New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

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For 3,961 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: 2,220 out of 3961
  2. Mixed: 1,378 out of 3961
  3. Negative: 363 out of 3961
3961 movie reviews
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  1. The Adventures of Tintin
    Everything he did in live-action movies with rolling boulders and runaway convoys he does bigger and better - by a factor of ten - in every frame. At the end of two hours, my jaw ached from grinning.
  2. The Conjuring
    The Conjuring succeeds because of all that anticipation of dread things to come. The damned thing works you so well that you may even consider leaving halfway through, for fear you'll have a heart attack.
  3. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Lapid’s thrilling use of the camera, the way his unbalanced frame and his imaginative staging work with the precision of his story, results in something new and genuinely unnerving.
  4. The Homesman
    For much of its running time, The Homesman doesn’t quite seem to know where it’s going. But once it actually gets there, it attains a hardscrabble nobility.
  5. Thunderbolts*
    Thunderbolts* recaptures some of the magic of the early Marvel productions, when they felt like some alchemical phenomenon of corporate entertainment, and not just slop. The secret, which should have been obvious, is taking pleasure in the people these movies put on screen, rather than just treating them as marketing materials for future installments.
  6. The East
    The magnetic Alexander Skarsgard is the leader, Benji, a soft-spoken dreamboat, ever-direct but with a haunted quality, with something in reserve. Ellen Page gives a Lili Taylor–worthy performance (high praise) as a suspicious, abrasive young woman.
  7. Monster House
    The movie might be scary for small kids--but good scary, with goose-bump-inducing frames, witty repartee, and three resourceful kid protagonists.
  8. Black Mass
    Johnny Depp makes a valiant stab at the part, but even with his hair thinned and lightened and his face hardened, Depp remains Depp: I never forgot I was watching a big star doing an impersonation. It’s as if the spirit of a psychopath like Bulger resists the camera. Or maybe the movie isn’t imaginative enough to penetrate his shell.
  9. 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fist of Fury
    It doesn’t quite work, but Lee’s fight choreography is so riveting it doesn’t matter.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Sterile Cuckoo
    There is all too little here to interest an adult, let alone any veteran of the nutty-girl vs. stodgy-boy chiche. [27 Oct 1969, p.68]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  12. The Illusionist
    The ending dispels a lot of the magic, but the silent-movie palette is gorgeous, and the film is worth seeing for the inspired hamming of Paul Giamatti as Vienna's chief inspector, whose plummy tones made me sure I could hear the ghost of James Mason cackling.
  13. Office Space
    Office Space is so enjoyable that you wish it were even better...Once the scheme to bilk Initech is set in motion, the off-kilter humor flattens into a take-this-job-and-shove-it thing, and the ending seems pooped-out.
  14. 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.
  15. For Your Consideration
    Gooses you even in its barren patches and gets fresher and funnier as it goes along. It builds to a shriekingly funny (and scary) revelation and a dénouement so brilliant it's almost demonic.
  16. A Civil Action
    I'm all for films that don't flow from the usual Hollywood test tubes, but A Civil Action is basically the standard formula with a dash of downbeat.
  17. Richard Jewell
    I think Eastwood’s audience is going to eat this movie up, and maybe even turn it into a rallying cry. The legacy of the bombing of Olympic Centennial Park might end up suiting the bomber just fine.
  18. Heaven
    A great deal of energy is expended on metaphysical ruminations that become ever fuzzier. The film is intended as an allegory, but it works best as a jailbreak romance. In this movie, lowbrow trumps highbrow every time.
  19. The Bourne Identity
    All this is diverting but also borderline dull.
  20. American Animals
    The bigger problem is that stupidity just isn’t a very interesting subject.
  21. Leave the World Behind
    Unfortunately, the film doesn’t demonstrate any kind of interest in, or affection for, its characters. They’re cardboard cutouts, there to represent postures rather than evoke our sympathy or humanity or even curiosity.
  22. 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.
  23. Everybody Knows
    The mystery becomes popcorn-chompingly compelling, each new piece of information adding shading and dimension to the true shape of the family. Nobody is above suspicion or below empathy.
  24. The Wedding Banquet
    Even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.
