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. 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.
  2. Once Upon a Deadpool
    It feels like overkill. It is overkill. But then again, isn’t that what the Deadpool films are all about? Once Upon a Deadpool, in that sense, feels very much of a piece with the overall series. It’s a sick, dumb joke that you can’t help but laugh at. And as soon as you do, you feel bad about falling for the gag. I wish I could f-[bleep] this movie.
  3. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The grandeur of the Lord of the Rings trilogy [has] been replaced by something that resembles tatty summer-stock theater.
  4. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cuba
    Marvelous atmosphere and individual scenes, but not quite a movie. [31 Dec 1979, p.12]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  6. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition--or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves...It's the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is a cosmic nothing.
  7. Beautiful Creatures
    I enjoyed this piece of southern-fried screwball Gothic whimsy (with jolts of CGI spell-casting for the multiplex crowd) so much that I’m sad to admit that it’s nowhere near as potent as "Twilight."
  8. The Other Boleyn Girl
    A brisk feminist melodrama that is, historically speaking, a load of wank. It has the feel of a game of “telephone,” in which information is progressively mangled.
  9. Half of a Yellow Sun
    Transporting, well acted, and occasionally powerful. It’s also a rushed, maddening mess.
  10. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    Bad Boys: Ride or Die serves as passable entertainment. But one does miss the gonzo action spectacles of yore, which this franchise once embodied.
  11. Fair Play
    Chloe Domont’s film divides the entire world into binary moments of understanding and misunderstanding — without the shades of gray that would make Fair Play and its characters more tangible and its central tension less didactic.
  12. Wilson
    I wish the movie had more of a tragic undercurrent — the tone is wobbly.
  13. Operation Finale
    The fleeting good moments in Operation Finale come from a few of the actors.
  14. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    If there’s a sure thing in movies, it’s that if you cast Nicolas Cage in a role in which he goes crazy, he’ll rise to the occasion and keep on rising until he seems even loonier than his character.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Serena
    This is a film full of unremarkable compromises — the kind that result in a bland film rather than a bad one.
  16. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    John Travolta finds no artistic breathing-room in A Love Song for Bobby Long.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Brooks is looking for comedy in all the wrong places. He's no longer his own White Whale. He's something slower, in a shell--his own turtle.
  18. 3 Generations
    While 3 Generations certainly has some worthy explorations, it’s too vain not to sugarcoat itself, visually or otherwise.
  19. It: Chapter Two
    It Chapter Two moves with an almost too swift purpose, never feeling the weight of its nearly three-hour runtime; although it is long, the film feels frustratingly thin. Meanwhile, the film is aggressively sentimental, and moments of emotional catharsis or terror don’t often hit the way they need to. When they do, it is because of the dedication of the acting.
  20. Little Monsters
    Rarely have I seen a horror-comedy as joyless as Little Monsters. Which feels like a weird (and sad) thing to say, because rarely have I seen a horror-comedy that is also so insistent in its humor, so determined to try and entertain me, as Little Monsters. It’s fast, loud, and impossibly shrill — except when it quiets down, which is when it briefly, belatedly comes to life.
  21. Boogie
    There is a maddeningly unconsidered quality to Boogie’s emotions about Asian American masculinity, and never more so than in the film’s fraught relationship with Blackness.
  22. Love Actually
    Cloying as much of this stuff is, it's not cynical. Curtis seems genuinely convinced that love is all around. Far be it from me to say otherwise. We don’t speak the same language.
  23. 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.
  24. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    I don’t hold Larsson’s novels in enough esteem to mind a theoretical sanding down of them into B-movie popcorn fare, but this isn’t the way to do it.
  25. Men
    Despite all the broken bones, the graphic deaths, and the copious amounts of blood, the driving idea behind Men is not bold enough to feel frightening. Instead, it’s remarkably tepid.
  26. Elio
    Elio . . . plays like something that was imperfectly assembled from its component parts, as though its creative team couldn’t figure out a way to align its visions of candy-colored intergalactic diplomacy with its emotional themes of empathy and learning to think about what’s going on inside those around us.
  27. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then.
  28. The Age of Adaline
    The Age of Adaline, for its part, delivers the twists and turns of its fantastical plot with elegance and confidence. Here, the weak romance threatens to bring everything down.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Swing Shift
    It offers a Life-magazine view of the home front, with adultery added--but the adultery is so unimpassioned that it might have come from Life, too. [30 Apr 1984, p.87]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  30. The Light Between Oceans
    Here, the material is already melodramatic — the characters are at the mercy of seismic forces — and Cianfrance’s direction comes off as wildly overwrought.
