The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,324 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: 9,408 out of 20324
  2. Mixed: 8,449 out of 20324
  3. Negative: 2,467 out of 20324
20324 movie reviews
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  1. Streets of Fire
    For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.
  2. Sleeping with the Enemy
    Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.
  3. Dude
    The movie becomes more involving as it finds its focus.... Ms. Hale does an excellent job portraying a popular overachiever understandably resisting the inevitable.
  4. The Sword and the Sorcerer
    A nonsensical, Hollywood-made, R-rated adventure-fantasy set in a primeval past about usurped kingdoms, erring knights, recently awakened ogres, distressed princesses and various hangers-on.
  5. A Kid Like Jake
    Directed by Silas Howard from a screenplay by Daniel Pearle, who adapted his own stage play, A Kid Like Jake is humane, compassionate and strangely detached, almost to the point of inconsequentiality.
  6. The Legend of Billie Jean
    The Legend of Billie Jean' is competently made, sometimes attractively acted, and bankrupt beyond belief. It's hard to imagine that even the film makers, let alone audiences, can believe in a sweet, selfless heroine who just can't help becoming a superstar.
  7. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Throughout, the writer and director Cordula Kablitz-Post asserts Andreas-Salomé’s commitment to her own independence. But Ms. Kablitz-Post’s focus on Andreas-Salomé’s suitors has the effect of chaining the early feminist’s legacy to exactly the patriarchal conventions she claims to reject.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    A murkily pretentious shocker.
  9. The Rachel Divide
    Basic sympathy is where the usefulness of The Rachel Divide ends. Ms. Brownson hasn’t figured out how to construct a movie around a figure who essentially owes her fame to the obfuscation of her past. Anything Ms. Dolezal says has to be taken with such a large grain of salt that it’s not clear why it’s worth listening.
  10. Bleak Moments
    The best that can be said for Bleak Moments is that it earns its name. The film, while it has been handsomely photographed, seems entirely given over to pained, wordless interludes. [23 Sep 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  11. Woman Walks Ahead
    It’s all ridiculously romanticized and self-serving. But the performances are so good (Mr. Greyeyes, in particular, is a miracle of intelligence and dignity) and Michael Eley’s vistas, shimmeringly shot in New Mexico, are so stunning, it feels churlish to resist.
  12. Meantime
    The first hour is given to aimless glimpses of aimless existences, and the second, in which Colin finds a sort of deliverance, is contrived in concept and awkward in execution.
  13. In a Relationship
    The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.
  14. Jonathan
    The movie, itself somewhat torn in sensibility, permits itself an easy out.
  15. State Like Sleep
    The images serve the dialogue, but they are not given a chance to expand the story, depriving the movie of texture and energy. Danluck dives with Katherine into the depths of grief-stricken obsession, and her film suffocates for want of room to breathe.
  16. The Desert Bride
    A road movie of sorts, it steers clear of melodrama or sentimentality, but it also never risks hitting anything.
  17. The Delta
    A film that's alternatingly intriguing and frustrating and that leaves too many loose ends dangling.
  18. Straight Into a Storm
    What fascinated me most about the movie was its likely inadvertent depiction of the comfortable bubble the band and its fandom seem to have created for each other.
  19. Who's That Knocking at My Door?
    The director, who also wrote the original story and screenplay, hasn't succeeded in making a drama that is really much more aware than the characters themselves. The result is a movie that is as precise—and as small—as a contact print.
  20. New York, New York
    It's not that the movie runs out of steam long before it has gone on for two hours and 33 minutes, but that we have figured it out and become increasingly dumbfounded.
  21. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.
  22. Perfect
    Too superficially knowing to be a camp classic, but it's an unintentionally hilarious mixture of muddled moralizing and all-too-contemporary self-promotion.
  23. Nossa Chape
    The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.
  24. Toys
    The film has no consistent vision. Even worse, it's not very funny.
  25. El Angel
    Carlitos’s sole reason for living is moving from one transgression to the next. The same might be said of the movie, which superficially probes his amorality while exploiting it for slick thrills.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Billy Jack
    The whole picture nicely conveys a Southwestern atmosphere. But much too often, at the cost of plain credibility, it stacks its cards, characters and even credo like any rootin', tootin' Western.
  27. Blue Collar
    Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounder
    And if Sounder, an intelligent enough movie, avoids all the major pitfalls of its type, it also lacks the excitement that may have come from plumbing greater depths and discovering a few tougher, less accessible insights.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    At first appears to be rich with a quantity of felt life, but on reflection seems both more carefully studied and more coldly casual than profoundly understood.
  30. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.
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