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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  1. Thor: Ragnarok
    This one is probably my favorite, being the most unlike the others.
  2. All I See Is You
    As a psychological not-quite thriller, it’s consistently entertaining; as a visual exercise, it’s more adventurous than most would be.
  3. Jane
    Morgen gets a little Terrence Malick-y for my taste, too, as he revs up for the big finish.
  4. The Snowman
    I figured the film would have an off-the-charts creepy quotient (the novel is chilling) and gobs of atmosphere. I could never have predicted it would turn out to be such a shambles.
  5. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Her ability to take in the chaos and darkness of the ’70s and find some kind of acceptance through her writing is what makes her as relevant as ever.
  6. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    BPM is vital for the history it depicts, but it’s also important in the here and now, as a testament to public action — even messy, not-always-effective public action.
  7. Wonder Wheel
    Watching the rest of the movie, I wondered if Allen had discovered the script in an old file cabinet (maybe meant as a play?) and appended that meta intro to account for how obvious and old-hat the rest of it is. Probably a good strategy.
  8. Breathe
    It’s a plenty good story to tell, but even by the time the respirator takes its last gasp, I was ultimately unmoved.
  9. Human Flow
    Ai clearly wants to take a macro view of an impossible problem, to find some clarity in abstraction. But whenever he just talks to the refugees face to face, we learn more than any drone shot could tell us.
  10. Happy Death Day
    It’s a fun little movie, more of a giddy rom-com than a splatter-y slasher.
  11. The Foreigner
    That makes Brosnan the more interesting protagonist, Chan the wild card — and changes The Foreigner from a standard revenge melodrama into something weightier and less predictable. It’s an awkward weave, but it has gravitas.
  12. Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    What Professor Marston and the Wonder Women does, with a wink but refreshingly few snickers, is color in the life-giving fantasy that fueled the creation of the perennially embattled American icon.
  13. Dina
    As a woman with a seemingly boundless amount of love to share, she gives voice to an urge that most other romantic comedies take for granted.
  14. Take My Nose... Please!
    Early in the film, Margaret Cho nails both sides of the issue in her stand-up act, decrying plastic surgery as “brainwashing, mutilation, and manipulation of women.
  15. The Mountain Between Us
    It’s said you have a choice at a movie like The Mountain Between Us: Laugh at it or go with it. I don’t see those two things as mutually exclusive. I laughed at it and enjoyed the hell out of it.
  16. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    I hope the film inspires a new generation of amateur sleuths. Maybe — thanks to movies like The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson — a wish-fulfilling fictional scenario will come to pass in the real world, and the injustices of history will stand plainly in the living present.
  17. Flatliners
    I wish I could tell you they made a mistake and it’s not so bad, but, as Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man would put it, “Ees so bad, ees terrible.”
  18. Super Dark Times
    Phillips kind of stumbles when he tries for a pat wrap-up of a still-horrific problem. But when he digs into the muck of the rot at the heart of it, he comes up with some unforgettable moments.
  19. Our Souls at Night
    The last act of Our Souls at Night is rushed and the ending truncated. But the good vibes linger. Netflix is putting the film in a few theaters but it’s online now to watch. You should. It’s a nice little movie.
  20. American Made
    If you’re the type of viewer who thought "Wolf of Wall Street’s" failing was that it looked too cool, American Made is for you. It’s the grubbiest, greasiest vision of bad boys gettin’ away with it in recent memory.
  21. Blade Runner 2049
    There’s nothing close to the shock of seeing Blade Runner’s Tokyo-influenced futuristic dystopia — a dismal mix of high-tech and corrosion — for the first time. I thought it was okay.
  22. Last Flag Flying
    It’s in the uncertainties and dissonances of Last Flag Flying that Linklater’s humanism really expresses itself. Three men of vastly different values and temperaments come alive in the shared understanding that their losses were for nothing. And that shared understanding is something.
  23. Victoria and Abdul
    The chief — though hardly the only — problem with Victoria & Abdul is that too much political correctness proves to be as bad for drama as too little.
  24. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    Kingsman: The Golden Circle is the bloated, campy, thoroughly stupid sequel to the 2014 action thriller "Kingsman: The Secret Service."
  25. Battle of the Sexes
    If Battle of the Sexes is unsurprising to a fault, it’s by no means a double fault. The movie is very entertaining.
  26. Stronger
    Though Gyllenhaal is making the clearest bid for the big awards performance and deserves any accolades it brings him, Maslany’s performance was the one that floored me.
