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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    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Holiday Affair
    Mitchum’s tough-guy demeanor serves him well here, giving an odd energy to the love story.
  2. Les Miserables
    The tasteless bombardment that is Les Misérables would, under most circumstances, send audiences screaming from the theater, but the film is going to be a monster hit and award winner, and not entirely unjustly.
  3. Your Monster
    Your Monster has some chucklesome moments, none of it enough to paper over the film’s many contrivances. And some late-breaking gruesome bits can’t retroactively redeem the lazy writing. But the movie does have Barrera, and maybe that’s enough.
  4. Changeling
    It would be a horrific story even if underplayed, but Eastwood shoots it like a horror movie.
  5. Knock at the Cabin
    The result is the most exhilarating and wounding film M. Night Shyamalan has made in many, many years.
  6. Nappily Ever After
    Unfortunately, instead of coming across as a warm throwback, Nappily Ever After is a romantic comedy saddled with a reductive understanding of black womanhood without enough cast chemistry or beauty to distract us.
  7. Zoo
    Devor doesn't endorse horse-on-man sex, but he does attempt--with sympathy--to account for the appeal.
  8. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.
  9. Rob the Mob
    For all their fuck-ups, we never question why these two characters are still together. In these actors’ hands, ably guided by a director who deserves to be better known, this minor little crime caper becomes a very human romantic drama.
  10. Rocky Balboa
    Does Rocky Balboa deliver? Weirdly enough, it does: I was jumping out of my seat during Rocky's bout. If you close your eyes and try to halve your IQ--aim for something between a baboon and a lemur--you might even think it's a masterpiece.
  11. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    The law of commerce worked this time around: One terrific thrill ride has begotten another.
  12. Jimmy's Hall
    Don’t let the politics scare you off, though, for Jimmy’s Hall is a joyous movie. I wasn’t being glib with that earlier mention of "Footloose": Loach’s film isn’t technically a musical, but it has that same spirit, that same let’s-put-on-a-show vitality.
  13. Green Zone
    It's also rather tawdry. The climax is as ludicrous as any Jack Bauer adventure, and Greengrass is always on shaky ground. Literally.
  14. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    Penn is mostly in "I Am Sam mode" here, doing a lot of shoe-gazing and mumbly-talk, but not without adding an edge of bitter intelligence to his character; he's just too good an actor to merely repeat himself, even when the material encourages him to.
  15. Damsel
    I was alternately delighted and irritated, though mostly a very happy camper.
  16. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    This time around, Harry Potter has more to worry about than the Dark Arts -- though parts of The Chamber of Secrets are spellbinding, he seems to be suffering from a bit of sequelitis.
  17. Master Gardener
    Master Gardener plays less like a thematic finale and more like the director is trying to exorcise himself of his perpetual idée fixe.
  18. The 11th Hour
    It isn’t much of a movie (unless your aesthetic was formed in high-school science class), but it will be hugely informative to aliens who land on this planet in a thousand years and wonder why there’s no welcoming committee.
  19. Unsane
    In spite of the somewhat-cheesy climax, I came away admiring Unsane.
  20. Spring Breakers
    Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine’s calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney’s direction.
  21. Fingernails
    The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center.
  22. Stowaway
    The film’s central tension, between hand-wavingly vague science and the contagious immediacy of the characters’ emotions, becomes most pronounced during the final act, which is somehow both impressively suspenseful and frustratingly confusing. Still, Stowaway is never boring, even as it leaves you with a million unanswered space questions.
  23. Open Water
    Terrifying precisely because it doesn't go in for cheesy shock tactics and special effects. (Those sharks are REAL.)
  24. Happy Times
    Zhang is working in a popular sentimental mode here, but his connection to the material -- and to us -- is heartfelt and without a trace of condescension. As a filmmaker, he's the opposite of a con artist, and his new movie is a gentle marvel.
  25. Luz
    If Luz had been a play, I’d probably have walked out halfway through, but as a film I found it eerie enough to stay rooted.
  26. Triangle of Sadness
    Östlund’s slog of a film is exceptional in the distance it creates between the viewer and its characters and in how comfortable its attempts at causticity actually feel. It comes complete with an ending that should be bitterly dark and instead just comes across as a moue of indifference.
