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. 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.
  3. Caddyshack II
    The film features someone who walks like Jackie Mason, talks like Jackie Mason, does everything except make people laugh like Jackie Mason.
  4. The Toy
    My mind wasn't simply wandering during the film - it was ricocheting between the screen and the exit sign.
  5. Zapped!
    ZAPPED! is a half-baked, rather retarded parody of Carrie and a number of other films that, using the awesome power of their ignorance, drove telekinesis into the ground.
  6. Kin
    Kin is insufferable, self-seriously combining shut-in nerdiness with wannabe macho pyrotechnics. It’s Bro Cinema in all the worst imaginable senses of the term.
  7. Supercon
    Supercon offers lip service to fan culture, yet it is difficult to imagine who would enjoy watching this ill-conceived satire. Directed by Zak Knutson, who also contributed to the screenplay, the movie is careless with its setting, callous toward its characters and crass about its audience.
  8. Like a Boss
    Actors make lousy choices all the time and if Like a Boss makes money no one will care that it’s formulaic, unfunny, choppy, insults women and seems to be missing much of its middle.
  9. An L.A. Minute
    That such a woebegone project attracted such a largely first-rate cast is peculiar but not inexplicable; sometimes the urge to bite the hand that feeds you overwhelms your quality control filter.
  10. 8 Million Ways to Die
    HOW did Eight Million Ways to Die commit suicide? Let us count the ways.
  11. Head Full of Honey
    To go with its bizarre plotting and shrill performances, the film seems to have been edited in a Cuisinart. But those are the least of its crimes.
  12. Maniac
    William Lustig is the film's director, and Joe Spinell, who plays the maniac, also collaborated on the screenplay (with C.A. Rosenberg) and wrote the original story. He is terrible in all capacities, though his performance is more immediately objectionable. Watching him act like a psychopathic killer with a mommy-complex is like watching someone else throw up.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Polar
    If Polar were a teenager, it might be content to chug Mountain Dew while playing first-person shooter games and trolling innocents online. Unfortunately, Polar is a movie, and if it has any redeeming qualities, it chooses to keep them a secret.
  14. Billboard
    The details of the story, as they unfold, do not correspond with any dimension of reality. Character development is nonexistent. The sluggish rhythms, the awkward cuts, the unlovely cinematography cohere into what seems like the enactment of a pointless dream.
  15. A Dog's Journey
    I suppose it’s a genuine achievement that a movie packed with as much delightful canine (and agreeable human) talent as this one should be so insufferable.
  16. Saturday the 14th
    It's an unfunny horror-filmparody with a cast headed by Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss and Severn Darden , directed and written by Howard R. Cohen, who shouldn't be trusted to park the cars of such people, much less make a movie with them.
  17. Killers Anonymous
    While you might leave with several unanswered questions, the most concerning one is how this fiasco was ever financed in the first place.
  18. Shanghai Surprise
    One of the few things this listless bore of a film makes clear is that Mr. Penn, ever since his hilarious performance as a stoned surfer in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, has been greatly overrated.
  19. Point Blank
    If anything, the film emanates a startling ineptitude, unable as it is to clear some basic standards of craftsmanship.
  20. Sextuplets
    Each comic set piece decomposes on the screen, lifeless and hopeless.
  21. The Fanatic
    As it lumbers to its climax, the movie delineates the border that separates the merely stale from the genuinely rancid. For all the heavy lifting The Fanatic does, it winds up on the weaker side of the divide.
  22. Cuck
    If you want to make a movie that argues for stricter gun laws, or more conscientious nationwide mental health care, by all means go ahead. But this kind of morbid, witless scab-picking, capped by an oh-so-ironic choice of closing credits song, is worse than useless.
  23. Lucky Day
    If you’re one of those people who believes the Tarantino of today still needs to “grow up,” this movie will provide an oblique but vivid insight into how much worse things might have been.
  24. The Pretenders
    As nostalgic twaddle goes, “Me and Phil and the New Wave Girl” (I mean Pretenders) initially feels like an innocuous treatment of the joys and sorrows of cinephilia and young love. The sort of thing concocted by men whose collegiate experience taught them little beyond how to turn self-serving reminiscences into middling indie movies. Soon, though, it descends into several discrete modes of misogyny.
  25. The Gallows Act II
    The movie’s finale offers a twist that ostensibly ameliorates the internal-logic complaints. But it most vividly registers as a rancid misogynist cherry atop a sloppy concoction of tired jump scares.
  26. Portals
    It is difficult to believe that an actual first encounter with interdimensional beings would be such a complete waste of time.
  27. Transylvania 6-5000
    THE actors in Transylvania 6-5000 seem to have the impression that they are doing something funny, though where they got that idea is anybody's guess. It cannot have come from the screenplay, which was written by Rudy DeLuca, who also directed the film, as a series of utterly listless comic setups. It's not that Mr. DeLuca has done anything wrong, exactly; it's simply that he never does anything right. There's no reason for this material to be funny, so, not surprisingly, it never is.
  28. Where the Boys Are
    Dumb, vulgar and mostly humorless.
  29. Same Boat
    While Glanz is the only cast member who gets within swinging distance of charisma, Roberti’s chops as a romantic lead are lacking.
  30. Spree
    Coarsely merging social-media critique and slasher comedy, this shallow take on the evils of internet addiction is as unoriginal as it is unfunny.
  31. The Binge
    Here’s an equation for third-period math: Take “Superbad,” “Booksmart,” and, hell, any teen-party movie, add in a useless overarching conceit, subtract all originality. The result is The Binge, a new Hulu original that is only exceptional in its mind-numbing inanity.
  32. Johnny Mnemonic
    Johnny Mnemonic looks and feels like a shabby imitation of Blade Runner and Total Recall. It is a disaster in every way.
  33. Breaking News in Yuba County
    One may wonder how Tate Taylor, who has overseen high-profile, conventional, ostensibly respectable Hollywood product like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Help,” came to direct this amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.
  34. Roe v. Wade
    Those who disagree that abortion is akin to murder are unlikely to be persuaded, and even those on the fence might struggle to sit through the hammy acting and poor production values.
  35. Donny's Bar Mitzvah
    Donny’s Bar Mitzvah — which is littered with chaotic party scenes of horny, dysfunctional attendees — oscillates between offensive and offensively unamusing.
  36. The Virtuoso
    It’s not just the title character who fails to thrive. The filmmaking is on occasion, to put it kindly, fractured.
  37. Dear Evan Hansen
    Treacly and manipulative, Dear Evan Hansen turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability. It made me cringe.
  38. Ski Patrol
    Movies don't get more derivative or less comic than this.
  39. Rogue Hostage
    Rogue Hostage is shoddy work.
  40. Grace and Grit
    An insufferable movie.
  41. Broken Diamonds
    The movie treats illness as a series of contrivances, an engine that keeps the plot pistoning forward, and the result of this approach is a film that feels lifeless, or worse, reductive.
  42. Brain Damage
    Written and directed by Frank Henenlotter, this oozer specializes in unspecial effects and unspeakable acting. Strictly for the brain damaged.
  43. Home Sweet Home Alone
    Who’s the real victim here? The audience — yet Kemper’s no-nonsense pixie who suffers a dozen thumbtacks to the face runs a close second.
  44. The Desperate Hour
    The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone.
  45. The Cherry Bushido
    It’s all a mess of ideology and theology, of flowing robes, flying fists, karma, camp, cant and can’t: can’t act, can’t kick, can’t marshal any art.
  46. Ten Tricks
    Despite her strong effort, even Thompson can’t deliver the film’s attempt at a three-dimensional female protagonist. There is truly no magic here.
  47. Last Resort
    This endeavor might have tried the alternative title “Die Hard on a Budget,” except even that would have been hopelessly optimistic.
  48. Virtually Heroes
    Between its old-hat story, flagrantly distasteful humor and lousy visual effects, Virtually Heroes feels as if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a lot longer than 10 years. It probably should have remained there.
  49. Ghosted
    This tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.
  50. Ride On
    The film is so graceless and bizarre in its attempts at tugging at the viewer’s emotions that it often feels like a work of parody.
  51. The Choirboys
    The movie, which Mr. Aldrich directed from a screenplay by Christopher Knopf, is cheap and nasty without having any redeeming vulgarity and absolutely no conviction of truth.
  52. The Strangers: Chapter 3
    Now that the third and mercifully final film has flumped into theaters, this empty trilogy offers few worthwhile returns other than well-duh horror lessons that should (but won’t) sink in: Leave good horror alone, and relentless cat-and-mouse games do not a movie make.
  53. Old Dogs
    This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?
  54. Gamer
    A futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets.
  55. The Singing Forest
    The Singing Forest was written and directed by Jorge Ameer, whose film "Strippers" opened three years ago and remained the single worst movie I had ever reviewed -- until now.
  56. Murder-Set-Pieces
    It is hard to know what exactly Mr. Palumbo is trying to say in his debased film.
  57. Alone in the Dark
    So inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn't release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.
  58. King's Ransom
    Incoherent mess of a film.
  59. Chaos
    The only thing this so-called cautionary tale will inspire audiences to do is to never sit through another insultingly awful piece of exploitative trash "conceived" by David DeFalco.
  60. Dirty Love
    Even by the standards of its bottom-feeding genre, Dirty Love clings to the gutter like a rat in garbage.
  61. Waiting...
    Putrid comic stew.
