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. Rust and Bone
    Rust and Bone doesn't come together, but it's a triumph of non-actorish acting.
  2. Rise of the Guardians
    As much as its premise may sound like the start of a bad joke, Peter Ramsey's movie preserves just enough genuine childhood wonder in its whooshing, high-tech theatrics to make it a delight.
  3. Red Dawn
    Love it or hate it, Milius's original Red Dawn looks like an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece next to this latest iteration, directed by Dan Bradley.
  4. Life of Pi
    Pi has designed his own terrarium to keep from staring directly into the abyss. It's not denial. It's faith in something else: the transformative power of storytelling. The film is transcendent.
  5. Silver Linings Playbook
    It's Lawrence who knocked me sideways. I loved her in "Winter's Bone" and "The Hunger Games" but she's very young - I didn't think she had this kind of deep-toned, layered weirdness in her.
  6. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    If anything, this series has gotten dumber and more inert as it has progressed, with this last one finally reaching over into an extended wallow in camp.
  7. 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.
  8. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    Beyond the Mafia-like code of silence, it comes down to this: The guys at the top reserved their compassion for priests like Father Murphy in the belief that the boys were young and would get over it. No one of true faith will get over Maxima Mea Culpa.
  9. Anna Karenina
    Every unhappy movie is unhappy in its own way, and Joe Wright's Anna Karenina is as boldly original a miscalculation as any you're likely to see.
  10. Lincoln
    Lincoln is too sharply focused to deserve the pejorative "biopic" label. It's splendid enough to make me wish Spielberg would make a "prequel" to this instead of another Indiana Jones picture.
  11. Skyfall
    It's an unusually funny, literate, worked-out script, and Mendes seems hell-bent on making the best Bond since "Goldfinger" - or the best, period, given that he exhumes Bond's old Aston Martin only to shoot it cheekily to pieces.
  12. A Late Quartet
    I was happy watching these actors, happy going behind the scenes of a sober classical music ensemble instead of another druggy rock group, happy hearing Beethoven for a couple of hours. The movie is haut-bourgeois to the bone, but so am I: Let's hear some chamber music and have a little laugh and a cry!
  13. 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.
  14. Wreck-It Ralph
    Still, it does eventually become a bit tedious, and for all the breathless kineticism of the film's second act, you may find yourself twiddling your thumbs. It's a cool game, to be sure, but watching someone else play it gets old after a while.
  15. Flight
    No actor is as brilliant, or as cunning, as Denzel Washington at portraying superhuman coolness and the scary prospect of its loss.
  16. Chasing Mavericks
    It's a perfect fortune cookie of a movie, full of bland life lessons for everybody; would that there were some drama or style in it somewhere along the way.
  17. Fun Size
    Still, it's hard not to think that there's a darker, funnier movie in there waiting to get out. In the meantime, we'll always have the humping chicken.
  18. Cloud Atlas
    The cast comes off like a third-rate stock company on the matinee after the night on which everyone got bombed on mescal (and possibly mescaline).
  19. Alex Cross
    What a whorish film this is: Even the serial killer lectures the detective.
  20. Paranormal Activity 4
    But the real problem behind Paranormal Activity 4 is that its entire raison d'être has gotten old; producer Oren Peli, who directed the first one, even included some gentle digs at the found-footage genre in his superior "Chernobyl Diaries," released earlier this year.
  21. The Sessions
    The briskness of The Sessions works against it: It lacks the fullness of the best films of its ilk, chief among them Jim Sheridan's "My Left Foot." But Lewin lets his eye wander pleasingly.
  22. Holy Motors
    Holy Motors is typically confounding but on every level that matters a work of unfettered - and liberating - imagination.
  23. Here Comes the Boom
    So even if Here Comes the Boom doesn't quite work as a comedy (it's not particularly funny), or a drama (it's not particularly poignant), it has an earnest charm that keeps us engaged.
  24. Sinister
    Sinister did something I thought would be impossible: It made this lifelong horror freak abhor horror movies.
