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. St. Vincent
    The destination is often familiar and not always particularly interesting, but the ride itself isn’t always so bad, especially when you’ve got Bill Murray along for company.
  2. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    It’s funny, fast, and charming.
  3. Kill the Messenger
    Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger made me so angry over the apparent injustice done to its journalist hero, Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), that I found it hard to remain in my seat.
  4. Dracula Untold
    Dracula Untold is a dumb, lowest-common-denominator kind of movie, but it’s a surprisingly entertaining one. It’s brisk, which counts for a lot in this overbaked genre. The action is directed with verve and imagination — and it’s all gorgeously bleak, with black clouds of bats whipping around remote, craggy castles beneath portentous Carpathian skies.
  5. Inherent Vice
    Like Pynchon’s novel, it’s a little insular, too cool for school. It’s drugged camp. Some of the plot points get lost in that ether — it’s actually less coherent than Pynchon, no small feat. It’s not shallow, though.
  6. Men, Women & Children
    The real problem is that the film doesn't know what to do with its depiction of life in the interconnected age. It’s a nothing movie.
  7. Annabelle
    Familiarity is not always a bad thing, though. "The Conjuring" breathed new life into old clichés; it showed that those creaking doors and possessed closets and white-robed figures still had the power to scare us. But that was a movie made with sensitivity and purpose. The blunt, lifeless Annabelle, on the other hand, sucks that life right back out.
  8. Left Behind
    Left Behind is biblical in its silliness.
  9. The Two Faces of January
    It’s a case of diminishing returns: gorgeous, occasionally evocative, but, in the end, mostly dull.
  10. Pride
    What a cast Pride has — some of the best famous actors in Britain and lesser-known younger ones that will (soon) take their place in the firmament.
  11. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    With Jimi: All Is By My Side, writer-director John Ridley tries to do for the rock biopic what Jimi Hendrix did for rock 'n' roll itself in the 1960s — explode it, redefine it, and help it find its best self.
  12. The Equalizer
    There’s a special kind of hell for artists who array vigilante revenge-porn in saintly garb, and Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua should go to the front of that damnable line after The Equalizer.
  13. The Zero Theorem
    It starts off as a mess, yes, but eventually finds itself in a very poignant place. Even a lesser Terry Gilliam film is usually more engaging and invigorating than most of the other movies out there.
  14. Gone Girl
    The movie is phenomenally gripping—although it does leave you queasy, uncertain what to take away on the subject of men, women, marriage, and the possibility of intimacy from the example of such prodigiously messed-up people.
  15. 20,000 Days on Earth
    Certainly for any fan of Cave’s, 20,000 Days on Earth makes for a creative, enthralling journey through the man’s world.
  16. Tusk
    Tusk is not a particularly good movie, but the vivid anxiety dream at its heart makes it one of the most personal films this writer-director has ever made.
  17. This Is Where I Leave You
    Somewhere in this mess, there might be a very good movie.
  18. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    The talented writer-director Scott Frank comes awfully close in his adaptation of one of Block’s better novels, A Walk Among the Tombstones. I’d be way more enthusiastic if Frank hadn’t swapped out the book’s horrific, unforgettable ending for something so conventional, I can barely remember it a few days later.
  19. The Maze Runner
    The Maze Runner only answers some of the questions it so marvelously sets up. And while I probably now know too much about the story for it to work a similar magic next time, I find myself genuinely anticipating the next one.
  20. The Guest
    Wingard is also clearly enamored of the synthesized soundtracks of Giallo and John Carpenter films, and here, he turns that into a whole thing, too: A mix Anna makes for David becomes a plot point, giving the director an excuse to practically drench his scenes in dreamy electronica.
  21. Tracks
    In the end, the point of this ridiculous, arduous, oft-interrupted odyssey turns out to be elusive — and is all the richer for it.
  22. Stray Dogs
    This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.
  23. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Anyone who has ever ended a relationship and taken long walks in the rain will relate, at least until the characters open their mouths.
  24. Dolphin Tale 2
    A well-crafted family flick that gets the job done, then gets out of the way.
  25. The Drop
    Most thriller writers don’t aim so high: You really have to grapple with Lehane’s vision to see how tiresome it is.
  26. No Good Deed
    It’s certainly not good. But it’s not entirely dire.
  27. 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.
  28. God Help the Girl
    It’s an inviting, approachable world that Murdoch creates for us — still a total fantasy, of course, but one with a veneer of plausibility. Get on its wavelength, and you’ll be utterly charmed. Don’t, and you’ll run screaming from the theater.
  29. The Identical
    It's stocked with clichés, but they're arranged in such weird ways that the end result is both predictable and certifiable. If only any of it actually went somewhere.
  30. Last Days in Vietnam
    In sum, Last Days is the best kind of documentary — it ties you up in knots.
  31. Wetlands
    Women deserve their own gross-out movies, and, in Wetlands, the punk force is strong. If your taste runs thataway, you should see it in a theater with one eye on the audience — and hope that a few people will think they’re going to see a documentary about threatened ecosystems. Talk about all wet!
  32. The Last of Robin Hood
    The film is too wan and distanced to sweep you up, but it holds you.
  33. Life of Crime
    If Life of Crime transcends its lightheartedness to actually make us care for what happens to its characters, it doesn’t quite transcend its own haphazard, impoverished story.
  34. Starred Up
    Starred Up is an edgy, teeming thriller, brilliantly disorienting, making strange a world we thought we knew, at least from other movies.
  35. As Above, So Below
    There are moments of welcome tension amid the inchoate lunacy, but these in turn merely highlight why the rest of the film doesn’t work.
  36. The November Man
    Appropriately pulpy — fuss-free and fast.
  37. To Be Takei
    The kind of documentary that’s smart enough to step back and let its charming subject take over. It won’t break new ground, but it’s not lazy or generic.
  38. Are You Here
    It’s funny, clunky, earnest, and barely credible, but it’s all of a piece.
  39. When the Game Stands Tall
    The real-life story behind When the Game Stands Tall sounds amazing. But for all its exciting sports scenes, the movie version falls flat as drama.
  40. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    The highest-gloss revenge porn imaginable. It’s hard to believe that so much visual elegance has been brought to bear on material so ugly, and yet the disjunction is intentional, and the film is all of a piece.
  41. The One I Love
    It’s Moss who takes the film to a higher, scarier level. After years of playing Peggy Olson on "Mad Men", she knows how to smile and nod and say one thing while obviously meaning the exact opposite, and when at last she unleashes the truth, it’s with demonic intensity. She turns subtext into horror-poetry.
  42. Love Is Strange
    I think this tale of woe can principally be seen as a plea for a heightened sense of community. It takes a village to keep us all afloat.
  43. Dinosaur 13
    For all its stridency, Dinosaur 13 isn’t looking to mobilize us or get us to think hard about these issues. It just wants to tell its wild, one-of-a-kind tale in the most engaging way possible, and it does that exceptionally well.
  44. Life After Beth
    Life After Beth is a reasonably fun, medium-gory horror comedy that’s better before the innards hit the fan.
  45. Frank
    As playful as it is, Lenny Abrahamson’s film is mostly a surprisingly earnest story about the compromises and conflicts of art, stardom, and mental illness.
  46. The Expendables 3
    A sad, bad, parade of uninspired cameos and listless violence.
  47. The Giver
    You wind up with a movie that plays like a low-rent "Logan’s Run" crossed with a UNICEF commercial.
  48. Let's Be Cops
    Let’s Be Cops has its moments, but it in no way distinguishes itself.
  49. The Trip to Italy
    As befits its settings, The Trip to Italy aims higher than its predecessor — maybe too high — and isn’t as fresh. I enjoyed it, though.
  50. What Now? Remind Me
    What Now? Remind Me is all over the place, but it never feels messy or lax.
  51. Step Up: All In
    The fifth entry in the popular dance-off franchise is, like the others, a fantasia that upends the usual rules of filmmaking. Here, the more threadbare the scenario, and the more unmotivated an action, the better. Character and story just get in the way of all the awesome dancing.
  52. What If
    In the end, What If belongs to Zoe Kazan. And both she and it are wonderful.
  53. Into the Storm
    Into the Storm is at once one of the dumbest films you'll see this year and one of the scariest.
  54. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Largely indistinguishable from any number of bloated superhero spectacles that have already graced our screens. Your kids may not mind it, but it’s more insistent than it is fun.
  55. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    Perhaps the film’s most telling part comes during the deep dives themselves. When Cameron finds himself alone in his submersible, crammed into a little turret from which he can watch and film the world around him, the bravado fades away, and he becomes a little kid again.
  56. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    Ultimately, what comes through most forcefully in The Hundred-Foot Journey is the longing of the immigrant, the overwhelming push-pull between the need to belong and the need to assert one’s own identity.
  57. Rich Hill
    This vital documentary gives you a world of hurt, prescribes nothing, and calls the ultimate questions you can ask as an American.
  58. Child of God
    James Franco’s adaptation of the sick little Cormac McCarthy period novel Child of God is surprisingly pretty good.
  59. Calvary
    Those shots are in contrast to those landscapes, which are craggy, primordial. It’s meant to be a haunting combination, and I have colleagues who’ve found it just that, who came out of the movie ashen, devastated. But I found it bludgeoning — I think it gives new meaning to the phrase hammer of God.
  60. Get On Up
    Tate Taylor’s film cares less about narrative clarity and more about portraying a life lived between the extremes of sin and grace, between the abject and the sublime. It’s lively, stylized, and genuinely surprising.
  61. Guardians of the Galaxy
    The film seems content to be the class clown of the Marvel Universe, which is all well and good. But like most class clowns, sometimes you wish it would apply itself — because it seems capable of being so much more.
  62. Very Good Girls
    The film never quite reconciles the banality of this love triangle with its far more interesting depiction of the rest of these characters’ lives.
  63. Magic in the Moonlight
    It starts off with a flourish and winds up limp, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat that turns out to be dead.
  64. A Master Builder
    Gregory and Demme have turned A Master Builder into (pardon my invoking the name of a Strindberg work) a dream play, and have made it once more madly, bitingly, chillingly alive.
  65. The Kill Team
    The Kill Team, an essential film no matter what your political convictions. The setting is Afghanistan, but it might be Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere with occupying forces. It might be Gaza. This map of hell is timeless, placeless.
  66. Lucy
    An outlandishly entertaining mixture of high silliness and high style.
  67. A Most Wanted Man
    What’s on display here is a great actor at his absolute peak — damn it all.
  68. Hercules
    Hercules has no right to be as entertaining as it is.
  69. And So It Goes
    Clean, pleasant, and thoroughly unremarkable. It passes the time, but with that cast and that director, it should have been so much more.
  70. Mood Indigo
    It has an energy all its own, and Gondry’s voice is always welcome, and essential. Mood Indigo is somehow both unmissable and whisper-thin.
  71. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    The sequel, Planes: Fire and Rescue, is still a DisneyToon production, but it does aim higher, with a visual zip that was lacking from the first. It is, in almost all respects, a better movie. It’s still not particularly good, though.
  72. I Origins
    I Origins really loses its oomph when Ian travels to India in search of a particular pair of eyeballs, and the movie closes on a note that would make even M. Night Shyamalan roll his own.
  73. Sex Tape
    At heart, it’s about as naughty as an old Disney movie with Dean Jones, Suzanne Pleshette, and an unruly Great Dane. I liked its gung-ho slapstick spirit, though. No one’s slacking off.
  74. The Purge: Anarchy
    It's also breathtaking to watch a throwaway studio sequel break its corporate chains before your very eyes and become something thrilling and dangerous and alive.
  75. Wish I Was Here
    Wish I Was Here, not unlike its predecessor "Garden State," captures a certain generational drift. It just doesn’t know what to do with it. So it beats the damned thing into the ground until it’s dead.
  76. Rage
    The movie is imprisoned by its Cage’s stiffness. All he gives us is strained, robotic seriousness. I’m not sure he even gives us any rage.
