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. Into the Night
    A little bit of Into the Night is funny, a lot of it is grotesque and all of it has the insidey manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other's films in their own screening rooms.
  2. The Breakfast Club
    The five young stars would have mixed well even without the fraudulent encounter-group candor towardS which The Breakfast Club forces them. Mr. Hughes, having thought up the characters and simply flung them together, should have left well enough alone.
  3. Lost in America
    A yuppie mid-life crisis is in the offing, and Albert Brooks has made it the basis for Lost in America, an inspired comedy in his own drily distinctive style.
  4. Vision Quest
    Movies are not like people who, if they're basically nice and decent, can be liked even if they're not very stimulating company. Movies of that order wear one down. They demand attention without giving much in return - amiability is not enough. This is Vision Quest.
  5. Turk 182
    A movie with a sloppily sentimental heart that's as big as the city in which its story takes place.
  6. The Mean Season
    Philip Borsos, who directed ''The Grey Fox,'' builds the suspense of The Mean Season slowly and, for the most part, very effectively.
  7. Witness
    It's not really awful, but it's not much fun. It's pretty to look at and it contains a number of good performances, but there is something exhausting about its neat balancing of opposing manners and values.
  8. The Falcon and the Snowman
    A very curious though effective entertainment, a scathing social satire in the form of an outrageously clumsy spy story told with a completely straight face.
  9. Mischief
    IF Norman Rockwell had wanted to make ''Porky's,'' he might have come up with something like Mischief.
  10. Heaven Help Us
    The director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into.
  11. The Killing Fields
    Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.
  12. A Passage to India
    Mr. Lean's Passage to India, which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.
  13. Fandango
    Kevin Reynolds, who wrote and directed Fandango, is for the most part making just another coming-of-age film. But at its best, his debut feature has an appealing boisterousness, and it successfully walks a fine line between sensitivity and swagger.
  14. Blood Simple
    BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's Blood Simple a directorial debut of extraordinary promise.
  15. Ghoulies
    This one is a cut-rate Gremlins, about some small, nasty creatures brought forth by a young man dabbling in the occult.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The New Kids
    A teen-age revenge melodrama that is both sadistic and wimpish.
  17. Tuff Turf
    Enough visual bravado to overpower the peculiarities of its class pretensions.
  18. The River
    The River has a meticulously detailed physical production and, from time to time, is acted with passion by its cast. Yet its ideas are so profoundly muddled that the film must run mainly on sentimentality.
  19. Johnny Dangerously
    Johnny Dangerously winds down as it moves along, eventually descending to a lowest common denominator of dopey adolescent gags that overpower the parody. Still, even at its thinnest, it remains good-humored and intermittently entertaining.
  20. Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo
    Breakin' 2 slights dramatic matters to concentrate exclusively on dancing. The movie contains so much of it that it's exhausting even to watch, but at least the choreography isn't being executed by John Travolta.
  21. The Flamingo Kid
    Even if The Flamingo Kid comes out of sit-com country, the character and the performance effortlessly rise above their origins.
  22. Birdy
    Mr. Modine's performance is exceptionally sweet and graceful; Mr. Cage very sympathetically captures Al's urgency and frustration. Together, these actors work miracles with what might have been unplayable.
  23. Micki + Maude
    The director, the star and the writer make a fine team in this often riotous tale.
  24. Protocol
    Protocol is a breezy, not entirely unpredictable comedy that was made to order for the gifted Goldie Hawn by Buck Henry, the writer, Herb Ross, the director, and Miss Hawn herself, who is the film's executive producer. [21 Dec 1984, p.C25]
    • The New York Times
  25. Starman
    Starman provides him with a role that, played by anyone else, might seem preposterous. In Mr. Bridges' hands it becomes the occasion for a sweetly affecting characterization - a fine showcase for the actor's blend of grace, precision and seemingly offhanded charm.
  26. Runaway
    Runaway doesn't stint on the gizmos, and its inventiveness in that respect is its best feature; it comes up with, among other things, foot-long metallic spiders with a deadly sting and heat-seeking bullets that can be programmed to track specific human targets.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cotton Club
    The Cotton Club is not a complete disaster, but it's not a whole lot of fun. It just runs on and on at considerable length, doing obligatory things, being photographically fancy but demonstrating no special character, style or excitement.
  28. Dune
    SEVERAL of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in the movie.
  29. 2010
    A perfectly adequate though not really comparable - sequel to Stanley Kubrick's witty, mind- bending science-fiction classic, ''2001: A Space Odyssey.'
  30. City Heat
    Overdressed and overplotted as it is, City Heat benefits greatly from the sardonic teamwork of Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. Without them the film would be eminently forgettable, but their bantering gives it an enjoyable edge.
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