The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Gattaca
    A handsome and fully imagined work of cautionary futuristic fiction.
  2. 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.
  3. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Though it flies in the face of credibility and becomes downright silly by its end, I Know What You Did Last Summer knows its way around the rules of the popular horror-film genre.
  4. The Devil's Advocate
    The film uses morphing and Rick Baker's monster effects strikingly, but it also keeps its gimmicks well tethered to reality.
  5. Gummo
    October is early, but not too early to acknowledge Harmony Korine's Gummo as the worst film of the year. No conceivable competition will match the sourness, cynicism and pretension of Mr. Korine's debut feature.
  6. Telling Lies in America
    The movie is loaded with heart and the feel for local color and period detail that can only come out of a personal reminiscence.
  7. Boogie Nights
    The movie's special gift happens to be Mark Wahlberg, who gives a terrifically appealing performance in this tricky role.
  8. The House of Yes
    The House of Yes was adapted from a play by Wendy MacLeod. And the movie, with its brittle, outrageous dialogue has a shrill stagy feel. That would be fine, if the dialogue sustained the stylish crackle of a drawing-room comedy gone berserk, but there are many gaping holes between the funny moments.
  9. Lilies
    Lilies, an extravagantly mannered revenge fantasy by the Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, raises the level of protest at religious prohibitions against homosexuality into a piercing operatic cry.
  10. Seven Years in Tibet
    Beyond his struggles with an unwieldy accent and the screenplay's hokum, Mr. Pitt gives a sincere if labored performance enhanced by a sense of genuine struggle.
  11. Gang Related
    Gang Related is a preposterously overplotted tale of two police detectives with moral compasses so defective that they have buried their brains and consciences along with 10 of their murder victims long before the film even begins.
  12. Kiss the Girls
    Mr. Freeman projects a kindness, patience and canny intelligence that cut against the movie's fast pace and pumped-up shock effects. His performance is so measured it makes you want to believe in the movie much more than its gimmicky jerry-built plot ever permits.
  13. U Turn
    However simply he approaches this familiar milieu, Mr. Stone winds up treating his story's sin-soaked connivers the way Francis Ford Coppola treated vampires. Neither of them is really capable of anything plain.
  14. The Ice Storm
    Elegant and deeply disquieting drama.
  15. The Peacemaker
    Culminates in a show-stopping action sequence set in midtown Manhattan, directed by Ms. Leder with crisp economy and furious energy.
  16. Soul Food
    This new menu movie has a soapy plot, appealing stars, family values, down-home atmosphere and a conviction that there's rarely a problem fried chicken can't cure.
  17. The Edge
    There's no need to worry that Mamet is on foreign territory with this action premise. The Edge succeeds ably in blending his famously acerbic dialogue with nerve-racking adventure scenes.
  18. L.A. Confidential
    A tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today.
  19. In & Out
    Deliver laughs and skewer a few stereotypes, thanks to extremely sly wit and a fine cast.
  20. Nenette and Boni
    If the film's easygoing, catch-it-while-you-can approach yields some unexpected nuggets, it also makes for lopsided storytelling. But when Nenette et Boni is studying the faces and following the moods of its likable if terribly confused title characters, it captures the stubborn spirit of youth itself.
  21. Going All the Way
    In "Going All the Way," a flashy movie adaptation of Dan Wakefield's popular 1970 novel about growing up in the heartland in the repressed 1950s, Mark Pellington, a director from the world of music video, has inflated a realistic memoir into a garish, hyperkinetic social satire.
  22. The Myth of Fingerprints
    Has some good performances (Ms. Moore's ongoing snit is a terrifically sustained bit of glowering), but it only barely begins to knit its self-pitying characters into a credible family unit. They are oddballs with attitude.
  23. My Sex Life... or How I Got Into an Argument
    Both Paul and the film would seem maddening if they weren't so passionately sincere, and if Paul did not gaze at the film's many beautiful young actresses with such an amazed, seductive gleam in his eye.
  24. The Game
    Mr. Douglas, who delivers a new shade of cruel elegance each time he plays another urbane monster, is the ideal star for this vigorously contrived thriller.
  25. A Self-Made Hero
    But this miracle of self-invention has more virtue in the abstract than it does on screen.
  26. Fire Down Below
    A superior Seagal film, a smooth blend of action, character and noble environmental message. Credit is owed to the screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Philip Morton, which provides strong supporting roles; the photography, directed by Tom Houghton, which brings out the beauty of the landscape violated by the villains, and the lively country music, which is attributed to Nick Glennie-Smith. [6 Sept 1997, p.18]
    • The New York Times
  27. Excess Baggage
    Ms. Silverstone's pouty all-American brashness counts for little in a film whose flat screenplay doesn't give her a single funny line.
  28. She's So Lovely
    The beat-up poetry, soused look and bad habits of She's So Lovely are often dated. The showy bravado is not.
  29. Hoodlum
    And while Mr. Duke's direction has visual panache, the movie is unevenly paced.
  30. G.I. Jane
    Mr. Scott's affinity for the visceral and strenuous, from ''Alien'' to ''Blade Runner'' to ''White Squall,'' is much more central here than the renegade feminism of his ''Thelma and Louise.'' With punishing intensity, he plunges his audience into the maelstrom of the training program.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »