New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Y2K
    Y2K is audacious in concept but pretty slapdash in execution.
  2. Sleuth
    I think the movie works best if you know the original and have a taste for goofy revisionism.
  3. Amsterdam
    Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.
  4. Downhill
    It can’t quite match the power of Östlund’s film, or its bemused, clinical (dare I say Scandinavian?) sensibility, but it has an awkward, American charm all its own.
  5. The Catcher Was a Spy
    The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.
  6. Little
    As many times as I tried to get onboard with its proposed brand of breezy fun, it kept kicking me off, if only because I found myself running up against the very foundation of its premise.
  7. Insidious: The Last Key
    There is a real chance that one might be too busy trying to piece it all together to notice the jump scares, the film’s prime mode of horror-stirring.
  8. Reminders of Him
    It’s familiar, it’s generic, and it feels like a test of how far we’ll lower our standards.
  9. Riddick
    As a result, we get relatively little insight into the other characters as they react to Riddick. Without an unknown force to spark our own imaginations, the result is mostly dead air.
  10. Men in Black II
    The hang-loose grodiness of these films has its charms, and the Ray-Banned team of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, at its best, is good vaudeville.
  11. The Black Dahlia
    It's a stilted thing--overstylized and inexpressive, like high-school kids playing dress-up, or bad Kabuki.
  12. Stalingrad
    While the imagery in this retelling is impeccable, the story is strangely lifeless.
  13. The Good Night
    Jake Paltrow's comedy takes familiar male-angst material and turns it into a painful--but fun--string of jokes.
  14. Stagedoor
    Stagedoor features unremarkable rehearsal footage (exhibitionists make poor subjects for vérité documentaries) and thoughtful but unsurprising interviews with camp counselors and parents.
  15. The Promise
    The film is no masterpiece — again, George can’t illuminate why a million people were murdered by their own countrymen. But as we focus on Rusesabagina’s almost farcically desperate attempts to forestall tragedy, we have a vision of genocide as a virus with its own terrible momentum.
  16. The Thorn in the Heart
    This is an extraordinary film.
  17. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    It’s so obviously shaped by fan response that it feels like the movie equivalent of someone who went viral online and now can only repeat themselves to diminishing returns in an attempt to hawk merch while they can.
  18. Hart's War
    A movie like Hart's War, for all its realistic trappings, is essentially escapism. And yet it inadvertently pushes the 9/11 button. The real world is going to intrude a lot this year at the movies. Better get used to it.
  19. K-PAX
    Spacey is turning into another Robin Williams: Between this film and "Pay It Forward" he cops the prize for the Sappiest Performances by an Actor Previously Known to Have Great Talent.
  20. The Price of Milk
    Gets points for oddness. Excellence is another matter.
  21. 7 Days in Entebbe
    It muddles what might have been a fascinating alternate — i.e., downbeat — take on one of Israel’s most-acclaimed military operations.
  22. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    Horizon feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently rolling into place, carefully delineating characters and offering telltale glimpses into their lives. It’s rich in period detail and filled with majestic vistas that seem to match the expanse of its story. But this can be a curse, too, at least while the film only exists as this one installment.
  23. Rio 2
    You wish Rio 2 had the smarts and the inventiveness to match its scattered bursts of ambition.
  24. Live by Night
    Once Affleck’s Joe gets to Florida, Live by Night loses its pulse and you’re left with a lot of pale characters, secondhand plotting, and maybe second thoughts about the daffy idea of a liberal-humanist gang boss.
  25. Oldboy
    Watching Spike Lee’s decent but unmemorable remake of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture "Oldboy," I kept trying to figure out why he’d done it.
  26. Scotland, Pa.
    Writer-director Billy Morrissette doesn't have much feeling for satire -- or for Shakespeare. This is a comedy for people who couldn't make it through the CliffsNotes.
  27. Cake
    Actually, the whole movie is grim — drearily so.
  28. The Instigators
    More than anything, The Instigators is ethnic comedy if being a white guy from Boston counts as its own ethnicity, an argument that Damon and the Afflecks have spent a good portion of their careers making. Those local specifics and in-jokes may not amount to much, but they are what distinguishes this film from other half-baked crime movies.
  29. 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.
  30. Scoop
    The first Allen picture since "Sweet and Lowdown" that doesn't leave a bad odor in its wake.
  31. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    The battle scenes are loud and jangly and dissonant enough to unnerve you — they work. But I’d like to see a congressional committee grill Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan about what’s going on half the time.
  32. 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.
  33. Buffalo Boys
    Moderately entertaining, immoderately splattery spaghetti Western.
  34. The Banger Sisters
    The best way to kill the spirit of the sixties is to sanitize it with preachiness, which is what happens here. That rock-cock collection might as well be a box of baseball cards.
  35. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    So relentlessly giddy and hyperactive that it doesn’t really need a movie review--it needs a prescription.
  36. The Predator
    The Predator throws enough at you to keep you distracted from seeing all the marks it’s not quite hitting. Rhodes’s pop-top vet is amusing and scary in equal measure, and little Jake Tremblay is as good as you’d hope, especially when his Rory mouths off to the Machiavellian Traeger on the subject of reverse psychology.
  37. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    The only reason to put yourself through Guy Ritchie's overblown, inelegant Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows is to see Jared Harris, who plays Professor Moriarty, in a chilling low key.
  38. 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.
  39. Six Minutes to Midnight
    The movie is dogged by wobbly reasoning and dramaturgical lassitude, but at least one actor tries to spice it up. There are certainly other performers who emerge unembarrassed — Dench does a lovely turn from foolishness into new wisdom, for instance. But D’Arcy is as silly as the film itself and the only one who knows what movie he’s in.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Real Blonde
    Stupidity is also an issue in the independent film The Real Blonde, in which everyone seems to have suffered an IQ slippage of some 40 points.
  41. TRON: Ares
    Mostly, when you watch Tron: Ares, you become aware of the degree to which this franchise has exhausted its own metaphor.
  42. 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.
  43. Ted 2
    The trouble is, lazy, opportunistic writing can be distracting in its own way, and there’s way too much of it in Ted 2 to fully ignore.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All We Had
    Even in a rote story, with prosaic direction from Holmes, the lead performances ring true.
  45. Divergent
    If you can forget what it’s saying, Divergent is fairly entertaining.
  46. The Greatest Showman
    Musicals are inherently fake — they can be ecstatically, transcendentally fake — but this is a whole other level of disingenuousness.
  47. Mothers' Instinct
    Mothers’ Instinct is, indeed, pretty terrible, and not in the so-bad-it’s-good sense, and yet there’s something strangely moving about it. It’s a poignant example of how what looks like rich material to actors can turn out to be lousy material for audiences.
  48. 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.
  49. Tears of the Sun
    In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, it’s a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Willis’s anguished mug. There’s an uncomfortable Great White Father (and Mother) aspect to this movie.
  50. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    People who see Sinbad for its star power--a big selling point in the movie’s marketing campaign--are being oversold.
  51. The Counselor
    It shows us things — obscene and hilarious, yes, but also just as often harrowing and unforgettable — we never thought we’d see. It’s ridiculous, but it has a ragged nobility all its own.
  52. Red Hook Summer
    This is a film made by a wiser man who recognizes that everybody's looking for salvation in their own way. In the end, as the camera revisits the cast of broken, fallen characters, we may realize that Red Hook, as far as Spike Lee is concerned, is a state of mind.
  53. Underwater
    The primary pleasure of Underwater is the spectacle of everything going wrong, all at once.
  54. The Gallerist
    Like most art world satires (a generally cursed subgenre), The Gallerist doesn’t ultimately have all that much to say about the art world that hasn’t been said a million times before. But it’s also a blast, thanks to its energetically mannered performances and director Cathy Yan’s snappy pacing and flair for visual humor.
  55. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    The sequel, Planes: Fire and Rescue, is still a DisneyToon production, but it does aim higher, with a visual zip that was lacking from the first. It is, in almost all respects, a better movie. It’s still not particularly good, though.
  56. Escape Room
    Tight, fun little thriller.
  57. Tomb Raider
    The fights and chases are well designed. You can always tell where everything is in relation to everything else and who’s hitting or shooting whom — which isn’t a given, surprisingly, when fast cutting and loudness can cover a lot of infelicities.
  58. Child's Play
    Unfortunately, Child’s Play is undone by a lack of tension even its best performances can’t conjure, and a familiar story that only skips lightly along the surface of gnarly ideas.
  59. The Thing with Feathers
    It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances [Cumberbatch] has given. Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character.
  60. Gran Turismo
    The line between a movie and an advertisement has gotten increasingly blurry — movies used to be a way to sell toys, but now toys have become the sole basis of movies. But Gran Turismo, in its texturelessness, the lack of joy in its depictions of gameplay, its too-sleek race footage and void of a main character, is particularly egregious in what it’s doing.
  61. 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.
  62. State Like Sleep
    Maybe my assessment is colored by the dud ending, since the journey to its criminally unsatisfying final scenes is tantalizingly dreamlike and unnerving.
  63. Lockout
    The pretty good thriller Lockout peaks with its first shot...When the camera moves and the plot kicks in - as it must - the movie loses its witty economy. Things get cluttered.
  64. Bullet to the Head
    The upshot is a shoot-‘em-up with a lean palette and relatively streamlined carnage, wet but not sloppy. It can almost pass for “classical.”
  65. I'm Still Here
    There's a thrilling madness to Phoenix's Method.
  66. Cat Person
    The most compelling moments come from watching Braun and Jones advancing toward and retreating from each other. It doesn’t sound quite right to say they have good chemistry; it’s more accurate to say that both actors understand how to make the lack of chemistry between their characters real and tangible.
  67. The Girl on the Train
    A filmmaker has a feel for this kind of storytelling or doesn’t, and the people behind The Girl on the Train don’t.
  68. High Crimes
    Franklin directs smoothly, but except for Freeman, the theatrics are pretty pro forma.
  69. Shallow Hal
    Some good gross-out inventiveness, but too heartfelt by half. Do we really need the Farrellys to champion inner beauty?
  70. Angels & Demons
    A shapely, stylish, white-knuckle horror-thriller that hits its marks with blood and thunder. It stinks to heaven, too, but it isn't lame. The streets of Rome haven't run this red since the Inquisition.
  71. Hungry Hearts
    Based on a novel by Marco Franzoso, Hungry Hearts is a riveting, relentless film. It may also be an infuriating one, and not always in a good way.
  72. Wonderful World
    The movie is unfailingly likable and finally impressive. Goldin doesn’t settle for easy answers, and he makes you think that no one should.
  73. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    The film would be better if it were gentler. It's broadly written and played, the actors too busy telegraphing their characters' emotions to let us contemplate their faces in peace.
  74. Admission
    That first half of Admission is a lot for an actress to overcome. It’s not just very bad, it’s very fast, as if someone had overwound the metronome. Fairly naturalistic lines are delivered at the pace of screwball zingers — which stubbornly refuse to zing.
  75. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    The thinness of the movie, which is what is intermittently enjoyable about it, is at odds with its sob-sister pretensions.
  76. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an atrocious movie, but it’s atrocious in a way that Marvel movies rarely are.
  77. King of Thieves
    The primary pleasure of James Marsh’s understated heist film is the opportunity to watch these icons go from mild-mannered pensioners to snarling, backstabbing hoods. That’s one of its shortcomings, too: We want more, and the picture never quite gives it to us.
  78. The Call of the Wild
    Something sure is screwy when a kid needs to go back to old Warner Bros. cartoons in which coyotes with jet-propelled tennis shoes or do-it-yourself tornado kits come closer to suggesting how nature actually works.
  79. Don't Worry Darling
    The film is smooth, competent, (mostly) well-acted, and merely tedious.
  80. I Feel Pretty
    The plot-engine joke — that Schumer’s character Renee hits her head and wakes up convinced she’s gorgeous — is nothing if not well-intentioned, but veers into cheap and easy enough times to be misinterpreted. When it’s good, though, and when Schumer’s fully locked into her take-no-prisoners charm assault, it’s pretty undeniably delightful stuff.
  81. The Mountain Between Us
    It’s said you have a choice at a movie like The Mountain Between Us: Laugh at it or go with it. I don’t see those two things as mutually exclusive. I laughed at it and enjoyed the hell out of it.
  82. Black Nativity
    It doesn’t always work as drama, but as a musical, it’s often fantastic.
  83. 17 Again
    What I can't accept is that the stringy, insipidly earnest teen idol Zac Efron would grow up to be the defensively ironic, twisty-faced Matthew Perry.
  84. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Jayne Mansfield’s Car isn’t likely to set America’s theaters on fire, but it’s a powerful whisper of a film.
  85. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    This thing is an unholy mess.
  86. A Love Song for Bobby Long
    John Travolta finds no artistic breathing-room in A Love Song for Bobby Long.
  87. Haunted Mansion
    Disney’s new Haunted Mansion is a hot mess, but it’s a sporadically entertaining one.
  88. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    The Mummy is an enormously silly gross-out flick that for some reason believes it ought to be a meditative slow-burn affair.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fun with Dick and Jane
    A pitch-perfect farce for the post-Enron era.
  90. 3 Generations
    While 3 Generations certainly has some worthy explorations, it’s too vain not to sugarcoat itself, visually or otherwise.
  91. Borstal Boy
    For all its triteness, Sheridan's sentimentality has its poignancy: This adolescent boy is all set up to live out a halcyon life he'll never have.
  92. In the Cut
    Campion is dabbling in several different types of movie here: police procedural, film noir, romantic melodrama, sex fantasia. None really succeeds.
  93. Sonic the Hedgehog
    Carrey is the film’s most prized weapon, letting us wallow in the ridiculousness of this whole enterprise without ever holding himself above it. Quite the contrary, he overcommits in the best possible way.
  94. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    If the series was conceived as a way to hold on to the fans of the original books and movies who are now grown, what’s clear in practice is it’s a children’s story staggering to support a few ambitious and deeply underdeveloped themes.
  95. RED 2
    No movie with this much ass-kicking should feel so lifeless. Nothing in Red 2 is actively offensive, but for the most part, it’s hard to really care for anything that’s happening to these characters.
  96. 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.
  97. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    Playing Teddy Roosevelt in these films was nowhere near a highpoint for Williams, but it did speak to his fondness for these CGI-infused kids’ spectacles. His final farewell here is gentle, reflectively and almost unbearably moving. It lends the the film a retroactive grace.
  98. The Matrix Revolutions
    This final installment jettisons most of the Zen mumbo-jumbo from the first two movies in favor of lots of very loud explosions. Since I didn’t take the mumbo-jumbo seriously to begin with, my letdown was minor, but aficionados may feel like they’ve been played for suckers.
  99. In the Heart of the Sea
    In the Heart of the Sea isn’t a bad film, necessarily. It has some genuinely effective passages in its first half, and Howard is nothing if not a dutiful, check-the-boxes kind of director. But a story like this – one of horror and madness, which helped give birth to an ornate masterpiece of obsession – needs to go a little crazy. And this director doesn’t do crazy.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »