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. Beverly Hills Cop
    Beverly Hills Cop finds Eddie Murphy doing what he does best: playing the shrewdest, hippest, fastest-talking underdog in a rich man's world.
  2. Supergirl
    Supergirl arouses some initial curiosity about the differences between the two cousins; for instance, that Supergirl can't change in phone booths and is much the better flier of the two. However the film, as directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by David Odell, quickly loses its novelty.
  3. Falling in Love
    Falling in Love is not a bad movie by any means. It's not stupid or gross or cheap. It's been done with taste, but it's the sort of production that, even when it works, which it frequently does, seems too small and trite to have had so much care taken on it.
  4. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    A Nightmare on Elm Street puts more emphasis on bizarre special effects, which aren't at all bad.
  5. Night of the Comet
    A good-natured, end-of- the-world B-movie, written and directed by Thom Eberhardt, a new film maker whose sense of humor augments rather than upstages the mechanics of the melodrama.
  6. Missing in Action
    A simple, bullet-riddled, crowd-pleasing action movie.
  7. Oh, God! You Devil
    The material is extremely slight, but at least it's benign.
  8. No Small Affair
    As directed by Jerry Schatzberg from a screenplay by Charles Bolt and Terence Mulcahy, the film stays snappy much of the way.
  9. Paris, Texas
    Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.
  10. A Soldier's Story
    Mr. Jewison, filming mainly at Fort Chaffee, Ark., has opened up the play by using such interiors as the bar where the troops hang out and exteriors on and around the base. But perhaps most commendably, he has let Mr. Fuller's drama speak for itself, applying the skills of a film maker to polish the facets that lent such substance to the drama.
  11. The Terminator
    A B-movie with flair.
  12. Body Double
    It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film ("Vertigo"), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.
  13. The Gods Must Be Crazy
    The Gods Must Be Crazy is so genial, so good-natured and, on occasion, so inventive in its almost Tati-like slapstick routines, that it would would seem to deny the existence of any racial problems anywhere.
  14. Firstborn
    It is to the credit of Mr. Apted, and to a cast including some very believable young actors, that Firstborn moves swiftly and smoothly enough to dispel much nitpicking about plot points, at least for a time.
  15. The Little Drummer Girl
    What the film demonstrates most obviously is that when there is this much plot on the screen, there isn't time for actors to develop anything much in the way of plausibility of characterization.
  16. Crimes of Passion
    FOR all their extravagance, Ken Russell's films have never lacked exuberance or humor, which makes the flat, joyless tone of Crimes of Passion a surprise. Much of this is attributable to a screenplay by Barry Sandler filled with smutty double-entendres and weighty ironies. Only intermittently does Mr. Russell break through with the kind of manic flamboyance that is so singularly and rudely his own.
  17. The Razor's Edge
    Slow, overlong and ridiculously overproduced.
  18. Stop Making Sense
    Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own.
  19. Songwriter
    Though Songwriter is an original, it recalls the director's earlier Roadie in its choppiness, its knowing view of show business, and its humor, which tends to be exuberantly rude.
  20. Places in the Heart
    Robert Benton has made one of the best films in years about growing up American.
  21. Teachers
    Teachers is Arthur Hiller's attempt to do for public education what he did for medicine in The Hospital, and the results are very uneven.
  22. Eureka
    There are enough plots here for several movies, but not enough for this one.
  23. The Wild Life
    Something like a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The characters are different, but the perspective on teen-age Americana, West Coast-style, is very much the same. This time around, though, the material is less funny.
  24. Irreconcilable Differences
    Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.
  25. Threads
    Clearly, Threads is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful. [12 Feb 1985, p.42]
    • The New York Times
  26. All of Me
    If this, the best American comedy since Tootsie, doesn't have you in stitches, check your vital signs: you may be in as much trouble as Edwina Cutwater, the dying dowager Miss Tomlin plays.
  27. The Evil That Men Do
    Mr. Bronson is stony as ever, and a little more nattily dressed.
  28. The Brother from Another Planet
    The Brother From Another Planet, set in major part in Harlem, means to be fantastic as well as funny and satiric, and from time to time, it is each of these things. Mostly, though, it's a nice, unsurprising shaggy-dog story that goes on far too long.
  29. Amadeus
    Mr. Forman has preserved the fascinating heart of Mr. Shaffer's play, and made it available to millions who might never enter a legitimate theater. Well done.
  30. C.H.U.D.
    C.H.U.D. makes no pretension toward serious theses about government or the environment. It is meant to be light commercial entertainment, and in the category of horror films it stands as a praiseworthy effort.
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