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. Matchstick Men
    Both entertaining and empty: an emotional shell game that leaves you feeling cheated even though, on the surface at least, everyone is a winner.
  2. The Terminator
    A B-movie with flair.
  3. Identity
    Reasonably well-executed thriller. It suffers not from awkwardness or silliness, which would make it more fun, but rather from its air-brushed, expensive pretentiousness.
  4. The Waterboy
    This escapist comedy is so cheerfully outlandish that it's hard to resist, and so good-hearted that it's genuinely endearing.
  5. Holy Man
    For all the funny possibilities of Mr. Murphy's neat transformation here, the latest comedy from Stephen Herek ("Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," "The Mighty Ducks") doesn't know what to do with him.
  6. Dahmer
    As gamely as the movie tries to make sense of its title character, there remains a huge gap between the film's creepy, clean-cut Dahmer (Jeremy Renner) and fiendish acts that no amount of earnest textbook psychologizing can bridge.
  7. The Komediant
    As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.
  8. The Breakfast Club
    The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towardS which The Breakfast Club forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone.
  9. Tycoon: A New Russian
    For all its energy and fine acting, Tycoon has a frustrating lack of narrative coherence.
  10. The Virgin Suicides
    Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.
  11. Millennium Mambo
    Despite its artistry, it seems to last nearly a millennium.
  12. Little Nicky
    It's a clever idea bogged down in sophomoric sloppiness. Sitting through it doesn't feel like eternal damnation, but it's not exactly heaven, either. It's a $9.50 tour of adolescent purgatory.
  13. Owning Mahowny
    Whatever minor entertainment there is to be gleaned from Mahowny -- set in the early 1980's, mostly in Toronto -- comes in bits and pieces.
  14. The Perfect Score
    A thin, pleasant teenage heist comedy with a chewy nugget of social criticism buried inside it.
  15. Stripped
    This is a bumpy ride, but one worth taking.
  16. Spiral
    Perhaps the most gripping thing about the ultimately disappointing Japanese horror film Uzumaki is the patient way the picture develops mood.
  17. Inventing the Abbotts
    Best watched as a showcase for radiant young talent.
  18. The Myth of Fingerprints
    Has some good performances (Ms. Moore's ongoing snit is a terrifically sustained bit of glowering), but it only barely begins to knit its self-pitying characters into a credible family unit. They are oddballs with attitude.
  19. Remember Me, My Love
    An abrasive but innovative fusion of farce, satire and drama that blurs their boundaries in uncomfortable ways. It's a noisy movie whose characters tend to talk at medium-to-high volume.
  20. The Acid House
    With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.
  21. Swiri
    Mr. Kang is a gifted choreographer of bloody chaos, but he has enough range and imagination to strew a few interludes of haunting tenderness amid the shell casings and ketchup packs.
  22. Road Trip
    Bad taste is timeless. And sometimes it can be so funny that you can't help laughing.
  23. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    A loose- jointed, not especially memorable comic caper with some lovely moments of humorous invention, many patches of clumsy writing and a few game performances.
  24. Twentynine Palms
    The sustained force of Mr. Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker.
  25. The Mexican
    The movie's biggest strength is a story that refuses to quit and almost makes sense within its own screwball logic.
  26. Unlikely Heroes
    Much of the time, unfortunately, the responsible, institutional filmmaking of Unlikely Heroes, from Moriah Films, an arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, does not do full justice to these stories.
  27. Lucía, Lucía
    Ms. Roth's radiance and understanding of Lucía's emotional life gives this film a touch of necessary psychological accessibility.
  28. Black and White
    It's another of Mr. Toback's quick-talking autobiographies that, like the best pop, have a clock running on their expiration dates.
  29. Snake Eyes
    A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.
  30. Revolution OS
    Everybody loves a David and Goliath story, and this one is told almost entirely from David's point of view.
  31. Love Liza
    The movie is so small and emotionally constricted that it gives Hoffman too little room to explore his range.
  32. Last Night
    Softening that apocalyptic undercurrent is a counter-strain of quiet nobility.
  33. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    An enjoyable, noisy romp.
  34. Moulin Rouge!
    Simultaneously stirring and dispiriting.
  35. The Yes Men
    Diverting if heavily padded, this is the newest addition to an increasingly crowded field of political nonfiction films and certainly the easiest viewing.
  36. Taking Lives
    From a technical standpoint, Taking Lives is competent and sometimes even impressive. It is cleanly edited and nicely shot -- at times as cool and rich as a York Peppermint Pattie. Beyond that, there is not much to say.
  37. Hope Floats
    Hope Floats, which often resembles a rosy commercial, does indulge in too much awkward slow motion, and in occasional embarrassing romps that are meant to signify family fun.
