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. Ray
    Sure, it’s the Jamie Foxx breakout role. But the movie around it is so systematically “inspirational” that it comes perilously close to sabotaging the breakout.
  2. Sideways
    Sweetest, funniest, most humane movie I've seen all year.
  3. Being Julia
    Suggests a cross between "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve." The suggestion, alas, doesn't go very far, but Bening's performance approaches the pantheon.
  4. P.S.
    Maudlin.
  5. Vera Drake
    One of the letdowns of Vera Drake is that once Vera is arrested, we lose her voice.
  6. Stage Beauty
    Crudup, whose features have the appropriate delicacy, plays Ned with complete conviction; it’s difficult to imagine anyone else succeeding as well.
  7. Tarnation
    By all odds, Tarnation should have been an unwatchable, masochistic morass, but Caouette's love for the broken Renee--which is the true subject of the film--is awe-inspiring.
  8. I Heart Huckabees
    The philosophic notions in I Love Huckabees are ultimately not much more than window dressing for some fancy slapstick.
  9. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    It underscores, with ample footage from his rallying speeches and his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just how important it was for the antiwar movement to be represented by someone like Kerry.
  10. The Motorcycle Diaries
    The film is a deeply felt and beautifully acted hagiography.
  11. A Dirty Shame
    Despite its exuberant perversities, Waters’s take on erotomania is almost quaint.
  12. Head in the Clouds
    The film is a stodgy snooze, and Theron, who is about as expressive here as a porcelain doll, lacks all believability--she's followed her best performance (in Monster) with her worst.
  13. Silver City
    Using Dickie Pilager as a stand-in for George W. Bush seems too coy a tactic for these scabrous times. For better or worse, we want the real--or at least, the "real"-deal.
  14. Criminal
    Taut and straightforward and a little grungy, which is how these movies ought to be.
  15. When Will I Be Loved
    In much the same way that Godard used heroines like Anna Karina or Bardot, Toback showcases Campbell's face as a placard of unknowability--a quality he recognizes as inherently feminine. The (inadvertent) question we are left with is, How much is there to know about her anyway?
  16. Vanity Fair
    The effect is a bit like watching "Gone With the Wind" with a dumpling substituting for Scarlett O’Hara.
  17. Hero
    So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast
  18. 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.
  19. Bright Leaves
    While making his new film, he (McElwee) imagines that his boy is looking back at his screen image from some distant point in the future, when McElwee himself is gone. No child of a moviemaker could ask for a more beautiful bequest.
  20. Almost Peaceful
    The film was adapted from a 1993 novel by Robert Bober, who drew on his own childhood experiences, and as it unwinds, one begins to appreciate Deville's desire to see things work out well for these people.
  21. Bright Young Things
    Fry's saving grace is his love of actors. The younger and less familiar performers are more than adequate, but it's the older guard that shines. Broadbent is marvelously rummy.
  22. Red Lights
    Red Lights is the most ambiguously compelling romance around.
  23. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    A sense of unease, of incompleteness, is, I think, the appropriate response to this movie. Instead of trying to fill in the blanks, Curran and Gross leave things open and ambiguous. Just like life.
  24. Collateral
    Most of the time we are with Cruise and Foxx, and their interplay is never less than galvanizing.
  25. Code 46
    Their doomy romance is supposed to be fated, but it just seems sloggy, certainly not the stuff of myth. A good comedy could be made from this same premise.
  26. Open Water
    Terrifying precisely because it doesn't go in for cheesy shock tactics and special effects. (Those sharks are REAL.)
  27. The Manchurian Candidate
    Demme’s Manchurian Candidate is far from a disgrace, but it's not freewheeling enough, not strange enough to make sense of our gathering dread.
  28. The Village
    The Village is a better movie (than Signs) --probably his best since "The Sixth Sense"--but it indulges Shyamalan's penchant for messianic uplift.
  29. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    What gives Los Angeles Plays Itself its extraordinary density is the way Andersen transforms a cliché into a metaphysical truth that encompasses far more than L.A.
  30. She Hate Me
    Spike Lee’s She Hate Me is his worst movie ever--even worse than "Bamboozled," his self-serving indictment of modern minstrelsy, which at least was worth arguing about.
  31. A Home at the End of the World
    Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.
  32. The Door in the Floor
    Bridges redeems the clichéd role of spoiled artist-sot. He's flamboyantly entertaining, which is more than this otherwise dreary movie deserves.
  33. King Arthur
    Fuqua deliberately downplays the fantastical in King Arthur, but the gritty faux realism wears itself out quickly. You've seen one lancing, you've seen them all.
  34. De-Lovely
    Just because Cole Porter's biography was botched and airbrushed in "Night and Day," starring Cary Grant, doesn't mean De-Lovely, which is up-front about Porter's homosexuality, is a whole lot better.
  35. Spider-Man 2
    The set pieces, such as an unmasked Spider-Man trying to stop a runaway subway car, are furiously scary, and compensate for all the icky mooning and moping that Peter does whenever he's questioning his gift, which is most of the time.
