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 Savages
    The Savages is a delightful movie--the perfect companion piece (and antidote) to the year’s other superb convalescent-dementia picture, "Away From Her."
  2. Starting Out in the Evening
    Above all is Langella, achingly vulnerable under layers of flesh. In one scene, alone, he eats peanut butter intensely, thoughtfully, and nothing he could do as Hamlet would seem deeper or more poetic.
  3. I'm Not There.
    Too often, it’s the MOVIE that isn’t there. What’s meant to be archetypal comes across as superficial.
  4. The Mist
    A derivative horror picture that somehow rises to the level of a primal scream. The premise is simple, by which I mean both easy to understand and feeble-minded.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    Intriguing and entertaining despite some rough edges, Dan Katzir’s documentary profits immeasurably from the ancient Spaisman’s genuine charisma.
  6. Margot at the Wedding
    Margot at the Wedding doesn’t develop; it just skips from one squirmy scene to the next.
  7. Redacted
    Anyone who sees the suffering faces of the victims in "Casualties" and "Redacted" knows that De Palma not only despairs over what he’s showing us but implicates his own medium--his own male gaze--in the crimes against nature.
  8. Southland Tales
    Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.
  9. The Life of Reilly
    Occasionally you see a documentary and it hits you how much you don’t know about someone who was part of your mental landscape.
  10. Lions for Lambs
    Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.
  11. No Country for Old Men
    It’s a near masterpiece.
  12. War Dance
    For these kids to sing and dance with all their hearts, they need to go to a place in themselves that should be closed down forever. The glories of War/Dance are torturously won, and all the more glorious for it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Kasper Collin’s documentary puts a human face on Ayler’s legacy.
  14. American Gangster
    For all the sprawl, American Gangster feels secondhand. It’s like "Scarface" drained of blood, at arm’s length from the culture that spawned it.
  15. Bee Movie
    The film will be huge. It’s busy. It’s kinetic. It’s a treat for kids. But like much of Seinfeld’s work outside his TV show, it’s impersonal. It doesn’t come from anywhere interesting.
  16. Darfur Now
    The depressing subtext is that even with detailed proof of ongoing genocide, it takes movie stars to get to the movers and shakers, and to get worthy movies like this one into theaters.
  17. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    At least the movie never bogs down. But you only get a taste of what made the Clash for a brief period the most exciting band on that side of the Atlantic.
  18. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    His [Sidney Lumet] touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it’s hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling.
  19. 30 Days of Night
    Danny Huston is screamingly funny as the alternately finicky and savage Head Ghoul--he’s like something spewed forth from the bowels of the Politburo. The problem is structural.
  20. Gone Baby Gone
    Casey Affleck has never had a pedestal like the one his brother provides him, and he earns it. His Patrick is pale and raspy, with a slight grogginess that gives him an astounding vulnerability--and makes his bursts of temper shocking.
  21. Rendition
    The jumping around is as deft as a hippo in a tutu, and the director, Gavin Hood, never finds a rhythm.
  22. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.
  23. Lars and the Real Girl
    Often howlingly funny, and the actors are a treat. But the underlying message is so suspect that it’s hard to suspend disbelief.
  24. Sleuth
    I think the movie works best if you know the original and have a taste for goofy revisionism.
  25. Terror's Advocate
    A brilliant study in the link between moral corruption and narcissism.
  26. We Own the Night
    Gray knows how to sell the idea of unalterable destiny with a car chase: That’s the mark of a real action director.
  27. The Good Night
    Jake Paltrow's comedy takes familiar male-angst material and turns it into a painful--but fun--string of jokes.
  28. Michael Clayton
    Clooney is as good as he has ever been.
  29. Lake of Fire
    Lake of Fire centers on abortion, but Kaye understands that while dead fetuses are the hook, the agenda covers the whole life cycle.
  30. The Darjeeling Limited
    Hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained.
  31. The Kingdom
    Sensationally directed by Peter Berg, it’s a combination forensics detective movie (car bomb blows up secure American compound in Saudi Arabia--who dunnit and how can we stop him from doing it again?) and red-meat waste-the-terrorists action picture.
  32. Lust, Caution
    After seeing "Brokeback Mountain," with its sanctified couplings against a backdrop of purple mountain majesties, some of us felt that Ang Lee owed us a dirty movie with more bodily fluids. Lust, Caution is that movie--for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. The rest of the film is absorbing, though.
  33. The Last Winter
    Like his "Wendigo," the film has a lot of mumbo jumbo about ancient spirits revived and angered by human disrespect--the old Indian-graveyard paradigm, as clunky as ever. But the context is overpoweringly eerie.
  34. Into the Wild
    With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.
  35. Eastern Promises
    It’s engrossing, and Mueller-Stahl’s mix of Old World chivalry and murderousness is scarier than Jason and Freddy combined.
  36. In the Valley of Elah
    As a narrative, it’s clunky. As a whodunit, it’s third-rate. As the drama of a closed-off man’s awakening, it’s predictable. But Haggis has got hold of a fiercely urgent subject: the moral devastation of American soldiers serving in (and coming home from) Iraq. At its heart are deeper mysteries--and a tragedy that reaches far beyond anything onscreen.
  37. The Brave One
    Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.
  38. 3:10 to Yuma
    As Ben Wade, gang leader and murderer, he gives an ironic performance, but Crowe’s irony is more intense than other actors’ obsession. He turns the idea of having so few emotions--of being beyond caring--into a bloody joke. He upstages everyone with his laughing eyes.
  39. In the Shadow of the Moon
    I came out giddy, feeling lighter--by about five-sixths--than I did when I went in.
  40. Exiled
    If you’ve never seen a Johnnie To crime picture, Exiled is a simple, stylish, and utterly delightful introduction.
  41. The Nanny Diaries
    As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It’s zombie-land.
  42. Death at a Funeral
    It goes soft, but even a gelded traditional farce is more potent than most of our slob comedies.
  43. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    Kohn’s gripping Manda Bala is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It’s a free-form portrait of a place--Brazil--with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming.
  44. Superbad
    Might be the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny.
  45. The 11th Hour
    It isn’t much of a movie (unless your aesthetic was formed in high-school science class), but it will be hugely informative to aliens who land on this planet in a thousand years and wonder why there’s no welcoming committee.
  46. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    Very entertaining (and doesn’t overstay its welcome) but it’s a little depressing to contemplate.
  47. 2 Days in Paris
    The movie should be seen with a large, responsive audience--the better to live with it in the moment instead of worrying about where it’s going.
  48. Stardust
    It’s puffed up in obvious ways but disarmingly puckish in others. As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful--yet his gung-ho spirit wins him Brownie points.
  49. Becoming Jane
    A bearable period chick flick with a self-congratulatory “realistic” conceit.
  50. The Bourne Ultimatum
    It’s not just vérité--it’s battlefield vérité; it triggers your fight-or-flight instincts.
  51. The Camden 28
    The Camden 28 is slapdash: more talking heads, reunion footage with the mother reading from her own testimony, newscasts of the day. But the editing supplies some urgency, and the subjects remain radiant yet down-to-earth--too good-humored to be beatific.
  52. No End in Sight
    A meticulous, thoroughly engrossing lesson in how not to win friends (or wars) and influence people (or potential terrorists).
  53. The Simpsons Movie
    It’s intermittently very funny. But it doesn’t make the existential leap to the big screen, and it doesn’t have the density of gags or the lunatic free-association of the best episodes.
  54. Hairspray
    Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there’s something garish about its hustle--it’s like an elephant trumpeting in your face.
  55. Sunshine
    They’ve taken "2001" and Tarkovsky’s "Solaris" and "Silent Running," mixed in stuff from save-the-earth pictures like "The Core" and "Deep Impact," and thrown in a cheesy climax out of "Alien."
  56. Interview
    I’ve sat through so many claustrophobic examples of the genre I forgot how exhilarating, how pure a great one could be. Interview is a great one--electric as theater and cinema.
  57. My Best Friend
    The prolific Patrice Leconte takes a break from mythic, life-and-death scenarios with My Best Friend, a sitcom that threatens to take a rockier emotional path before swerving back into the comfy zone. It’s better when it’s threatening, but Leconte knows his audience.
  58. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    For all its portentousness, this is the best Harry Potter picture yet. In some ways, it improves on J.K. Rowling’s novel, which is punishingly protracted and builds to a climactic wand-off better seen than read.
  59. Joshua
    The line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid.
  60. Rescue Dawn
    The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career. His pet theme is here: man tested against nature, his sanity more precarious than his body.
  61. Sicko
    Sicko is Moore’s best film: a documentary that mixes outrage, hope, and gonzo stunts in the right proportions; that poses profound questions about the connection between health care and work.
  62. Ratatouille
    Bird clearly knows the great silent clowns: The slapstick he devises is balletic.
  63. Evening
    The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.
  64. Evan Almighty
    Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety.
  65. A Mighty Heart
    The movie is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic. It is practically a POLICIER , although the suspense is mitigated by our knowledge that the investigation will end badly.
  66. Lady Chatterley
    I found the first half-hour a snooze, but once I adjusted to the movie's rhythms, I was completely enraptured. Ferran weaves the love affair into nature, but not in the mystical, sanctified manner of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain."
  67. Nancy Drew
    It's one of the few tween movies that isn't in your face; its limpness becomes appealing.
  68. Fido
    It's madly funny--a treat for moviegoers who don't mind gnawed-off limbs with their high jinks.
  69. Ocean's Thirteen
    It's so money! It's so fun!
  70. Surf's Up
    Don't worry, parents, only you--and not your 5-year-old--will get that the chicken's stoned out of his gourd.
  71. La Vie en Rose
    She lip-syncs convincingly to Piaf's songs. Even when she overacts like mad, she makes you think she’s Piaf overacting like mad--the little sparrow with the foghorn pipes.
  72. Knocked Up
    Knocked Up feels very NOW. The banter is bruisingly funny, the characters BRILLIANTLY childish, the portrait of our culture's narrowing gap between children and their elders hysterical--in all senses.
  73. Mr. Brooks
    If the movie were just these two (Costner/Hurt), bopping around arguing and offing people, it would have been better than the unholy mess it turns into.
  74. Crazy Love
    It takes some time to realize we're in a maelstrom--going down down down into a saga of obsession, sadism, masochism, and codependency that was and remains one of the great, sick tabloid stories of all time.
  75. Pierrepoint
    Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold's attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.
  76. Bug
    Has the feverish compression of live theater and the moody expansiveness of film. The mix is insanely powerful.
  77. Golden Door
    The greatness of Golden Door is its tone; sympathetic but always wry.
  78. Steel City
    It has vivid characters, a strong sense of place, and a free-floating hopelessness that never precludes the possibility of meaningful action.
  79. Shrek the Third
    Computer-generated animated movies with wall-to-wall jokes can be excruciating, but these jokes are the funniest money can buy.
  80. 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.
  81. Brooklyn Rules
    Baldwin is so good in the coming-of-age gangster drama Brooklyn Rules that it's like watching a voodoo priest.
  82. The Wendell Baker Story
    If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.
  83. 28 Weeks Later
    Blistering and nihilistic--a vision to reduce you to a puddle of despair.
  84. Day Night Day Night
    The film is, in fact, a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information--and once you accept those parameters, it’s riveting.
  85. Away from Her
    Away From Her is a twilight-of-life love story, one that harshly demolishes our romantic notions of love and loyalty, then replaces them with something deeper and, finally, more consoling.
  86. Spider-Man 3
    The movie isn't a dud: It has exuberant bits and breathtaking (money money money) effects. But it's supposed to be fun and inspirational, and it's too leaden for liftoff.
  87. L'iceberg
    Not every sight gag works, and there's a brief stretch in the middle where the action becomes landlocked. But once we're out to sea the movie goes swimmingly--its three protagonists fighting, flailing, and often on the verge of drowning as their tiny skiff surges toward the land of the Inuit.
  88. Waitress
    I think of Waitress as an overstuffed, overcooked pie--too ungainly to eat all of, too generous to pass up, too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.
  89. Jindabyne
    Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome.
  90. Zoo
    Devor doesn't endorse horse-on-man sex, but he does attempt--with sympathy--to account for the appeal.
  91. Hot Fuzz
    Hot Fuzz is fun, and it's nice to see all the English character actors who aren't busy in Harry Potter films, but it lacks its predecessor's freshness.
  92. Vacancy
    If "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" are the seminal killer-as-voyeur movies, Vacancy is the nasty little runt offspring with no other purpose in life but to gnaw on you.
  93. Fracture
    What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.
  94. Private Fears in Public Places
    It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.
  95. Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    It's Jordan’s feat to make a linear, talking-heads documentary (among the heads are Jonas Mekas, Robert Wilson, John Waters, Nick Zedd, and John Zorn) that still manages to evoke something of Smith's floating, ravishingly colorful dreamscapes--a menagerie of creatures that, even as they're captured on film, are already fading into the air.
  96. Disturbia
    One way you know that D.J. Caruso is a resourceful director is that he scares you silly with a minimum of violence and a few smears of blood. His job was certainly made easier by Morse, whose glassy demeanor and high, soft rasp suggests horrors that not even Quentin Tarantino could imagine.
  97. Grindhouse
    The fun is in the one-thing-after-another delirium the movie induces, and in our breathless anticipation of what they'll hurl at us next.
  98. The Hoax
    The movie is too long (nearly two hours), but the acting--Gere, Molina, the peerlessly edgy Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's loopy Swiss-German painter wife--keeps you giggling. And the story has something up its sleeve--a dream finish.
  99. The TV Set
    It's deftly calibrated and acted with relish: Kasdan is really good!
  100. Black Book
    I urge you not to pass up Black Book, especially on a wide screen. It's a marvelous movie-movie, with a new screen goddess. Van Houten has a soft, heart-shaped face on top of a body so naturally, ripely beautiful it has its own kind of truth.
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