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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    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    This second time around for Harper is a lackluster workout despite its colorful settings, occasional tension and a cast that includes Joanne Woodward (Mrs. Newman). As a convoluted caper it generates action rather than character and surface mystery rather than meaning.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Apple Dumpling Gang
    Walt Disney started by making movies in which animated drawings played the parts of people or animals who stood for people. Later he turned to making movies in which people or animals play the parts of animated drawings. They bound, they double-take, they simper when moved and quack when angry. Their disasters—crashes, plunges through space, explosions—are weightless. The Apple Dumpling Gang is a fair example.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Devil's Rain
    The Devil's Rain is ostensibly a horror film, but it barely manages to be a horror. The quality of writing, acting and direction give a general and routine witlessness to this movie.
  4. Race with the Devil
    This is a ridiculous mishmash of a movie for people who never grew up, which is not so say it's for children. One would think that Mr. Fonda and Mr. Oates had better things to do, but perhaps not. American movie production is in a bad state.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    It's not funny at all and, not being funny, it becomes, instead, frivolous.
  6. Bite the Bullet
    A big, expensive Western that doesn't contain one moment that might be called genuine.
  7. Jaws
    If you think about Jaws for more than 45 seconds you will recognize it as nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun, if you like to have the wits scared out of you at irregular intervals.
  8. Nashville
    A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.
  9. Lancelot of the Lake
    What's missing from the film is any urgent interior meaning, and this it may be because of the distractions of the exterior details. It may also be because the conflicts that rage within Lancelot — between duty and desire, courtly love and physical love — simply aren't complex enough to bring out the best in Mr. Bresson.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bug
    Bug is decidedly poisonous. It is not simply a scary picture, nor simply a violent one. It is a cruel picture.
  11. The Wind and the Lion
    An elaborate, expensive‐looking, ludicrously jingoistic historical‐adventure that comes out so firmly in favor of Teddy Roosevelt's “Big Stick” policy, 70 years later, that it could also be a put‐on.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Eiger Sanction
    The Eiger Sanction is a long, foolish but never boring suspense melodrama about a college art professor named Jonathan Hemlock (Clint Eastwood), who has a passion for French Impressionists and mountain climbing and an underground reputation as the best assassin in the international spy business.
  13. The Return of the Pink Panther
    The screenplay is funny but even better are the sight gags that are a kind of inventory of everything Clouseau has been unable to master in his long, irrelevant career.
  14. French Connection II
    The concerns of French Connection II are not much different from those of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen in jeopardy and then figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in the quality of the supermen and in their predicaments.
  15. The Fortune
    It's a marvelous attempt to recreate a kind of farce that, with the notable exceptions of a handful of films by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, disappeared after World War II.
  16. Smile
    It's an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.
  17. The Day of the Locust
    Its grossness—its bigger-than-life quality — is so much a part of its style (and what West was writing about) that one respects the extravagances, the almost lunatic scale on which Mr. Schlesinger has filmed its key sequences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Death Race 2000
    In the end, it reveals itself to have nothing to say beyond the superficial about government or rebellion. And in the absence of such a statement, it becomes what it seems to have mocked—a spectacle glorifying the car is an instrument of violence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dolemite
    Dolemite remains the Citizen Kane of kung fu pimping movies. [26 May 2002, p.1]
    • The New York Times
  20. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail...is a marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor.
  21. Supervixens
    It's full of the old Meyer preoccupations — insatiable women, impotent men, lonely desert landscapes in which the promise of sex is the only reliable compass. Yet something has been lost. Could it be innocence?
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Unfortunately, Mr. Wayne's first film trip to London doesn't appear to have been necessary. He and his busy company only serve to make Brannigan a commonplace crime caper.
  23. Escape to Witch Mountain
    Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.
  24. Tommy
    Mr. Russell's Tommy virtually explodes with excitement on the screen. A lot of it is not quite the profound social commentary it pretends to be, but that's beside the point of the fun.
  25. Night Moves
    An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.
  26. Shampoo
    In Shampoo Ashby shows that he has a good memory for a couple of decades of cinematic clichés. He gives us an unnecessary motor race and some obligatory slow motion, but he misses most of the opportunities offered him.
  27. The Great Waldo Pepper
    Its moods don't quite mesh and its aerial sequences are so vivid—sometimes literally breathtaking—that they upstage the human drama, but the total effect is healthily romantic. It's the kind of movie that enriches dreams even though its story seems sort of strung-out, like a first draft, and includes moments that slip into bathos.
  28. The Wilby Conspiracy
    The best thing about the movie, flimed mostly in Kenya, is its performances, funny and hip and self-assured in the manner of television personalities working in front of loving audiences. Mr. Caine and Mr. Poitier are never unaware that their material may not be the greatest, but that doesn't spoil their good spirits, and when a good line comes along they get maximum results without stomping on it or us.
  29. The Strongest Man in the World
    A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Man with the Golden Gun
    Mr. Moore functions like a vast garden ornament. Pedantic, sluggish on the uptake, incapable of even swaggering, he's also clumsy at innuendo. If you enjoyed the early Bond films as much as I did, you'd better skip this one.
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