The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Under the Volcano
    A film that is especially impressive for the courage, intelligence and restraint with which it tackles an impossible task...What it can do, and does to such a surprising degree, is to bring the characters to life and offer fleeting glimpses into the heart of Mr. Lowry's tragedy.
  2. Ghostbusters
    However good an idea it may have been to unleash Mr. Murray in an ''Exorcist''-like setting, this film hasn't gotten very far past the idea stage. Its jokes, characters and story line are as wispy as the ghosts themselves, and a good deal less substantial.
  3. Gremlins
    Gremlins is far more interested in showing off its knowledge of movie lore and making random jokes than in providing consistent entertainment. Unfortunately, it's funniest when being most nasty.
  4. Top Secret!
    Top Secret! comes nowhere near ''Airplane!'' but in its own cheerful, low-pressure way, it's about as amiable an entertainment as you will find this summer.
  5. Beat Street
    Designed for everybody who still hasn't had his or her fill of break dancing, or who doesn't yet understand that break dancing, rap singing and graffiti are legitimate expressions of the urban artistic impulse.
  6. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    Leonard Nimoy, who directed this third installment, hasn't matched the playfulness and energy of ''Star Trek II,'' but he's way ahead of the first film, making up in earnestness what he lacks in style. That kind of conviction, while sometimes verging on undue self-importance, goes a long way toward making the material touching.
  7. Once Upon a Time in America
    It's a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders. [U.S. theatrical release]
  8. Streets of Fire
    For all its studied sultriness, the movie feels unsexy, perhaps because its inspiration is the kind of hard- hearted western that concentrates on manly combat while eschewing all sentiment.
  9. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    Watching it is like spending a day at an amusement park, which is probably what Mr. Spielberg and his associates intended. It moves tirelessly from one ride or attraction to the next, only occasionally taking a minute out for a hot dog, and then going right on to the next unspeakable experience.
  10. The Element of Crime
    A film noir that's murky without being terribly mysterious.
  11. Firestarter
    A good, stylish mixture of the kind of hokey horror and science-fiction elements in which Mr. King specializes.
  12. The Natural
    Mr. Levinson, who both wrote and directed Diner, the small, exquisitely realized comedy about growing up aimless in Baltimore, here seems to be at the service of other people's decisions. Though entertaining in short stretches, The Natural has no recognizable character of its own.
  13. Sixteen Candles
    The movie is cheerful and light, showcasing Mr. Hughes's knack for remembering all those aspects of middle-class American adolescent behavior that anyone else might want to forget.
  14. Breakin'
    The film, directed by Joel Silberg in and around Los Angeles, employs a very small story that is meant to be functional but still interrupts the dancing far too often.
  15. The Bounty
    The movie seems to have been planned, written, acted, shot and edited by people who were constantly being overruled by other people. It's totally lifeless.
  16. Hardbodies
    This isn't the kind of sexy California beach film that lulls you into a pleasant stupor. It's the kind that makes you wish for a biblical plague.
  17. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
    While not exactly an actress picture, The Final Chapter takes pains to make its characters a little more personable than the horror- movie norm. This is unfortunate, since there is nothing to do during the second half of the film but watch them die.
  18. Suburbia
    Probably the best teen-agers-in-revolt movie since Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge.
  19. Swing Shift
    Mr Demme has a special talent for locating the humor and pathos within the commonplace experiences of American life.
  20. Iceman
    Having been handed a script that, at its best moments, is a wan though benign reminder of the original version of The Thing, Mr. Schepisi seems uncertain whether to distract the audience's attention by decor or to send up the cliches of a certain kind of science-fiction. Unfortunately, he plays it straight most of the time. [16 May 1984, p.17]
    • The New York Times
  21. Moscow on the Hudson
    It seems unfinished, not yet thought through. Even the title doesn't quite fit, since the New York City that Vladimir discovers is far more densely populated by Southern blacks, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, Orientals and Indians from India than by Russians. It sounds as if it were one of those titles around which a screenplay was eventually composed.
  22. Where the Boys Are
    Dumb, vulgar and mostly humorless.
  23. Romancing the Stone
    An elaborately produced, mostly charmless adventure-comedy that intends to make fun of a kind of romantic fiction that's one step removed from what the movie is all about.
  24. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
    Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.
  25. Police Academy
    The movie plows through one outrageous sequence to the next with the momentum of a freight train.
  26. L'Argent
    It goes beyond the impartiality of journalism. It has the manner of an official report on the spiritual state of a civilization for which there is no hope.
  27. Racing with the Moon
    Racing With the Moon demonstrates such intelligence and wit that the result is an unexpected pleasure.
  28. Tank
    Tank is as immediately forgettable as a lesser, made-for-television movie.
  29. The Ice Pirates
    A busy, bewildering, exceedingly jokey science-fiction film that looks like a Star Wars spinoff made in an underdeveloped galaxy.
  30. Splash
    Splash could have been shorter, but it probably couldn't have been much sweeter. Only purists will quibble with the blissfully happy ending, which has the lovers swimming through a shimmering underwater paradise that is supposed to be the bottom of the East River.
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