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. First Position
    Kargman is light on her feet, and she has chosen to follow a fascinating group of kids preparing for the 2010 Youth America Grand Prix.
  2. The Five-Year Engagement
    A charming, funny, reactionary mating comedy.
  3. The Avengers
    The Avengers is both campy and ­reverential. Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.
  4. Headhunters
    The compact Hennie is a wonderful actor, smoothly congenial when confident, uproarious when rattled. And he will be rattled-as well as stabbed, shorn, bitten, mangled, and worse.
  5. Sound of My Voice
    Batmanglij keeps the movie even-keeled, full of medium close-ups, underscored by ambient plinks and shimmers, with nothing to break the trance until a last scene that upends everything we thought we knew.
  6. The Lucky One
    Efron's stopped-clock seriousness is more convincing on a melancholy loverboy than it is on a melancholy soldier. We can't quite sense the harrowing torment of lives lost before his eyes, but we can sense the sweet anguish of being around the woman you adore. It'll have to do.
  7. Think Like a Man
    It also helps that they've got actresses like Gabrielle Union and Taraji P. Henson doing the heavy lifting of trying to show real emotion while still keeping things light and on the comedy track.
  8. Goodbye First Love
    There's nothing like a film about wayward passions to remind you how differently people feel things.
  9. Darling Companion
    If you can stay awake, you'll see a performance by ­Keaton that is radiant in its simplicity, all ditheriness shaken off. She's still ­peaking - ­someone give her a great role.
  10. Lockout
    The pretty good thriller Lockout peaks with its first shot...When the camera moves and the plot kicks in - as it must - the movie loses its witty economy. Things get cluttered.
  11. The Three Stooges
    The combination of childlike glee and grown-up precision is a wonder. The movie actually earns the right to exist, which is no mean feat.
  12. Detention
    You admire the movie for refusing to ever, ever slow down, but you also wonder what might have happened had Kahn dared to settle, even just a bit. Instead, what we get is a mad kaleidoscope of genre, with occasional glimpses into the mysteries of the exploding teenage heart.
  13. Monsieur Lazhar
    Ineffably sad - yet there's almost no loitering. The film is crisp, evenly paced, its colors bright, as sharp as the winter cold.
  14. The Cabin in the Woods
    Is it scary? Not especially. But there are enough gory surprises around every bend to keep you laughing/screaming/cringing.
  15. Damsels in Distress
    Stillman's comeback comedy Damsels in Distress is wobbly and borderline twee, but it deepens as it goes along and becomes rich.
  16. Wrath of the Titans
    Wrath at least has the good sense to try to have a little fun with its mince-myth premise. It's better than Clash, but it's still not particularly good.
  17. Mirror Mirror
    The Snow White comedy Mirror, Mirror turns out to be not that terrible - or maybe it's that the terrible first half hour wears you down so much that the rest seems relatively pleasant.
  18. 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.
  19. Bully
    Bully is repetitive and not especially artful, but children who allow themselves to see the world through the eyes of the film's victims will never be the same.
  20. The Raid: Redemption
    Once the action starts - and it starts very quickly - The Raid is relentless, breathtaking in its sheer propulsive majesty. But it's also shot through with moments of bleak poetry amid the carnage.
  21. The Deep Blue Sea
    The Deep Blue Sea is not a showy or pronounced movie. Open yourself up to it, however, and it might destroy you.
  22. The Hunger Games
    Watching The Hunger Games, I was struck both by how slickly Ross hit his marks and how many opportunities he was missing to take the film to the next level - to make it more shocking, lyrical, crazy, daring.
  23. Seeking Justice
    To be fair, when the story is moving, it's okay.
  24. A Thousand Words
    His performance feels so disingenuous, so forced, that an otherwise perfectly acceptable high-concept comedy comes crashing down around him.
  25. John Carter
    There's no wonder or elation or even dopy sincerity here - just a high level of proficiency and, yes, a lot of expensive CGI.
  26. The Kid with a Bike
    Despite the simplicity of the brothers' technique, The Kid With a Bike has deep religious underpinnings, a relentless drive toward the mythos of death and resurrection. The film is not just in the tradition of Pinocchio and A.I.: It is a worthy successor.
  27. 21 Jump Street
    It has a bad, slapstick first act but by midpoint becomes strangely compelling, tapping into the fantasy of reliving one's high-school years (which did a number on us all) and getting it right.
  28. Friends with Kids
    Westfeldt, now 42, belongs to a generation (and class) of people for whom nothing about having kids is easy. Her intensity feels just right - better than in any film I've seen in years - for How We Breed Now.
  29. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In their move from 11-minute episodes on TV to 94 minutes, Tim and Eric have lost none of their hilarity or irreverence. But this time around, they somehow manage to be tedious, too.
  30. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    Dr. Seuss's The Lorax [sic] isn't Seussian in spirit. It's shrill and campy and stuffed with superfluous characters.
  31. Project X
    As a tribute for the awesome destructive power of the teenage libido, the house-party-gone-apocalyptic flick Project X is pretty compelling...Think "Girls Gone Wild" meets "Black Hawk Down." Unfortunately, it also appears to want to tell a story, with characters and things, and on that level it pretty much completely falls apart.
