The New York Times' Scores

For 20,312 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:
20312 movie reviews
  1. 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.
  2. Clockwatchers gets many of the details of office life eerily right: the arrogant, smarmy male executives who affect a patronizing jocularity with secretaries whose names they can never remember; the iron-fisted boss who huffs windily about everyone in the company being a "family"; the petty tyrant who doles out pencils as though they were gold bullion.
  3. The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.
  4. Deep Impact confines much of its horror to television news reports and has a more brooding, thoughtful tone than this genre usually calls for.
  5. This aggressively whimsical fairy tale about a pair of grown-up orphans who rob from the rich to give to the poor (themselves!) and end up living happily ever after darts forward so quickly that several major plot turns are dispensed with in 10 or 15 seconds of babble.
  6. Basketball, bold urban landscapes, larger-than-life characters and red-hot visual pyrotechnics are the strong points of Mr. Lee's biggest three-ring circus, not to mention the central presence of Denzel Washington.
  7. Fry's warmly sympathetic performance finds the gentleness beneath the wit. He conveys the sense of a man at the mercy of forces he cannot control, not least of them his own brittle genius.
  8. However turbulent its narrative, this Les Miserables unfolds in a comforting style, serious and intelligent in ways that seem much too quaint today. The essence of Hugo's morality tale remains pure, and so does the value of a vigorous, gripping story, straightforwardly told.
  9. Once the movie throws in a jolting, late-in-the-gameplot twist that could have been borrowed from "City of Angels," it never regains its balance.
  10. A high-concept, low-reward hodgepodge that mingles elaborate stunts and shootouts with stereotypical ethnic humor.
  11. Robert Downey Jr.'s Blake Allen is enough of a raging dynamo to find the dark humor and desperate romanticism at the heart of Mr. Toback's ego trip of a premise, and to make Blake sympathetic too.
  12. Easier to watch than it is to believe.
  13. What hip means in this uneven comic suspense film is maintaining the ironically distanced tone of a deadpan ''Married to the Mob'' or a tongue-in-cheek Coen Brothers caper.
  14. Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.
  15. In the spring a monster's fancy lethally turns to thoughts of lust. This thought, reduced to a level contemptuous of taste and reasonable intelligence, underlies Species II.
  16. The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.
  17. For most moviegoers over 12, this, the fourth Three Ninjas movie, will be interminably boring. But it's possible that young children will enjoy the film, since it falls into both the action category and the children-are-smart-adults-can't-do-anything-right genre.
  18. Sonatine, made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit Fireworks by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor.
  19. Campy moments and a luridly colorful look (with cinematography by Malik Sayeed) may give this no-flair, no-frills B movie a healthy video afterlife some day.
  20. This is his sleekest and most engaging film thus far. If you like a good cat-and-mouse game with a keen ear for language, then go.
  21. The film has energy even when it hasn't much sense, in a manner that will strike most non-cultists as exhausting.
  22. Hugely expensive, weakly formulaic.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Although the film is longer than the television and video segments children this age are accustomed to, the pacing is brisk enough to hold them.
  23. If Mr. Linklater is not entirely at ease with action sequences (or with the obligatory having-fun montage once the brothers become successful), he still makes this (after ''Before Sunrise'' and ''Suburbia'') another admirable directorial stretch.
  24. Predicated on two ideas -- that human nature is rife with perfidy and that it's important to get the cast into hot cars or bathing suits whenever possible -- Mr. McNaughton and the cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball (''Top Gun,'' ''True Romance'') give a decadent gloss to this far-fetched, quintuple-crossing tale.
  25. It's a movie struggling with its own identity crisis, and with the obvious constraints created by its subject matter.
  26. Exquisite.
  27. Wide Awake imagines it's a seriocomic "coming of age" film radiating waves of healing sweetness and light. But beneath its suffocating, smug sentimentality, you have to look hard to uncover a single moment of truth and genuine feeling.
  28. The filmmaker's equal fondness for bright floral paintings and exploding blood bags is sure to keep an audience on its toes, even if some of the effects are as blunt as (quite literally) chopsticks in the eye.
  29. Beyond its persistent coarseness, Wallace's story often trades yesterday's inspiration (Dumas) for today's (Simpson-Bruckheimer).

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