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. Paper Moon
    Peter Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted Joe David Brown's novel, have set out to make a bittersweet comedy that is both in the style of thirties movies and about the thirties. They evoke the time (1936) and the place (rural Kansas and Missouri) so convincingly that their rather sweet formula story seems completely inadequate, even fraudulent.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Leaves a viewer with the happy thought that she now can get back to nursing and away from films like Coffy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    The aphoristic style, combined with Winner's unwavering visual instinct for crushingly obvious detail, helps to push Scorpio out of low dullness into vertiginous absurdity.
  4. Season of the Witch
    Hungry Wives has the seedy look of a porn film but without any pornographic action. Everything in it, from the actors to the props, looks borrowed and badly used. [12 Dec 1980, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  5. Scarecrow
    It all goes decisively wrong when Jerry Schatzberg, the director, and Garry Michael White, who wrote the screenplay, decide to saddle the pair with a poetic vision that suddenly makes everything needlessly phony.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Theater of Blood
    Douglas Hickox's wry romp spotlights a vengeful Shakespearean ham (Vincent Price) and his helpful daughter (Diana Rigg). It's gory and funny. [14 Apr 1996, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  7. The Mack
    Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.
  8. Sisters
    A good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."
  9. Godspell
    I like its music, its drive and its determination, even when it's pretending to a kind of innocence and naiveté that I never for a second believe.
  10. The Crazies
    An inept science-fiction film from George A. Romero, the Pittsburgh man who established himself as the Grandma Moses of exurban horror films with The Night of the Living Dead.
  11. The Long Goodbye
    It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.
  12. Walking Tall
    Valiant Southern sheriff. Effective, unsurprising.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emitaï
    It is a cool, balanced, proportionate spirit, affectionate but unillusioned, and wonderfully suited to the intricacies (and the idiosyncracies) of the subject matter. Sembene does not grab you; he engages you.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Train Robbers
    As an exercise in pleasantness, The Train Robbers is an interesting addition to the late history of the traditional unpretentious Western.
  15. Last Tango in Paris
    Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is a beautiful, courageous, foolish, romantic, and reckless film.
  16. The Heartbreak Kid
    The Heartbreak Kid occasionally goes for laughs without shame (which is what has always bothered me about Simon's brand of New York comedy), but behind the laughs there is, for a change, a real understanding of character — which is something that I suspect, can be attribued to Miss May.
  17. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
    It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.
  18. The Getaway
    The action and the violence of The Getaway are supported by no particular themes whatsoever. The movie just unravels.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Poseidon Adventure
    Though tensions slacken and credibility is strained here, realistic technical effects make the stricken ship and the efforts of its survivors to escape a fairly spellbinding adventure.
  20. Trafic
    For all of the laughter in "Traffic," there are moments when the banal utilitarianism of the super-highway is seen as a work of extraordinary art.
  21. The Mechanic
    I suspect that another, tougher director might have made something quite interesting of the same script.
  22. Lady Sings the Blues
    The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Night of the Lepus
    The film relies almost entirely on slow-motion shots of ordinary rabbits running through miniaturized settings or in front of scaled-down back projections. It is this technical laziness as much as the stupid story or the dumb direction that leaves the film in limbo and places it in neither one camp nor the other.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fist of Fury
    The action here is as black-and-white and as pleasantly, if naively, diverting as that in any western even though it was all shot in vivid colors.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Last House on the Left
    The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounder
    And if Sounder, an intelligent enough movie, avoids all the major pitfalls of its type, it also lacks the excitement that may have come from plumbing greater depths and discovering a few tougher, less accessible insights.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Way of the Dragon
    Unlike its predecessor, Enter the Dragon, which was praised as a well-made movie, this picture is dreadfully slow and feeble whenever the cast isn't fighting. So you yearn for each battle, just as you wait impatiently for the songs or dances in a tedious musical.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snoopy Come Home
    This sprightly, clever and hilarious treat—all that a comic strip should be on the screen—is even better than "A Boy Named Charlie Brown," which began the series.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    The film's gut pleasures are real, and there are a lot of them. But, they always connect with one another in a world so precisely, cruelly, excitingly balanced that there is no movement without countermovement, no pressure without a greater pressure in return.
  30. Fat City
    A knockout scene by that grand old battler, John Huston.
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