New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

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For 3,962 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: 2,221 out of 3962
  2. Mixed: 1,378 out of 3962
  3. Negative: 363 out of 3962
3962 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    It's Jordan’s feat to make a linear, talking-heads documentary (among the heads are Jonas Mekas, Robert Wilson, John Waters, Nick Zedd, and John Zorn) that still manages to evoke something of Smith's floating, ravishingly colorful dreamscapes--a menagerie of creatures that, even as they're captured on film, are already fading into the air.
  3. Darfur Now
    The depressing subtext is that even with detailed proof of ongoing genocide, it takes movie stars to get to the movers and shakers, and to get worthy movies like this one into theaters.
  4. Diary of the Dead
    Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.
  5. Shame
    McQueen films his characters like specimens in a jar, but the stakes are so high that the actors deliver.
  6. So Close
    Cory Yuen's So Close is a kind of Hong Kong martial-arts variation on the Charlie's Angels movies, only better.
  7. Drop
    It’s a perfectly preposterous set-up for a thriller, but the core of Fahy’s agonizingly distracted performance is something real and recognizable.
  8. Julie & Julia
    Julie & Julia is full of holes, but you don't even care when Streep is onscreen.
  9. 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.
  10. A Dangerous Method
    That wordiness coupled with Cronenberg's classical restraint is part of the splendid Freudian joke at the movie's center.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wedding Singer
    It’s a pleasant movie -- very pleasant, in fact -- but soft as a down quilt.
  12. Bruno
    Is Brüno riotous? Yes, more so than "Borat," in which Baron Cohen's targets were ducks in a barrel and largely undeserving of ridicule. He doesn't aim much higher here, but his tricks are more inventive.
  13. 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.
  14. Greenberg
    Greenberg would be a heckuva movie if we could just get Greenberg out of there.
  15. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Jayne Mansfield’s Car isn’t likely to set America’s theaters on fire, but it’s a powerful whisper of a film.
  16. 3:10 to Yuma
    As Ben Wade, gang leader and murderer, he gives an ironic performance, but Crowe’s irony is more intense than other actors’ obsession. He turns the idea of having so few emotions--of being beyond caring--into a bloody joke. He upstages everyone with his laughing eyes.
  17. The Witch
    To my taste, the movie finally feels rather one-dimensional, basic. But there’s no disputing its awful power.
  18. Gringo
    Gringo is a slightly above-average crime farce with a way above-average protagonist — both in terms of writing and performance, and especially given the genre. It’s a surprising high point in Oyelowo’s already distinguished career.
  19. Death in Love
    A pretentious and stilted but weirdly compelling blend of sins-of-the-parent saga and horror movie.
  20. A Home at the End of the World
    Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.
  21. The Eagle
    The Eagle is furiously unsettled-thematically, temporally, meteorologically. Wild-eyed, long-haired Brits leap atop the Romans' shields as the soldiers blindly hack away, the bodies so close that you can barely tell the victor from the vanquished. The battles in the fog and rain have a hallucinatory power.
  22. 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.
  23. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The movie has amusingly broad performances; good, bloodless scares (the characters die horribly — but have multiple lives); and self-empowering life lessons too bland to be specious. You could do far worse.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. Pain & Gain
    Pain & Gain gives you a rush while at the same time making you queasy about how you’re getting off.
  27. Death on the Nile
    When given the freedom, he can be one of the most overheated of directors, but the excess rarely feels cynical or cheap. In fact, it feels personal. You sense that he wants you to get excited about this stuff because he gets so excited about this stuff.
  28. Religulous
    As he delivered his climactic sermon in the Israeli desert, I murmured, "Amen, brother." Religulous is a religious experience.
  29. His House
    Horror is often cathartic, purifying — it puts you through the wringer but you emerge on the other side, somehow cleansed. You’ll find no such succor here. His House is beautifully made, and its scares are monstrously effective, but its images of real-world dread remain unresolved, its specters unvanquished. The film leaves you with wounds that won’t heal.
  30. Duck Butter
    Duck Butter is a lot — I felt dizzy upon leaving the theater, like I myself had just gone through that same wired 24 hours the protagonists did. For that, I have to give Arteta and Shawkat props — and as the writing debut for the latter, it isn’t shabby at all
  31. The White Tiger
    Through this unique figure, and through this highly specific portrait of one country, The White Tiger achieves a kind of universality.
  32. Overboard
    By shifting its perspective and updating its anxieties, Overboard is a decent-to-great model for a rom-com renaissance, the kind of film that sends one out on a high note great enough to blur many of the blemishes that have come before.
  33. Supernova
    Supernova isn’t adapted from a play, but it sometimes feels like it was, not because of its talkiness or the tightness of its focus, but because it has a tendency to be a little blunter in practice than its understated initial tone might have you expect. The performances are lovely, though, and they carry this minor-key movie through to its ambiguous end.