  38. Cecil B. DeMented
    Consistently amusing and smart in its choice of targets, but it lacks the manic edge of some of Waters' earlier movies.
  39. The General's Daughter
    Travolta again carries a film with enjoyable ease, even if this one remains badly diminished by its perverse streak.
  40. Festival in Cannes
    A good deal of anger washes through this acerbic portrait of the movie business in histrionically high gear. But so does a lot of sentimentality, and as the sentimentality quotient rises, it erodes the film's credibility.
  41. The Raspberry Reich
    Revolting and hilarious satire.
  42. Against the Ropes
    Some of the performances show flashes of idiosyncrasy and flair that are nearly snuffed out by the pedestrian script.
  43. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    A 1950's movie magazine fantasy dressed up just enough to pass for contemporary.
  44. eXistenZ
    Its name, the film's title, is pronounced "eggs is tense" and meant to have a whiff of the philosophical, even if its intellectual ambition seems mostly limited to spelling affectations.
  45. Go Further
    Mr. Harrelson seems appealingly goodhearted, but his naïve idealism leaves him always on the edge of self-parody.
  46. Such a Long Journey
    The main problem with Such a Long Journey is its storytelling. There is simply too much happening.
  47. Mona Lisa Smile
    Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.
  48. Pumpkin
    The filmmakers try to balance pointed, often incisive satire and unabashed sweetness, with results that are sometimes bracing, sometimes baffling and quite often, and in unexpected ways, touching.
  49. Anna and the King
    Has the rambling pace of an episodic 1950s costume drama.
  50. Monsoon Wedding
    The agile handling of the soap-opera elements -- conventional plotting at best -- finally makes "Wedding" a pop, facile take on Capulet versus Montague stuff, likable but square.
  51. In the Cut
    A disjointed, sometimes fascinating mélange of moods, associations and effects.
  52. Stuck on You
    It's a much funnier movie than the trailer would lead you to believe; it would almost have to be. But it is just not as consistent as their previous trash wallows.
  53. Way Past Cool
    Unfortunately, its inescapable comparison is to David Gordon Green's "George Washington," made the same year as Mr. Davidson's film but with a far greater sense of style and a more profound grasp of the fragility of young lives. Way Past Cool can't stand up to that kind of competition.
  54. Runaway Bride
    More often, the film is like a ride through a car wash: forward motion, familiar phases in the same old order and a sense of being carried along steadily on a well-used track. It works without exactly showing signs of life.
  55. Town & Country
    What it does offer, however, are the pleasures of watching its seasoned stars expertly go through their familiar paces.
  56. The Replacement Killers
    The movie they have concocted has the feel of a visual sampler or an elaborate color swatch submitted for a design that remains largely unexecuted.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dr. Dolittle
    There is the language to consider, but despite the film's slow start, small children should take to the idea of communicating with animals.
  58. Farmingville
    Though it has the slight, informal feel of a made-for-television documentary shot on video, Farmingville is an unusually sensitive and sophisticated piece of investigative journalism.
  59. Facing Windows
    Despite its surreal touches and an improbable story that piles on the metaphors, the movie, which has a rich, honey-dripping score by Andrea Guerra, maintains a tone of refined heart-tugging realism.
  60. Dudley Do-Right
    Works well as family entertainment.
  61. Final Destination 2
    Has a ghoulish wit. It's not as cheekily knowing as the "Scream" movies or as trashily Grand Guignol as the "Evil Dead" franchise, but like those pictures it recognizes the close relationship between fright and laughter, and dispenses both with a free, unpretentious hand.
  62. Mallrats
    Mallrats mixes clever bits and an appealing quirkiness (which goes a long way) with gross-out practical jokes, needless repetition and obvious padding, since it has no real plot.
  63. The Other Side of the Bed
    A satire of contemporary sexual warfare that leaves you smiling but also stung.
  64. Walking Tall
    Walking Tall has no more fat on it than the Rock himself, a hulking yet curiously ingratiating presence who seems the most likely candidate to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as America's favorite living comic book character.
  65. The Recruit
    Like Christopher Walken or Marlon Brando, Mr. Pacino frequently uses his gifts to make mediocre movies more interesting. Everything else in The Recruit may be tiresomely predictable, but he, at least, is not.
  66. Mind the Gap
    Mr. Schaeffer takes his time cryptically setting up his characters' situations in the film. When they finally start moving toward one another and revealing their secrets, the revelations flow like diet soda.
  67. 10 Things I Hate About You
    If it's all very clever for a teen-age film, it also feels terribly forced.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.
  69. The Ladykillers
    Unquestionably minor, perhaps deliberately so, but it is nonetheless intermittently delightful.
  70. Chaos
    The film's mechanical workings are still impressive, but between the unsympathetic characters and the coldly precise direction, there is little here for an audience to clutch to its heart.
  71. The Brown Bunny
    Neither an atrocity nor a revelation, The Brown Bunny is a very watchable, often beautiful-looking attempt by Mr. Gallo to reproduce the kind of loosely structured mood pieces that found American and select foreign-language cinemas of the 1960's and 70's often at their most adventurous.
  72. Speaking in Strings
    Draws a curtain over her intimate personal life.
  73. Blade Runner
    THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned.
  74. Silent Water
    Silent Waters is several different movies, and most of them feel negligible and meandering, until the film finally packs a wallop.
  75. A Silent Love
    Ultimately, A Silent Love transcends its problem-play situation to ponder how the best laid plans for an arranged marriage are no match against the vicissitudes of passion in a romantically besotted culture.
  76. Sling Blade
    Thornton is sadly affecting in the film's central role.
  77. Tea with Mussolini
    Once you accept the notion that Tea With Mussolini aspires to be little more than a kind of British-Italian ''Steel Magnolias,'' with a patina of World War II-movie uplift, it becomes a pleasure to watch its stars shamelessly hamming it up.
  78. Rush Hour 2
    The action and humor are enough to make an hour and a half pass quickly and pleasantly.
  79. Rain Man
    In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  80. Sphere
    While this is no quick-witted treat on a par with Mr. Levinson's ''Wag the Dog,'' it's a solid thriller with showy scientific overtones.
  81. Mau Mau Sex Sex
    The fun is contagious.
  82. Little Lili
    For all its spikiness, there are hurdles that La Petite Lili cannot overcome. Abridged and abbreviated, Chekhov's leisurely philosophic reflections evoke a musty aroma of pressed flowers in a scrapbook that is out of tune with the times.
  83. The Patriot
    Shamelessly stirring, brandishing Mr. Gibson's anguished masculinity like a musket. It may be effective, but you leave the theater feeling used.
  84. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The film's resolute indifference to fashion makes it, perhaps paradoxically, a refreshing piece of old-style entertainment, accompanied by a whooshing, trembling score by Edward Shearmur.
  85. Kal Ho Naa Ho
    Its luxuriant, nearly three-hour running time allows lots of room for spectacular musical numbers and dramatic climaxes that are extended to the breaking point and beyond.
  86. Wet Hot American Summer
    In essence, it's a ragged collection of bits and sketches cobbled into about a dozen plots, most of which call upon the cast to do a lot of tongue and neck-spraining French kissing.
  87. Gozu
    Mr. Miike is best known in the United States for horror films like "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer." Gozu, for all its extremity, is a more relaxed, less disturbing picture. Its dreamy disconnection is reminiscent of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," but it is, if anything, even more hermetic and dissociated.
  88. Mr. and Mrs. Iyer
    Not a subtle film; and, most curiously -- to put it mildly -- for a sermon on tolerance, it resorts to history's eternal scapegoat.
  89. Instinct
    The medium is more palatable than the saccharine message because Hopkins and Gooding know how to put on a show.
  90. Save the Last Dance
    Bland but poised.
  91. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    The best case for Warriors is its cinematic time travels and its peek into the natural wildness of a long-closed countryside.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ferris Bueller's Day Off
    In this film [Hughes] has created a character who is every teen-ager's fantasy, but in the process he has lost some of the authenticity of his other films - leaving several slow transitions or awkward moments.
  93. Red Dragon
    The entire picture is a third-generation Xerox copy, in part because adapting Mr. Harris's books for the screen seems to turn directors into rigid formalists.
  94. Lost Highway
    Lost Highway, an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of "Blue Velvet," the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles.
  95. Stage Beauty
    As drama, Stage Beauty is both timorous and ungainly, words that might also describe Ms. Danes's performance.
  96. Enduring Love
    Mr. Michell whips the camera around too much and cuts into his scenes too quickly, but he pumps juice into this thin story and, together with his performers, keeps a movie going that might otherwise crash-land.
  97. In Praise of Love
    Godard's artistry -- the way his scenes are at once archly stylized and informal, the quick precision of his eye -- is unarguable. But the beautiful images and solemn words cannot disguise the slack complacency of his vision.
  98. Girls Will Be Girls
    Appropriately cynical, pleasantly camp (Coco has the best hair -- a teased, sprayed flip) and just fresh enough to be funny more often than not.
  99. A Knight's Tale
    The picture itself is good-humored, but bland and predictable. It's a cross between an All-American vaudevillian version of "Shakespeare in Love" and Mel Brooks's "Robin Hood: Men in Tights."
  100. A Map of the World
    Something disturbing has happened to this story en route to the screen.
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