For 8,156 reviews, this publication has graded:
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49% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.9 points lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
| 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: 3,636 out of 8156
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Mixed: 3,390 out of 8156
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Negative: 1,130 out of 8156
8,156
movie reviews
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 30
The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8] -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
The mousetrap setup and tight fight spaces, the bad blood and cruel deaths - soon makes the movie grindingly monotonous, a blur of thudding body blows.- Posted Mar 22, 2012
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 30
I don't know how much The Score cost, but it's pretty close to worthless. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 30
This tirelessly violent, ultimately exhausting film has the utter sincerity of all good science fiction, and a lot more flair than most, but it suffers from a certain confusion of purpose. In the end, it amounts to quite the pistol-packing plea for peace. -
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Critic Score 30
The movie's main theme, no surprise, is the struggle of The Times to survive in the age of the Internet. But it does little to illuminate that struggle, preferring instead a constant parade of people telling the camera how dreadful it would be if The Times did not survive. True, of course, but boring to the point of irritation after five or six repetitions.- Posted Jun 16, 2011
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 30
Weightless. It is also, unfortunately, without much point at all... A movie of random effects and little accumulative impact. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
With the exception of some of the battles, which have the angry desperation of Mr. Yuen's inspired martial-arts choreography, Close is a nominal effort. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
In the movie's cheapest, most exploitative gesture - just as it is about to run out of tricks - a snake slithers into the pine box in which Paul awakens bound and gagged, not knowing where he is. With that gimmick, the movie sacrifices its last shred of integrity. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
Just when it seems as though the language of insult and humiliation couldn’t get any nastier, the movie escalates the barrage. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 30
Not even bags of body parts, a bitten-off tongue or a man forced to cut off a pound of his own flesh keep it from being dull. [22 September 1995, p. C18] -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
Because it unfolds like a garish hybrid of Simon Birch and What Dreams May Come, with some horror-movie touches thrown in to keep us from nodding off, "The Sixth Sense" appears to have been concocted at exactly the moment Hollywood was betting on supernatural schmaltz. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 30
Lacks the sexy elan of "La Femme Nikita" and suffers from infinitely worse culture shock. [18 Nov 1994, p.C18] -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 30
The film tries to cover too much ground, even though Calder Willingham's script eliminates or telescopes events and characters from the Berger novel. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 20
Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.- Posted Apr 25, 2013
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
The worst flaw of Willard is a clunky tone-deaf screenplay based on Gilbert Ralston's original and updated by the director. Barely a line flies by that doesn't land with a wooden thud. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 30
Anyone looking for the lowdown on haute cuisine will be sorely disappointed: devoid of emotion, context or narrative, the baffling avant-garde techniques and extreme politesse of the lab become oppressively dull.- Posted Jul 26, 2011
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
The film's spareness and lack of words seem affected and ultimately unrealistic. At such moments, its refusal to put things into words and its crushing sense of gloom turn self-defeating. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
Filled with voyeuristic shots as the camera peers through picket fences and windows and around corners; the film looks as if it were shot with a surveillance camera from a 7-Eleven -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
It has the melancholy mildew of both "Marty" and the 1940's weepie "The Enchanted Cottage." -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 20
The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 20
Silver Bullets neither pleases the eye nor stimulates the mind.- Posted Oct 27, 2011
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 30
Cocaine Cowboys is a tabloid headline, a movie as oppressive and inarticulate as the lives it represents. -
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Reviewed by
Dave Kehr 30
The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances. -
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 30
This kind of thing might tickle a drunk, way off Broadway audience, but on screen it merely shows the futility of following in the faux-silent footsteps of the director Guy Maddin. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
During the ensuing narrative unpleasantness and visual incoherence (meaningless choker close-ups, pointless slow motion), Hayley subjects Jeff to a range of torture, all in the name of, well, what? Despite the two fine performances, it's hard to say. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
The eventual video game is bound to be a lot more fun -- and less slowed down by bad dialogue -- than this "Dead." -
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Reviewed by
Nicolas Rapold 30
Wrong lets most of its random gags and view-askew premises twist in the wind like hamhandedly wacky improv comedy, punctuated with synthesizer effects. The film’s misguided flatness is perhaps its fatal flaw, not so much deadpan or existential as just monotonous.- Posted Mar 28, 2013
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Reviewed by
Neil Genzlinger 30
The product - sloppy even by guerrilla filmmaking standards - has no revelations to offer that are worth the slog of watching it.- Posted Jan 3, 2011
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Reviewed by
Nathan Lee 30
For a movie premised on unrelenting action, Crank proves fatally turgid. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.- Posted Apr 11, 2013
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.- Posted Nov 11, 2010
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
Despite its sociological tidbits and flashes of musical vitality, Saudade do Futuro never goes anywhere. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 30
You may not believe it's possible to bore people to death with a film about risking your life, but The Wildest Dream comes shockingly close. -
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Reviewed by
Rachel Saltz 30
It’s dragged down by non-scene after non-scene, and filmmaking choices that don’t earn their keep.- Posted Feb 21, 2013
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 30
An astonishingly lazy and perfunctory effort that does little to realize his (Carrey) comic potential. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
What is harder to comprehend is how Mr. Clooney turned out such a sloppy, haphazard and tonally incoherent piece of work. Leatherheads lurches hectically between Coen brothers-style pastiche and John Saylesian didacticism, while Mr. Clooney works his brow and his jaw and waits in vain for his charm to kick in and save the day. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
By interweaving several stories, the movie suffers from a peculiar multiplier effect: it deepens its shallowness. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 30
The only thing missing is a coherent story -- or even, for that matter, an interesting idea for one. -
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Critic Score 30
In films like Quick Change, he is bogged down by scripts that don't begin to match his comic imagination. Even though he chose and developed Quick Change himself, Bill Murray deserves better than this clunky, stereotypical comedy. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
Soon after that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks, as though the money had run out and the project had been called off in the middle of a scene that makes no psychological or dramatic sense. It leaves you frustrated and annoyed. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 30
Yes is not just a movie, in other words, it's a poem. A bad poem. There is no denying Ms. Potter's skill at versifying - or for that matter, at composing clear, striking visual images - but her intricate, measured lines amount to doggerel, not art. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 30
For every necessary touch that Valmont has reduced or dispensed with (the climactic duel scene, for instance), there is another, less vital moment that has been expanded. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 0
See the Holocaust trivialized, glossed over, kitsched up, commercially exploited and hijacked for a tragedy about a Nazi family. Better yet and in all sincerity: don't. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 20
What's disheartening is that an actress as fine as Ms. Linney has to endure the indignity of such excremental nonsense. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 30
The end titles and the ones that introduce Veronica Guerin...are the most informative parts of the film, and also the most powerful. What comes between them is a flat-footed, overwrought crusader-against-evil melodrama, in which Ms. Blanchett's formidable gifts as an actress are reduced to a haircut and an accent. -
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Reviewed by
Mike Hale 30
The final image - a freeze frame of a pas de deux staged to resemble a triumphal Communist poster - perfectly captures the film's overall effect: it's strenuously brainless. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 20
A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos...The loose ends are neatly tied up, as they are when you seal a bag of garbage -- or if you prefer, rubbish. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
Muddled, pretentious assemblage of film clips of the band shot between 1966 and 1971. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 10
As high concept and rife with cliché as anything ever churned out by Hollywood, but with worse production values and a load of sanctimonious political correctness. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 10
Once Ice-T sticks his mug in the window of the couple's BMW and begins haranguing the wife in bad stage dialogue, all credibility flies out the window. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 0
Mush, delivered with a trembling, quasi-biblical solemnity, is what emanates from Anthony Hopkins most of the time in Hearts in Atlantis, a nostalgic fiasco so shameless it makes movies like "Simon Birch" and "Frequency" seem as austere as the work of Robert Bresson. -
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 20
The movie is bulky and inarticulate, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and incoherence. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16] -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.- Posted Apr 25, 2013
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.- Posted Apr 18, 2013
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
Perhaps the directors are under the delusion that the dodging and leaping can make up for an ending that leaves the cast members of "Killer" adrift and nearly scratching their heads in puzzlement. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
They drink at the pub, they drink at home. They drink until they pass out and then, after they have had a good vomit, they drink again. If that sounds too disgusting to watch, it almost is. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 10
If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report, a potentially brilliant conceptual comedy that fizzles because its writer and director, Jody Hill, doesn't have the guts to go with his spleen. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel. -
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Critic Score 30
The performers have little to do besides spill and drink blood in this tedious, inconsequential B picture. The sun doesn’t rise nearly fast enough. -
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow -- and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong -- addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways. -
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Reviewed by
Nicolas Rapold 30
Slack storytelling (including snippets from a post-film Q. and A. session) and patchy filmmaking seal the unappealing deal.- Posted May 2, 2013
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Reviewed by
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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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 30
This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.- Posted Mar 7, 2013
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Reviewed by
Dana Stevens 30
The human landscape of Palindromes is a vista of grotesqueness, dishonesty and creepiness. These are qualities Mr. Solondz has explored before, but this time he fails to make them interesting, partly because he lets himself and the audience off the hook. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
A movie like We Are Marshall stands or falls on its ability to make you feel the pain and loss of individuals in a place where community pride and football are one and the same. As the film, directed by McG (the "Charlie's Angels" movies) from a wooden screenplay by Jamie Linden, follows a handful of Huntington residents during the months after the accident, not one of them comes fully to life. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 30
In Twins, which is supposed to be funny, the former Mr. Universe and pint-sized Danny DeVito play twins, the result of a genetic experiment that went awry. To the extent that Twins is carried by anybody, it is carried by Mr. DeVito. Mr. Schwarzenegger is dead weight. [9 Dec 1988, p.C18] -
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Critic Score 30
The quirky characters they meet aren't quirky enough, and the political points Ms. Bettauer sprinkles into her script thud awkwardly. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 30
A limp urban comedy not nearly as whimsical as its title. -
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Reviewed by
Janet Maslin 30
The essentially two-character play has been opened up to the point that it includes a variety of settings and subordinate figures, but it never approaches anything lifelike. -
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 30
Just a parade of scattershot gags, more often weird than funny an dmost often just flat. [13 Dec 1996, p.C5] -
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Reviewed by
Dave Kehr 30
Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense. -
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Critic Score 30
It's showtime!" says Jimmy, the one-man band of American Animal. And for Matt D'Elia, who plays him in this hour and a half of pretentious mind games, it certainly is. There are other players, but it's all about Jimmy, portrayed with a free-associative, Jim Carrey-like mania.- Posted May 17, 2012
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Reviewed by
Manohla Dargis 30
Wildly overproduced and filled with fussy flourishes that make even a derelict hallway look like a million bucks, Dark Water fails to rustle up either meaning or meaningful scares. -
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Reviewed by
Vincent Canby 20
Return of the Jedi oesn't really end the trilogy as much as it brings it to a dead stop. The film...is by far the dimmest adventure of the lot. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
For much of the movie, the kinetic furor of the game sequences helps camouflage the weaknesses of a screenplay that is a mechanically contrived series of power struggles. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.- Posted Apr 21, 2011
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Reviewed by
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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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
Can a feature-length movie be built on minutiae like jammed copying machines, unsent business letters and orientation programs for new employees? This innocuous wisp of a film, as weighty as a scrap of fax paper caught in an updraft, suggests that the answer is no. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
This crude, inspirational tear-jerker is as sweet as a bowl of instant oatmeal smothered in molasses. It should please those who honestly believe that Santa Claus and God are synonymous; others may retch. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
What we see on screen is a lumbering, flat-footed fancy-dress melodrama. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
As its momentum accelerates, and its special effects transform it into a pulpy cartoon, Predators loses its judgment and turns into a frantic, clichéd chase film. This chaotic stew of fire, blood, mud and explosives is so devoid of terror and suspense that any metaphorical analysis is rendered moot. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes. -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 30
As flimsy and manipulative as the shallowest Hollywood fantasy. -
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Reviewed by
Jeannette Catsoulis 30
A lackadaisical dive into backwoods barminess and masculine neuroses, this low-budget paean to indoor plumbing and rampant facial hair doesn't unfold so much as unravel.- Posted Jul 7, 2011
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Reviewed by
Elvis Mitchell 30
Mr. Carpenter has directed the film with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap. And his screenplay (written under the pseudonym Frank Armitage) makes the principals sound even more tongue-tied than they have to. [4 Nov 1988, p.C8] -
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Reviewed by
Stephen Holden 20
Played in a loud sketch-comedy style that might be described as "Gay Mad TV." The haranguing, badly acted farce wears out its comic welcome within half an hour. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 20
The film falls far short of its goals, but it is a classic of sorts. It belongs in that Blockbuster on Mount Olympus, where pristine new copies of "I Changed My Sex," "Dracula's Dog," "Blackenstein" and "Battlefield Earth" play constantly. -
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Reviewed by
A.O. Scott 30
Such few assets aren't enough to alleviate the film's shallowness. -
