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. Lean on Me
    Audiences are apt to root for the film's Mr. Clark even when they aren't entirely enthusiastic about what he's doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freeman's fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (''Rocky''), who has stacked the deck in every way he can.
  2. Skin Deep
    Mr. Ritter is an engagingly comic actor, but the women in his life are so uncharacterized, in the writing, casting and the playing, that the comedy fizzles. All that's left is a movie about a seriously alcoholic writer making a mess of things.
  3. High Hopes
    High Hopes manages to be enjoyably whimsical without ever losing its cutting edge.
  4. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.
  5. The Mighty Quinn
    The Mighty Quinn is an entertaining, touristy sort of movie that manages to be lighthearted without being soft in the head.
  6. True Believer
    The film's view of Eddie Dodd is occasionally on the facile side, but Mr. Woods's performance is crackling and passionate enough to give the character depth despite that; it's also laced with snappish, self-mocking humor that Mr. Woods delivers particularly well. This performance is so razor-sharp that Eddie can be seen coming alive with each little triumph, reveling in each little maneuver and taking each little disappointment terribly hard. His enthusiasm is irresistible.
  7. The Fly II
    The Fly II is competent but hardly clever. The only respect in which it matches Mr. Cronenberg's Fly is in its sheer repulsiveness, since this film degenerates into a series of slime-ridden, glop-oozing special effects in its final half hour.
  8. Her Alibi
    A romantic melodrama of a boringness to make your average tooth extraction seem preferable.
  9. Who's Harry Crumb?
    In Who's Harry Crumb? Mr. Candy has a varied role, a good supporting cast, a script full of comic setups and every imaginable opportunity to shine. But the result is little more than a weak comedy, one that suggests Mr. Candy is potentially a great deal better than his material.
  10. Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects
    The screenplay, by Harold Nebenzal, leaves one end of this story conspicuously untied, but it does its best to titillate the audience with a mixture of teen-age porn and trademark Bronson spitefulness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mississippi Burning
    For those who know such places, Mr. Parker, who is English, evokes the texture, the gritty, fly-specked Southernness, the brooding sense of small-town menace, the racial hatred, with considerable accuracy.
  12. Three Fugitives
    This comedy has the earmarks of humor and even a few genuine laughs, but it also has a prefabricated, automatic-pilot feeling.
  13. Parents
    The satire of the 50's is more bland than biting, dependent on authentically garish costumes and sets. And when the horror-film scenes begin to intrude on normal life (what is hanging from the cellar ceiling, anyway?) Mr. Balaban can't make the dark elements seem comic enough to mesh with the rest of this nightmarish joke.
  14. Gleaming the Cube
    Gleaming the Cube (the title refers to achieving the skateboarding equivalent of cosmic bliss) has an intrigue plot that is unremarkable, and it doesn't do anything terribly novel with the relationship between Brian and the policeman (Steven Bauer) who helps investigate the case. It becomes somewhat more interesting in exploring the Vietnamese community of Orange County, Calif., especially in its tinier details.
  15. DeepStar Six
    Even the fish lack personality in Deepstar Six, a film that makes the exotic undersea world not much more interesting than the average bedroom closet.
  16. The January Man
    The January Man is well titled. It's a big-budget mainstream production that, in spite of its first-rate writer, director and cast, manages to fail in just about every department.
  17. The Accidental Tourist
    The Accidental Tourist often relies on Miss Tyler's methods without tempering them, and gives a tone of crashing obviousness to material that need not have seemed that way. [23 Dec 1988, p.C12]
  18. Working Girl
    Working Girl is enjoyable even when it isn't credible, which is most of the time. The film, like its heroine, has a genius for getting by on pure charm.
  19. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    Though the script for Hellbound is related to the Barker story, the film drops its plot whenever a fake-looking monster walks on the screen. Ogling strange creatures is the film's true reason for being.
  20. Talk Radio
    A mess of a movie that comes complete with a conventional beginning, middle and end, and long, spongy flashbacks...a nearly perfect example of how not to make a movie of a play.
  21. Rain Man
    In much the way that Raymond stays detached, the performance seems to exist outside the film but, instead of illuminating Rain Man, it upstages the work of everyone else involved. [16 Dec 1988, p.C12]
    • The New York Times
  22. Dangerous Liaisons
    Nothing Miss Close has done on the screen before approaches the richness and comic delicacy of her work as the Marquise. [21 Dec 1988, p.C22]
    • The New York Times
  23. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
    Line by line, the dialogue isn't all that quotable, but there is consistently funny life on the screen. The film's comic timing is nearly flawless.
  24. I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
    I'm Gonna Git You Sucka is a lively but uncertain mixture of nostalgia, silliness and genuinely unpredictable humor.
  25. Twins
    Twins turns out to be, among other things, sad evidence that witty direction is becoming a dying art.
  26. My Stepmother Is an Alien
    Unlike the screenwriters, who often cross the thin line between wit and silliness as they outline Celeste's neo-I Love Lucy-isms, Miss Basinger reveals unfailingly sound instincts for comedy.
  27. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
    It will help if, while watching The Naked Gun, viewers can assume a mental age of about 14. The jokes will seem fresher that way, and they will also, much to the writers' credit, seem screamingly funny at times.
  28. Tequila Sunrise
    The movie has the fuzzy focus of someone who has stared too long at a light bulb. Narrative points aren't made and the wrong points are emphasized. It could also be that too much footage was shot so that, when the time came for editing, a lot of essential material had to be cut out.
  29. Scrooged
    Scrooged works in fits and starts. The mundane demands of the sentimental story keep interrupting what are, essentially, revue sketches, a few of which are hilarious.
  30. Cocoon: The Return
    Cocoon: The Return is so tired, in fact, that it can barely recapitulate the winning formula of the original hit.
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