  27. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    There’s no there there, and the film never seems to know what it’s playing with besides the idea of movies in general.
  28. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Five Foot Two distinguishes itself from similar projects from Justin Bieber and Katy Perry by not trying to be a 101 class in the subject and her personal history, but when it hits similar beats — heartbreak, the physical demands of performing, tearful scenes with family — anyone who doesn’t have a Little Monster’s encyclopedic knowledge might feel a little emotionally lost.
  29. Woodshock
    There are a lot of half-complete ideas among the sisters’ jumble of imagery, but trying to tie them together is a fitfully enjoyable, if ultimately fruitless experience.
  30. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    This is a formula movie but Gilroy is no hack. He hits the expected beats but with more color and depth than you expect.
  31. Brad's Status
    Brad walks around seething, and Stiller is a good seether. He has made a career of playing men with colossal chips on their shoulders. He has a zest for humiliation. Maybe he fits the role of Brad too well. He’s so convincing that he’s difficult to watch. So is the movie, though on balance it’s very fine.
  32. American Assassin
    It gallops along quickly enough to keep us entertained, but not so quickly that we can’t see the seams of its creaky American Hero setup.
  33. The Shape of Water
    It’s an utterly lovely, complacent movie, too comfortable with itself to generate real dramatic tension.
  34. First They Killed My Father
    Amid all the important facts, I longed for something unnecessary from the filmmaker, some expressive flourish whose sole purpose isn’t just to convey information. Again I find myself typing the words, “It’s an unquestionably worthy story, I just wish it was told with more inventiveness.”
  35. Molly's Game
    Molly’s Game isn’t the deepest movie you’ll see, but it’s both finely tuned and big-hearted. It’s a rouser.
  36. It
    This new It has more on its mind, and gives more body and voice to King’s ideas of childhood anxieties and the corrosive power of fear.
  37. Suburbicon
    The most charitable way to view it is as a Dadaist experiment, in which two tonally disparate movies were hacked down and their remaining strands woven together to bizarre effect.
  38. The Unknown Girl
    Every Dardennes movie is worth seeing, and The Unknown Girl has all kinds of gripping undercurrents.
  39. Trophy
    Nothing in Trophy shakes out neatly, because everyone onscreen has his or her own set of values and every value is in conflict. The movie is richer in every way for its tangled sympathies. It will leave you angry, sick, and confused — but not smug. Never smug.
  40. mother!
    For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.
  41. I Do... Until I Don't
    The movie’s satirical backbone softens and dissolves, and watching it go wrong might make you realize it wasn’t that good to begin with — that Bell had been getting by on energy and the audience’s goodwill.
  42. Bushwick
    Bushwick is actually an amazing template for the kind of virtual-reality entertainment that I bet will be common in a decade or two.
  43. Beach Rats
    The film is at its best when it lets Dickinson’s deceptively blank face and Hélène Louvart’s lyrically natural cinematography tell the story, which is far more informed by mood than events.
  44. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    The whole film feels slightly grubby and low-res, like it’s been languishing in private mode on the filmmakers’ pre-HD YouTube page since 2008.
  45. Patti Cake$
    It’s a real crowd-pleaser, and I hope a lot of people will be inspired by its mixture of grittiness and uplift. But it also demonstrates that showbiz go-for-it stories are more alike than unalike, even when they have a vivid countercultural vibe and feature actors who don’t conform to (Hollywood white male) studio ideals.
  46. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    As is often the case in documentaries like this, absorbing all those details as part of one, tightly edited story gives them an impact they lack when digested in individual pieces over time.
  47. Gook
    The images of polo-shirt wearing Asian men with rifles lining the rooftops of Koreatown is one of the more troubling images from April 1992. Gook purposefully chooses not to tell a story of that scale, but I did wish it could have found more moral complexity in the corner of the city it chose to depict.
  48. Crown Heights
    We’re left floored by the facts of Colin Warner’s case; the film itself falls away.
  49. Logan Lucky
    The whole movie is a trick, reversing our expectations at nearly every turn and casting actors in roles that they were not exactly born to play, but do so with relish.
  50. Lemon
    It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been honing her own jarring, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and character for years. As a debut feature, it feels auspicious; as a snapshot of a masculine emergency, it feels timeless.
  51. Marjorie Prime
    The sci-fi chamber drama Marjorie Prime is exquisite — beautiful, intense, shivering with empathy.
