The New York Times' Scores

For 9,713 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 47% lower than the average critic
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 This Is Not a Film
Lowest review score: 0 Alien Girl
Score distribution:
9,713 movie reviews
  1. Sweet, sometimes dull and certainly overlong.
  2. To succeed as more than a study in artifice, a film - especially one steeped in fatalism - needs to feel real.
  4. In the end the issues of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are conflated, weakening the filmmaker's argument. Ultimately the varying points are way too much to take on in one film.
  6. Jack & Diane offers a glaring example of a writer and director, Bradley Rust Gray, unable to trust in the simple strength of his material.
  8. It ends up being largely just another story about a rebellious American teenager.
  9. The grittier side of Coming Up Roses, which Ms. Albright wrote with Christina Lazaridi, is unconvincing boilerplate grunge.
  11. The backstage commentary circles around the bailiwick of a production designer and frustrations over Mr. Helnwein's literal interpretations. But they are rarely juicy or pursued in depth, and platitudes abound (with the exception of a matter-of-fact lighting designer named Bambi).
  12. In spite of the golden presence of Brad Pitt as the killer, a level-headed professional named Jackie Cogan, the movie has an agreeably scuzzy, small-time feeling.
  13. Parked collapses into sentimentality that not even an actor of Mr. Meaney's dignity and restraint can redeem from mawkishness.
  14. It catalogs agony without making you feel it.
  16. If the movie had more courage, it would lay waste these people as hilariously as Robert Altman's film "A Wedding." But as its bad vibes accumulate, Cheerful Weather exhibits all the energy of a disgruntled wedding guest muttering complaints under his breath.
  17. Apart from the car chase, the only real fun in Jack Reacher comes from Mr. Herzog and Robert Duvall, called in near the end for some marvelously gratuitous scenery chewing as a gruff former Marine. They enliven the movie's atmosphere of weary brutality for a few moments, but they also call attention to the dullness of their dramatic surroundings.
  18. It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.
  21. Except for Ms. Janney's monstrous mother and an Alzheimer's-afflicted grandmother (Polly Bergen), Struck by Lightning gives its characters no dimension.
  23. An awkward blend of anti-Semitic atrocities and identity-swapping absurdity, the World War II drama My Best Enemy struggles to find a convincing tone.
  24. The film's biggest weakness is its unsympathetic main character, a snippy, nervous, expressionless control freak who gets more despicable as the story unfolds.
  25. The South Korean director Kim Jee-woon fails to dazzle with the endless speeding-car sequences, but that 60-second flourish during a lengthy firefight is almost worth the tedium.
  26. While the veteran action director Walter Hill hasn't done much to enliven this dull, unmemorable material, with its mechanically moving parts and popping gunfire, its dull-red splatter and spray, he has brought a spark of wit to the proceedings, starting with the figure of Sylvester Stallone.
  27. Except for Mr. Lloyd, the film is so sweet-natured and bland that it is almost instantly forgettable.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Like "The Wiz," though, Xanadu is desperately stylish without having any real style. A dance number featuring two teams of dancers -one group dressed as punks, the other in 1940's garb - winds up a terrible mess, because the two groups aren't dressed or choreographed to have anything to do with one another.
  28. Like many broad successes this unremarkable movie proves decidedly reluctant to yield any golden secret to box-office bonanzas, unless you count tried-and-true chase formulas and a moral about rethinking priorities.

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