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. Vengeance
    In fitting with its main character’s desperate aversion to vulnerability, Vengeance squirms away from any satirical or emotional territory that might genuinely hurt.
  2. Alan Partridge
    Alan Partridge awkwardly tries to wed the episodic spirit of the character with the feature-length demands of a theatrical experience. The result is a mess, but it’s got some choice bits. Even if you forget the film itself, you might find yourself quoting parts of it for years.
  3. Stuber
    I laughed way too hard at too many points in Stuber to entirely dismiss it, even if, as a movie, it doesn’t really hold together.
  4. The Piano Lesson
    When it succeeds, it’s impressive. But it also can’t hold a candle to Wilson’s original, and it can’t reconcile the fundamental tension between theater and film.
  5. The Gunman
    The Gunman passes the time, but it never quite reconciles its conflicted nature. It’s not smart enough to be a paranoid thriller, nor fun enough to be a blood-soaked action flick.
  6. Smile
    Smile has such a visually powerful concept that it might take a while before you realize the movie is blowing it.
  7. Across the River and Into the Trees
    Ortiz’s film does have its charms.
  8. To the Wonder
    To the Wonder feels like generalized woo-woo—and self-parody.
  9. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Bloated and often boring and has absolutely no reason to exist, but that it also hits its marks. No fanboy will pass it up. No studio head will lose his or her job.
  10. Wicked Little Letters
    Wicked Little Letters delights in its naughtiness, but it really should’ve embraced its perversion.
  11. Ender's Game
    Ender’s Game’s only lyrical presence is Breslin’s. The actress has a gentle soul. In the end, she’s the movie’s mascot, and its mournful spirit.
  12. Funny People
    Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.
  13. Windtalkers
    Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.
  14. The Place Beyond the Pines
    The segments are essentially monodramas, so sketchily written that the big moments feel less like recognizable human behavior than recognizable screenwriter overreaching.
  15. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Infinitely Polar Bear is a good example of how a film that looks on paper like a mess of indie clichés can be redeemed by fantastic performances … even if, ultimately, it remains a mess of indie clichés.
  16. Last Vegas
    We know where it’s going, and it doesn’t take long to get there. There are some good jokes along the way, a few of them blandly off-color.
  17. 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.
  18. Good Deeds
    Watching the impossibly dry and somnambulant Good Deeds, you actually miss that crazy side of Perry. It's sort of ironic: Here's a film about a guy who's being false to his true self, and you realize the director might be doing the same.
  19. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    There’s no there there, and the film never seems to know what it’s playing with besides the idea of movies in general.
  20. Jessabelle
    It’s a strange spectacle: a horror film that spends as much time dismantling suspense as it does building it.
  21. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    I realize Legally Blonde 2 was not intended as scathing political satire, but I wish someone out there in movieland did indeed have just such an intention these days.
  22. The Good German
    Steven Soderbergh is usually an inspired chameleon, perfectly suiting his style to his content. But The Good German is an ambitious miss...It's all very beautiful, high-minded, and remote.
  23. Joshua
    The line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid.
  24. Capturing the Friedmans
    Jarecki shows off this footage as evidence of a truly dysfunctional family in various stages of denial. What it reveals at least as much is the modern phenomenon of reality-TV self-exposure carried to such lengths that, by comparison, the Osbournes look like the Cleavers.
  25. 300: Rise of an Empire
    The best thing about the new 300: Rise of an Empire is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it. And the worst thing about it is that Zack Snyder didn’t direct it.
  26. Rabbit Trap
    Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.
  27. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Directed by David Zellner from a script he wrote with his brother, Nathan, the film has its tender mercies, as well-meaning Minnesotans attempt to reach out to this preoccupied Japanese woman with almost no English.
  28. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    While there aren’t any genuine belly laughs in the new movie, there are plenty of modestly likable, chucklesome ones. That ain’t nothing in this terrible, terrible world.
  29. Scream
    This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.
  30. Peter Pan & Wendy
    The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.
