The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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  1. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    Meant to be funny, but it only swells the sinus passages. It is a painfully inept comedy.
  2. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
    Instead, Mr. Carrey turns up in a sloppy second Ace Ventura film that's little more than an echo of the first. A two-minute trailer wouldn't miss many of its highlights.
  3. Valmont
    For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded.
  4. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    One of the many problems with Gus Van Sant's tortured, worked-over Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is that Sissy Hankshaw talks like a novel, and a dated one at that.
  5. It Takes Two
    Under the direction of Andy Tennant, the Olsen sisters lay on the icky-poo cuteness with several trowels, often delivering their lines as though they were reciting the alphabet.
  6. Conan the Barbarian
    Conan the Barbarian is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past.
  7. The Fan
    The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical flash.
  8. Educating Rita
    The essentially two-character play has been opened up to the point that it includes a variety of settings and subordinate figures, but it never approaches anything lifelike.
  9. Quick Change
    In films like Quick Change, he is bogged down by scripts that don't begin to match his comic imagination. Even though he chose and developed Quick Change himself, Bill Murray deserves better than this clunky, stereotypical comedy.
  10. Another 48 Hrs.
    Though the body count is high, all of the people killed are faceless or only minor characters, until the end. It's as if the movie were saying that lethal violence is acceptable (and fun) as long as the victims - like the victims of guided missiles and high-altitude bombing - remain anonymous. Any comedy that allows the mind to ponder high-altitude bombing is in deep trouble.
  11. Little Big Man
    The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.
  12. Newsies
    Newsies is a long, halfhearted romp through what is made to seem a not terribly compelling chapter in New York City's history.
  13. The Secret Agent
    The movie, which imagines its principal characters as metaphorically ticking time bombs, never convincingly portrays their passions.
  14. The Dead Pool
    The Dead Pool, possesses a couple of good jokes, but nothing can disguise the fact that it's a mini-movie in the company of a mythic figure.
  15. Twins
    Twins turns out to be, among other things, sad evidence that witty direction is becoming a dying art.
  16. Nightwatch
    Nightwatch spends so much time churning up eerie atmospheric effects that it doesn't have time to develop its preposterous story in which Martin finds himself accused of the murders.
  17. Cool World
    The plot of Michael Grais's and Mark Victor's screenplay is even more nonsensical than it needs to be. [11 Jul 1992]
  18. Flash Gordon
    The best things in the production are the garishly absurd sets. The costumes, including the gold lame athletic supporters worn by the members of Ming's palace guard, suggest an adolescent's fever dream. The pacing is so funereal that this Flash Gordon seems far longer and far less funny that the 15-chapter serial, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938), which starred Buster Crabbe. [05 Dec 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  19. Twilight Zone: The Movie
    The film, which opens today at the Sutton and other theaters, is composed of a prologue, written for the movie, plus four separate stories, each of them either based directly on a script from the television series or suggested by one. A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs.
  20. A Chorus Line
    A Chorus Line is less a movie than an expensive souvenir program.
  21. Somewhere in Time
    The screenplay is priceless (funny) and it's Mr. Reeve who sets the film's tone. Unfortunately, his unshadowed good looks, granite profile, bright naivete and eagerness to please - the qualities that made him such an ideal Superman - look absurd here.
  22. Step Up 3-D
    The dancers may be skilled, but their work has no meaning in terms of the story -- it's pure spectacle, and numbingly repetitive spectacle at that.
  23. Knight and Day
    A loud, seemingly interminable, and altogether incoherent entry in the preposterous and proliferating “action-comedy” genre.
  24. Man of the Century
    Amusing one-joke film.
  25. Beloved/Friend
    Like its title, it's a clumsy contraption.
  26. Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    The re- enactments, however fascinating they may be as history, are too crude to serve the work especially well.
  27. Besotted
    Like a soft drink that's been sitting open too long: it's too much syrup and not enough fizz.
  28. Fear of Fiction
    A washout.
  29. White Hotel
    Could serve as a textbook example of what to avoid in nonfiction filmmaking.
  30. The Woman Chaser
    Strives desperately for a zaniness that is largely absent from the screenplay and from comic performances that are too blank and unfocused to register as parody.
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