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. Dragged Across Concrete
    The movie is generally watchable, even at its slowest and ugliest, simply because the actors are solid even when their characters are repellent.
  2. The Lonely Guy
    If you can get past the movie's aimlessness and its visual drabness, it has its share of isolated laughs.
  3. Instant Family
    Instant Family isn’t a hellish movie, although it is very much a Hollywood one.
  4. The Stranger
    The whole thing becomes a routine and mechanical cat-and-rat chase, with the outcome completely apparent, despite a few bright and clever twists.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wolf Man
    The wolf man is left without a paw to stand on; without any build-up either by the scriptwriter or director, he is sent onstage, where he, looks a lot less terrifying and not nearly as funny as Mr. Disney's big, bad wolf.
  6. The Westerner
    If some one could just have decided who should carry the ball, instead of letting it pass from one to the other, The Westerner might have been a bang-up, dandy film. And that, we are sorry to say, it isn't. The trouble, as indicated, is that the picture has no core.
  7. Rope
    At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start.
  8. Torn Curtain
    In these times, with James Bonds cutting capers and pallid spies coming in out of the cold, Mr. Hitchcock will have to give us something a good bit brighter to keep us amused.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amityville II: The Possession
    The new movie starts out eerily enough but soon manages even to make sensation, blood, sex and suspense become a monotonous way of life. After a while, one doesn't really care what happens to this family of five who had problems when they moved in and whom we never do get to know very well.
  10. Child's Play 2
    Vicious as Chucky is, it's hard to be scared by anything that kicks its little feet helplessly every time it flings itself upon a full-sized human target.
  11. High Road to China
    Miss Armstrong, who was seen as the second, prettier wife in Alan Alda's ''The Four Seasons,'' is the best thing in the film, though even she seems to be a cross between Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett. Mr. Selleck is, indeed, a handsome actor, but his good looks here have no individual personality, which may be the script's fault.
  12. The Return of the Living Dead
    Though certainly not for the squeamish, the film is by no means the ultimate horror movie it aspires to be. The volume of stagy gore quickly reaches a point of diminishing returns. And rather than trying to sustain a mood of grim suspense, the writer-director Dan O'Bannon has conceived this cinematic cousin of Night of the Living Dead as a mordant punk comedy.
  13. Return of the Living Dead III
    Return of the Living Dead 3 has more visual than dramatic flair, with the actors most memorable for their sharply-lit cheekbones and upstaged regularly by the macabre special effects.
  14. Happy Death Day 2U
    Jessica Rothe as Tree is still an appealing presence. But the film is overstuffed with unfunny self-parodying gore slapstick, half-felt sentimentality and semi-meta sci-fi.
  15. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
    Its own efforts to be tongue-in-cheek, as with a backwoods gunman who quotes Emerson and Machiavelli, fall seriously flat. But should anyone have the patience to look closely, the two leading players do show signs of what would soon make them famous.
  16. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
    Though the film hints at psychological intrigue, it never moves beyond the limits of its genre.
  17. Scaffolding
    Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.
  18. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II
    Hello Mary Lou has nothing much to do with the original "Prom Night" (1980), except that it's somewhat more entertaining if female nudity, bizarre violence and comically deadpan special effects amuse you...Bruce Pittman, the director, and Ron Oliver, who wrote the screenplay, have constructed the movie as if it were a gourmet banquet for toddlers. From the first course to the last, it's all ice cream.
  19. The Mule
    The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.
  20. Body Snatchers
    With its homogenized flavor, this Body Snatchers seems like a movie made BY pod people, FOR pod people.
  21. Don't Go
    It falls on the performances to add subtle touches to the narrative’s broad strokes. George is admirably warm as the earthbound Hazel, and Dorff suggests the selfishness of his character’s selfless desperation.
  22. The Clovehitch Killer
    With its achingly slow build and understated performances, The Clovehitch Killer strains to surmount its lack of urgency.
  23. King Kong
    It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.
  24. Godzilla 1985
    Though special-effects experts in Japan and around the world have vastly improved their craft in the last 30 years, you wouldn't know it from this film.
  25. Mobile Homes
    This is an atmospheric, well-acted film that leaves us mostly cold.
  26. The Invisibles
    Hearing from these survivors is vitally important. But by smushing together two distinct styles of narrative, The Invisibles risks draining the power from both.
  27. The Best of Enemies
    Rather than illuminating the politics of the present by examining the struggles of the past, Bissell lurches from folksy comedy to clattering melodrama, producing the opposite of enlightenment. To quote an old protest song: When will we ever learn?
  28. A Dog's Way Home
    As ridiculous as it gets, and that’s plenty, A Dog’s Way Home manages to serve up a one- to two-hankie finale, depending on the extent of your dog-person-ness.
  29. Impulso
    The movie’s challenge is to bottle her spontaneity, which is clearly thrilling to behold in person but less dynamic in a medium that requires every move to be selected in advance, without the suspenseful bond that an artist shares with a live audience. Belmonte gets caught between two modes of nonfiction filmmaking.
  30. Escape Room
    There are intimations of “Tales From the Crypt,” “Final Destination,” “The Game,” and other older, better films here; this movie never catches a fire like any of those did, and even its twist coda feels dreary and pro forma.
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