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. Crimson Gold
    Watching it is like getting a peek behind the curtain. But it's frustrating, too, because the casting of Emadeddin as a murderer-in-the-making precludes any psychological depth. And as an indictment of social inequality, which is the film's calling card, Panahi inadvertantly makes a far better case for the haves than for the have-nots.
  2. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    At its best, the film compares favorably to its obvious antecedents, "Rififi" (which Melville once hoped to direct) and "The Asphalt Jungle."
  3. The Son
    A prime piece of whirlybird filmmaking, and the technique saps what might have been a powerful experience.
  4. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Sam Rockwell plays Barris with a hipster’s shimmy that’s creepily effective -- The problem with making a movie about a hollow man is that, when things start to get heavy, you’re stuck with nothingness at the core.
  5. Chicago
    I realize that Fosse's dark sizzle might seem a bit dated today, but surely something halfway snazzy could have been devised for this movie. It's toothless.
  6. The Pianist
    Polanski’s strongest and most personally felt movie.
  7. Max
    Noah Taylor does startlingly well by this role, but the conceit behind the film is a bizarre piece of wish-fulfillment.
  8. Nicholas Nickleby
    Showcases some of the world’s finest and funniest actors having a high old time. It’s best enjoyed as a kind of traveling music-hall revue.
  9. The Hours
    If all three of the women’s lives had come across with equal weight and artistry, the film, which glides back and forth among them, might have approached the symphonic. But only the Streep section truly inspires the kind of awe and terror that the film as a whole strives for.
  10. Catch Me If You Can
    Breezily enjoyable but thin.
  11. Gangs of New York
    Stunning, and it has the added bonus of being about an era that is virtually new to movies. As a dramatic achievement, however, it is not quite so amazing.
  12. Spider
    A kind of psychological whodunit, but without the thrills. The clue-making is rather desultory, as if Cronenberg were indulging a narrative strategy he didn’t really care for.
  13. Antwone Fisher
    Should be remembered for a pair of performers -- Derek Luke and Viola Davis, whose cameo as the mother who abandoned him cuts through the sap like an acetylene torch.
  14. 25th Hour
    This is romanticism of a rather low order.
  15. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Jackson has a genuine epic gift: Few filmmakers have ever given gross-outs such resplendence.
  16. The Guys
    A hushed and powerful piece.
  17. About Schmidt
    It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.
  18. Analyze That
    Compounds the problems of its predecessor, "Analyze This," while duplicating almost none of its humor.
  19. Adaptation.
    Spellbindingly original -- Like the wild orchid, Adaptation is a marvel of adaptation, entwined with its hothouse environment and yet stunningly unique.
  20. Russian Ark
    It’s a hyper-aestheticized meditation on the meaning of history, visually astonishing, dramatically stilted. No masterpiece, but quite a feat (and quite effete).
  21. Die Another Day
    This series is in its fortieth year; it might be nice to see Bond battle a readily identifiable, real-world villain for a change. There's certainly no shortage.
  22. Talk to Her
    Talk to Her affects some people very deeply, while others, like me, find it high-grade kitsch.
  23. The Quiet American
    Beautifully directed by Phillip Noyce, the film -- is a full experience, a love story and a murder mystery that expands into a meditation on the deep deceptions of innocence.
  24. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    This time around, Harry Potter has more to worry about than the Dark Arts -- though parts of The Chamber of Secrets are spellbinding, he seems to be suffering from a bit of sequelitis.
  25. 8 Mile
    What it's really about is the euphoria that talent can bring to those who are possessed by it. That euphoria lights up the screen.
  26. Far From Heaven
    It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.
  27. Femme Fatale
    It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.
  28. Daughter from Danang
    This may sound like an Oprah episode, but the outcome is far from predictable and carries the force of a tragedy in which everyone, and no one, is to blame.
  29. Roger Dodger
    The dramatic arc of Roger Dodger may be banal, but Kidd manages some marvelous moments.
  30. The Truth About Charlie
    Another charmless Hollywood thriller.
  31. Frida
    Neither terrible nor excellent; Hayek, who also co-produced, may have obsessed for years about this project, but the result is a fairly standard this-happened-and-that-happened biopic.
  32. All or Nothing
    The empathy never lifts off -- never becomes poetry. It doesn't help that Leigh indulges his unfortunate habit of larding the soundtrack with draggy, mournful music, heavy on the cello.
  33. Auto Focus
    Schrader really isn't interested in Crane except as the straw man for his moral lessons about sin and sexuality and the nature of celebrity. Auto Focus is the perfect capper to Crane's career: Even in a movie about himself, he remains minor.
  34. Safe Conduct
    Spacious, headlong entertainment.
  35. Comedian
    At its best, it's a lively on-the-road chronicle of how to put an act together from scratch.
  36. Swept Away
    If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.
  37. White Oleander
    Tends to settle for easy, homiletic insights. But it also has a collection of first-rate performances by some marvellous actresses.
  38. Punch-Drunk Love
    A startling achievement, but its lack of psychological dimension prevents it from making much human contact with us. It ends where it begins: in a state of shock.
  39. Heaven
    A great deal of energy is expended on metaphysical ruminations that become ever fuzzier. The film is intended as an allegory, but it works best as a jailbreak romance. In this movie, lowbrow trumps highbrow every time.
  40. Bloody Sunday
    The most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil war since Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers."
  41. Moonlight Mile
    A sentimental, feel-good look at a family in mourning, but Jake Gyllenhaal rises above the clichéd script with a brilliantly creative performance.
  42. 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.
  43. Secretary
    Secretary is deeply conventional: Edward and Lee accept their bondage as the way to a more fulfilling life. It's the filmmakers who need to be spanked.
  44. Spirited Away
    The most deeply and mysteriously satisfying animated feature to come along in ages.
  45. Alias Betty
    Complicated thriller that gets more interesting as its complications pile up.
  46. The Pinochet Case
    The Pinochet Case is a searing album of remembrance from those who, having survived, suffered most.
  47. City by the Sea
    The role plays all too easily into De Niro's worst current habits. He's dulled himself out in the service of a phony kitchen-sink pseudo-realism. For De Niro, less has become less.
  48. In Praise of Love
    I found myself staring at his new one, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'Amour), in a state of rapt annoyance and befuddlement. It's constructed in two sections, which are far more fractured and opaque than the simple description I will here try to set out.
  49. How I Killed My Father
    Michel Bouquet's performance makes Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father required viewing.
  50. S1m0ne
    Writer-director Andrew Niccol throws around a lot of intriguing ideas in this film, and even though his ambitions are more expansive than his talent, he's managed to come up with something that credibly resembles the shape of things to come, Hollywood-style.
  51. One Hour Photo
    Williams once knew how to be very still and yet allow us to see the plangent human being underneath. In One Hour Photo, Sy's scary ordinariness is a species of acting stunt. There's no there there.
  52. Possession
    "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things," at least held you. Possession piddles away as you're watching it.
  53. 24 Hour Party People
    One of the sharpest and funniest movies about the music business ever made.
  54. Blood Work
    Eastwood's earnestness has its own stoic charm. There's something nutty but also heroic in how he plays this macho-man-with-the-heart-of-a-woman premise with a straight face.
  55. 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.
  56. One Last Kiss
    It's a frisky, funny roundelay starring Stefania Sandrelli, and it features enough shouting and arm-waving to power a windmill.
  57. Signs
    Shyamalan wants to be the metaphysical poet of movies, but he's dangerously close to becoming its O. Henry. The best surprise ending he could give us in his next movie would be no surprise ending at all.
  58. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    Evans, in effect, is the real producer here, and the film, which mostly consists of artfully blended archival footage, comes across like a last will and testament.
  59. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Caine is burlesquing his own iconography and enjoying every minute of it. He hasn't lost his dignity, though; it takes a lot of self-possession to act this blissfully silly. He even looks good with bad teeth.
  60. Happy Times
    Zhang is working in a popular sentimental mode here, but his connection to the material -- and to us -- is heartfelt and without a trace of condescension. As a filmmaker, he's the opposite of a con artist, and his new movie is a gentle marvel.
  61. K-19: The Widowmaker
    As a technical achievement, K-19 is right up there with Das Boot. Don't expect much dramatic depth, though. The fathoms descended in this movie are strictly nautical.
  62. Road to Perdition
    In the scenes between Hanks and Newman, we get glimpses of greatness.
  63. Tosca
    A rare example of first-rate filmed opera.
  64. Metropolis (re-release)
    You've seen the rest; now see the best.
  65. Read My Lips
    Devos is especially fine as a woman whose inner solitude carries depth charges.
  66. 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.
  67. Notorious C.H.O.
    She sometimes falls into the same trap that Lenny Bruce fell into, playing the taboo-breaking emancipator, but for the most part she's blessedly bawdy.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  68. Mr. Deeds
    Hollywood movies are once again taking on the job that Andy Griffith–era TV sitcoms used to fill, touting homespun values in Never Land.
  69. Sunshine State
    The usual Sayles mix of torpor and talent prevails here.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  70. Minority Report
    One of the glummest and most forbidding thrillers ever.
  71. Lilo & Stitch
    Disney's Lilo & Stitch, which is animated in the traditional way, with watercolor backgrounds, is lovely, and funny, too. It owes a great deal to Japanese anime, but there's also a "Looney Tunes" friskiness to it that's distinctively homegrown.
  72. War Photographer
    What's remarkable is how often the photographer's subjects allow themselves to be caught on film; it's as if they understood implicitly that Nachtwey was there not only to agitate for reform but to memorialize their agony. He does both.
  73. Windtalkers
    Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.
  74. The Bourne Identity
    All this is diverting but also borderline dull.
  75. Bad Company
    Some of this stuff is uncomfortably close to minstrelsy. Bad Company closes on a patriotic note in a brief scene that pays heartfelt tribute to the terrorist-thwarting sacrifices of the CIA. Timing is everything, I guess.
  76. 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.
  77. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    At times it's plodding and inchoate, but there's certainly nothing else like it in the movies right now, and it has at least one great sequence.
  78. The Sum of All Fears
    Movie has been upstaged by the sum of our fears. The staunch heroics, frantic presidential huddles, and hairbreadth rescues all seem tinny and escapist, too Cold Warrior–ish, for what's really going on now.
  79. CQ
    Not everything in this ambitious comic escapade works, but Coppola, along with his sister, Sofia, is a real filmmaker. It must be in the genes.
  80. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Arkin has a great and gentle feeling for small-time malcontents, and he knows how to make their woes our own. He does justice to the human comedy -- and redeems the movie.
  81. Enough
    Clumsy, obvious, preposterous, the movie will likely set the cause of woman warriors back decades.
  82. Insomnia
    The best thing about Insomnia is that despite director Christopher Nolan's soft spot for moody-blues obfuscation, he has the good sense to keep his star in practically every shot.
  83. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Spirit's narration comes to us courtesy of Matt Damon, who, having played a horse's ass in some of his earlier movies, perhaps thought it wise to inhabit the entire nag this time around.
  84. 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.
  85. Late Marriage
    So intimate and sensual and funny and psychologically self-revealing that it makes most of what passes for sex in the movies look like cheap hysterics.
  86. About a Boy
    Sophisticated and nuanced, and every character is bursting with emotional contradictions.
  87. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    Still, in its own Saturday-morning-serial kind of way, Attack of the Clones is a commendable example of the sort of movie we once loved and then outgrew. Of course, if it was even better, we wouldn't feel as if we'd outgrown it.
  88. Unfaithful
    A glossy, depthless melodrama.
  89. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    If you've never experienced a Bollywood musical before, seeing Lagaan will be like watching "Gone With the Wind" without ever having seen a Hollywood movie.
  90. The Mystic Masseur
    It's a sinuous, bittersweet odyssey, and although the filmmaking lacks finesse, the actors, especially Mandvi, with his bright, sorrowful beauty, and the great Om Puri, who plays Ganesh's father-in-law with an infernal crankiness, are always worth watching.
  91. Hollywood Ending
    At one point, Val bemoans how stupid the country is, how dumbed-down everything has become. Allen's new movie is far from dumb, but it has an air of abdication about it.
  92. Spider-Man
    Despite all the computer-generated effects and highflying superhero theatrics, this roughly $120 million movie is, with few exceptions, remarkable only in its small human touches.
  93. Enigma
    Stoppard and his director, Michael Apted, must be aware of how dry their film is, because periodically they work in little thriller divertimenti -- car chases and such -- that only serve to point up how un-thrilling everything is.
  94. Murder by Numbers
    Director Barbet Schroeder is too elegant an artist for this material, which veers between routine cop-movie conventions and high-toned malarkey that seems a lot closer to Dungeons & Dragons than to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."
  95. Nine Queens
    If Nine Queens were a great film, instead of just a very good one, this rottenness would be so pervasive that it would burst the bounds of the plot; it would make us shudder.
  96. Murderous Maids
    Sylvie Testud gives such a ferociously controlled performance that the messy murder seems like a necessary release.
  97. The Triumph of Love
    A lovely confection.
  98. Changing Lanes
    More entertaining than it has a right to be. It's pulpy and preposterous, and yet it gets at a real truth.
  99. Frailty
    The film becomes cumulatively stranger as it goes along, and it has a lulu of a kicker.
  100. High Crimes
    Franklin directs smoothly, but except for Freeman, the theatrics are pretty pro forma.
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