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. The Exorcist
    The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.
  2. The Sting
    A lot of the other period details aren't too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magnum Force
    The movie is a muddle of morality.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    A number of bit performances, including actual police squads and a team of emergency-room doctors, lend vivid local color and authenticity to an engrossing and adult crime caper.
  5. The Day of the Dolphin
    The Day of the Dolphin is not a movie with much personality of its own.
  6. Sleeper
    There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.
  7. Papillon
    A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.
  8. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is one superbly funny, uproariously intelligent performance, plus two others that are very, very good, which are so effectively surrounded by profound bleakness that it seems to be a new kind of anti-comedy. You'll laugh at it, not through your tears but with a sense of creeping misery.
  9. Don't Look Now
    A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.
  10. Serpico
    It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. (Review of Original Release)
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    This is highly engrossing science-fiction, a French-Czechoslovak co-production in animation.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Stereo mainly proves that you can't successfully spoof psychology merely by making it dull.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Holy Mountain
    Mr. Jodorowsky’s movie is a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and the exploitation of third world cultures by the West. It unfurls like a hallucinogenic daydream.
  14. Westworld
    Crichton the director seems to have had more fun with the film than Crichton the writer, whose screenplay can offer us no better explanation for the sudden, bloody robot rebellion than an epidemic of "central mechanism psychosis."
  15. Robin Hood
    The visual style is charmingly conventional, as gently reassuring as that of a Donald Duck cartoon, sometimes as romantically pretty as an old Silly Symphony.
  16. The Iceman Cometh
    From the opening frames of John Frankenheimer's film version of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, you get the feeling that you're being taken on a guided tour of one of the greatest American plays ever written, instead of seeing a screen adaptation with a life of its own.
  17. The Way We Were
    By, some peculiar alchemy, The Way We Were turns into the kind of compromised claptrap that Hubbell is supposed to be making within the film and that we're meant to think is a sellout. It is.
  18. Charley Varrick
    Siegel has decorated the movie with a lot of colorful bit characters including a chatty, sex‐obsessed old woman, but the action sequences give the film its content as well as style.
  19. The Paper Chase
    It takes a long while for The Paper Chase to disintegrate, and there are some funny, intelligent sequences along the way, but by the end it has melted into a blob of clichés.
  20. Badlands
    One may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent. Badlands is a most important and exciting film.
  21. Mean Streets
    No matter how bleak the milieu, no matter how heartbreaking the narrative, some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter. Such a film is Mean Streets.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    Clearly, the director was awash in his fantasies about lesbianism.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mother and the Whore
    Watching The Mother and the Whore, you find that you're back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties, when a number of mediocre French films focused on sub-Sagan characters: numb, semi-paralyzed creatures who hardly had the calories to drag themselves through the day.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    A simply marvelous cinematic experience.
  25. High Plains Drifter
    Part ghost story, part revenge Western, more than a little silly, and often quite entertaining in a way that may make you wonder if you have lost your good sense. The violence of the film (including a couple of murders by bull-whipping) is continual and explicit. It exalts and delights in a kind of pitiless Old Testament wrath.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    The picture is expertly made and well‐meshed; it moves like lightning and brims with color.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    American Graffiti
    American Graffiti exists not so much in its individual stories as in its orchestration of many stories, its sense of time and place. Although it is full of the material of fashionable nostalgia, it never exploits nostalgia. In its feeling for movement and music and the vitality of the night—and even in its vision in white—it is oddly closer to some early Fellini than to the recent American past of, say, The Last Picture Show or Summer of '42.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Lightning
    A fairly awful movie that keeps producing good things—scenes, performances, moments of insight—that seem connected to better ideas than anything suggested in the film's larger intentions.
  29. The Day of the Jackal
    The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.
  30. Cleopatra Jones
    The movie seems to want to be a James Bond sort of adventure in black drag, but it's more reminiscent of Batman.
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