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 Final Year
    The Final Year is stirring and saddening, but too well behaved by half; I wanted it to be a little less Steven Pinker and a little more Dwayne Johnson. I wanted the huge fight.
  2. True Stories
    Byrne is trying for something large scale: a postmodern Nashville. Byrne sets up the material for satirical sequences, yet he doesn't give it a subversive spin. His unacknowledged satire is like a souffle that was never meant to rise.
    • The New Yorker
  3. Somewhere
    The futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 146]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Dec 13, 2010
  4. The Wind and the Lion
    When the actors begin to talk (which they do incessantly), the flat-footed dialogue and the amateurish acting (especially by the secondary characters) take one back to the low-budget buffoonery of Maria Montez and Turhan Bey.
    • The New Yorker
  5. Save Yourselves!
    Do not be fooled by the sci-fi trimmings of this film. Despite its light and amiable manner, it’s a sort of “Deliverance” for the digital age, deriding the ability of tame souls, at a supposedly advanced stage of civilization, to cope with the unknown.
  6. The Future
    The movie, which Miranda July wrote and directed, is pretty sharp, not to say acidic, on the silliness of good intentions, but she also takes care to slant the best lines toward the subject of time, and its terrible crawl.
  7. Cinderella
    Indeed, there is barely a frame of Branagh’s film that would cause Uncle Walt to finger his mustache with disquiet.
  8. Mr. Holmes
    In truth, Mr. Holmes is not Holmesian at all. It is Jamesian, as shown by a wonderful encounter between Kelmot and Holmes — an attraction of opposites, you might say — on a garden bench.
  9. The Time Machine
    The machine itself is a beauty, with a red velvet seat and gadgets made of ivory and rock crystal, and the time-travel effects help to make this film one of the best of its kind. However, it deteriorates into comic-strip grotesqueries when the fat ogreish future race of Morlocks torments the effete, platinum-blond, vacant-eyed race of Eloi.
    • The New Yorker
  10. Fiddler on the Roof
    This joyously square musical succeeds in telling one of the root stories of American Life.
    • The New Yorker
  11. World Trade Center
    This square movie, at its best, is very powerful.
  12. The Breakfast Club
    But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon. [8 Apr 1985, p.123]
    • The New Yorker
  13. Innerspace
    Mostly it gets by on being good-natured enough for you to accept its being clumsy and padded and only borderline entertaining.
    • The New Yorker
  14. Racing with the Moon
    The picture isn't enough of anything; there isn't a thing in it that you can get excited about or quarrel with.
    • The New Yorker
  15. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    As Mostow proved in “Breakdown” and “U-571,” he can churn out excitement at a steady pace; whether he can handle dread--altogether a more unstable material--is another matter. [14 & 21 July 2003, p. 85]
    • The New Yorker
  16. Julie & Julia
    One of the gentlest, most charming American movies of the past decade. Its subject is less food as something to cook than food as the binding and unifying element of dinner parties, friendship, and marriage.
  17. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    First, you try to understand what the hell is going on. Then you slowly realize that you will never understand what is going on. And, last, you wind up with the distinct impression that, if there was anything to understand, it wasn’t worth the sweat.
  18. City Island
    An amiable family comedy one step above a TV sitcom (and several steps below “Moonstruck.”
  19. Something's Gotta Give
    Harmless, but it gave me a pain. Why make such a fuss over middle-aged bodies anyway? [22 & 29 December 2003, p. 166]
    • The New Yorker
  20. Beverly Hills Cop
    The whole picture is edited and scored as if it were a lollapalooza of laughs. And, with Murphy busting his sides guffawing in self-congratulation, and the camera jammed into his tonsils, damned if the audience doesn't whoop and carry on as if yes, this is a wow of a comedy. [24 Dec. 1984, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
  21. White Hunter Black Heart
    Eastwood’s subject is wasted lives and wasted talent; Wilson’s charisma and Hollywood’s money prove irresistible, and their sheer power brings noteworthy results—but they emerge from a needless vortex of ruin.
  22. Auto Focus
    Certainly holds one's attention, but it's a strange and grim experience, ice-cold and borderline pointless. [28 October 2002, p. 119]
    • The New Yorker
  23. Dark Horse
    Abe is blustery and self-pitying, but, with Solondz's new tender mercies fully engaged, Gelber makes you feel close to a guy for whom nothing was ever meant to go right.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dead Again
    When it's time to wrap up the mystery, the movie leaves too many of the plot's enigmas unresolved, and Branagh's insouciance loses its charm.
  25. Wiener-Dog
    The joke is that Wiener-Dog is about as non-epic as can be, but there’s also a sleight of hand, with the dazzle of the images distracting us from the fact that the movie has run out of plot. Meanwhile, the depths of doghood remain unplumbed.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ever After
    The film swings from farce to soap opera and back again—but it's got enough girl-power moments to make a Spice Girls fan happy.
  27. The Founder
    Layer by layer, this dumbfounding movie devises its magical recipe, and dares us to resist it: ketchup, mustard, two slices of pickle, and hold the irony. Delicious.
  28. The Thomas Crown Affair
    What gives this trash a life, what makes it entertaining is clearly that the director, Norman Jewison, and some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly, shallow script used the chance to have a good time with it.
    • The New Yorker
  29. Moonraker
    This one doesn't look too bad, but it has no snap, no tension. It's an exhausted movie.
    • The New Yorker
  30. The Rain People
    There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film, but it's a ponderously self-conscious effort; the writer-director applies his film craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student's imitation of early Tennessee Williams. The result is academic, and never believable.
    • The New Yorker
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