The New York Times' Scores

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:
20269 movie reviews
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This "Computer" isn't I.B.M.'s kind but it's homey, lovable, as exciting as porridge and as antiseptic and predictable as any homey, half-hour TV family show.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    He's tall, dark, handsome and has a dimpled chin. But Mr. Lazenby, if not a spurious Bond, is merely a casual, pleasant, satisfactory replacement. For the record, he plays a decidedly second fiddle to an overabundance of continuous action, a soundtrack as explosive as the London Blitz, and flip dialogue and characterizations set against some authentic, truly spectacular Portuguese and Swiss scenic backgrounds, caught in eyecatching colors.
  1. Topaz is not only most entertaining. It is, like so many Hitchcock films, a cautionary fable by one of the most moral cynics of our time.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The picture moves around comfortably in nice color, against some authentic Manhattan exteriors. But it is primarily the verve and skill of the performances, the pungent air of sexual chemistry and the peppery good humor that make the movie so diverting.
  2. Gene Kelly, who directed two classic musicals with Stanley Donen, here acts like a caretaker of a big, valuable property. He and Michael Kidd, his choreographer, have protected everything Gower Champion gave the original, and added nothing to the heritage of the musical screen except statistics.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If Marooned falls short as a soaring blockbuster, it does keep both feet on the ground.
  3. Z
    An immensely entertaining movie -- a topical melodrama that manipulates our emotional responses and appeals to our best prejudices in such satisfying ways that it is likely to be mistaken as a work of fine -- rather than popular -- movie art.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In appreciating that world, its pathos, its narcissism, its tensions, and its sufficient moments of glory, Downhill Racer succeeds with sometimes chilling efficiency. Within the limits imposed by the tangential nature of its insights, it is a very good movie.
  4. Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.
  5. The over-all production is very handsome, and the performances fine, especially Newman, Redford, and Miss Ross, who must be broadly funny and straight, almost simultaneously.
  6. These sequences—the dogfights over Dover, the disintegration of planes in mid-air, the graceful tactics of evasion—are more than just technically stunning. They also are beautiful, in the completely impersonal way that the spectacle of machines—working well and seemingly with wills of their own—can be beautiful. Unfortunately, something less than one-third of the film takes place in the air.
  7. Quite clearly, Pookie Adams is a marvelous role, full of tough-sweet humor, and Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and the late Judy Garland, turns it into one of the most appealing performances of the season, a triumph limited only by the squashy movie that encases it.
  8. An amiable, $20-million musical. That's a high price to pay for something that is more an expression of good intentions than evidence of sustained cinematic accomplishment. However, because amiability is never in over abundant supply, especially in Hollywood super-productions, the movie can be enjoyed more often than simply tolerated.
  9. The film is technically sophisticated and emotionally retarded.
  10. A film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    [Coppola] has made a relentlessly good-looking, accurate-feeling movie without the patronizing paranoia toward the American heartland and its natives that is so much in fashion these days.
  11. With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    As usual, the clutter of clichés is exceeded only by the excessive sound and fury.
  12. Very beautiful and the first truly interesting, American-made western in years.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The plot is an overstated, reworked and all too familiar one.
  13. A marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters, noble characters and virtuous rewards.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The April Fools is not a comic masterpiece, but it has a nice, understated sense of the absurd.
  14. Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42d Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers, and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Probably the best-rounded and most appealing personalized film of this kind ever made.
  15. The structure of the movie is so loose that a narrator (Victor Jory) must be employed from time to time to explain the plot, as if it were a serial. Most surprising in a movie that obviously cost a good deal of money is the sloppy matching of exterior and studio photography with miniature work for special effects.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The general tone, and point — festering hatred — is simply not enough to make the picture matter, although Mr. Widmark almost single-handedly does. Tough, laconic, squinty-eyed and moving around deceptively like a tired, middle-aged panther, he gives this characterization a scorching vibrancy.
  16. It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verite or direct cinema.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It is a loud, churning and triumphantly empty exercise.

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