  25. Hustle
    Hustle works, and it works beautifully, thanks to Sandler’s commitment.
  26. Thank You for Your Service
    Thank You for Your Service is a more critical film than most in this milieu, and it’s refreshingly honest about mental-health issues.
  27. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The jokes might not be the funniest, the bits might not be the wittiest, but it’s all done with such verve and velocity that we might not notice.
  28. Avengers: Infinity War
    Flagrantly, bombastically extravagant, it plays its audience like a hundred million fiddles.
  29. Maps to the Stars
    Please don’t bore me by complaining that the characters are “unlikable.” The defense admits that the movie is indefensible. Just breathe in the aroma of decay and howl like a banshee.
  30. F1: The Movie
    This is Pitt’s movie, and like its star, it never opens itself up enough to truly take off.
  31. John Wick
    John Wick is a violent, violent, violent film, but its artful splatter is miles away from the brutality of "Taken" or the gleeful gore of "The Equalizer." It’s a beautiful coffee-table action movie.
  32. 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.
  33. The Way, Way Back
    The story doesn’t feel dramatized. It feels pitched.
  34. Chef
    A comfort movie about comfort food, Chef won’t knock your socks off, but it believes in itself — and for Favreau, that’s all that matters.
  35. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    It's probably easier for an ex-prosecutor known for macho threats to say he got caught screwing than for him to say he got screwed. But folks, he was reamed.
  36. Journey to the West
    Chow is at his best when juggling disparate elements – tragedy, slapstick, romance, melancholy, fantasy. Everything is big with him; he seems incapable of underplaying anything. The crazier his movies, the better. And Journey to the West might be the craziest thing he’s done yet. You may wonder, afterwards, if you dreamt it all.
  37. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    The film remains too mannered for its own good; it’s unquestionably nice and well-intentioned, but lacking momentum.
  38. The Party's Just Beginning
    A brutal, meandering depiction of a quarter-life crisis, Gillan’s script is staunchly resistant of silver linings or “it gets better” messaging.
  39. Friends with Money
    Friends With Money doesn't quite snap into focus. It just floats along-an agreeable comedy of manners with actors you like to hang out with.
  40. Enola Holmes
    Bonham-Carter is somehow both perfect for the part of Mother Holmes and, unfortunately, wasted. Perhaps we’re merely being set up for future adventures, in which these characters will presumably play greater parts.
  41. My Friend Dahmer
    It would be misleading to call My Friend Dahmer “entertaining,” but I got off on its fuzzy sense of dread, its poker-faced ghoulishness.
  42. Come True
    There are only a couple of jump scares in Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True — mild ones at that — but the movie’s elusive sense of menace lingers for days, weeks, possibly forever. That’s quite an achievement for a film whose premise isn’t particularly novel.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Quiet Place: Day One
    The don’t-speak values of the series, faithfully preserved by Sarnoski and beautifully expressed by Nyong’o, are still welcome in a Hollywood landscape that would prefer to drown audiences in sound. But if you repeat it enough, a bold new approach to multiplex thrills becomes just more noise.
  44. X2: X-Men United
    The best new addition to the corp is Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler.
  45. Paranormal Activity
    I’ve never seen a movie that so cunningly exploits our anticipation.
  46. Theater of War
    As a onetime dramaturg and Brechtian, I enjoyed the chin-wags and the glimpses of Streep in rehearsal--especially her quivering admission that she can't bear the thought of anyone seeing her process.
  47. No Time to Die
    Amid the grit and the attempted emotional catharses and the sturm-und-drang, there is an actual Bond movie in there. No Time to Die is fun, but only when it dares to be.
  48. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Directed by David Zellner from a script he wrote with his brother, Nathan, the film has its tender mercies, as well-meaning Minnesotans attempt to reach out to this preoccupied Japanese woman with almost no English.
  49. Rafiki
    Its lead protagonists and their endless reserve of raw, bittersweet chemistry are Kahiu’s greatest asset.
  50. Just Mercy
    Jordan has a great face for doubt and inner conflict. There’s a quizzical, nervous quality to him — which is also why when he does action movies, he’s so wonderfully unpredictable — and you can sense his devotion to justice clashing with his genuine fear.
  51. The Place Beyond the Pines
    The segments are essentially monodramas, so sketchily written that the big moments feel less like recognizable human behavior than recognizable screenwriter overreaching.
  52. 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.
  53. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Lucas is a brilliant technician but a poor philosopher, and his lurchingly thought-out rendering of futuristic politics prevents the entire series from achieving the greatness to which it aspires. (You don’t make anything this big, for this long, without aiming for the planet Masterpiece.)
  54. Superman
    There’s a lot about how we complicate and obfuscate what should be obvious goods, such as saving the lives of children. But the film’s approach isn’t ham-fisted, and it makes room for gleefully fun stuff, too.
  55. Fracture
    What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.
  56. Departures
    It will resonate with anyone who has ever buried a loved one and struggled to reconcile the myriad emotions--grief, anger, helplessness. Which is to say, everyone. And yet out of this premise comes glop. Departures needed a little more work in the morgue--like cutting to the bone.
  57. People Places Things
    We know these characters are going through a lot, even if we don’t always see it. And so, this short, ramshackle, shrinking movie manages to stick with you.
  58. The Italian Job
    An elaborate techno-heist thriller, The Italian Job features some spectacular chase scenes, but for a change, the people doing the chasing are also worth watching.
  59. Never Look Away
    The actors are good, but their lovemaking has no raw edges, no messiness. Deschanel lights them like sculptures — art objects — while Richter saws away to serenade their transcendent oneness. It’s Middlebrow Realism, comrades.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jurassic Park
    Spielberg does deliver; he delivers thrills with all his genius for the mechanics of movement and the psychology of fear.
  61. Neighbors
    That very unknowability, which hampered so many Efron performances in the past, turns out to be his most humanizing trait, and Neighbors’ secret weapon.
  62. War Dance
    For these kids to sing and dance with all their hearts, they need to go to a place in themselves that should be closed down forever. The glories of War/Dance are torturously won, and all the more glorious for it.
  63. Noah
    It’s Aronofsky’s least personal work. So you get a fat dose of conventional melodrama with your Old Testament: It’s the antediluvian "Gladiator."
  64. Crimes of the Future
    Seydoux may exude voluptuous sensuality, and Stewart may be performing a whispery, dystopian take on a sultry librarian, but the film itself has an aloof, clinical quality. What interests it is not the potential of our physical forms for pleasure and revulsion, but their inevitable failure.
  65. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    In its broad strokes, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a fairly by-the-numbers action comedy, one that sometimes wears Cage’s presence like a talisman against the bad juju of slipshod storytelling. But the talisman works because the film never loses sight of its touchingly nutty premise and because Cage remains a compelling actor.
  66. Black Widow
    That it feels like it’s half at war with its title character, bringing her firmly to Earth (until she, like Bond in Moonraker, has to make her way to a high-altitude villain’s lair) and insisting on emotional coherence from her personal history, is its most interesting quality, though it’s maybe not as revolutionary as it first seems.
  67. Whip It
    Page is softer than in "Hard Candy" and "Juno." Without Diablo Cody comebacks, she’s even more marvelous.
  68. Z for Zachariah
    The descent into a tepid thriller of sexual jealousy slowly negates the abstract, almost metaphorical quality of this film — and it ultimately undoes the spell cast by that mesmerizing first half.
  69. Problemista
    The best parts of Problemista, which is a charming film without ever becoming more than semi-successful, bend the world through his perspective with the help of some Michel Gondry–esque DIY Surrealism.
  70. Praying with Lior
    Praying With Lior engages us on so many levels it transcends its middle-class Jewish milieu.
  71. Rustin
    All in all, one walks away from Rustin enchanted with Domingo’s performance, while feeling that a character as larger than life and momentous as Bayard Rustin surely deserves a film less dutiful and more inspired.
  72. The Good Thief
    Bob is a marvelous creation--a faker who is also the genuine article. He’s the perfect hero for a movie about the world as one big scam.
  73. Monsters and Men
    Monsters and Men, then, functions more as a lightly fictionalized photo essay than a narrative film — which is okay, it just means that it feeds more off timeliness than character or art, and there are obvious limitations to that.
