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. The Rocker
    It's depressing when the best thing you can say about a comedy is that its second-rateness is pleasantly in sync with its unmagnetic hero.
  2. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Ought to have been an eye-roller. What a surprise that it's so seductive. The Woodman lives!
  3. Tropic Thunder
    All over the map, but it's worth enduring the botched gags, formula plotting, and even the racism to marvel at the genius of Robert Downey Jr.
  4. Elegy
    A spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal."
  5. Pineapple Express
    It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.
  6. Frozen River
    All in all, Frozen River is gripping stuff. Except it's also rigged and cheaply manipulative.
  7. American Teen
    The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.
  8. Baghead
    Too bad the movies collapses at the end when we find out what's really going on. Baghead is so much more vivid when it's indefinite.
  9. Man on Wire
    The most miraculous thing about Man on Wire is not the physical feat itself, 1,350 feet above the ground, but that as you watch it, the era gone, the World Trade Center gone, the movie feels as if it's in the present tense. That nutty existentialist acrobat pulled it off. For an instant, he froze time.
  10. The Order of Myths
    Brown explores a potentially enraging subject--rigidly upheld racial segregation in the country's oldest Mardi Gras celebration, in Mobile, Alabama--but her touch is so unforced and her gaze so open that no one is bruised.
  11. Boy A
    This is another of those dead-kid dramas in which the terrible event is handled like a striptease--tantalizing flashes until the climax.
  12. The Dark Knight
    The novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.
  13. Mamma Mia!
    Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I'd like to forget the others--especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I've heard of a water buffalo.
  14. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    The best scene is when Hellboy and Abe get drunk and sing out raucously, which after "Hancock" suggests a trend toward superhero alcoholism.
  15. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    It would be barely passable under normal circumstances, but in 3-D it's a circus of excellent FX.
  16. Full Battle Rattle
    The film is freaky, amusing, and sickening in equal measures—part fly-on-the-wall vérité, part multiple-perspective Altmanesque tragicomedy.
  17. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    A tender, even-tempered elegy to a writer who at his peak could ingest staggering (literally) amounts of drugs and alcohol and transform, like Popeye after a can of spinach, into a superhuman version of himself--more trenchant, more cutting, more hilarious than any political journalist before or since.
  18. The Wackness
    The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  19. WALL-E
    The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.
  20. Wanted
    It takes about an hour after it's over for the heart to slow, the brain to recalibrate, and the nonsensicalness of the thing to sink in.
  21. Get Smart
    Get Smart the sitcom was a one-joke affair and got tedious fast, whereas Carell’s starry-eyed dweeb has room for nuance, for growth, for inspiration.
  22. Expired
    Morton is one of those tingly actresses whose skin barely covers her soul, and to watch her search for tender mercies in a crazy-hostile world is a gift. The film is appallingly good.
  23. 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.
  24. The Happening
    A high-toned revenge-of-nature horror picture, it's a little depressed, with only gross-out shocks (gushing jugulars, bodies run over by lawnmowers) to relieve the torpor.
  25. 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.
  26. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    Chris & Don is the rarest of documentaries: a realistic portrait of the human spirit.
  27. My Winnipeg
    My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing.
  28. Quid Pro Quo
    The first half of Quid Pro Quo is among the most jaw-dropping things I"ve ever seen: Who knew there was a closeted subculture of people pretending to be paraplegics?
  29. Encounters at the End of the World
    Midway through, an eerier theme creeps in, all the more powerful for Herzog's lack of insistence. By the "end of the world" he means the end of the world.
  30. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    Director Dennis Dugan knows his way around shin-whacking slapstick, and Sandler is mesmerizing.
  31. The Go-Getter
    This one is alive with discoveries--of locations, characters, the actors who embody them, and even the medium. In The Go-Getter, filmmaking itself feels like Manifest Destiny.
  32. Mother of Tears
    The first two thirds are gangbusters, with marauding bands of tarted-up young witches who look only slightly less scary than Lindsay Lohan and her pals on an average night.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take Out
    Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker’s gripping, no-budget tale of a day in the life of a young Chinese immigrant taking on extra restaurant delivery duties in order to pay off a debt manages to mix immersive, pseudo-documentary filmmaking with a suspenseful narrative.
  34. Operation Filmmaker
    Operation Filmmaker doesn't quite shake out as a microcosm of the American-Iraq relationship, although Davenport cheekily toys with the conceit. But the movie is endlessly resonant.
  35. Savage Grace
    Howard A. Rodman's script has a lot of juice, and the rhythms are so pregnant that the air vibrates with something, even if you're not sure what.
  36. Sex and the City
    Sex and the City: The Motion Picture is a joyful wallow. And it's more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it's what the series finale should have been.
