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 TV Set
    It's deftly calibrated and acted with relish: Kasdan is really good!
  2. Swan Song
    Swan Song is a tremendously tender love letter to someone who survived so many of the slings and arrows that accompanied being an openly gay man in a small, conservative area.
  3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    It's one of the weirdest achievements in film history: Temperamentally, Spielberg and Kubrick are such polar opposites that A.I. has the moment-to-moment effect of being completely at odds with itself.
  4. The Dating Game
    The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality.
  5. Arlington Road
    If the bad guys in the real world were all this obvious, life would be a whole lot easier.
  6. Caught Stealing
    Caught Stealing is an intermittently fun experience that would be a better time if Aronofsky either loosened up a little more or, conversely, maintained a tighter grip on the wheel.
  7. Unexpected
    Smulders’s performance makes Unexpected more than worthwhile.
  8. The Runaways
    In patches it's agreeably lurid, but it's otherwise ho-hum.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Gambler
    The Gambler is a perceptive and remarkably paced drama, with director Karel Reisz in full command of his medium. [07 Oct 1974, p.93]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Other
    There is a consistency of character, time and place that properly compliments the plotting and is admirable enough to almost - but not quite - make us forgive the loose ends and missing links. [29 May 1972, p.71]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  11. Pawn Sacrifice
    This is another moderately interesting but shallow biopic with an actor going for broke — to win, not to draw.
  12. Memphis
    Sutton finds the lyrical tension in torpor; he shows how Willis’s artistic vacuum isn’t a passive thing, how it eats into him, how it even permeates the natural world.
  13. Kill Your Darlings
    Kill Your Darlings wants to be a young man’s movie, but it’s all “cinema du papa,” as the French New Wave used to call it. The philosophical disconnect is downright cosmic.
  14. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition--or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves...It's the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is a cosmic nothing.
  15. Battle for Haditha
    Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture.
  16. Salt
    A senseless blast.
  17. 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.
  18. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Lana Condor’s comic timing should be getting its own paragraph, dammit, not my shrill complaints about our dysfunctional messaging around higher education. But the film’s own attention to the way romantic comedies operate teaches us to watch it with our guard up.
  19. Everything Must Go
    That lawn with its scraps of a ruined life is a setting both satirical and poignant, and Will Ferrell gives a performance of Chekhovian depth.
  20. Amazing Grace
    Michael Apted's Amazing Grace is a beautifully chiseled blunt instrument. No, it's not subtle, but how subtle was slavery?
  21. One Last Kiss
    It's a frisky, funny roundelay starring Stefania Sandrelli, and it features enough shouting and arm-waving to power a windmill.
  22. Saving Mr. Banks
    A fair number of people have responded with tears and laughs to Saving Mr. Banks, but I found it interminable.
  23. Made in Dagenham
    It's hard to do justice to Hawkins's acting, because you never actually see it: Her Rita simply is.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. Bull
    Annie Silverstein’s Bull doesn’t jerk you around. It doesn’t Go for It. It’s quieter and more pensive than a glib summation (or a trailer) would suggest, but it never goes soft.
  27. Monsters University
    Perhaps only Pixar could give us such a rare beast: a delightful disappointment.
  28. 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.
  29. Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    James Scurlock's documentary Maxed Out, tells the bone-chilling, bloodcurdling, hair-raising story of a country (guess which one?) that's up to its eyeballs in credit-card debt.
  30. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    Utterly demented and magnificent.
  31. The Courier
    The Courier is a serviceable espionage drama and history lesson, but whenever these two actors are onscreen together, it approaches the sublime.
  32. Men
    Despite all the broken bones, the graphic deaths, and the copious amounts of blood, the driving idea behind Men is not bold enough to feel frightening. Instead, it’s remarkably tepid.
  33. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The childlike, free-associative playfulness is now underscored by a palpable hunger to be the cleverest and coolest kids’ movie on the block, a hunger that weighs down Lord and Miller’s plenty-smart silliness.
  34. Maudie
    Sally Hawkins doesn’t rise above the film’s conception, but she makes it work.
  35. The Good Boss
    It’s a perfect role for Bardem, who has always exuded a kind of natural authority and calm. Every line reading is measured without feeling rehearsed. (He’s a great performer, but that wonderfully solid, anvil-shaped profile of his helps, too. Plus, he gets to indulge his fondness for ridiculous wigs again.)
  36. Panic Room
    It's difficult to work up a strong case of the heebie-jeebies when you keep getting thrown out of the movie by all the atrocious acting.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miss Americana
    Miss Americana peels away some of Taylor Swift’s complexities to reveal even more complexities. It’s an enjoyable document for fans looking to get a peek inside their favorite artist’s brain.
  38. Entertainment
    Entertainment wears its contempt too arrogantly, fulsome in its emptiness.
  39. Twisters
    That compulsion to reverse engineer serious stakes for a fundamentally frivolous story is Twisters’ most contemporary quality and its most irritating.
  40. Oh, Canada
    Oh, Canada might be a movie that was conceived in the long dark night of the soul, but it moves towards brightness and possibility.
  41. The Art of Self-Defense
    The only surprise is the level of violence — not just beyond "The Karate Kid" but beyond "Fight Club." The problem with that strategy is that unless you’re knocked out, you’re just grossed out and eager to go. You practice the art of self-defense against the movie.
  42. Cadillac Records
    The ensemble is stupendous--howlingly great--and the music goes deep.
  43. Ali
    Ultimately, Ali is a far more complex creature than this movie allows for.
  44. 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.
  45. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams certainly isn’t inept, and Bynum, who wrote as well as directed it, summons a devastatingly spare atmosphere that’s broken up with some arrestingly dreamlike compositions when Killian arrives at a show or competition. But it consists of the same idea, underlined over and over.
  46. Unknown White Male
    Given that this retrograde memory loss has cleansed Doug Bruce's perceptions and made him an altogether more open and emotional person, Unknown White Male suggests that amnesia could be the ultimate chicken soup for the soul.
  47. Coco Before Chanel
    Surprisingly intimate and nuanced.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    Parallax View is Pakula's best to date; its intrigue is honest, its logic unassailable, and its performances first rate. [24 June 1974, p.58]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  49. 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.
  50. Eddington
    No genre really makes more sense for this moment than horror — except, maybe, for black comedy, and Aster’s bracingly nasty but centerless new film offers plenty of both.
  51. Klaus
    It’s awkward and weird, and yet all that awkwardness and weirdness give it personality and charm and a freewheeling, nonsensical quality that feels refreshing.
  52. The End
    The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.
  53. Hostiles
    Hostiles is a brutal if well-intentioned film that doesn’t help its cause with its lack of development of its Native characters.
  54. Coherence
    Byrkit’s film is very much its own thing. It’s an urbane dinner-party movie that turns into something magnificent, terrible, and strange – and yet it never quite stops being an urbane dinner-party movie, never lets up its tone of ironic refinement. Coherence is a gentle film, but you walk away from it with your brain on fire.
  55. The First Omen
    Like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The First Omen is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears.
  56. The Unknown Girl
    Every Dardennes movie is worth seeing, and The Unknown Girl has all kinds of gripping undercurrents.
  57. The Overnight
    The actors manage to show crack comic timing while looking as if they’re groping along blindly — a high compliment for psychodrama.
  58. Hanna
    Yes, this farrago of fairy tale and sci-fi conspiracy flick is, on one level, howlingly obvious. But there are howls of derision and howls of amazement, and mine were of the latter kind, mostly.
  59. Pacific Rim
    Pacific Rim made me marvel at the technology of movies, but never the magic of them.
  60. The Smashing Machine
    Sports biopics are so common that one couldn’t blame Safdie for trying to avoid conventionality, but sometimes the conventions are there for a good reason. In the end, though, he understands that his greatest weapon here is his star. A weapon, and a gift: It’s nice to have the Rock acting again.
  61. Swallow
    While "The Invisible Man" was built around its clever set pieces rather than its characters, Swallow is led by its protagonist’s mental and emotional state. It takes place in a landscape that’s largely internal — but that’s territory that can be just as filled with darkness and dread as a forbidding mansion.
  62. We Were Soldiers
    Fitfully effective as a battle movie, and Mel Gibson does his rugged best to take center stage without seeming to. But the movie is self-righteous in a way that's frequently unseemly.
  63. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    I hope that in Part 2, Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves give Fiennes a better send-off than Dame J.K. did in her less-than-wizardly climactic wandathon. Having made us sit through two and a half hours with no payoff, they'd better not go all Muggle on us. Next time, we want magic, people.
  64. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    First Steps certainly has a few potentially provocative ideas rattling around in its tulip-chair-and-tiki-bar brain, but it’s too afraid to explore them in any depth.
  65. Down in the Valley
    The best thing about Down in the Valley is that you hope it's not going where you have an inkling it's going. The purity of Norton's madness is a wonder.
  66. In a Better World
    Bier dramatizes our ambivalence so earnestly that it's tempting to give her awards rather than admit that the movie is a crushing bore.
  67. Last Breath
    It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.
  68. The Rover
    It’s overbaked art-pulp. You’re always thinking, What fresh horror is around the next bend?
  69. Marie Antoinette
    This is one of the most immediate, personal costume dramas ever made, and so it's not unseemly to consider how the writer-director and her heroine overlap.
  70. Suffragette
    Suffragette is slick and efficient, but also diffuse and formless; it’ll pass the time but it fails to engage.
  71. Interview
    I’ve sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.
  72. Cavite
    It's not a particularly complex (or pleasant) film, but along the way you get a glimpse of the kinds of neighborhoods that give birth to anti-Western fanatics.
