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. Lost Boys of Sudan
    Getting an audience so caught up is no small feat; it is a tribute to the directors' storytelling.
  2. Boogie Nights
    The movie's special gift happens to be Mark Wahlberg, who gives a terrifically appealing performance in this tricky role.
  3. Chasing Amy
    Smith's knowing humor and unruffled style make a good antidote to gender chaos. Music by David Pirner contributes to the film's loose, inviting mood.
  4. Narc
    Narc is convincing, an entertaining, grimy view of the traps of machismo tucked inside a cop thriller.
  5. Waiting for Guffman
    The don't quite do for "Oklahoma!" what they did for heavy metal, but they come close. [31 Jan 1997, p.C6]
  6. Shanghai Knights
    With Shanghai Knights, he (Chan) has come through with one of his best. This time, it's personable.
  7. Songs from the Second Floor
    A heartbreakingly thoughtful minor classic, the work of a genuine and singular artist.
  8. The Iron Giant
    A smooth, skilled example of animated filmmaking.
  9. We Were Soldiers
    Like the best war movies -- and like martial literature going back to the Iliad -- it balances the dreadful, unassuageable cruelty of warfare and the valor and decency of those who fight.
  10. Burnt Money
    The passions of "Plata Quemada" are as bold as the images.
  11. Love and Death on Long Island
    John Hurt is simply wonderful -- acerbic, funny and heartbreaking.
  12. Father and Son
    Like a dream within a dream. Its images and emotions are vivid, disquieting and also hermetic, and while it may frustrate your desire for clear storytelling and psychological transparency, it has an intensity that surpasses understanding.
  13. I'm Not Scared
    Although the movie takes on many of the characteristics of a conventional thriller, it refuses to go for cheap, vicious shocks, and the adults are seen through the curtain of Michele's trust.
  14. Fade to Black
    Even if the film could use some trimming, its hip-hop splendor proves hype-worthy.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Waterfront
    Moviemaking of a rare and high order. (Review of Original Release)
  16. The Bourne Identity
    The Bourne Identity, like its hero, triumphs through sheer unreflective professionalism. It is, by today's standards, a modest thriller, with a self-contained storyline and with very few big special effects.
  17. White Oleander
    The accumulation of sharp candid flashes adds up to a disturbing vision of Los Angeles as a teeming jungle of dysfunction.
  18. Amadeus
    Mr. Forman has preserved the fascinating heart of Mr. Shaffer's play, and made it available to millions who might never enter a legitimate theater. Well done.
  19. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers, which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence.
  20. Magnolia
    It's astonishing to see a film begin this brilliantly only to torpedo itself in its final hour.
  21. Cast Away
    At its best, Cast Away, like "Titanic," awes us with its sheer oceanic sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance.
  22. Voices of Iraq
    If this film cannot claim to represent the political "truth" about the war - what film could? - it certainly provides a broad glimpse of daily life in Iraq.
  23. The Usual Suspects
    Goes straight to cult status without quite touching one important base: the audience's emotions. This movie finally isn't anything move than an intricate feat of gamesmanship, but it's still quite something to see.
  24. Bright Future
    Casts its spell by drawing out the horror of everyday existence bit by bit, and then tossing in some otherworldly weirdness that makes the hair on the back of your neck try to run for cover.
  25. The Godfather: Part III
    One of this film's greatest accomplishments is its making an audience believe that the Corleones and their various partners in crime have been entirely in character during the intervening decades, but have simply neglected to turn up on screen.
  26. Elephant
    By making the camera an observer, we get a perspective that often comes out of horror movies, a choice that whips the ordinary with the terrifying, an unforgettable mix.
  27. Independence Day
    Two reasons it's impossible to resist "Independence Day": because of its pitch-perfect cartoonish dialogue ("Now you're never gonna get to fly the space shuttle if you marry a stripper!") and because the Captain, like Indiana Jones, is so unflappably tough.
  28. The Mother
    The screenplay bluntly faces anxieties of aging that are rarely voiced in the movies, and it is too hard-headed to offer comfy palliatives.
  29. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    Everyone treats his material with the proper combination of solemnity and good humor that avoids condescension. One of Mr. Lucas's particular achievements is the manner in which he is able to recall the tackiness of the old comic strips and serials he loves without making a movie that is, itself, tacky.
  30. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Never backing off from big, emotional moments, but also fleshing out the necessary transitions between them, he has realized his finest movie. It's a renaissance for Mr. Schultz, who seems to be speaking with his own voice after all these years.
  31. Gods and Monsters
    What especially elevates it is the razor-sharp cleverness of McKellen's performance, which brings unusual fullness and feeling to a most unusual man.
