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. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    A sunny, exuberant confection and an enjoyably skillful one.
  2. Rocky V
    Rocky V takes him out of his gilded cage and back to the director (John G. Avildsen), the settings and the underdog's outlook that made him famous in the first place. It's a smart move. There's life in the old boy yet.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Home Alone
    Kevin has the potential to be the mawkish child or the obnoxious little adult so common on screen, but he is neither. Played with great glee by Macaulay Culkin, he is a totally endearing, up-to-the-minute little boy.
  4. The Rescuers Down Under
    The mice themselves are enjoyably dowdy, comfortable throwbacks to a time before earth-shattering conquests were the sine qua non of children's entertainment. The film's action sequences, on the other hand, provide the dizzying heights and spectacular exploits to which live-action audiences are by now well accustomed, and they seem derivative despite the ingenuity of the animators.
  5. Dances with Wolves
    Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.
  6. The Krays
    Gary Kemp, as the more commanding and peculiar Ron Kray, makes an especially scary impression, particularly once the Krays' perfect control has begun to unravel. In a series of events set off by Reg's marriage, the Krays are seen on a downhill spiral that Mr. Medak conveys with great and effective understatement.
  7. Child's Play 2
    Vicious as Chucky is, it's hard to be scared by anything that kicks its little feet helplessly every time it flings itself upon a full-sized human target.
  8. My Twentieth Century
    My 20th Century, a new Hungarian film written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, is a number of wondrous things. It's a bracing combination of wit, invention, common sense and lunacy. It's a gravely comic meditation on civilization at the turn of this century. It's also about light and shadow and electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, movies and what it's like to be Hungarian in a world where no one is quite sure where Hungary is.
  9. Jacob's Ladder
    The ending of Jacob's Ladder, when it finally arrives, is, like much of the film, both quaint and devastating.
  10. Vincent & Theo
    The enjoyment in Vincent and Theo comes more from the director's attention to art history than from his ability to interpret it anew.
  11. Graffiti Bridge
    Prince's direction is on a par with his acting, roughly equivalent to his aptitude for Presidential politics. Nonetheless, the film has a lively style, a galvanizing score and some dance numbers in which the star truly shines.
  12. Graveyard Shift
    As directed by Ralph S. Singleton, Graveyard Shift works better above ground than below. The early scenes that allow the actors a little color are more fun than the all-basement episodes, which are visually monotonous despite the fact that the film's monster plot is a multi-media affair.
  13. Night of the Living Dead
    [A] witty, entertaining remake.
  14. White Palace
    No more convincing on screen than it was on the page. But it is greatly helped by the presence of Mr. Spader, who was apparently born to play life-denying, icy-veined young heroes, and especially Ms. Sarandon, who has made a career out of coaxing such characters out of their buttoned-down ways.
  15. Quigley Down Under
    The director, Simon Wincer, makes Quigley Down Under an unapologetic homage to the formula western at its most pokey, complete with Wagon Train-style score. All things considered, this could be a lot worse.
  16. Avalon
    A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.
  17. Reversal of Fortune
    What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]
    • The New York Times
  18. The Hot Spot
    The Hot Spot, his film noir set in a small, sex-starved Texas backwater, is the closest Mr. Hopper has yet come to working within the bounds of a familiar genre. Nevertheless, The Hot Spot bears the film maker's idiosyncratic stamp all the way.
  19. Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael
    Though ''Roxy Carmichael'' is never as fresh or powerful as it might have been, it is a sweetly engaging film in the Barry Levinson school: just when you think it might fall into a bottomless pit of sentimentality, it stops short.
  20. Memphis Belle
    The direction by Michael Caton-Jones, the Englishman whose first theatrical feature was Scandal, is undistinguished here, but the material is not great.
  21. Mr. Destiny
    While Mr. Destiny is not technically a remake of anything, it's hard to find a glimmer of originality, much less wit or emotion.
  22. Miller's Crossing
    Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact.
  23. Marked for Death
    As directed by Dwight H. Little, Marked for Death lacks much visual interest or suspense.
  24. Henry & June
    The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.
  25. Desperate Hours
    What has been lost is more than Bogart's gritty presence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    An Angel at My Table
    For all of the casual brutality of the hospital scenes, An Angel at My Table seems a very gentle film about a woman of such a passionate nature.
  27. King of New York
    Mr. Walken, as Frank, does a memorable job of taking a fanciful projection of corruption, greed and complacency, giving it intelligence, and making it flesh and blood.
  28. Pacific Heights
    Pacific Heights deserves a little credit for originality, and a little more for remaining within the realm of realism until a contrived, violent ending becomes overdue. Thanks to its three stars and a well-chosen supporting cast, the film remains sly fun even when its characters begin making silly mistakes.
  29. Texasville
    There are times when Texasville, like the Larry McMurtry novel on which it is based, seems top heavy with eccentrics. Everybody is tirelessly and (worse) lovably oddball. The snappy dialogue occasionally exhausts. Yet also like the book, the movie becomes seriously involving, a cockeyed acknowledgment of an especially American kind of inarticulate despair.
  30. Narrow Margin
    Though the story evokes old movie formulas - from Strangers on a Train to the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, which inspired it - this film does not reinvent them. It dully echos their conventions.
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