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 First Wives Club
    The film is played as witchy, all-star vamping with a lethal sting. What makes its premise especially funny is that, at heart, it's no laughing matter.
  2. Surviving Picasso
    Freed from the slavishness of most authorized biography, the film makers try bold strokes.
  3. Last Man Standing
    Last Man Standing comes to life only with rapturous gunfights that add Sam Peckinpah to the film maker's pantheon of heroes, and that are ear-splitting enough to jolt the audience out of its seats. These scenes have their firepower, but they would have larger impact if anyone cared which of the film's gangsters lived or died.
  4. Feeling Minnesota
    No film winds up with a name like Feeling Minnesota if it has anything definite in mind.
  5. Fly Away Home
    Rekindling the delicacy and invigorating naturalness he brought to "The Black Stallion," and again helped immensely by the radiant cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, Ballard turns a potentially treacly children's film into an exhilarating '90s fable.
  6. Bulletproof
    Bulletproof, directed by Ernest Dickerson from a screenplay by Joe Gayton and Lewis Colick, is really a screwball love story disguised as a macho action film.
  7. The Trigger Effect
    Directed with a spare look and exceptional crispness and precision, The Trigger Effect ultimately falls back on the familiar, especially in its banal ideas of how Matt and Annie are changed by their experience. But during the three-day emergency that it describes, this cleverly made film sustains a spooky intensity and an insinuating, utterly confident style.
  8. First Kid
    A clean-cut, affable family film without objectionable elements, beyond the brief and needless violence that complicates its finale.
  9. Carpool
    Wide-eyed and mirthlessly peppy, Mr. Arnold soon wears out his welcome as a bumbling would-be bank robber who commandeers a group of young hostages.
  10. Freeway
    Rather than seeming classic, Freeway appears to be another film maker showcase, a derivative apprentice work.
  11. A Very Brady Sequel
    This carefree comedy film does its best with material that would have been totally ephemeral in a less Brady world.
  12. She's the One
    This time, he takes no great risks, nor does he break new ground in the 20-something serial-small-talk genre. (Currently, Nicole Holofcener's sprightly "Walking and Talking" does it better.) But Burns emphatically avoids sophomore slump with an inviting, ruefully funny film that lives up to his initial promise.
  13. The Island of Dr. Moreau
    Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane.
  14. Girls Town
    In celebrating the solidarity of high school girls who refuse to live and die according to the Beverly Hills ideal, the movie raises a hoarse cheer for candor and spunky self-determination.
  15. Tin Cup
    Bright, stylish, ridiculously alluring.
  16. The Fan
    The film's elegantly tricky cinematography and ominous, pounding score by Hans Zimmer (provocatively juxtaposed with the Rolling Stones), only underline the emptiness behind its technical flash.
  17. Kansas City
    If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality.
  18. Tales From the Crypt Presents Bordello of Blood
    Vampires aren't the only things in Bordello of Blood that can't stand up to daylight. Neither can the plot.
  19. Basquiat
    But the film's central figure remains a cipher, the subject of a colorful scrapbook rather than a revealing portrait.
  20. Jack
    Within the limits and cliches of utterly predictable material, Mr. Coppola is still finally able to make this one from the heart.
  21. Escape from L.A.
    Escape From L.A., which the director wrote with Mr. Russell and Debra Hill, is much too giddy to make sense as a politically astute pop fable. As amusing as some of its notions may be, none are developed into sustained running jokes. [09 Aug 1996, p.C5]
    • The New York Times
  22. Emma
    Gwyneth Paltrow makes a resplendent Emma, gliding through the film with an elegance and patrician wit that bring the young Katharine Hepburn to mind.
  23. Matilda
    Twisted enough by Mr. Dahl and given a jolt of caricature by Mr. DeVito, Matilda makes too perverse a tale for very young children. But this one has playful flamboyance and a dark verve that older children should appreciate. And it has a sweet, self-possessed little heroine.
  24. Chain Reaction
    Unlike ''The Fugitive,'' which had tremendous dramatic urgency, this film isn't clear enough to build suspense that escalates from scene to scene...A lively look and some frantically inventive action scenes generate energy, even if the gimmicks do have an edge of desperation. Mr. Davis churns out vigorous excitement inside the working of a drawbridge, in a science museum, in a secret bunker and on a frozen lake.
  25. Cyclo
    An oblique narrative and shadowy thoughts, in a film that divides itself abruptly between wordlessness and outright poetry, become too fragile to rise above harsher images that overwhelm the viewer. Cyclo never achieves the balance to make such contrasts work as lucidly as they might.
  26. Manny & Lo
    It's the kind of story that leaves viewers with a warm glow.
  27. A Time to Kill
    If the film doesn't add up to a cogent legal argument, neither does it have trouble delivering 2 hours and 20 minutes' worth of sturdy, highly charged drama.
  28. Trainspotting
    The stylish irreverence of Trainspotting mimics that drug high and delivers its own potent kick.
  29. The Frighteners
    The actors can't keep the film's mood from verging on hysteria as the story roams all over the map.
  30. Walking and Talking
    Concentrating on the fine-tuned trivia that fuels so much television comedy, it also creates two bright, appealing heroines and watches them face life's little insults with fresh, disarming humor.
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