  27. Let Him Go
    The patient, somber direction gives the characters — and the actors playing them — room to breathe. It lets them do the things they’re best at: Costner gets to be the sad dad. Diane Lane gets to be passionate. And Lesley Manville gets to eat up the screen. For all its surface simplicity, Let Him Go is a surprising emotional roller coaster, and it stays with you.
  28. City of Men
    City of Men is clunky and often contrived, but there’s something haunting about fatherless boys in a blighted place fumbling to teach themselves what it means to be a man.
  29. World War Z
    Without a character, he’s (Pitt) back to that soft, appraising, Robert Redford Jr. stare, his mouth half open as if he’s about to speak but plainly with nothing on his mind apart from, “This is what a movie star looks like without any lines.” The ghouls are having deeper thoughts.
  30. Maria
    Despite the obvious effort that went into the making of Maria, there’s so little life. For a movie built around a performance meant to be lauded for its bravery, there’s no sense of anything risked.
  31. Split
    My loathing of Split goes beyond its derivative ideas and second-hand parts.
  32. Normal
    I was never bored by Normal, but I’d also be lying if I said I was ever excited by it. Maybe it’ll help you forget your troubles for an hour or two, but there’s also a good chance you’ll forget the movie itself in even less time.
  33. The Dreamers
    He doesn’t entirely succeed, but the attempt has poignancy: As uneven as much of his recent work has been, Bertolucci's still in love with the movies, and his ardor--if not always the ends he puts it to--is exhilarating.
  34. Faces of Death
    The uncommonly entertaining horror film, the third from the Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline team of Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, is a clever, nastily contemporary riff on what the original represents — not just the blurring of what’s real and what’s not, but the urge to rubberneck at gore and treat the ability to be unshaken by it as a point of pride.
  35. Laggies
    We basically know where Laggies is headed; the film is a soft, straight, easy pitch down the middle, story-wise. And it’s a light movie: You won’t get a particularly profound look at adults who act like kids from it.
  36. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    Maybe this frivolous little movie reflects our own world back to us in more ways than we might wish to admit.
  37. Free Fire
    The result is reasonably entertaining and totally disposable. Which it shouldn’t be, given that its focus is on guns and the way that they facilitate mayhem. Gory farce can be bracing. It’s the glibness that’s unconscionable.
  38. Keanu
    In my frequent role as “laugh accountant” for mainstream comedies, I’d estimate two-thirds of it works, and when it’s good it’s sooooo good — good enough to make you want to see Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key and director Peter Atencio and co-writer Alex Rubens do it again and go farther out.
  39. In the Earth
    COVID has proven a difficult subject for fiction, but In the Earth feels as though it sets up an emotional parallel that it doesn’t follow through on, abandoning the virus as a backdrop for a horror story that’s slapdash and never very creepy. It’s another instance of pandemic cinema that feels as if it could use more distance to figure out what it wants to say.
  40. Beau Is Afraid
    It packs the screen with witty details, features some brilliantly directed sequences, sets up downright baroque punchlines, and is anchored by an incredibly game performance by Phoenix. But ditching the genre framework doesn’t make it feel more honest — its self-deflating comedy is, ironically, that of someone afraid of being taken seriously.
  41. A Haunting in Venice
    This is an eerily silent work, full of long pauses and distant, baffling sounds; even the score seems to be mixed low, as if it were drifting through a window, a dark memory. Branagh also plays with the rhythm, using pace and composition to set us ill at ease. Vast stretches of darkness in the frame are cut through with shocks of color.
  42. The Signal
    The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.
  43. Burn After Reading
    Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."
  44. The Matrix Resurrections
    The Matrix Resurrections might lack the ground-shaking originality of its 1999 predecessor, but it manages to chart a stunning, divergent path, philosophically and cinematically.
  45. Shutter Island
    The ending is powerful..., but Shutter Island is a long slog.
  46. Across the River and Into the Trees
    Ortiz’s film does have its charms.
  47. Bubble
    Worth seeing, even if you're as ambivalent about it as I am. Its strength is in the way the drama creeps up on you.
  48. Thanksgiving
    Roth has a talent for anticipation, but not really for suspense. We don’t watch Thanksgiving wondering what’s going to happen next to these people. We watch because we know what’s going to happen next to these people.
  49. Youth in Revolt
    Miguel Arteta’s rollicking Youth in Revolt is one of several recent movies to elevate the generic coming-of-age teen sex comedy to a plane of surrealism.
