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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Opening Night
    Opening Night is a reminder of what has made Mr. Cassavetes's films so appealing, and of what can make them so maddening, too. For all its length -- nearly two and three-quarter hours -- it's a relatively thin example of the director's work, but a mischievous and inviting one, too.
  2. The Choirboys
    The movie, which Mr. Aldrich directed from a screenplay by Christopher Knopf, is cheap and nasty without having any redeeming vulgarity and absolutely no conviction of truth.
  3. The Gauntlet
    It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time.
  4. Saturday Night Fever
    Fever beings to flag when, after an initial hour filled with high spirits and jubilant music, it settles down to tell its story; the effect is so deflating that it's almost as though another Monday has rolled around and it's time to get back to work.
  5. Candleshoe
    Candleshoe, with its beguiling English countryside settings, languid pace, defanged Dickensian villains, compassionate butler, down-at-the-heels nobility, hidden treasure and orphaned children engaged in a plot to outwit swindlers, keep up appearances and save the old manor from foreclosure, is the fiction of a bygone era.
  6. The Goodbye Girl
    Exhuasting without being much fun.
  7. Semi-Tough
    A funny film that is as much satire as parody, as much about our time as it is about some of our more bizarre culture heroes.
  8. The Turning Point
    The Turning Point is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.
  9. Heroes
    Heroes, co-starring Henry (The Fonz) Winkler and Sally (The Flying Nun) Field, brings to the motion-picture theater all of the magic of commercial television except canned laughter. Well, no truly rotten movie is perfect. Harrison Ford, who may be one of the most-seen movie actors of the day because of his role in Star Wars, is effective in a supporting role too small to make the picture worth seeing.
  10. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Steven Spielberg's giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind...is the best—the most elaborate—1950's science fiction movie ever made, a work that borrows its narrative shape and its concerns from those earlier films, but enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and space technology.
  11. 1900
    It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired.
  12. Pete's Dragon
    At two hours and 14 minutes, the movie is a lot longer than it needs to be. On the other hand, Elliott (whose beeps and bomps and chomping sounds are supplied by Charlie Callas) is very sweet and emotive, and you don't often see children's musicals as ambitious as this one any more.
  13. Damnation Alley
    The only real value of Damnation Alley is educational: This is the movie to see if you don't understand what was so wonderful about the special effects in, say, Star Wars.
  14. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    Miss Keaton, who continues to grow as an actress and film presence, is worth paying attention to in bits and pieces of the movie. She's too good to waste on the sort of material the movie provides, which is artificial without in anyway qualifying as a miracle fabric.
  15. Rolling Thunder
    The movie has some good things, but in the way it has been directed by John Flynn it moves so easily and sort of foolishly toward its violent climax that all the tension within Charlie has long since escaped the film.
  16. Oh, God!
    An uneasy amalgam of inconsistent attitudes, without enough humor or zaniness to divert attention from its questionable premise.
  17. Julia
    Mr. Sargent and Mr. Zinneman have amplified the story with solemn care, in good taste (which is not always desirable), and have come forth with a film that is both well-meaning and on the side of the angels but with the exception of a half-dozen scenes, lifeless.
  18. Bobby Deerfield
    Big, expensive, ultimately ridiculous movie that appears to have been constructed to be a Love Story on wheels.
  19. The American Friend
    Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.
  20. House
    A midnight movie in lysergic spirit and vibe, this was a film made for late-night screening and screaming.
  21. Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown
    The net effect is that of having read the comic strip for an unusually long spell, which can amount to either a delightful experience or a pleasant but slightly wearing one, depending upon the intensity of one's fascination with the basic “Peanuts” mystique.
  22. Suspiria
    Mr. Argento's methods make potentially stomach-turning material more interesting than it ought to be. Shooting on bold, very fake-looking sets, he uses bright primary colors and stark lines to create a campy, surreal atmosphere, and his distorted camera angles and crazy lighting turn out to be much more memorable than the carnage.
  23. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    Nicolas Gessner's direction has a correspondingly comfortable feel, but this type of story is as old as the hills—no, older—and Mr. Gessner doesn't do much to make it plausible.
  24. The Kentucky Fried Movie
    Lots of people will probably like The Kentucky Fried Movie, just as they like Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's hamburgers. But popularity is still no reason for deifying mediocrity.
  25. The Spy Who Loved Me
    The film moves along at a serviceable clip, but it seems half an hour too long, thanks to the obligatory shoot-'em-up conclusion, filmed on the largest sound-stage in the world, but nevertheless the dullest sequence here.
  26. Orca
    If it were medically possible to overdose on claptrap, Orca would be compelled to carry a warning from the Surgeon General.
  27. The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training
    Manufactured comedy of a slick order, depending aImost entirely for its effects on the sight and sound of a bunch of kids behaving as if they were small adults. It's a formula that worked for Our Gang Comedy for many years, and works again here with a bright screenplay by Paul Brickman, based on Bill Lancaster's original characters, and direction of intelligent lightness by Michael Presman.
  28. Greased Lightning
    Mr. Pryor is especially successful in presenting Mr. Scott as a man who guards his energy and intelligence carefully, betraying very little to his enemies and saving a great deal for the moments that matter.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Empire of the Ants
    The human's fright is seen as play acting, and the account of their progress over a gory trail is slow and repetitive. And, aside from some multifaceted ant's-eye views of humans, the special effects are artificial and unexciting.
  30. Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
    Special effects in which the actors appear repeatedly in black outline and occasionally distorted perspective; and an assortment of tricks (rearing up on hind wheels, blushing and blinking his lights) that possesses a somewhat limited power to captivate...Reluctant adults marched off to "Herbie" by tiny press gangs may take what consolation they can from the scenery, featuring France and Monaco.
    • The New York Times
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