New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

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For 3,960 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Hell or High Water
Lowest review score: 0 Daddy's Home 2
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,219 out of 3960
  2. Mixed: 1,378 out of 3960
  3. Negative: 363 out of 3960
3960 movie reviews
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    • 90 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a “future” cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today. Certainly the mentality and values of the movie can be duplicated in third-rate non-science of any place or period.
  2. Poor Things
    Poor Things is ultimately ugly — spiritually and narratively, which curdles even its aesthetic splendor.
  3. The White Ribbon
    Chill to the core, Haneke presents human cruelty not to make us empathize with the victims or understand the oppressors but to rub our noses in the crimes of our species. He thinks he’s held on to the subversive ideals of punk, but all I smell is skunk.
  4. Blindspotting
    It’s not that Blindspotting doesn’t have important points to make about how individuals live in a collective history of racialized violence. It’s that it has a hard time making those points feel organic to the story and style, whether it’s going for realism or over-the-top musical-theater territory.
  5. Candyman
    In trying to reckon with the contradictions of the ’92 film, as well as carve out their own work, DaCosta and her collaborators have created a misfire that can’t make its tangle of politics — about gentrification, the Black body (horror), racism, white desire — feel either relevant or provocative. When Blackness is whittled down, this is the kind of poor cultural product we are sold.
  6. Young Adult
    The movie spreads bad vibes like a virus.
  7. Macbeth
    I can’t decide if Kurzel’s Macbeth is worse than the geriatric Maurice Evans–Judith Anderson version I was forced to endure in high school, but it’s certainly less lively than the two terrible gangster updates, Joe Macbeth and Men of Respect.
  8. Prisoners
    Villeneuve is trying like hell to elevate what turns out to be a dumb genre picture.
  9. Gunner Palace
    Gunner Palace too often makes the grunts look like mean slackers -- precisely the opposite, one presumes, of what was intended.
  10. 21 Grams
    It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.
  11. Materialists
    While the press tour for the film has highlighted the rapport between its attractive and game stars, that doesn’t reflect the chemistry between them onscreen. There isn’t a flicker of heat between any of them. But the bigger issue is that each character is more of a threadbare idea improperly stitched together than a person.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    There's Something About Mary
    The general insensitivity of the atmosphere gets one down after a while. None of these people go together: Friends don't seem like friends, lovers don't seem like lovers. In brief, it's not enough just to have bad taste. You have to have talent, too.
  13. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    What’s ultimately so disappointing about Cha Cha Real Smooth is its shallow vision of growing up, which might explain why the protagonist does so little of it.
  14. The Hateful Eight
    You wonder what he has up his sleeve in The Hateful Eight, but gorgeous as that sleeve might be, what’s up it is crap. The movie is a lot of gore over a lot of nothing. I hope that won’t be Tarantino’s epitaph.
  15. Blink Twice
    Unfortunately, Kravitz has neither the vision nor the range to deftly skewer the heinous foibles of wealthy men, let alone disrupt Tatum’s onscreen reputation.
  16. Holy Spider
    It’s not the first film to try to disguise its titillation at violence, in particular against women, with blunt, larger themes. But when those themes are about the structures that enable that violence, the whole enterprise just feels repellent.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    This is a wan, shapeless, and amazingly conventional piece of work .
  18. Elf
    I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.
  19. You're Next
    Maybe, in another time and place, and with different actors and a better director, it might have worked. But this thing collapses right from the get-go.
  20. Saving Mr. Banks
    A fair number of people have responded with tears and laughs to Saving Mr. Banks, but I found it interminable.
  21. Entertainment
    Entertainment wears its contempt too arrogantly, fulsome in its emptiness.
  22. Guest of Cindy Sherman
    The documentary has its roots in a monologue in which the "guest of Cindy Sherman" (what H-O's place-card read at a gala) stood up for his personhood and made himself the center of the story—only there's NO STORY, not even insight into what made this unlikely couple click. Remove the boldface names and there's no movie; that center does not hold.
  23. Pitch Perfect 2
    I’m also guessing Kendrick did not want to come back. I’ve never seen her so flat-out bad — distracted, depressed, conviction-less. Anna, I still adore you, but you should have tried to make it work.
  24. Changeling
    It would be a horrific story even if underplayed, but Eastwood shoots it like a horror movie.
  25. Triangle of Sadness
    Östlund’s slog of a film is exceptional in the distance it creates between the viewer and its characters and in how comfortable its attempts at causticity actually feel. It comes complete with an ending that should be bitterly dark and instead just comes across as a moue of indifference.
  26. Split
    My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.
  27. The Rental
    Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.
  28. Oculus
    One reason Oculus feels so talky and monotonous in spite of its tricky syntax is that the space itself isn’t charged with malignancy. And the monster doesn’t compensate — it’s dumb, blockish, inert. The mirror doesn’t have two faces. It barely has one.
  29. Respect
    The preceding two-plus hours of this 145-minute slog — Tommy’s threadbare hodgepodge of bad impressions, gratuitous filmmaking, and even worse depictions of mental health — isn’t even a shadow of the real natural woman.
