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. A Clockwork Orange
    It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at... Because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual--and disorienting--movie experience.
  2. Harold and Maude
    As performers, they both are so aggressive, so creepy and off‐putting, that Harold and Maude are obviously made for each other, a point the movie itself refuses to recognize with a twist ending that betrays, I think, its life‐affirming pre tensions.
  3. Diamonds Are Forever
    Diamonds Are Forever is great, absurd fun, not only because it recalls the moods and manners of the sixties (which, being over, now seem safely comprehensible), but also because all of the people connected with the movie obviously know what they are up to.
  4. The Hospital
    Although Mr. Chayefsky has written a very contemporary melodramatic farce, his political sympathies have their roots in the liberalism of 20 years ago.
  5. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
    A tricky, cheerful, aggressively friendly Walt Disney fantasy for children who still find enchantment in pop-up books, plush animals by Steiff and dreams of independent flight.
  6. Nicholas and Alexandra
    The problem with "Nicholas and Alexandra" is not inflation, but deflation, the attempt to cram too big a picture into too small a frame.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Born to Win
    Too theatrically phony and too predictably conventional, and the comedy — though in a few cases genuinely funny — is too mechanical for its function.
  8. Brian's Song
    The film's only concession to contemporary cinematography was in the cliché of lyrical slow motion, with extended sequences of the two football players, one white and the other black, running together through sylvan glades. More than that, though, the basic story is moving.
  9. Duel
    Mr. Spielberg's 1971 television film Duel took advantage of the very narrowness of its premise, building excitement from the most minimal ingredients and the simplest of situations.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Play Misty for Me
    It is not simply that the movie fails to make sense. A lot of good movies are weak on sense—though they don't often require a leading man to be quite so dense for quite so long in interpreting the behavior of a psychotic leading woman. But they must not be weak in sensibility, in that logic of emotional response that is the real motive power of the atmospheric thriller.
  11. 200 Motels
    200 Motels is not all bad, but because it's a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting—in actual effect, soporific.
  12. Fiddler on the Roof
    They want to show us everything, to give us our money's worth. In so doing, they've not just opened up the play, they've let most of the life out of it.
  13. The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's fine second film, The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, has the effect of a lovely, leisurely, horizontal pan-shot across the life of Anarene, Tex., a small, shabby town on a plain so flat that to raise the eye even 10 degrees would be to see only an endless sky.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    Subtle, stately, stunningly colored and exquisitely directed by Belgium's young Harry Kumel, the coscenarist, this is far and away the most artistic vampire shocker since the Franco-Italian Blood and Roses 10 years ago.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    The French Connection is a film of almost incredible suspense, and it includes, among a great many chilling delights, the most brilliantly executed chase sequence I have ever seen. [8 October 1971]
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Murder of Fred Hampton
    Although it is unabashedly biased and it is flawed in technical execution, it emerges as a disturbingly somber illustration of some of the ills that beset us and our social system.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Skin Game
    Garner and Gossett seem like originals out of American humor, and in a better movie they might have continued that way. But Skin Game is neither written nor directed with enough toughness, or enough compassion, to realize its potential.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black God, White Devil
    At once, one of the most visually effective and artistic examples of the work of Glauber Rocha, a leading light among Cinema Novo's young directors. But as a contemporary allegory fulminating darkly against miseries inflicted on the poor by landowners and the Government, it is more mystically stylized than moving.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Although a disappointment generally, there are several things going for it; among them, the pleasantly aggressive title, which has, as is proper, only the most casual relation to the movie.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Johnny Got His Gun
    Insistent virtue, without ideas, becomes demagoguery.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lawman
    A potent but curiously exasperating Western.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Omega Man
    Peppered with some sharp, even amusing dialogue, the story temporarily shelves the heavy allegory and slips into good, slam-bang suspense. But it doesn't last.
  23. Willard
    Willard, which is otherwise a dull movie of no major consequence, is a rather astonishing footnote to a major urban problem.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Night Digger
    It begs for empathy for its tortured principals, but despite the clearly dedicated contributions of Patricia Neal, Roald Dahl, her scenarist-husband; Pamela Brown and a young newcomer, Nicholas Clay, the strain on credibility is a good deal more notable than the impact on the emotions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    Despite the false bid for suspense in its framing device and its several ritual claims to excitement, it finally lacks even the interest of its own events. For this, I think the director is very much at fault.
  26. On Any Sunday
    The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium.
  27. The Devils
    It's a see-through movie composed of a lot of clanking, silly, melodramatic effects that, like rib-tickling, exhaust you without providing particular pleasure, to say nothing of enlightenment.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    It is a nightmare world view, but it is a world view, and The Panic in Needle Park never pretends that it is subject to moral condemnations, or to easy cure or the insights of urban sociology.
  29. Two-Lane Blacktop
    Two-Lane Blacktop is a far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker.
  30. Shaft
    Shaft is not a great film, but it's very entertaining.
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