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. Obsession
    There’s probably a smart, chilling film to be made about the terrors of smothering and relentless adoration — one imagines what Rod Serling would have done with something like this — but this isn’t really that film.
  2. Paper Tiger
    Driver ably brings the heartbreak in Paper Tiger, though Johansson’s no slouch in a less ornate but no less harrowing role.
  3. Nope
    Nope is a work of sly devastation from writer-director Jordan Peele.
  4. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    With this documentary, Morgan Neville has made a movie about Orson Welles that would have transfixed the great master himself.
  5. Finding Dory
    In the end, is Finding Dory better than Finding Nemo? It’s funnier and more intricate, but the tears it jerks have been jerked before. It’s not as original, not as deep.
  6. Rescue Dawn
    The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career. His pet theme is here: man tested against nature, his sanity more precarious than his body.
  7. Human Flow
    Ai clearly wants to take a macro view of an impossible problem, to find some clarity in abstraction. But whenever he just talks to the refugees face to face, we learn more than any drone shot could tell us.
  8. Happy Feet
    You should see Happy Feet--not only because it's stupendous, but also because it features the best dancing you'll see on the screen this year.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sleeper
    In his fourth movie, Allen comes into his own as a filmmaker, providing us with the comedy of the year.
  10. Longlegs
    Longlegs is terrifying for much of its running time, and it should satisfy most genre fiends. But the greatness that earlier seemed well within its grasp eludes it by the end.
  11. Bye Bye Tiberias
    The documentary may be understated, with its long dialogue-free stretches. But the distractions that pull Abbass’s stare away from her daughter’s lens give Bye Bye Tiberias a pointedly political backbone that the documentary buoys with clever editing and a tangible self-assuredness.
  12. The Gift
    It’s that rarest of psychological thrillers: one that actually lives up to the words “psychological thriller.”
  13. Queen of Earth
    Queen of Earth is a psychodrama shot like a horror movie — "Persona" meets "The Shining." Right down to the haunting, minimalist score (by Keegan DeWitt) that’s perched dangerously, wonderfully between spooky and lyrical.
  14. Paddington
    Paddington is decidedly, proudly unhip. It’s a lovely, endearing chocolate-box of a movie.
  15. Mississippi Grind
    A film that turns on this kind of ambiguity would ordinarily be cold, grim, paranoid. But Boden and Fleck give this world texture and warmth; their widescreen interiors glow, and it’s hard not to be lulled into them by the siren song of conversation and clinking drinks and possibility.
  16. Mother of George
    This world is ravishingly beautiful, but there’s also something oppressive about its exoticism. The color doesn’t just saturate the frame; it thickens it.
  17. Wetlands
    Women deserve their own gross-out movies, and, in Wetlands, the punk force is strong. If your taste runs thataway, you should see it in a theater with one eye on the audience — and hope that a few people will think they’re going to see a documentary about threatened ecosystems. Talk about all wet!
  18. 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.
  19. Wild Tales
    Whatever the style, the point is blunt, reductive: Civilized humans can transform, in an instant, into blindingly destructive forces of nature. Not exactly an original thesis, but as a source of movie fodder, it’s scarily entertaining.
  20. The Royal Hotel
    Green has a talent for depicting the way women constantly recalibrate their behavior when moving through male spaces, trying to figure out how to attract enough attention but not too much, to come across as pleasant without inviting unwanted intimacies.
  21. Best of Enemies
    Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one.
  22. Personal Shopper
    If you have a penchant for mood pieces that flirt with genre but are too pretentious to deliver the full climactic payload, Personal Shopper is for you. I loved nearly all of it, disposed to forgive Assayas his arty withholding for the pleasure of watching Stewart through his eyes.
  23. 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.
  24. Babyteeth
    If there’s a complaint to be made about it, it’s only that it feels like another sign of a stylistic trend that’s inexorably cohering, as seen in other recent (and enjoyable!) work like Emerald Fennell’s "Promising Young Woman" and like "Killing Eve," a show Fennell wrote for and that Murphy has directed episodes of.
  25. The Jungle Book
    The film is a triumph of technology and safe “family” storytelling. It’s dazzling — almost no one will dislike it.
