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. Mysteries of Lisbon
    In Mysteries of Lisbon, the prolific Chilean-born director and egghead Raúl Ruiz has achieved something remarkable, at once avant-garde and middlebrow: the apotheosis of the soap opera.
  2. Attack the Block
    Cornish, like Edgar Wright (who directed "Shaun of the Dead" and was an executive producer here), can parody a genre in a way that revitalizes it, that reminds you why the genre was born in the first place. The movie is in a different galaxy than "Cowboys & Aliens": It has, in both senses, guts.
  3. Cowboys & Aliens
    An agreeable time-killer, but I'll bet a couple of clever kids could make a livelier movie with a Woody puppet and a Predator doll.
  4. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    The script, by Dan Fogelman, is unusually and gratifyingly bisexual - i.e., it boasts scenes from both the male and female points of view!
  5. The Future
    This could be the premise of a zany comedy, but the mood of The Future is, from the outset, defeatist - annoyingly defeatist, to be frank.
  6. Tabloid
    Tabloid is candy for voyeurs. We laugh like mad at a nut whose only mistake was being born in the last century, too early to have made real money.
  7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    HPATDH 2 works like a charm. A funereal charm, to be sure, but then, there's no time left for larks.
  8. Project Nim
    You get a bad feeling early in Project Nim, the brilliant, traumatizing documentary by James Marsh (Man on Wire).
  9. Larry Crowne
    The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.
  10. Buck
    Meehl, in her directing debut, is attuned to the rhythms of Buck, who's attuned to the horses.
  11. Green Lantern
    Apart from having no particular reason to exist onscreen, especially at these prices, it's not half bad.
  12. Super 8
    It would be easy to dismiss as 100 percent ersatz if it didn't rekindle at least some of the old excitement - and if the magic of Spielberg's older movies didn't filter through, like light from a distant galaxy.
  13. Beginners
    Mike Mills's marvelously inventive romantic comedy Beginners is pickled in sadness, loss, and the belief that humans (especially when they mate) are stunted by their parents' buried secrets, their own genetic makeup, and our sometimes-sociopathic social norms.
  14. The Tree of Life
    After warming up with "The Thin Red Line" and "The New World," Malick has succeeded in fully creating his own film syntax, his own temporal reality, and lo, it is … kind of goofy. But riveting.
  15. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.
  16. Midnight in Paris
    This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.
  17. Thor
    Equal parts trippy, tacky, and monumental, the blend surprisingly agreeable, a happy change from all those aggressively down-to-earth superhero flicks like "Iron Man."
  18. Everything Must Go
    That lawn with its scraps of a ruined life is a setting both satirical and poignant, and Will Ferrell gives a performance of Chekhovian depth.
  19. The Beaver
    Gibson is better in the later scenes, when Walter tries to escape the Beaver's nefarious influence. And Gibson's never bad. It's just that we know how much is missing. As a raging nutcase, he's capable of so much more.
  20. Hobo with a Shotgun
    There's something appealing about the movie's unpretentious carnival of carnage, although I could have done without the flamethrower assault on a school bus to raise the stakes.
  21. 13 Assassins
    Has a mixture of bloodletting and exultation that would make Sam Peckinpah sit up in his grave and howl with pleasure.
  22. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    When the film shifts to Shanghai and the club Casablanca, there's too much lustrous-hued loitering and too few martial­-arts set pieces.
  23. Exporting Raymond
    Amusing and annoying in the wrong ratio, maybe 30/70.
  24. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams is sometimes frozen by Herzog's awe. But it's hard not to love him for always trying to look beyond the surface of things, to find a common chord in the landscape of dreams.
  25. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    It's surprising that The Greatest Movie Ever Sold plays so entertainingly, given that Spurlock's quest is essentially beside the point.
  26. Incendies
    The movie doesn't quite jell, but you'll feel its sting for hours.
  27. Meek's Cutoff
    For all its indirection, Meek's Cutoff is an utterly conventional film. But it's worth asking whether Reichardt's drowsy rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage add up to something illuminating. And here's where she earns at least some of those plaudits she's been getting.
  28. Arthur
    In Arthur, the spectacularly grating remake of Steve Gordon's 1981 P. G. Wodehouse simulation (this time, Peter Baynham miswrote, Jason Winer misdirected), Russell Brand gives a career-killing performance.
  29. Hanna
    Yes, this farrago of fairy tale and sci-fi conspiracy flick is, on one level, howlingly obvious. But there are howls of derision and howls of amazement, and mine were of the latter kind, mostly.
  30. The Conspirator
    The screenwriter, James Solomon, does the poor job only a liberal could at making the case for a Cheneyesque "dark side," and he isn't helped by Kline's wooden acting. Too bad. The Conspirator is eloquent enough to let the other side have its say.
  31. In a Better World
    Bier dramatizes our ambivalence so earnestly that it's tempting to give her awards rather than admit that the movie is a crushing bore.
