The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Night Shift
    This is a halfway funny movie, one that's got loads of good gags in its first half and nothing but trouble in its second.
  2. The Last American Virgin
    The best things about the movie are probably its amusingly modish outfits and hairdos, which demand that the audience keep its eyes open, and the music, which doesn't.
  3. An Officer and a Gentleman
    Undeniably, there's an element of corniness to this. But that doesn't keep An Officer and a Gentleman from being a first-rate movie - a beautifully acted, thoroughly involving romance.
  4. The World According to Garp
    If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one.
  5. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
    This film lacks even the inadvertently buoyant awfulness that makes some bad movies fun. It's just plain dull.
  6. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
    Its light classical manner and its happyish ending. Whatever Mr. Allen is doing in constructing this pretty, slight, gently entertaining movie, he isn't doing the thing he does best. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy gives the impression of someone speaking fluently but formally in a language not his own.
  7. The Secret of NIMH
    Resourceful and valiant though unsuccessful attempt to revive the kind of animated feature identified with the Golden Age of Walt Disney. If The Secret of N.I.M.H. had had a screenplay to equal its great visual qualities, it might have become a classic in its own right.
  8. Six Pack
    If you've never seen anyone wear a gold chain with a sweatshirt, then by all means go see Kenny Rogers in Six Pack. If that is not your idea of originality, the good-natured but none-too-interesting Six Pack won't strike you as anything new.
  9. TRON
    It is beautiful -spectacularly so, at times - but dumb. Computer fans may very well love it, because Tron is a nonstop parade of stunning computer graphics, accompanied by a barrage of scientific-sounding jargon. Though it's certainly very impressive, it may not be the film for you if you haven't played Atari today.
  10. Blade Runner
    THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned.
  11. The Thing
    The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.
  12. Série Noire
    Serie Noire,' adapted by Mr. Corneau and Georges Perec from ''A Hell of a Woman'' by the late Jim Thompson, takes itself much too seriously, as is the way with humorless French adapters of American fiction of this sort.
  13. Megaforce
    Mr. Needham's secret weapon is Mr. Reynolds, and Mr. Reynolds isn't here. Without his overriding friendliness and humor on hand, there is too much opportunity to notice the weak spots in Mr. Needham's direction.
  14. Annie
    It's big, colorful, slightly vulgar, occasionally boring and full of talent not always used to its limits.
  15. Firefox
    Firefox is only slightly more suspenseful than it is plausible. It's a James Bond movie without girls, a Superman movie without a sense of humor.
  16. Author! Author!
    Hiller makes this warm, friendly and sometimes cute, but he doesn't make it move very quickly.
  17. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    "E.T." is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it's full of the timeless longings expressed in children's literature of all eras.
  18. Grease 2
    Less a sequel than a retread...Dizzy and slight, with an even more negligible plot than its predecessor had. This time the story can't even masquerade as an excuse for stringing the songs together.
  19. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    The second Star Trek movie is swift, droll and adventurous, not to mention appealingly gadget-happy. It's everything the first one should have been and wasn't.
  20. Poltergeist
    Poltergeist often sounds as if it had been dictated by an exuberant twelve-year-old, someone who's sitting by a summer campfire and determined to spin a tale that will keep everyone else on the edges of their knapsacks far into the night.
  21. Chan Is Missing
    Chan Is Missing is not only an appreciation of a way of life that few of us know anything about; it's a revelation of a marvelous, completely secure new talent.
  22. Burden of Dreams
    One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work.
  23. Rocky III
    It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.
  24. The Escape Artist
    The Escape Artist represents a lot more talent than is ever demonstrated on the screen.
  25. The Road Warrior
    In its stripped-down, cannily cinematic way, it's one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country. It has no pretensions to do anything except entertain in the primitive, occasionally jolting fashion of the first nickelodeon movies, whose audiences flinched as streetcars lumbered silently toward the camera.
  26. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    A genial, gently mocking, brilliantly executed spoof that may offend the purists but which should delight the buffs.
  27. Conan the Barbarian
    Conan the Barbarian is an extremely long, frequently incoherent, ineptly staged adventure-fantasy set in a prehistoric past.
  28. Wrong Is Right
    Mr. Brooks has a couple of major defects to be successful in this kind of project. He is a man with no great feeling for comedy of any sort, and his reactions to the lunacies of contemporary life are trivial.
  29. Paradise
    Paradise is The Blue Lagoon with camels.
  30. The Sword and the Sorcerer
    A nonsensical, Hollywood-made, R-rated adventure-fantasy set in a primeval past about usurped kingdoms, erring knights, recently awakened ogres, distressed princesses and various hangers-on.
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