The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Michael Collins
    The film itself works eagerly to emphasize the frankly entertaining aspects of its story.
  2. Fire
    Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, this glossy melodrama, mixing references to Indian mysticism and the epic poetry of the "Ramayana" with late-20th-century feminism, teeters unsteadily between sociology and soap opera.
  3. Copycat
    The screenplay for Copycat, by Ann Biderman and Jay Presson Allen from a story by David Madsen, is otherwise so crackling good that character development threatens to eclipse the actual crimes.
  4. Clockers
    Beyond its grit and nonchalance, this story has a resigned, reflective, hard-earned wisdom that's unusual in an American film about such familiarly lurid subject matter. It's even more unusual in a film by Spike Lee.
  5. Dolores Claiborne
    Written as a book-length harangue from its heroine's point of view, and directed efficiently by Taylor Hackford, Dolores Claiborne has become a vivid film that revolves around Ms. Bates's powerhouse of a performance.
  6. Don Juan DeMarco
    It benefits not only from Mr. Brando's peculiar presence, but also from Johnny Depp, who again proves himself a brilliantly intuitive young actor with strong ties to the Brando legacy. The movie is cheesy, but its stars certainly are not.
  7. Strictly Ballroom
    Baz Luhrmann's Australian film Strictly Ballroom is, in short, pure corn. But it's corn that has been overlaid with a buoyant veneer of spangles and marabou, and with a tireless sense of fun.
  8. Cold Comfort Farm
    Mr. Schlesinger draws lively performances out of his cast and surprising variety out of the film's secondary sights, which range from a gala soiree to a heap of steaming dung.
  9. Rumble in the Bronx
    The movie is a giddy triple somersault of a film that makes no sense whatsoever, although in its best moments it is as much fun to watch as a death-defying circus act.
  10. Philadelphia
    In the end, thanks to such effects and to the simple grace of Mr. Hanks's performance, this film does accomplish what it means to. Philadelphia rises above its flaws to convey the full urgency of its difficult subject, and to bring that subject home.
  11. The Portrait of a Lady
    Brilliantly eccentric even when it yields mixed results.
  12. A Bronx Tale
    A Bronx Tale offers a warm, vibrant and sometimes troubling portrait of the community it describes. Almost everyone within that community sounds a little bit like Robert De Niro except Mr. De Niro himself.
  13. The Flower of My Secret
    [Almodovar’s] returns to the mordant but sympathetic comedy of his early, best work. Though the new film is not as antic as "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," it is funny and free of the nasty undertone that has made him seem tired and tiresome lately.
  14. Bird
    Bird is less moving as a character study than it is as a tribute and as a labor of love. The portrait it offers, though hazy at times, is one Charlie Parker's admirers will recognize.
  15. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.
  16. RoboCop
    Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch director ("Soldier of Orange"), doesn't let the furiously futuristic plot get in the way of the flaming explosions, shattering glass and hurtling bodies.
  17. The Conversation
    Mr. Coppola, the writer as well as the director, has nearly succeeded in making a great film but has, instead, made one that is merely very good.
  18. Naked Lunch
    For the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.
  19. Porky's
    A portion of the audience will be strongly offended by Porky's, just as another portion will find it filthy but fun. However, there is no debating the success of Mr. Clark's casting, for he has assembled a cheerful, likable bunch of actors, most of them unknowns.
  20. Witness
    It's not really awful, but it's not much fun. It's pretty to look at and it contains a number of good performances, but there is something exhausting about its neat balancing of opposing manners and values.
  21. Crooklyn
    Messy as the semiautobiographical Crooklyn often is, it succeeds in becoming a touching and generous family portrait, a film that exposes welcome new aspects of this director's talent.
  22. The City of Lost Children
    The movie is best appreciated as a collection of whimsical toys drawn from a fantasy grab bag that encompasses everything from Grimm's fairy tales to "Star Wars."
  23. First Blood
    It's a film with a number of strengths, not the least of them its fierce, agile, hollow-eyed hero.
  24. Trading Places
    It's a big, lavishly staged farce that aims to please even those who favor sophisticated screwball comedy, a genre to which it is greatly indebted.
  25. The Last Temptation of Christ
    despite such maladroit moments, The Last Temptation of Christ finally exerts enormous power. What emerges most memorably is its sense of absolute conviction, never more palpable than in the final fantasy sequence that removes Jesus from the cross and creates for him the life of an ordinary man.
  26. Father of the Bride
    The screenplay represents recycling at its best. The material has been successfully refurbished with new jokes and new attitudes, but the earlier film's most memorable moments have been preserved.
  27. Father of the Bride Part II
    The bourgeois splendor of the Banks house is a major feature of Father of the Bride Part II, a cheerful, harmlessly ingratiating sequel on a par with its 1991 predecessor.
  28. The Quick and the Dead
    Ms. Stone's presence nicely underscores the genre-bending tactics of Sam Raimi, the cult director now doing his best to reinvent the B-movie in a spirit of self-referential glee. Mr. Raimi is limited by a sketch mentality, which means his jokes tend to be over long before his films end. But his tastes for visual mischief and crazy, ill-advised homage can still make for sly, sporadic fun.
  29. Nixon
    Mr. Stone's compassion for his subject overwhelms his film's false moves. And the barrage of undramatized, undigested data gives way to a much tighter and more artful vision...the film starts snowballing its way to real dramatic power. [20 Dec 1995, p.C11]
    • The New York Times
  30. Broken Arrow
    Mr. Woo orchestrates his giddy, daring stunts on a newly spectacular level. There's plenty of physical audacity on screen.
  31. Butterfly Kiss
    Where most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma.
  32. All the Right Moves
    A well-made but sugar-coated working-class fable about a football star.
  33. The Unbelievable Truth
    Mr. Hartley and his director of photography, Michael Spiller, have made a film that is visually and verbally much richer than its low budget.
  34. Silkwood
    Silkwood is a very moving work about the raising of the consciousness of one woman of independence, guts and sensitivity.
  35. Sixteen Candles
    The movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget.
  36. Hoffa
    Hoffa is an original work of fiction, based on fact, conceived with imagination and a consistent point of view.
  37. Rocky V
    Rocky V takes him out of his gilded cage and back to the director (John G. Avildsen), the settings and the underdog's outlook that made him famous in the first place. It's a smart move. There's life in the old boy yet.
  38. Days of Thunder
    Tony Scottmdoes his utmost to pump up the audience's adrenaline at all times, which means that the film's big moments - the races, the crashes, the news that someone needs brain surgery - don't seem that different from the small ones.
  39. Delicatessen
    Among the things that deserve mention in this lightweight but sometimes subversively stylish farce are its ingenious credit sequence, its lively editing by Herve Schneid, its use of code names like Artichoke Heart and Cordon Bleu in the guerrilla war that rages underground and its reference to a couple of odd inventions.
  40. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
    The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.
  41. Easy Rider
    With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America.
  42. The Corruptor
    The movie may be a conventional story of police corruption, temptation and conflicting loyalties, but it never loses its smarts.
  43. Coming to America
    Though Coming to America is a romantic comedy the director steers the film more often toward quick, in-and-out comic situations and gags that are only mildly funny. In part this is due to the fact that Mr. Murphy plays the prince with cheerful, low-keyed innocence that is completely legitimate, but is not supported by the short attention span of the screenplay. The romance is tepid.
  44. Telling Lies in America
    The movie is loaded with heart and the feel for local color and period detail that can only come out of a personal reminiscence.
  45. Wall Street
    Wall Street isn't a movie to make one think. It simply confirms what we all know we should think, while giving us a tantalizing, Sidney Sheldon-like peek into the boardrooms and bedrooms of the rich and powerful.
  46. Rambo III
    Rambo's self-important, weight-of-the-world manner and his taste for political posturing would make him genuinely silly were they not counterbalanced by Mr. Stallone's startling, energetic physical presence and the film's stabs at self-mocking humor.
  47. UHF
    The movie is forever digressing so that Mr. Yankovic can offer media spoofs that have only the most tangential relation to the story. [22 Jul 1989, p.1.15]
    • The New York Times
  48. Little Shop of Horrors
    Little Shop of Horrors isn't uniformly entertaining, nor is its score always entirely audible; the musical dubbing is at times very awkward. But its best moments are delightful enough to make the slow stretches unimportant.
  49. The Favor
    The Favor remains funny and credible in ways that prove feminist comedy is not an oxymoron.
  50. Phar Lap
    The movie Phar Lap is as much of a crowd pleaser as the champion Australian race horse for whom it is named. In a gently rousing style that should appeal in equal measure to adults and children.
  51. Beastly
    This is the kind of cornball entertainment that rainy afternoons were made for. Throw in a cozy sofa too. Beastly will size down well on your television.
  52. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    If there is a bit more humor on display here -- some of it evidence that an element of self-conscious self-mockery is sneaking into the franchise -- there is also more violence, and, true to the film’s title, a deeper intimation of darkness. What there isn’t, as usual, is much in the way of good acting, with the decisive and impressive exception of Ms. Stewart, who can carry a close-up about as well as anyone in movies today.
  53. Eat Pray Love
    The film offers an easygoing and generous blend of wish fulfillment, vicarious luxury, wry humor and spiritual uplift, with a star, Julia Roberts, who elicits both envy and empathy.
  54. Get Him to the Greek
    Get Him to the Greek displays the bawdy-sweet mixture that is the signature of the Judd Apatow school of screen comedy.
  55. Shrek Forever After
    What fortifies Shrek Forever After are its brilliantly realized principal characters, who nearly a decade after the first “Shrek” film remain as vital and engaging fusions of image, personality and voice as any characters in the history of animation.
  56. Kick-Ass
    Ms. Moretz is by far the best thing about the film: she holds the screen as gracefully as she executes a running back flip.
  57. Hillbrow Kids
    The blithe cruelties of outdoor living mount up, but the filmmakers refuse to exaggerate or sensationalize their material.
  58. Too Much Sleep
    Maquiling creates an unusual and intriguing tone somewhere between sharp, deadpan comedy and a soft, dreamy surrealism.
  59. Divorce Iranian Style
    Reminds you that marital discord knows no geographic boundaries.
  60. A Trial in Prague
    Shows the human face of both communism and its victims, and shows how hard it is to tell the two apart.
  61. Barenaked in America
    May not be dispassionate filmmaking, but it is certainly entertaining.
  62. Facing the Music
    Often feels like two movies loosely sewn together. By far the most compelling of the two is its portrait of Ms. Boyd, a woman who for all her quirks and self-dramatizing flourishes, emerges as a noble spirit on the side of the angels.
  63. Sia, the Dream of the Python
    In trying to reproduce the griot's tone, Mr. Kouyaté rejects psychological nuance and dramatic shading: this is a tale that advances quickly and boldly, peopled by deliberately one-dimensional characters.
  64. As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
    Has a lovely, unadorned, though distended sentimentality.
  65. Standing by Yourself
    Highly irritating at first, Mr. Koury's passive technique eventually begins to yield some interesting results.
  66. *Corpus Callosum
    A playful parlor trick, a departure from the performance-art films that have made this director's reputation. In keeping with his lighter side, *Corpus is also fun; imagine a Looney Tunes segment or an episode of Nickelodeon's "Kablam!" directed by Red Grooms.
  67. Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    An appealing blend of counter-cultural idealism and hedonistic creativity.
  68. Close, Closed, Closure
    The freer and more sophisticated approach of "Divine Intervention" makes these traditional-minded documentaries look somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned by comparison, but both have a value as reportage that Mr. Suleiman's film does not pretend to have.
  69. Strange Fruit
    Polished, well-structured film.
  70. Catching Out
    The scruffy, outspoken train-hoppers in Sarah George's exhilarating documentary, Catching Out, are a sure sign that the pioneer spirit still flickers in pockets of TV-wired America.
  71. Pellet
    As blunt as it is in depicting child abuse, El Bola is a movie steeped in an ambiguity that lends its conflicts a symbolic resonance.
  72. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    An inspiring demonstration of that old saw about necessity being the mother of (in this case, artistic) invention.
  73. Bombay Eunuch
    The film offers a concise history of hijras, who used to officiate at births, weddings and other religious rituals.
  74. Daydream Believer
    It's the best kind of homemade movie, created with skill, modesty and a pleasing awareness of what works in an ultra-low-budget format that tends to be performance and storytelling, rather than visual expressiveness and technical polish.
  75. Punks
    The movie's warmth, and Mr. Gilliam's sober, likable performance sustain it through its ragged stretches and amateurish lapses.
  76. Morning Sun
    Does a thoughtful job of streamlining the bloody realities -- both literal and psychological -- of China's Cultural Revolution into roughly two hours of film.
  77. Gibel Otrara
    Has an edge of cynicism and cruelty that just as often suggests the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone.
  78. From the Other Side
    A spare, painterly and scrupulously unsentimental look at the plight of illegal Mexican immigrants massed at the United States border.
  79. Empathy
    The director's seriousness and intelligence are evident, but so is her satisfaction in displaying them, and the movie has a self-indulgent, undisciplined tone that nearly obscures its provocative ideas.
  80. Made-Up
    Its warm, occasionally off-putting individuality is more like what you look for in a friend than in a movie, and like a friend it invites you to see the unique beauty that lies under its superficial flaws.
  81. Eat This New York
    The directors Andrew Rossi and Kate Novack may not be great filmmakers -- it's hard to tell, based on this bare-bones picture -- but they know a great story, and more important, how to tell it.
  82. Chain Camera
    Filtered through tears, laughter and affection, the results -- are touching and fascinating though, by their nature unilluminated by dispassionate analysis.
  83. Marathon
    The beauty of Mr. Naderi's filmmaking lies in his combination of acute social observation (with the subway population providing its habitual cross section of New York classes and cultures) and pure, almost mathematical formalism.
  84. Collateral Damages
    The most moving aspect of Collateral Damages is the firefighters' sense of brotherhood and duty to their jobs. It is expressed matter-of-factly, without a shred of smugness or superiority, almost with embarrassment.
  85. An Injury to One
    Revels in directorial assertiveness, including an omniscient narrator and an intrusive use of slick, magazine-style graphics to identify characters and spell out slogans.
  86. Superstar in a Housedress
    This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.
  87. Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes
    A fairly tough-minded film until the end, when several commentators who have been critical suddenly turn misty-eyed and suggest that underneath it all, Holmes was really a sweetie.
  88. Afraid of Everything
    The writer and director, David Barker, discards the didactic tone of so much American independent filmmaking in favor of a character study that leads to no easy conclusions.
  89. The Season of Men
    The movie isn't entirely despairing. Near the end, it suggests that contemporary Tunisian women with enough fighting spirit can achieve a measure of autonomy, although the personal cost may be bitter. And the movie's sun-drenched views of life on the southern Tunisian island of Jerba are beautiful.
  90. The Youth
    Mr. Ratnam is a dynamic, natural filmmaker who happily uses every device at his disposal, from rapid-fire MTV editing to sped-up action scenes that recall silent serials, to keep his lengthy film moving at a brisk pace. The film flags only when Mr. Ratnam must turn his attention to the soggy romantic subplots.
  91. Chop Suey
    Though undoubtedly a vanity project -- the music clearances alone must have cost much more than the film could ever hope to gross -- it functions pleasantly enough as an exercise in free association.
  92. Story of the Eye
    It is a strange, beautiful, disturbing and at times literally painful work, an original and distinctive expression by a gifted young Philadelphia-based filmmaker who here confirms the talent he displayed in his 2001 film, "A Chronicle of Corpses."
  93. Massoud, the Afghan
    I was struck by how personal this movie is, and by the delicate symbiosis that develops between biographer and subject. Mr. Ponfilly's presence in the film (mostly on the soundtrack and once or twice on camera) does not overshadow Massoud so much as filter our understanding of him.
  94. Imelda
    As a personality study Imelda is a devastating portrait of how power begets self-delusion. It must be said, however, that through it all Mrs. Marcos exudes considerable charm and even a flickering sense of humor.
  95. Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven's Gate
    A documentary 10 times as engrossing as the film that is its subject.
  96. Ticket to Jerusalem
    It has an air of melancholy humor as its characters fumble toward normalcy.
  97. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    As social criticism -- not only of Israel, but of other affluent countries as well -- James' Journey is both potent and a little didactic.
  98. Crying Ladies
    Its most winning attribute is a kind of sloppy, unassuming friendliness, a likability aptly reflected in its characters.
  99. AmnesiA
    The first feature written and directed by Martin Koolhoven. It reveals him as a skillful manipulator of disturbing visual images (much of the film is washed in inky blue) and a screenwriter adept at sustaining a mood of impending doom.
  100. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    Mr. Hamzeh's film is responsible and intelligent, though, and important as a record of a disturbing incident.
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