The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Cape Fear
    Technically, it's a good job. Mr. Webb has prepared a tough, tight script and Mr. Thompson has directed in a steady and starkly sinister style. There is no waste motion, no fooling. Everything is sharp and direct. Menace quivers in the picture like a sneaky electrical charge. And Mr. Mitchum plays the villain with the cheekiest, wickedest arrogance and the most relentless aura of sadism that he has ever managed to generate...But this is really one of those shockers that provokes disgust and regret. There seems to be no reason for it but to agitate anguish and a violent, vengeful urge that is offered some animal satisfaction by that murderous fight at the end.
  2. Experiment in Terror
    It takes more than two hours to come to a solution of the problem in this film. They would do it in one hour on TV, and it would probably be every bit as good.
  3. Sweet Bird of Youth
    Sweet Bird of Youth, for all its graphics and the vigorous performance of its top roles, has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that's all.
  4. Through a Glass Darkly
    It has a simple, straight cinematic form, unifying a little tangle of experience within a modest frame. It may strike one as slight and disappointing alongside the intellectual magnitude of such as his film "The Seventh Seal." But it suggests a new mood of its author—introspective, troubled, cold.
  5. Lover Come Back
    One of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.
  6. Victim
    As a straight piece of blackmail melodrama, it is a good bit below the British par. But as a frank and deliberate exposition of the well-known presence and plight of the tacit homosexual in modern society it is certainly unprecedented and intellectually bold.
  7. The Children's Hour
    It is hard to believe that Lillian Hellman's famous stage play, The Children's Hour, could have aged into such a cultural antique in the course of three decades as it looks in the new film version.
  8. Judgment at Nuremberg
    On the point of the fundamental issue in the Nazi war guilt trials that were held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II, Stanley Kramer, the producer-director, has pinned a powerful, persuasive film. The major weakness, perhaps, of the whole thing is that it is inevitably compressive and sometimes glib. The strength and wonder of it is that it manages to say so much that still needs to be said.
  9. One, Two, Three
    That's about the nature of the picture. It is one with which you can laugh--with its own impudence toward foreign crises--while laughing at its rowdy spinning jokes.
  10. El Cid
    It is hard to remember a picture in which the sheer pictorial punch was greater than it is in this three-hour exhibition of kings and warriors in medieval Spain.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    This time, Mr. Disney, true to himself in his own fashion, has constructed a garden of dreams to delight every child, with the aid of a few of the noted Herbert melodies, a spate of new ones, a cast of photogenic kids and willing grown-ups and sets as stylized as those of any Disney cartoon.
  12. West Side Story
    What they have done with West Side Story in knocking it down and moving it from stage to screen is to reconstruct its fine material into nothing short of a cinema masterpiece...In every respect, the recreation of the Arthur Laurents-Leonard Bernstein musical in the dynamic forms of motion pictures is superbly and appropriately achieved.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blue Hawaii
    Mild, nonsensical and harmless.
  14. The Comancheros
    So studiously wild and woolly it turns out to be good fun.
  15. Splendor in the Grass
    Miss Wood has a beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breakfast at Tiffany's
    Like that storied novella by Truman Capote from which it stems, it is a completely unbelievable but wholly captivating flight into fancy composed of unequal dollops of comedy, romance, poignancy, funny colloquialisms and Manhattan's swankiest East Side areas captured in the loveliest of colors.
  17. Paris Blues
    Paris Blues is a small movie with large ambitions.
  18. The Hustler
    Under Robert Rossen's strong direction, its ruthless and odorous account of one young hustler's eventual emancipation is positive and alive. It crackles with credible passions. It comes briskly and brusquely to sharp points.
  19. Yojimbo
    As in most Westerns, the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese. Kurosawa is here showing more virtuosity than strength. Yojimbo is a long way (in the wrong direction) from his brilliant Rashomon.
  20. Scream of Fear
    Though clearly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, Scream of Fear is closer to Orson Welles in its baroque visual design and delight in style for style's sake. [21 Oct 2008, p.C4]
    • The New York Times
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
    Good color, handsome photographic effects and a submarine to end them all make Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea a mildly diverting but far from memorable screen plunge.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    Even though the picture runs more than two hours and a half, it moves swiftly and gets where it is going. J. Lee Thompson has directed it with pace and has seen to it that the actors give the impression of being stout and bold.
  23. La Dolce Vita
    A brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary upon the tragedy of the overcivilized. (Review of Original Release)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blast of Silence
    Molly McCarthy, however, is deceptively unaffected as the heroine, and her spirited attack on her two big scenes has the quality of the film as a whole—over-eager, unsuccessful, but worth watching.
  25. Breathless
    Say this, in sum, for "Breathless": it is certainly no cliché, in any area or sense of the word. It is more a chunk of raw drama, graphically and artfully torn with appropriately ragged edges out of the tough underbelly of modern metropolitan life.
  26. The Misfits
    Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Great Impostor
    An amusing, and occasionally fascinating, comedy-drama about the career of one of the most amazing—and likable—contemporary charlatans, Ferdinand W. Demara Jr.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    A generally cozy and sentimental little yarn about a nice young English couple, their brood of dogs and a lady dognapper who collects Dalmatians to make coats. It's a rather clever idea, if a bit unsettling.
  29. Where the Boys Are
    Inspired by the novel of Glendon Swarthout, which one reviewer described as "a highly carbonated elixir of sex, sun-shine and beer," it has been patterned into a movie by the glib script writer, George Wells, so that it looks and sounds like a chummy dramatization of the Kinsey reports.
  30. The Grass Is Greener
    Miss Kerr and Miss Simmons look attractive and Mr. Grant and Mr. Mitchum try hard to create the illusion of being moved by love and passion. But they both appear mechanical and bored. [24 Dec 1960, p.8]
    • The New York Times
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