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. In the Realms of the Unreal
    Obscure by nature and unwieldy by design, Darger's work is difficult to confront and consume; Ms. Yu has brought it a little closer, and that is as fine a public service as an art documentary can provide.
  2. The Incredibles
    Because it is so visually splendid and ethically serious, the movie raises hopes it cannot quite satisfy. It comes tantalizingly close to greatness, but seems content, in the end, to fight mediocrity to a draw.
  3. School of Rock
    A very funny for-kids-of-all-ages delight that should catapult Mr. Black straight to the top of the A-list of Hollywood funnymen.
  4. Shaun of the Dead
    By treating the genre as a joke, this satire, whose title plays off George A. Romero's 1979 golden oldie, "Dawn of the Dead," yields ironic dramatic dividends.
  5. Taking Sides
    Sparked by the actors' powerful performances, Arnold's moral absolutism and Furtwängler's lofty aestheticism make for a dramatically compelling clash.
  6. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    Very funny, extremely obscene movie spinoff from the popular animated Comedy Central series.
  7. Team America: World Police
    Clever comedians that they are, they have also rigged Team America with an ingenious anti-critic device, which I find myself unable to defuse. Much as it may pretend otherwise, the movie has an argument, but if you try to argue back, the joke's on you.
  8. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    Carnal, glamorous and worth the price.
  9. Intimate Strangers
    Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.
  10. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    Like its humor, the film's sentiment sneaks up on you, and so does the dramatic reversal that makes it something more than a collection of wry anecdotes.
  11. The Twilight Samurai
    Mr. Yamada is confident that by taking his time and relishing the leathery arrogance that is the perquisite of a director in his 70's, his audience will follow his whims.
  12. Riding Giants
    Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.
  13. Collateral
    Pitched between interludes of anxious intimacy and equally nerve-shredding set pieces, Collateral scores its points with underhand precision.
  14. Black Cat, White Cat
    Made with such overriding jubilation that its coarseness is mostly liberating...well worth admiring for its sheer glee.
  15. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    This film may disappoint some dogmatic Old Hogwartsians: a few plot points have been sacrificed, and Mr. Cuarón does not seem to care much for Quidditch. But it more than compensates for these lapses with its emotional force and visual panache.
  16. Peter Pan
    Mr. Hogan understands both themes, and his filmmaking style is a perfect mixture of wide-eyed wonder and slightly melancholy sophistication.
  17. Spider-Man
    Spider-Man, while hardly immune to these vices, is, like Mr. Maguire, disarmingly likable, and touching in unexpected ways.
  18. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The movie itself triumphs by similar means; it is a marvel of unleashed childishness, like a birthday party on the edge of spinning out of control.
  19. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    The actor's (Murray) quiet, downcast presence modulates the antic busyness that encircles him, and his performance is a triumph of comic minimalism.
  20. Courage Under Fire
    Despite its underlying predictability, Courage Under Fire manages warmth, intelligence and a healthy share of surprises.
  21. The Birdcage
    An American remake with plenty of new pizazz.
  22. Tin Cup
    Bright, stylish, ridiculously alluring.
  23. I Shot Andy Warhol
    The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.
  24. Mission: Impossible
    A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.
  25. U Turn
    However simply he approaches this familiar milieu, Mr. Stone winds up treating his story's sin-soaked connivers the way Francis Ford Coppola treated vampires. Neither of them is really capable of anything plain.
  26. The Relic
    Yes, we've seen it all before. But The Relic proves that the hoariest cliches, when stirred together with enough money, shaken vigorously and artfully lighted, can still make the adrenaline surge.
  27. Lolita
    The film's master stroke is its understanding that this is Humbert's story, told in his own lyrical voice, from his own passionate, sad, tortured perspective.
  28. Clear and Present Danger
    Another fast, gripping spy story with some good tricks up its sleeve.
  29. Afterglow
    Even after the film's last half-hour descends into a silly season, Mr. Rudolph writes and directs with obvious affection for his characters and with a deep knowledge of whatever makes them tick.
  30. Bean
    But while rooted in British sensibilities, Bean is not to be confused with a Noel Coward comedy. Not every gag in Bean succeeds, but compared with most comedies, this one is a keeper.
  31. Mad City
    But Mr. Costa-Gavras, a galvanizing filmmaker working with a splendid cast, is able to tell this story in style.
  32. Soul Food
    This new menu movie has a soapy plot, appealing stars, family values, down-home atmosphere and a conviction that there's rarely a problem fried chicken can't cure.
  33. Pocahontas
    Gloriously colorful, cleverly conceived and set in motion with the usual Disney vigor, Pocahontas is one more landmark feat of animation.
  34. The Crossing Guard
    But Mr. Penn mostly keeps a tight, impassioned grip on this material, preventing it from wandering too far afield. The influence of John Cassavetes is again clear in the characters' emotional sparring, which has energy and heart.
  35. Spanking the Monkey
    It is also the sort of astonishingly fresh and self-assured work that can make a reputation.
  36. Cliffhanger
    All of the performers are upstaged by the film's breathtaking backdrop, and by the fast and furious way Renny Harlin, the director, approaches action sequences.
  37. Free Willy
    How each frees the other is the stuff of Free Willy, which is as engaging as such films can be without offering rude surprises.
  38. Speed
    This film's dialogue isn't much more literate than a bus schedule, but its plotting is smart and breathless enough to make up for that.
  39. Emma
    Gwyneth Paltrow makes a resplendent Emma, gliding through the film with an elegance and patrician wit that bring the young Katharine Hepburn to mind.
  40. Boys on the Side
    What matters more is that Ms. Goldberg, along with her co-stars Mary-Louise Parker and Drew Barrymore, is so sharp, funny and wholehearted that this film creates an unexpected groundswell of real emotion.
  41. Circle of Friends
    Another nice thing about Circle of Friends is that it escapes a happily-ever-after scenario to provide more bite and toughness than it first promises.
  42. Children of the Revolution
    This comedy has less to do with narrative than with sheer chutzpah and a first-rate cast. It manages to be irreverently funny despite a subject that is no laughing matter.
  43. 4 Little Girls
    Mr. Lee, whose lean, straightforward documentary style loses none of his usual clarity and fire (the film has been exceptionally well shot by Ellen Kuras), summons a powerful sense of Birmingham's past and a galvanizing sense of how this bombing would change its future.
  44. The Bridges of Madison County
    Limited by the vapidity of this material while he trims its excesses with the requisite machete, Mr. Eastwood locates a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill.
  45. That Thing You Do!
    Mr. Hanks's debut feature, written and directed with delightful good cheer, is rock-and-roll nostalgia presented as pure fizz.
  46. Superman II
    A marvelous toy. It's funny, it's full of tricks and it manages to be royally entertaining, which is really all it aims for.
  47. A Family Thing
    In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.
  48. Cry, the Beloved Country
    Because movies have become so invested in the unleashing of violent emotion and the escalation of hostility, that expressions of restraint, reconciliation and forgiveness can easily be read as corny cop-outs. Cry, the Beloved Country is not corny, and it doesn't cop out.
  49. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
    Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle has its flaws, but it also has a heartfelt grasp of what set Dorothy Parker apart from her fellow revelers and makes her so emblematic a figure even today.
  50. Grumpy Old Men
    Grumpy Old Men is the kind of holiday movie a lot of people are searching for. It's cheerful, it's well under two hours and it doesn't concern any major social blights, unless you think Jack Lemmon tossing a dead fish into Walter Matthau's car is cause for alarm.
  51. Death and the Maiden
    Mr. Polanski's brilliance with the camera turns Ariel Dorfman's well-meaning but pretentious play about human rights into a harrowing experience.
  52. A Little Princess
    Shaking off the solemnity that smothers many a well-meaning, high-minded family film, this one revels in an exuberant sense of play, drawing its audience into the wittily heightened reality of a fairy tale. The material, like the title, is a tad precious, but the finished film is much too spirited and pretty for that to matter.
  53. Unstrung Heroes
    A warm, surprising, gently incandescent film that discreetly describes a family tragedy.
  54. Cronos
    This film's reflective, even stately style elevates it from the ranks of ordinary stake-through-the-heart vampire dramaturgy, turning it into something much more exotic.
  55. Hair
    A rollicking musical memoir, as much a recollection of the show as of the period, a film that has the charm of a fable and the slickness of Broadway show biz at its breathless best.
  56. Against All Odds
    Against All Odds is so lively and enjoyable on its own terms that its genre problems, while real, are easily overlooked. Mr. Hackford's brand of glossy, romantic escapism doesn't have to work as an homage. It has a vitality of its own.
  57. Swimming to Cambodia
    Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.
  58. Happy Together
    Stylistically brash, pulsing with life.
  59. The Bostonians
    The moral ambiguity of James's novel has been skillfully captured in the film, as has its remarkable modernity.
  60. Last Tango in Paris
    Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is a beautiful, courageous, foolish, romantic, and reckless film.
  61. The Shining
    Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says "Tuesday."
  62. The Dead Zone
    A well-acted drama more eerie than terrifying, more rooted in the occult than in sheer horror.
  63. Drugstore Cowboy
    Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.
  64. Silverado
    Silverado is sufficiently modern to make its landscapes bigger, its people smaller and its moral polarities less powerfully distinct than those of simpler, more starkly beautiful westerns gone by.
  65. Gallipoli
    Mr. Weir's work has a delicacy, gentleness, even wispiness that would seem not well suited to the subject. And yet his film has an uncommon beauty, warmth and immediacy, and a touch of the mysterious, too.
  66. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
    The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert presents a defiant culture clash in generous, warmly entertaining ways.
  67. Body Heat
    While Body Heat involves murder, fraud, a weak hero led astray and a seductive, double-dealing broad, it also incorporates something new: a sexual explicitness that the old films could only hint at.
  68. Fatal Attraction
    Mr. Lyne takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.
  69. Terms of Endearment
    Terms of Endearment is a funny, touching, beautifully acted film that covers more territory than it can easily manage.
  70. Georgia
    The result is a film as maddening and unpredictable as the character herself, held together by a fierce, risk-taking performance and flashes of overwhelming honesty.
  71. 48 Hrs.
    Walter Hill, the director of such beautiful but stilted tough guy movies as ''The Warriors'' and ''The Long Riders,'' has attempted something very different in 48 Hours a male-buddy action film that's positively witty and warm-hearted compared with his other work.
  72. Mad Dog and Glory
    The great satisfaction of Mad Dog and Glory is watching Mr. De Niro and Mr. Murray play against type with such invigorating ease. Each is the other's straight man, a relationship that is hilariously set up in the initial encounter of the cop and the hoodlum.
  73. The Man Without a Face
    The best that can be said about Mr. Gibson as a director -- and this is no mean achievement -- is that it's often possible to forget he was the man behind the camera. Most of this film has a crisp, picturesque look and a believable manner.
  74. Natural Born Killers
    Natural Born Killers never digs deep enough. Mr. Stone's vision is impassioned, alarming, visually inventive, characteristically overpowering. But it's no match for the awful truth.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Roman Holiday
    It is a contrived fable but a bittersweet legend with laughs that leaves the spirits soaring.
    • 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.
  77. The Distinguished Gentleman
    The Distinguished Gentleman is an easy, breezy romp of a movie, a low comedy of highly entertaining order.
  78. Lethal Weapon 2
    Before it skids out of control in the final sequence, the film is so careful to preserve its successful comic-action formula that it follows the most basic law of sequels. If you liked ''Lethal Weapon,'' you'll like Lethal Weapon 2; it's almost as simple as that.
  79. Hamlet
    Mel Gibson's Hamlet is strong, intelligent and safely beyond ridicule.... He is by far the best part of Mr. Zeffirelli's sometimes slick but always lucid and beautifully cinematic version of the play.