  77. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Even given the spate of post-apocalyptic and dystopian films that rule the multiplexes, this is the bleakest “franchise” in human history, and I’m curious if there will be any balm whatsoever in the next close encounter of the furred kind.
  78. Boyhood
    Living with Mason and his parents over time you feel an intimacy, an empathy, a shared stake. I’m not saying Boyhood is the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but I’m thinking there’s my life before I saw it and my life now, and it’s different; I know movies can do something that just last week I didn’t. They can make time visible.
  79. Me and You
    For all the limitations of its setting and palette, this is a gorgeous, visually exciting movie.
  80. Earth to Echo
    Earth to Echo resonates, despite itself.
  81. Deliver Us From Evil
    Bana is a likable actor, but he doesn’t bring any vulnerability or transparency to the part; it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking, if he’s thinking anything at all. And so, we move from one bleak, bludgeoning setpiece to another. But with each loud noise, the film loses us more and more.
  82. Tammy
    I hesitate to label the result as bad or good. It’s just … off.
  83. They Came Together
    Taking pretty much every rom-com trope and distilling it into highly concentrated ridiculousness, Wain’s film is both a takedown and a tribute: As with his summer-camp-movie spoof "Wet Hot American Summer," you walk away with a renewed love for the genre.
  84. Begin Again
    Begin Again is very funny, mostly because Ruffalo makes such an adorably rumpled drunken a--hole.
  85. Snowpiercer
    Now, at last, comes a fun dystopian sci-fi epic — a splattery shambles with a fat dose of social satire and barely a lick of sense. It’s Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, which must be seen to be disbelieved.
  86. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    Nearly three %$^&%!!# hours, and they’re brain-freezing.
  87. Venus in Fur
    Venus in Fur is both kinky and can pass as a form of self-flagellation. One additional, not-small thing: It allows him to demonstrate, with a minimum of means, his superb craftsmanship.
  88. Third Person
    They make you wish Haggis would put away the Great Themes, the belabored dialogue, the forced narrative dynamics, and just figure out a way to scale down his scope and tell smaller stories. Maybe it’s not all as connected as he thinks.
  89. 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.
  90. Think Like a Man Too
    Mostly uninspired and insipid, but it rallies, and builds up enough comic steam by the end that you might find yourself amused.
  91. Jersey Boys
    To be fair, some of it is good, very good. Jersey Boys has an easy, likable gait. It’s Eastwood’s most fluid film: He gets the swing of the music without fancy editing.
  92. The Signal
    You spend a lot of the movie confused, but the great big reveals of its finale don’t feel very shocking at all. Yet it’s not a complete wash and, given the circumstances, that feels like an accomplishment.
  93. The Rover
    It’s overbaked art-pulp. You’re always thinking, What fresh horror is around the next bend?
  94. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    Dragon 2 is at its best when it quiets down and dares to be intimate.
  95. 22 Jump Street
    At its best, 22 Jump Street is less an action comedy than a loosely plotted revue, and though it’s not as witty as either Joe Dante’s "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" or Edgar Wright’s "Hot Fuzz" (in which the directors evinced genuine love for their chosen genres), it’s sure as hell better than a straight buddy-cop sequel.
  96. Obvious Child
    The beauty of Obvious Child is that there’s nothing obvious about it.
  97. Borgman
    Van Warmerdam has a way with images that are both playful and horrific, and you may find yourself chuckling at Borgman as much as you recoil at it. It’s destined for cult status.
  98. The Sacrament
    I found parts of The Sacrament more effective than anything else he’s done to date, as it’s probably the least genre of his movies. But don’t tell West that; I’m pretty sure he still thinks he’s made a horror flick.
  99. Edge of Tomorrow
    It’s probably no great loss, but here and elsewhere the seams show. And in this sort of movie it’s often more fun before we get our bearings and have time to say, “This makes no sense.”
  100. The Fault in Our Stars
    The film does, however, have the best weapon in the world against the perception of slickness: an actress without a smidgen of actressiness.
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