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. The Beguiled
    Coppola’s The Beguiled doesn’t have the southern-gothic kick of its predecessor. It’s not a horror movie. Its power is in its undercurrents, in the sense that what we’re seeing isn’t inevitable but a sort of worst-case scenario of genders in opposition. No one is wholly good or bad. Both sides are beguiled.
  2. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    It’s incredible what a difference 12 years makes: Baumbach is an altogether more generous and insightful filmmaker here than he was the last time he told this story.
  3. Wonderstruck
    Wonderstruck gestures at a lot, especially between the two narratives, which Haynes flips between with such rapidity that the film isn’t able to find a tonal groove until well past its halfway point.
  4. Okja
    The film is packed with so many strange gems of moments, and while a few feel like Bong losing the plot (specifically any time Okja decides to loosen her bowels) it always snaps back together.
  5. Alien: Covenant
    The dialogue of Alien: Covenant is often clunky and its plot repetitious. (As usual these days, there are too many climaxes.) But it’s scary and splatterful, which is all it really needs to be. It holds you.
  6. The Drowning
    It’s a closed, depressing vision, elevated by compassion and superbly evocative filmmaking.
  7. Snatched
    I’m not sure about Hawn. A youthful twitterer, she has developed an expressively croaky voice, but nothing about her reads “nervous, agoraphobic cat lady.” She’s no longer a jumpy clown — she doesn’t need the humiliation.
  8. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    King Arthur is guilty of many blockbuster sins critics have taken it upon themselves to call out over the last decade. And yet, seeing a version of them this derivative and dumb, with neither CGI grandeur nor a sense of fun on its side, is like a splash of cold water in the face, a reminder of how bad things can be when nobody cares.
  9. Last Men in Aleppo
    You should — you must — see Last Men in Aleppo to witness an ongoing tragedy. But you should also see it to learn humility. We — meaning Americans — ain’t seen nothin’. Yet.
  10. The Lovers
    Writer-director Azazel Jacobs has made a very smart movie about a very dumb idea.
  11. 3 Generations
    While 3 Generations certainly has some worthy explorations, it’s too vain not to sugarcoat itself, visually or otherwise.
  12. Sleight
    The film lives and dies by Latimore’s performance, which is quiet and ever-shifting.
  13. The Circle
    The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.
  14. One Week and a Day
    The comedy in One Week and a Day comes from confusion, ineptitude, and alienation. It comes from people’s defenses being way, way down. It doesn’t cheapen the tragedy. It grounds it, sometimes in the mud.
  15. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    It’s not the weighty emotions that drag Vol. 2 down. It’s the plot that chases its own tail and the cluttered visual palette.
  16. The Promise
    The film is no masterpiece — again, George can’t illuminate why a million people were murdered by their own countrymen. But as we focus on Rusesabagina’s almost farcically desperate attempts to forestall tragedy, we have a vision of genocide as a virus with its own terrible momentum.
  17. Free Fire
    The result is reasonably entertaining and totally disposable. Which it shouldn’t be, given that its focus is on guns and the way that they facilitate mayhem. Gory farce can be bracing. It’s the glibness that’s unconscionable.
  18. A Quiet Passion
    The final scenes are potent enough to save the movie.
  19. The Fate of the Furious
    The action has become incoherent, largely past the point of enjoyability.
  20. The Lost City of Z
    The Lost City of Z(ed) isn’t as expansive as you might initially wish but still pulls you in and along.
  21. Graduation
    Graduation, like Mungiu’s lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," layers misfortunes and mistakes on top of one another in a way that feels both oppressive and true.
  22. Gifted
    Outside of its open and shameless heartstring tugging, Gifted at least sets up a compelling, multisided moral dilemma.
  23. Colossal
    Vigalondo demonstrates that even the dumbest genres can be used to profound ends — not cheapening serious things but kicking them to the next metaphoric level. A woman finding her inner strength is inspiring. But a woman finding her inner giant monster who kicks butt — that’s just so cool.
  24. Your Name.
    Perhaps a less uplifting ending may have seemed more honest. But Shinkai’s a romantic at heart, and it’s infectious. By the end, you just want these two crazy kids to get together, no matter whose bodies they’re in.
  25. The Boss Baby
    All other films hoping to become the official cinematic standard-bearer of #TheResistance, take a seat. This is the most damning political narrative of 2017.
  26. 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.
  27. Ghost in the Shell
    The filmmakers think little of the emotional and intellectual connection fans already have with this property, and have put all their chips on the aesthetic. It’s exhausting to watch them curate what parts of the story’s Japanese origin are worth keeping and which can be discarded.
  28. Life
    As a final-girl structured horror film, it has plenty of imaginative moments.
  29. Saban's Power Rangers
    It’s bright and fun and doesn’t look like any climactic fight of a superhero movie in recent memory.
  30. Wilson
    I wish the movie had more of a tragic undercurrent — the tone is wobbly.
  31. Prevenge
    Lowe, who was actually pregnant during production, also wrote the movie’s script, whose rough edges and gaps are filled in by her strong sense of tone and instinctual truth as a director.
  32. T2 Trainspotting
    It doesn’t have the youthful kick of its predecessor, but given the pervasiveness of addiction and suicidal ideation and despair it’s amazingly buoyant.
  33. The Belko Experiment
    The fundamental ironic juxtaposition — ultraviolence meets corporate banality — is a bludgeon that never feels fresh no matter how many times it’s driven into our aching skulls.
  34. I Called Him Morgan
    It’s mesmerizing, too vivid to be evanescent, too precious to hold.
  35. Personal Shopper
    If you have a penchant for mood pieces that flirt with genre but are too pretentious to deliver the full climactic payload, Personal Shopper is for you. I loved nearly all of it, disposed to forgive Assayas his arty withholding for the pleasure of watching Stewart through his eyes.
  36. The Sense of an Ending
    It’s world away from the mystery and irrevocable tragedy that Barnes evokes in his slim novel. The climactic revelation is very sad, but it doesn’t wound you.
  37. Kong: Skull Island
    Its combination of lavishness and lack of imagination is the only thing memorable about it.
  38. Raw
    Raw is certainly nasty, but its gore is strategic and sparse. It is, however, a very stressful film to watch from beginning to end, even before the real feasting gets underway.
  39. Catfight
    Tukel takes a big risk in Catfight: using farcical means to weave together personal and political tragedies, so that each dimension feeds the other. The rough edges and occasional clunks are a small price to pay.
  40. Beauty and the Beast
    After a couple musical numbers, it occurs to you that the film you’re watching is every bit as animated as the original, but it’s somehow turned out less lifelike, despite its considerable technological advantage.
  41. Logan
    The film is stunningly bleak and staggeringly violent. Major characters go down in showers of blood and gore. I’ve seen worse and so, probably, have you, but never from such an essentially wholesome corporate enterprise with a target audience so young and hopeful.
  42. Before I Fall
    The film mostly retains its humanity, largely thanks to Deutch’s performance and Russo-Young’s insistence on keeping her at the forefront of almost every shot.
  43. My Life as a Zucchini
    My Life As a Zucchini is a deft work of empathy, and unlike a few of its fellow animation Oscar contenders, it works on a more intimate scale, without a big message or master thesis to carry it to its conclusion.
  44. Get Out
    Get Out is a ludicrous paranoid fantasy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alive in the unconscious. Having it out there in so delightful a form helps us laugh at it together — and maybe later, when we’ve thought it over, shudder.
  45. The Great Wall
    The absurdity is what makes it such a hoot-and-a-half.
  46. John Wick: Chapter 2
    For a movie so visual (how many shades of blue can you count?), John Wick: Chapter 2 has quite a clever script. Derek Kolstad anchors that abstract action with good, spiky passages of dialogue.
  47. Fifty Shades Darker
    People are calling Fifty Shades Darker the worst movie ever made, but it’s really not that terrible. It does, however, misrepresent itself, which is true of most mainstream American films about sex. The movie’s real subject is wealth.
  48. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The last hour is like a night at the comedy club after the headliners have left and the room has the smell of stale beer and flop sweat.
