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 Good Dinosaur
    The resulting film is amiable, pretty, and charming in all the right ways — even if it ultimately settles for a fairly typical tale of a late bloomer finding his way.
  2. Creed
    Movies don’t always have to be “how things are.” When they’re as warm and rousing as Creed, they can be “how we want to make things.”
  3. Democrats
    It truly is a movie about politics, and it’s among the more mesmerizing ones you’ll see — even if you know very little about Zimbabwe itself.
  4. Man Up
    Even a second-rate farce like Man Up can be a jolly pick-me-up. Its momentum alone made me very happy.
  5. Goodnight Mommy
    Goodnight Mommy is a very disquieting, very suspenseful film, but proceed with caution.
  6. Mustang
    Mustang breathes new life into the old trope by reconnecting it with the elemental horror that drives it. These aren’t just body snatchers; they take your soul, too.
  7. Legend
    Hardy, it seems, is an ecosystem of love and hate and betrayal and madness unto himself. The rest of Legend just can’t keep up.
  8. Carol
    Haynes has calibrated the film so precisely to Blanchett’s talents that he couldn’t have rendered her better with animation.
  9. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    The final film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian Hunger Games YA novels, Mockingjay — Part 2, is a potent antiwar saga: bleak, savage, and very modern in the depiction of an unholy union between political manipulation and showbiz.
  10. Entertainment
    Entertainment wears its contempt too arrogantly, fulsome in its emptiness.
  11. By the Sea
    You keep watching not just because she and Brad and the Mediterranean are beautiful, but also because small, surprising details start to take on great importance.
  12. Trumbo
    Trumbo is a film that at times can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. At its worst, it’s musty and awkward; at its best, it’s irreverent and funny. Unfortunately, it settles for the former more than the latter.
  13. The Peanuts Movie
    Somehow, this Peanuts feels familiar, even cozy. I can’t make any great claims for it, but it feels like the return of an old friend.
  14. SPECTRE
    The new James Bond movie Spectre makes a satisfying final chapter to the four-film saga of Daniel Craig’s 007, even if that saga turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.
  15. Spotlight
    This tight, relatively low-key, step-by-step procedural has a stronger impact than any horror movie.
  16. Brooklyn
    Brooklyn doesn’t quite capture Brooklyn, but its ambivalence about being Irish is gloriously epic.
  17. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    The gags are mostly puerile and uninspired — like the film was dreamed up by a bunch of tired, wired 13-year-olds; it has their insistence but little of their invention.
  18. The Armor of Light
    Far beyond the courage of its convictions, The Armor of Light also has the intelligence and grace to embrace its contradictions. It’s a beautiful, conflicted piece of work.
  19. Love
    This is not a rich, novelistic tapestry of humanity; this is a solipsistic world, enclosed on all sides by the director’s ego. But the entrapment is vivid and poignant. Look past all the beautiful people fucking, and you realize that Love is sad in all the right ways.
  20. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Our Brand is Crisis hits a lot of clunky notes and the end is unforgivably cornball, but it’s still one of the liveliest political black comedies I’ve seen in a while. The pacing is lickety-split, the talk is boisterous, and the cast is all aces.
  21. 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.
  22. (T)error
    For all of (T)error’s topicality and its thriller-like qualities, what makes the film is Sutcliffe and Cabral’s compact, complex portrait of Saeed — paranoid, chatty, mired in self-loathing, but also oddly reflective.
  23. The Forbidden Room
    The Forbidden Room is often maddening, occasionally beautiful, and ultimately unforgettable.
  24. Trash
    A misguided attempt to mix together social realism, children’s adventure, and political thriller, Stephen Daldry’s Trash never sits still long enough to be any of those things.
  25. Suffragette
    Suffragette is slick and efficient, but also diffuse and formless; it’ll pass the time but it fails to engage.
  26. Tokyo Tribe
    Beneath the goofy plot, the tacky fashions, the fronting rappers, and the exploding bodies, there’s an undeniable earnestness to Tokyo Tribe. It’s the craziest film you’ll see this year, but it’s also — dear God, am I really saying this? — one of the sweetest.
  27. Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk is terrifying and strange, to be sure, but it’s the old-fashioned veneer that makes it beautiful.
  28. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
    If only Ghost Dimension spent more time in the ghost dimension and less time in the people dimension, we might have had something.
  29. I Smile Back
    The movie improves on Koppelman’s ungainly novel but is generally dreary and light on insight. Director Adam Salky steers clear of the usual addiction-movie clichés, but he doesn’t have anything to replace them with, so it’s as if all the connective tissue is gone.
  30. Rock the Kasbah
    The air of mourning might have worked as a counterpoint to the silliness if Mitch Glazer’s script had smart gags, but as one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who’s really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter (not granddaughter) and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton–style hooker-businesswoman.
  31. The Last Witch Hunter
    Watching The Last Witch Hunter is like sitting by while someone else plays a game whose coolness eludes us.
  32. Heart of a Dog
    Anderson says that as a child she dreamed of making something that had never been made before, and, with the help of some gifted artists and editors and camera-people, she has done it again — with bells on. The only thing that would make it more pleasurable would be Anderson narrating it in person.
  33. Beasts of No Nation
    Fukunaga’s hurtling camera and taut cutting keep Beasts of No Nation only just this side of hallucinatory, and Elba is the kind of titanic actor to kick it to a near-mythic level.
  34. Truth
    The most engrossing part of Truth is the gradual, grueling retreat from the story, first by its participants and then by the network that broadcast it.
  35. Goosebumps
    The movie version of Goosebumps replicates that balancing act. It’s a cheerful, nasty delight.
  36. Room
    Room is astonishing: It transmutes a lurid, true-crime situation into a fairy tale in which fairy tales are a source of survival.
  37. Crimson Peak
    It doesn’t always seem to know what it wants to be. But it’s still full of marvels.
  38. Pan
    Careens helplessly between the garish and the generic.
  39. Labyrinth of Lies
    Here’s a movie about the efforts to bring the soldiers stationed at Auschwitz to justice, and it’s strangely light on its feet.
  40. Steve Jobs
    The first act is a thing of beauty and the second, good enough. Shame about that third act, though, and the ending that retroactively diminishes everything that preceded it.
  41. Experimenter
    Experimenter is busily, thrillingly reflective. Its artificiality makes it seem even more alive, more in the present tense.
  42. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Taxi is a strange movie. These are nonprofessional actors, and the film veers between documentary realism and playful staginess.
  43. Bridge of Spies
    It’s Rylance who keeps Bridge of Spies standing. He gives a teeny, witty, fabulously non-emotive performance, every line musical and slightly ironic — the irony being his forthright refusal to deceive in a world founded on lies.
  44. Freeheld
    Perhaps seeking not to sensationalize or to Hollywood-ize a story set in a drab, mundane world, Sollett shoots without any frills. That’s usually a good thing, but here it helps to suck the life out of the material — in part because Nyswaner’s screenplay seems to have settled for the most direct, speechifying way of dramatizing the issues at hand.
  45. The Martian
    The Martian is shot, designed, computer-generated, and scripted on a level that makes most films of its ilk look slipshod. Scott and writer Drew Goddard aren’t trying to make an “important” sci-fi movie like Interstellar. They aim lower but blow past their marks.
  46. The Walk
    The problem — not fatal — with The Walk is that the narrative wire droops between the movie’s opening and final sequences.
  47. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Hotel Transylvania 2 is minor, to be sure, but given the comedian’s recent work, it still counts as a pleasant surprise.
  48. Finders Keepers
    It’s a tale of class privilege gone wrong, the relentless hunger for fame, stoic mourning and submerged family neuroses, and the crazy contortions caused by money and ownership. In 82 svelte minutes, Finders Keepers encapsulates something ineffable about the modern American experience.
  49. Mississippi Grind
    A film that turns on this kind of ambiguity would ordinarily be cold, grim, paranoid. But Boden and Fleck give this world texture and warmth; their widescreen interiors glow, and it’s hard not to be lulled into them by the siren song of conversation and clinking drinks and possibility.
  50. The Keeping Room
    The Keeping Room is slow and rather arty, with a chamber-music (plus harmonica and fiddle) score and cinematography that shrouds the faces in shadow. But it’s a fine piece of storytelling and earns its look and feel.
  51. The Intern
    The Intern degenerates into a series of monologues about ambition and relationships and having it all. As the speeches pile up, our goodwill dissipates, and so does the film’s magic.
  52. Stonewall
    Unfortunately, Roland Emmerich is a terrible filmmaker, and his efforts to make his protagonist "relatable" backfire spectacularly.
  53. The Green Inferno
    Unlike the '70s Italian cannibal movies, The Green Inferno doesn’t have a mondo vibe. It’s artfully made and acted with skill.
  54. 99 Homes
    Bahrani’s casting of Dern is genius. She’s such a profoundly unaffected actress that you instantly buy her aversion to her son’s lucre. She has a moral and aesthetic problem with that tacky mansion on the waterway. She wouldn’t fit in there.
  55. Prophet's Prey
    At times, I found myself wishing Berg focused more on Brower and Krakauer’s investigations and given the film a more present-tense narrative. This is a fascinating movie, but there’s a lot to cover here, and one can occasionally feel lost amid all the strands.
  56. The Cut
    There is little doubt throughout that it’s a work of artistry, grace, and, yes, outrage.
  57. Pawn Sacrifice
    This is another moderately interesting but shallow biopic with an actor going for broke — to win, not to draw.
  58. Captive
    You’re left with no real catharsis — religious or emotional. And without that, Captive winds up building to a big nothing.
  59. Sicario
    What keeps Sicario from cynicism is the nature and depth of Villeneuve’s gaze, not childishly wide-eyed but capable still of feeling pain. He’s a terrific director. You know that if his heroine, Alice, gets out of Cartel-land alive, she might spend a few months in an asylum, but she’ll be back, hell-bent on seizing the foreground.
  60. 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.
  61. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    The Scorch Trials isn’t a particularly good movie, but it’s just fast and nutty enough to keep you entertained.
  62. Everest
    Everest may disappoint those looking for a more awe-inspiring film with big vistas and jaw-dropping stunts and acts of surreal heroism. Unlike many mountain-disaster stories, this is the kind that makes you never want to look at a mountain again.
  63. Welcome to Leith
    Welcome to Leith is a sober, terrifying look at the very real monsters roaming the quiet countryside.
  64. Coming Home
    Coming Home works best on a more lived-in, emotional level. It presents a trajectory not uncommon in Zhang's films: a journey from howling passion to somber, almost tragic acceptance.
  65. The Visit
    M. Night Shyamalan has come up with an unoriginal faux-doc horror picture that actually works like a demonic charm.
  66. Sleeping with Other People
    Sleeping With Other People is a rare American non-homogenized rom-com, and it’s delightful even when you’re not sure what you’re watching.
  67. The Perfect Guy
    The kind of movie you keep wishing would just cut loose and go off the deep end. Nobody goes to these "Fatal Attraction" retreads anymore for serious drama. But this one is a movie torn — too grim and self-important to go truly nuts, but too silly and slipshod to work on a more somber level.
  68. James White
    James White looks like a simple film on its surface.... But despite the vérité-influenced stylization, writer-director Mond (whose own struggle with loss likely inspired some of this story) doesn’t seem too interested in realism or grit.
  69. Time Out of Mind
    Moverman is attempting something hugely ambitious with Time Out of Mind: a socially conscious, existential-displacement art movie. I think it would have worked better with a little less rigor and a little more intimacy.
  70. American Ultra
    American Ultra is undemanding late-summer studio fare — ultraforgettable. But I’ll remember the faces of Eisenberg and Stewart, who are easy to ridicule but, whatever the pundits say, very much movie stars.
  71. Sinister 2
    Sinister 2 is far from perfect, but it has a nobility that’s rare in much modern horror cinema.
  72. Hitman: Agent 47
    Hitman: Agent 47, much like its anonymous title, is a film pretending to be an action movie instead of the real thing. It might as well be a commercial. Or, hell, a video game.
  73. The Mend
    One of the very best American independent films you’ll see this year, John Magary’s The Mend, takes what could have easily been a mundane tale of brotherly dysfunction and turns it into something abstract and electrifying.
  74. Queen of Earth
    Queen of Earth is a psychodrama shot like a horror movie — "Persona" meets "The Shining." Right down to the haunting, minimalist score (by Keegan DeWitt) that’s perched dangerously, wonderfully between spooky and lyrical.
  75. The Second Mother
    It’s a drama, and it smartly uses its little moments of humiliation to open our eyes to a world of delicate, but deep, injustice.
  76. A Walk in the Woods
    The lax, lame A Walk in the Woods is a road movie without a road, a journey of self-discovery without discovery, and a tale of friendship without any chemistry.
  77. The Golden Dream
    Don’t expect incendiary topicality from The Golden Dream; this is more poetry than politics.
  78. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    No doubt, Black Panthers won’t be for everybody. Despite Nelson’s efforts at balance, this is a largely admiring portrait, and there will be those who wish the film focused more on the Panthers’ less savory actions and cases. But the film is also refreshingly clearheaded about the limits of idealism and provocative action.
  79. The Transporter Refueled
    Stupid, stupid, stupid — and it certainly knows it. You might even chuckle contentedly at its knowing silliness — that’s sort of what this low-rent franchise is here for — but you’ll also miss Jason Statham, whose deadpan self-awareness somehow legitimized the ridiculousness of the previous films.
  80. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    Little here is new, but the archival footage is well chosen, the interviewees are illuminating, and Gibney, as usual, potently synthesizes what’s out there.
  81. No Escape
    It’s just plain offensive — and not all that well made, either. No Escape takes the casual xenophobia of something like Taken, crossbreeds it with something altogether more noxious, then asks us to kick back and enjoy the ride. We don’t. We can’t. And the ride isn’t that great to begin with.
  82. We Are Your Friends
    It’s all big, dumb, broad strokes, with plot points visible from miles away. But it works where it matters: The music is fantastic, and the film invests you in its central relationship.
  83. She's Funny That Way
    She’s Funny That Way often displays an old-school generosity and polish, and at least one breakout performance — but just as often, its moments of inspiration are tempered by miscasting and shrill attempts at humor.
  84. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    Look past its colorful, smooth surfaces and something corrosive emerges. And it’s not like the film isn’t aware of this. But it doesn’t really know what to do with it.
  85. Being Evel
    “He’s probably the only man in history who has become famous for trying to kill himself,” says Johnny Carson as he introduces Knievel in a clip from The Tonight Show. As the film makes clear, Evel often bore out that tension in his acts, and it slowly, subtly ate away at him.
  86. Grandma
    Grandma marks a new era in gay cinema — one’s that confident and mature enough to acknowledge regret.
  87. Meru
    Meru is a packed 90 minutes. And I guess it is inspiring, in the sense that if human beings can endure this kind of risk and punishment, they could colonize Mars or breed a super-race to carry our species to the ends of the galaxy. All the familiar critical adjectives (harrowing, etc.) sound especially lame in this context. The movie is sick.
  88. Tom at the Farm
    Tom at the Farm, adapted by Dolan and Michel Marc Bouchard from Bouchard’s own play, has the outward trappings of a genre piece. And as such, it’s fairly suspenseful. But at heart, it’s still very much an Xavier Dolan film – ragged, explosive, and often moving.
  89. 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.
  90. Straight Outta Compton
    Straight Outta Compton is among the most potent rags-to-riches showbiz movies ever made.
  91. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    It turns out to be absolutely delightful.
  92. Cop Car
    Cop Car does enough things so well for so long that to quibble with its finale feels churlish. This is a film very much worth seeing.
  93. Dark Places
    As a result, the mystery itself eventually becomes tiresome and shrug-worthy, even as the film breathlessly racks up the revelations. In the end, this twisty thriller just winds up twisting in the wind.
  94. The Gift
    It’s that rarest of psychological thrillers: one that actually lives up to the words “psychological thriller.”
  95. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The first thing to know about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that young British actress Powley is staggeringly good in it.
  96. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    Shaun the Sheep might look like an exciting, no-nonsense tale for little kids — and it totally is, on one level — but beneath its pitch-perfect simplicity lies great wisdom and beauty.
  97. Fort Tilden
    The movie is broad and mean and for a while very funny, but even when it goes sour — when the world slaps them in the face for their sins — it doesn’t lose its momentum.
  98. Mistress America
    Mistress America is hit-and-miss. It’s not as burdened by blame as other Baumbach films — Gerwig leavens him. But it’s labored.
  99. Fantastic Four
    Given the level of talent involved both in front of and behind the camera, nobody should feel much joy — no anti-tentpole schadenfreude or blockbuster-busting righteousness — to discover that the latest Fantastic Four film is a catastrophe
  100. 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.
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