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. Together
    One of the most pleasant foreign films of the year, a funny, graceful and immensely good-natured work.
  2. Timecode
    It's amazing to see a film so brazenly experimental, so committed to reflecting on the circumstances and techniques of its making, that is at the same time so intent upon delivering old-fashioned cinematic pleasures like humor and pathos, character and plot.
  3. Lawless Heart
    By allowing the stories to play off one another and allowing layers of meaning to accumulate before we even notice them, the filmmakers capture some of the essential strangeness of life -- the way our relations are governed by laws that remain invisible to us until art reveals their workings.
  4. Jerry Maguire
    Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real.
  5. A Few Good Men
    A big commercial entertainment of unusually satisfying order. [11 Dec 1992]
    • The New York Times
  6. Seven Samurai
    On that simple framework and familiar story line, director Kurosawa has plastered a wealth of rich detail, which brilliantly illuminates his characters and the kind of action in which they are involved. He has loaded his film with unusual and exciting physical incidents and made the whole thing graphic in a hard, realistic western style.
  7. Frailty
    Paxton's Dad may be the most terrifying father to appear in a horror film since Jack Nicholson went crazily homicidal in "The Shining."
  8. Twelve Monkeys
    Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course. The film's hero fears that he's half-crazy, and for two hours Mr. Gilliam artfully keeps his audience feeling the same way.
  9. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Although Mr. Petri quite consciously makes movies about ideas, he has, in his "Investigation," made a movie in which the ideas, and the man who seethes with them, have the shock and impact of the most fundamental kind of melodrama.
  10. The Son
    To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.
  11. Medea
    No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.
  12. A Simple Plan
    When you get the shivers watching this wintry tale unfold, it won't be from the cold.
  13. Insomnia
    The anomalous proliferation of scenic beauty gives Mr. Nolan irony to play with, and he uses it spectacularly. The director and his gifted cinematographer, Wally Pfister, are clearly turned on by all this wasted beauty.
  14. Buena Vista Social Club
    The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.
  15. Ronin
    Ronin can be watched as appreciatively for its hard-boiled performances as for its visceral excitement.
  16. A Walk on the Moon
    Even when it turns turbulent, the film sustains its warm summer glow, and makes itself a conversation piece about the moral issues it means to raise.
  17. The Thin Blue Line
    Morris has fashioned a brilliant work of pulp fiction around this crime. [26 Aug 1988, p.C6]
  18. Dirty Pretty Things
    This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start.
  19. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    "E.T." is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it's full of the timeless longings expressed in children's literature of all eras.
  20. Teacher's Pet
    Marvelously quick-witted and gloriously goofy hand-drawn feature shows there's still more than 21 grams of life left in the form.
  21. The Quiet American
    Fowler may be the richest character of Mr. Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness.
  22. The Legend of Drunken Master
    Has enough going on to make it a classic. You'll want to own it.
  23. Osama
    Osama's unvarnished vulnerability, along with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.
  24. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    This hilarious fake documentary -- deserves a place beside the comedies of Christopher Guest in the hall of fame of semi-deadpan spoofs.
  25. Happiness
    It has taken only two films, "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and now Happiness, for Todd Solondz to establish his as one of the most lacerating, funny and distinctive voices in American film.
  26. The Horse Whisperer
    Mr. Redford has found his own visually eloquent way to turn the potboiler into a panorama, with a deep-seated love for the Montana landscape against which his rapturously beautiful film unfolds.
  27. Grazia's Island
    Not since "Y Tu Mamá También" has a movie so palpably captured the down-to-earth, flesh-and-blood reality of high-spirited people living their lives without self-consciousness.
  28. Shattered Glass
    An astute and surprisingly gripping drama not only about the ethics of magazine writing, but also, more generally, about the subtle political and psychological dynamics of modern office culture.
  29. Blood Simple
    BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's Blood Simple a directorial debut of extraordinary promise.
  30. Bloody Sunday
    The level of accomplishment in the filmmaking is overwhelming.
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