  32. Insidious
    The thing is scary as hell when it's all creaks and thumps and doors swinging open. Then come the explanations, the special effects, and the inevitable feeling of been-there-been-­bombarded-by-that.
  33. Source Code
    It's a crackerjack ride, shot and edited for maximum discombobulation.
  34. Paul
    The third and least original of the Pegg-Frost features, but it's still a lot funnier than most films of its ilk.
  35. Jane Eyre
    Wasikowska's Jane is as watchful as only a damaged soul can be, and, when challenged, frighteningly fast.
  36. 3 Backyards
    The movie has none of the smugness of "­American Beauty": You could dream of living in a world like this.
  37. Win Win
    Blessed is the go-for-it movie that can make room for dissonances and weirdness.
  38. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    Uncle Boonmee is entrancing-and also, if you're not sufficiently steeped in its rhythms, narcotizing.
  39. Hall Pass
    It's a terrific performance-and terrifying. Owen Wilson is aging: Where goeth my own youth?
  40. The Adjustment Bureau
    The doughy Damon and aristocratic Blunt don't match up physically, and they never get any Hepburn-Tracy rhythms going that might create some current.
  41. The Eagle
    The Eagle is furiously unsettled-thematically, temporally, meteorologically. Wild-eyed, long-haired Brits leap atop the Romans' shields as the soldiers blindly hack away, the bodies so close that you can barely tell the victor from the vanquished. The battles in the fog and rain have a hallucinatory power.
  42. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    This sensationally engineered promo film makes Justin Bieber look like a true force of nature.
  43. Poetry
    It comes together neatly, perhaps too neatly to be … poetry. But it's not prosaic, either. It has a lucid grace.
  44. Cedar Rapids
    It helps that Reilly is the opposite of a slob-comic. With his hangdog melancholy, he makes even the nonstop cunnilingus allusions poignant-the product of emotional longing.
  45. Kaboom
    The movie ends abruptly-too abruptly for my taste-but the gaiety lingers through the closing credits. Not even apocalypse can dispel the sexy vibes.
  46. Applause
    As much of her (Steen) as there is, you'll want more.
  47. No Strings Attached
    No Strings Attached is so palpably calculated that you know if the camera had pulled back a foot from the bed in which Portman and Kutcher were pretending to have sex, you'd have seen their agents standing by beaming: proud parents, proud pimps.
  48. The Dilemma
    Perhaps the late Blake Edwards could have found a balance between slapstick and psychodrama, but Ron Howard can't get the pacing right, and Allan Loeb's script is even wordier than the one he wrote for "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."
  49. The Green Hornet
    At least The Green Hornet is likable, and a refreshing change from the heavy, angst-ridden superhero pictures so beloved by obnoxious fanboys.
  50. Somewhere
    This is a mood piece, shapeless but often lyric.
  51. Another Year
    Another year, another Mike Leigh gem.
  52. Blue Valentine
    Blue Valentine leaves you with the shattering vision of its truest victim-the one who'll someday look for safety in places it might not be. And the psychodrama will go on and on …
  53. Rabbit Hole
    The Kidman in Rabbit Hole is a revelation.
  54. Love and Other Drugs
    Love & Other Drugs is crazily uneven, jumping back and forth between jerk-off jokes and Parkinson's sufferers sharing their stories of hope. It's the sort of movie in which half the audience will be drying their eyes and the other half rolling them.
  55. How Do You Know
    The sad part is that How Do You Know is nowhere near as dumb as it looks. A couple of comic set pieces are inspired-or would be, if Brooks's timing weren't off.
  56. TRON: Legacy
    With a million times more computing power at its disposal than its 1982 predecessor, Tron: Legacy still looks like Disco Night at the jai alai fronton.
  57. The Tempest
    The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor's spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea.
  58. The Fighter
    The movie has so much texture that once it gets you, you're good and got.
  59. True Grit
    True Grit isn't as momentous an event as you might hope, but once you adjust to its deliberate rhythms (it starts slowly), it's a charming, deadpan Western comedy.
  60. The King's Speech
    It's a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.
  61. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    I hope that in Part 2, Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves give Fiennes a better send-off than Dame J.K. did in her less-than-wizardly climactic wandathon. Having made us sit through two and a half hours with no payoff, they'd better not go all Muggle on us. Next time, we want magic, people.
  62. Black Swan
    This is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions.
  63. The Nutcracker
    Even if the film were well done, it would still be a travesty.
  64. Made in Dagenham
    It's hard to do justice to Hawkins's acting, because you never actually see it: Her Rita simply is.
  65. For Colored Girls
    He (Perry) has taken Shange's landmark poem cycle for seven African-American actresses, cut it up, and sewn its bloody entrails into a tawdry, masochistic soap opera that exponentially ups the "Precious" ante.
  66. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    It's probably easier for an ex-prosecutor known for macho threats to say he got caught screwing than for him to say he got screwed. But folks, he was reamed.
  67. Fair Game
    Exposed, abandoned, branded as traitors, the Wilsons finally have no choice but to tell their story, the latest chapter of which is this potent Hollywood melodrama.