  49. The Comedian
    The Comedian falls into the same trap as most films that hinge on an amazing song or an incredible painting — Jackie’s act doesn’t quite live up to its riotous reception.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Sick
    Infused with honesty and authenticity, Michael Showalter’s crowd-pleaser is an instantly winning heart-stealer and a superbly well-timed story of culture clash that resolves into a lovely tale of mutual understanding and acceptance.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mudbound
    The biggest accomplishment of Mudbound is its restraint; it’s a lyrical lament that aims both for the heart and the mind. Rees, the indie darling of six years ago, is undoubtedly on her way to becoming a prominent filmmaker, with a new kind of American classic already under her belt.
  52. The Salesman
    All I can is that I didn’t draw too many breaths during the last half hour.
  53. I Am Not Your Negro
    Raoul Peck’s driving, free-form documentary I Am Not Your Negro is not a direct response to Donald Trump’s delighted recognition of the lone nonwhite face he saw at one of his rallies: “Look at my African-American over here!” But the movie feels, if anything, even timelier, which is to say, timeless.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Dog's Purpose
    Filmed in the burnished glow that envelops all of Hallström’s American movies, A Dog’s Purpose recycles bits of every animal saga you can name, and practically dares you to make it through with a face of stone. Even a dog movie could use a higher purpose.
  55. Split
    My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.
  56. Live by Night
    Once Affleck’s Joe gets to Florida, Live by Night loses its pulse and you’re left with a lot of pale characters, secondhand plotting, and maybe second thoughts about the daffy idea of a liberal-humanist gang boss.
  57. The Founder
    Michael Keaton is sensational as Kroc.
  58. Paterson
    I’ve never seen a film that captures the inner world of an artist with such delicacy.
  59. Fences
    It’s not cinematic enough to make you forget you’re watching something conceived for another, more spatially constricted medium, but it’s too cinematic to capture the intensity, the concentration, of a great theatrical event.
  60. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is irreducible, too, although certain adjectives and adverbs do leap to mind: generous, reflective, absolutely delightful.
  61. Toni Erdmann
    The German comedy Toni Erdmann makes the best case imaginable for the importance of tone.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sing
    You’re either someone who didn't like American Idol at all or you’re someone who loved it and and believe the concept could only be improved upon with the addition of talking cartoon animals.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Why Him?
    Wealth does not confer decency and should not excuse noxious behavior, and it is not a replacement for a soul. But it is, apparently, the final answer to the question in the movie's title.
  64. Silence
    The movie is impressive.
  65. Passengers
    Only a corporate entity could deliver an ending like this one. But only humans could devise and enact the often delightful scenario that precedes it.
  66. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    The movie didn’t rekindle the thrill of seeing, say, The Empire Strikes Back, but Rogue One will loom pretty large in the Star Wars galaxy — if only because there’s so little competition.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All We Had
    Even in a rote story, with prosaic direction from Holmes, the lead performances ring true.
  68. La La Land
    The actors carry the music in their gait, their gestures, the rhythms of their speech, so that their singing and dancing is a small but exquisite step up from the way that they normally talk and walk. To rhapsodize about La La Land is to complete the experience. You want to sing its praises, literally.
  69. Jackie
    Jackie is a hard movie to love, but its brittleness might be its most admirable quality.
  70. Rules Don't Apply
    Beatty is trying to elevate the material while at the same time draining it of energy. The movie is so misbegotten that it’s almost poignant. But I hope Beatty has a few more left in him.
  71. Allied
    With Allied, Robert Zemeckis has fashioned a good old-fashioned World War II romantic espionage movie, but that wouldn’t matter a damn if the leads weren’t beautiful and didn’t look great in period clothes. They are and they do.
  72. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The movie might pass muster for kids weaned on the Harry Potter films — I shudder to think of the movies that pleased me when I was 7 or 8 — and uncritical critics. But you’d have to be desperate for another Potter fix to think this is magical entertainment. It’s thoroughly No-Maj.
  73. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    The main problem with Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is superficial, literally. Lee has opted for the rare 120-frames-per-second format, allegedly because he thought it would deepen our connection to the characters. He thought wrong.
  74. Loving
    It’s the damnedest thing how the longueurs of Loving have such a cumulative power. I was still crying as the credits ended.
  75. Arrival
    Why did Villeneuve and the screenwriter, Eric Heisserer, let the grade-B military melodrama run away with the story?
  76. Doctor Strange
    This is a rare case in which Marvel has freed a director’s imagination instead of straitjacketing it.
