A.O. Scott, The New York Times
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For 1,278 reviews, this critic has graded:
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48% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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50% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
A.O. Scott's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 61 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 641 out of 1278
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Mixed: 467 out of 1278
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Negative: 170 out of 1278
1,278
movie reviews
- By critic score
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A.O. Scott 20
It's hard to take Passion seriously because it brings to mind the kind of shallow psychology that wouldn't be out of place in a history short about Sigmund Freud on "ABC Schoolhouse Rock." -
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A.O. Scott 20
Everything in this film is forgettable, right down to bongos pounding on the soundtrack to indicate a quickening of the pulse. -
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A.O. Scott 20
May lead to a new axiom: success has many fathers, but failure has "Project Greenlight." -
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A.O. Scott 20
You can't get more high-concept, or less plotted, than this, and Daddy Day Care is proof. -
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A.O. Scott 20
The current version, however, like its predecessor, fails as entertainment. Mr. McTiernan's remake may be lighter on its feet -- the sober-minded original was as graceful as a tap-dancing rhino -- but it is just as boring and as obvious. -
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A.O. Scott 20
Mr. Deeds is mostly terrible, a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news crew. -
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A.O. Scott 20
Backstage isn't as good as the rap documentaries "Rhyme and Reason" and "The Show," but it still casts a keen, observant eye...on this world. -
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A.O. Scott 20
It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama. -
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A.O. Scott 20
There are a few laughs, but I'm not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what "Smoochy" does. -
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A.O. Scott 20
It lumbers from one scene to the next with the stop-and-start mistiming generally seen in the outtakes shown at the end of the "Cannonball Run" movies, which this picture resembles in spirit. -
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A.O. Scott 20
It's fleet- footed, merciless entertainment. But the mixture of laughs, bathos and brutality is a big turnoff. -
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A.O. Scott 20
There's so little chemistry between Mr. Wilson and Ms. Hudson that you begin to look back on what now seems like the halcyon time of "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days." -
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A.O. Scott 20
"Queen" is a movie that stoops to jokes like calling Lestat's CD "a monster hit"; the movie is just a plain old monster. -
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A.O. Scott 20
You might be tempted to say, "Huh?" Or, if you're in the theater, to leave. But wait -- there's less. -
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A.O. Scott 20
All it has in common with the original is a few dumb fun scares. In the new version, what we're left with after the scares is just plain dumb. -
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A.O. Scott 20
The stripped-down narrative is almost an apology for the ludicrous story -- but it's just not enough of one. -
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A.O. Scott 20
A film so family-safe it feels sheathed in plastic Bubble Wrap. Unfortunately, it's not even as much fun as popping the bubbles. It doesn't matter that the film is less than 90 minutes. It still feels like a prison stretch. -
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A.O. Scott 20
After several scenes of this tacky nonsense, you'll be wistful for the testosterone-charged wizardry of Jerry Bruckheimer productions, especially because Half Past Dead is like "The Rock" on a Wal-Mart budget. And the marked-down price tags are incredibly visible. -
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A.O. Scott 20
High-school cafeteria soup has more flavor than this bland, tepid throwback. -
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A.O. Scott 20
The film equivalent of the dark, boring period on a haunted house ride before the gondola crashes into another room filled with dirty mirrors. -
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A.O. Scott 20
The worst that can be said of the first two-thirds of Tideland is that it is tiresome. Toward the end it becomes creepy, and not in a good way. -
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A.O. Scott 20
Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity." -
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A.O. Scott 20
Does it have to be so witless, so stupid, so openly contemptuous of the very audience it’s supposed to be pandering to? -
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A.O. Scott 20
Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke. -
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A.O. Scott 20
Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself. -
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A.O. Scott 20
The problem -- the catastrophe -- of The Last Airbender is not in the conception but the execution. The long-winded explanations and clumsy performances are made worse by graceless effects and a last-minute 3-D conversion that wrecks whatever visual grace or beauty might have been there. -
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A.O. Scott 20
You are not, in a movie like this, supposed to think too much; you are supposed to be transported beyond skepticism on a wave of pure, tacky feeling. Instead, in this case, you drown in sentimental, ghoulish nonsense. -
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A.O. Scott 20
If you can discern any critical distance or interesting perspective here, or even a good reason to spend 90 minutes in such company, I'm afraid the joke is on you.- Posted Nov 16, 2012
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A.O. Scott 20
The film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.- Posted Mar 19, 2013
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A.O. Scott 20
It may be too much to ask for anything more, but, on the other hand, if you’re going to go to the trouble of pretending to blow up the White House, you might also want to pretend that something was at stake.- Posted Mar 21, 2013
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A.O. Scott 10
Strands one of the most gifted casts assembled in some time. Sadly, though many of the actors throw off a spark or two when they first appear, they can't generate enough heat in this cold vacuum of a comedy to start a reaction. -
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A.O. Scott 10
So minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world's first movie without even a text. -
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A.O. Scott 10
It's the element of condescension, as the filmmakers look down on their working-class subjects from their lofty perch, that finally makes Sex With Strangers so distasteful. -
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A.O. Scott 10
Has the dreary one-track banality of a feature-length version of an episode of "Red Shoe Diaries," Showtime's series for people who like soft core but are too lazy to leave the house. -
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A.O. Scott 10
Wants to be sweet and dark at the same time, but it is as distant as a planet's satellite. -
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A.O. Scott 10
The cast of The Core deserve Oscar nominations just for being able to speak most of the lines without succumbing to the chortles. -
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A.O. Scott 10
A dreary crash of malapropisms and slapstick maimings wrapped very loosely around a murder mystery. -
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A.O. Scott 10
Ops is too brain-dead to play the incognito war criminal segment for comedy, although when Will is seen thumbing through the pages of a newspaper called USA Daily, the picture has inadvertently tumbled down a Mad magazine wormhole. -
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A.O. Scott 10
Festooned with yards of gross-out jokes, sniggering allusions and, astonishingly, a sentimental climax that's more repellent than any of the crude effluvia the film is drenched with. -
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A.O. Scott 10
Few people other than future airline passengers should be subjected to such misery. -
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A.O. Scott 10
The only people who could be surprised at this movie will be those who wandered into the wrong multiplex theater by mistake. -
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A.O. Scott 10
The film isn't even as good as the second-rate game it is based on, which is nothing but a shootout. -
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A.O. Scott 10
After about 20 minutes of "Thing," a concussion begins to look enormously appealing. -
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A.O. Scott 10
If Boat Trip were screened on a cruise ship, most of the passengers would be dog-paddling back to shore. -
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A.O. Scott 10
As good as cut-rate animation that seems to consist of screen savers can be. -
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A.O. Scott 10
A Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others. -
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A.O. Scott 10
The only thing that kept me watching License to Wed until the end (apart from being paid to do so) was the faith, perhaps misplaced, that I will not see a worse movie this year. -
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A.O. Scott 10
So shameless in its pandering, sentimental vision of Frenchness as to constitute something of a national embarrassment. -
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A.O. Scott 10
An R-rated version of this mess would be only more gratingly dishonest as it tried to hide its weak sentimentality behind a fig leaf of vulgarity. -
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A.O. Scott 10
What makes Leap Year so singularly dispiriting is precisely that it is bad without distinction -- so witless, charmless and unimaginative that it can be described as a movie only in a strictly technical sense. -
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A.O. Scott 10
The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. -
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A.O. Scott 10
There is nothing here to enjoy, beyond the tiny satisfaction in noting that the movie lives up to its name.- Posted Mar 24, 2011
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A.O. Scott 10
This may be the worst movie Pauly Shore has ever been in. Think about that.- Posted Sep 10, 2011
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A.O. Scott 10
The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, reverse-engineered into something resembling popular art in accordance with the reigning imperatives of marketing and brand extension.- Posted Mar 1, 2012
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A.O. Scott 10
His (Fleischer) first feature, "Zombieland," was a half-witty genre parody. This one might be described as genre zombie-ism: the hysterical, brainless animation of dead clichés reduced to purposeless, compulsive killing. Too self-serious to succeed as pastiche, it has no reason for being beyond the parasitic urge to feed on the memories of other, better movies.- Posted Jan 10, 2013
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A.O. Scott 0
It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but Battlefield Earth may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century. -
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A.O. Scott 0
The Love Guru is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again. -
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A.O. Scott 0
The most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made. -
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A.O. Scott 0
The law of diminishing returns is enforced so stringently that the movie succeeds not only in negating its own comedy, but its very being. -