The New Yorker's Scores

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For 3,482 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 61% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1 point higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Fiume o morte!
Lowest review score: 0 Bio-Dome
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,940 out of 3482
  2. Mixed: 1,344 out of 3482
  3. Negative: 198 out of 3482
3482 movie reviews
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  1. The Passion of the Christ
    By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. [1 March 2004, p. 84]
    • The New Yorker
  2. We're No Angels
    Michael Curtiz directed this oppressive, misbegotten venture.
    • The New Yorker
  3. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle.
  4. High Anxiety
    This is a child's idea of satire - imitations, with a funny hat and a leer...There isn't a whisper of suspense, and there are few earned laughs; all Brooks does is let us know he has seen some of the same movies we have.
    • The New Yorker
  5. The Terminal Man
    One of those errors-of-science thrillers; it's an even worse error of moviemaking.
    • The New Yorker
  6. 9 Songs
    There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972. But what “Last Tango in Paris” proved was that our skin-grazing view of a body makes us more, not less, enthusiastic to grasp the shape of the soul that it enshrines.
  7. Apollo 11
    With extraordinary material, a merely ordinary approach is worse than a bore; it’s a betrayal.
  8. Joker
    The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.
  9. Full Frontal
    Full Frontal is the sort of arbitrary mess that gives experimentation a bad name. The news that the movie was shot on digital video and film in eighteen days, and that the actors drove themselves to the set and applied their own makeup, would have made a nice Sunday Times story if the movie were any good. But it isn't. [5 August 2002, p. 80]
    • The New Yorker
  10. The Flintstones
    The cast looks sound enough—John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma, Rick Moranis and Rosie O'Donnell as the Rubbles—but the script, cobbled together by a crowd of writers, gives them nothing but a handful of limp gags.
  11. She Hate Me
    The mélange of plots, subplots, reveries, gags, cartoons, dirty bits, and hissy fits points to a work that is structurally modelled less on the classic narratives of cinema than on, say, a portion of Russian salad.
  12. The Life of David Gale
    One of those hyper-articulate messes which inspire awe and a kind of nauseated pity. [3 March 2003, p. 94]
    • The New Yorker
  13. A Few Good Men
    The moral discussions operate like a bad pair of elevator shoes: it's obvious that their function is to lift black-and-white melodrama into message-movie paradise. The whole film, with its steady, important-picture pacing and its bits of pseudo-profundity, is a piece of glorified banality. [14 Dec 1992, p.123]
    • The New Yorker
  14. Patch Adams
    This shameless piece of sentimentality is indignantly on the side of feelings and spontaneity and against coldhearted technique, as if those were the only two choices in training doctors.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Addicted to Love
    A desperately misbegotten screwball comedy.
  16. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Birds of Prey, alas, is an unholy and sadistic mess.
  17. The Blue Lagoon
    All we have to look forward to is: When are these two going to discover fornication? The director, Randal Kleiser, and his scenarist, Douglas Day Stewart, have made the two clean and innocent by emptying them of any dramatic interest. Watching them is about as exciting as looking into a fishbowl waiting for guppies to mate. It's Disney nature porn.
    • The New Yorker
  18. The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    The whole enterprise heaves and strains with a sadistic overkill that even Dario might find too rich.
  19. The Majestic
    Carrey, unable to pretzel himself in this role, has to do a normal job of characterization, but he never fills in the blank spaces in Peter Appleton. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]
    • The New Yorker
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Batman Forever
    Schumacher's direction is coarse and slovenly: the picture has the self-conscious jokiness of the "Batman" TV series and the smudged, runny imagery of a cheaply printed comic book.
  21. Deep Blue Sea
    The disgraceful script is by Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers, and Wayne Powers. Directed with occasional flashes of nasty wit by Renny Harlin.
  22. The Happening
    To be honest, I would be perfectly happy to walk with a zombie after ninety minutes of this; it would feel like light relief.
  23. The Book of Eli
    The Book of Eli combines the maximum in hollow piety with remorseless violence. [18 Jan. 2010, p.82]
    • The New Yorker
  24. The Intouchables
    The plot becomes disastrously condescending: the black man, who's crude, sexy, and a great dancer, liberates the frozen white man. The handsome Omar Sy jumps all over the place, and he's blunt and grating. Francois Cluzet acts with his eyebrows, his nose, his forehead. It's an admirable performance, but the movie is an embarrassment. [28 May 2012, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted May 23, 2012
  25. Watchmen
    The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.
  26. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The story, devised by David Benioff and Skip Woods, is largely meaningless, and the emotions are no more than functional—they set up the next fight.
  27. The Banger Sisters
    Painful to sit through, because you want to see someone like Paul Thomas Anderson take hold of the character and the actress and start again from the beginning. Bob Dolman understands Suzette, but the rest of the movie is composed of ham-handedly obvious scenes. [23 Sept 2002, p. 98]
    • The New Yorker
  28. Speed Racer
    Though the film is not as criminally poor as "V for Vendetta," which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.
  29. Monster-in-Law
    The self-confident fatuity and condescension of the movie is offensive.
  30. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Maguire has the nerve to give her heroine a big speech on the “integrity” of proper journalism — this after Bridget Jones’s Baby has made fun of foreigners’ names, and arranged for her to put the wrong Asian guest in front of the cameras. (Do all Asians look alike to her? Is that the joke?) So reliably does she embarrass herself at every public event that the film, trudging by on automatic, becomes an embarrassment, too.
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