  68. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    As in his pithy, tuneful songs-many written from different perspectives, in different styles-Merritt is committed to stylizing his misery instead of boring you with it.
  69. Welcome to the Rileys
    Ken Hixon's script contrives a lot of mutual-healing set pieces and then sadly but shrewdly aborts them: That makes the drama more Chekhovian than "quite real."
  70. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    Larsson is renowned for his attention to marginal details, which gives his prose a rambling, one-thing-after-another pace that many readers find soothing. Onscreen, the lack of acceleration makes for one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.
  71. Hereafter
    Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.
  72. Ophelia
    This is the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie, and frankly a lot of it is silly and sophomoric. But it’s also juicy and fun.
  73. Wildlife
    [Dano] gives his actors space so that the rhythms are their own, and they hold us through the tough final scenes and bittersweet ending. This is a superb film.
  74. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Lisa’s drive is more than biological; it’s intellectual and emotional, and that’s what keeps what often risks becoming camp madness in an identifiably human place — almost all the way to the end.
  75. The Happy Prince
    The Happy Prince proves that a film can be both bleak and warm-spirited, as befits its mighty subject.
  76. Private Life
    Jenkins’ writing underlines the fundamental instability at the heart of all our lives, while proposing that most universal of remedies: empathy, love.
  77. Colette
    Politeness may be the film’s weakest point, whether with its characters or bedroom scenes. But it’s hardly something to complain about, especially when the company is this lively.
  78. Lizzie
    The problem is the enervated pacing and ludicrous depiction — after much fancy skipping back and forth in time — of the murders themselves.
  79. I Think We're Alone Now
    After its intriguing start, the movie gets dumb and dumberer. “Third-act problems,” concluded many in the Sundance audience. But the first two acts have issues, too.
  80. Juliet, Naked
    It’s everything a mainstream rom-com should be but no longer is — literate, unpredictable, full of bustling tangents.
  81. Blindspotting
    It’s not that Blindspotting doesn’t have important points to make about how individuals live in a collective history of racialized violence. It’s that it has a hard time making those points feel organic to the story and style, whether it’s going for realism or over-the-top musical-theater territory.
  82. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade is cognizant of all the new scary realities of growing up with an internet-connected camera on your person at all times, but it also finds hope in it, as, if nothing else, a tool for self-discovery.
  83. Sorry to Bother You
    A pro-union, anti-corporate, race-conscious, Silicon Valley side-eyeing tale of one man’s journey through the late-capitalist nightmare of an “alternate present” version of Oakland, Sorry to Bother You’s greatest asset is the strength of its conviction, and how far it’s willing to go to make sure it stays burned in your brain.
  84. Leave No Trace
    The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.
  85. Damsel
    I was alternately delighted and irritated, though mostly a very happy camper.
  86. I, Tonya
    I, Tonya is not by any means a weeper. It’s a black comedy, and parts of it are too broad, like a second-rate Coen brothers movie.
  87. Carlos
    Shot by shot, scene by scene, it's a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn't bored for a millisecond.
  88. Inside Job
    As he proved in his Iraq-centered "No End in Sight," policy wonk turned documentarian Charles Ferguson has no peer when it comes to tracking the course of a preventable catastrophe.
  89. Let Me In
    The poetic Swedish vampire picture (with arterial spray) "Let the Right One In" has been hauntingly well transplanted to the high desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and renamed Let Me In.
  90. The Social Network
    It's an entertainingly cynical small movie. Aaron Sorkin's dialogue tumbles out so fast it's as if the characters want their brains to keep pace with their processors; they talk like they keyboard, like Fincher directs, with no time for niceties.
  91. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    The sequel to an influential eighties motion picture is so loaded with characters and crosscurrents that we wonder why it isn't a thirteen-hour cable mini-series instead of an impacted two-hour mess. The film is like my portfolio: full of promise, with minuscule returns.
  92. Waiting for 'Superman'
    This is one of the most galvanizing documentaries I've ever seen.
  93. The Town
    In The Town, he (Renner) doesn't signal that Jem is a sociopath... It's a deeply unnerving performance, beyond good or evil.
  94. Catfish
    Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?
  95. Easy A
    Lisa Kudrow does a dazzling turn as a guidance counselor who's a flickering mixture of sympathy and narcissism. But the movie belongs to Stone, that gorgeous, husky-voiced redhead.
  96. Lovely, Still
    A haunting duet for two great actors who haven't lost a step and have gained the most exquisite lyricism.
  97. I'm Still Here
    There's a thrilling madness to Phoenix's Method.
  98. A Film Unfinished
    It becomes a meditation on the dual nature of film, on a "reality" at once true and false, essential and tainted.
  99. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    The film is repetitive, top-heavy: Wright blows his wad too early. But a different lead might have kept you laughing and engaged.
  100. Animal Kingdom
    Early on, writer-director David Michôd serves up "Trainspotting"-like tricks and narration that is beguiling, if rarely apropos. But the actors are something.
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