The New Yorker's Scores

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For 3,481 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 1.1 points 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: 1,939 out of 3481
  2. Mixed: 1,344 out of 3481
  3. Negative: 198 out of 3481
3481 movie reviews
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  1. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    One of the rare films that genuinely deserve to be called controversial. I think people will really fight about it. It's the story of a woman who has a second chance thrust on her; she knows enough not to make the same mistake again, but she isn't sure of much else. Neither is the movie. Alice is thoroughly enjoyable: funny, absorbing, intelligent even when you don't believe in what's going on--when the issues it raises get all fouled up. [13 Jan 1975, p.74]
    • The New Yorker
  2. Lenny
    Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.
    • The New Yorker
  3. Murder on the Orient Express
    This all-star version of an Agatha Christie antiquity promises to be a sumptuous spread, and so it is, but not as tasty as one had hoped.
  4. A Woman Under the Influence
    The scenes are often unshaped, and so rudderless that the meanings don't emerge. Rowlands externalizes schizophrenic dissolution; she fragments before our eyes. But her prodigious performance is enough for half a dozen tours de force--it's exhausting.
    • The New Yorker
  5. Earthquake
    The picture is swill, but it isn't a cheat; it's an entertaining marathon of Grade-A destruction effects, with B-picture stock characters spinning through it.
    • The New Yorker
  6. Phantom of the Paradise
    The film is a one-of-a-kind entertainment, with a kinetic, breakneck wit.
    • The New Yorker
  7. Airport 1975
    Processed schlock. This could only have been designed as a TV movie and then blown up to cheapie-epic proportions.
    • The New Yorker
  8. Alice in the Cities
    With this film, Wenders crystallized his style of existential sentimentality. His cool eye for urbanism and design blends a love of kitsch with a hatred for commercialism, historicism with a fear of history’s ghosts.
  9. A Bigger Splash
    By means of suggestive editing, plus a potent score by Patrick Gowers, Hazan makes us feel that we are watching a mystery. Naturally, no solution is provided.
  10. The Gambler
    The script, by James Toback, is a grandiloquent, egocentric novel written as a film; it spells everything out, and the director Karel Reisz's literal-minded, proficient style calls attention to how airless and schematic it is.
    • The New Yorker
  11. Early Spring
    Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.
  12. The Longest Yard
    For all its bone-crunching collisions, it's almost irresistibly good-natured and funny.
    • The New Yorker
  13. Harry and Tonto
    Uneven and often clumsy, yet with a distinctive satirical charm, the picture is full of misfits and faddists and social casualties.
    • The New Yorker
  14. Chinatown
    The film holds you, in a suffocating way. Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It's all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don't care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.
    • The New Yorker
  15. The Terminal Man
    One of those errors-of-science thrillers; it's an even worse error of moviemaking.
    • The New Yorker
  16. Daisy Miller
    One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.
  17. The Conversation
    Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.
  18. The Three Musketeers
    Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.
    • The New Yorker
  19. Thieves Like Us
    Robert Altman finds a sure, soft tone in this movie, from 1974, and he never loses it. His account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the thirties is the most quietly poetic of his films; it’s sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice.
  20. Zardoz
    With ideas skimmed off the top of various systems of thought, Zardoz is a glittering cultural trash pile.
    • The New Yorker
  21. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    Tyson's performance and Korty's tact are more than enough to compensate for the flaws.
    • The New Yorker
  22. Magnum Force
    Eastwood's gun power makes him the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world. Ted Post's direction is mediocre; the script by John Milius and Michael Cimino is cheaply effective.
    • The New Yorker
  23. The Sting
    This is a visually claustrophobic, mechanically plotted movie that's meant to be a roguishly charming entertainment, and many people probably consider it just that.
    • The New Yorker
  24. The Laughing Policeman
    Standard gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt.
    • The New Yorker
  25. The Day of the Dolphin
    It's preposterously ill-conceived.
    • The New Yorker
  26. Sleeper
    It's a very even work, with no thudding bad lines and no low stretches, but it doesn't have the loose, manic highs of some of Allen's other films.
    • The New Yorker
  27. Papillon
    A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.
    • The New Yorker
  28. The Last Detail
    The film is distinguished by the fine performances of Nicholson and Quaid, and by remarkably well-orchestrated profane dialogue. It's often very funny. It's programmed to wrench your heart, though-it's about the blasted lives of people who discover their humanity too late.
  29. Don't Look Now
    This is the fanciest, most carefully assembled enigma yet put on screen...Using du Maurier as a base, Roeg comes closer to getting Borges on the screen than those who have tried it directly, but there's a distasteful clamminess about the picture. Roeg's style is in love with disintegration.
    • The New Yorker
  30. Serpico
    The theme is richly comic, and the film is great fun, even though it sacrifices Serpico's story--one of the rare hopeful stories of the time--for a cynical, downbeat finish.
    • The New Yorker
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