The New York Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 9,400 out of 20312
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20312
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20312
20312 movie reviews
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  1. Funny Games
    Funny Games observes the family's excruciating terror and suffering with the patient delight of a cat luxuriantly toying with a mouse that it is in the process of slowly killing. Posing as a morally challenging work of art, the movie is a really a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism. You go to it at your own risk.
  2. U.S. Marshals
    A movie that knows how to pace its audience. Watching it is like going for a long and satisfying jog.
  3. Love and Death on Long Island
    John Hurt is simply wonderful -- acerbic, funny and heartbreaking.
  4. The Big Lebowski
    Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.
  5. Hush
    The movie... hasn't the foggiest notion whether it's a soap opera or a horror film, and wanders around in a generic fog.
  6. The Real Blonde
    A lively, well-constructed film with a large and appealing cast.
  7. Senseless
    The gags, like the plotting, have a giddy edge that can be sharp, but just as often they go nowhere.
  8. Palmetto
    The film, adapted from a novel by James Hadley Chase, aspires to out-noir every other film noir that has been lumped under that popular term, including "The Big Sleep" (which it resembles), in plot trickery and steaminess.
  9. Dark City
    So relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns. Although its story doesn't add up when you analyze it afterward, the movie does take you on a visually arresting ride that offers many unsettling surprises right up to a sentimental sunburst of an ending that has a paranoid undertone.
  10. Dangerous Beauty
    No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.
  11. The Wedding Singer
    Half the film is an ingenuous love story, but the better half consists of pop culture time-warp jokes set in 1985.
  12. Sphere
    While this is no quick-witted treat on a par with Mr. Levinson's ''Wag the Dog,'' it's a solid thriller with showy scientific overtones.
  13. The Replacement Killers
    The movie they have concocted has the feel of a visual sampler or an elaborate color swatch submitted for a design that remains largely unexecuted.
  14. The Night Flier
    A thuddingly blunt contemporary morality tale devoid of wit and only minimally suspenseful.
  15. Nil by Mouth
    Even for American audiences used to the argot of Mike Leigh films, the accents are thick here and the characters impenetrable at first. But it isn't long before the film begins exerting a powerful hold, once the hard edges of its story begin to emerge.
  16. Blues Brothers 2000
    The movie only really comes alive when the music plays and people sing and dance.
  17. Great Expectations
    Largely because Mr. Cuaron is such a voluptuous visual stylist, this Great Expectations is capable of wonder even when its wilder ideas misfire.
  18. 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.
  19. The Gingerbread Man
    With unexpected success, Robert Altman plays a John Grisham mystery in a seductive new key.
  20. Phantoms
    The movie's computer animation is so cut-rate and its direction (by Joe Chappelle) so slack that the attacks are virtually terror-free.
  21. Spice World
    Disarmingly, the film thus acknowledges the Spice Girls' flash-in-the-pan status and lets them kid around about their frankly synthetic career.
  22. Hard Rain
    A well-cast disaster movie more notable for special effects and stunts than for credible drama.
  23. Half Baked
    Not very funny, intellignet or grippingly plotted, it is likely to appeal only to those who think that anything to do with marijuana - smoking, sharing, stealing or selling - constitutes the Everest of rip-roaring hilarity. [17 Jan 1998]
    • The New York Times
  24. Live Flesh
    A richly detailed tale of passion, perfidy and revenge adapted from a typically tricky Ruth Rendell novel.
  25. Fallen
    With the warmly engaging presence of Mr. Washington to keep it at least half-credible, and with a brooding and literate noir screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, ''Fallen'' was directed by Gregory Hoblit with the same dark intensity of his earlier feature ''Primal Fear.''
  26. The Boxer
    Mr. Day-Lewis, looking wearily rugged and battling his way through several plausible boxing matches, once again breathes fire into the character of a high-minded loner, and his vitality lends real force to the film's moral arguments.
  27. Oscar and Lucinda
    As directed exquisitely by Gillian Armstrong in a headstrong spirit that recalls her debut feature, "My Brilliant Career," this elliptical tale makes up in visual beauty whatever it lacks in universal meaning.
  28. Afterglow
    Even after the film's last half-hour descends into a silly season, Mr. Rudolph writes and directs with obvious affection for his characters and with a deep knowledge of whatever makes them tick.
  29. The Postman
    Every truly awful movie epic has a point of no return, a moment when the accumulated bad lines and bogus sentimentality become so cloying that the best defense against a mounting queasiness is an awed amusement. The Postman, offers a new opportunity for levity every few minutes after its first hour.
  30. Wag the Dog
    Wag the Dog, the poison-tipped political satire that's as scarily plausible as it is swift, hilarious and impossible to resist.
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