  80. Postcards from the Edge
    Postcards From the Edge seems to have been a terrifically genial collaboration between the writer and the director, Miss Fisher's tale of odd-ball woe being perfect material for Mr. Nichols's particular ability to discover the humane sensibility within the absurd.
  81. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
    Line by line, the dialogue isn't all that quotable, but there is consistently funny life on the screen. The film's comic timing is nearly flawless.
  82. Young Guns
    Young Guns is best watched in the playful, none-too-serious spirit in which it was made. Though the film concentrates reverentially on its young stars, it also includes good performances from a few grown-ups, notably Terry O'Quinn as a lawyer and Jack Palance as the story's wild-eyed villain.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mississippi Burning
    For those who know such places, Mr. Parker, who is English, evokes the texture, the gritty, fly-specked Southernness, the brooding sense of small-town menace, the racial hatred, with considerable accuracy.
  84. Ghostbusters II
    Even the special effects are more to the point of the comedy than they were in the first film. For some reason, this appears to leave more room for the sort of random funny business that Mr. Murray and his friends do best, or to which they react with most aplomb.
  85. Parenthood
    Ron Howard's bittersweet adult comedy, Parenthood, lays out an entire catalogue of psychological stresses afflicting family life in white middle-class America, then asks if the rewards of being a parent are worth all the agony.
  86. Empire of the Sun
    A visual splendor, a heroic adventurousness and an immense scope that make it unforgettable.
  87. Henry V
    Mr. Branagh has made a fine, rousing new English film adaptation of Shakespeare's ''Henry V,'' a movie that need not apologize to Laurence Olivier's 1944 classic.
  88. The Disappearance of Finbar
    Acted by an appealing cast, enlivened with well-chosen and varied music and filmed with bleak beauty by the cinematographer Eduardo Serra.
  89. The Governess
    Because the cinematography of The Governess is so richly panoramic, the movie forces you to contemplate the emotional power exerted by film.
  90. Lethal Weapon
    The film is all fast action, noisy stunts and huge, often unflattering close-ups, but it packs an undeniable wallop.
  91. Broadcast News
    Mr. Brooks's screenplay overstates matters both at the beginning of the film and at the end, with a prologue that strains to be cute and an epilogue that is just unnecessary. In between, however, the movie is a sarcastic and carefully detailed picture of a world Mr. Brooks finds fascinating and also a little scary.
  92. Big
    Big features believable young teen-age mannerisms from the two real boys in its cast, and this only makes Mr. Hanks's funny, flawless impression that much more adorable. This really is the performance to beat.
  93. Animal House
    National Lampoon's Animal House is by no means one long howl, but it's often very funny, with gags that are effective in a dependable, all-purpose way.
  94. The Pillow Book
    The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks.
  95. Hairspray
    The actors are best when they avoid exaggeration and remain weirdly sincere. That way, they do nothing to break the vibrant, even hallucinogenic spell of Mr. Waters's nostalgia.
  96. The Lost Boys
    The Lost Boys is to horror movies what ''Late Night With David Letterman'' is to television; it laughs at the form it embraces, adds a rock-and-roll soundtrack and, if you share its serious-satiric attitude, manages to be very funny.
  97. The Goonies
    It has crooks, bats, cobwebs, skeletons, a lovable monster, an underground grotto and a treasure hidden by some of the most considerate, clue-loving pirates who ever lived. Their ghostly ship is the movie's piece de resistance.
  98. Pump Up the Volume
    Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, Pump Up the Volume succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.
  99. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
    With their remarkable contributions, ''Baron Munchausen'' is full of moments that dazzle, just for the fun of seeing the impossible come to life on the screen. What the Folies-Bergere once was for the foot-weary tourist, ''Baron Munchausen'' is for the television-exhausted child. Nothing much happens, but you can't easily tear your eyes away from it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cabaret
    Cabaret is one of those immensely gratifying imperfect works in which from beginning to end you can literally feel a movie coming to life.
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