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. Free Guy
    Like its star, Ryan Reynolds — and maybe thanks to its star, Ryan Reynolds — the picture occasionally seems aware of its limitations. At its best, it turns its cynicism into an asset.
  2. About Last Night
    As an honest look into relationships, it's a bust. As a straight-up comedy, though, it’s hilarious.
  3. Sly
    As a movie, Sly is something of a mess. But as a portrait of a messy man, it can be quite moving.
  4. Jonathan
    Jonathan is good enough for us to want it to be better.
  5. Match
    Captain Jean-Luc Picard would be enough for one lifetime, but given that Sir Patrick is now living out an exuberant second adolescence as a Brooklyn hipster and throwing himself into parts like these, it’s time to proclaim him another reason to love New York.
  6. Plane
    The violence is visceral and presented with just enough authenticity to make you quiver. The context, however, is unreal enough that you don’t have to think too hard about it. You weren’t supposed to be thinking anyway.
  7. 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.
  8. The Help
    It's a tough, beautifully judged performance (Davis) - it gives this too-soft movie a spine.
  9. Lu Over the Wall
    Lu Over the Wall...is every bit as imaginative as the rest of his body of work, but whereas previous Yuasa works would veer from ominous to outrageous to sweet to explicit to metaphysical, Lu is perfectly happy to stop at sweet. And so am I, quite frankly: Yuasa can be really good at sweet, something that’s often overshadowed by his more mile-a-minute tendencies.
  10. Annabelle: Creation
    There’s nothing cheap about the rest of Annabelle: Creation, so this scattered finale felt like a letdown.
  11. Daddio
    Daddio is a classic two-hander, focusing entirely on the seesawing power dynamic between two very different individuals. As such, it’s at times theatrical and precious, a bit too on the nose with its metaphors and symbols and running themes. But boy, can it be fun to watch these two go at it.
  12. Bug
    Has the feverish compression of live theater and the moody expansiveness of film. The mix is insanely powerful.
  13. The King
    The King has enough in its coffers to keep you moderately engaged.
  14. Abigail
    It’s a cheap-thrill movie, and on that score it mostly delivers.
  15. Destroyer
    Kidman’s performance as this broken, obsessed woman is powerful. Breathless, rasping through her teeth, she conveys both vulnerability and intractability. She seems like she could drop dead at any second, and yet, we also sense that we’re watching someone who has already had to endure the worst life has to give her.
  16. Sleight
    The film lives and dies by Latimore’s performance, which is quiet and ever-shifting.
  17. On Chesil Beach
    Unfortunately McEwan, adapting his own work, and first-time director Dominic Cooke, have a hard time rendering the touchy, interior subject matter cinematic; a potentially promising story of an emotional and physical impasse is flattened so much as to be offensive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Front Page
    Billy Wilder's remake of The Front Page is a refreshing refurbishment for our time. [23 Dec 1974, p.71]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  19. The Rental
    Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.
  20. The Interpreter
    Penn is terrific in his low-key doggedness.
  21. The Monkey
    The problem is that The Monkey has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either.
  22. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    For all its calculation and manipulation, there's a very human movie somewhere within Marigold Hotel. You might just have to wade through a thousand clichés to get to it.
  23. Lucy
    An outlandishly entertaining mixture of high silliness and high style.
  24. The Devil Wears Prada
    A scantily clad revenge memoir.
  25. Apostle
    Apostle is ultimately an absorbing, horrifying movie that’s maybe not as smart as it wants to be. But it is a lot stranger, and more disturbing, than you might expect.
  26. Zoolander
    When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.
  27. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy may be starting to channel Woody Allen's directorial skills, but Rock has fully appropriated the Woodman's barbed comic anger.
  28. Stop-Loss
    It’s ironic that Stop-Loss loses its momentum when the characters go on the road. Yet Rasuk--the star of "Raising Victor Vargas"--gives a stunning performance.
  29. How to Train Your Dragon
    All in all, this live-action adaptation works remarkably well — a rare feat.