  31. American Assassin
    It gallops along quickly enough to keep us entertained, but not so quickly that we can’t see the seams of its creaky American Hero setup.
  32. Red Sparrow
    Figuring out whether someone is a double, triple, or quadruple agent isn’t a brain-teaser, it’s a brain-irritant, especially when the script is so convoluted. The novel by Jason Matthews is cleaner, without so much jumping around between the two main characters.
  33. Rust
    The picture is dedicated to Hutchins, and its brooding elegance, its rich shadows and evocative close-ups, demonstrates her achievement: Visually, Rust is often astonishing — which of course reminds us all over again of the dark specter hanging over the film.
  34. The Protégé
    Unfortunately, for every scene in which The Protégé seems to know exactly what it is, there’s one in which it seems to think it’s a lot smarter than it is. Given the level of talent involved, that has to count as a disappointment.
  35. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    I don't mean to unduly target Kill Bill Vol. 2 --it's certainly no worse than most of the blam-blam fare out there. But what I crave now are movies that speak to me in a different way about violence, that acknowledge the fact that real people are harmed.
  36. The Book of Clarence
    It begins as a comedy, takes a turn toward the earnest, and ends with a sort of genial blasphemy. There’s definitely nothing else like it out there, for better and worse, and even if it doesn’t work, there’s something admirable about how at ease the film is with its own erratic rhythms.
  37. The Equalizer 2
    The film starts to feel like it’s more invested in selling the idea of the series rather than a film in and of itself.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Fifty Shades of Grey is nowhere near as laughable as you might have feared (or perversely hoped for): It’s elegantly made, and Dakota Johnson is so good at navigating the heroine’s emotional zigs and zags that you want to buy into the whole cobwebbed premise.
  41. Maleficent
    Jolie’s commitment to the part is admirable: She gives this Maleficent a real emotional urgency. But the rest of the movie lets her down.
  42. You, Me & Tuscany
    Nobody ever feels like a real person in this movie, but we’re pulling for them anyway. The same could be said for the film: It’s not particularly good, but I selfishly want it to be a hit anyway, just so we can bask in the genre for a little longer. The world was a better place when rom-coms roamed the land.
  43. Babel
    In their last collaboration, "21 Grams," the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.
  44. Deep Water
    Deep Water, which was written by Zach Helm (of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium) and Euphoria Svengali Sam Levinson, never creates any sense of internal coherence in its toxic main pair.
  45. City of God
    Undeniably powerful, but also rather numbing.
  46. Divided We Fall
    Divided We Fall is intended to be restorative, but its wish fulfillments, while charming, are also a bit too gaga for that.
  47. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.
  48. Pleasure
    Thyberg clearly set out to create a hysteria-free look at the industry, taking on the challenge of critiquing structural issues without casting judgments on the idea of having sex on camera. Pleasure succeeds at this, though not without a cost. It’s a clear-eyed treatment of porn wedded to a character study that never comes to life.
  49. 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.
  50. 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Catch-22
    As Catch-22 limps along from vignette to vignette, one sees that what it lacks is cohesion, style and essential mood. [29 June 1970, p.54]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  52. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    The tall, cool Kidman works hard to impersonate a woman possessed, but she's not the type of actress to fill in a role that hasn't been filled in on paper.
  53. The Judge
    In The Judge, a legal drama that builds to the requisite Hollywood Dark Night of the Soul, Robert Downey Jr. has a role so far inside his comfort zone that the movie has no drive, no urgency.
  54. Die Another Day
    This series is in its fortieth year; it might be nice to see Bond battle a readily identifiable, real-world villain for a change. There's certainly no shortage.
  55. Ride Along
    It all mostly works, but you can’t help but wonder at times if it could have been a lot funnier if it had just a bit more edge.
  56. The Amateur
    Malek keeps trying to find the emotional center and dignity of a character who’s pure pulp, and while it’s an admirable effort, it’s also jarringly unsuited to the movie.
  57. The Longest Ride
    The Longest Ride is actually one of the more competent Sparks films in some years — a far cry from the creaky noir of "Safe Haven," the awkwardly backloaded melodrama of "The Best of Me," or the phony brooding of "The Lucky One." It goes down smoothly, if blandly, like an air-flavored milkshake.
  58. 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.
  59. Out of Time
    A crime thriller that is strong on sultry atmosphere--you practically break into a sweat watching it--but weak on believability.
  60. Most Likely to Murder
    Most Likely to Murder, a perfectly fine and forgettable story about a man who still has some growing up to do coming back to his childhood home, is not the worst or the best, merely the latest.
  61. 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.
  62. 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.
  63. Hamlet 2
    Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting.
  64. 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.
