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. Down with Love
    It’s all strenuously camp.
  2. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    The problem is that Allen is getting a bit long in the tooth to be playing a romancer-rescuer, and since he and Helen Hunt have a rather frigid actorly rapport, we have plenty of time to notice the awkward, and barely acknowledged, disparity in their ages.
  3. Happy Gilmore 2
    The dissonance between that meditative quality and a premise as goofy as Happy Gilmore’s is jarring, though it’s hard to blame Sandler for taking the time to look back, no matter the context.
  4. Parthenope
    Our protagonist comes to feel like an avatar of the very ideas of youth and possibility, which also makes her an avatar of the opposite of those things — the idea that life eventually passes us all by. In creating a film about one beautiful person, Sorrentino reminds us that, in our memories, we were all beautiful once.
  5. Black Snake Moan
    It's outlandish, hilariously overripe, and possibly sexist: You'd expect no less from Craig Brewer, the writer and director who made the passionate case for how hard it is out there for a pimp. But I loved the picture's tabloid energy and heart.
  6. Love Me
    Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.
  7. Blackhat
    Good enough to make you wish it were better.
  8. Fay Grim
    It's a rich idea -- a Hartley-esque variation on the theme of American Innocents Abroad. And it works superbly until -- well, Grim's the word.
  9. Greendale
    Neil Young’s concept album turned concert tour turned movie, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen--at least not in an unaltered state.
  10. Coming 2 America
    Coming 2 America is both figuratively and literally a nostalgia tour.
  11. Insidious: Chapter 3
    This is so often the problem with this genre — scary setups, followed by dopey resolutions — that you sort of want to give the movie a pass. But given its distinguished forebears, Insidious: Chapter 3 doesn’t quite live up to expectations.
  12. Cuban Fury
    Cuban Fury has a surprising amount of fun with these acknowledged clichés. At times, the movie has the energy of an "Anchorman"-style spoof — a hilarious late-movie dance-off between Bruce and Drew takes on absurdist overtones, as they dance on car roofs and do increasingly impossible moves.
  13. Boulevard
    Boulevard is a sad, hesitant little movie about a sad, hesitant little man. That may be a far cry from the Robin Williams roles we knew and loved, but it’s not a bad one on which to go out.
  14. The Lake House
    Deliriously stupid romantic time-travel drama.
  15. Trap
    It works so much better than should be possible because of Hartnett, who gets a showcase on par with the one the filmmaker gave to James McAvoy in Split.
  16. Death on the Nile
    When given the freedom, he can be one of the most overheated of directors, but the excess rarely feels cynical or cheap. In fact, it feels personal. You sense that he wants you to get excited about this stuff because he gets so excited about this stuff.
  17. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Spirit's narration comes to us courtesy of Matt Damon, who, having played a horse's ass in some of his earlier movies, perhaps thought it wise to inhabit the entire nag this time around.
  18. Eternals
    With Eternals, Marvel proves itself to be nothing more than a staid, lumbering black hole.
  19. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    The United States vs. Billie Holiday (which is out now on Hulu) wants to be a history lesson, but it’s at times so one-note and inert that it loses any sense of authenticity.
  20. Maggie
    It’s not a great movie, but it’s haunting, a sort of one-stop shop for a range of cultural anxieties — plague, environmental catastrophe, big government threatening the sanctity of home and family.
  21. Murder on the Orient Express
    To return to why Murder on the Orient Express was remade: Beats me. Maybe it’s someone’s idea of counterprogramming when every other film in the multiplex is for kids or yahoos. Maybe it’s a tax shelter.
  22. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    It’s a genre-bending mash-up, a non-vampire vampire movie about class, race, love, and cruelty. It consciously seeks to marry its diverse influences in an attempt to present something between schlock and art house, between passionate gore and urbane chill. It contains multitudes, and not always all that well.
  23. Possession
    "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things," at least held you. Possession piddles away as you're watching it.
  24. Serendipity
    I've never understood why filmmakers construct romances in which the leads hardly spend any time together.
  25. Charlie's Angels
    Where the last two Charlie’s Angels installments were sold on their trio of stars, this soft reboot has leads at various levels of recognizability, and they all seem to be acting in their own movie.
  26. 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.
  27. Anyone But You
    It would be silly to call Anyone But You smart, but it has a knowing quality that allows it to confidently navigate some of the more familiar aspects of the rom-com.
  28. Ghost in the Shell
    The filmmakers think little of the emotional and intellectual connection fans already have with this property, and have put all their chips on the aesthetic. It’s exhausting to watch them curate what parts of the story’s Japanese origin are worth keeping and which can be discarded.
  29. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Despite being half–“Let’s put on a show” movie and half–romantic comedy, two genres dedicated to delight, Magic Mike’s Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.
  30. Running with Scissors
    Ryan Murphy’s jaunty screen version of Running With Scissors proves that nothing consecrates one's depiction of a narcissistic mother like having her embodied by Annette Bening. Bening's specialties are (a) insane people and (b) actresses.