  50. V for Vendetta
    It's the perfect moment for the ridiculous but riotously enjoyable revolutionary comic-book thriller V for Vendetta-which will doubtless outrage conservatives and unnerve fuddy-duddys but liberate the rest of us with its magisterial irresponsibility.
  51. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Spiderwick. There’s nothing wrong with it that passion and personality couldn’t fix.
  52. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Such a clunkerama that it made me rethink all the nice things I wrote about its predecessor, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Could the same people have made both films?
  53. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Solo: A Star Wars Story hits all its marks except the one it needed to hit most: accounting for one of pop culture’s most cantankerous charismatics.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mask of Zorro
    Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas work with professional skill in a ludicrous vehicle.
  55. Iron Man 3
    At least this time "Goopy" Paltrow gets to perform a few superheroics herself, along with enduring some heavy-duty torture that’s bound to please her haters — for whom the sight of the top of her face being peeled off in "Contagion" was like Christmas in July.
  56. Hollywoodland
    Reeves had an easy but peppy presence that was very likable, and Affleck's moroseness doesn't do him justice...and it doesn't help that Adrien Brody--as the film's ­other protagonist, a burnt-out gumshoe--is more actorish than the supposed actor.
  57. Backcountry
    While there is some gore late in the film, what makes Backcountry special is the care and patience it invests in its characters and the quiet, haunting tension of its story line.
  58. 42
    Helgeland’s epic about Jackie Robinson’s first year in Major League Baseball is uneven — often exciting, and just as often shallow and ham-handed — but if there’s one thing to which it remains true, it's that the almighty American greenback and the all-American athlete are the great destroyers of bigotry.
  59. Disturbia
    One way you know that D.J. Caruso is a resourceful director is that he scares you silly with a minimum of violence and a few smears of blood. His job was certainly made easier by Morse, whose glassy demeanor and high, soft rasp suggests horrors that not even Quentin Tarantino could imagine.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jackie Brown
    Not revolutionary or even evolutionary but enormously .... methodical. Working from an Elmore Leonard novel, Tarantino has created a gangster fiction that is never larger than life and sometimes smaller.
  61. Godzilla
    The problem is that he — unlike most modern sci-fi directors, who throw so much CGI at you that they make miracles cheap — seems peculiarly stingy when it’s time to deliver.
  62. Jesus Camp
    A frightening, infuriating, yet profoundly compassionate documentary about the indoctrination of children by the Evangelical right.
  63. Killer Joe
    As splashy as Killer Joe is, it's also, beat by beat, meticulously orchestrated, with no shortcuts to the carnage. When it comes to mapping psychoses, Letts and Friedkin are diabolically single-minded cartographers.
  64. CHAOS: The Manson Murders
    There’s a bitter irony to the fact that, whether due to access issues or an inability to wrangle what he wanted from his material, in retreading the Manson details, Morris has made something that feels a lot closer to that omnipresent slop than to the work that inspired it.
  65. Medicine for Melancholy
    Jenkins is so desperate to give his love story a social and economic context that he stops the movie cold for a bunch of unrelated white people to articulate their grievances over gentrification--it's as if "Annie Hall" had paused for a seminar on agrarian reform.
  66. Begin Again
    Begin Again is very funny, mostly because Ruffalo makes such an adorably rumpled drunken a--hole.
  67. Shopgirl
    Danes gives a marvelously quiet, poignant performance.
  68. Ocean's Thirteen
    It's so money! It's so fun!
  69. The Duchess
    An uncommonly well-crafted historical feminist tearjerker--both anti-patriarchal and a monument to motherhood.
  70. Beautiful Boy
    A test of an actor is playing someone who’s split in so many ways that he moves forward while looking backwards and vice versa, and Chalamet is already a master.
  71. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.
  72. Big Eyes
    Adams is lovely and tremulous, but Big Eyes would be even better if Waltz was in the same key.
  73. Goodrich
    Watching Goodrich isn’t like playing tourist in an upscale world — it’s more like stepping into the head of someone whose sense of normal is wildly different from your own.
  74. The Gift
    Were it not for these performances (Blanchett, Ribisi, Swank, Reeves), The Gift would be fairly negligible.
  75. Black Sea
    Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.
