New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

Select another publication »
For 3,957 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 0.6 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: 2,217 out of 3957
  2. Mixed: 1,377 out of 3957
  3. Negative: 363 out of 3957
3957 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    This winning coming-of-age comedy understands that, when you’re 13 years old, the world really does feel like it could end if you’re not able to wear the dress of your dreams to your bat mitzvah, or if, God forbid, your crush expresses interest in someone other than you.
  3. 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.
  4. Strays
    The story doesn’t want to surprise us so much as it wants to live down to our crude expectations. At its best, as with the aforementioned squirrel-a-trois, Strays jolts us with randomness. But most of the time, it’s pleasingly, predictably deranged.
  5. Blue Beetle
    In the details, Blue Beetle comes alive — in the warmth with which the Reyes family is depicted, for example, or in Jaime’s utter cluelessness as he tries to control his newfound powers. Maridueña conveys the overwhelmed young hero’s anxiety with real charisma; the more helpless he is, the more we like him.
  6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    The turtles’ unceasing, rapid-fire banter is all affectionate dunks on one another and pop-culture quips, and the look of the film is never less than entrancing, with computer animation that creates the feel of something handmade.
  7. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    What truly distinguishes Last Voyage of the Demeter, beyond its thick atmosphere of dread, is its gleeful cruelty, the delicious mean streak with which it sets up its suspense set pieces and its kills.
  8. Passages
    Tomas is the film’s most captivating element as well as its limiting factor because it’s only possible to bear so much time in his company. It’s a testament to Rogowski’s performance that Tomas’s appeal remains apparent despite his behavior, that his gravitational pull is understandable even as you long for the others to escape it.
  9. Dreamin' Wild
    Dreamin’ Wild, as I’ve noted, has its issues: There are lines of dialogue so blunt that I actually found myself bursting out laughing during some pretty serious scenes. But great performances don’t happen in a vacuum, and credit should go to Pohlad for knowing exactly what to do with Goggins.
  10. Talk to Me
    Talk to Me doesn’t quite have something pointed to say about it, or anything else, but that’s okay — it’s just here to show you a good time and then usher itself out before overstaying its welcome.
  11. Haunted Mansion
    Disney’s new Haunted Mansion is a hot mess, but it’s a sporadically entertaining one.
  12. Oppenheimer
    Oppenheimer is a movie so sprawling it’s difficult to contend with. It’s rich, uncompromising, and borderline unwieldy, but more than anything, it’s a tragedy of operatic grandeur despite so many of its scenes consisting of men talking in rooms.
  13. Barbie
    There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.
  14. Joy Ride
    Watching the film is a reminder that the most boundary-pushing comedy isn’t about risqué content but a willingness to get uncomfortable and the confidence to assume audiences will join along in that journey. Joy Ride instead seeks out the warm fuzzies in a way that feels like a surrender.
  15. Bird Box Barcelona
    Writer-directors Àlex and David Pastor have come up with a tantalizingly evil idea, but they’re not cruel enough to see it through to its conclusion.
  16. Afire
    Seriousness does eventually descend on Afire like the check at the end of a meal, but until then the film, the latest feature from German filmmaker Christian Petzold, is a beguilingly funny affair about getting in your own way.
  17. Theater Camp
    Theater Camp really just wants to bask in the world it’s created, and it’s hard to complain about something being too affectionate.
  18. Nimona
    What makes Nimona so refreshing is that it doesn’t just plunk these characters onscreen as a contribution to the battered cause of representation — it also has something to say about them and their respective relationships with the status quo.
  19. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.
  20. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    The look of Ruby Gillman has a TV-cartoon cheapness, but its frames are cluttered with all manner of objects and elements of odd design, almost as if the filmmakers hope we won’t notice how basic and uninspired everything looks.
  21. The Blackening
    The Blackening gets halfway there, and has the benefit of some gifted performers and some very good ideas. It just never really figures out how to be a movie.
  22. No Hard Feelings
    For all its breeziness, No Hard Feelings stays with you because its central dynamic feels so surprisingly honest.
  23. Flamin' Hot
    What makes Flamin’ Hot such a depressing offering isn’t the relative truthiness of its source material, but the qualities it holds aloft as inspiring.
  24. 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.
  25. Elemental
    While Sohn has said Elemental was inspired by his parents, his upbringing in multicultural New York City, and his own mixed marriage, the lack of deeper consideration his film gives to its ideas leads to some ugly reductiveness.
  26. Past Lives
    There’s a disconcerting shrewdness underneath its patina of tastefulness — it’s too calculating to achieve the transcendent almost-romance it strives for but never inhabits.
  27. The Boogeyman
    In order for the film’s stylistic conceit to work, the protagonists need to pop more. We need to want them to break free of their grief and find ways out of the darkness.
  28. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    Across the Spider-Verse looks incredible, even better than the groundbreaking first installment, but what’s truly impressive about it is how willing it is to entrust its storytelling to its animation.
  29. Reality
    Reality is filled with the sickening tension of a thriller, but it really plays like a tragedy, given that we already know what happened to its subject next.
  30. Perfect Days
    Your cousin could have written this movie. But maybe only Wenders could have directed it. He has the sensitivity to shoot the seesawing depths of Yakusho’s face. He has the eye to capture the elegant and diverse architecture of Tokyo’s public bathrooms.
  31. You Hurt My Feelings
    It’s warm and inveigling, but what it could use is a little more emotional ugliness.
  32. Kubi
    Kitano has conjured a universe of such incredible and casual nastiness that we yearn for some nobility and loyalty, or even some modicum of decency.
  33. Close Your Eyes
    Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal.
  34. Monster
    By cutting things up and showing us the perils of fractured perspectives, the director, one of cinema’s great humanists, demonstrates that compassion is more than just a natural state of being; it’s a process that requires constant expansion of one’s field of vision.
  35. Asteroid City
    The audacity and beauty of Asteroid City lie in the way it connects the mysteries of the human heart to the secrets of science and the universe.
  36. The Zone of Interest
    In its own sly and subtly devastating way, The Zone of Interest pulls us into its circle of evil.
  37. May December
    The film is both humane and scathing. Which is why Haynes’s stylistic treatment of the subject, veering between noirish gusto and flights of snark, winds up being so touching.
  38. The Little Mermaid
    Bailey is, unfortunately, completely failed by the dull, misguided production around her. As the studio has done with other live-action remakes, Disney betrays its own lack of imagination and an essential misreading of what made its original children’s fare such a joy to audiences in the first place.
  39. Killers of the Flower Moon
    For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.
  40. Fast X
    The film plays more like it was made by an AI versed in the existing movies but not quite up to spitting out something coherent itself.
  41. Master Gardener
    Master Gardener plays less like a thematic finale and more like the director is trying to exorcise himself of his perpetual idée fixe.
  42. The Night of the 12th
    Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine.
  43. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    The damn thing is fun. Mangold may not have the young Spielberg’s musical flair for extravagant action choreography (who does?), but he is a tougher, leaner director, using a tighter frame and keeping his camera close.
  44. BlackBerry
    It’s the comic energy generated by the triumvirate of Howerton, Baruchel, and Johnson that really drives BlackBerry, but Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller also find lively ways to dramatize the technological concepts at play.
  45. Sisu
    Sisu veers between the elemental and the ethereal. Once it’s over, it feels like you must have dreamed it.
  46. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    Because Rocket is not just an object, and because the film’s flashback structure invests the quest with emotional power, the plot of Guardians 3 never feels like paint-by-numbers gamification; it feels like something we might actually want to care about.
  47. Polite Society
    The sheer joy of watching characters in full bridal splendor preparing to plunge into combat can’t be underestimated, but it’s never as satisfying as it should be.
  48. Peter Pan & Wendy
    The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.
  49. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    If the grown-ups in this coming-of-age story keep drawing all the focus, it’s no shade on Margaret — they just have so much more going on.
  50. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.
  51. Quasi
    The flaws are part of the overall effect — spontaneous and human. The reason Broken Lizard seems to keep making cult movies is because when you watch them, you feel like you were there when they made it. Broken Lizard is all of us.
  52. Beau Is Afraid
    It packs the screen with witty details, features some brilliantly directed sequences, sets up downright baroque punchlines, and is anchored by an incredibly game performance by Phoenix. But ditching the genre framework doesn’t make it feel more honest — its self-deflating comedy is, ironically, that of someone afraid of being taken seriously.
  53. Renfield
    Hoult, playing a pallid, anxious, disconcertingly dreamy Renfield, and Cage, fully Cageing it up as the count, manage to be compelling even when vamping (sorry) with all their might to make this material work.
  54. Suzume
    Suzume may be a less effective romance than something like Your Name — it’s tough when half of your main pairing is a piece of furniture — but that’s because its real love story is with the stuff of everyday life, making it almost unbearably inviting and worth fighting for.
  55. The Pope's Exorcist
    It allows Crowe to have fun with the part of Father Amorth, but the film forgets to have fun along with him.
  56. Showing Up
    Showing Up is more than worth surrendering to. It’s one of Reichardt’s best — warm as one of the sunny Portland, Oregon, afternoons Lizzy’s perpetually fretting her way through and an affectionate rumination on the relationship between art and all the day-to-day stuff of life that can get in the way of making it.
  57. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    How to Blow Up a Pipeline wants to pick a fight, and it does so with an appealing lack of artifice, its heart on its sleeve and its agenda in its punching fists.
  58. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie, an almost impressively generic kiddie movie re-skinned with characters and concepts from one of the most famous video game franchises in the world, might as well have been assembled by a focus group.
  59. Air
    Air might seem at first like a ridiculous idea for a movie, but it is in fact an ingenious one.
  60. Rye Lane
    Rye Lane asks you to fall in love with Dom and Yas, but failing that, it will have you hopelessly smitten with its South London setting and with that feeling of having the day open and nothing to do but wander and see what may happen. With the city spread before you, you never know who you might meet.
  61. Murder Mystery 2
    It’s a time-filler, not a time-waster. It’s a film of simple pleasures — but they are pleasures.
  62. A Thousand and One
    A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.
  63. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action and suspense to add some urgency, not the other way around.
  64. Walk Up
    It’s uniquely pleasurable in how self-contained it is.
  65. The Lost King
    The fact that The Lost King never quite reconciles this tension between striving for noble recognition and the fallacy of divine majesty feels like an implicit damnation of both.
  66. Tori and Lokita
    Tori and Lokita is a film born of rage and frustration, and as such, it’s a moving one. But it’s fair to expect more than just rage from artists — especially our greatest and most empathetic ones.
  67. John Wick: Chapter 4
    Chapter 4 is blissfully entertaining, full of pratfalls and acting turns that lead to the audience swelling with oohs, aahs, and yelps.
  68. Inside
    The results are dispiritingly pleasureless, as though to fully embrace the idea of a penthouse prison would get in the way of the movie’s nebulous ideas about art.
  69. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t unwatchable. It’s competent, uninspired swill, undone largely by the fact that it’s following up a superior first movie.
  70. 65
    65 is not good, if that even needs to be said. For something that involves almost nonstop dino action, it’s impressively unengaging, like watching a video game no one’s allowed to play. But its mangled badness is kind of compelling.
  71. Scream VI
    Scream 6 does distinguish itself in the horror set pieces. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also made the previous entry) clearly grasp that these movies are, at their best, mean.
  72. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Come to think of it, these are all great roles — for Statham, Plaza, and Hartnett. Everybody in Operation Fortune — yes, even Ritchie — seems to be having fun. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
  73. Creed III
    Creed III’s greatest achievement is demonstrating that there’s more story to be told about Donnie, who after two films had been looking pretty thoroughly explored as a character.
  74. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    The relationship McInerny and Tucker build is so convincing in its mixture of exploitation and yearning that Palm Trees and Power Lines capably secures what Lea desires most too: your attention.
  75. Cocaine Bear
    It has an ambling, gory insouciance that might have been more off-putting in a movie not called Cocaine Bear.
  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. Return to Seoul
    Freddie is a live wire given form, flesh, sinew. She’s a woman defined by what she refuses to be, and Chou appropriately refuses to offer any heartwarming, simple resolutions to the dilemmas marking her life.
  78. The Blue Caftan
    Maryam Touzani’s film is as precise and vivid as its titular garment.
  79. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Despite being half–“Let’s put on a show” movie and half–romantic comedy, two genres dedicated to delight, Magic Mike’s Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.
  80. Knock at the Cabin
    The result is the most exhilarating and wounding film M. Night Shyamalan has made in many, many years.
  81. One Fine Morning
    This could have easily become a torrid, tear-jerking melodrama, but Hansen-Løve’s matter-of-fact approach to performance and incident allow the emotions to emerge organically from the unfussy drama onscreen.
  82. Infinity Pool
    In addition to being a film about soulless jet-setters as a new form of walking dead, grounded in and caring about nothing, Infinity Pool is a phantasmagoric ode to the sensation of staying too long at the party.
  83. No Bears
    While No Bears is profoundly powerful in its own right, the knowledge that its maker is incarcerated gives its explorations of exile, truth, and freedom a throat-catching urgency.
  84. Skinamarink
    When Skinamarink sets out to actively scare . . . it’s very good at it. But the idea of the movie is more beguiling than the overall experience of watching it.
  85. Plane
    The violence is visceral and presented with just enough authenticity to make you quiver. The context, however, is unreal enough that you don’t have to think too hard about it. You weren’t supposed to be thinking anyway.
  86. M3GAN
    M3gan’s reach is never in danger of exceeding its grasp. It wants only to provide a diverting 100-odd minutes of horror comedy, with a heavy emphasis on the comedy.
  87. The Pale Blue Eye
    The Pale Blue Eye shows us everything we need to figure it all out and still manages to pull the rug out from under us. Even so, what ultimately resonates are the picture’s surprisingly moving central relationship and its vivid setting.
  88. Babylon
    Babylon is a film too busy writing an elegy for the still-breathing body of film as a medium to capture the true beauty and complications of being alive.
  89. Avatar: The Way of Water
    The Way of Water makes clear that Cameron no longer needs to leave the confines of this (virtual) extrasolar moon in the Alpha Centauri system to create something closer to the heart. He can bend Pandora to his will, and now he’s bent it to make what might be his most earnest film to date.
  90. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is instead an incandescent work that examines Goldin’s personal life, her evolution as an artist, and her later turn toward harm-reduction advocacy, and understands them to be part of the same journey.
  91. The Inspection
    Bratton, who has an eye for compelling framing and unexpected beauty, has made something more complicated than a treatise against the power structures enshrined in the military, though he’s very aware of them.
  92. Bones and All
    The pleasures of Bones and All wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting — an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there. The film, as a whole, never quite hangs together, because even as it goes through the motions of both the road movie and the romance, it never really finds an animating energy to drive it along.
  93. Disenchanted
    This isn’t an organic continuation of Giselle’s story so much as an uninspired knockoff of the original, yet another attempt to use existing IP to attract viewers and subscribers besotted by the prospect of watching something familiar on a Friday night.
  94. The Son
    The ending may be heavily foreshadowed, but that doesn’t make the lead-up any less exasperating or what happens any less egregious.
  95. The Menu
    The rage at the heart of The Menu is directed at the impossible melding of art and commerce, at the way we’re taught that success at the former requires the support of the latter, even if it means making crushing compromises that drain the joy out of, in this case, the expressly straightforward pleasure of food.
  96. Enola Holmes 2
    One might say that this new film attempts to be something closer to a standard-issue mystery, with its ornate story line, ambitious action scenes, and historically resonant milieu. But in the end, it still thrives or dies on its teenage star’s charm. It mostly thrives, even if the luster is a bit off this time around.
  97. Something in the Dirt
    Something in the Dirt deftly bounces between the oddness of its central story, the silliness of its documentary framing, and the resentments that eventually develop between its main characters, all buried inside what is essentially a hangout movie.
  98. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    This fake Weird Al movie could have used some of the real Weird Al’s cleverness. Weird doesn’t feel like a parody; it feels like an impostor.
  99. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    To say the film is overtaxed is an understatement. Regrettably, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever tries to do so many things that it comes across as threadbare and pallid — less a failure of imagination and more of circumstance, time, and narrative constraints.
  100. Holy Spider
    It’s not the first film to try to disguise its titillation at violence, in particular against women, with blunt, larger themes. But when those themes are about the structures that enable that violence, the whole enterprise just feels repellent.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »