The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Starting Over
    Starting Over depicts an abandoned man in all his misery, and still manages to be fast and funny while it breaks new ground.
  2. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Herzog's film seems well worth the effort to me. It's funny without being silly, eerie without being foolish and uncommonly beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with mere prettiness.
  3. Time After Time
    A movie that's as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining.
  4. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
    Some intelligent, sophisticated people have knocked themselves out to transform bland into bland, and they have succeeded to the extent that anyone who fondly remembers the comic strip, or the old movie serial with Buster Crabbe, probably will not feel cheated.
  5. The Onion Field
    This is a strong, affecting story but it's also a straggly one, populated by tangential figures and parallel plotlines; the criminals' histories are every bit as convoluted and fascinating as those of the policemen they abducted. Even the courtroom drama is unusually complicated, introducing a new legal team with each new trial.
  6. Yanks
    Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Legacy
    A horror film that is not so much frightening as it is depressing. It is thin and dopey, which is perfectly O.K., but in place of invention it uses contrivance, and in place of imagination it uses shock.
  8. Love and Bullets
    Mr. Bronson grows ever more coolly dependable with each new film, but Love and Bullets is too clumsy to show him off to much advantage.
  9. Hanover Street
    Every now and then a film comes along of such painstaking, overripe foolishness that it breaks through the garbage barrier to become one of those rare movies you rush to see for laughs. The clichés were everywhere, but always just slightly out of place and inappropriate.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rock 'n' Roll High School
    Rock 'n' Roll High School purports to be little more than summer fun, and, in its zanily unpretentious way, it is certainly that.
  11. The Concorde... Airport '79
    Aeronautically and otherwise, it's a bumpy trip.
  12. My Brilliant Career
    My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments.
  13. The Seduction of Joe Tynan
    The principal thing that keeps "The Seduction of Joe Tynan" engrossing is the level of acting it sustains throughout.
  14. Apocalypse Now
    Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.
  15. Sunburn
    As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.
  16. North Dallas Forty
    The central friendship in the movie, beautifully delineated, is the one between Mr. Nolte and Mac Davis, who expertly plays the team's quarterback, a man whose calculating nature and complacency make him all the more likable, somehow.
  17. More American Graffiti
    More American Graffiti is grotesquely misconceived, so much so that it nearly eradicates fond memories of the original.
  18. The Amityville Horror
    So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect.
  19. The Villain
    Mr. Douglas does a lot of stunts, some of them reasonably good; these seem to be the would-be comic backbone of a movie that's not after laughs but heehaws, which in any case it doesn't get.
  20. Breaking Away
    The cast is unknown, the director has a spotty history, and the basic premise falls into this year's most hackneyed category (unknown boxer/ bowler/jogger hopes to become sports hero). Even so, the finished product is wonderful. Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn't even need a big budget or a pedigree.
  21. Dracula
    By no means lacking in stylishness; if anything, it's got style to spare. But so many of its sequences are at fever pitch, and the mood varies so drastically from episode to episode, that the pace becomes pointless, even taxing, after a while.
  22. The Frisco Kid
    There's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material.
  23. The Wanderers
    Makes mincemeat of an excellent novel.
  24. Moonraker
    Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced.
  25. Meatballs
    With far fewer high spirits than “Animal House,” and only two characters of any interest, Meatballs reveals itself to be a loud, offkey cry for conformism of a most disappointing sort. It's a sheep in wolf's clothing.
  26. The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again
    As cheerful and painless as not going to the dentist.
  27. The Muppet Movie
    It's also very well written by Jerry Juhl and Jack Burns and directed by James Frawley ("Kid Blue," "The Big Bus") with a comic touch that never becomes facetious.
  28. Escape from Alcatraz
    Escape From Alcatraz is not a great film or an especially memorable one, but there is more evident skill and knowledge of movie making in any one frame of it than there are in most other American films around at the moment. I should also add that it's terrifically exciting.
  29. Rocky II
    Rocky II has a waxy feeling, and it never comes to life the way its predecessor did. As the characters go through their stock routines — Talia Shire shyly whispering I love you, Mr. Stallone making self-deprecating jokes, Burgess Meredith telling the kid he's either a bum or a hero — you get the feeling that you've been here before. Well, you have.
  30. Prophecy
    Prophecy is full of lingering lap-dissolves and elegant camera movements that suggest history is being made. Leonard Rosenman's soundtrack music is so grand it could be played at a coronation, and it's so loud that it pierces the ears and threatens the head. None of this fits the movie.
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