  76. The Children Act
    In the hands of "Iris" and "Notes on a Scandal" director Richard Eyre, McEwan’s story is stagy and austere, taking place in gleaming flats and spotless courtrooms, like a Nancy Meyers movie with more court wigs. It’s a wan, sapped atmosphere, making the life, faith, and literal blood of a 17-year-old boy all the more stark a line to run through it.
  77. Kong: Skull Island
    Its combination of lavishness and lack of imagination is the only thing memorable about it.
  78. Antwone Fisher
    Should be remembered for a pair of performers -- Derek Luke and Viola Davis, whose cameo as the mother who abandoned him cuts through the sap like an acetylene torch.
  79. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Caine is burlesquing his own iconography and enjoying every minute of it. He hasn't lost his dignity, though; it takes a lot of self-possession to act this blissfully silly. He even looks good with bad teeth.
  80. Veronica Mars
    Somehow, miraculously, the Veronica Mars movie is definitely not bad. It's pretty damn good, actually.
  81. The Yellow Handkerchief
    The first half of The Yellow Handkerchief is the half-movie of the year, and the rest isn’t bad--just more sentimental, more ordinary.
  82. Seraphim Falls
    Given that the movie is one long chase--Neeson's motive withheld until the end, the monotony broken only by the slaying of one member of his posse after another--the film is surprisingly gripping.
  83. Comedian
    At its best, it's a lively on-the-road chronicle of how to put an act together from scratch.
  84. Permission
    The final scenes are wrenching. The final shot is happy and sad and strange and awful and very hopeful. As I said, it depends on your vantage.
  85. The Photograph
    Unfortunately, The Photograph doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of its premise.
  86. Expired
    Morton is one of those tingly actresses whose skin barely covers her soul, and to watch her search for tender mercies in a crazy-hostile world is a gift. The film is appallingly good.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    I Got a Story to Tell is essential viewing, provided that you’re the kind of person who can rap the first verse of “Hypnotize” from memory. You come away wishing B.I.G. could’ve dreamed bigger.
  88. The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
    That the actors are so good, and the imagery absorbing, also helps paper over some of the film’s weaker elements. Even as we dig into these men’s pasts, Dunham wants to maintain the slightly unreal, allegorical quality of his story.
  89. Fall
    Sure, the vertiginous shots up the side of the tower are stomach-turning, but what’s really satisfying is the message that sometimes it’s better just to stay home. It’s Fall, get it? Summer is over.
  90. Despicable Me 2
    Despicable Me 2 does have plenty of what made the first film so entertaining — its wedding of James Bond–like gadgetry and visual invention with goofy slapstick, and the dizzying fun had with shrink rays, piranha guns, elaborate evil spaceships, and the like.
  91. The Matrix Reloaded
    This monstro-budgeted sequel to The Matrix has more than twice as many special effects as the original... there is also more than twice as much philosophic bull as before--and there was plenty of that the first time around.
  92. Ted
    Ted runs out of invention in its last act (the bear is coveted by a chillingly deadpan sociopath, played by Giovanni Ribisi, and the villain's fat son), but I can't think of a better movie to see if you're male and want to get high and relive your idiot adolescence.
  93. Visitors
    All joking aside, this is a director who is incapable of creating something that’s not beautiful. He can, however, on occasion indulge in a little too much cliché.
  94. Baghead
    Too bad the movies collapses at the end when we find out what's really going on. Baghead is so much more vivid when it's indefinite.
  95. The Woman in Black
    There is one nice pop-up scare against a dozen or so false, ineffectual ones - a poor percentage. As the title states, she is a woman and wears black, but she might as well be a hastily decked-out script girl for all her impact.
  96. The Golden Bowl
    What makes Nolte so much stronger than the other performers is precisely this sense of mysteriousness and indirection, which doesn't really correspond to the Adam Verver of the novel but certainly jibes with James's overall method.
  97. Saved!
    It's the barbs, and not the inspirationalism, that work best in this movie.
  98. Goodbye to All That
    Romantic comedies involving people moving on after divorce are a dime a dozen, but rarely are they as generous, sharply observed, and humane as Angus MacLachlan’s Goodbye to All That.
  99. Alex Strangelove
    Alex Strangelove is a little stylistically unambitious, nor is it terribly compelling as a romance — who Alex ends up with is ultimately beside the point.
  100. The Five-Year Engagement
    A charming, funny, reactionary mating comedy.
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