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. Trafic
    For all of the laughter in "Traffic," there are moments when the banal utilitarianism of the super-highway is seen as a work of extraordinary art.
  2. The Mechanic
    I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.
  3. Lady Sings the Blues
    The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Night of the Lepus
    The film relies almost entirely on slow-motion shots of ordinary rabbits running through miniaturized settings or in front of scaled-down back projections. It is this technical laziness as much as the stupid story or the dumb direction that leaves the film in limbo and places it in neither one camp nor the other.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fist of Fury
    The action here is as black-and-white and as pleasantly, if naively, diverting as that in any western even though it was all shot in vivid colors.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Last House on the Left
    The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounder
    And if Sounder, an intelligent enough movie, avoids all the major pitfalls of its type, it also lacks the excitement that may have come from plumbing greater depths and discovering a few tougher, less accessible insights.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Way of the Dragon
    Unlike its predecessor, Enter the Dragon, which was praised as a well-made movie, this picture is dreadfully slow and feeble whenever the cast isn't fighting. So you yearn for each battle, just as you wait impatiently for the songs or dances in a tedious musical.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    This sprightly, clever and hilarious treat—all that a comic strip should be on the screen—is even better than "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," which began the series.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    The film's gut pleasures are real, and there are a lot of them. But, they always connect with one another in a world so precisely, cruelly, excitingly balanced that there is no movement without countermovement, no pressure without a greater pressure in return.
  11. Fat City
    A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston.
  12. Deliverance
    An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.
  13. Late Spring (1949)
    Ozu's recognition of the wall of skin separating the mind of the character from the viewer is an integral part of his philosophy. It amounts to a profound respect for their privacy, for the mystery of their emotions. Because of this—not in spite of this—his films, of which Late Spring is one of the finest, are so moving.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joe Kidd
    For perhaps its first half-hour, John Sturges's new Western, Joe Kidd, looks surprisingly good. It seems restrained, relaxed, unfashionably out of the current mode in its commitment to people and horses rather than to sadistic monsters and machines. Nothing remarkable, but modestly decent—a feeling that persists, with continually diminishing assurance, almost until the climax, when everything is thrown away in a flash of false theatrics, foolish symbolism and what I suspect is sloppy editing.
  15. Le Samouraï
    Delon is fine and the movie has the cool delicacy and preci sion one ordinarily associates with something no more philosophical than a Swiss watch. Melville, however, is a philosopher and “The Godson” is as much parable as fascinating melodrama.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hannie Caulder
    Hannie Caulder, which begins cruel and comic, gradually becomes gentler and more serious; and by the time its spirit of outrage has subsided into something like elegy, the film has turned into a fairly moving study of what it means to be cursed by having to pursue a mission instead of a life.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
    It's not bad, as apes and 20th Century-Fox go, at least hand in hand.
  18. The Candidate
    One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.
  19. Frenzy
    Watching Frenzy is like riding a roller coaster in total darkness. You can never be quite sure when you're going to start a terrifying new descent or take a sudden turn to the left or right. The agony is exquisite.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    The thoughtful, ironic script by Joyce H. Corrington and John William Corrington thins only toward the middle and the whole thing has been beautifully directed by Mar tin Scorsese, who really comes into his own here.
  21. Duck, You Sucker
    The resultant mix of dreaminess, violence and politics is a bit unwieldy, but it sticks to your ribs. You'll savor pieces of Duck, You Sucker in your head much later: the mark of a work by a true voluptuary, the overspill in whose craft comes as much from enthusiasm as arrogance.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    The rest of the costumed crew, led by that veteran horror hand, Peter Cushing, as the twins' witchhunting uncle, who chases the fanged Count and his retinue, hardly give Twins of Evil a good name.
  23. The Other
    Thomas Tryon, the actor (The Cardinal), wrote the screen adaptation of his best-selling novel, which is in almost every way more precise, more complex and less ambiguous than the "Summer of '35" sort of movie Robert Mulligan has made from it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeremiah Johnson
    There are momoments of great beauty and terror and deeply earned pathos. There are as well such not-so-incidental pleasures as John Rubinstein's lovely and serviceable musical score, and a cast of excellent supporting actors.
  25. Play It Again, Sam
    Even when he's not in an anarchic mood, Woody Allen is still the funniest neurotic in American movies today and Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross from Allen's screenplay, will probably remain the funniest new movie around this summer until another Allen work shows up.
  26. Buck and the Preacher
    Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier's first film as director as well as star, is a loose, amiable, post-Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience.
  27. Fritz the Cat
    A low, bawdy cartoon feature that hasn't forgotten that there still can be something uniquely funny in animated films that exaggerate human actions and emotions (in this case, love, rage, compassion and, especially, lust) to the extraordinary extents available only in cartoons.
  28. The Godfather
    One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment. [16 Mar 1972]
    • The New York Times
  29. Slaughterhouse-Five
    A wild, noisy, sometimes very funny film that eventually becomes as unstuck in its own exuberance as its hero, Billy Pilgrim, the Illium, N. Y., optometrist, is unstuck in time.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    Even on the basis of a limited exposure to his work, the story seems archetypal Ozu.
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