The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. At Close Range
    At Close Range is never boring. There's something bold about the film's wealth of imagery, but it also so overstates the material of the screenplay that it eventually annihilates both it and the story, which might possibly have been moving and terrifying. This just looks like fancy movie making.
  2. Absolute Beginners
    Looking through these layers of time, this flashy, extravagant rock musical, which opens today at the Ziegfeld, elevates style to a symptom and cause of social change. And though it aims for more coherence than it delivers, it has endless flair with no self-importance...For all its unevenness, Absolute Beginners is high pop culture.
  3. Wise Guys
    From its cartoony credits to its knish-and-cannoli close, Wise Guys is one funny movie.
  4. The Toxic Avenger
    The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.
  5. Critters
    It's commercially calculated to have something for everyone - suspense, humor, even a bounty hunter from the krites' planet who poses as a rock star. Unfortunately, the film doesn't have the humor or the budget to match any of these goals.
  6. Band of the Hand
    The rest is mainly whack, splat and kaboom, with fast cuts to a rock beat. Miami vise.
  7. My Beautiful Laundrette
    My Beautiful Laundrette has the broad scope and the easy pace that one associates with our best theatrical films. It puts its own truth above the fear of possibly offending someone. Without showing off, it has courage as well as artistry. A fascinating, eccentric, very personal movie.
  8. A Room with a View
    As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Last Resort
    It's a kind of twisted Alice in Wonderland - without Alice, without imagination and most certainly without wonder.
  10. Lucas
    No, it's not a daringly original plot and yes, it is sentimental, but Mr. Seltzer handles his small story as gently as Lucas handles the baby locust he finds in the road.
  11. Rad
    The bicycle acrobatics behind the credits at the opening of Rad are so spectacular that you wonder what the movie can do to improve on them. The short answer is, nothing. It's a.ll uphill once the tale gets under way
  12. April Fool's Day
    The dialogue is mostly composed of rude variations on ''eek,'' ''ugh'' and ''I'd like to sleep with you this evening.''
  13. The Money Pit
    If you can imagine a remake of Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist in which the spirits of the dead have been shoved aside by equally loud, unruly plumbers and carpenters, you'll have some idea of The Money Pit.
  14. Hamburger: The Motion Picture
    If the Food and Drug Administration labeled movies, the warning on ''Hamburger'' might be that it is likely to cause heartburn...The result is plenty of irreverence but not much fun. Somebody must have told the waitress to hold the laughs.
  15. Police Academy 3: Back in Training
    The plot, which more or less prompts the gags without interfering with them, has something to do with a competition between the two police academies to see which one will survive a state-decreed budget cut. It's perfectly serviceable.
  16. Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation
    To make a long story short, the film ends on a note that equally serves Great Wishing Star, the Care Bears, free enterprise and redemption. Very young kids may love this, but anybody over the age of 4 might find it too spooky.
  17. GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords
    True to Saturday-morning cartoon tradition, GoBots is a jerky, semi coherent series of chases, laser-gun battles and explosions, with an allegorical plot about how no one can handle too much power.
  18. Gung Ho
    It's more cheerful than funny, and so insistently ungrudging about Americans and Japanese alike that its satire cuts like a wet sponge.
  19. Crossroads
    Unfortunately, the authentic music is betrayed by the final guitar competition, a kind of Karate Kid cacophony between Eugene and the devil's favorite, a punk rocker, in which souls are saved, but Mr. Cooder may have jeopardized his own.
  20. Highlander
    Since none of the characters makes sense even on the movie's own terms, Highlander keeps on exploding for almost two hours, with nothing at stake.
  21. Desert Hearts
    Desert Hearts has no voice or style of its own. It's as flat as a recorded message from the telephone company.
  22. Trouble in Mind
    Alan Rudolph's latest movie seems to be striving to say something but isn't able to break through the fog of his script.
  23. Pretty in Pink
    Fortunately, the actors are mostly likable, and the story is told gently enough to downplay both its trendiness and its conventionality.
  24. House
    It has a style that is unexpectedly snappy. Scares are not its strong suit, but it has a trim, bright look and better performances than might be expected. William Katt, looking weathered and sounding very Robert Redfordlike as Roger Cobb, brings some conviction to his role, and George Wendt is funny as a nosy next-door neighbor named Harold.
  25. Nine 1/2 Weeks
    In 9 1/2 Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries.[21 Feb 1986, p.C17]
    • The New York Times
  26. The Hitcher
    Existential terror, in the case of Robert Harmon's Hitcher, means an unmotivated viciousness that's as cryptic at the story's end as it was at the beginning.
  27. The Delta Force
    The 1986 film all others will have to beat for sheer, unashamed, hilariously vulgar vaingloriousness.
  28. Quicksilver
    As long as the characters are doing stunts or whizzing impossibly through city traffic to a strong rock beat, there's something to watch. For the rest of the time, Quicksilver is as much fun as a slow leak.
  29. Wildcats
    This is another of the iron-buttercup roles in which Miss Hawn has been specializing since ''Private Benjamin,'' films in which her inspired dizziness masks an unexpectedly strong will. Initially, that contrast was delightful. But it has begun to seem less and less funny as Miss Hawn's films develop a preachier edge.
  30. F/X
    The movie, which looks as if it had been made on an A-picture budget, has a lot of the zest one associates with special-effects-filled B-pictures.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »