The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,268 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 4.3 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 20268
  2. Mixed: 8,427 out of 20268
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20268
20268 movie reviews
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  1. Imitation of Life
    This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.
  2. Sleeping Beauty
    A crisply stylized fairyland, where the colors are rich, the sounds are luscious and magic sparkles spurt charmingly from wands.
  3. Some Came Running
    It is all very complex and confused. Indeed, it is so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end.
  4. Separate Tables
    The characters here are all misfits—people who have not quite been able to adjust their own inadequacies and terrors to the hard realities of life. And it is in the revelation of these people to a more or less brilliant extent that the fascination and satisfaction of this picture lie.
  5. My Uncle
    Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.
  6. The Seventh Seal
    A piercing and powerful contemplation of the passage of man upon this earth. Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough—and rewarding—a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year.
  7. The Old Man and the Sea
    Whatever allegorical intimations there may be in it are not conveyed to any sensible degree in a voice narration that breaks in occasionally or in the mumblings of the old man.
  8. The Big Country
    For all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude.
  9. The Defiant Ones
    A remarkably apt and dramatic visualization of a social idea—the idea of men of different races brought together to face misfortune in a bond of brotherhood — is achieved by Producer Stanley Kramer in his new film, The Defiant Ones.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blob
    It is truly providential that a new horror melodrama called The Blob is so woodenly presented on the whole, for a little astute showmanship applied to such a plot would have been enough to scare the quills off a porcupine.
  11. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform!
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Fly
    Believe it or not, The Fly happens to be one of the better, more restrained entries of the "shock" school. As produced and directed by the late Kurt Neumann, with an earnest little cast headed by Al Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price, this is a quiet, uncluttered and even unpretentious picture, building up almost unbearable tension by simple suggestion.
  13. Gigi
    Charming entertainment.
  14. Vertigo
    Believe us, that secret is so clever, even though it is devilishly far-fetched, that we wouldn't want to risk at all disturbing your inevitable enjoyment of the film.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror of Dracula
    Perhaps the constant hunt for hemoglobin is slowing our villain down, for this time there are strong indications that the once gory plot is showing definite signs of anemia.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The One That Got Away
    If not a milestone, The One That Got Away adds up to a consistently good tingler.
    • The New York Times
  17. Run Silent Run Deep
    A better film about war beneath the ocean and about guys in the "silent service" has not been made.
  18. Witness for the Prosecution
    For a courtroom melodrama pegged to a single plot device--a device that, of course, everybody promises not to reveal--the Arthur Hornblow Jr. film production of the Agatha Christie play "Witness for the Prosecution" comes off extraordinarily well. This results mainly from Billy Wilder's splendid staging of some splintering courtroom scenes and a first-rate theatrical performance by Charles Laughton in the defense-attorney role.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Touch of Evil
    Mr. Welles' is an obvious but brilliant bag of tricks. Using a superlative camera (manned by Russell Metty) like a black-snake whip, he lashes the action right into the spectator's eye. [22 May 1958, p.25]
  20. The Tarnished Angels
    Mr. Faulkner's faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.
  21. Paths of Glory
    Mr. Kubrick has made it look terrific. The execution scene is one of the most craftily directed and emotionally lacerating that we have ever seen. But there are two troubling flaws in this picture, one in the realm of technique and the other in the realm of significance, which determine its larger, lasting worth.
  22. Old Yeller
    In this very lean and sensible screen transcription of Fred Gipson's children's book, adapted by himself and William Tunberg, a warm, appealing little rustic tale unfolds in lovely color photography. Sentimental, yes, but also sturdy as a hickory stick.
  23. The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Brilliant is the word, and no other, to describe the quality of skills that have gone into the making of this picture, from the writing of the script out of a novel by the Frenchman Pierre Boulle, to direction, performance, photographing, editing and application of a musical score.
  24. Peyton Place
    Except that they take a long time at it, Scriptwriter John Michael Hayes and Director Mark Robson construct a drama of personal tensions and incongruities that has something of the irony and terror of the film version of "An American Tragedy."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    Presley fans may not like the idea of his being a churlish, egotistical wonder boy of television and the screen for a good half of the picture.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time Limit
    What Time Limit has to say is sobering, important and exciting and, though its principals are caught in circumstances that are extraordinary, it meticulously arrives at terrible truths that are timeless and universal.
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