  52. The Trip to Spain
    The Trip to Spain plays like it’s no big deal — a throwaway — but it’s consistently funny, its bitterness nudging the sweetness into complexity, its sweetness tempering the soupçon of despair. If that also sounds like a food review, well, someone has to write one.
  53. Annabelle: Creation
    There’s nothing cheap about the rest of Annabelle: Creation, so this scattered finale felt like a letdown.
  54. The Glass Castle
    Even those of us willing to accept that there are many different shades at work here will likely feel the foundation of the film fall out from under us by its conclusion.
  55. Ingrid Goes West
    Director Matt Spicer’s Sundance breakout is a friend-crush tale as old as time, modeled almost to a T on "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (without the murder). As such, your mileage will vary depending on whether or not you’ve ever been to Café Gratitude and how much of a tolerance you have for Aubrey Plaza.
  56. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    As a character study, it’s highly successful, but given the context it will be watched in — albeit not quite as oxygen-deprived and manic as Sundance — it feels a little too pat.
  57. Step
    There are many films that attempt to illuminate the world through pain, but Step is most instructive in its moments of joy.
  58. The Dark Tower
    As a mascot, McConaughey embodies the movie’s lack of conviction, but as an indication that a star could conceivably be computer-generated with no loss of affect or facial mobility, he might inspire the next generation of bloodless fantasy epics.
  59. Kidnap
    This is a low-stakes, no-frills, point-A-to-point-B crime thriller, taking inspiration from every parent’s worst nightmare, and pretty much nothing else.
  60. Wind River
    Although the resolution to the mystery wouldn’t do credit to a third-rate thriller, it’s crazily powerful — sudden and bloody but with no real catharsis, just a sense of waste and a feeling of, “What now?” I’m not sure how Sheridan would answer that — not that an artist really needs to.
  61. Detroit
    Bigelow and Boal don’t bring much moral complexity to Detroit. They don’t illuminate the psyches of the cops or suggest the fundamental feeling of weakness that drives people to violence. They don’t shed much light on Dismukes’s inaction or subsequent thoughts about what he didn’t do. What Bigelow does — incomparably — is put us in that room with those people at that moment.
  62. Atomic Blonde
    You don’t go to operas for dancing or ballets for singing, and you don’t see Atomic Blonde for anything but a badass female protagonist crunching bones and pulping faces in gratifyingly long takes or remarkable simulations thereof. The auteur here is literally the stunt man.
  63. The Incredible Jessica James
    The Incredible Jessica James is a little odd duck of a film, an old-fashioned romantic comedy that’s decidedly modern in its frame of reference, a character-driven piece that never lets us too deep into its protagonist, a movie as pleasant as it is fleeting.
  64. The Emoji Movie
    It is one of the darkest, most dismaying films I have ever seen, much less one ostensibly made for children.
  65. Brigsby Bear
    It elicits more than a few excruciating laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s also tragic and vulnerable — not to mention frequently unpleasant.
  66. Landline
    It’s a light musing on adulthood and monogamy and sisterhood, washed in Pavlovian period nostalgia. The revelations are gentle, but worthwhile.
  67. Dunkirk
    What Nolan plus IMAX can do is go big. Spitfire swerving, boat tippings, men dropping to the sand as planes scream by — it doesn’t get any better. That first shot of men on a street in a shower of paper on which their deaths are foretold — brilliant. Somewhere inside the mess that is Dunkirk is a terrific linear movie.
  68. Girls Trip
    Like "Bridesmaids," it makes no more promises than an actual night out: These people will be there, and the goal is to have a good time. And while it may not quite have the undergirding pathos of the former, Girls Trip is a very good time.
  69. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    As a mogul, Besson doesn’t worry about pleasing his corporate masters. He and his visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk, can expend all their energy on topping themselves and making each other laugh. The movie is like a wave that makes you want to yell, “Cowabunga!”
  70. Wish Upon
    A deeply silly midsummer lark that makes up for the fact that it’s about nothing by being incredibly entertaining.
  71. Lady Macbeth
    August Wilson knew that, which is why his plays resonate far beyond melodrama. So does Lady Macbeth. It eats into the mind with its vision of evil as a contagion that transforms victims into oppressors.
  72. War for the Planet of the Apes
    War for the Planet of the Apes manages to be both alienating and sappy, and the biblical finale seems to come from a different universe altogether. It’s an awesome, dull movie.
  73. A Ghost Story
    Even at its most self-conscious, there’s something lovable about A Ghost Story.
  74. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    The breeziest, most convivial Marvel movie in ages.
  75. The House
    All these performers are given decent setups, but the script loses interest in anything that starts to look like a comedic through line.
  76. Nowhere to Hide
    Probably that’s the most hopeful thing in the film — that and the spare and very beautiful guitar soundtrack by Gaute Barlindhaug and Ciwan Haco. No one can make sense of what is happening to this and other families. But they must film it.
  77. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The Transformers movies are a favorite object of critical scorn, and narratively, The Last Knight remains barely coherent. But it’s more fun than "Age of Extinction," though both movies are so drunk on money and effects they accidentally go weird.
  78. The Little Hours
    The movie is not camp. It’s deliciously deadpan sex farce played by some of the deftest clowns in the English-speaking world. The more matter-of-fact it is, the more screamingly funny.
  79. Baby Driver
    As he proves yet again in his thrillingly syncopated heist movie Baby Driver, the 43-year-old U.K.-born Edgar Wright is just about the perfect 21st-century genre director. He has a fanboy’s scintillating palette — flesh-eating zombies, righteous vigilante cops, stoic bank robbers in sunglasses — without a fanboy’s lack of peripheral vision.
  80. Maudie
    Sally Hawkins doesn’t rise above the film’s conception, but she makes it work.
  81. All Eyez on Me
    All Eyez on Me is rarely more than a faithful adaptation of the rapper’s Wikipedia entry, so fixated on name-checking every footnote of Shakur’s public life that there is no space to explore the experience of the man himself.
  82. The Book of Henry
    It does not suffice to call The Book of Henry bad; it’s nonfunctional, so poorly conceived from the ground up as to slip out of the grasp of the usual standards one applies to narrative film. It might be admirable if it wasn’t such torture to watch.
  83. Rough Night
    Rough Night, which is like an episode of Broad City that got a blowout and smoked a pound of primo studio notes, tries to have it both ways. It wants to be a character-based lost-weekend romp, but keeps forcing itself toward increasingly ridiculous and self-consciously naughty set pieces.
  84. It Comes at Night
    The cast functions brilliantly as individuals and as a unit, each in his or her own world but linked near-telepathically to the movements of the others. Like, come to think of it, a family.
  85. My Cousin Rachel
    My Cousin Rachel is a fascinating hybrid. It uses clunky devices out of a 19th-century melodrama, but its subject is modern: mistakes of perception and of metaphor. It’s about the myopia of the male gaze.
  86. The Mummy
    The Mummy is not your usual lousy movie. It has been made with skill and hits its marks. But those marks are so low and so brazenly mercenary that it doesn’t feel like much of an achievement. It’s not involving.
  87. Beatriz at Dinner
    Beatriz at Dinner may not stick the landing, but its central clash between healers and destroyers maintains its choke hold long after the credits have rolled.
  88. The Rider
    In telling the story of a disappearing slice of America, Zhao has created a portrait of resilience, and the bonds that last even after the rodeo’s over.
  89. The Exception
    The superb English stage director David Leveaux keeps the pacing taut while creating space for his actors to work their magic.
  90. Wonder Woman
    The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.
  91. Baywatch
    It’s the smart-ass nerd’s Baywatch. The movie is okay, though, if you don’t mind manic pacing and icky dick jokes.
  92. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    The script is frantically trying to build a whole world when a modest house would do.
  93. You Were Never Really Here
    Cinematically, it’s undeniably gripping, a tightly wound contraption of nervous energy, grief, and gore. But it’s in service of a story that’s been told countless times before, and it’s not clear where Ramsay’s usually singular point of view is in play.
  94. Happy End
    Haneke’s integration of the ways we communicate and conduct our lives via phone and laptop feels uniquely effective.
  95. Loveless
    Loveless gives us a multicourse meal of social ills, too dispersed to feel like a thesis, yet too chilly to feel like a raw, unbridled tantrum.
  96. The Square
    Östlund’s eye for the subtleties of human behavior, especially public behavior, never fails.
  97. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    It’s stuffed to the gills with effects executed by the highest-paid artists and technicians in the business. But it’s still a sorry spectacle.
  98. Good Time
    For all its throttling thrills, Good Time is a film about a destructive love — and loving someone despite not having the right kind of love to give them. Ignore the deceptively convivial title: This is the kind of thrill that sticks.
  99. The Florida Project
    This is a near-perfect film, and a heightening in every way of everything that was great about Baker’s last movie.
  100. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    To see an unfettered nightmare like this from such an idiosyncratic director feels like a cruel treat, and a welcome stylistic stretch.
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