  25. Seven Psychopaths
    Sam Rockwell kills as the hero's loony tunes best friend, deliciously abetted by Christopher Walken as an aging, sad-sack dognapper.
  26. Argo
    A marvel of cunning, an irresistible blend of cool realism and Hollywood hokum.
  27. The Paperboy
    It offers a deranged hodgepodge of tones and acting styles and strange mannerisms and affectations and narrative dead ends that feels like it was assembled by a committee of bipolar extraterrestrials.
  28. Taken 2
    The screenwriters go out of their way to prepare you for Taken 3: Serbedzija has more sons, and Kim's virginity is getting harder and harder to preserve.
  29. Butter
    Butter essentially eats its own premise, then proceeds to bludgeon us with unfunny, unoriginal political satire.
  30. Hotel Transylvania
    The pleasantly disposable animated flick Hotel Transylvania, which gathers all the monsters in the world under one roof, is better than it should be, if not quite as good as it could be.
  31. Pitch Perfect
    She has the perfect nervy, nerdy, needy alter ego in Anna Kendrick.
  32. Won't Back Down
    If you want your movie to blow up the right way, you have to do better than the paint-by-numbers story and characters presented here.
  33. Looper
    If high-toned futuristic time-travel pictures with a splash of romance float your boat the way they do mine, you'll have yourself a time.
  34. Trouble with the Curve
    As cheap as the whole set-up is, the actors make wonderful music together - even if there's not much left of Eastwood's vocal cords except a handful of dust.
  35. End of Watch
    There's nothing in David Ayer's cop drama End of Watch that you haven't already seen, but the film has moments so riveting that you might not care too much.
  36. Dredd
    Dredd 3-D places you firmly in an unreal, dreamlike world and rouses you with its unexpected grace and its rhythms and its movement. The plot ceases to matter after a certain point: This is a great big beautiful music video, and there's nothing really wrong with that.
  37. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    That's the feeling Stephen Chbosky captures in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his exquisite adaptation of his best-selling YA novel about a Pittsburgh high-school freshman who doesn't fit in and then all of a sudden does, for a spell.
  38. 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.
  39. Arbitrage
    Jarecki puts the veteran actor to brilliant use in the insanely gripping Arbitrage.
  40. The Master
    If I seem cool, it might be because I came in hoping for the same level of blood-and-thunder as in the Evangelical scenes of "There Will Be Blood," whereas The Master is a cerebral experience. But Anderson has gone about exploring fundamental tensions in the American character with more discipline than I once thought him capable.
  41. The Words
    The movie, written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, is desultory when it's not inept, but the set-up is so good that you can't help sticking it out to the (unforgivable) end.
  42. Keep the Lights On
    Sachs hits notes we've rarely heard in gay cinema, in which the hedonist bleeds into the humanist, the ephemeral into the enduring.
  43. For a Good Time, Call...
    The confusion in For a Good Time, Call… is delightful, the phone-sex talk sweetening the vibe. Justin Long is peerlessly funny as the girls' gay pal, but the movie belongs to Graynor, who's like Sandra Bullock with a touch of Ginger Rogers–y brass.
  44. Bachelorette
    Bachelorette has some big gaps, and it isn't what you'd call fun - it's not "Bridesmaids 2." But lovely women doing genuinely ugly things makes for a potent combination.
  45. The Possession
    It's a shame, though, that so many of The Possession's later scenes, particularly the exorcism stuff at the end, is mostly a grab bag of tired old scares. You might have convinced yourself, for a while at least, that this one was going to rise above the crowd.
  46. Sleepwalk with Me
    Moment to moment, Sleepwalk With Me is smooth and very entertaining, but it's arrested somewhere between fiction and autobiography.
  47. Lawless
    Although it's shot in lovely, dusty shades of brown with splashes of Coca-Cola red, John Hillcoat's Lawless is dead weight: listlessly classical and then bludgeoning.
  48. Premium Rush
    Premium Rush is that rare bird: a chase picture that's just a chase picture - and a dandy one.
  49. Hit and Run
    Hit and Run works less as a film and more as a likable, semi-documentary romp among friends. The illusion of the drama may be gone, but it's been replaced by something more authentic and adorable. And we might be okay with that.
  50. Cosmopolis
    Cosmopolis is often beautiful, but at times it feels like a movie sealed off from itself.
  51. Sparkle
    These numbers, frankly, display a professionalism and confidence that most of the rest of the movie can't match. And yes, that's the bad news.
  52. ParaNorman
    In the end, perhaps the most touching quality of this film is its low-key, but sensitively rendered portrait of a young, awkward child who hasn't quite managed to figure his way out in the world yet.
  53. The Awakening
    The Awakening has the good sense to find a mood and stick with it. It's not afraid to take itself seriously. It'll send shivers up your spine, both as a thriller and as the melodrama it eventually becomes.
  54. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    For all its feints at sensitivity, this isn't a movie, it's a machine, and it's hard not to be impressed - perhaps even awed - by the sheer ruthlessness with which it jerks the tears from your eyes. If anything, a real movie might just have gotten in the way.
  55. The Expendables 2
    Believe it or not, there's a strange kind of lifelessness to the movie that makes you wish it were dumber -- that it was more obnoxious and louder and crazier.
  56. Robot and Frank
    Robot & Frank, like its protagonist, is charming enough to get by with the sleight-of-hand. Its irresponsibility redeems it - it's a raspberry blown against the dying of the light.
  57. The Campaign
    Roach is too stiff a director to give Ferrell room to romp. Bits like the one in which he's challenged to recite "The Lord's Prayer" needed extra zigs and zags instead of variations on the same joke. A looser director like Adam McKay (Step Brothers) might have created a happier climate for improv.
  58. 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.
  59. Hope Springs
    Streep and Jones make themselves small: She's chirpy; he's crusty. Incessant pop standards on the soundtrack supply the emotion the director can't. All that's missing are commercials for estrogen cream and erectile-dysfunction meds.
  60. Red Hook Summer
    This is a film made by a wiser man who recognizes that everybody's looking for salvation in their own way. In the end, as the camera revisits the cast of broken, fallen characters, we may realize that Red Hook, as far as Spike Lee is concerned, is a state of mind.
  61. 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.
  62. 360
    How odd then that a film all about human connections manages to make none of its own.
  63. Total Recall (2012)
    There isn't anything in this Total Recall to match the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger send-offs, "See you at the pah-ty" and everyone's favorite alimony killer, "Consider this a divorce."
  64. Ruby Sparks
    It's a great metaphor - but not a great movie. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct in a drably naturalistic style, and the script is thin.
  65. The Watch
    Yes, it all gets kind of old, and yes, it's all over the place, but you'll probably find yourself laughing at least some of the time. Dick jokes, after all, can be pretty funny.
  66. 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.
  67. Red Lights
    Veering between tonal and narrative extremes, it's the kind of film that makes you long for the grim pomposity of something like "Signs."
  68. The Queen of Versailles
    For Greenfield, the Siegels are a brilliant metaphor for everything farkakte about the U.S. economy and the culture that shaped it.
  69. Savages
    The film is impressive. It has a bit of the cinematic whoop-de-doo of his noxious "Natural Born Killers," in which serial killers became existential heroes, celebrated for attaining absolute freedom.
  70. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    I hope I'm not raining on Beasts of the Southern Wild's deluge to say it doesn't always live up to its pretensions. There's a lot of unshaped babble and draggy landscape shots, and the music, so lovely in small doses, is numbing when it's ladled over everything.
  71. Magic Mike
    It's better to think of Magic Mike as arty but energetic soft-core porn, with no pickle shots but plenty of juice. You should see it if only for McConaughey, an underrated leading man who finally gets a chance to use his strange timing.
