The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,313 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: 9,401 out of 20313
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20313
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20313
20313 movie reviews
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  1. In the Tall Grass
    Natali whips up an atmospheric frenzy in kind, but every new addition is a subtraction. Two characters condemned to an eternal game of “Marco Polo” is scary enough on its own.
  2. Anne at 13,000 ft
    The title character is one of those difficult women that the movies just can’t quit and rarely prove as interesting as filmmakers seem to think. Anne obviously has issues — psychological, behavioral, familial — but the movie isn’t big on specifics. It’s a pretty, uninvolving blur.
  3. Color of Night
    The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream, and about as much reliance on everyday logic.
  4. Human Capital
    The Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.
  5. The Children's Hour
    It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman's famous stage play, The Children's Hour, could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three decades as it looks in the new film version.
  6. Class of 1999
    Class of 1999 is the paranoid student's dream movie, full of absurd battle scenes and failed attempts at dark humor.
  7. How the West Was Won
    With little or no imagination and, indeed, with no pictorial style, despite the fact that the three directors were Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and John Ford, they have fashioned a lot of random episodes, horribly written by James Webb, into a mat of outdoor adventure vignettes that tell you nothing of how the West was really won.
  8. Elvira: Mistress of the Dark
    Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a lame attempt to cash in on her character's success.
  9. 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.
  10. Knives and Skin
    It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.
  11. The Three Musketeers
    Conceived frankly as a product, complete with hit-to-be theme song over the closing credits, this adventure film cares less about storytelling than about keeping the Musketeers' feathered hats on straight whenever they go galloping.
  12. Innocent Blood
    Innocent Blood, which could easily have been titled "A French Vampire in Pittsburgh" in homage to one of Mr. Landis's earlier triumphs, is even more dependent on gruesome special effects than "An American Werewolf in London" was, and is a lot less imaginative.
  13. Operation Dumbo Drop
    Operation Dumbo Drop is painlessly good-humored by any lights, but the viewers most likely to enjoy all this are those most easily driven to giggles by the idea of elephant poop.
  14. Betty Blue
    Too often, Betty Blue has the posturing good looks of a fashion spread and nothing more.
  15. Necessary Roughness
    If the movie were a farcical free-for-all ridiculing the hyper-competitive world of college football, it might be amusing. But it can never decide whether to be an athletic answer to "National Lampoon's Animal House" or icky-inspirational like "Rocky."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Considering the ersatz tension and plotting, Black Christmas is hardly worth the efforts of all concerned.
  17. After the Murder of Albert Lima
    In its quest for entertainment value, this documentary loses sight of the actual grief and hurt a devastated son would feel.
  18. The Prophecy
    Angels have proliferated in popular culture in such profusion lately that maybe they needed a comeuppance. A few more movies like The Prophecy should stop the whole celestial bandwagon right in its tracks.
  19. Spies in Disguise
    The lessons are so treacly, and their delivery method so single-minded, that the Valley Girl phrase “gag me with a spoon” springs to mind. But you have to give the movie credit for sticking to its lack of guns.
  20. Fire in the Sky
    Fire in the Sky treats the story with cautious, unimaginative, quite boring politeness.
  21. Quezon's Game
    Unfortunately, in Matthew Rosen’s fictionalized take, Quezon’s Game, this story of intrigue turns stiff and sentimental.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Death on the Nile
    A big expensive, star‐studded bore in which a lot of famous talent is permitted — no, encouraged — to do a series of campy turns on their own worst mannerisms.
  23. Downhill
    There are some jokey parts, some weepy bits, a sexy moment and a few fine displays of anger from Louis-Dreyfus, but they’re all just thrown together like salted nuts and cheap candies in a snack mix.
  24. Magic
    A no-frills, no-imagination reworking of the story about the ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy.
  25. Sneakers
    Sneakers is jokey without being funny, breathless without creating suspense, in part because of the feeble plot.
  26. Crimes of Passion
    FOR all their extravagance, Ken Russell's films have never lacked exuberance or humor, which makes the flat, joyless tone of Crimes of Passion a surprise. Much of this is attributable to a screenplay by Barry Sandler filled with smutty double-entendres and weighty ironies. Only intermittently does Mr. Russell break through with the kind of manic flamboyance that is so singularly and rudely his own.
  27. King of the Gypsies
    Frank Pierson has written and directed a melodrama about three generations of gypsies that is all color and no substance.
  28. Waiting for Anya
    Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Inferno
    The movie's distinguishing feature is not the number or variety of horrible murders, but the length of time it takes for the victims to die. This is a technique that may have been borrowed from Italian opera, but without the music, it loses some of its panache.
  30. Striptease
    Written mostly as ensemble comedy, Striptease grinds to a halt whenever the star goes through her dance paces, most of which prove awkwardly strenuous and are daring only by the standards of A-list movie stars.
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