  62. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Viewer discretion is advised, if only because it's well-nigh unwatchable.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    September Dawn
    The maudlin, grotesque western September Dawn, about the massacre on Sept. 11, 1857, of about 120 settlers by Mormons (and their Paiute Indian mercenaries), apes "Schindler’s List" in hopes of creating a Christian Holocaust picture.
  64. Shoot 'Em Up
    A worthless piece of garbage.
  65. Elite Squad
    A relentlessly ugly, unpleasant, often incoherent assault on the senses from Brazil.
  66. The Hottie & the Nottie
    Custom designed for its smirking star (who is also an executive producer), this tasteless train wreck asks only that she preen and prance on cue.
  67. The Love Guru
    The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again.
  68. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    The crushingly unfunny and slopped-together How to Lose Friends & Alienate People has neither the ambition nor the intelligence to do justice to its source material.
  69. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't.
  70. Seven Pounds
    The most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.
  71. Downloading Nancy
    A nasty exploitation flick tarted up with art-house actors and psychobabble.
  72. Surveillance
    It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.
  73. Vulgar
    Too campy to work as straight drama and too violent and sordid to function as comedy, Vulgar is, truly and thankfully, a one-of-a-kind work.
  74. Sorority Boys
    A film that even a rabid lowbrow like Homer Simpson (or, when the mood strikes, this critic) would find beneath his dignity.
  75. Whipped
    Bottom-feeding monstrosity of a comedy.
  76. Addicted to Love
    Ms. Ryan's lean, eagle-eyed golden girl is enough to curdle milk.
  77. Dracula 2000
    It's a little sad to see actors of the quality of Christopher Plummer and Jonny Lee Miller struggling straight- faced to dignify this sewage.
  78. Hearts in Atlantis
    Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson.
  79. State Property
    At the end the picture seems to acknowledge its own ludicrousness, but by then it, like Beans, is beyond rescue.
  80. Simon Birch
    No doubt there are those who will deem Simon Birch ''heartwarming.'' It is exactly the kind of movie that has given that hackneyed superlative a bad name.
  81. Showgirls
    The film makers had declared they were bravely exploring new levels of licentiousness, but the biggest risk they've taken here is making a nearly $40 million movie without anyone who can act. The absence of both drama and eroticism turns Showgirls into a bare-butted bore.
  82. Equilibrium
    If someone left "1984," "Fahrenheit 451," "Brave New World," "Gattaca" and the Sylvester Stallone potboilers "Judge Dredd" and "Demolition Man" out in the sun and threw the runny glop onto a movie screen, it would still be a better picture than Equilibrium, a movie that could be stupider only if it were longer.
  83. Baby Geniuses
    One way to get through Baby Geniuses is to think about whether it really is the worst movie you've ever seen. Probably not, but pretty darn close.
  84. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.
  85. Bio-Dome
    Thoroughly incoherent... A dreary fizzle. [12 Jan 1996, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  86. Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    Villainy toward the infant class now comes from Jon Voight, descending to the depths of his 37-year-career.
  87. Hush
    The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.
  88. Two of a Kind
    The results are so disastrous that absolutely no one is shown off to good advantage, with the possible exception of the hairdressers involved.
  89. Vampire in Brooklyn
    Like so many Eddie Murphy misfires, Vampire in Brooklyn has no idea how to capitalize on the actor's immense appeal. The film was directed by the horror master Wes Craven and it turns out to be an Eddie Murphy-Wes Craven movie that is not funny or scary. Now that's a nightmare.
  90. Air America
    This muddled film about a secret C.I.A. project in Laos in 1969 fails on every possible level: as action film, as buddy film, as scenic travelogue and even, sad to say, as a way to flaunt Mel Gibson's appeal.
  91. MacGruber
    The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being.
  92. Cupid's Mistake
    At 70 minutes, Cupid's Mistake is short, but then, so is our time on this planet.
  93. Heartbreak Hospital
    An excruciating demonstration of the unsalvageability of a movie saddled with an amateurish screenplay.
  94. The Price of Air
    The picture is a smeary, dreary mess from start to finish.
  95. Strippers
    Cheesy, amateurish film.
  96. Don't Tell
    The kind of witless production that should rightly be cluttering the discount bins at your local video store.
  97. The Tiger and the Snow
    A scorching affront to Italians, Iraqis and the intelligence of movie audiences everywhere.
  98. Harold
    Harold is the type of one-note dead zone ideally suited for a bathroom break while sitting home on a Saturday night, alone and semidrunk, in front of the television. At feature length it's enough to make you tear your hair out.
  99. America the Beautiful
    Clueless, directionless and altogether pointless.
  100. Mary
    A convoluted, hysterical mess of a movie with grandiose spiritual airs and not a drop of humor.
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