  32. This Is Not a Film
    In totalitarian societies, artists have found all sorts of ways - some brilliantly imaginative - to disguise their political protest, but Panahi has no subterfuges left. This Is Not a Film ends with a whimper that is a bang. He must be freed.
  33. Gone
    Believe it or not, the delicate-featured, whisper-thin actress manages to (mostly) pull it off, but the abysmal movie around her lets her down.
  34. Wanderlust
    It's not fresh terrain for satire, yet most of the jokes play riotously well.
  35. Good Deeds
    Watching the impossibly dry and somnambulant Good Deeds, you actually miss that crazy side of Perry. It's sort of ironic: Here's a film about a guy who's being false to his true self, and you realize the director might be doing the same.
  36. Act of Valor
    In the movie's best moment, an American sniper takes out a bad guy by a pier while a pair of hands reaches out of the water to grab the body so it doesn't make a splash and alert the other baddies.
  37. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    Spirit of Vengeance is so focused and, as a result, so impoverished that you actually feel bad for Cage. The actor tries to bring the weird (though at this point one wonders if he can even do anything else) but the film more often than not leaves him high and dry, saddling him with standard-issue action hero lines and boilerplate action set-pieces.
  38. The Forgiveness of Blood
    [A] compelling film touching on the perils of being young - that's it, merely young - in a culture without justice.
  39. Return
    There are a couple of hundred instances in which Johnson or her actors could take condescending short cuts and slip into white-trash stereotypes, but I didn't see any - only gifted performers vanishing into their characters, refusing to pass judgment.
  40. This Means War
    The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.
  41. Chronicle
    Indeed, to even call Josh Trank's film a superhero movie seems wrong: Rather, it's about what the average teenage boy might actually do with superpowers - and there is very little heroism or villainy on display here. Chronicle's very lack of scope is its strength.
  42. 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.
  43. 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.
  44. In Darkness
    In outline, In Darkness is a standard conversion melodrama, but little within those parameters is easy. The darkness lingers into the light.
  45. Perfect Sense
    You've got to make room in your heart for a film in which the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but a cuddle.
  46. Kill List
    The final twist is both baffling and repulsive, but as an evocation of the triumph of evil, it's peerless.
  47. 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.
  48. The Grey
    Neeson's gravity elevates the action, and there's a fine, prickly performance by an actor new to me, Frank Grillo, as the asshole of the group. But The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant.
  49. Haywire
    Soderbergh tends to get one big idea - a thesis idea - per film and stick with it even when a touch more flexibility would help. Here it's that non-kinetic camera, which he's so wedded to that parts of the film seem underenergized, like a cheap seventies or early eighties picture you'd catch at two in the morning on Cinemax's tenth most popular channel.
  50. Albert Nobbs
    The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear - the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.
  51. Underworld: Awakening
    Anyway, "Children of Men" this ain't, though the inert directing of Len Wiseman (who helmed the first two films and has a producer credit here) has thankfully been replaced by Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein, who seem to have a lot more verve and even some visual whimsy.
  52. Red Tails
    For all the occasional grace of its high-flying derring-do, Red Tails barely feels like a movie. It's an uncertain hodgepodge of impulses and desires that never coheres enough to even crash and burn.
  53. Joyful Noise
    A Joyful Noise overcomes. The big numbers are a gospel-pop-funk fusion that made me think, Hmmm, this seems very processed - before I noticed my feet were tapping of their own accord. How can you resist that wah-wah funk guitar?
  54. Contraband
    The result is that rare Hollywood genre film that earns its intensity rather than forcing it upon you.
  55. The Devil Inside
    It has been a long time since I've heard people - many people - distinctly yell, "Boo!" Usually they just growl or moan or hiss. They don't bother actually to articulate the word "Boo!" I second their statement. The ending reeks.
  56. A Separation
    What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem.
  57. The Iron Lady
    Shallow but satisfying, largely because of Meryl Streep and her big fake English teeth and gift for using mimicry as a means of achieving empathy.
  58. The Muppets
    It may not entirely work as a movie, but The Muppets shines as a piece of touching pop nostalgia.
  59. Rampart
    As Brown becomes more flagrantly self-destructive and at the same time more deluded, you realize you're watching "Bad Lieutenant" made by a tediously finger-wagging Jew instead of a tediously desecrating Catholic.
  60. A Dangerous Method
    That wordiness coupled with Cronenberg's classical restraint is part of the splendid Freudian joke at the movie's center.
  61. Shame
    McQueen films his characters like specimens in a jar, but the stakes are so high that the actors deliver.
  62. Outrage
    Even when a guy is getting stabbed in the ear with a chopstick, Outrage is so controlled you're liable to go mad watching it. Somehow both stifling and beautiful, it's the Salo of Yakuza pictures.
  63. Sleeping Beauty
    Novelist-turned-director Leigh's dryly efficient style is perched between the matter-of-fact and the impossibly arty.
