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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    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Barefoot Executive
    In this genial but strained and arch frolic, the one real joke is not only "in" but it wears thin and even frantic.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vanishing Point
    A movie about which I can think of almost nothing good to say.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Andromeda Strain
    Despite all the drama of the situation (United States threatened with biological destruction from outer space, etc.) nothing very exciting goes on in The Andromeda Strain. Since nobody greatly feels or acts, we are left with the drama of people tensely sitting around in chairs, twisting dials and watching TV monitors. From time to time, somebody gets up and paces the room.
  4. Bleak Moments
    The best that can be said for Bleak Moments is that it earns its name. The film, while it has been handsomely photographed, seems entirely given over to pained, wordless interludes. [23 Sep 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  5. There Was a Crooked Man...
    There Was A Crooked Man . . . is really a duel between two men, one good, one bad, and it's these smaller, more civilized confrontations, done with irony and wit, that make the film one of the more pleasant things you're likely to see this season.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Aristocats
    As funny, warm and sweet an animated, cartoon, package as ever gave a movie marquee a Christmas glow.
  7. Little Big Man
    The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel.
  8. Brewster McCloud
    Attempts to be a kind of all American, slapstick Orpheus Ascending, a timeless myth about innocence and corruption told in the sort of outrageous and vulgar terms that Brian De Palma and Robert Downey do much better.
  9. Wuthering Heights
    The screenwriter, who often uses bits of dialogue from the novel, doesn't hesitate to add new material that is completely inappropriate.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    El Topo
    El Topo is a good deal more interesting and a good deal less hung up on its own pretensions than all my most intelligent friends had led me to believe.
  11. Love Story
    It looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.
  12. Husbands
    Like Faces, which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense. Husbands, however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long.
  13. Scrooge
    It is absurd, sentimental, pretty, never quite as funny as it intends to be, but quite acceptable, if only as a seasonal ritual.
  14. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is comparatively mild Billy Wilder and rather daring Sherlock Holmes, not a perfect mix, perhaps, but a fond and entertaining one.
  15. The Conformist
    The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film. (Review of Original Release)
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Vampire Lovers
    The Vampire Lovers, praise be, does manage to be a departure from a hackneyed, bloody norm. It also is professionally directed, opulently staged and sexy to boot.
  17. The Great White Hope
    The Great White Hope is one of those liberal, well-meaning, fervently uncontroversial works that pretend to tackle contemporary problems by finding analogies at a safe remove in history.
  18. Tora! Tora! Tora!
    From the moment you read the ads for Tora! Tora! Tora! ("The Most Spectacular Film Ever Made!”), you are aware that you're in the presence of a film possessed by a lack of imagination so singular that it amounts to a death wish.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    At first appears to be rich with a quantity of felt life, but on reflection seems both more carefully studied and more coldly casual than profoundly understood.
  20. The Wild Child
    Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.
  21. La Piscine
    Pretty people behaving poorly in beautiful settings is something we don’t see as much of in cinema as we used to. This is a master class in the subgenre, and one of unusual depth.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Bullet for Pretty Boy
    The film looks a little as if they had taken the members of the cast of, say, "Beach Blanket Bingo" and put them in costume and given them old cars to drive and told them to play it for real. For real it isn't.
  23. Take the Money and Run
    Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.
  24. Catch-22
    The most moving, the most intelligent, the most humane--oh, to hell with it!--it's the best American film I've seen this year.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kelly's Heroes
    Not without its problems. But it is very largely without viable solutions to them. Not without resources—it is full of resources, natural and mostly untapped—but with out that resourcefulness necessary to persuade us that comedy, any comedy, is worth the time of day.
  26. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    Any movie that Jacqueline Susann thinks would damage her reputation as a writer cannot be all bad. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn't—which is not to say it is any good.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Mules for Sister Sara
    I'm not sure that it is a great movie, but it is very good, and it stays and grows in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Watermelon Man
    Watermelon Man demands complete surrender and gives absolutely nothing in return except embarrassment.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Getting Straight
    A brilliant, mercurial performance by Elliott Gould steadies and vivifies but cannot save Getting Straight. Even with such sideline brilliance as the sad-funny performance of young Robert F. Lyons almost matching Gould's, the picture ends as a cop-out of its own professed principles and initial honesty.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    The very helter‐skelter, unstudied nature of the picture provides a revealing close‐up of the world's most famous quartet, playing, relaxing and chatting.
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