  65. Sidewalks of New York
    It makes the same misstep that Allen's comedies often do: It assumes that the lives of these people are only about sex and love, and so that's all we ever see of them. This one-and-a-half-dimensionality wears thin.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Dog's Purpose
    Filmed in the burnished glow that envelops all of Hallström’s American movies, A Dog’s Purpose recycles bits of every animal saga you can name, and practically dares you to make it through with a face of stone. Even a dog movie could use a higher purpose.
  67. M3GAN 2.0
    M3gan 2.0 is a baffling movie, relying less on the conceptual humor of its predecessor and more on occasional quips and a few genuinely silly gags.
  68. Dreamcatcher
    It would take a filmmaker of truly astonishing versatility to harmonize all these disparate tones...But there are moments in Dreamcatcher when Kasdan gives you the giggles and the creeps at the same time, and that’s not easy to do.
  69. Runner Runner
    Ben Affleck makes for a pretty good jerk, but he can’t pull off outright villainy. That’s probably the main problem with the crime thriller Runner Runner.
  70. 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.
  71. War for the Planet of the Apes
    War for the Planet of the Apes manages to be both alienating and sappy, and the biblical finale seems to come from a different universe altogether. It’s an awesome, dull movie.
  72. 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.
  73. The Hunt
    The Hunt isn’t a total mishap, not with Gilpin being as good as she is and with Zobel’s gleeful aptitude for violence, but that’s what’s so exasperating about it. It has a habit of getting in its own way with trollish tendencies whenever it starts to build momentum.
  74. Be Kind Rewind
    The funniest things in Be Kind Rewind are not the many moments in which Mike and Jerry look like Ed Wood’s worst nightmare, but when the pair finds expedient ways to do for pennies what would take Brett Ratner millions and be less expressive to boot.
  75. 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.
  76. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.
  77. See You When I See You
    See You When I See You grapples with serious subjects, and everybody involved surely meant well. That’s just not enough.
  78. San Andreas
    There are things in San Andreas that no one would have dreamed of seeing 40 years ago, when "Earthquake" (with its tacky, plaster-cracking “Sensurround”) represented the state of the art. But nothing means anything. The spectacle feels less earned than Dwayne Johnson’s biceps, which are ludicrous but not hollow.
  79. This Means War
    The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.
  80. Aloha
    The film arrives with both too much and too little to say. It comes at us in choppy bursts of brilliance and dopiness. That is at once its great charm and its great curse.
  81. Swimming Pool
    Ozon has a smooth gift for scenes of unease, but ultimately Swimming Pool liquifies into a dreary puzzle movie.
  82. Becoming Jane
    A bearable period chick flick with a self-congratulatory “realistic” conceit.
  83. 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.
  84. Nosferatu
    What his vampire drama is missing is precisely the quality that’s given Eggers’ earlier work its unsettling energy, which is that he’s able to render the past as an alien landscape whose inhabitants don’t just look different, but conceive of the universe in ways very different than we might.
  85. Greta
    The film is intense and features a performance by Chloë Grace Moretz that’s more committed than this swill deserves.
  86. Australia
    Jackman has musical-theater chops and knows how to sell material this ham-handed; Kidman isn't quite as deft. I've always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness--but that tightness has now spread to her skin.
  87. 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.
  88. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    The appeal of the cast can’t change the fact that its members are playing incredibly soft targets instead of real characters.
  89. Don't Worry Darling
    The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well-acted, and merely tedious.
  90. Avenue Montaigne
    Avenue Montaigne would be difficult to stomach if it weren't so light and uninsistent, and if its actors weren't so charming. I still rolled my eyes--but sometimes I do that when I get a really good croissant.
  91. 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.
  92. 3 Days to Kill
    A comic-tragic-sentimental genre hodgepodge that wants to make you feel all the feelings amid all that action spectacle. It doesn’t entirely deliver, but at times you can’t help but admire its strangeness.
  93. Unfriended: Dark Web
    In Dark Web, the threat is wholly of this world, which makes the sequel feel as though it comes from another universe entirely. It is scary, but it isn’t much fun.
  94. Big Fish
    Has moments of genuine emotion...but overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit.
  95. 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.
  96. 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.
  97. Beauty and the Beast
    After a couple musical numbers, it occurs to you that the film you’re watching is every bit as animated as the original, but it’s somehow turned out less lifelike, despite its considerable technological advantage.
  98. Seeking Justice
    To be fair, when the story is moving, it's okay.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wanderers
    Apart from Wahl, the acting in the Wanderers is either embarrassingly flat or hysterically emotional, and the movie is an exhausting mishmash of styles. [23 July 1979, p.62]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All We Had
    Even in a rote story, with prosaic direction from Holmes, the lead performances ring true.
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