The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,335 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: 9,412 out of 20335
  2. Mixed: 8,455 out of 20335
  3. Negative: 2,468 out of 20335
20335 movie reviews
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  1. Napoleon Dynamite
    The performances, even those by trained actors like Mr. Ramirez and Ms. Majorino, have the hesitant, blinking opacity that some directors look for in nonprofessional casts. Their awkwardness is charming, and part of the point of the movie, but it also makes for some dull stretches and thwarts your ability to regard the characters with sympathy rather than mere curiosity.
  2. Meet the Fockers
    Ms. Streisand hasn't been called on to deliver an immortal or even interesting performance, but she is a pip to watch.
  3. Volcano
    In Volcano, the thrills are so well wrought that they eventually lose their novelty and become numbing.
  4. Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
    Mr. Garcia gives one of his sleeker dreamboat performances.
  5. Mimic
    Ghoulish interest is a prerequisite for watching Mira Sorvino (as a bold and athletic entomologist) act against performers who have mandibles, or for appreciating the care with which nymph, juvenile and adult insect villains have been devised.
  6. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
    Amusing but sloppy and overcomplicated.
  7. Crash
    The Crash characters sleepwalk through this story in a state of futuristic numbness, seeking extreme forms of sensation because familiar feelings have long since failed them. It's a chilling, ghastly possibility that manages to exert a grim fascination.
  8. Dante's Peak
    The special effects are suitably catastrophic, though they aren't much more clever than the computer tricks that turn up in beer commercials these days.
  9. A Life Less Ordinary
    Mr. Boyle's brand of heaven-sent love story comes with a strange and whimsical mean streak. Tender thoughts and ha-ha shootings don't automatically mix.
  10. Night Falls on Manhattan
    But Night Falls on Manhattan is also oddly listless. It doesn't often live up to the doomy eloquence of its title.
  11. Paradise Road
    In trying to keep track of everybody while providing enough melodrama to sustain an atmosphere of controlled terror, Paradise Road stumbles all over itself and never really finds its center.
  12. Welcome to Sarajevo
    Yet this film, for all its apparent immediacy, winds up less affecting than a more poetic or roundabout approach might be.
  13. The Nutty Professor
    Mr. Murphy proves himself a surprisingly strong actor here, playing Sherman with sweetness and poignancy, not to mention loads of funny weight-related humor.
  14. Die Hard: With a Vengeance
    The movie turns two hours of bombings, subway crashes, car chases and helicopter pursuits into the ultimate roller-coaster ride.
  15. Jumanji
    Eschewing warm, cuddly imagery just as Mr. Van Allsburg's book does, the film affects a strange, artificial style that has the invasive weirdness of "Gremlins" but none of the charm.
  16. Basquiat
    But the film's central figure remains a cipher, the subject of a colorful scrapbook rather than a revealing portrait.
  17. Michael
    The movie is so busy applying cute touches to everything and everybody that it forgets to devote enough attention to the souls Michael has come down to save.
  18. Home for the Holidays
    Ms. Foster and the screenwriter, W. D. Richter, have given this film some peculiar mood swings, so that it starts out zanily and winds down to a wistful note.
  19. Batman Forever
    As for the actual movie, it's the empty-calorie equivalent of a Happy Meal (another Batman tie-in), so clearly a product that the question of its cinematic merit is strictly an afterthought.
  20. Marvin's Room
    This film often fumbles, but it finally tugs at the heartstrings all the same.
  21. Fallen Angels
    Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.
  22. Return to Paradise
    The film's cool, sober texture and its clever characters are often more interesting than the larger plot.
  23. Romeo + Juliet
    Mr. Luhrmann's frenetic hodgepodge actually amounts to a witty and sometimes successful experiment, an attempt to reinvent "Romeo and Juliet" in the hyperkinetic vocabulary of post-modern kitsch. This is headache Shakespeare, but there's method to its madness.
  24. This Boy's Life
    The film recreates Toby and Caroline's aimlessness, but without appearing to understand it enough to make it as moving and important as it ought to be.
  25. American Me
    But Mr. Olmos's direction, from a screenplay by Floyd Mutrux and Desmond Nakano, is dark, slow and solemn, so much so that it diverts energy from the film's fundamental frankness. Violent as it is, American Me is seldom dramatic enough to bring its material to life.
  26. Grumpier Old Men
    Grounding the zaniness is the chemistry between its two likable stars. Beneath their crusty eccentricities, Max and John are teen-agers at heart, a Wayne and Garth for the "Modern Maturity" set. As Max, his leathery face beaming with pleasure, might put it: "Holy moley, is this a dumb movie!" But it is also fun.
  27. Mary Reilly
    A gloomy film with a story whose outcome... is an especially foregone conclusion.
  28. Jude
    With Christopher Eccleston as Jude and Kate Winslet of ''Sense and Sensibility'' as his great love, Sue Bridehead, and with convincing evocations of 19th-century England from locations in Edinburgh and the north of England, Jude remains a handsome if gravely flawed film.
  29. Grand Canyon
    [Grand Canyon] eventually pulls its punches, taking an unconvincingly beatific look at the problems and dangers that have been so persuasively outlined in what has come before. But until it hits that false note, Mr. Kasdan's film is at least as fascinating as it is amorphous.
  30. I Love You to Death
    More problematical is the tone of the film, which attempts to be both compassionate and goofy, though the events are funny only if they are seen as farcical.
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