  37. Stuck
    The film becomes an aria of agony--but with a rousingly yucko finish!
  38. 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.
  39. The Edge of Heaven
    The Edge of Heaven is powerfully unsettled--it comes together by not coming together.
  40. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Such a clunkerama that it made me rethink all the nice things I wrote about its predecessor, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Could the same people have made both films?
  41. Reprise
    Broadly, this is a coming-of-age movie in the "Diner" mold: Trier tracks Phillip and Erik and a few of their pals as they stagger into a world that can't be attuned to their (male adolescent) expectations--especially in regard to women.
  42. Sangre De Mi Sangre
    Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon.
  43. Speed Racer
    Orgy, hell: The film is like a nightmare in which you're trapped in an arcade with screens on all sides and no eyelids. Based on an elemental but happily streamlined Japanese cartoon (an anime precursor), it's an eyesore, a shambles, with incoherent action and ear-buckling dialogue.
  44. Turn the River
    Has a mixture of edginess and melancholy that's beautifully sustained until the climax, when the tang of realism becomes the cudgel of melodrama.
  45. Battle for Haditha
    Battle for Haditha has some of the raw energy of Sam Fuller's war pictures, which weren't subtle but left you energized by their ambivalence (there was no good or evil). It's a hell of a picture.
  46. Iron Man
    Loyal assistant, Pepper Potts, isn't much of a part, but Gwyneth Paltrow is a presence. She stands around looking amused and flabbergastingly pretty, slinging wisecracks with serene aplomb.
  47. Mister Lonely
    I'm glad Korine has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle, full of obvious group improvisations that fail to spark and an overdose of bathos.
  48. Redbelt
    So how's the Mamet "Rocky"? Fast. Lively. In your face. Very watchable. And, like its predecessors, so bizarrely convoluted it barely holds together on a narrative level. But the underpinnings are consistent.
  49. Standard Operating Procedure
    I’m not sure Morris clinches his case, but I’m not sure he wants to: His aim is to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our perception.
  50. 88 Minutes
    Forget Pacino; it’s all those red herrings that reek.
  51. The Forbidden Kingdom
    Once past the clunky prologue, the film is great fun, with a good balance between computer effects and athleticism.
  52. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    But even with bits that are crazily inspired, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is depressing. The Apatow Factory is too comfy with its workers’ arrested development to move the boundary posts. If they could find scripts by female writers that dramatize the other side of the Great Sexual Divide, it might be a place of joy--and embarrassed recognition--for everyone.
  53. The Life Before Her Eyes
    In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win--but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious.
  54. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    The film is a hodgepodge, and it closes with a whimper. But along the way some lucid voices slip through.
  55. Smart People
    The middling romantic comedy Smart People, which centers on a hyperintellectual dysfunctional family, is of interest chiefly for the first post-Juno role of Ellen Page.
  56. Flight of the Red Balloon
    In The Flight of the Red Balloon, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien uses Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece "The Red Balloon" as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level.
  57. Shine a Light
    My favorite rock-concert movies, Jonathan Demme’s "Stop Making Sense" and "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," are organic: They chart a miraculous path from sound to soul. Scorsese stays on the outside, as befits his temperament and his subject. Yet there is, amid the whirligig spectacle, a spark of connection.
  58. Run, Fatboy, Run
    I wouldn’t believe that Run, Fat Boy, Run was co-written by Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) if he weren’t up there on the screen in teeny briefs and with his gut stuck out, trying to endear himself to the American audience in material maybe a notch above Rob Schneider’s.
  59. My Brother Is an Only Child
    What makes My Brother Is an Only Child so alive and entertaining is how it dramatizes the endless tug-of-war between political conviction and personal experience--the way the lines twist and blur and finally implode.
  60. 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.
  61. Shotgun Stories
    The movie makes you empathize with the rage that drives these young men to violence--but it also makes you see how manly action wipes out their individuality, their uniqueness, and turns them into archetypal meatheads.
  62. Boarding Gate
    Boarding Gate was evidently made quickly and cheaply, and parts of it are fun. It’s too bad there’s no real viewer equivalent--that you can’t WATCH a film quickly and cheaply.
  63. The Grand
    The Grand is a seesaw, but the setting--the high-stakes poker subculture--is remarkably fertile and the actors are a treat.
  64. Love Songs
    Honoré has proven you can make a movie musical in which style doesn’t upstage content--a movie musical that blossoms from the inside out.
  65. Funny Games (2008)
    Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.
  66. Married Life
    In Married Life, Ira Sachs aims a bit lower than Green but obliterates his target: The funny, the scary, the campy, the sad--they’re all splendidly of a piece.
  67. Paranoid Park
    Paranoid Park is a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant’s current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson’s finely tuned first-person “young adult” novel.