  30. September 11
    An ungainly, intermittently harrowing omnibus filled with moments of piercing sorrow and rage.
  31. Runaway Jury
    The inevitable showdown between these two paragons is something of a fizzle; there's too much over/under-acting going on.
  32. Stolen
    Little turns out well in Rebecca Dreyfus's Stolen, a haunting and expansive documentary.
  33. Big Miracle
    The film bulldozes any genuine nuance or insight or even emotion in exchange for ready-made plot points and by-the-numbers catharsis.
  34. Margaret
    This is the first bad movie that has ever made me call for a sequel - to get it all right.
  35. Copshop
    It’s clever but not cute, savage but not depressing, and cartoonish but not asinine.
  36. Ice Age
    Marvelously funny.
  37. Stuck
    The film becomes an aria of agony--but with a rousingly yucko finish!
  38. Edmond
    Depressing, disgusting, and dated, Edmond is worth braving to experience America’s best-known serious playwright at his most gruesomely undiluted.
  39. The Wackness
    The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  40. Americana
    The movie is called Americana, not America, and while it treats characters as mixtures of what they were born into and what they chose for themselves, it suggests that there’s something kitschy about the very idea of national identity, whether it’s defined by what’s in your display case or the color of your eyes.
  41. 10 Years
    It's just a movie about a bunch of guys and gals returning home for their reunion, with the only twist being that it's loaded up with stars and recognizable faces. Unfortunately, that serves to highlight the film's greatest failing, which is that all these big names and faces are given practically nothing to do.
  42. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    Fire and Ash is in some ways the messiest of the three Avatar movies, but it’s also the richest, the one in which we most lose ourselves, the one that makes us wonder about these characters and constantly peer into those rapturous backgrounds, trying to see forever.
  43. Reign Over Me
    The film is slick when it needs to be raw, tidy when it needs to sprawl, and amorphous when it needs to focus.
  44. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    Scene after scene rockets past dumb, past camp, past Kabuki, and into the Milky Way of Silly where laws can be made up and discarded as long as what happens gets laughs.
  45. Heart Eyes
    Heart Eyes is strong enough that the shortcomings that keep it in the realm of the passable instead of the actually good are maddening.
  46. Sputnik
    The new Russian horror film Sputnik whipsaws between suggested horror and schlock so furiously that it turns inconsistency into a virtue. It’s a creepy chamber drama that morphs regularly into an effects-laden ick-fest. But transformation is in the film’s DNA.
  47. Babylon
    Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rush Hour
    The movie is no more than a well-produced confection designed for quick payoff in the big cities, but it's pretty consistently funny.
  49. Oculus
    One reason Oculus feels so talky and monotonous in spite of its tricky syntax is that the space itself isn’t charged with malignancy. And the monster doesn’t compensate — it’s dumb, blockish, inert. The mirror doesn’t have two faces. It barely has one.
  50. The Kings of Summer
    The Kings of Summer is far from original, but it’s also far stranger than it seems, in ways both good and bad.
  51. Barrymore
    God, I love Plummer's performance - the twiddling fingers, the tipsy sway of the head, the reverberating roar, as well as the pathos of a man who can't stop acting long enough to hear the cry of his own soul.
  52. Peter Pan & Wendy
    The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.
  53. White Oleander
    Tends to settle for easy, homiletic insights. But it also has a collection of first-rate performances by some marvellous actresses.
  54. Matchstick Men
    The movie is moderately enjoyable, but it also makes you feel conned: It offers up a disturbing protagonist and then substitutes cuteness for character.
  55. The To Do List
    The To Do List feels fresh and strange and wondrously new. It shouldn’t, but it does.
  56. The Sense of an Ending
    It’s world away from the mystery and irrevocable tragedy that Barnes evokes in his slim novel. The climactic revelation is very sad, but it doesn’t wound you.
  57. Dog
    Dog feels like it should have been bigger and braver, but by the end, it also feels as if it could have been improved by being much smaller, closing in until it was just a guy and a dog and some of the country’s most beautiful scenery. What else do you really need?
  58. Taking Sides
    Taking Sides has a padded-out, stagebound quality that is anything but lyrical. And Szabó, a Hungarian best known for "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is not at his best here.
  59. Frida
    Neither terrible nor excellent; Hayek, who also co-produced, may have obsessed for years about this project, but the result is a fairly standard this-happened-and-that-happened biopic.
  60. Magic Mike XXL
    It’s sort of like "Pitch Perfect 2," only with better music and dancing and less trumped-up conflict.
  61. Black Phone 2
    You might go nuts trying to figure out exactly how anything works in this movie. But in the right hands, this can be a strength too. It certainly enhances the overall sense of dread, since we’re now in a world whose rules haven’t been clearly defined.
  62. The Soloist
    The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright's direction is too slick to elicit much feeling.
  63. Vice
    As impersonated by Bale, Cheney the Edifice is too impregnable for McKay to make it — psychologically speaking — past the moat, but the movie does have a firm dramatic arc.
  64. Ocean's 8
    I left Ocean’s 8 more convinced than ever that no amount of fierce, fantastic female ensembles can overcome the mediocrity of a dull male director.
  65. Sleeping Beauty
    Novelist-turned-director Leigh's dryly efficient style is perched between the matter-of-fact and the impossibly arty.
  66. Dead for A Dollar
    The picture’s surface austerity and simplicity have a crystallizing effect, drawing our attention to the coldhearted, transactional nature of this world.
  67. Respect
    The preceding two-plus hours of this 145-minute slog — Tommy’s threadbare hodgepodge of bad impressions, gratuitous filmmaking, and even worse depictions of mental health — isn’t even a shadow of the real natural woman.
  68. Laurel Canyon
    Frances McDormand deserves much better than Lisa Cholodenko’s flat-footed Laurel Canyon...McDormand alone makes the picture worth seeing: Her character is a rash combo of steel and dissolution and regret.
  69. Capitalism: A Love Story
    On one level: groan. On another: No one else seems about to make those arrests. The only thing that would scare Wall Street straight is the image of Michael Moore as the new sheriff in town.
  70. Day Night Day Night
    The film is, in fact, a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information--and once you accept those parameters, it’s riveting.
  71. Fast & Furious 6
    The driving in the film is a thing of beauty.
  72. This Must Be the Place
    The director seems to be drawing a line from the horror of the war years to the infantilism of the Boomers and rock; the father lost his innocence, and the son froze his.
  73. Muppets Most Wanted
    It's not bad, exactly; the songs are catchy, the cameos are okay, and some of the jokes work fine. Set your expectations super-low, and you'll probably be fine.
  74. Onward
    This film feels like a pile of prefab story ideas occasionally enlivened by brief flashes of earnestness and invention.
  75. Jesus Is King
    Nothing about the film is especially coherent, including its simultaneous status as a piece of art, a gesture of religious conviction, and a shameless act of commerce. It feels like notes from an artist who’s not sure if he wants to express himself as a worshiper or an object of worship — but who’s prepared to give it a try anyhow, on the biggest screen possible.
  76. Hamlet
    Karia’s film is uneven, but, as with its aforementioned staging of “To be or not to be,” it tosses enough new ideas around to keep us watching.
  77. The Kite Runner
    The Afghan boys’ kite-flying contests are the emotional core of the film, and Forster and his crew bring the camera into the sky and make it dip and soar along with the kites. It’s a thrilling spectacle, although it’s also tinged with a peculiarly emasculating aggression.
  78. Criminal
    Taut and straightforward and a little grungy, which is how these movies ought to be.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lenny
    Tailored to a point rather than to comprehensive biography, its triumph is its touch upon the public nerve of our most private inhibition. [30 Dec 1974, p.86]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  80. The Incredible Hulk
    The Incredible Hulk is weightless--as disposable as an Xbox game. It's also fairly entertaining: swift, playful without pitching into camp, and acted with high spirits.
  81. The Front Runner
    The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps.
  82. Blue Beetle
    In the details, Blue Beetle comes alive — in the warmth with which the Reyes family is depicted, for example, or in Jaime’s utter cluelessness as he tries to control his newfound powers. Maridueña conveys the overwhelmed young hero’s anxiety with real charisma; the more helpless he is, the more we like him.
  83. The Persian Version
    When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.
  84. Carnage
    A scabrous, amusing, and thoroughly predictable exercise in exposing the animalistic underbellies of grown-ups pretending to be civilized liberals.
  85. Trance
    To like Trance as much as I did, you have to revel in the senseless showmanship — in watching Boyle indulge his taste for cinematic flight, in this case teasing you with the old “Is this real or a dream?” number so artfully that you don’t care that much about the answer.
  86. Lust, Caution
    After seeing "Brokeback Mountain," with its sanctified couplings against a backdrop of purple mountain majesties, some of us felt that Ang Lee owed us a dirty movie with more bodily fluids. Lust, Caution is that movie--for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. The rest of the film is absorbing, though.
  87. Where God Left His Shoes
    The acting, the on-the-fly atmosphere (the film was shot quickly), and Leguizamo's increasingly urgent hustle are deeply evocative, but parts of the movie are almost too painful to endure.
  88. Velvet Buzzsaw
    It’s clear between this and Nightcrawler that Gilroy and Gyllenhaal have some kind of gonzo chemistry. Even if Velvet Buzzsaw starts to sputter slightly after it’s made its point, it’s plenty exciting to witness the incredibly specific madness they whip up together.
  89. First Girl I Loved
    The way the narrative starts and stops and doubles back mirrors the characters’ own confusion. We try to make sense of the story along with them — who did what, said what, when, and what did it really mean.
  90. Dogville
    The film centers almost entirely on the faces of the townspeople, which Von Trier frames vividly. There’s nothing static about his technique, but everything else about the movie is dreary and closed off.
  91. Scream VI
    Scream 6 does distinguish itself in the horror set pieces. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also made the previous entry) clearly grasp that these movies are, at their best, mean.
  92. The Bourne Legacy
    The best thing in Gilroy's "Michael Clayton" was the final scene between George Clooney and Tilda Swinton, the one in which the vise tightened click by click on Tilda. This is another vice-tightening sequence, but scary instead of triumphant, and with a long and explosive punch line. Finally, a sequence we can follow! After this, Gilroy owns us.
  93. Elysium
    The action is bludgeoning. When Max gets pummeled by fists and lethal objects, we get pummeled by light and noise and rock-'em-sock-'em editing. No shrimp, though. As a narrative, "District 9" wasn't particularly original, either — in the end it was a standard conversion melodrama. But everything is better with shrimp.
  94. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    There is absolutely nothing original in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which just goes to show that you don’t need originality to be effective.
  95. The Wolverine
    Slapped with the generic title The Wolverine, the fifth feature-length appearance of Hugh Jackman’s X-Man John Logan is basically "The Bad News Wolverine Goes to Japan" and is not especially world-shaking.
  96. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    When Day of the Soldado truly wallows in violence, it does so exquisitely, with the kind of hopelessness that film violence, especially around this subject matter, should convey. But it also destabilizes any marketable attempts at heroism or character investment.
  97. Saltburn
    Saltburn’s seductive imagery outweighs its obvious attempts at provocation. And while it does end up making being rich look pretty sweet, that’s not exactly a revelation worth hanging a whole movie on.
  98. Bad Trip
    Bad Trip might be a dumb, gross candid-camera comedy, but don’t be surprised if it makes you feel a little better about your world.
  99. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    Kingsman is full of elaborately orchestrated violence and acrobatic stunt work, shot in fast, sinewy, CGI-enhanced long takes that push and pull our perspective this way and that. It’s all very silly and not really meant to be taken seriously, but as the story gets more and more brutal, something strange happens: We start to care for these cartoonish characters and this absurd scenario.
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