  74. Last Days in the Desert
    [A] haunting, beautiful movie.
  75. The Captain
    It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element.
  76. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    But even with bits that are crazily inspired, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is depressing. The Apatow Factory is too comfy with its workers’ arrested development to move the boundary posts. If they could find scripts by female writers that dramatize the other side of the Great Sexual Divide, it might be a place of joy--and embarrassed recognition--for everyone.
  77. Dead Man's Wire
    It has plenty of gritty ’70s atmosphere (facial hair! Radio DJs!) and feels grounded in its time and place, but it also has a purposeful whiff of timeliness that tells us it’s as much about today as it is about 1977.
  78. Avatar: The Way of Water
    The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. He can bend Pandora to his will, and now he’s bent it to make what might be his most earnest film to date.
  79. Summer of Sam
    It's all been done before, and better.
  80. Snow Angels
    Scene by scene his (David Gordon Green’s) new film, Snow Angels, isn’t terrible. Parts of it are amusing, and there are wintry images that eat into the mind. But it’s one of the most disjunctive things I’ve ever sat through.
  81. The Blackening
    The Blackening gets halfway there, and has the benefit of some gifted performers and some very good ideas. It just never really figures out how to be a movie.
  82. Thirteen Days
    I much prefer the whacked-out, Dr. Strangelove-ish brand of political-apocalypse film to all this straitlaced you-are-there dramaturgy, which seems a throwback to the early sixties not only in time but in spirit. But what Thirteen Days sets out to do it does admirably.
  83. Almost Peaceful
    The film was adapted from a 1993 novel by Robert Bober, who drew on his own childhood experiences, and as it unwinds, one begins to appreciate Deville's desire to see things work out well for these people.
  84. Robot and Frank
    Robot & Frank, like its protagonist, is charming enough to get by with the sleight-of-hand. Its irresponsibility redeems it - it's a raspberry blown against the dying of the light.
  85. Vox Lux
    As a story of popular art born in the crucible of violent trauma, it’s a fantastic, wildly ambitious idea; as a filmed drama with human characters, it’s confoundingly executed at every turn. Vox Lux is a failure, but one I can’t stop thinking about.
  86. In Bruges
    For In Bruges to click, McDonagh needed either to get more real or more fake.
  87. Ned Rifle
    It’s an interesting idea, and the deep pall of suspicion that hangs over some of Ned Rifle is occasionally compelling. But the movie doesn’t exactly go anywhere.
  88. 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.
  89. Bolt
    As Bolt, John Travolta is inspired: His voice still cracks like an adolescent’s, and he has the perfect dopey innocence.
  90. 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.
  91. This Is the End
    Some of that fun is infectious. For a while. Maybe 45 minutes. But when actors look as if they’re having a better time than you are, the buzz wears off fast. You turn into a wallflower at an especially obnoxious party.
  92. The Door in the Floor
    Bridges redeems the clichéd role of spoiled artist-sot. He's flamboyantly entertaining, which is more than this otherwise dreary movie deserves.
  93. Sound of My Voice
    Batmanglij keeps the movie even-keeled, full of medium close-ups, underscored by ambient plinks and shimmers, with nothing to break the trance until a last scene that upends everything we thought we knew.
  94. Steel City
    It has vivid characters, a strong sense of place, and a free-floating hopelessness that never precludes the possibility of meaningful action.
  95. Fahrenheit 9/11
    More often than not, Moore goes for the guffaw, and as enjoyable as that can be, it falls short of producing the kind of devastating, in-depth analysis that might really challenge the hearts and minds of ALL audiences, left and right. At the very least, this approach undercuts the effectiveness of Moore’s own case.
  96. An Ideal Husband
    Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism.
  97. Cuties
    Cuties is not a blunt screed or a finger-wagging cautionary tale in either direction — which is one reason why anyone watching the film looking for clear messages about right and wrong is bound to be disappointed, maybe even outraged.
  98. Halloween
    Green’s Halloween doesn’t have the geographical simplicity — the elegance — of Carpenter’s. It’s a bit all over the place. But I love how he takes memorable images from the original and turns them on their heads.
  99. Synecdoche, New York
    It's heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.
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