  72. Madea's Witness Protection
    He's still a young guy, but all throughout Witness Protection I imagined Perry sitting glumly at a dressing-room mirror, like the aging Chaplin in "Limelight," forlornly rubbing makeup in his face - a tired, old clown stuck in a tired, old routine.
  73. People Like Us
    As usual, it's Banks, who's turning great performances in lousy movies into some kind of brilliant career strategy.
  74. 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.
  75. The Amazing Spider-Man
    I've saved the best for last: The love interest played by that throaty redheaded (here blonde) darling Emma Stone, whose blue eyes radiate so much intelligence that any actor on whom she trains them in adoration becomes an instant movie star.
  76. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Unfortunately, there's also a certain artificiality to the whole film, both visually and narratively.
  77. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    The whole movie is a good try.
  78. Brave
    In addition to being fast, funny, and unpretentious, Brave is a happy antidote to all the recent films in which women triumph by besting men at their own macho games.
  79. To Rome with Love
    I was blissed out during much of To Rome With Love, but I have to acknowledge its creepy side.
  80. That's My Boy
    The results are soul-corrodingly funny.
  81. Rock of Ages
    Rock of Ages withholds nothing and makes miracles seem cheap.
  82. Safety Not Guaranteed
    The real revelation here is Plaza, whose shtick - the willowy cutie deadpanning about how lousy her life is - should be grating and tired, but it works remarkably well for some reason.
  83. Dark Horse
    You could never call Solondz a humanist, but he achieves something I've never seen elsewhere: compassionate revulsion.
  84. Prometheus
    It's a different sort of experience: a stately, somewhat plodding but endurable science-fiction saga.
  85. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    It also comes as little surprise that she (Fonda) knocks the part out of the park, even if the film around her leaves something to be desired.
  86. Snow White and the Huntsman
    The movie's revisionist tone is startlingly enough to carry you along.
  87. Men in Black III
    The finished product is in a different league than the whompingly terrible Men in Black II - it hits its marks. But it's not inventive enough to overcome the overarching inertia, the palpable absence of passion.
  88. Oslo, August 31st
    Crosses the blood-brain barrier like … like … whatever the drug is, I haven't tried it, thank God. The movie eats into your mind - ­slowly.
  89. Moonrise Kingdom
    It left me bemused instead of moved, but true Andersonites will likely float away in a state of nirvana.
  90. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Somehow both annoyingly overstuffed and depressingly thin.
  91. Battleship
    One of the more enjoyably terrible movies of the year.
  92. Hick
    For a movie that deals with rape, criminality, and even racks up a real body count, Hick is whisper-thin and instantly forgettable.
  93. The Dictator
    The good news is that The Dictator is a loose and silly and occasionally exhilarating political farce in the tradition of Chaplin's The Great Dictator (obviously) and the Marx Brothers' antiwar masterpiece "Duck Soup." And it comes in at a fleet 83 minutes - just right.
  94. Dark Shadows
    The screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith is witless and meandering, though the witlessness wouldn't matter so much if it moved, or the meandering if it were droll.
  95. Where Do We Go Now?
    Although the film's why-can't-we-all-get-along story line and even some of its quirk-laden pit stops feel familiar, the very texture of what we're seeing seems to change from one moment to the next, resulting in an occasionally breathtaking uncertainty.
  96. 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.
  97. Bernie
    On its own terms, Bernie is smoothly made and reasonably entertaining, Linklater doing his Austin-based best not to condescend to the locals - at least the East Carthage locals.
  98. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    The film would be better if it were gentler. It's broadly written and played, the actors too busy telegraphing their characters' emotions to let us contemplate their faces in peace.
  99. I Wish
    Koreeda's compositions have a sympathetic detachment that Americans rarely value but is, for many Japanese, the whole point of art. That means you can contemplate the wonder in these glowing young faces without feeling as if you're on an intravenous drip of corn syrup.
  100. Girl in Progress
    The movie goes soft. But it has the unpretentious energy and charm of a good YA girls' novel.
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