The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. When a Stranger Calls
    The gimmick behind When a Stranger Galls is a scary one, but it's been played for more than it's worth.
  2. The Great Santini
    Mr. Duvall, Miss Danner and Mr. O'Keefe are the main reasons you should see The Great Santini. They play together with the kind of ease and self-assurance that, in a movie, is as exhilarating as it is rare.
  3. French Postcards
    Parts of French Postcards have considerable charm, even if it is charm with the consistency of bunny-fluff.
  4. ...and justice for all.
    With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.
  5. Meteor
    As it is, the suspense is sludgy and the character development nil; even the inadvertent comedy is spotty.
  6. Vengeance Is Mine
    VENGEANCE IS MINE, directed by Shohei Imamura, a Japanese director largely unknown in this country, is chilly without being austere, the sort of confounding movie that tells us too much and not enough.
  7. The Black Stallion
    For all its pretty glimpses of the desert island, the film never offers a clear, overall sense of what the place looks like; neither the camera nor the boy really goes exploring.
  8. The Europeans
    The Europeans isn't simply pretty, it's so relentlessly pretty it becomes almost boring to watch.
  9. 10
    Blake Edwards's frequently hilarious new film, “10,” is the story of George's desperate efforts to come to terms with life in Southern California even though he knows he's inadequate.
  10. Starting Over
    Starting Over depicts an abandoned man in all his misery, and still manages to be fast and funny while it breaks new ground.
  11. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog's film seems well worth the effort to me. It's funny without being silly, eerie without being foolish and uncommonly beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with mere prettiness.
  12. Time After Time
    A movie that's as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining.
  13. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
    Some intelligent, sophisticated people have knocked themselves out to transform bland into bland, and they have succeeded to the extent that anyone who fondly remembers the comic strip, or the old movie serial with Buster Crabbe, probably will not feel cheated.
  14. The Onion Field
    This is a strong, affecting story but it's also a straggly one, populated by tangential figures and parallel plotlines; the criminals' histories are every bit as convoluted and fascinating as those of the policemen they abducted. Even the courtroom drama is unusually complicated, introducing a new legal team with each new trial.
  15. Yanks
    Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Legacy
    A horror film that is not so much frightening as it is depressing. It is thin and dopey, which is perfectly O.K., but in place of invention it uses contrivance, and in place of imagination it uses shock.
  17. Love and Bullets
    Mr. Bronson grows ever more coolly dependable with each new film, but Love and Bullets is too clumsy to show him off to much advantage.
  18. Hanover Street
    Every now and then a film comes along of such painstaking, overripe foolishness that it breaks through the garbage barrier to become one of those rare movies you rush to see for laughs. The clichés were everywhere, but always just slightly out of place and inappropriate.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rock 'n' Roll High School
    Rock 'n' Roll High School purports to be little more than summer fun, and, in its zanily unpretentious way, it is certainly that.
  20. The Concorde... Airport '79
    Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.
  21. My Brilliant Career
    My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments.
  22. The Seduction of Joe Tynan
    The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.
  23. Apocalypse Now
    Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.
  24. Sunburn
    As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.
  25. North Dallas Forty
    The central friendship in the movie, beautifully delineated, is the one between Mr. Nolte and Mac Davis, who expertly plays the team's quarterback, a man whose calculating nature and complacency make him all the more likable, somehow.
  26. More American Graffiti
    More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.
  27. The Amityville Horror
    So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect.
  28. The Villain
    Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that's not after laughs but heehaws, which in any case it doesn't get.
  29. Breaking Away
    The cast is unknown, the director has a spotty history, and the basic premise falls into this year's most hackneyed category (unknown boxer/ bowler/jogger hopes to become sports hero). Even so, the finished product is wonderful. Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn't even need a big budget or a pedigree.
  30. Dracula
    By no means lacking in stylishness; if anything, it's got style to spare. But so many of its sequences are at fever pitch, and the mood varies so drastically from episode to episode, that the pace becomes pointless, even taxing, after a while.
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