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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sands of Iwo Jima
    Sands of Iwo Jima so easily could have been a great war film instead of just a good one.
  2. Young Man with a Horn
    If you have a sneaking affection for 1950-ish, made-to-measure movies, there are pleasures to be found in Young Man With a Horn.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gun Crazy
    Pretty cheap stuff.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
    The credits outweigh the debits and Mr. Disney has included enough elements of entertainment to make his newest film package a solid entertainment.
  5. On the Town
    Gaiety, rhythm, humor and a good, wholesome dash of light romance have been artfully blended together in this bright Technicolored comedy.
  6. Holiday Affair
    An amiable little romance in which a boy meets a girl at Christmas-time, and the sentiments are quite as artificial and conveniently sprinkled as the snow is provided—for those who like such things—in RKO's Holiday Affair.
  7. Adam's Rib
    Of Adam's Rib we might say, in short, that it isn't solid food but it certainly is meaty and juicy and comically nourishing.
  8. They Live by Night
    They Live by Night has the failing of waxing sentimental over crime, but it manages to generate interest with its crisp dramatic movement and clear-cut types.
  9. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    In this big Technicolored Western Mr. Ford has superbly achieved a vast and composite illustration of all the legends of the frontier cavalryman.
  10. Under Capricorn
    It is an overlong, overlabored essay on the torments of conscience and love which Mr. Hitchcock has beautifully filmed in Technicolor but pointed in glaring blacks and whites.
  11. The Third Man
    Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bad of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. [3 Feb 1950, p.29]
  12. White Heat
    The Warners have pulled all the stops in making this picture the acme of the gangster-prison film. They have crammed it with criminal complications—some of them old, some of them glittering new—pictured to technical perfection in a crisp documentary style. And Mr. Cagney has played it in a brilliantly graphic way, matching the pictorial vigor of his famous "Public Enemy" job.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mighty Joe Young
    The wonder of Mighty Joe Young is the mobility of the mechanical star, but even that novelty wears thin after a while.
  14. Neptune's Daughter
    It has some quite clever popular music, Ricardo Montalban to make Latin love—and it has, above all, Red Skelton and Betty Garrett to play the buffoons.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Window
    The striking force and terrifying impact of this RKO melodrama is chiefly due to Bobby's brilliant acting, for the whole effect would have been lost were there any suspicion of doubt about the credibility of this pivotal character.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Set-Up
    The Set-Up is a real dilly for those who go for muscular entertainment.
  17. Little Women
    If anything, it has hauled back much too briskly on the strings of the heart and has strained a few muscles in the process.
  18. Take Me Out to the Ball Game
    For all its high spots, however, the show lacks consistent style and pace, and the stars are forced to clown and grimace much more than becomes their speed. Actually, the plotted humor is conspicuously bush-league stuff. Don't be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.
  19. Force of Evil
    A dynamic crime-and-punishment drama, brilliantly and broadly realized.
  20. 3 Godfathers
    It is Mr. Ford's wonderful style in picturing a frontier fable that has the classic mould. His unsurpassed talent for bringing upon the motion-picture screen the nature and the drama of the great West is in itself an art.
  21. The Snake Pit
    The Snake Pit, while frankly quite disturbing, and not recommended for the weak, is a mature emotional drama on a rare and pregnant theme.
  22. Hamlet
    The filmed Hamlet of Laurence Olivier gives absolute proof that these classics are magnificently suited to the screen.
  23. Rope
    At all events, the picture takes on a dull tone as it goes and finally ends in a fizzle which is forecast almost from the start.
  24. Red River
    Even despite a big let-down, which fortunately comes near the end, it stands sixteen hands above the level of routine horse opera these days.
  25. A Foreign Affair
    A dandy entertainment which has some shrewd and realistic things to say.
  26. Key Largo
    The script prepared by Mr. Huston and Richard Brooks was too full of words and highly cross-purposed implications to give the action full chance.
  27. The Paradine Case
    Call it a mystery melodrama...Call it a courtroom tragi-romance or a husband-wife problem play. Call it, indeed, a social satire and you won't be entirely wrong. For it's all of these things rolled together in one fitfully intriguing tale, smoothly told through a cultivated camera.
  28. Romance on the High Seas
    As a brash little night-club singer who is supposed to act like a swell, Miss Day is most plainly the victim of the writers' unutterable ennui. Furthermore, Michael Curtiz's direction of her and the rest of the cast is as slapdash and void of distinction as it can professionally be. Not only has he let the young lady spread noisiness all over the place, but he has wasted the few minor talents that he had in a most provoking way.
  29. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
    Most of the comic invention in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is embraced in the idea and the title. The notion of having these two clowns run afoul of the famous screen monster is a good laugh in itself. But take this gentle warning: get the most out of that one laugh while you can, because the picture...does not contain many more.
  30. Melody Time
    Walt Disney has let his animators and his color magicians have free rein in his latest cartoon package-picture, Melody Time. And again, as in Make Mine Music! he has come up with a gaudy grab-bag show in which a couple of items are delightful and the rest are just adequate fillers-in.
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