  31. Dog
    Dog feels like it should have been bigger and braver, but by the end, it also feels as if it could have been improved by being much smaller, closing in until it was just a guy and a dog and some of the country’s most beautiful scenery. What else do you really need?
  32. The Equalizer
    There’s a special kind of hell for artists who array vigilante revenge-porn in saintly garb, and Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua should go to the front of that damnable line after The Equalizer.
  33. 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.
  34. Bush's Brain
    I’m not sure that depicting Rove as a demonic Wizard of Oz does much more than stir righteous indignation among the already indignant. A more pertinent and challenging mission would have been to show just how the public can be gulled by Rove's dirty tricks in the same ways again and again.
  35. House of Gucci
    Gaga is wildly watchable in the role, broad but unwinking, an absolute scream, and the movie only really makes sense when it’s about her.
  36. The Fountain
    The movie would be more bearable without the unyielding score by Clint Mansell, which somehow melds the worst of Minimalism, art rock, and New Age music. It's what you'd hear if your massage therapist wanted to induce a stroke.
  37. Camp
    Art as a passport to healing may be what audiences are craving these days, but the poultice provided by this movie couldn't cover a paper cut.
  38. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    Ready or Not 2 moves at a decent clip and is generally entertaining, but there’s something deflatingly lazy about its slate of rich assholes, which is heavy on standard-issue entitled daughters and smug failsons who treat the staff like props.
  39. 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.
  40. Sylvia
    The problem with Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia, as with most movies about deeply troubled artists, is that for the most part we are seeing the troubles and not the artist.
  41. The Importance of Being Earnest
    Parker "opens up" a play that was perfectly wonderful closed down. Wilde subtitled his masterpiece "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." This movie seems intent on being a trivial comedy for trivial people.
  42. The Magnificent Seven
    The Magnificent Seven has the trappings of a classic Western and it hits its marks. All of Fuqua’s movies hit their marks — even sadistic formula junk like "The Equalizer." But there’s no grandeur in its images or generosity in its soul. I don’t think Fuqua ever loved Westerns. And by the time this movie ended, I’d forgotten why I do.
  43. Rambo: Last Blood
    Quick as it is, though, you have time to wonder how these Mexican assassins can watch their comrades getting skewered, dismembered, and eviscerated by Rambo’s traps and not think, Maybe we should pull out and rethink this assault.
  44. Son of Saul
    The movie doesn’t expand in your mind — it shrinks along with its protagonist, its conclusion a reductio ad absurdum.
  45. Paranormal Activity 4
    But the real problem behind Paranormal Activity 4 is that its entire raison d'être has gotten old; producer Oren Peli, who directed the first one, even included some gentle digs at the found-footage genre in his superior "Chernobyl Diaries," released earlier this year.
  46. 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.
  47. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Waititi hasn’t always been the most precise at mixing pathos and humor (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, yes, Jojo Rabbit, no), and the calibrations in Love and Thunder are all off.
  48. The Lords of Salem
    The Lords of Salem is gloomy, lacks variety, and is not without its flat patches. Heidi is an increasingly dullish heroine, and in the first 15 minutes you’ll know what’s going to happen in the next 80.
  49. Inferno
    Tom Hanks takes his art down a peg with another paycheck performance as the dramatic cipher Robert Langdon in Inferno, Ron Howard’s mostly lame adaptation of Dan Brown’s wholly lame novel.
  50. W.
    W. isn't gripping enough as drama or witty enough as satire. It's neutered.
  51. Along Came a Spider
    There's not much here for a great actor to sink his teeth into once, let alone twice.
  52. Calvary
    Those shots are in contrast to those landscapes, which are craggy, primordial. It’s meant to be a haunting combination, and I have colleagues who’ve found it just that, who came out of the movie ashen, devastated. But I found it bludgeoning — I think it gives new meaning to the phrase hammer of God.
  53. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    It’s a lot more like the movie we were worried the first one was going to be: baggy, bloated, and only sporadically engaging.
  54. Tammy
    I hesitate to label the result as bad or good. It’s just … off.
  55. Vox Lux
    As a story of popular art born in the crucible of violent trauma, it’s a fantastic, wildly ambitious idea; as a filmed drama with human characters, it’s confoundingly executed at every turn. Vox Lux is a failure, but one I can’t stop thinking about.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Sterile Cuckoo
    There is all too little here to interest an adult, let alone any veteran of the nutty-girl vs. stodgy-boy chiche. [27 Oct 1969, p.68]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  57. The Alto Knights
    The Alto Knights is a movie whose ambition has passed. It feels like the husk of something that might have been great once.
  58. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    There’s enough going on to keep you watching — and, as I said, to keep fanboys wowed by the scale of the production and pretension. But most people will leave feeling drained and depressed, wondering how a studio can get away with withholding so much.
  59. Oblivion
    Oblivion is like that movie-within-a-movie: Everything in it feels 100 percent inauthentic. That vibe, as it happens, turns out to be intentional. But when the humans arrive, it’s still a narcotic.
  60. Bride of the Wind
    Beresford, can't bring this saga to life because Alma herself never fully comes to life; her contradictoriness, like the way she embraces Mahler only to rail against his "Jewish music," doesn't add up to a whole and complex human being.
  61. Salinger
    The fact that the movie’s focus is how and why he renounced the world, moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, and stopped publishing makes it worse, somehow. Salerno probably didn’t mean it this way, but he gives you the impression he came to mock his subject: We’ve got you now, you antisocial bastard.
  62. The Pope's Exorcist
    It allows Crowe to have fun with the part of Father Amorth, but the film forgets to have fun along with him.
  63. Renfield
    Hoult, playing a pallid, anxious, disconcertingly dreamy Renfield, and Cage, fully Cageing it up as the count, manage to be compelling even when vamping (sorry) with all their might to make this material work.
  64. In the Cut
    Campion is dabbling in several different types of movie here: police procedural, film noir, romantic melodrama, sex fantasia. None really succeeds.
  65. All the King's Men
    As Willie Stark, Sean Penn demonstrates how a great Method actor can make the world’s most unconvincing rabble-rouser.
  66. The Dead Don't Die
    It’s painful to report that Jarmusch’s deadpan is in the rigor mortis stage in The Dead Don’t Die. His own creative ferment isn’t happening this time — the acid cynicism has killed the yeast — and the actors seem unsure whether to commit to the material when their director plainly hasn’t.
  67. The Monkey
    The problem is that The Monkey has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either.
  68. The Wolf of Wall Street
    A veritable orgy of immorality, each scene making the same point only more and more outrageously, the action edited with Scorsese's usual manic exuberance but to oh-so-monotonous effect.
  69. Men in Black: International
    It’s not that this new movie has forgotten the fleet-footed charm of the original MIB films; it’s just that it doesn’t quite know how to conjure it again, so it confuses levity with listlessness.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Planet of the Apes
    Devoured by its own mechanical ostentation, generates no emotional involvement, and has a smart-ass, infinitely less powerful ending than the original.
  71. Taken 2
    The screenwriters go out of their way to prepare you for Taken 3: Serbedzija has more sons, and Kim's virginity is getting harder and harder to preserve.
  72. Total Recall (2012)
    There isn't anything in this Total Recall to match the immortal Arnold Schwarzenegger send-offs, "See you at the pah-ty" and everyone's favorite alimony killer, "Consider this a divorce."
  73. The Identical
    It's stocked with clichés, but they're arranged in such weird ways that the end result is both predictable and certifiable. If only any of it actually went somewhere.
  74. In the Grey
    In his latest, In the Grey, Ritchie takes this compulsive, hyperanalytical love of preparation to comical levels. Intentionally, but maybe not productively: As the screen fills up with lists and the narrative overloads on data, we may find our attention drifting.
  75. Ghostbusters
    The new Ghostbusters isn’t a horror, exactly. It’s just misbegotten. It never lives.
  76. 360
    How odd then that a film all about human connections manages to make none of its own.
  77. The Moment
    The Moment, directed by music-video wunderkind Aidan Zamiri, feels like a half-hearted hybrid of a real concert doc and a This Is Spinal Tap-like satire. It’s a little too afraid to go too far in either direction, and the end result is pure brand management.
  78. Gladiator II
    The thrill of the action sequences just underscores the hollowness of the rest of the enterprise. Sure, not all of us spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire, but those who do deserve better than this.
  79. Kong: Skull Island
    Its combination of lavishness and lack of imagination is the only thing memorable about it.
  80. Full Frontal
    Has its fun moments, and the dialogue, some of which was surely improvised, has a natural flow. But Soderbergh suffocates everything with stylistics. Soderbergh is exploring his navel.
  81. The Pink Panther
    Steve Martin can be a delightfully spasmodic clown, but his Clouseau makes no sense.
  82. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    The experience of watching it, especially given its dreamlike unreality and head-scratching punnery (this is a deeply unfunny movie) is like listening to a doddering old man for whom every story — about art, politics, local goings on — ends up being about how every woman is an evil witch that can’t be trusted.
  83. Fatman
    There’s nothing wrong with subtle or contextual humor, of course, but here, frankly, it feels like a waste of a pretty great concept.
  84. Trash
    A misguided attempt to mix together social realism, children’s adventure, and political thriller, Stephen Daldry’s Trash never sits still long enough to be any of those things.
  85. The Old Guard 2
    There’s a debilitating cheapness that keeps this picture from reaching its true potential. I have no idea what the budget was — for all I know, it could have been bigger than the original film’s — but it feels at times like we’re watching a mock-up of what a movie called The Old Guard 2 might look like.
  86. A Fantastic Woman
    I just wish Vega and Lelio let us in a little more to see her as an individual, aside from the hostility she encounters.
  87. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    It’s as if the film is taking after its own heroines: aspiring to something bigger than it should, and too often looking awkward in the process.
  88. Trumbo
    Trumbo is a film that at times can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. At its worst, it’s musty and awkward; at its best, it’s irreverent and funny. Unfortunately, it settles for the former more than the latter.
  89. Cake
    Actually, the whole movie is grim — drearily so.
  90. Get Hard
    The real problem is that Get Hard’s very idea of edge is itself pretty stale. It feels like a bunch of off-color jokes the filmmakers have been trying to tell for years, and they’ve crammed them all into one film — with tiresome results.
  91. Alex & Emma
    Life imitates art, except there’s precious little of either here.
  92. 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.
  93. Strange Magic
    The problem with Strange Magic isn’t so much its derivative story as it is the odd, half-complete way it unfolds. You can sense the weird mixture of tones, influences, ideas — as if the whole thing were still in its planning stages.
  94. The Gentlemen
    For a filmmaker who used to make these movies with a measure of anarchic glee, Ritchie appears to have bought into his own bullshit here.
  95. Oxygen
    Aja knows what sort of product he is turning out and does it ably, if without much excitement, as though understanding he is filling a hole in a lineup. It’s actually Laurent, who is too classy to be here, who doesn’t entirely grasp the assignment. She keeps overreaching, giving her cutout character shows of realistic emotion that the film she is appearing in can’t support.
  96. The Voices
    This film really doesn’t know what to do with itself, except to show us the difference between Jerry’s happy world and his dark world as if it’s some kind of revelation; it’s the one move the film has, and it does it over and over again.
  97. Trolls World Tour
    Trolls World Tour is ruthlessly simple, rushed, and obvious.
  98. The Black Dahlia
    It's a stilted thing--overstylized and inexpressive, like high-school kids playing dress-up, or bad Kabuki.
  99. The 355
    The 355 was directed by X-Men: Dark Phoenix’s Simon Kinberg, who wrote the script with Smash creator Theresa Rebeck, and he’s genuinely terrible with fight sequences, which is a real issue in a movie that has a lot of them.
  100. TRON: Ares
    Mostly, when you watch Tron: Ares, you become aware of the degree to which this franchise has exhausted its own metaphor.
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