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. Jason Bourne
    As an actor, Matt Damon has too much integrity to pretend he can multitask to that advanced degree and still be, you know, a fun person. So he turns his face into a mask of stoicism and gives the dullest performance of his career.
  2. Indignation
    Schamus is the former head of Focus Features, and seeing how he directs (this is his debut, though he has been Ang Lee’s collaborator for decades), I suspect he chose the company’s name. His vision is 20/20 plus.
  3. Lights Out
    Bello is an excellent actress and makes Sophie’s anguish credible, although she can’t rise above the material.
  4. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    That Feuerzeig can navigate this hall of mirrors so cleanly and effectively is positively supernatural.
  5. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    It’s as if the film is taking after its own heroines: aspiring to something bigger than it should, and too often looking awkward in the process.
  6. Star Trek Beyond
    It’s better to have a well-made, unapologetic action-adventure like this one than a creepy stab at replication.
  7. Don't Think Twice
    It’s funny and inspiring and harsh and depressing. It’s steeped in existential dread. I don’t know how Birbiglia pulled it off, but he gets the minutiae of an improv-comedy show thrillingly right while using the form to build a kind of allegory of the corrosive effects of capitalism.
  8. Sand Storm
    Ultimately, this is a tale of a mother and daughter trapped in a cycle of yearning and despair. It’s a lovely, deeply affecting film.
  9. Captain Fantastic
    As the father-in-law, Langella has one of those thankless antagonist roles — the rigid, killjoy patriarch — that older actors take for the paycheck and almost never pull off. As usual these days, he’s remarkable.
  10. Café Society
    It’s an unusually warm world, full of helpful wealthy people and friendly faces. That’s the conundrum. It’s too shallow to nourish the spirit of a man like Bobby. But it’s too rich to leave.
  11. Ghostbusters
    The new Ghostbusters isn’t a horror, exactly. It’s just misbegotten. It never lives.
  12. Life, Animated
    Owen is a hugely engaging screen presence.
  13. The Legend of Tarzan
    The new Tarzan film, The Legend of Tarzan, plays as if a dog ate part of the script.
  14. The BFG
    A labor of love that sometimes wears its love too laboriously, but a surfeit of rapture isn’t the worst thing in a movie.
  15. Independence Day: Resurgence
    This hodgepodge has been thrown together in so slovenly a way that it’s no surprise the studio didn’t show it to the press.
  16. Wiener-Dog
    I loved it, but you might not. Despite its often prostrating bleakness and an ending likely to inspire howls of outrage (Solondz’s world is not kind to children or pets), it might be the closest he’ll ever come to making an inspirational work.
  17. Finding Dory
    In the end, is Finding Dory better than Finding Nemo? It’s funnier and more intricate, but the tears it jerks have been jerked before. It’s not as original, not as deep.
  18. Genius
    Genius does a pretty good job of capturing the peculiar drama of the relationship between editors and writers, in this case some of the most revered in American letters.
  19. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    I’d see a whole film about the adventures of Hader’s desperate-for-transcendence roadie. Unlike Popstar, it might actually go somewhere.
  20. 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.
  21. X-Men: Apocalypse
    Watching Apocalypse, you don’t feel as if every character is being set up for his or her own spinoff. They complement one another. They need one another. The overflowing ensemble nature of the enterprise is the whole point.
  22. Maggie's Plan
    Maggie’s Plan doesn’t quite gel, but it’s very enjoyable, and it has a solid emotional core.
  23. The Nice Guys
    The Nice Guys has a nice feel: just slick enough to keep from falling apart, just brutal enough to keep from seeming inconsequential.
  24. Weiner
    Weiner is a tabula rasa documentary — one of the most provocative of its kind I’ve seen.
  25. Captain America: The First Avenger
    Until the computer-generated effects bog it down and mess up its rhythms, Captain America: The First Avenger, has a measured, classical pace and a lot of good, old-fashioned craftsmanship.
  26. Love & Friendship
    Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.
  27. Captain America: Civil War
    The best way to think of Captain America: Civil War is as a toy box in which the sheer quantity of toys partly makes up for the lack of anything new. But the big takeaway is worrisome. Marvel has created a universe teeming with superheroes who simply don’t have enough to do. They’re all suited up with nowhere to go.
  28. Keanu
    In my frequent role as “laugh accountant” for mainstream comedies, I’d estimate two-thirds of it works, and when it’s good it’s sooooo good — good enough to make you want to see Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key and director Peter Atencio and co-writer Alex Rubens do it again and go farther out.
  29. Elvis & Nixon
    A thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities.
  30. The Jungle Book
    The film is a triumph of technology and safe “family” storytelling. It’s dazzling — almost no one will dislike it.
  31. Everybody Wants Some!!
    If you’ve seen Linklater’s other films, you know that time for him isn’t just a factor, it’s a character, a player.
  32. Louder Than Bombs
    In truth, I’m not sure the movie jells — even the title, from an album by The Smiths, seems oblique. But I loved it anyway.
  33. Miles Ahead
    This is probably Cheadle’s most electrified performance since the one that made him a star, as the incorrigibly homicidal Mouse in "Devil in a Blue Dress."
  34. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    There’s enough going on to keep you watching — and, as I said, to keep fanboys wowed by the scale of the production and pretension. But most people will leave feeling drained and depressed, wondering how a studio can get away with withholding so much.
  35. Midnight Special
    Nichols’s mythic aspirations are still a puzzle to me; I’m not sure he has connected all the dots in his psyche yet, or that he fully brings off his finale. But I love watching his movies.
  36. Krisha
    There’s an extended shot in Trey Edward Shults’s remarkable debut feature, Krisha, that’s a showstopper of bad vibes, a psycho-symphony that bumps the film to a different — more ominous — level of reality.
  37. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    10 Cloverfield Lane does what it needs to do: make you sit and squirm and want very badly to know. It has the appeal of suspense radio plays from the '30s and '40s and even a touch of Orson Welles’s most infamous Mercury Theater broadcast.
  38. The Brothers Grimsby
    Parts of The Brothers Grimsby are very funny.
  39. Creative Control
    Creative Control is the most elegant vision imaginable of a world in the process of losing its moorings.
  40. Zootopia
    What saves this big-budget cartoon behemoth is its modest, old-fashioned storytelling.
  41. Knight of Cups
    He has told the story of humanity’s fall from grace so many times that you wonder if his wand is starting to sputter.
  42. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    It’s not so much bad as dismayingly bland. It’s WTF for all the wrong reasons.
  43. Eddie the Eagle
    By keeping things simple — by refusing to burden us with too many facts, or too much portent, or complicated characters — Eddie the Eagle channels that spirit well. It won’t win any medals, but it earns its place.
  44. Gods of Egypt
    It’s both thin and overstuffed, filled with intricate, at times dazzling set-pieces peopled by characters we don’t care about, and an irreverent sense of fun that nevertheless leaves us cold. It tries so hard… and ultimately achieves so little.
  45. Triple 9
    Given the movie’s bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.
  46. Risen
    Still, for a film that could have easily become bogged down in Sunday School reverence, or culture-war opportunism, Risen presents an intriguing, oblique approach to a Bible movie.
  47. Race
    As Jesse Owens, [James] mixes confidence, bewilderment, and subdued rage into a powerful whole. It’s not a big, show-offy performance. Quite the contrary: He’s surprisingly quiet, watchful. Everything seems to be submerged, but still present.
  48. The Mermaid
    Mermaid is a very, very funny movie, but its caustic swipes at China’s nouveau riche, combined with its despairing look at the devastation of the country’s environment, suggest a filmmaker trying to find ways to reconcile his buoyant sense of fun with deeper, darker themes.
  49. A War
    Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
  50. Embrace of the Serpent
    It’s another in a long, honorable line of films that chart the poisonous effects of colonialism on indigenous populations and their ecosystems, but with an unusually invigorating perspective, like a reverse-angle "Heart of Darkness."
  51. The Witch
    To my taste, the movie finally feels rather one-dimensional, basic. But there’s no disputing its awful power.
  52. Zoolander 2
    How bad is Zoolander 2? It’s "Batman and Robin" bad. It’s so bad that it makes you feel sorry for the scores (literally) of celebrities who show up in cameos, even the ones (Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Susan Sarandon, Ariana Grande, Kimye ...) who actively resist your sympathy, whom you maybe want to see taken down a peg.
  53. Deadpool
    Deadpool is a send-up of Marvel movies but in no way a takedown of them. It’s not subversive — it’s meant to elasticize and enhance the superhero genre, to flatter the audience for being hip enough to get all of those in-jokes.
  54. The Choice
    By the time its finale rolls around, The Choice has completely undone its own spell.
  55. Regression
    Perhaps a story like this needed to be a drama. Or maybe, with its constant, almost comical shifting of blame, a dark satire. Instead, it’s wound up as the worst of all possible alternatives: a disposable genre movie that cannot scare, convince, or enlighten.
  56. The Club
    It’s occasionally beautiful, but just as often stomach-turning. You watch it at a remove, but still with a dull combination of pity and horror and regret. Maybe that’s the idea. For a brief, agonizing moment, you share the spiritual quicksand with these disgraced men.
  57. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The best thing about the movie is that you don’t have to invest a lot of time into seeing Austen’s prose manhandled. You can enjoy the film — well, parts of it — as a middling stock production with flurries of gore to break the monotony.
  58. Hail, Caesar!
    Their amalgamations can be feats of genius, like their stoner-gumshoe farrago "The Big Lebowski." Or they can pretty much lie there, like much of their new, star-packed comedy, Hail, Caesar!, which is nothing but movie fodder.
  59. Yoga Hosers
    Yoga Hosers is the best film Kevin Smith has made in a long time, which admittedly isn’t saying much. But this new cult comedy-thriller may well represent a turning point for the writer-director.
  60. Sing Street
    Sing Street is far more boisterous and certainly funnier than Once, but it remains in a minor key; “finding happiness in sadness,” is how one character puts it.
  61. Operation Avalanche
    The earnest enthusiasm with which Operation Avalanche begins, and the paranoia and fear toward which it proceeds, chart the course of an entire nation.
  62. Newtown
    It confronts, but it doesn’t exploit. It’s about one of the most horrifying events of recent years, and yet it’s defined by its austerity, its sense of quiet. It is as much about the complex, dull horror of memory as it is about the brute, sharp horror of that day.
  63. Morris from America
    This understated, generous film quietly sneaks up on you.
  64. Little Men
    The power of Little Men is in how the characters resist the melodramatic flow (which is, come to think of it, how Chekhov works, too).
  65. The Birth of a Nation
    It's a beautiful, reflective film even as it is also a brutal, visceral one.
  66. Monster Hunt
    Monster Hunt is not a movie that aims for narrative dexterity, or subtlety, or grace. It’s a blunt, bloated object, designed to bludgeon us with silly action and broad humor.
  67. Manchester by the Sea
    Lonergan is the master of taking a scene that starts off as something familiar, then sending it spinning off in another direction, and then pulling back at just the right moment, as the viewer’s imagination hurtles ahead to fill in the gaps.
  68. Aferim!
    Like much of Romanian cinema, Aferim!’s narrative and stylistic gambit doesn’t quite click until the final scenes.
  69. The 5th Wave
    For all the goodwill generated by its early scenes, by the time The 5th Wave lumbers to its conclusion, you realize you’re not watching a movie but an act of crisis management.
  70. Concussion
    There’s a lot of good stuff here, but the movie often seems more interested in ennobling rather than dramatizing.
  71. Where to Invade Next
    Where to Invade Next shows Moore at his cheapest, while also affording glimpses of the filmmaker he once was.
  72. Point Break
    Uninterested in competing on the bromance front, or even on the action-thriller front, this new Point Break often plays like an extreme-sports documentary with bits of narrative interstitials to carry us along.
  73. Norm of the North
    Everything appears to have been thrown together with little attention paid to how it might all work together.
  74. Ride Along 2
    Ride Along 2, which picks up not long after the first film ended, doesn’t mess much with the formula, except that everything feels more frayed and tired this time around.
  75. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    The battle scenes are loud and jangly and dissonant enough to unnerve you — they work. But I’d like to see a congressional committee grill Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan about what’s going on half the time.
  76. The Forest
    The concept promises us a melancholy kind of dread, and there are bits and pieces throughout of the movie The Forest could have been. But any compelling sense of unease is ultimately undone as the film gradually settles for tedious schlock.
  77. Diablo
    By the time the film works up to its finale, what secrets it wants to reveal to us have become fairly obvious. But they still carry a dark charge; Diablo’s ultimate grisliness is impressive in its own way. And it might have worked, had the film not asked entirely too much of its young lead.
  78. The Treasure
    Drolly funny and rigorously executed, Corneliu Porumboui’s The Treasure offers a fine example of the conceptual boldness that characterizes much of New Wave Romanian cinema.
  79. Son of Saul
    The movie doesn’t expand in your mind — it shrinks along with its protagonist, its conclusion a reductio ad absurdum.
  80. Anomalisa
    Once the surprise of seeing something so miserable depicted with such wit and poetry wears off, you’re left with a nagging ugh, as well as the feeling that this emotional/psychological syndrome isn’t nearly as universal as Kaufman thinks it is.
  81. 45 Years
    The movie has momentously disturbing ideas but a fine grain, its images suitable for framing — or hiding away in the attic.
  82. Daddy's Home
    Ferrell and Wahlberg previously paired up in "The Other Guys", one of the great comedies of the millennium, but put aside any expectation that their latest collaboration might even come close to that sublime masterpiece.
  83. 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.
  84. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    The movie has already blown away advance-sale records, and when you go (which, of course, you will) I bet you’ll have fun — I did, mostly. But it’s the fun of seeing something fairly successfully redone, with the promise of more of the same to come.
  85. The Revenant
    I think The Revenant is, on the whole, pain without gain, but it’s certainly a tour ​de force — literally, a feat of strength.
  86. Joy
    I don’t think Russell has ever directed a scene as phony as the one in Joy’s office where she shows her abiding beneficence to a sweet young African-American couple. Equilibrium makes Russell a dull boy.
  87. In the Heart of the Sea
    In the Heart of the Sea isn’t a bad film, necessarily. It has some genuinely effective passages in its first half, and Howard is nothing if not a dutiful, check-the-boxes kind of director. But a story like this – one of horror and madness, which helped give birth to an ornate masterpiece of obsession – needs to go a little crazy. And this director doesn’t do crazy.
  88. Chi-Raq
    Bitches, it’s always a good month in America for an antigun movie. The newest, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, might be the best ever. It’s sexy, brash, and potent — a powerful weapon in its own right.
  89. Youth
    Though often beautiful, this is an emotionally paralyzed film about emotionally paralyzed people.
  90. Theeb
    The film remains grounded in the elemental, the practical, and the real. That’s not to say it isn't beautiful.
  91. Of Men and War
    Of Men and War’s compassion is matched only by its relentlessness.
  92. Love the Coopers
    Jessie Nelson’s film sells itself well. There’s care in the details, and the characters often feel like actual people.
  93. The Night Before
    It’s a pageant, as they say — a bunch of cameos and funny situations all sort of held together with a bare bones plot and some nods to the Christmas spirit.
  94. The Secret in Their Eyes
    It’s a cop movie that’s largely uninterested in cops, crimes, or criminals. And yet, despite all that, the film is at times an effective, evocative mood piece. The funereal pall of sorrow that hangs over everything these characters do has a strange, surprising pull.
  95. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    The unexpected element is a series of letters (some never before heard) Joplin wrote to her family back home in Port Arthur, Texas, read by Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) in a voice that captures the cadences of Joplin’s speech without being an imitation. The letters are heartbreaking in their own way.
  96. Killing Them Safely
    The documentary could hardly be more timely or essential.
  97. 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.
  98. The Big Short
    The best film of the year? Possibly …
  99. The Danish Girl
    What Hooper can’t manage is to put us inside his characters’ heads — where we should be in a story that makes every surface suspect.
  100. Victor Frankenstein
    A catastrophic miscalculation of a movie, Victor Frankenstein is a perfect example of a Hollywood revision that, in trying to outsmart an original, reveals what worked about said original in the first place.
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