If you take an average of critic and audience scores from RT, the PT still has the lowest scores from any era of Star Wars:
A New Hope: 94.5%
Empire Strikes Back: 96%
Return of the Jedi: 87%
Phantom Menace: 57%
Attack of the Clones: 61%
Revenge of the Sith: 72%
The Force Awakens: 90%
Rogue One: 86%
The Last Jedi: 68.5%
Solo: 67%
Given this, I would be hard pressed to say that the PT are "still better than most movies", even though they do contain some great-to-excellent set pieces (Podracing, Qui-Gon/Obi Wan vs. Darth Maul, Obi Wan vs. Anakin) and great performances (Ewan McGregor's performance as Obi Wan is possibly the best in the entire series), but when you put them up against the other films in the series, let alone in the genre, they don't hold up.