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. The Rookie
    What saves it is Dennis Quaid.
  2. Time Out
    A hushed, small-scale masterpiece that moves into the shadowlands of tragedy.
  3. The Piano Teacher
    Haneke is an exploitation filmmaker of the highest gifts. His movies are not to be entered into lightly.
  4. Panic Room
    It's difficult to work up a strong case of the heebie-jeebies when you keep getting thrown out of the movie by all the atrocious acting.
  5. Y Tu Mamá También
    The funniest and most emotionally charged erotic road movie since Bertrand Blier's "Going Places."
  6. Showtime
    Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro have made any number of lame movies on their own, but there's a special wastefulness connected to their first co-starring vehicle, Showtime: It's lameness times two, and then some.
  7. Ice Age
    Marvelously funny.
  8. We Were Soldiers
    Fitfully effective as a battle movie, and Mel Gibson does his rugged best to take center stage without seeming to. But the movie is self-righteous in a way that's frequently unseemly.
  9. 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.
  10. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Sets out to demonstrate that life is about more than having sex. Inadvertently -- I think -- it ends up showing us just the opposite. As if we didn't already know.
  11. Big Bad Love
    The only reason to check out Big Bad Love is Debra Winger, last seen onscreen in 1995.
  12. Monsoon Wedding
    Eminently disposable, but that's its charm. It stays with you just long enough to make you smile.
  13. 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.
  14. Scratch
    A loose-limbed documentary about the hip-hop D.J. scene that, for know-nothings like me, is highly informative without being in the least academic.
  15. John Q
    Is it possible none of these actors read the script before they signed on? Were New Line executives perhaps too hung up on hobbits to notice how whacked out this movie is?
  16. Collateral Damage
    A stinker.
  17. 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.
  18. Birthday Girl
    The film's Russians are all played by French and Australian actors. Too bad Butterworth didn't find a Russian to play the Brit. That would have made the inauthenticity complete.
  19. Domestic Violence
    Wiseman lets the material breathe in a manner unique to the subject.
  20. Storytelling
    Twisted and outrageous but ultimately artificial. Albert Brooks did this art-reality thing a lot better years ago in "Real Life," his takeoff on PBS's "An American Family," and was sidesplitting besides.
  21. The Son's Room
    A bit too awed by its depiction of the healing power of love. It's minor indeed compared with "In the Bedroom," which deals with a similar subject and doesn't back away from the rawness of grief.
  22. Waydowntown
    Has a poignant undertone: We may feel we already know in our bones just how suffocating this culture is; but the people who made this movie seem to be discovering each fresh horror for the first time. It's like watching a virgin sacrifice.
  23. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    An exuberantly garish French movie.
  24. What Time Is It Over There?
    An art piece in which everything seems to be a metaphor for something else, and as pleasing as it is to watch, it's too pretentious by half.
  25. I Am Sam
    I Am Sam is about as connected to the real world as Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham, from which its title is derived -- in fact, in the realism department, Seuss may have the edge.
  26. Monster's Ball
    An arty sleepwalk. Thornton has developed a style of acting that goes beyond minimal into the near nonexistent.
  27. Gosford Park
    A love affair between performer and filmmaker. The director shows off his ardor by eliciting from his actors aspects of their gifts that they themselves may not have known they had.
  28. Ali
    Ultimately, Ali is a far more complex creature than this movie allows for.
  29. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Smashing for much of the way; as a piece of fantasy moviemaking, franchise-style, it beats the bejesus out of "Harry Potter."
  30. Iris
    By continually interrupting the sequences of the adult couple with scenes of the young pair, Eyre shatters the emotional power of Dench and Broadbent.
  31. The Royal Tenenbaums
    Anderson is something of a prodigy himself, and he's riddled with talent, but he hasn't figured out how to be askew and heartfelt at the same time. When he does, he'll probably make the movie The Royal Tenenbaums was meant to be, and it'll be a sight to see.
  32. Vanilla Sky
    Probably the most garishly masochistic star turn since Mel Gibson's "The Man Without a Face." It could also be the most baroque chick flick ever made, the freakazoid spawn of "An Affair to Remember" and "The Matrix."
  33. Baran
    It's an elliptical tragedy in which the fate of its characters takes on a larger significance while never losing its intimacy.
  34. Last Orders
    The lifelong friends in Fred Schepisi's marvelous Last Orders actually seem like lifelong friends.
  35. Ocean's Eleven
    The movie, in a very real sense, is about the privilege, the sexiness, of being a movie star. Certainly it isn't about the heist; never was.
  36. The Business of Strangers
    Channing's formidably good -- a career woman in extremis -- but the movie, which was written and directed by Patrick Stettner, otherwise unfortunately resembles a product of the Neil LaBute Finishing School.
  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. In the Bedroom
    Field made a thriller about what we are capable of in the name of hatred -- and of love.
  39. Sidewalks of New York
    It makes the same misstep that Allen's comedies often do: It assumes that the lives of these people are only about sex and love, and so that's all we ever see of them. This one-and-a-half-dimensionality wears thin.
  40. The Devil's Backbone
    del Toro blends agit-prop politics and ghoulishness without making the entire enterprise seem silly.
  41. Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    This unrated documentary, which contains no hard-core shots, could have used more hog and less hedge, if you catch my drift: When Jeremy drones on about his quest to be cast in mainstream movies, dullness sets in.
  42. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    I wish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had developed more of a life of its own instead of being essentially a flat visualization of the book.
  43. Shallow Hal
    Some good gross-out inventiveness, but too heartfelt by half. Do we really need the Farrellys to champion inner beauty?
  44. Heist
    Mamet is so in love with the con that he's conned himself.
  45. Monsters, Inc.
    Much more kid-oriented than any other computer-animated movie thus far. In other words, it's much more Disneyish. I enjoyed it.
  46. Amélie
    Jeunet wants us to know that times are hard for dreamers and that one shouldn't pass up a chance for true love. He means it, no doubt, but he doesn't have the simplicity of soul to quite bring off the sentiment. Still, we're charmed by the attempt.
  47. Tape
    Linklater must have recognized a kindred spirit when he read Belber's play. He's given us a reality-fantasy game, a psychodrama, a harangue, and a detective story all rolled into one.
  48. The Man Who Wasn't There
    The Coens have a true feeling for the sleek surfaces of the genre, but they don't connect with its sordid, sexy undercurrent; that's why Crane is made to seem so passive.
  49. 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.
  50. From Hell
    The only note of authenticity in the movie comes from Ian Holm, playing the royal physician. What is this nuanced performance -- at least until the final fireworks -- doing in this twaddle?
  51. The Last Castle
    Plays out like "Cool Hand Luke" meets "Attica," and it's quite the silliest thing.
  52. Riding in Cars with Boys
    Thank God for Barrymore: When Beverly's water breaks and she looks down at her feet and cries, "This is so gross," you know how good this actress can be, and how good this movie might have been.
  53. Waking Life
    An astounding, one-of-a-kind movie.
  54. Bandits
    What we're getting in this movie isn't necessarily better; it's just more.
  55. Mulholland Dr.
    Lynch needs to renew himself with an influx of the deep feeling he has for people, for outcasts, and lay off the cretins and hobgoblins and zombies for a while. Mulholland Drive is the product of David Lynch, Inc.
  56. Fat Girl
    A lovely minor achievement. It would have been major if Breillat had been more expansive with respect to Anaïs instead of contentedly letting her go on about her lumpish ways.
  57. Training Day
    On a purely visceral level, Training Day is easily the most exciting movie out there right now, but as a morality tale with anything large on its mind, it's a cop-out.
  58. Serendipity
    I've never understood why filmmakers construct romances in which the leads hardly spend any time together.
  59. La Ciénaga
    There's a new sensibility at work here, wry yet lushly disaffected, and it will be worth watching what Martel does next.
  60. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Rivette keeps the life-is-a-play metaphysics to a minimum, and the cast, including Jeanne Balibar and Sergio Castellitto, is attractive.
  61. Don't Say a Word
    You would have to have been born yesterday to miss the switcheroos and reeking red herrings planted in this pulp.
  62. Zoolander
    When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.
  63. Liam
    Has some rapturously observant sequences concerning childhood.
  64. Children Underground
    Belzberg doesn't intervene during the moments of violence, believing that the film can force social change only by showing the worst. If she is correct, then this film should move mountains.
  65. Our Lady of the Assassins
    By the end of the movie, the characters are numbed, while the audience is sensitized to the mayhem to an almost unbearable degree.
  66. Rock Star
    Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.
  67. O
    It's a doomy dirge of a movie, in which the protagonists, or at least the actors who play them, aren't equipped to handle their outsize passions.
  68. Together
    Moodysson captures exactly the preening narcissism and gumption of these frazzled would-be revolutionaries trying to wriggle out of their bourgeois straitjackets.
  69. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    As Jay and Silent Bob, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith are the perfect comedy team for smart, dirty-minded 15-year-olds, which means just about all of us.
  70. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    The problem is that Allen is getting a bit long in the tooth to be playing a romancer-rescuer, and since he and Helen Hunt have a rather frigid actorly rapport, we have plenty of time to notice the awkward, and barely acknowledged, disparity in their ages.
  71. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    Fortunately, it never dips into bathos. These two actors SHOULD be noticed. They've crafted the most ingenious résumé of the year.
  72. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    Based on an interminable 1994 international bestseller by Louis de Bernières that I found impossible to make my way through. The movie duplicates exactly my experience with the book, although I must say I was thankful to be spared serial outbreaks of hearty Greek dancing.
    • 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.
  74. America's Sweethearts
    Too eager to please to be truly dislikable, and Roberts and Cusack have a fine rapport.
  75. 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.
  76. The Score
    I'm not sure I have it in me to rant yet again about what a deprivation it is for our finest actor to deny us his genius in this way.
  77. Scary Movie 2
    Isn't scary, funny-scary, or even just plain funny.
  78. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    It's one of the weirdest achievements in film history: Temperamentally, Spielberg and Kubrick are such polar opposites that A.I. has the moment-to-moment effect of being completely at odds with itself.
  79. Songcatcher
    This is not just a musicologist's dream; it's our dream, too.
  80. Sexy Beast
    A flashy, nasty triumph
  81. La grande strada azzurra
    It's worth seeing, though, not only for its occasional moments of breathtaking beauty and sadness but also because its very rarity demands it.
  82. Divided We Fall
    Divided We Fall is intended to be restorative, but its wish fulfillments, while charming, are also a bit too gaga for that.
  83. Swordfish
    Another in a long line of middling movies for Travolta, who must have been so stunned to regain his stardom with "Pulp Fiction" that he hasn't stopped working since.
  84. Evolution
    Began life as a standard sci-fi horror script before mutating into the unfunny mess it now is.
  85. The Anniversary Party
    A heavy dose of movie-colony narcissism posing as warts-and-all honesty.
  86. 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.
  87. Rape Me
    Sordid Thelma & Louise-ish spree, which also has certain affinities with Breathless but would be better termed Affectless.
  88. The Road Home
    Predictable, not so much from his (Zhang Yimou) previous movies as from the work of the many sentimentalists who have already plowed this well-tilled turf.
  89. Pearl Harbor
    For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.
  90. Our Song
    iIsn't really much more than a funny, touching little squiggle, but it has a bracing honesty and pays particular heed to the betweenness in people's lives, to how much goes on when nothing seems to be going on at all.
  91. Angel Eyes
    Together, Lopez and Caviezel make quite a pair. Sorrowful yet hip, they seem to be inventing a new mood: designer melancholia.
  92. Shrek
    The script, instead of being what we tolerate in order to savor the visuals, is a delight all by itself.
  93. Moulin Rouge!
    It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.
  94. Startup.com
    There's something a bit condescending about how the movie devolves into a falling-out-between-friends scenario, as if the only way our attention could be held by this subculture were if it was presented to us sentimentally.
  95. Bread and Roses
    Loach has gotten hold of a marvelous subject -- the invisibility of the working poor in the environs of the rich -- that keeps you watching despite all the banner-waving.
  96. A Knight's Tale
    For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.
  97. The Man Who Bought Mustique
    Glenconner is such a class-conscious caricature that he doesn't need the filmmakers to do him in; he does a sterling job all by himself.
  98. Eureka
    His (Aoyama) existential odyssey is so attenuated and aloof that he turns suffering into an art thing.
  99. Time and Tide
    It's an opulent, if instantly disposable, kinetic joyride.
  100. Under the Sand
    Creepily evocative.
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