  36. Fahrenheit 9/11
    More often than not, Moore goes for the guffaw, and as enjoyable as that can be, it falls short of producing the kind of devastating, in-depth analysis that might really challenge the hearts and minds of ALL audiences, left and right. At the very least, this approach undercuts the effectiveness of Moore’s own case.
  37. The Terminal
    It’s an odd fable: Viktor is the mysterious visitor who shows us what the American Dream is all about--in the movie’s terms, compassion for others--without ever wanting to become an American himself. He's a spiritual twin to E.T., who also had trouble phoning home.
  38. The Stepford Wives
    If the filmmakers had made a point of satirizing the new makeover culture in ways that went beyond camp jibes at décor and suburbia, they might have come up with a classic.
  39. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    The most powerfully entrancing children's film in years. Of course, a true kid's classic is just as magical for adults.
  40. The Day After Tomorrow
    The catastrophe is so pulped and exaggerated that uninformed audiences will safely assume that global warming is just a Democratic scare tactic.
  41. The Mother
    There is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.
  42. Saved!
    It's the barbs, and not the inspirationalism, that work best in this movie.
  43. Shrek 2
    The filmmakers betray the essentially childlike appeal of Shrek by piling up all these too-hip Hollywood references aimed at adults. It's not just kids who will feel cheated.
  44. Troy
    Except for a few brilliant flashes, mostly from Peter O'Toole as Hector’s father, the Trojans' magisterially woebegone King Priam, Troy is a fairly routine action picture with an advanced case of grandeuritis.
  45. Coffee and Cigarettes
    What unites everything is Jarmusch’s playful, hang-dog absurdism.
  46. Strayed
    Téchiné gets deep inside the dread and exhilaration of people who have lost their bearings so suddenly they don't even have the luxury of grief.
  47. Super Size Me
    Spurlock's movie is an attack on our eating habits, but it's also a prime example of an all-American sport--making a spectacle of oneself for fun and profit. Spurlock, you'll be surprised to learn, is developing a TV spinoff, with himself as host.
  48. Laws of Attraction
    It’s tough to be Tracy and Hepburn, let alone Doris Day and Rock Hudson, when you're trying to get your mouth around lines that wouldn't pass muster on a UPN sitcom.
  49. Mean Girls
    A smart little teen picture that, for a change, actually features recognizable teens.
  50. People Say I'm Crazy
    It’s a bracing antidote to the usual “Beautiful Mind”–style Hollywoodization of mental illness.
  51. The Saddest Music in the World
    Too much of this fantasy is filled out with artsy folderol, but it's a movie like no other--except, maybe, one by Guy Maddin.
  52. The Agronomist
    Free speech isn't merely a shibboleth in The Agronomist. As embodied by Dominique, it's a fire-breathing force.
  53. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    For all its high-end ambitions, This So-Called Disaster has a tabloid-TV-like appeal: We want to see if these volatile performers get on each other's nerves.
  54. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    I don't mean to unduly target Kill Bill Vol. 2 --it's certainly no worse than most of the blam-blam fare out there. But what I crave now are movies that speak to me in a different way about violence, that acknowledge the fact that real people are harmed.
  55. Walking Tall
    The new film stars The Rock, but The Wood might be a better description of his performance.
  56. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    Kim exalts nature--life’s passage--without stooping to sentimentality. He sees the tooth and claw, and he sees the transcendence. Whether this is a Buddhist attribute, I cannot say, but the impression this movie leaves is profound: Here is an artist who sees things whole.
  57. The Ladykillers
    It’s both lowdown and effete, a jamboree of whoopee jokes and sick wit.
  58. Dogville
    The film centers almost entirely on the faces of the townspeople, which Von Trier frames vividly. There’s nothing static about his technique, but everything else about the movie is dreary and closed off.
  59. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    For most of Eternal Sunshine, I found myself fighting off Gondry's hyperactive intrusions in order to get at the melancholia at its core. Fortunately, the idea behind this movie is so richly suggestive that it carries you past Gondry's image clutter.
  60. Spartan
    Spartan is a character study embedded in an action-hero scenario. Neither aspect ever really breaks loose.
  61. Starsky & Hutch
    Ends with a bunch of goofy outtakes--which are as dismal as the rest of the movie. How do you decide what to leave out when there's nothing worth keeping in?
  62. Hidalgo
    Fortunately, most of the malarkey in this movie seems intentional in the same Sunday-afternoon-serial way as the Indiana Jones movies (some of which Johnston worked on).
  63. Collateral Damages
    In Collateral Damages, we are witness to heroism, all right, but it's a heroism unsullied by sentimentality.
  64. 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.
  65. The Passion of the Christ
    It isn't just the violence that is overplayed. There is so much creepy-Gothic Sturm und Drang in The Passion that at times it seems as if Clive Barker should get credit for the story along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
  66. Kitchen Stories
    The film is saying that, left to their own devices, all men would devolve into a morass of monastic grouches. Kitchen Stories is a prime piece of comic anthropology.