  32. Fear and Trembling
    Mr. Corneau, an eclectic director with a mildly perverse sensibility, turns the conflict of cultures into a psychodrama that is at once lighthearted and intense.
  33. Strayed
    It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.
  34. Elizabeth
    This Elizabeth is presented as a glamorously stressed-out modern woman who must cope with a super-intense case of having it all.
  35. Full Metal Jacket
    No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.
  36. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
    Mr. Drake can be rivetingly angry, intense, frenetic, frank and touching.
  37. Something's Gotta Give
    Nobody else working in movies today can make her (Keaton) own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity.
  38. Springtime in a Small Town
    As Mark Li Ping-bing's beautiful cinematography observes the change of season, the movie becomes a broader meditation on rebirth, and how, in the language of T. S. Eliot, April, the month that stirs such hopes for the future, is also "the cruellest month" for awakening such keen desire.
  39. Oasis
    The remarkable if overlong Korean film Oasis strips away much of the sentimentality and goody-two-shoes attitudes that the movies traditionally display toward disabled people.
  40. Jandek on Corwood
    A canny look at both sides of a musical experiment. Jandek plucks out his atonal efforts, and the record-store obsessives speculate about every subtlety.
  41. Intermission
    Altogether compelling.
  42. Ali
    We see the movie levitate when Ali and Brown chant, "Float like a butterfly," the slogan that takes on a different meaning in each context, starting off as hopeful and spry, finally becoming rueful and pointed. When the film pulls off moments like these, it's breathtaking -- a near great movie.
  43. The Barbarian Invasions
    The rapprochement between Rémy and Sébastien is beautiful to watch, and all of the characters in The Barbarian Invasions are played with a lusty warmth that makes them lovable even when they are being tiresome.
  44. Tokyo Godfathers
    For all its echoes of Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin (as well as Ford), the movie is also a love letter to modern Tokyo, whose alleyways and skyscrapers are drafted with flawless precision and tinted with tenderness and warmth.
  45. Purple Butterfly
    Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.
  46. American History X
    An inflated yet gut-slugging film.
  47. New Waterford Girl
    A freshness and intensity that recall the television series "My So-Called Life."
  48. Working Girl
    Working Girl is enjoyable even when it isn't credible, which is most of the time. The film, like its heroine, has a genius for getting by on pure charm.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Not One Less
    A splendid, assured piece of storytelling.
  50. The Road Home
    A cinematic ballad of such seamless construction and exquisite tonal balance it transcends most of the pitfalls of movies that aspire to a classic, lyric simplicity.
  51. Happy Times
    A wise, gentle and sad new comedy by Zhang Yimou.
  52. Girlfight
    The movie belongs to Ms. Rodriguez. With her slightly crooked nose and her glum, sensual mouth, she looks a little like Marlon Brando in his smoldering prime, and she has some of his slow, intense physicality. She doesn't so much transcend gender as redefine it.
  53. Shadow of the Vampire
    At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.
  54. Lethal Weapon 4
    The characters remain funny and likable, and they all live on Earth.
  55. Fierce Creatures
    The real fun here comes from watching Mr. Kline bounding through two archly good performances, Mr. Cleese coming hilariously unstrung in the presence of Ms. Curtis and all those adorable animals.
  56. Liar Liar
    Two little words: Jim Carrey. That's all it takes to transform Liar Liar from a formulaic Hollywood comedy into an uproarious one-man free-for-all.
  57. Jaws
    If you think about Jaws for more than 45 seconds you will recognize it as nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun, if you like to have the wits scared out of you at irregular intervals.
  58. Promises
    Demonstrates the unusual power of thoughtful, subjective filmmaking.
  59. The Saddest Music in the World
    Like most great musicals, though, this one slides, with breathtaking ease, from silliness to pathos and freely mixes exquisiteness and absurdity.
  60. True Romance
    A vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie.
  61. Birth
    Without Ms. Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.
  62. Scream 3
    Funny and brisk, with enough good lines to make the comedy more satisfying than the somewhat routine but still unsettling jolts to the spine.
  63. The Truman Show
    Warm, affecting and refreshingly shtickless, he (Carrey) occupies center stage here through sheer, beguiling force of personality.
  64. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.
  65. Bedazzled
    Outrageous fun.
  66. Beijing Bicycle
    At once somber and mysterious, comical and sad. It shows just how lonely a crowded city can be.
  67. The Big Red One
    The Big Red One, for all its uncompromising brutality, is viscerally, angrily alive. Fuller was lucky to survive the war. It is our good fortune that this film, a tribute to his luck (and to those who did not share it), has come back to life.
  68. Control Room
    Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.
  69. Garage Days
    The end may be a bit of a letdown, but much of Garage Days is choice cuts indeed.
  70. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    As the film's images accumulate, the movie becomes a sustained and ultimately refreshing meditation on surrender to the idea of temporality.
  71. Ararat
    Until its final moments this almost great movie feels as if it's racing against itself in a neck-and-neck battle between its troubled heart and its egg-shaped head. The heart wins by a nose.
  72. Fight Club
    The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.
  73. The Way of the Gun
    May feel redundant, but it is stylish and intelligent.
  74. The Taste of Others
    A witty, sociologically astute reflection on the attraction between opposites.
  75. Dog Days
    The believability comes from the casting: he has found a group of actors and nonprofessionals who interact spectacularly well.
  76. True Crime
    Directed by Eastwood with righteous indignation and increasingly strong momentum.
  77. Ocean's Eleven
    Soderbergh rallies a seismic jolt of enthusiasm, and the movie is an elating blaze of flair and pride.
  78. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven... never quite fulfills the expectations it so carefully sets up. It doesn't exactly deny them, but the bloody confrontations that end the film appear to be purposely muted, more effective theoretically than dramatically.
  79. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Like many musicals, The Blind Swordsman works better in individual scenes than as a whole. Mr. Kitano is not the most disciplined storyteller, and the plot meanders along tangents and stumbles into flashbacks, losing momentum for long stretches in the middle.
  80. The Age of Innocence
    Ms. Pfeifer is lovely, the visual focal point of the film, but also much more. With her soft voice, her reserve and her quickness of mind, her Ellen has emotional weight. She's the film's heart and conscience. [17 Sept 1993, p.C1]
    • The New York Times
  81. Bringing Out the Dead
    An intense, volatile film full of sorrow and wild, mordant humor.
  82. The Big Lebowski
    Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.
  83. Clueless
    Even if Clueless runs out of gas before it's over, most of it is as eye-catching and cheery as its star. [19 July 1995]
  84. Hukkle
    It works just fine as a sophisticated wildlife documentary with a submerged narrative. But if you enjoy the challenge of solving difficult mysteries, Hukkle presents a tantalizing case waiting to be cracked.
  85. Notre musique
    Mr. Godard treads on dangerous ground by linking the historical suffering of Jews and the Palestinians, but his sympathy for both people is so manifest, his sense of history so deep, that the film defies reductive readings.
  86. Whale Rider
    Wickedly absorbing.
  87. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Compassionate though it is, this is not a movie that offers much in the way of solace. It insists that there is no end to human weakness, and not much cure for it either. That's pretty strong stuff.
  88. Kitchen Stories
    His painstakingly coordinated scenes and exquisitely timed takes are the filmmaking equivalent of wringing every single use from a paper towel and then folding it before disposal.
  89. Cold Mountain
    The result is a mountain of honest, nourishing corn, a lavish evocation of simplicity that, for all its showy sophistication, has an appealing emotional directness. For all its sweep and scope and movie-star magic, Cold Mountain is studded with fine small moments and deft supporting performances.
  90. 28 Days Later...
    Mr. Boyle has hardly lost his sly, provocative perversity or his ear for the rhythms of unchecked violence, but he does seem to be maturing. It's as if, in contemplating the annihilation of the human race, he has discovered his inner humanist.
  91. Dogville
    While you watch the movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded. But once it's over, its characters' miserable faces remain etched in your memory, and its cynical message lingers.
  92. Vanilla Sky
    Highly entertaining, erotic science-fiction thriller that takes Mr. Crowe into Steven Spielberg territory.
  93. Akira
    Violent as it is on the surface, Akira is tranquil at its core. The story's sanest characters plead for the wise use of mankind's frightening new powers, lending the whole film the feeling of a cautionary tale.
  94. The American President
    With great looks, a dandy supporting cast, a zinger-filled screenplay by Aaron Sorkin ("A Few Good Men") and Mr. Douglas twinkling merrily in the Oval Office, The American President is sunny enough to make the real Presidency pale by comparison.
  95. Before Sunset
    The script of Before Sunset is both rambling and self-conscious, and at times it has the self-important sound of clever writing. But though it is sometimes maddening, the movie's prodigious verbiage is also enthralling.
  96. Bad Santa
    Takes all the Christmas season's bad vibes and converts them into an achingly funny and corrupt dark comedy.
  97. Chocolat
    So assured in its manipulative prowess that only afterward do you realize how fully you've been worked over.
  98. Diamond Men
    Eddie Miller (Robert Forster), the stolid protagonist of Diamond Men, a small, finely acted slice of American life, is the sort of character the movies normally shun like the plague for lack of glamour.
  99. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    This angular and intelligent romantic comedy isn't entirely consistent. Even as you laugh, it's a movie you admire more than love.
  100. Hellboy
    Mr. del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.
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