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. Lord of the Flies
    As directed by Harry Hook, the new Lord of the Flies offers much spectacle for the eye and almost nothing to keep the mind from wandering.
    • The New York Times
  2. House Party
    Unlike most teen-age movies, which attempt to impose some kind of adult order and significance on the events they recall, House Party has the light touch, rude wit and immediacy of rap as improvised by someone in top form.
  3. Joe Versus the Volcano
    Not since "Howard the Duck" has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano. Many gifted people contributed to it, but there's no disbelieving the grim evidence on the screen.
  4. Bad Influence
    Bad Influence is full of sharply observed subsidiary characters and details of dress and behavior. Among other things, they help ease one past the plot's point of no return.
  5. The Handmaid's Tale
    With its devilish attention to polite little touches, its abundant bitchiness, its decrying of the Handmaids' oppression along with its tacit celebration of their fecundity, The Handmaid's Tale is a shrewd if preposterous cautionary tale that strikes a wide range of resonant chords.
  6. The Hunt for Red October
    The movie finally is never very convincing. Even the special effects aren't great. Mr. Connery, however, wears the movie as if it were a favorite old hat. He makes it look good.
  7. Glory
    Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.
  8. Nightbreed
    Surrounded by Mr. Barker's visual clutter and lack of narrative energy, Mr. Cronenberg's presence only highlights the difference between a gruesome but first-rate psychological horror story like Dead Ringers and a mediocrity like Nightbreed.
  9. Revenge
    A flaccid movie version of Jim Harrison's slightly less flaccid 1979 novella...The movie is soft and aimless. Revenge is the kind of film in which subsidiary characters and events are more interesting than anything the movie is supposed to be about. Even the brutality has no shock effect.
  10. Madhouse
    To his credit, Mr. Ropelewski comes up with fairly novel forms of mayhem and makes an effort to tie up most of the loose ends when the film is over.
  11. Hard to Kill
    Mr. Seagal is effective for both his novelty value and his ability to be both literally and figuratively disarming. And the film itself is a lively one for its genre, ambitious enough to do more than simply string fight scenes together.
  12. Stella
    Ms. Midler's performance manages to be both involving and wildly inconsistent. The story is so full of holes that both she and Ms. Alvarado sometimes experience full personality changes from scene to scene.
  13. Tremors
    Tremors wants to be funny, but it spends too much time winking at the audience. More than anything else, it looks like the sort of movie that might have been put together so that tourists visiting Universal Studios could see a movie being made.
  14. Internal Affairs
    The very appealing Mr. Garcia has an intense, studied cool that is nicely offset by bilingual outbursts. And Mr. Gere makes the most of Peck's smiling villainy, giving him a powerful physical presence and a dangerous, unpredictable edge.
  15. Ski Patrol
    Movies don't get more derivative or less comic than this.
  16. The Plot Against Harry
    Behind the film's easygoing mood there is firm directorial control. This, together with Mr. Roemer's keen sense of personality and place and his wry humor, accounts for why The Plot Against Harry holds up so well.
  17. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.
  18. Sidewalk Stories
    Even more impressive than the tact, warmth and humor of Sidewalk Stories is the fact that it exists at all. Mr. Lane has flown quite fearlessly in the face of fashion, and done this so confidently that any comparisons with Chaplin deserve to be appreciative.
  19. Akira
    Violent as it is on the surface, Akira is tranquil at its core. The story's sanest characters plead for the wise use of mankind's frightening new powers, lending the whole film the feeling of a cautionary tale.
  20. Always
    Gentle and moving as it means to be, Always is overloaded. There is barely a scene here that wouldn't have worked better with less fanfare.
  21. Tango & Cash
    Tango and Cash is loaded with sweating, straining, smashing and grunting, with bulging-bicep shots and sadistic special effects. Watery electrocution sequences are a particular favorite, since these mean wet clothes, shooting sparks, writhing bodies and other current staples of high style. Images like these are so all-important in Tango and Cash that the idea of storytelling has virtually been annihilated.
  22. Born on the Fourth of July
    It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie.
  23. Driving Miss Daisy
    Mr. Beresford and Mr. Uhry, working in concert, see to it that the essential spirit of Driving Miss Daisy shines through the sometimes deadening effects of literalism.
  24. We're No Angels
    The movie proceeds at the pace of a child reluctant to go to bed. It dawdles over irrelevant details and grows sleepier and sleepier until it seems to be snoozing, though still standing up.
  25. The Wizard
    Video-addicted kids may well find this exciting, but for anyone old enough to stay out later than 9 P.M. it's a distinct bore.
  26. Family Business
    The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.
  27. Blaze
    Blaze has been beautifully photographed by Haskell Wexler in the soft, lulling colors of the Louisiana countryside, against which Ms. Davidovich's amusingly garish costumes stand out as markedly as they're meant to. The costumes, by Ruth Myers, are particularly good, with ice-cream-colored suits for Mr. Newman that allow him to dominate the film visually just as surely as he dominates it dramatically.
  28. She-Devil
    Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.
  29. Mapantsula
    Mr. Mogotlane makes Panic much more than a symbol, treating him as a raffish, amusingly overconfident figure at first and a visibly shaken man as the film progresses, until at last he utters the single syllable that encapsulates the film's final point.
  30. The War of the Roses
    The film's outstanding nastiness, which is often diabolically funny until a poorly staged final battle sequence simply takes things too far, has something real and recognizable at its core.
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