The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Chasing Amy
    Smith's knowing humor and unruffled style make a good antidote to gender chaos. Music by David Pirner contributes to the film's loose, inviting mood.
  2. The Saint
    Loud, frantic, ridiculously overproduced and featuring a preening performance by Val Kilmer as a supposedly brilliant master of disguise, The Saint is sheer overkill.
  3. Double Team
    Rodman, awkward but definitely lively, is the occasion for har-har hair jokes ("Who does your hair, Siegfried or Roy?") and gives the film some much-needed comic relief. Rourke, as a villain named Stavros, is scary. And for once, he's supposed to be.
  4. Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie
    Five-year-olds who have read their Shakespeare will recognize that Turbo is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
  5. The Devil's Own
    Mr. Pitt moves through this unexpectedly solid thriller with dazzling confidence, showing off all the star power that he usually works overtime to hide.
  6. Cats Don't Dance
    While the animated characters, bright colors and an appealing Randy Newman score may keep the children content, Cats Don't Dance is no saccharine fantasy. Its Hollywood references and dark satire constitute its real strengths.
  7. Selena
    On its own good-natured terms, Selena' is both pleasant to watch and instructive in familiarizing a movie audience with the Texan-Mexican borderland music known as Tejano.
  8. Liar Liar
    Two little words: Jim Carrey. That's all it takes to transform Liar Liar from a formulaic Hollywood comedy into an uproarious one-man free-for-all.
  9. Crash
    The Crash characters sleepwalk through this story in a state of futuristic numbness, seeking extreme forms of sensation because familiar feelings have long since failed them. It's a chilling, ghastly possibility that manages to exert a grim fascination.
  10. Maborosi
    A pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth.
  11. Gray's Anatomy
    This direction is more ambitious than apt, since it calls attention to the artifice that Mr. Gray otherwise conceals so well. Cuts and scene changes become distractingly blunt, as do the star's efforts to suggest spontaneous enthusiasm.
  12. The Substance of Fire
    The film, to its credit, never tries to pluck your heartstrings. As it follows the Geldharts around New York, they are figures in a meditative dialogue on human values that reaches no easy conclusions.
  13. Love Jones
    Slinky, sexy Love Jones brings new life to an old story: a courtship and all its predictable detours on the road to romance, with a boy-meets-girl inexorability along the way to love.
  14. Private Parts
    Thanks to sharp editing and surprisingly strong comic timing, the film puts less emphasis on the Stern raunchiness than on how his wilder routines make listeners drive off the road.
  15. Jungle 2 Jungle
    Jungle 2 Jungle' still finds time to appreciate Mr. Allen's easy way with a child actor, an audience or a heavily tranquilized pet cat.
  16. The Watermelon Woman
    That it succeeds in being both stimulating and funny is a testament to the talent and open-heartedness of Ms. Dunye, who wrote and directed the movie and is its star.
  17. The Daytrippers
    The main action of The Daytrippers is bright, real and even poignant enough to make this journey worth the ride.
  18. Donnie Brasco
    Crackling good... the best crime movie in a long while.
  19. Hard Eight
    The role of Jimmy is one of Mr. Jackson's scarier characters, and this brilliant actor inhabits all four corners of his jittery, avaricious personality. When he and Sydney finally clash, the movie makes its darkest, cleverest turn into film-noir nightmare.
  20. Smilla's Sense of Snow
    This story has now been gracefully adapted by Bille August into a sleek, good-looking film that captures the book's peculiar fascination.
  21. Booty Call
    This contemporary sex farce, directed by Jeff Pollack, has the attention span of a hyperactive child, but its bawdy sexual humor rarely flags.
  22. Lost Highway
    Lost Highway, an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of "Blue Velvet," the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles.
  23. Rosewood
    The film transcends racial divisions by bestowing equally hopeless dialogue on both sides.
  24. Fools Rush In
    The film never gets past the unlikelihood that its characters have much chance of living happily ever after. Or of finding real heat or humor along the way.
  25. Vegas Vacation
    Throughout this lame film, directed by Stephen Kessler and written by Elisa Bell, situations are developed -- complicated directions to a hotel room, Clark clinging to the face of Hoover Dam, Ellen the object of Mr. Newton's seductive charm -- and left to wither without a payoff.
  26. Absolute Power
    Eastwood directs a sensible-looking genre film with smooth expertise, but its plot is quietly berserk.
  27. Touch
    Mr. Schrader doesn't match the Leonard habit of ending each scene with a lively little jolt. But he succeeds admirably in extracting the novel's best lines and in casting his film with mischievous verve.
  28. That Darn Cat
    While Mr. Doug brings plenty of enthusiasm to the task, he doesn't have the moves, and the scene, which ends with his following a mouse into a Dumpster, is one dull thud. The movie also crams far too many subsidiary characters into its 89 bumpy minutes.
  29. Dante's Peak
    The special effects are suitably catastrophic, though they aren't much more clever than the computer tricks that turn up in beer commercials these days.
  30. SubUrbia
    Mr. Bogosian's venomously funny play, which he adapted himself for the screen, is given warmth and generosity by Mr. Linklater, whose elegantly fluid direction and great skill with actors are accentuated by the play's spareness.
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