  31. 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.
  32. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    What truly distinguishes Last Voyage of the Demeter, beyond its thick atmosphere of dread, is its gleeful cruelty, the delicious mean streak with which it sets up its suspense set pieces and its kills.
  33. 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.
  34. Madame Bovary
    Look closely and you may see that this madame is alive in all sorts of ways. At least for its first half, this is a textured, haunted, remarkably empathetic film.
  35. After the Hunt
    After the Hunt might be confused, and it might even be unsatisfying — but it also refuses to coddle anyone, and that feels like some sort of victory.
  36. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    As uneven as Ridley Scott’s career; at times, it seems to be a journey through the director’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. The good news is that his strengths eventually win out; the bad news is all the awkward storytelling and botched character interactions we have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Once we do, though, Exodus is a hoot.
  37. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    It’s enough to make me wonder if this series might still have a few decent tricks left up its sleeve. We’ll see. This movie’s a bust, but I’ll let myself remain hopeful.
  38. 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.
  39. A Working Man
    The villains in this movie aren’t merely cruel and sadistic; they’re also profoundly stupid and incompetent, which actually feels closer to the way things tend to be in the real world.
  40. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    It’s tough to sustain a story line this thin for two hours, and the movie runs down at the two-thirds mark.
  41. Secondhand Lions
    The only saving grace is that Caine and Duvall don’t overdo the southern-coot stuff.
  42. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    This sensationally engineered promo film makes Justin Bieber look like a true force of nature.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Watcher in the Woods
    This so-called “children’s film” selects a variety of phobias and stitches them into a patchwork of shimmering terrorscapes and half-baked ideas about secret societies, the occult, and, of course, dirt-bike-racing in rural England. In other words, it’s perfect.
  44. 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.
  45. 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.
  46. X-Men: Apocalypse
    Watching Apocalypse, you don’t feel as if every character is being set up for his or her own spinoff. They complement one another. They need one another. The overflowing ensemble nature of the enterprise is the whole point.
  47. The Monuments Men
    It’s a graceful, engaging film — I enjoyed it. But it could have been called "The Tasteful Dozen."
  48. The International
    It's good enough that you forget how much better Brian De Palma could do it. The rest is a slow road to nowhere, less clunky than "The Interpreter" but bogged down by its own cynicism.
  49. Nacho Libre
    The movie is semi-infantile camp but often riotous.
  50. Beckett
    Director Filomarino is onto something here. The warm intimacy of the movie’s early scenes is replaced by such shocking brutality by the end that the violence feels like an emotional correlative, a blood ritual of sorts.
  51. Triple 9
    Given the movie’s bloody stew of greed and sadism, its unbalanced frames and ear-scraping soundscape, its moral tidiness can bring a smile to your otherwise appalled face.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Object of My Affection
    If the woman’s love is obsessive and needy, the story becomes stupid and painful, and that is what happens in The Object of My Affection, the Stephen McCauley novel that has been adapted for the movies with disastrous panache by playwright Wendy Wasserstein and director Nicholas Hytner.
  53. Epic
    For all its attempts at wonder and spectacle and play, Epic is mostly a slog.
  54. Blow
    It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snake Eyes
    I can't think of another movie that starts so brilliantly and ends so miserably as this one.
  56. Peeples
    Pleasant, if inane – helped along by a likable cast that’s clearly having fun.
  57. The Interview
    If Amy Pascal loses her job over this, it will be an outrage. The only thing about which we disagree is The Interview. She hated it; I think it’s a blast.
  58. RoboCop
    It’s a rare “reboot” that transcends its studio’s money-grubbing. It has some Big Ideas.
  59. 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."
  60. The Intern
    The Intern degenerates into a series of monologues about ambition and relationships and having it all. As the speeches pile up, our goodwill dissipates, and so does the film’s magic.
  61. 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.
  62. Woman Walks Ahead
    The movie’s most exciting moment comes when Weldon realizes that she has been played — that in helping turn the tribes against the Dawes Act, she has won the battle and lost the war, since the U.S. would now have cause to attack. That’s the moment when Woman Walks Ahead should get really good but turns, instead, into a weeper.
  63. A Walk in the Woods
    The lax, lame A Walk in the Woods is a road movie without a road, a journey of self-discovery without discovery, and a tale of friendship without any chemistry.
  64. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    The movie plays like a strenuous imitation of Steven Spielberg instead of the real deal.
  65. You're Cordially Invited
    You’re Cordially Invited might have been better off ditching the rom of it all entirely, but Stoller is good enough at this that even if the rest of his movie consists of two slightly discordant halves, both are pretty solid.
  66. Windtalkers
    Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.
  67. Mammoth
    In the flawless cast, Williams is the most affecting.
  68. 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.
  69. Contraband
    The result is that rare Hollywood genre film that earns its intensity rather than forcing it upon you.
  70. Breathe
    It’s a plenty good story to tell, but even by the time the respirator takes its last gasp, I was ultimately unmoved.
  71. Death of a Unicorn
    There’s enough material for a rollicking 25-minute short in Death of a Unicorn, which unfortunately spreads its goods out over the stretch of a feature.
  72. Cesar Chavez
    The ultimate effect of this film, directed by actor Diego Luna, is curiously cold — it never transcends the hagiographic nature of its material, despite a talented cast and a compelling subject.
  73. The Kid
    It succeeds sporadically as a corrective anti-myth, but as a story about people, it fails to come to life.
  74. Love
    This is not a rich, novelistic tapestry of humanity; this is a solipsistic world, enclosed on all sides by the director’s ego. But the entrapment is vivid and poignant. Look past all the beautiful people fucking, and you realize that Love is sad in all the right ways.
  75. Jack the Giant Slayer
    It’s fast, rousing, and blessedly brief.
  76. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    As a mogul, Besson doesn’t worry about pleasing his corporate masters. He and his visual effects supervisor, Scott Stokdyk, can expend all their energy on topping themselves and making each other laugh. The movie is like a wave that makes you want to yell, “Cowabunga!”
  77. Live From New York!
    It’s too cursory, too frivolous to make a case for the show’s importance as an American institution, even though it insists on it.
  78. Bird Box
    You don’t appreciate the art of a good genre contrivance until you see one pulled off poorly.
  79. Birthday Girl
    The film's Russians are all played by French and Australian actors. Too bad Butterworth didn't find a Russian to play the Brit. That would have made the inauthenticity complete.
  80. Le divorce
    It may be that Merchant Ivory need the armature of the past in order to create a sense of the present. Le Divorce is mustier than any of their movies set back in time.
  81. Quasi
    The flaws are part of the overall effect — spontaneous and human. The reason Broken Lizard seems to keep making cult movies is because when you watch them, you feel like you were there when they made it. Broken Lizard is all of us.
  82. 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.
  83. 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.
  84. Snitch
    There’s a lot of cartoonish potential in Snitch, but director Ric Roman Waugh (who previously made the excellent prison drama "Felon," another exercise in somber desperation) seems intent on trying to sell the movie as a more serious enterprise. And amazingly, the gambit works.
  85. Project Power
    The trouble with trying to push at the boundaries of the superhero genre isn’t that we’re out of material, it’s that imaginations are so limited that a film that starts with a twist on a familiar premise nevertheless loops around to a standard showdown involving an incoherent blur of computer generated effects.
  86. Skyscraper
    Skyscraper is one of the stupidest movies I’ve seen since San Andreas, but I enjoyed it a great deal — more than San Andreas, certainly, as well as Rampage and Baywatch and most other Dwayne Johnson pictures.
  87. Trial by Fire
    The movie is painstakingly well made and murderously hard to sit through.
  88. God's Pocket
    Slattery adapted the book with Alex Metcalf and gets the tone just right. The film is damnably amusing.
  89. Irreversible
    Noé shoots his sequences in long, unbroken takes, and the unblinking horror that results is, I think, the opposite of exploitation. There has been so much lurid bloodletting in the movies that you might think nothing could faze us anymore. Think again.
  90. Risen
    Still, for a film that could have easily become bogged down in Sunday School reverence, or culture-war opportunism, Risen presents an intriguing, oblique approach to a Bible movie.
  91. The Grinch
    The good news is that within its own little cinematic fantasy realm, Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney’s The Grinch manages to be pleasantly moving in its treatment of Seuss’s classic solitary crank. As voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, the Grinch is a surly, sour, but ultimately wounded soul.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Wild Things
    Wild Things, which was written by Stephen Peters and directed by John McNaughton, lacks fantasy and flamboyance, that it lacks, precisely, wild things, and that most of it is just flat.
  93. Dumbo
    It’s not hard to enjoy Dumbo. Like the circus owners and carnival crackpots who try to exploit the flying elephant for all he’s worth, Tim Burton still knows how to give us what we want. He may think of himself as the tormented freak on display, but he’s also clearly the all-powerful showman, ready to exploit our sense of wonder.
  94. Rough Night
    Rough Night, which is like an episode of Broad City that got a blowout and smoked a pound of primo studio notes, tries to have it both ways. It wants to be a character-based lost-weekend romp, but keeps forcing itself toward increasingly ridiculous and self-consciously naughty set pieces.
  95. Cleaner
    Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.
  96. Peter Rabbit
    It’s so insistent that this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Peter Rabbit — while, again, not straying from the original character design all that much — that it feels like the animators are at war with the writers, and the loudest of the two groups tends to win out at every turn.
  97. 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.
  98. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    He’s a deceptively crafty director (he fakes naturalism beautifully in movies like "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise," and "Boyhood"), but he can’t find a suitable form for Maria Semple’s patchwork best seller about a misanthropic, malcontented ex-architect named Bernadette.
  99. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Come to think of it, these are all great roles — for Statham, Plaza, and Hartnett. Everybody in Operation Fortune — yes, even Ritchie — seems to be having fun. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
  100. 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.
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