  30. Bad Hair
    Bad Hair surprised me, ranking as the most stunning floundering of filmmaking in 2020 — a failure of empathy, intellect, and morality that I haven’t been able to shake.
  31. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is trying for a blend of horror and humor, something close to the heart and terror that Raimi was able to bring to bear throughout his career. But here, his craft has been hemmed in, gamified, leeched of color and vivacity.
  32. Together
    Since this is a coming-of-age movie about a poor rural kid who grapples with the big city, it would be nice if its protagonist weren’t such a lummox.
  33. Warm Bodies
    For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.
  34. Wonder Woman 1984
    Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.
  35. Joker
    The downside to the performance is the downside to the movie: It’s one note played louder and louder.
  36. The Little Mermaid
    Bailey is, unfortunately, completely failed by the dull, misguided production around her. As the studio has done with other live-action remakes, Disney betrays its own lack of imagination and an essential misreading of what made its original children’s fare such a joy to audiences in the first place.
  37. Cruella
    Cruella takes one of the richest narrative archetypes — the madwoman — and whittles her down into a glossy, hollow, capitalism-approved monster fueled by girl-boss politics. It has nothing to say about how women move through the world.
  38. Flamin' Hot
    What makes Flamin’ Hot such a depressing offering isn’t the relative truthiness of its source material, but the qualities it holds aloft as inspiring.
  39. Color Me Kubrick
    The movie is endless even at less than 90 minutes. You could use it, "A Clockwork Orange" style, as aversion therapy for seemingly incorrigible con artists.
  40. Wrath of Man
    Wrath of Man could have been salvaged had it delivered on some decent action sequences, but once such sequences come, they tend to be either lifeless or unintelligible or both.
  41. Galveston
    The pitch-black and paper-thin Galveston not only fails to find a way to reinvent, or at least refresh, that old tired idea, it also piles a few more tired ideas on top of it.
  42. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    An exuberantly garish French movie.
  43. Ibiza
    Ibiza doesn’t have the strength of wit and character to suffice as a hangout vacation movie, and it has zero idea how to be a romantic comedy, either. It’s not a movie, it’s Netflix.
  44. Watchmen
    This kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.
  45. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary has no mighty gonzo wind. Even with a push from its Thompson-worshipping star, Johnny Depp, it leaves our freak flag limp.
  46. The Anniversary Party
    A heavy dose of movie-colony narcissism posing as warts-and-all honesty.
  47. Mother
    Most of the dialogue and effects are clunky, repetitive, second-rate. A minute or so of David Lynch’s latest Twin Peaks series has more irrational menace. For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.
  48. Series 7: The Contenders
    There's less here than meets the eye or ear: We're a long way from Jonathan Swift, and any old episode of "Cops" is bound to be more engrossing, not to mention "real."
  49. Exporting Raymond
    Amusing and annoying in the wrong ratio, maybe 30/70.
  50. The Flash
    The film is remarkably banal. It’s a deteriorating rest stop on the road to nowhere.
  51. Starsky & Hutch
    Ends with a bunch of goofy outtakes--which are as dismal as the rest of the movie. How do you decide what to leave out when there's nothing worth keeping in?
  52. All the Pretty Horses
    Most movies take a while to slip you into a stupor. All the Pretty Horses makes you groggy right away. Set in 1949, it's a lackadaisical series of vignettes apparently culled from a much longer movie that never made it to the screen. Be thankful for that.
  53. The Adam Project
    It’s an assemblage of ideas from other popular films that just hangs there with little cohesion. It’s like watching a movie that hasn’t been made yet.
  54. The Bride!
    Like Shelley’s much-adapted creature, The Bride! is a creation of enormous ambition. It’s also an incoherent disaster — and not of the noble folly variety. It leaves you with the sinking feeling of watching someone fight their way to the front of a crowd to speak, only to realize when the spotlight is finally on them that they’re not actually sure what to say.
  55. Art School Confidential
    Zwigoff doesn't get the tone right, and the picture goes from reasonably amusing (if crude) to puzzling to boring to (when a campus strangler enters the picture) hateful.
  56. From Hell
    The only note of authenticity in the movie comes from Ian Holm, playing the royal physician. What is this nuanced performance -- at least until the final fireworks -- doing in this twaddle?
  57. The Discovery
    This is peak TV in a feature-film package, a faux-deep, workmanlike script splashed with some strikingly moody sci-fi imagery tailor-made for a YouTube trailer. It aspires to eerie and constantly ends up at belabored and literal.
  58. The Exterminating Angels
    Exterminating Angels is meant as an autocritique--and yet the director can't get past his notion of himself as a fearlessly transgressive artist-hero, a martyr to the limitations of male gaze.
  59. Rock Star
    Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.
  60. Sinister
    Sinister did something I thought would be impossible: It made this lifelong horror freak abhor horror movies.
  61. Robin Hood
    Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is a pompous, interminable hash.
  62. Palindromes
    Mostly stiff acting and intentionally flat, banal dialogue.
  63. Enemy at the Gates
    It's as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war-movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script.
  64. Knock Knock
    The film collapses, because it doesn’t convince us on a basic level: The characters are driven by convenience, not behavior, and their actions seem like they’ve been manhandled into place to make the plot work.
  65. O
    It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.
  66. The Wood
    The people who made this movie have either seen too much mayhem -- or they haven't seen any.
  67. Eternals
    With Eternals, Marvel proves itself to be nothing more than a staid, lumbering black hole.
  68. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    It’s enough to make me wonder if this series might still have a few decent tricks left up its sleeve. We’ll see. This movie’s a bust, but I’ll let myself remain hopeful.
  69. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    If anything, this series has gotten dumber and more inert as it has progressed, with this last one finally reaching over into an extended wallow in camp.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Object of My Affection
    If the woman’s love is obsessive and needy, the story becomes stupid and painful, and that is what happens in The Object of My Affection, the Stephen McCauley novel that has been adapted for the movies with disastrous panache by playwright Wendy Wasserstein and director Nicholas Hytner.
  71. Epic
    For all its attempts at wonder and spectacle and play, Epic is mostly a slog.
  72. Bird Box
    You don’t appreciate the art of a good genre contrivance until you see one pulled off poorly.
  73. Birthday Girl
    The film's Russians are all played by French and Australian actors. Too bad Butterworth didn't find a Russian to play the Brit. That would have made the inauthenticity complete.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wild Things
    Wild Things, which was written by Stephen Peters and directed by John McNaughton, lacks fantasy and flamboyance, that it lacks, precisely, wild things, and that most of it is just flat.
  75. Me Before You
    Clarke is so insistent on becoming the new adorkable life force that she’s excruciating to watch. The movie makes you admire all the more her restrained power in Game of Thrones, in which her eyebrows are largely stationary.
  76. Karate Kid: Legends
    There’s plenty of talent involved here, but the film fails to cohere on a basic level. Yes, it’s a legacyquel, says so right there in the title, but did it have to be so lazy? Especially in a world where Cobra Kai exists?
  77. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    I know I’ve been rather harsh on an indie film that deserves points for its ambitions, so let me end on a brighter note. If Papierniak took that scene with Stanfield and started over with it, he might have a hell of a good rom-com. He needs to learn to separate the gold from the f*cking shit.
  78. The Six Triple Eight
    The Six Triple Eight is about people who received no public recognition for their achievements at the time, but in trying to give them their belated due onscreen, this clunky excuse for a war movie ends up being more about what they endured than about what they accomplished.
  79. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.
  80. Anonymous
    A well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything.
  81. City by the Sea
    The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.
  82. True Story
    There’s only one good scene in True Story, though it’s the most flagrantly absurd.
  83. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The pieces are in place — detestable villain, likable cast — but Now You Don’t can’t muster up the energy or the wit to make us care one lick about what’s happening onscreen.
  84. No Strings Attached
    No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps.
  85. For Colored Girls
    He (Perry) has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle for seven African-American actresses, cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the "Precious" ante.
  86. Jurassic World Rebirth
    Audiences may not have run out of enthusiasm for what the Jurassic Worlds are selling, or at least they haven’t yet, but the people tasked with making them sure are out of ideas.
  87. Jungle Cruise
    The clarity of its aspirations just makes the film’s downfall that much more pathetic, like a baseball player pointing to the home run he’s about to hit and then completely whiffing and landing on his ass.
  88. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks.
  89. Death of a President
    Is Death of a President plausible? As political prognostication, perhaps. As a TV documentary, no way in hell. What's missing is shapeliness, suspense, narrative cunning, visual flair--in short, art. Are we really to believe that a network of the future would broadcast such a barbiturate?
  90. Edtv
    I've never been sold on this anti-TV thesis. It's snooty. It assumes we in the audience have seen the light denied the lower orders. Invariably, the people in these movies who are rendered blotto by the tube are dingbat common folk. EDtv takes this notion to a new low.
  91. Big Bad Love
    The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.
  92. Antichrist
    Von Trier has said he wanted to make a genre horror picture, but he couldn’t even come up with a decent metaphor: The climax is out of a Grade C hack-’em-up with people chasing each other through the woods with axes and knives.
  93. Reminders of Him
    It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.
  94. Riddick
    As a result, we get relatively little insight into the other characters as they react to Riddick. Without an unknown force to spark our own imaginations, the result is mostly dead air.
  95. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can.
  96. K-PAX
    Spacey is turning into another Robin Williams: Between this film and "Pay It Forward" he cops the prize for the Sappiest Performances by an Actor Previously Known to Have Great Talent.
  97. The Price of Milk
    Gets points for oddness. Excellence is another matter.
  98. Scotland, Pa.
    Writer-director Billy Morrissette doesn't have much feeling for satire -- or for Shakespeare. This is a comedy for people who couldn't make it through the CliffsNotes.
  99. The Banger Sisters
    The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Real Blonde
    Stupidity is also an issue in the independent film The Real Blonde, in which everyone seems to have suffered an IQ slippage of some 40 points.
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