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. Voyage of the Damned
    Movies as clumsy, tasteless and self-righteous as this are worse than merely boring. By exploiting the tragedies of real people, some wildly fictionalized, The Voyage of the Damned attempts to turn them to profit without giving them any measure of the respect that is due.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nickelodeon
    Nickelodeon is two hours and two minutes of impersonations.Some of them are very good impersonations—deft and funny—but they lack a life to string them together.
  3. Mikey and Nicky
    Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.
  4. A Star Is Born
    Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.
  5. King Kong
    It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Shaggy D.A.
    As the sequel to "The Shaggy Dog," Walt Disney's 1959 moneymaker, The Shaggy D.A. is a farce with all the witless energy of an unrestrained Great Dane puppy and, thankfully, a cast and director who generally avoid taking themselves or the free-wheeling plot seriously.
  7. The Pink Panther Strikes Again
    Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Edwards delight in old gags, and part of the joy of The Pink Panther Strikes Again is watching the way they spin out what is essentially a single routine, such as one fellow's trying, unsuccessfully, to help another fellow out of a lake.
  8. Rocky
    The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.
  9. Silver Streak
    The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.
  10. The Last Tycoon
    The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Carrie
    Mr. de Palma has ordered universal overacting. Piper Laurie does it with considerable grace—the wicked witch in a children's pantomime. The marvel, though, is Sissy Spacek. She makes us perfectly aware that she is overacting, and yet she is very effective. Her hysteria is far too hysterical. Her delight in being taken to the prom is far too radiant. But it moves us.
  12. Network
    Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.
  13. Alice Sweet Alice
    Mr. Sole, whose first feature this is, knows how to direct actors, how to manipulate suspense and when to shift gears: the identity of the killer is revealed at just that point when the audience is about to make the identification, after which the film becomes less of a horror film than an exercise in suspense.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Two-Minute Warning
    The movie is a blank, in other words, until the end. And then, suddenly, a lot of people are killed very gorily; and there is a mass stampede, and the football crowd becomes a panicked, murderous mob. And even the panic lacks emotion. It has momentum—lots of feet stepping on faces—and viciousness. Nothing more.
  15. The Next Man
    A suspense melodrama made by people whose talent for filmmaking and knowledge of international affairs would both fit comfortably into the left nostril of a small bee.
  16. Assault on Precinct 13
    Assault on Precinct 13 is a much more complex film than Mr. Carpenter's Halloween, though it's not really about anything more complicated than a scare down the spine. A lot of its eerie power comes from the kind of unexplained, almost supernatural events one expects to find in a horror movie but not in a melodrama of this sort.
  17. The Marquise of O
    It's a dazzling testament to the civilizing effects of several different arts, witty, joyous and so beautiful to look at that it must seem initially suspect to those of us who have begun to respond to spray-painted subway graffiti as the fine art of our time.
  18. Car Wash
    A cheerful, somewhat vulgar, very cleverly executed comedy about what goes on in a single 10-hour period in a Los Angeles car wash.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Song Remains the Same
    The Song Remains the Same is a movie to listen to Led Zeppelin by. If you want to listen to Led Zeppelin. If you don't, there's no point going. If you do, it's still a dubious proposition...The scenes showing the group performing are more informative though not much more powerful.They are dominated by the singer, Robert Plant. A great mass of yellow curls tumbling around his shoulders, Mr. Plant sashays around the stage, posturing, pouting and conducting a meaningful relationship with the microphone. It looks like a sheep trying to seduce a telephone pole.
  20. Burnt Offerings
    Director Curtis times his audience immersions into the ice bath of terror with such skill that moviegoers will scarcely have the leisure to ask why some of the renters aren't a bit more observant and curious about their dwelling.
  21. J.D.'s Revenge
    J.D.'s Revenge crosses the line from a stupid movie to a potentially harmful one.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gator
    Messy little melodrama of Southern corruption. [25 Aug 1976, p.46]
    • The New York Times
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Shootist
    Mr. Siegel's lack of form and fidelity to his own story means that as the movie proceeds, even those things that are charming turn to lead.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Futureworld
    A film about robots and, evidently, for robots. It is as much fun as running barefoot through Astroturf.
  25. Obsession
    Whatever shred of credibility the movie retains is dispersed by the final, dead serious directorial hocus‐pocus.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Gumball Rally
    After they all start off, and once you get used to the rather handsome speeding-car effects, which is soon, the movie seems to be nothing but one long exhaust pipe. There is only so much that can be done with scenes of cars passing each other.
  27. Lifeguard
    As a film, Lifeguard is romantic twaddle, but as sociology it's a spontaneous assault on a very American way of life.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gus
    This is a decently average Disney film, with a few funny parts and other parts where you would agree to smile if you could.
  29. Shivers
    It's apparent that someone connected with They Came From Within has an impertinent sense of humor even though the film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it's difficult to stay with it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Outlaw Josey Wales
    The movie tends to muffle and sell short whatever points it may be trying to make. There seems to be a ghost of an attempt to assert the romantic individualism of the South against the cold expansionism of the North. Every Unionist is vicious and incompetent, whereas Wales, despite his spitting, is really a perfect gentleman. There is something cynical about this primitive one-sidedness in what is not only a historical context, but happens also to be our own historical context. To the degree a movie asserts history, it should at least attempt to do it fairly.
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