  67. Big Animal
    Audiences for this film should have no such qualms: When the camel lolls his jaws at dinnertime, or sways his Bactrian bulk, you may decide you've never seen anything quite so hilarious -- or magnificent.
  68. Lost Boys of Sudan
    A pretty good documentary about a great subject.
  69. The Code
    It might seem as though there is nothing new to be done with the crime thriller, but The Code (La Mentale), directed by Manuel Boursinhac and written by Bibi Naceri, provides a new twist.
  70. Osama
    Rarely has there been so obscenely precise a depiction of ravaged innocence. This young girl has nothing to live for--and an entire life ahead of her in which to live it.
  71. The Dreamers
    He doesn’t entirely succeed, but the attempt has poignancy: As uneven as much of his recent work has been, Bertolucci's still in love with the movies, and his ardor--if not always the ends he puts it to--is exhilarating.
  72. The Return
    The hurt and rage flying back and forth have primal power, like Russian-flavored Eugene O'Neill. It's rare for a movie to work as effectively as this one does on such parallel tracks.
  73. Touching the Void
    As a piece of inspirationalism about human stamina, Touching the Void is peerless, but what it doesn't--perhaps can't--explain is why people place themselves in such peril.
  74. Cuba: Island of Music
    Keys takes a scattershot approach to Cuban music, filming not only specific artists, like Los Cohibas and Los Zafiros, but also street musicians in the barrio and just about everywhere else he can find them.
  75. The Battle of Algiers
    What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway--the sense that ALL sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.
  76. Japanese Story
    Tsunashima gives a deft performance in a role that starts out as caricature but becomes full-bodied. Collette commands the screen virtually the entire time.
  77. Cold Mountain
    Cold Mountain has some marvelous, intimate moments and a real feeling, at times, for the loss that war engenders, but it also has more than its share of hokum--which would be more entertaining if the hokum were juicier.
  78. The Company
    It's plotless. It fits no category -- "docudrama tone poem" probably comes closest.
  79. Monster
    Theron breaks through with a ferocious performance--a real career-changer.
  80. Mona Lisa Smile
    Director Mike Newell and screenwriters Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal should have uncorseted their own imaginations. The girls on display are all tightly stereotyped.
  81. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    More often McNamara comes across as Exhibit A in Morris's latest metaphysical creepshow.
  82. House of Sand and Fog
    The performances are amazing.
  83. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    Jackson is rare among the makers of epic movies in that he knows how to do the small stuff, too. The Return of the King has “heart”--how else could it pump out all that blood?
  84. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Pretty much the whole movie is a series of poses, static and uninvolving, except for cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s lighting, which makes everything look convincingly Vermeer-ish. I’d like to see what he could do with Rembrandt.
  85. The Statement
    Seems tailor-made for an intelligent thriller in the Graham Greene mode, but in Jewison's hands, the dragnet that closes in on Brossard is lackadaisical, and the larger political overtones--especially concerning the complicity of the Catholic church in aiding Nazis--are spelled out over and over.
  86. Something's Gotta Give
    Even in a piffle like Something’s Gotta Give, Keaton reminds us of her uncanny ability to inhabit her characters' knockabout emotions.
  87. Big Fish
    Has moments of genuine emotion...but overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit.
  88. Way Past Cool
    It’s a magical little movie about a most unmagical subject.
  89. The Last Samurai
    The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That’s a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.
  90. In America
    Fortunately, there are more than enough moments when the heavy-handedness gives way to the sheer bliss of ordinary magic.
  91. The Triplets of Belleville
    The most joyously cinematic movie I've seen this year. Chomet's astonishing imagination conjures images you could swear you've seen in your dreams.
  92. Bad Santa
    My kind of Christmas movie--profane, subversive, and swarming with scuzzballs.
  93. 21 Grams
    It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.
  94. The Missing
    You can believe this man (Jones) left his family because he felt born into the wrong tribe. Now if only he had picked the right movie . . .
  95. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    The director of "Gallipoli" and "The Year of Living Dangerously" has muffled the rage and darkness of his best work in favor of an antiquated pleasingness. Master and Commander is a too-comfy classic.
  96. Elf
    I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.
  97. Love Actually
    Cloying as much of this stuff is, it's not cynical. Curtis seems genuinely convinced that love is all around. Far be it from me to say otherwise. We don’t speak the same language.
  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. The Human Stain
    Roth's deep-dish introspection would be difficult for any movie to achieve, but with the right cast and more passion, we might have been pulled right into Coleman's psychic prison. The Human Stain isn't a movie of ideas, and it's too inert to be a probing character study. No stain is left behind, just a wan watermark.
  100. Shattered Glass
    Writer-director Billy Ray is so eager to be fair-minded about everything and everyone that you can't help thinking he's a patsy, too. If he directed a movie of Othello, he'd probably try to make us feel warm and fuzzy about poor, misunderstood Iago.
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