The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Equinox Flower
    Equinox Flower—a particularly inscrutable title even for this great Japanese director—is one of Ozu's least dark comedies, which is not to say that it's carefree, but, rather, that it's gentle and amused in the way that it acknowledges time's passage, the changing of values and the adjustments that must be made between generations.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Smokey and the Bandit
    With Mr. Reynolds playing it cool and Mr. Gleason doing his burns and investing the film with a certain raunchy humor, the rest is up to the vehicles. And they don't do anything that hasn't been seen before.
  3. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    Everyone treats his material with the proper combination of solemnity and good humor that avoids condescension. One of Mr. Lucas's particular achievements is the manner in which he is able to recall the tackiness of the old comic strips and serials he loves without making a movie that is, itself, tacky.
  4. Cross of Iron
    Cross of Iron is Mr. Peckinpah's least interesting, least personal film in years, a hysterically elaborate, made-in-Yugoslavia war spectacle, the work of international financiers and a multinational cast, most of whom are supposed to be Germans although they sound like delegates to an international PEN convention.
  5. Citizens Band
    Citizen's Band, is so clever that its seams show. Mr. Demme's tidiest parallels and most purposeful compositions are such attention-getters that the film has a hard time turning serious for its finale, in which characters who couldn't communicate directly come to understand one another at long last.
  6. The Car
    The performances are terrible—thin and overwrought in the manner of actors trying to improvise without an idea in their heads.
  7. Annie Hall
    There will be discussion about what points in the film coincide with the lives of its two stars, but this, I think, is to detract from and trivialize the achievement of the film, which, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.
  8. Demon Seed
    Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly.
  9. Rabid
    It took (Cronenberg) several films to come into his own as a filmmaker, but even his earliest work reflects his obsessive interest in the human body as raw material that can be transformed -- for better or for worse -- by strong emotions. [08 Jun 2004, p.E3]
    • The New York Times
  10. The Eagle Has Landed
    A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.
  11. Black Sunday
    The characters don't motivate the drama in any real way. They are cut and shaped to fit it, and if the cast of Black Sunday were not so good, and if Mr. Frankenheimer were a less able director, the movie would be unendurably boring.
    • The New York Times
  12. Airport '77
    Airport '77 looks less like the work of a director and writers than like a corporate decision.
  13. Slap Shot
    The performances—which have a lot to do with the right casting, particularly in the smaller roles—are impeccable. Paul Newman maintains an easy balance between star and character-actor. The leading-man authority is there, but it's given comic perspective by the intensity of the character and by its tackiness, evident even in the clothes he wears.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    Nagging thoughts are not supposed to arise in horror pictures—last summer Mr. Winner predicted that this picture would be extremely horrifying — but The Sentinel has long stretches where there is nothing to do but notice things.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Cassandra Crossing
    The plague germs rapidly mutate into something harmless, like a cold. The film never mutates: It just goes on, becoming more and more lethal.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freaky Friday
    Toward the end there are some amusing car-chase scenes. Elsewhere the humor is clotted by the feeling that the jokes are chasing the reactions, instead of the other way around.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pumping Iron
    An interesting, rather slick and excessively long documentary about the small but intensely competitive world of body-building.
  18. The Town That Dreaded Sundown
    A couple of professional actors, Ben Johnson and Andrew Prine, head the cast, but the film looks nonprofessional in every other respect.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Enforcer
    The action is reasonably fast and competently photographed. The picture doesn't exactly drag. But it is maggoty with non‐ideas.
  20. Voyage of the Damned
    Movies as clumsy, tasteless and self-righteous as this are worse than merely boring. By exploiting the tragedies of real people, some wildly fictionalized, The Voyage of the Damned attempts to turn them to profit without giving them any measure of the respect that is due.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nickelodeon
    Nickelodeon is two hours and two minutes of impersonations.Some of them are very good impersonations—deft and funny—but they lack a life to string them together.
  22. Mikey and Nicky
    Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.
  23. A Star Is Born
    Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.
  24. King Kong
    It's a series of big, foolish but entertaining spectacle scenes.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Shaggy D.A.
    As the sequel to "The Shaggy Dog," Walt Disney's 1959 moneymaker, The Shaggy D.A. is a farce with all the witless energy of an unrestrained Great Dane puppy and, thankfully, a cast and director who generally avoid taking themselves or the free-wheeling plot seriously.
  26. The Pink Panther Strikes Again
    Both Mr. Sellers and Mr. Edwards delight in old gags, and part of the joy of The Pink Panther Strikes Again is watching the way they spin out what is essentially a single routine, such as one fellow's trying, unsuccessfully, to help another fellow out of a lake.
  27. Rocky
    The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.
  28. Silver Streak
    The sort of comedy that leaves you exhausted, though not from laughing.
  29. The Last Tycoon
    The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Carrie
    Mr. de Palma has ordered universal overacting. Piper Laurie does it with considerable grace—the wicked witch in a children's pantomime. The marvel, though, is Sissy Spacek. She makes us perfectly aware that she is overacting, and yet she is very effective. Her hysteria is far too hysterical. Her delight in being taken to the prom is far too radiant. But it moves us.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »