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. Youth Without Youth
    Half the time in the mystical saga Youth Without Youth, I had no idea what the movie was about, but I always felt that the director and screenwriter, Francis Ford Coppola, did, and that he was deeply in tune--and having a hell of a time--with the material.
  2. 360
    How odd then that a film all about human connections manages to make none of its own.
  3. Freedomland
    Its focus--the children--are not even onscreen very much. But their ghosts are everywhere, and the pain of the film is primal.
  4. Where the Crawdads Sing
    As the grown-up Kya, Edgar-Jones is perhaps best at conveying this young woman’s wounded inner life; that speaks to the actress’s talents. However, she never really feels like someone who emerged from this world, but rather one who was dropped into it; that speaks to the clunky filmmaking.
  5. The Aftermath
    Consumed by its own chilliness, The Aftermath is an emotionally constipated movie about emotional constipation. That may come off as a glib way to describe something that purports to explore the paralyzing nature of grief, but James Kent’s romantic historical drama falls so flat that any sense of tragedy is lost; it’s all surface, and stasis.
  6. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically even-handed waste of talent.
  7. 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.
  8. Instinct
    In the end, Powell thanks his doctor for sharing the journey, but audiences who sit through this zoologically daft back-to-nature clinker may feel far less charitable.
  9. I Do... Until I Don't
    The movie’s satirical backbone softens and dissolves, and watching it go wrong might make you realize it wasn’t that good to begin with — that Bell had been getting by on energy and the audience’s goodwill.
  10. Retribution
    This is a paycheck movie, to be sure, the kind of direct-to-video title that gets a theatrical release because the lead actor still has star power. But he and his director have earned that paycheck. I’m excited to see what Liam Neeson will be stuck inside next.
  11. Back to Black
    It’s a film about Amy Winehouse that just doesn’t care for Amy Winehouse much, as an artist or as a person.
  12. Dark Phoenix
    Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. It’s not boring.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Dog's Purpose
    Filmed in the burnished glow that envelops all of Hallström’s American movies, A Dog’s Purpose recycles bits of every animal saga you can name, and practically dares you to make it through with a face of stone. Even a dog movie could use a higher purpose.
  14. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    If we absolutely must have G.I. Joe movies, surely they shouldn’t be this joyless.
  15. The Circle
    The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.
  16. Glass
    If Shyamalan is an original, his originality is in draining the life out of pop archetypes, twerpily annotating them, and presenting it all as a gift from on high.
  17. Anaconda
    The movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.
  18. Scoob!
    The best part of Scoob!, a computer-animated reboot of the Scooby-Doo franchise, is the part in which the movie painstakingly recreates the opening credits of the original series.
  19. 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.
  20. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Insurgent is not a very good movie, but it’s better than it needs to be.
  21. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Not scary enough to thrill, funny enough to charm, or clever enough to convince, I Know What You Did Last Summer isn’t just forgettable. It’s actively irritating.
  22. Won't Back Down
    If you want your movie to blow up the right way, you have to do better than the paint-by-numbers story and characters presented here.
  23. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    It’s not spectacular enough to impress us, nor intimate enough to move us. It’s just kind of there — ready to be consumed and forgotten.
  24. Love the Hard Way
    Brody doesn’t deserve this movie.
  25. Robert the Bruce
    If I’ve made Robert the Bruce sound laughable, I’ve misrepresented it. It’s not bad at all. Though he is unusually uncharismatic, Macfadyen (who co-wrote the script) is an excellent actor, and Richard Gray directs ably. But that word — “ably.” I never used it before. It’s the bottom of the neutral zone, before you dip into negative territory.
  26. Transcendence
    Transcendence never quite succeeds at telling a story of scientific overreach. And it doesn’t really click as an action movie either. But as a human tragedy of man and monster, of beauty and beast, it has just enough genuine pathos that you wish it were better.
  27. The Current War
    Apart from those nutty camera angles and lenses, which throw you out of the action, The Current War is absorbing.... It never quite snaps into focus, though.
  28. Overboard
    By shifting its perspective and updating its anxieties, Overboard is a decent-to-great model for a rom-com renaissance, the kind of film that sends one out on a high note great enough to blur many of the blemishes that have come before.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    Winningly goofy but blemished by behind-the-scenes tinkering, The Lost Kingdom is disappointing in the usual sequel way: It rearranges without deepening the elements people liked about its predecessor.
  30. The Ice Road
    Ultimately, The Ice Road veers uneasily between immersive tension and a variety of you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me howlers on the level of both plot and dialogue.
  31. 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.
  32. Captain America: Brave New World
    The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have been interesting to pursue, had it been handled here with anything resembling wit, or intelligence, or depth.
  33. Jurassic Park III
    With Joe Johnston directing instead of Spielberg, who executive-produces, and a scrum of screenwriters, none named Crichton, the franchise suffers some negligence.
  34. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Wild Mountain Thyme is not just charmless. It is genuinely confounding, a movie constantly working against itself to make its characters and their dilemma comprehensible.
  35. Holland
    The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone.
  36. Daddy's Home
    Ferrell and Wahlberg previously paired up in "The Other Guys", one of the great comedies of the millennium, but put aside any expectation that their latest collaboration might even come close to that sublime masterpiece.
  37. The Affair of the Necklace
    The necklace in this movie was crafted by the elite London jewelers Asprey and Gerrard -- out of cubic-zirconium stones. That's just about perfect. The Affair of the Necklace is a cubic-zirconium epic.
  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. The Great Wall
    The absurdity is what makes it such a hoot-and-a-half.
  40. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    Does anybody really find this crap scary anymore?
  41. The Family
    But Besson — by no means a bad filmmaker — has gotten rich off that kind of violence that upsets no one, least of all jaded international action audiences. He tries to have it both ways and fails some of cinema’s most precious resources.
  42. Opus
    Aside from the ingenious creation of Moretti and his occasionally unpredictable behavior, the film fails at creating interesting characters, deploying suspense, and even delivering some cheap thrills.
  43. From Paris with Love
    Morel will inevitably be compared to John Woo, whom he trounces. He has fewer mannerisms (no damn doves) and a keener eye; his fastest, most kinetic shots flow together like frames in a flipbook.
  44. Cold Turkey
    Cold Turkey is a simmering piece of holiday dystopia with a good, scorching boil-over.
  45. Madea's Witness Protection
    He's still a young guy, but all throughout Witness Protection I imagined Perry sitting glumly at a dressing-room mirror, like the aging Chaplin in "Limelight," forlornly rubbing makeup in his face - a tired, old clown stuck in a tired, old routine.
  46. Devil's Knot
    It’s not a bad film, exactly, but it’s a jumbled, uncertain one, and it never quite makes a compelling case for itself.
  47. Along Came a Spider
    There's not much here for a great actor to sink his teeth into once, let alone twice.
  48. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Unfortunately, there's also a certain artificiality to the whole film, both visually and narratively.
  49. The Last House on the Left
    There's a huge change that turns the nihilistic carnage of Craven's original into something suffused with old-fashioned family values, so that we can relax and enjoy watching the bad guys get beaten, skewered, dismembered by garbage disposals, and tortured with microwave ovens.
  50. The House That Jack Built
    The film’s most offensive qualities have nothing to do with its grotesque violence and displays of human mutilation, but its terminal navel-gazing and reductive, borderline harmful ideas about art.
  51. Big Daddy
    Sandler being Chaplinesque isn't pretty; he's just doing his smart-aleck slacker shtick with a moister eye.
  52. A Bad Moms Christmas
    A Bad Moms Christmas is a film about women trapped in a bleakly infantilizing suburban hellscape with horrible lighting, whose only idea about how to subvert their situation is to scream and push people and hit each other in the crotch.
  53. Parallel Tales
    None of the female characters in the film acts in ways that suggest Farhadi has actually given much thought to what it’s like to move through the world as a woman.
  54. Halloween Kills
    You have to admire the effort — even as you survey, mouth agape, the calamitous results.
  55. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    What I experienced was a lot of fetid experimental-film folderol perfumed by Chopin nocturnes on the soundtrack.
  56. Suburbicon
    The most charitable way to view it is as a Dadaist experiment, in which two tonally disparate movies were hacked down and their remaining strands woven together to bizarre effect.
  57. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    It’s a dour, drab, dark movie, enlivened by some moderately effective chills in the first half but ultimately undone by its downbeat aimlessness.
  58. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    King Arthur is guilty of many blockbuster sins critics have taken it upon themselves to call out over the last decade. And yet, seeing a version of them this derivative and dumb, with neither CGI grandeur nor a sense of fun on its side, is like a splash of cold water in the face, a reminder of how bad things can be when nobody cares.
  59. Jackpot!
    The real problem with Jackpot! (aside from the inept direction, the unfunny script, and the irritating characters) is that the whole film indulges in a kind of misanthropy that would require a lot more thought and ballsiness to pull off.
  60. Larry Crowne
    The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.
  61. Memory
    In the end, Memory’s greatest asset might be that it knows exactly what it is — a fun combination of sleazoid action and surprising emotion. It’s the best kind of B-movie.
  62. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Somehow both annoyingly overstuffed and depressingly thin.
  63. Black Adam
    The film ultimately overloads us with so much amazing nonsense that we sort of give up and give in.
  64. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    That G.I. Joe silliness the first film embraced has been steamrolled into tentpole flatness this time around. It’s not stoopid anymore, but just plain stupid.
  65. Cinderella
    A musical, theoretically, could reveal something under the surface, whatever thoughts her character isn’t able to articulate in dialogue. But there’s nothing under the surface here, just a girl trying to sell you a dress.
  66. Machete Kills
    The carnage (with its computer-­generated splatter) is meant to be campy fun, but it’s so offhand that there’s less suspense than in an Austin Powers movie.
  67. Battleship
    One of the more enjoyably terrible movies of the year.
  68. Venom: The Last Dance
    Venom: The Last Dance isn’t a lark, but a smirk to let you know that while everyone may be aware of what it’s up to, you’re the sucker who bought the ticket.
  69. In the Lost Lands
    What’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene.
  70. Child 44
    A story this dense with incident, character, and history needs to breathe a little — think "The Lives of Others," or "Zodiac" — but Child 44 has no rhythm. It’s blunt, rushed, and scattershot. You're exhausted, bored, and confused by it at the same time.
  71. Ride Along
    It all mostly works, but you can’t help but wonder at times if it could have been a lot funnier if it had just a bit more edge.
  72. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    Without Remorse is awful — an incoherently shot, grindingly dull movie in which just about every actor manages to seem miscast.
  73. Moonfall
    It’s so unapologetically absurd and so very fun.
  74. Olympus Has Fallen
    Olympus Has Fallen is a disgusting piece of work, but it certainly hits its marks — it makes you sick with suspense.
  75. Kick-Ass 2
    Kick-Ass 2, a movie that, for all its predictable sequel-ness, manages to conjure up pretty much the same dark magic that the earlier film did, albeit with more troubling results. Believe it or not, Kick-Ass 2 is even more of a provocation than the first Kick-Ass.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Terminal Man
    Even George Segal gone bananas, courtesy of an out-of-whack computer in his head, chopping a lady and her waterbed into slow-motion streams of diluted blood that makes pretty patterns on white tiles, doesn't alleviate the excruciating boredom and intermittent nausea produced by The Terminal Man. [24 Jun 1974, p.59]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  77. The Curse of La Llorona
    It is a terrifically scary movie that I wish were more haunting.
  78. Spun
    As the cowboy-hatted wild man who cooks up speed in his motel-room lab, Rourke, who looks at home in his tattoos, is mesmerizingly grungy. He strikes a rare note of authenticity in this otherwise phony fandango.
  79. Pompeii
    More fun than any civilization’s fiery extinction should ever be, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii 3-D is gloriously exciting kitsch – a poor man’s "Titanic" crossed with an even poorer man’s "Gladiator."
  80. The Woman in the Window
    There is something endearing about watching a high-end cast and crew treat this material with such seriousness, even if they all seem to have missed the point. Sometimes schlock is just schlock, and it’s better off treated that way.
  81. When the Game Stands Tall
    The real-life story behind When the Game Stands Tall sounds amazing. But for all its exciting sports scenes, the movie version falls flat as drama.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Comes a Horseman
    [Pakula] has made the dreary mistake of reducing a half-dead genre to its basic elements, stripping away color, detail, humor--everything that makes it possible to regard a Western as a pleasure rather than an ordeal. [13 Nov 1978, p.128]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  83. Passengers
    Only a corporate entity could deliver an ending like this one. But only humans could devise and enact the often delightful scenario that precedes it.
  84. Sabotage
    For Sabotage, as good as it is in its first half, can’t keep it together.
  85. Miss Bala
    The souped-up plot is certainly indigestible (cheesecake, beefcake, bullets — choke on that), and there’s a steady stream of bad laughs, but something genuinely frightening comes through: a woman’s sense of disempowerment by men on all sides of the law. Hardwicke sticks to her guns — meaning there’s no play in the gunplay, only horror.
  86. Britney Vs. Spears
    The result is a piece that’s more personal, but also not as rigorous and objective.
  87. The Quiet Ones
    This demonic possession story is at times so lame it makes the last "Paranormal Activity" flick look like a masterpiece.
  88. Darling Companion
    If you can stay awake, you'll see a performance by ­Keaton that is radiant in its simplicity, all ditheriness shaken off. She's still ­peaking - ­someone give her a great role.
  89. Here Today
    While Here Today never works, there is a confessional quality to it that makes it intermittently interesting. It’s the movie equivalent of someone telling what they think is a funny anecdote, but that instead comes out as an inadvertent glimpse into their soul.
  90. Gangster Squad
    The period thriller Gangster Squad plays like an untalented 12-year-old's imitation of Brian DePalma's "The Untouchables."
  91. 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.
  92. Evolution
    Began life as a standard sci-fi horror script before mutating into the unfunny mess it now is.
  93. 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.
  94. An Acceptable Loss
    So-so quasi-thriller.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tempest
    This movie, one of the most bizarrely ambitious works directed by an American in recent years, is certainly a mess, but it's a joyful mess, with far more invention and life than many a more conventional well-made film. [16 Aug 1982, p.42]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  96. Act of Valor
    In the movie's best moment, an American sniper takes out a bad guy by a pier while a pair of hands reaches out of the water to grab the body so it doesn't make a splash and alert the other baddies.
  97. Horrible Bosses 2
    It puts the same characters into a vaguely familiar situation, with diminishing, tepid returns. They should have just called it 2.
  98. Unhinged
    For a movie marking a week in which theaters are reopening, Unhinged feels a lot like a movie that would be best caught on cable someday.
  99. Shaft
    It’s so aggressively puerile and phallocentric (big swinging dicks, big guns) it could be taken as a parody of a puerile, phallocentric action comedy — a hotfoot to feminists and girly-men. That’s a distinction without a difference, though, since either way it stinks to heaven.
  100. Here Comes the Boom
    So even if Here Comes the Boom doesn't quite work as a comedy (it's not particularly funny), or a drama (it's not particularly poignant), it has an earnest charm that keeps us engaged.
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