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. Bride of Re-Animator
    Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.
  2. Nothing But Trouble
    A charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap.
  3. Cadence
    Cadence, which is the first feature Martin Sheen has directed, allows the director and his son Charlie ample opportunity to grapple with one another, as well as with questions of racial harmony and with another of Mr. Sheen's sons, Ramon Estevez. The result is well meaning and at times even gently likable.
  4. The Silence of the Lambs
    All sorts of macabre things have gone on, and are still going on just offscreen, in Jonahan Demme's swift, witty new suspence thriller.[14 February 1991]
    • The New York Times
  5. L.A. Story
    Basically decent, intelligent and sweet. It's a fanciful romantic comedy whose wildest and craziest notion is that Los Angeles, for all of its eccentricities, is a great place to live.
  6. Sleeping with the Enemy
    Joseph Ruben, whose other films include The Stepfather and True Believer, has directed Sleeping With the Enemy with full appreciation of his leading lady's disarming beauty but less successful attention to the people and places that surround her.
  7. The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter
    Made with great effort and no charm, this mirthless fantasy film returns its young hero, Bastian Balthazar Bux (Jonathan Brandis), to the land of Fantasia, which when first glimpsed here appears to be made entirely of cellophane.
  8. Popcorn
    A horror film that is less mindless than most in that it is both funny and gross.
  9. Hamlet
    Mel Gibson's Hamlet is strong, intelligent and safely beyond ridicule.... He is by far the best part of Mr. Zeffirelli's sometimes slick but always lucid and beautifully cinematic version of the play.
  10. White Fang
    A scenic and enveloping nature film about a young man and his beloved pet. But it is by no means strictly a children's film, and it certainly isn't Lassie.
  11. The Garden
    Mr. Jarman's visual sense easily eclipses his conceptual talents. And The Garden has a burning, kaleidoscopic energy to compensate for the facile nature of some of its more unavoidable thoughts.
  12. Green Card
    That understated style at times makes Green Card seem too stiff and vacuous, as if Mr. Weir were inspired by the surface of a Jane Austen work and left out the wicked social observations. But the film is magnificently redeemed by Mr. Depardieu.
  13. Lionheart
    Van Damme, who has nonetheless made eight films in six years, including "Bloodsport," "Cyborg" and "Kickboxer." His looks are memorable but his acting skills stunningly limited, confined mostly to the flexing, seething and pouting realm. Should anyone be in the market for an all-new Hercules, Mr. Van Damme might at the very least take a number. But when it comes to even the minimally dramatic events of Lionheart, he's in over his head.
  14. Not Without My Daughter
    It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.
  15. Warlock
    Warlock is unexpectedly entertaining, having been concocted with comic imagination by D. T. Twohy, who wrote the screenplay, and Steve Miner, the director.
  16. The Godfather: Part III
    One of this film's greatest accomplishments is its making an audience believe that the Corleones and their various partners in crime have been entirely in character during the intervening decades, but have simply neglected to turn up on screen.
  17. Alice
    Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making.
  18. Kindergarten Cop
    No one laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger better than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself. In Kindergarten Cop, he plays off the Schwarzenegger image more gleefully and successfully than ever before. That is not quite enough to save the movie from its lame, predictable script.
  19. The Long Walk Home
    The Long Walk Home offers a careful, dispassionate, finally moving evocation of its setting. In attempting to present segregated Southern society matter-of-factly, it avoids shrillness and keeps its potential for preachiness more or less at bay.
  20. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Gross, unfunny...In adapting it to the screen, Mr. De Palma and Michael Cristofer, who wrote the screenplay, have made a series of wrong decisions that have the effect of both softening the satire and making it seem more uncomfortably racist than the Wolfe original.
  21. The Russia House
    As directed by Fred Schepisi and written by Tom Stoppard, The Russia House is confused and dim, far less complex, and even far less fun, than almost any le Carre work yet brought to the screen, excluding The Little Drummer Girl.
  22. Awakenings
    Awakenings both sentimentalizes its story and oversimplifies it beyond recognition. At no point does the film express more than one idea at a time. And the idea expressed, more often than not, is as banal as the reality was bizarre.
  23. Mermaids
    A terribly gentle if wisecracking comedy about the serious business of growing up.
  24. Edward Scissorhands
    Like a great chef concocting an exquisite peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, Mr. Burton invests awe-inspiring ingenuity into the process of reinventing something very small.
  25. The Rookie
    The Rookie is an astonishingly empty movie to come from Mr. Eastwood.
  26. The Grifters
    The Grifters moves with swift unsentimental resolve toward a last act as bleak as any in recent American screen literature. In a less skillful work, it would be a downer. The Grifters is so good that one leaves the theater on a spellbound high. [5 Dec 1990]
    • The New York Times
  27. Cyrano de Bergerac
    With its screenplay adapted from Rostand by Mr. Rappeneau and Jean-Claude Carriere, the movie is really memorable, though, only for the Depardieu performance, and for the chance it gives us to hear the original French verse.
  28. Misery
    It seems to want to be a Hitchcockian kind of cat-and-mouse suspense melodrama, which demands a lot more ingenuity than Mr. Reiner or Mr. Goldman ever muster. Misery is just good enough that one wishes it were far better. The ideas are there, but they become lost in the heavy-handed treatment.
  29. Eating
    Food assumes near-religious importance in Mr. Jaglom's portrait of needy, anxious women who spend an entire day playing upon one another's insecurities, and waxing rhapsodic about well-remembered culinary thrills.
  30. Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is wise and funny and just a little bit scary. Though it's an adaptation, it has the manner of a true original.
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