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. Modern Problems
    TWENTIETH Century-Fox knew exactly what it was doing when it decided to open Modern Problems at theaters all over New York on Christmas Day, without advance screenings for the press. It's not that Modern Problems is so bad, though it is incredibly sloppy.
  2. Absence of Malice
    Even when the action seems wrongheaded—and it frequently does—the movie is richly textured and well played.
  3. Sharky's Machine
    Mr. Reynolds's third and best directorial effort - the first two were Gator and The End - is an unexpectedly accomplished cop thriller. There is, as is often the case with movies of that genre, less here than meets the eye: the plot has its unreasonable spots, and the story doesn't come to much in the end. But one measure of the success of Sharky's Machine is that it's too fast and exciting for those considerations to count until after the movie is over.
  4. Neighbors
    The situation that Neighbors starts off with is funnier than anything that grows out of it, at least the version of the tale by Mr. Avildsen's and Larry Gelbart, the screenwriter. While Mr. Berger's novel has an aspect of the mysterious to keep it going, the film is solely devoted to hijinks, and the hijinks have nowhere to go.
  5. Rollover
    The dramatic possibilities of the material are weak at best, and its satirical underpinnings are nowhere to be found. As for the characters, they are either deeply unsympathetic or, when they resort to technical jargon for very long periods of time, incomprehensible.
  6. On Golden Pond
    Mr. Fonda gives one of the great performances of his long, truly distinguished career. Here is film acting of the highest order, the kind that is not discovered overnight in the laboratory, but seems to be the distillation of hundreds of performances.
  7. Ragtime
    The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Road Games
    Jamie Lee Curtis plays the jiggly hitchhiker he picks up, which is one reason he calls her Hitch. Another reason, according to a pretentious statement by the director, Richard Franklin, is to pay tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, who should be twirling.
  9. Time Bandits
    Time Bandits is a cheerfully irreverent lark - part fairy tale, part science fiction and part comedy. It's a fantastic though wobbly flight through history and legend in the company of a small boy named Kevin and six dwarfs named Randall, Fidgit, Wally, Og, Stutter and Vermin.
  10. Halloween II
    There's some variety to the crimes, as there is to the characters, and an audience is likely to do more screaming at suspenseful moments than at scary ones. The gore, while very explicit and gruesome, won't make you feel as if you're watching major surgery. The direction and camera work are quite competent, and the actors don't look like amateurs.
  11. Looker
    The premise, though, is the only satisfying thing about Looker, which Mr. Crichton has directed from his own original, stupifyingly nonsensical screenplay.
  12. Saturday the 14th
    It's an unfunny horror-filmparody with a cast headed by Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss and Severn Darden , directed and written by Howard R. Cohen, who shouldn't be trusted to park the cars of such people, much less make a movie with them.
  13. Quartet
    Almost always entertaining to watch and infuriatingly wrong in several important ways, chief among these being the casting of Miss Adjani as Marya.
  14. The French Lieutenant's Woman
    The film's beauty is dazzling. It stands with—or perhaps a little ahead of—Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Roman Polanski's Tess, but it also must be conceded, quickly and without too stern a reproach, that there is less to The French Lieutenant's Woman than meets the dazzled eye.
  15. My Dinner with Andre
    It's the achievement of Mr. Malle, the director of Atlantic City, Pretty Baby and a lot of other very fine, conventional movies, that he has successfully turned his two real-life personalities into actors capable of representing themselves.
  16. Rich and Famous
    The movie can't make up its mind whether it's about a tumultuously difficult but rewarding friendship or whether it's a sendup of the contemporary literary scene. It fails as both.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead & Buried
    Fairly standard and cynical stuff, with enough threatening incidents to satisfy the most jaded horror-film buff.
  18. The Watcher in the Woods
    A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.
  19. Paternity
    With the exception of Miss D'Angelo and Lauren Hutton and Elizabeth Ashley, who make cameo appearances, almost everything in Paternity is tired and perfunctory. This is especially true of Mr. Reynolds.
  20. Mommie Dearest
    Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another.
  21. Southern Comfort
    Though the film was photographed on what appear to have been extremely difficult locations in Louisiana and Texas, it never once convinces you that it's anything but pretentious moviemaking.
  22. True Confessions
    Marvelously well-acted...Quite simply it's one of the most entertaining, most intelligent and most thoroughly satisfying commercial American films in a very long time.
  23. So Fine
    Its comic episodes are nicely controlled, and the movie has a consistent zany style.
  24. The Disappearance
    Mr. Cooper's abrupt, stylized direction can't tease much delicacy or meaning out of the material, though delicacy is all that might recommend it. John Alcott's handsome cinematography is most effective, but the beauty it imparts is skin-deep.
  25. Continental Divide
    Mr. Apted has made this a sweet, engaging movie that audiences will very much want to see end well.
  26. Raggedy Man
    Raggedy Man is something like a country-and-western ballad that relates a supposedly sad, melodramatic story but whose simple, repetitive, upbeat rhythms effectively deny the awfulness of the events being sung about.
  27. The Haunting of Julia
    Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia manages to draw on every horror movie cliche imaginable and still make very little sense.
  28. Gallipoli
    Mr. Weir's work has a delicacy, gentleness, even wispiness that would seem not well suited to the subject. And yet his film has an uncommon beauty, warmth and immediacy, and a touch of the mysterious, too.
  29. Body Heat
    While Body Heat involves murder, fraud, a weak hero led astray and a seductive, double-dealing broad, it also incorporates something new: a sexual explicitness that the old films could only hint at.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hell Night
    Hell Night is not so bad as it might be. It is not so good as it might be, either, but remember that it is a horror film. As the popular culture declines, the horror film declines with it, and whereas the horror film was once spooky, now it is nauseating, measured by the barf, rather than the shiver. Hell Night, however, is only about half a barf, an improvement, therefore, over its kind.
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