  64. The Sitter
    The Sitter feels slapdash and quick, but you might not want to have it any other way.
  65. Young Adult
    The movie spreads bad vibes like a virus.
  66. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    The only reason to put yourself through Guy Ritchie's overblown, inelegant Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows is to see Jared Harris, who plays Professor Moriarty, in a chilling low key.
  67. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    The movie is wonderful, nonsensical fun.
  68. Carnage
    A scabrous, amusing, and thoroughly predictable exercise in exposing the animalistic underbellies of grown-ups pretending to be civilized liberals.
  69. We Bought a Zoo
    Cameron Crowe is a romantic bordering on utopian, and his authentic family values - biological and surrogate - shine through in his enchanting We Bought a Zoo.
  70. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    But the question hangs: Does this artificial, three-hankie scenario justify its 9/11 appropriations? Dry your eyes and decide for yourself.
  71. The Adventures of Tintin
    Everything he did in live-action movies with rolling boulders and runaway convoys he does bigger and better - by a factor of ten - in every frame. At the end of two hours, my jaw ached from grinning.
  72. War Horse
    Spielberg has been ridiculed for shooting his actors from below against impossibly Spielbergian skies and a denouement that lays the love on copiously. But there's nothing simpleminded about how he uses movie magic, as a spell to dispel nihilism, to save us from the worst of ourselves by summoning up the best.
  73. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    David Fincher's American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo adds nothing to the previous adaptation, but it's certainly the more evocative piece of filmmaking.
  74. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    I've heard it said that Le Carré's work lost its savor with the end of the Cold War, which is as dumb as discounting "Coriolanus" because Romans and ­Volscians are no longer killing each other. Le Carré's subject was the national character and what happened to it under threat and in the absence of public scrutiny. It could hardly be, mutatis mutandis, more contemporary.
  75. Hugo
    For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film.
  76. Coriolanus
    Fiennes and Logan haven't made a definitive Coriolanus, but they've made a sensationally gripping one. They have the pulse of the play, its firm martial beats and its messy political clatter. They tell a damn good story.
  77. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    In any case, the last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger. The movie's that primal.
  78. The Descendants
    Payne is too acerbic - maybe too much of an asshole - to settle for easy humanism. But he's too smart a dramatist to settle for easy derision. Mockery and empathy seesaw, the balance precarious - and thrillingly so. It's the noblest kind of satire: cruel and yet, in the end, lacking the killing blow.
  79. Melancholia
    The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime.
  80. J. Edgar
    It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings. Not DiCaprio, though.
  81. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary has no mighty gonzo wind. Even with a push from its Thompson-worshipping star, Johnny Depp, it leaves our freak flag limp.
  82. Tower Heist
    A shameless but exuberantly well-done caper comedy.
  83. Like Crazy
    Like Crazy has a lively syntax and could, in an ungrateful mood, be tagged as slick. But Doremus gets the tempos right.
  84. Anonymous
    A well-polished cowpat that will confuse and bore those who know nothing about Shakespeare and incense those who know almost anything.
  85. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The non-ending turns the whole movie into an elaborate tease, too creepy to dismiss, too shallow to justify its "ambiguities."
  86. Margin Call
    A hell of a picture. And shrewd.
  87. The Skin I Live In
    It's the only Almodóvar movie in which feeling, emotional or sexual, doesn't suffuse the imagery and hold the ramshackle melodrama together.
  88. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    The movie is a reductio ad absurdum, a sick joke taken to extremes, beginning with a goof on the notion that horror movies inspire copycats and ending with a test to determine whether some people will watch anything.
  89. The Ides of March
    It's tempting to praise The Ides of March as a realistic depiction of how low we've sunk. But that would mean accepting the second-rate writing and third-rate melodrama and incredible shrinking characters.
  90. Margaret
    This is the first bad movie that has ever made me call for a sequel - to get it all right.
  91. 50/50
    The movie belongs to Gordon-­Levitt and Anna Kendrick as his painfully green therapist.
  92. Take Shelter
    Nichols has a genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.
  93. Weekend
    I hate to damage so fragile a work with overpraise, but, gay or straight, if you don't see yourself in this movie, you need to get a life.
  94. Moneyball
    The movie doesn't quite come together, but it's full of smart, cynical talk, and it's very entertaining.
  95. Contagion
    Like much of Soderbergh's recent work, Contagion feels a little sterile, more like a cinematic exercise than something with blood pumping through it. It's certainly high-minded - it might be the most high-minded disaster movie ever made.
  96. Drive
    Every bit as dumb as August's "Conan the Barbarian" but awash in neon-lit nightscapes and existential dread, with killings so graphic that you can't entirely believe what you're gagging at.
  97. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.
  98. Apollo 18
    Apollo 18, isn't egregiously inept. It just never lives. It's 80 minutes of dead air.
  99. Colombiana
    Luc Besson's Jumping Frog Action Factory looks mighty lame in Colombiana.
  100. The Help
    It's a tough, beautifully judged performance (Davis) - it gives this too-soft movie a spine.
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