  73. Zarafa
    The patient storytelling and the elegant and colorful hand-drawn animation combine to give the film a pleasing, picture-book-like quality that should appeal to kids; there’s something very old-school about the film’s aesthetic. But in some senses, it also feels like a blast of fresh air, not the least because of where, and on whom, it chooses to place its focus.
  74. Sunshine
    They’ve taken "2001" and Tarkovsky’s "Solaris" and "Silent Running," mixed in stuff from save-the-earth pictures like "The Core" and "Deep Impact," and thrown in a cheesy climax out of "Alien."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    He Got Game
    The movie is a volatile combination of ambitious mythmaking and nasty reality, and like most of Spike Lee’s work, it is also an inextricable combination of good and bad.
  76. Alien: Romulus
    Alien: Romulus is diverting enough, but it’s also instantly forgettable — something I don’t think I’ve ever said about any other Alien film, good or bad.
  77. To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    Condor is a ready-made star, and Centineo rises to meet her, the adoring, throaty lunk any introverted teen dreams of coming around and melting away her shyness. Theirs is a teenage romance I can believe in, despite its ridiculously convoluted circumstances.
  78. Frozen II
    It’s easier to think about Frozen II as a product than as a film because a (sometimes stunning-looking) product is all that it feels like.
  79. Mother and Child
    Mother and Child is suffused with grief and loss. It’s also suffused with compassion and insight.
  80. The Vanishing
    The movie is phenomenally well made and the three actors who fall apart on our watch suffer magnificently.
  81. 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.
  82. Frailty
    The film becomes cumulatively stranger as it goes along, and it has a lulu of a kicker.
  83. 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.
  84. Wanted
    It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in.
  85. Enola Holmes 2
    One might say that this new film attempts to be something closer to a standard-issue mystery, with its ornate story line, ambitious action scenes, and historically resonant milieu. But in the end, it still thrives or dies on its teenage star’s charm. It mostly thrives, even if the luster is a bit off this time around.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    This is far and away Richard Brooks's best film. It is harrowing, powerful, appalling. [31 Oct 1977, p.116]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  87. JCVD
    At one point, Van Damme delivers a long, tortured soliloquy about his alienating stardom to the camera in a single take. It's the most amazing piece of acting I've ever seen by a martial artist. But the film itself doesn't rise above the level of a good try.
  88. Captain Marvel
    The best reason to see the movie is Larson, who showed how terrific she could be in "Short Term 12" and "Room" as women whose ways of fighting back were frustratingly earthbound.
  89. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Its tone is semi-parodic, with lurid black-and-white cinematography and brassy, tongue-in-cheek music. But Harron stops well short of camp.
  90. Rental Family
    Rental Family might be a modestly likable, often uneven movie about a fictional American actor in Japan, but it’s also a thoroughly fascinating movie about a very real actor in the midst of one of the strangest careers I’ve witnessed.
  91. undertone
    Undertone is creepy enough without needing to knit its haunting into its main character’s background so clunkily; ironically, its most effective moments are ones of stylistic indifference.
  92. The Innkeepers
    A poky but blood-freezing throwback to the gothic horror films of the seventies, when ingénues moved tremulously down dark corridors without holding digital video cameras.
  93. One Hour Photo
    Williams once knew how to be very still and yet allow us to see the plangent human being underneath. In One Hour Photo, Sy's scary ordinariness is a species of acting stunt. There's no there there.
  94. Confess, Fletch
    A quietly delightful new entry in the Fletch series.
  95. Prometheus
    It's a different sort of experience: a stately, somewhat plodding but endurable science-fiction saga.
  96. Bonjour Tristesse
    Preminger, an old noir hand, perhaps understood something fundamental about Sagan’s story: It is not one well served by subtlety or realism. Chew-Bose’s effort is nevertheless a noble one. She wants to make this world immersive, convincing, and compelling. She’s good enough to get part of the way there, but I don’t know if the destination was ever in sight.
  97. Goon
    The film has weight in ways that you don't quite expect. Or maybe it's just Scott's subdued, slow-burn performance, which may have intended to convey stupidity but actually helps create an overall mood of convincing despair.
  98. The Lost Bus
    The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.
  99. The Other Lamb
    The idea is that vulnerable women will give up their autonomy — their very identities — to such an entitled being, which I found a stretch but which certainly has historical precedents. It’s best to view The Other Lamb as a rite-of-passage fantasia with a gossamer heroine.
  100. The Pursuit of Happyness
    Conrad's last film, the underrated "The Weather Man," was a parade of miseries, too, but the protagonist (Nicolas Cage) didn’t move very fast in the throes of his existential crisis, and the palette (it was Chicago in winter) was glacial. Here, those crazy San Francisco hills give the movie a lift, and Muccino frames it all airily, with a glancing touch.
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