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. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
    The Kids in the Hall's first feature isn't anything more than a sloppy showcase for the group's costume-changing tricks, but sometimes its sheer chutzpah can be amusing. Just as often, flashes of complete plot incoherence or atrocious taste spoil the effect.
  2. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Easily summarized, the plot is entirely secondhand.
  3. Celtic Pride
    Celtic Pride has ingredients that could have made for a tough knockabout farce. Unfortunately, the film, directed by Tom De Cerchio from a screenplay by Judd Apatow, doesn't know the meaning of the term "light touch.
  4. The Substitute
    The movie's mentality is su'med up in one cutaway shot. A split second before a man's face is about to be shoved into a boat propeller, the movie flashes to another man pushing half an orange onto the head of a squeezer.
  5. Kazaam
    Memo to Shaquille O'Neal: Don't give up your night job.
  6. Courage Under Fire
    Despite its underlying predictability, Courage Under Fire manages warmth, intelligence and a healthy share of surprises.
  7. Fear
    A nasty little thriller that starts out on a somewhat higher plane but eventually trades in its level head for conventional scare tactics and violence.
  8. James and the Giant Peach
    A technological marvel, arch and innovative with a daringly offbeat visual conception. But it's also a strenuously artful film with a macabre edge that may scare small children. And beyond that, it lacks a clear idea of who its audience might be.
  9. Primal Fear
    Pared down to a farfetched plot and paper-thin motives, the story relies on an overload of tangential subplots to keep it looking busy. [3 Apr 1996, p.C15]
  10. A Family Thing
    In A Family Thing, an earnest upbeat fable about the meaning of brotherhood in America, first-rate film acting infuses a contrived story with enough flesh, blood, wrinkles, warts and beads of sweat to make it intermittently surge to life.
  11. Sgt. Bilko
    The film is full of gratifying gags, but it also has to strain for newly enlarged scope.
  12. Flirting with Disaster
    Mr. Russell's wonderfully mad odyssey of a movie, in which a man sets out to find his biological parents and winds up meeting more weirdos than Alice found down the rabbit hole.
  13. Welcome to the Dollhouse
    With a fine vengeance along with flashes of great, unexpected tenderness, Mr. Solondz lethally evokes every petty humiliation that his seventh-grade heroine can't wait to forget.
  14. Girl 6
    Mr. Lee isn't as successful at shaping a story around Girl 6, but enjoying her company is all his slender, sunny film really tries to do.
  15. Dekalog (1988)
    The profound pleasures they offer derive not only from their deft metaphysical playfulness but also from their storytelling genius.
  16. Ed
    One thing you can say for Ed, a chimpanzee whose baseball-playing expertise propels the Rockets, a minor-league team, to glory: his behavior is a lot more human than any of the other characters in this flimsy, laugh-free family comedy
  17. Executive Decision
    A good, taut movie for red-meat action audiences, but it's not one you will be seeing on an airliner. Not ever.
  18. Fargo
    For all its exaggerated ordinariness, this film seems to start where others leave off.
  19. The Birdcage
    An American remake with plenty of new pizazz.
  20. The Flower of My Secret
    [Almodovar’s] returns to the mordant but sympathetic comedy of his early, best work. Though the new film is not as antic as "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," it is funny and free of the nasty undertone that has made him seem tired and tiresome lately.
  21. Chungking Express
    While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film's real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation. Mr. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks.
  22. Hellraiser: Bloodline
    As cinematic Armageddons go, this one is a real bust...Although it succeeds in crudely outlining the fable of a magic toy box and the demonic secrets carried down in the bloodline of its inventor, it is otherwise incoherent and (except for Mr. Bradley's Pinhead) wretchedly acted. Farewell, Pinhead and company. You won't be missed.
  23. If Lucy Fell
    There was more Allenesque potential in (Schaeffer's) earlier ``My Life's in Turnaround'' (directed with Donal Lardner Ward) than there is in this painfully cute concoction, which is about two old friends with a pact to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. There are too many occasions when the viewer may wish they would just go ahead and jump.
  24. The Neon Bible
    When a poetically inclined film fixates on the same image too often, it is a sign that the movie may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic. That is one of the problems of The Neon Bible, the English director Terence Davies's hallucinatory portrait of the American South half a century ago.
  25. Down Periscope
    If Down Periscope, directed by David S. Ward, has the ingredients for a lively spoof of everything from Mutiny on the Bounty to Crimson Tide, they are slapped together so crudely that nothing gels, including any sense of a coherent ensemble. The tone of the acting, which is set by Mr. Grammer's blandly laid-back performance, is all wrong for a genre that demands over-the-top hamming.
  26. Rumble in the Bronx
    The movie is a giddy triple somersault of a film that makes no sense whatsoever, although in its best moments it is as much fun to watch as a death-defying circus act.
  27. Mary Reilly
    A gloomy film with a story whose outcome... is an especially foregone conclusion.
  28. Bottle Rocket
    A mildly facetious tone limits Anderson's film to the lightweight, but the collective enthusiasm behind this debut effort still comes through. What's best about Bottle Rocket is not the laid-back pranks that inflate its story to feature length but the offbeat elan with which that story is told.
  29. Happy Gilmore
    Doesn't deliver.
  30. Muppet Treasure Island
    In this sendup of Treasure Island, there are no compelling heroes or villains, and the suspense is minimal. Most of the fun lies in watching the Muppets defuse the swashbuckling tale of its scariness by superimposing their own precociously verbal identities onto their characters.
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