  77. Hacksaw Ridge
    Say what you will about Mad Mel Gibson, he’s a driven, febrile artist, and there isn’t a second in his war film Hacksaw Ridge — not even the ones that should register as clichés — that doesn’t burn with his peculiar intensity.
  78. The Handmaiden
    I still don’t know how a gore-meister like Park Chan-wook could have made the year’s most irresistible romance. Maybe it’s that he hates oppression — chauvinist, colonialist, Sadean — so deeply that in hoisting his old boys on their own petards, he has discovered the wellsprings of love.
  79. Inferno
    Tom Hanks takes his art down a peg with another paycheck performance as the dramatic cipher Robert Langdon in Inferno, Ron Howard’s mostly lame adaptation of Dan Brown’s wholly lame novel.
  80. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    The movie is lighter, more fun, and ultimately more satisfying than its weighty predecessor.
  81. Moonlight
    Hype would bruise Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, which is so delicate in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually shrill. It’s the gentlest, most suggestive of great films.
  82. First Girl I Loved
    The way the narrative starts and stops and doubles back mirrors the characters’ own confusion. We try to make sense of the story along with them — who did what, said what, when, and what did it really mean.
  83. Tower
    I love when non-fiction filmmakers stretch the form and attempt, with as much honesty as they can muster, to put us in the middle of the events they describe. They give us stunning hybrids like "Waltz With Bashir," "Persepolis," and, now, Tower.
  84. Certain Women
    Certain Women turns out to be a study in women’s uncertainties, in the experience of pain that leads not to action but acceptance. It’s a slow go — but you get there.
  85. The Accountant
    The action-thriller The Accountant is laughable, but when you’re not laughing at it, you’re laughing with it. It’s enjoyable enough.
  86. The Girl on the Train
    A filmmaker has a feel for this kind of storytelling or doesn’t, and the people behind The Girl on the Train don’t.
  87. 13th
    In the main 13th makes connections that haven’t been made in a mainstream documentary before.
  88. Deepwater Horizon
    My only serious complaint about Deepwater Horizon is that it’s not quite the muckraker I’d hoped for.
  89. American Honey
    If you think LaBeouf is a joke, you need to see him here. There’s wildness there, but acting centers him. He’s magnetizing.
  90. The Magnificent Seven
    The Magnificent Seven has the trappings of a classic Western and it hits its marks. All of Fuqua’s movies hit their marks — even sadistic formula junk like "The Equalizer." But there’s no grandeur in its images or generosity in its soul. I don’t think Fuqua ever loved Westerns. And by the time this movie ended, I’d forgotten why I do.
  91. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Although it’s patchy and gives off an air of trying too hard, the movie is surprisingly funny.
  92. Snowden
    Stone is so intent on making Snowden an icon that he scrubs him of his nuances, his individuality.
  93. Sully
    Hanks and those scenes in the cockpit make the movie worth seeing, in spite of the dumb melodramatics. But only just.
  94. The Light Between Oceans
    Here, the material is already melodramatic — the characters are at the mercy of seismic forces — and Cianfrance’s direction comes off as wildly overwrought.
  95. Southside with You
    The movie is charming even when it’s stilted, and it’s often stilted.
  96. Don't Breathe
    There isn’t a single false scare. There isn’t, come to think of it, a scare that doesn’t set up another scare.
  97. Florence Foster Jenkins
    It’s a wobbly, uneven, ultimately wonderful film — its unevenness befitting its title character, who we come to love despite her loopy lack of awareness of her own deficiencies.
  98. Pete's Dragon
    After half an hour or so of ... stutter steps, Pete's Dragon starts working on you, much like those gold standards of the boy-and-his-otherworldly-friend genre, "E.T." and "The Iron Giant."
  99. Hell or High Water
    This is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be, because the violence is bound to be gratuitous, absurd, with a needless finality. Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.
  100. Suicide Squad
    The visuals in the final battle have some charm: They reminded me of early Tsui Hark Hong Kong extravaganzas like Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain and A Chinese Ghost Story (which he produced). But there was passion in those HK pictures, along with acrobatic wire-work. Promiscuous CGI makes even the miraculous seem ho-hum.
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