  68. Snow Angels
    Scene by scene his (David Gordon Green’s) new film, Snow Angels, isn’t terrible. Parts of it are amusing, and there are wintry images that eat into the mind. But it’s one of the most disjunctive things I’ve ever sat through.
  69. City of Men
    City of Men is clunky and often contrived, but there’s something haunting about fatherless boys in a blighted place fumbling to teach themselves what it means to be a man.
  70. 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.
  71. The Unforeseen
    Hideously depressing but also enraging documentary.
  72. Chop Shop
    Bahrani’s concentration is close to supernatural as he tracks the young, prepubescent Ale (Alejandro Polanco) from job to soul-numbing job, some legal, some extralegal, to the point where you’re forced to suspend altogether your moral judgments and watch with a mixture of pain and awe.
  73. The Signal
    The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.
  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 Duchess of Langeais
    Rivette has aged into one of cinema’s most ingenious minimalists. In The Duchess of Langeais he uses intertitles--bits of literary exposition--with cheeky understatement.
  76. Diary of the Dead
    Compared with other first-person motion-sickness horror pictures like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield," George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead is weak tea, yet there’s enough social commentary (and innovative splatter) to acidulate the brew--to remind you that Romero, even behind the curve, makes other genre filmmakers look like fraidy-cats.
  77. Jumper
    Jumper is so in sync with the language of modern action movies that it’s possible to look past its soullessness and go with the quantum flow.
  78. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Spiderwick. There’s nothing wrong with it that passion and personality couldn’t fix.
  79. Ezra
    The story is hell to follow--the flashbacks aren’t in chronological order--and the nonacting variable.
  80. The Band's Visit
    The Band’s Visit resounds with tenderness and melancholy.
  81. In Bruges
    For In Bruges to click, McDonagh needed either to get more real or more fake.
  82. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    It was undoubtedly a great experience for everyone involved, and the show itself might have been a romp. But as a movie, Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show makes you think of the days in which troupes that didn’t deliver were run out of town, bullets pinging off their heels.
  83. Praying with Lior
    Praying With Lior engages us on so many levels it transcends its middle-class Jewish milieu.
  84. The Witnesses
    Excitingly convoluted.
  85. Rambo
    The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.
  86. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    The coup de grâce is especially graceless because everything we know is already visible in Marinca’s eyes. The actress is extraordinary.
  87. Teeth
    Most of the movie works because the blonde Weixler has a darling-daffy face (a pinch of Alicia Silverstone, a dollop of Drew Barrymore) and a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I ambivalence about sex that’s part realism, part screwball.
  88. Cloverfield
    We’ve never sat through anything with Cloverfield’s subjective sting. You’d have to be tougher than I was not to be blown sideways by it.
  89. Taxi to the Dark Side
    It’s the equal of "No End in Sight" in its tight focus on the nuts and bolts of incompetence, and it surpasses any recent melodrama in the empathy it evokes for both its victims and--surprisingly--victimizers.
  90. There Will Be Blood
    Anderson’s fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny. He has made a mad American classic.
  91. Persepolis
    Satrapi’s parents ship her off to a French school in Vienna, but she’s rudderless, ungrounded. She’s drawn back to a devastated Tehran, where she can’t design a life, either. This great film, by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, is that life, designed. It freed her mind; it frees ours.
  92. Charlie Wilson's War
    Philip Seymour Hoffman carries the movie. As the CIA operative who hates Communists and his myopic superiors in equal measure, he has a wily, don’t-give-a-shit drive that makes you wish he’d been in Baghdad in 2003.
  93. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Burton, bless him, constricts the space and concentrates the melodrama; he finds the perfect balance between the funereal and the ferocious. Above all, he treasures these ghouls: He digs both their bloodlust and their melancholy.
  94. I Am Legend
    The first two thirds and change of I Am Legend is terrific mindless fun: crackerjack action with gnashing vampires barely glimpsed (and scarier for that) and how’d-they-do-that New York locations that retroactively justify the traffic jams.
  95. 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.
  96. Youth Without Youth
    Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.
  97. Atonement
    Atonement works reasonably well as a tragic romance, but that sting is dulled. As a book, it was a blow to the head; as a movie, it’s an adaptation of a book.
  98. Juno
    It’s the writer, Diablo Cody, and the director, Jason Reitman, who have screws loose. Or maybe they’re just desperate to make their film a chick "Rushmore" or "Garden State."
  99. Billy the Kid
    A heartbreaking vérité documentary by Jennifer Venditti about a misfit Maine teenager--a film that makes you think about (and question) what fitting in really entails.
  100. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The film is a masterpiece in which “locked-in” syndrome becomes the human condition.
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