketchup.
  61. Cavemen
    A terrible movie about a bland, morose young man’s search for love.
  62. A Long Way Down
    If there is any humor to be gleaned from this concept, it is nowhere to be found in a movie so shoddily made that there is little continuity between scenes and not a laugh or even a titter.
  63. 10 Rules for Sleeping Around
    A sex comedy can sometimes get by, even if it is deficient in one of the two things that term promises. But a sex comedy that is short on both sex and comedy is unlikely to please anyone.
  64. Dark House
    Sadly, the only thing audiences are likely to find horrific is the acting. Or the possibility that any of these people might make another movie.
  65. Nothing Without You
    Even if we can get past unlikely details (like a mental institution that allows patients to play with scissors), the drab locations and dull performances suck the air out of a story (by Mr. Irving and Rick Santos) that’s every bit as troubled as its unappealing heroine.
  66. Harry and the Hendersons
    Attention must be paid when a movie is as aggressively awful as Harry and the Hendersons, though it's so pin-headed that it could be the last of its inbred line. It's not likely to spawn.
  67. The BreakUp Guru
    The humor, when it isn’t overcooked, can be downright insulting or worse.
  68. Persecuted
    This terrible attempt at a political thriller for the religious right is aimed not at Christians in general but at a certain breed of them, the kind who feel as if the rest of the world were engaged in a giant conspiracy against their interpretation of good and truth.
  69. Jersey Shore Massacre
    Acknowledging Hurricane Sandy, Jersey Shore Massacre reminds viewers that it’s hardly the worst disaster to hit the region. But it gives the Hindenburg stiff competition.
  70. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    Witless, soulless, often amateurish and filled with product placements (nice going, Coors), the movie has nothing going for it other than some wasted talent.
  71. Secret of Water
    There’s a whole lot of hogwash in Secret of Water, a cheesy documentary stuffed full of pseudoscience masquerading as profound truth.
  72. Marguerite & Julien
    The excruciating experience of Marguerite & Julien need only be endured by viewers with an obsessive interest in the least constructive aesthetic currents in contemporary French cinema.
  73. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    One of the worst films to sport the label “romantic comedy.”
  74. Norm of the North
    Its plotline, involving Norm’s trek to New York to foil a condos-in-the-Arctic scheme, is inane even by the standards of animated funny animal comedy. Its gag set pieces run the gamut from uninspired to incoherent.
  75. Father Figures
    Distinguished mainly by its overqualified cast and lack of inspiration, Father Figures can’t decide whether it’s a gross-out comedy or an uplifting tale of brotherly love; it embraces the worst of both worlds.
  76. The Choice
    Directed by Ross Katz and filmed like an ad for erectile-dysfunction medication, The Choice is almost repellently synthetic.
  77. Why Him?
    Why Him? is trite, crass and insultingly moronic.
  78. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
    Easily the most inept episode of the Halloween series, The Curse of Michael Myers, which opened yesterday, is so busy cramming half-baked supernatural rigmarole into its formula that it has forgotten how to be suspenseful.
  79. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    Its badness is not extreme, but exemplary: It’s everything wrong with Hollywood today stuffed into a little less than two hours.
  80. Misconduct
    This clumsy, poorly written action thriller is such a complete catastrophe that you wonder how actors with the stature of Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Pacino were bamboozled into appearing in it.
  81. Cabin Fever
    Who benefits from the existence of this film? Certainly not the largely bland ensemble of post-adolescent actors cast as the leads, who here can scarcely be called characters. Possibly the day players essaying those stock grotesques, who retain the air of being hungry for work.
  82. The Snowman
    A leaden, clotted, exasperating mess.
  83. Nine Lives
    The film, derivative (see “The Shaggy Dog” of 2006) and devoid of wit, is about that tiredest of kid-movie clichés, the parent who is too busy for his children and must be taught a lesson.
  84. Mother's Day
    The movie, a goopy, glossy mess with 10 times more respect for contrived sentimentality than for film grammar, is bereft of genuinely amusing jokes — Mr. Marshall really had some nerve naming his autobiography “Wake Me When It’s Funny.”
  85. Clown
    [A] glib and repellent exercise in “can you top this” genre opportunism.
  86. The Last Face
    As well meaning as this movie is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.
  87. Andron
    If it were at all original, Andron would be merely a bad movie poorly executed. That it is instead a knockoff of “The Hunger Games” and “The Maze Runner” makes it all the more condemnable.
  88. Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
    This spinoff from the story of a magical kingdom besieged by an evil empire is too ludicrous for words.
  89. Trash Fire
    I didn’t think I had see a worse fiction film this year than that other failed American Guignol, “Clown.” I may have been wrong.
  90. Eloise
    A horror movie of such ineptitude that it invites sympathy for even its least gifted participants.
  91. The Clapper
    Mashing limp romance and artless satire into a ludicrously contrived plot, The Clapper lurches from one mirthlessly eccentric scene to another.
  92. Game Over, Man!
    This almost laugh-free comedy, a Netflix Original directed by Kyle Newacheck, is distinguished by a relentless level of outrageous yet strangely listless vulgarity.
  93. Road House
    In Road House, Patrick Swayze has the most laughable role since Tom Cruise juggled a few liquor bottles and danced to ''The Hippy Hippy Shakes'' in Cocktail...Next to Dalton, Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing seems like Hamlet. Mr. Swayze does some dirty fighting here, but mostly the role requires a blank expression. At this point, Road House makes his career look like a bad joke.
  94. Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween
    This movie finds Mr. Perry, never the most deft at the technical aspect of filmmaking, drastically off whatever his best game is.
  95. Joe Versus the Volcano
    Not since "Howard the Duck" has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano. Many gifted people contributed to it, but there's no disbelieving the grim evidence on the screen.
  96. The Mangler
    It is not a compliment to suggest that a demonically possessed piece of machinery embarked on a bloodthirsty rampage has more personality than most of the flesh-and-blood characters in The Mangler, a horror movie based on a Stephen King story.
  97. Blame It on Rio
    Though the scenery can't be faulted, there's not a single funny or surprising moment in the movie. However, Blame It on Rio is not simply humorless. It also spreads gloom. It's one of those unfortunate projects that somehow suggests that everyone connected with the movie hated it and all of the other people involved.
  98. The Wilde Wedding
    The soullessness of the enterprise is staggering. Making clichéd, cynical gestures toward romance, Mr. Harris (whose last feature was almost a decade ago) tortured me for a full 96 minutes.
  99. Still Smokin
    With Still Smokin', Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong are scraping the bottom of their barrel and finding only bits and pieces of the characters and comedy routines that were so successful in their earlier films, including ''Up in Smoke,'' ''Nice Dreams'' and ''Cheech and Chong's Next Movie.'' [7 May 1983, p.16]
    • The New York Times
    • 35 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Inspector Clouseau
    A comedy so uninspired, so relentlessly awful that one occasionally laughs for it—more like a moo or a snort or a gagging noise—just to interrupt it a little or help it out of the room.
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