  34. Haywire
    Soderbergh tends to get one big idea - a thesis idea - per film and stick with it even when a touch more flexibility would help. Here it's that non-kinetic camera, which he's so wedded to that parts of the film seem underenergized, like a cheap seventies or early eighties picture you'd catch at two in the morning on Cinemax's tenth most popular channel.
  35. 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.
  36. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    I actually liked about two-thirds of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; I got impatient when Mister Rogers receded into the background and the film turned full-time to solving the problems of Lloyd Vogel, who’s based on the magazine writer Tom Junod.
  37. Bird
    Bird is the newest feature from Andrea Arnold — her first scripted film since the 2016 U.S. road odyssey American Honey — and it serves up an endearing, ungainly mix of the gritty and the magical.
  38. 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.
  39. Puzzle
    Like its protagonist, Puzzle finds itself as it goes along, and Agnes becomes a truly interesting person to root for.
  40. Freedomland
    Its focus--the children--are not even onscreen very much. But their ghosts are everywhere, and the pain of the film is primal.
  41. The Walk
    The problem — not fatal — with The Walk is that the narrative wire droops between the movie’s opening and final sequences.
  42. The Man I Love
    Jimmy is a compulsively magnetic figure who keeps everyone at arm’s length, including the audience, and for a film that embodies a voluptuous sense of tragedy, that leaves it undeniably aloof.
  43. Aferim!
    Like much of Romanian cinema, Aferim!’s narrative and stylistic gambit doesn’t quite click until the final scenes.
  44. A Prophet
    Rahim is an exciting, unpredictable presence, and Arestrup’s César has a stature that’s nearly Shakespearean.
  45. Turbo
    In the end, Turbo is an unambitious movie about a very ambitious character, but it has an infectious sense of fun. Don’t expect too much from it, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
  46. Reprise
    Broadly, this is a coming-of-age movie in the "Diner" mold: Trier tracks Phillip and Erik and a few of their pals as they stagger into a world that can't be attuned to their (male adolescent) expectations--especially in regard to women.
  47. Monster Hunter
    There’s something truly electric about the pure, visual storytelling of Monster Hunter.
  48. Wuthering Heights
    Wuthering Heists is Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date.
  49. Strays
    The story doesn’t want to surprise us so much as it wants to live down to our crude expectations. At its best, as with the aforementioned squirrel-a-trois, Strays jolts us with randomness. But most of the time, it’s pleasingly, predictably deranged.
  50. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The most successful quality of the film is how close it keeps in spirit and haphazard style to the first two installments, and how it feels proudly unstuck in time.
  51. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    If, like so many conspiracy-mongers, Brügger is in this to make his name, whatever the social consequences, his comeuppance should be swift. But I want to believe that this isn’t a stunt and that his first-person meta nonsense — his desire to call attention to his floundering — is a sign of honesty, not obscurantism.
  52. A Hero
    As further demonstration of the director’s already impressive ability to build stomach-gnawing suspense out of everyday interactions, the movie is well worth seeing. But it also represents a step back in some ways. Farhadi is one of the world’s great filmmakers, but the generosity of spirit that was so pivotal to his earlier work seems to be in retreat in his latest.
  53. Trap
    It works so much better than should be possible because of Hartnett, who gets a showcase on par with the one the filmmaker gave to James McAvoy in Split.
  54. Black Snake Moan
    It's outlandish, hilariously overripe, and possibly sexist: You'd expect no less from Craig Brewer, the writer and director who made the passionate case for how hard it is out there for a pimp. But I loved the picture's tabloid energy and heart.
  55. Monsoon Wedding
    Eminently disposable, but that's its charm. It stays with you just long enough to make you smile.
  56. Causeway
    Lawrence and Henry have a warm, natural chemistry, and that rapport really seems to guide where the movie ends up, instead of the other way around.
  57. Bully
    Bully is repetitive and not especially artful, but children who allow themselves to see the world through the eyes of the film's victims will never be the same.
  58. Relic
    What makes this movie so frustrating is that it ends on an intriguing message about what we inherit, what we’re bound to through our families. But without the heft of sincere horror behind it, Relic falls short of its potential and we’re left wondering how terrifying this message actually is.
  59. Cookie's Fortune
    Pleasingly shaggy.
  60. Crooked House
    It has its creaky corners, but there are enough twists and shocks to keep it engaging throughout.
  61. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    As a film, it’s warm and beautiful without being sentimental about the temporary intimacy that alcohol can provide, creating bonds that can dissolve in the daylightlike haze but are no less legitimate in the moment for it.
  62. Coach Carter
    Jackson's wonderfully nuanced, witty performance, and a few unexpected plot turns, give Coach Carter a subtext that helps complicate such knee-jerk oversimplifications, redeeming the role with energetic humor and a loose-limbed grace.
  63. Late Fame
    The premise of Late Fame is so captivating that one wants to forgive its shortcomings and focus on what it does so well, starting with a truly great and nuanced role for Dafoe, whose physical presence can evoke coarse sturdiness and emotional delicacy at the same time.
  64. The Lost King
    The fact that The Lost King never quite reconciles this tension between striving for noble recognition and the fallacy of divine majesty feels like an implicit damnation of both.
  65. Studio 54
    Swift, entertaining documentary.
  66. Amazing Grace
    Michael Apted's Amazing Grace is a beautifully chiseled blunt instrument. No, it's not subtle, but how subtle was slavery?
  67. Nostalgia
    Pellington and Perry can be accused of over-enunciating their ideas, but any film flooded with this level of emotion is worthy of our respect — and our tears.
  68. Sex and the City
    Sex and the City: The Motion Picture is a joyful wallow. And it's more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it's what the series finale should have been.
  69. 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.
  70. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    By turns desperately funny and unfunnily desperate?
  71. Nancy Drew
    It's one of the few tween movies that isn't in your face; its limpness becomes appealing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    Intriguing and entertaining despite some rough edges, Dan Katzir’s documentary profits immeasurably from the ancient Spaisman’s genuine charisma.
  73. A Short History of Decay
    Not a lot happens, and yet, as in the best so-called “slice of life” stories, you feel one way of life ending and another struggling to be born. The little that happens is enough.
  74. The Devil's Backbone
    del Toro blends agit-prop politics and ghoulishness without making the entire enterprise seem silly.
  75. Run
    Whenever Paulson is on screen, she gives Run a much-needed jolt of vitality as this Munchausen’s-by-proxy monster in catalog knitwear. Her character’s devotion is as terrible as it is unshakeable, but what makes the turn so enjoyable is that it’s grounded in something recognizable — a soul-deep dread of being abandoned, hidden under a nurturer’s smile.
  76. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    An altogether warm, sharp, and unobjectionable family holiday film.
  77. The Man Who Sold His Skin
    It tackles the refugee crisis, capitalism, political repression, and First World hypocrisy within the context of an art-world satire. It’s sometimes confused in conception, but never confusing. It’s a wild, modern-day fable that is lively and thought-provoking … so long as you don’t actually think too hard about it.
  78. Happy Death Day 2U
    Stalk-and-kill movies bear some resemblance to classic farces, but no horror movies have taken the similarities as far as Happy Death Day and its busier, just-as-fun sequel, Happy Death 2 U. The new film repeats some of the original material but with even more madcap permutations.
  79. Hail Satan?
    Lane observes with both wryness and palpable admiration as groups across the country embrace the gothic pageantry of the Temple as a means of exercising their political freedom.
  80. Avengers: Infinity War
    Flagrantly, bombastically extravagant, it plays its audience like a hundred million fiddles.
  81. Die My Love
    It’s not a film that fully works, but it’s a performance that’s monumental — and very grown up.
  82. MaXXXine
    As the crowning touch on West’s horror-movie mille-feuille, MaXXXine demonstrates that the trilogy never really had all that much going on, depth-wise, despite its sprawl. But Goth does her own synthesis of the characters she’s played across the titles, and the result is alternately disturbing, touching, and downright triumphant.
  83. 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.
  84. 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.
  85. King Richard
    When King Richard works, it sings.
  86. 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.
  87. Crown Heights
    We’re left floored by the facts of Colin Warner’s case; the film itself falls away.
  88. 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.
  89. The Cut
    There is little doubt throughout that it’s a work of artistry, grace, and, yes, outrage.
  90. Man Up
    Even a second-rate farce like Man Up can be a jolly pick-me-up. Its momentum alone made me very happy.
  91. First Reformed
    First Reformed is rigorously austere (as befits the author of Transcendental Style in Film), but every frame suggests a longing for a world elsewhere. It could be argued that it gets away from Schrader, who probably had to wrest the script from his own hands to begin shooting.
  92. Under the Skin
    At times the film is right on the border between mesmerizing and narcotizing, but it casts an otherworldly spell.
  93. Nobody 2
    The main danger with these types of movies is that all the fighting and shooting and snapping and stabbing and exploding will feel predictable or anonymous in a universe where action movies have become mere background noise. Tjahjanto infuses just enough creativity in his set pieces to keep us watching.
  94. In the Fade
    Thanks to chillingly spare storytelling, Kruger’s momentous performance, and a score by Josh Homme (the front man of Queens of the Stone Age) that features a sort of screechy clang that gave me shivers, In the Fade is gripping. But it’s hard to know what to take away from it.
  95. Perfect Sense
    You've got to make room in your heart for a film in which the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but a cuddle.
  96. Colette
    Politeness may be the film’s weakest point, whether with its characters or bedroom scenes. But it’s hardly something to complain about, especially when the company is this lively.
  97. Sleight
    The film lives and dies by Latimore’s performance, which is quiet and ever-shifting.
  98. Hall Pass
    It's a terrific performance-and terrifying. Owen Wilson is aging: Where goeth my own youth?
  99. Notorious C.H.O.
    She sometimes falls into the same trap that Lenny Bruce fell into, playing the taboo-breaking emancipator, but for the most part she's blessedly bawdy.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  100. 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.
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