  26. Slalom
    The film is too rich and too human for any kind of categorization. But for all its beauty, it’s also quite an unsettling watch — a delicate, authentic look at the complicated ways in which abuse works.
  27. The Hunting Ground
    The surprise is that, given the number of female college presidents, professors, and students, victims are still so reliably blamed, punishments so reliably weak, and serial offenders (responsible for 91 percent of all sexual assaults) so reliably undisturbed.
  28. While We're Young
    The biggest disappointment is the role that Baumbach wrote for Charles Grodin — his juiciest in many years but with only one or two laugh lines. If nothing else, I wanted Grodin to kick Stiller’s butt across the screen for desecrating the name of "The Heartbreak Kid."
  29. Shut Up & Sing
    What a mind-bending odyssey ensues--a tale of good old-fashioned American free expression at war with good old-fashioned American capitalism.
  30. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    You walk out of Sly Lives! feeling like you’ve genuinely learned something, but you also walk out exhilarated.
  31. Dallas Buyers Club
    Despite its downbeat context (a plague at its height), the movie is a crowd-­pleaser — graceful and funny enough to distract you from its gaps and elisions.
  32. Better Man
    There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with pat dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is then constantly upended by completely batshit musical sequences.
  33. Prophet's Prey
    At times, I found myself wishing Berg focused more on Brower and Krakauer’s investigations and given the film a more present-tense narrative. This is a fascinating movie, but there’s a lot to cover here, and one can occasionally feel lost amid all the strands.
  34. The Promised Land
    The result is the kind of ravishing, rousing epic we don’t really get much of anymore.
  35. The Messenger
    The actors playing parents and spouses (among them Steve Buscemi, Halley Feiffer, Portia, and Kevin Hagan) are stunningly believable. I'm not sure how Morton made sense of her character's ebbs and flows, but I never doubted her. She's a mariner in uncharted seas of emotion.
  36. Private Fears in Public Places
    It's a Parisian romantic roundelay with sundry couples connecting and disconnecting, but it looks and sounds like no sex comedy ever made: It's transcendentally yummy.
  37. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Surprisingly diverting as a case study: not only of a talented misfit sublimating like mad to keep his loneliness from consuming him but also of a fringe artistic community (which includes the makers of this film) that rallies to give him the reinforcement he craves.
  38. The Nightingale
    It’s constructed like a meathead melodrama — though with odd, last-act dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.
  39. Grandma
    Grandma marks a new era in gay cinema — one’s that confident and mature enough to acknowledge regret.
  40. Presence
    Presence isn’t afraid to be narratively predictable, because it’s out there visually. It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film, and it might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages.
  41. I, Tonya
    I, Tonya is not by any means a weeper. It’s a black comedy, and parts of it are too broad, like a second-rate Coen brothers movie.
  42. 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.
  43. Grindhouse
    The fun is in the one-thing-after-another delirium the movie induces, and in our breathless anticipation of what they'll hurl at us next.
  44. Caesar Must Die
    In a scant hour and a quarter it enlarges your notion of what theater and cinema, what art itself, can do — it dissolves every boundary it meets.
  45. The War Tapes
    See The War Tapes. Maybe this picture can be worth a thousand lives.
  46. Maestro
    Maestro somehow proves that Cooper is a director of genuine vision, even though it’s not a particularly successful movie.
  47. Project Hail Mary
    There are certainly some real laughs as well as some groaners, but at times you want the film to just get on with it. Mainly because once you get past the shtick, there’s an intriguing story there, fun and rousing in its own right without need of additional silliness.
  48. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    You come away from Jim & Andy wondering — not for the first time — about the cost to great artists of what they do, envious of their talent and thinking, “I’m glad that’s not me.”
  49. Relic
    What makes this movie so frustrating is that it ends on an intriguing message about what we inherit, what we’re bound to through our families. But without the heft of sincere horror behind it, Relic falls short of its potential and we’re left wondering how terrifying this message actually is.
  50. Chi-Raq
    Bitches, it’s always a good month in America for an antigun movie. The newest, Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, might be the best ever. It’s sexy, brash, and potent — a powerful weapon in its own right.
  51. Thelma
    Its observations about the disconnect between its elderly protagonist and the society around her are surprisingly relatable.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    Pittman's director, producer, and star have their hearts in movies, but they've made a TV film to be long remembered. [28 Jan 1974, p.58]
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  53. Love Lies Bleeding
    The film is at its best when it focuses on Lou and Jackie’s love for each other . . . Their passion fuels a lot of the characters’ impulsive decisions later in the story. But as things descend into further violence, the film can start to feel one note.
  54. The Invite
    The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early.
  55. Calvary
    Those shots are in contrast to those landscapes, which are craggy, primordial. It’s meant to be a haunting combination, and I have colleagues who’ve found it just that, who came out of the movie ashen, devastated. But I found it bludgeoning — I think it gives new meaning to the phrase hammer of God.
  56. 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.
  57. The Beguiled
    Coppola’s The Beguiled doesn’t have the southern-gothic kick of its predecessor. It’s not a horror movie. Its power is in its undercurrents, in the sense that what we’re seeing isn’t inevitable but a sort of worst-case scenario of genders in opposition. No one is wholly good or bad. Both sides are beguiled.
  58. The Mustang
    The Mustang brought the sensation back of having to slow down and breathe with a horse and in the process leave yourself behind. Any movie that makes leaving oneself behind so tactile and enticing is a horse of a different color.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Philomena
    The movie is overcalculating and occasionally coarse, but it has a gentle spirit. We should count its existence as a blessing.
  62. Jauja
    Jauja is a rapturously bizarre movie that resists knowledge. That’s its secret, intoxicating power; the less you understand, the more mesmerized you are.
  63. The Immigrant
    It’s richer than anything onscreen right now. It’s worth the pain.
  64. Detroit
    Bigelow and Boal don’t bring much moral complexity to Detroit. They don’t illuminate the psyches of the cops or suggest the fundamental feeling of weakness that drives people to violence. They don’t shed much light on Dismukes’s inaction or subsequent thoughts about what he didn’t do. What Bigelow does — incomparably — is put us in that room with those people at that moment.
  65. Logan
    The film is stunningly bleak and staggeringly violent. Major characters go down in showers of blood and gore. I’ve seen worse and so, probably, have you, but never from such an essentially wholesome corporate enterprise with a target audience so young and hopeful.
  66. 28 Years Later
    28 Years Later is choppy, muddled, strange, and not always convincing. But I’m not sure I’ll ever forget it.
  67. Monsoon Wedding
    Eminently disposable, but that's its charm. It stays with you just long enough to make you smile.
  68. Phineas and Ferb the Movie: Candace Against the Universe
    A 90-minute kid- and grown-up-friendly work of cartoon comedy that’s as consistently delightful and clever as the series always was.
  69. The Wife
    That’s what’s great about The Wife: Joe is no saint, and his philandering appears to be an open secret in the literary community, but it doesn’t mean Joan doesn’t love him. If she didn’t, none of this would be half as wrenching.
  70. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    Dragon 2 is at its best when it quiets down and dares to be intimate.
  71. The Disaster Artist
    The Disaster Artist is primarily a pedestal for the ultimate James Franco performance — it’s his "Lincoln." Whatever my queasiness about laughing at a head case, I couldn’t help myself from thrilling to Franco’s timing, his relish, his swan dive into an egotism that has no bottom.
  72. Broken Embraces
    This movie is utterly irresistible.
  73. Father Mother Sister Brother
    Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother finds the director in a minor key, which is sometimes his best key.
  74. Blue Caprice
    The movie substitutes milky, washed-out color and funereal music for insight. The murders are purposely un-fluid: When you see Mohammad or Malvo take a shot, you don’t see the impact of the bullet. When you see the victim struck, you don’t see the shooter.
  75. Maggie's Plan
    Maggie’s Plan doesn’t quite gel, but it’s very enjoyable, and it has a solid emotional core.
  76. Filipiñana
    Through heightened control of imagery and mood, attention to composition and texture and sound, Manuel turns this simple, languid setting into something far more sinister without ever betraying the beauty of what’s onscreen.
  77. Adventureland
    What makes the movie such an unexpectedly potent little number is that Adventureland comes to stand for Stagnationland; the real roller coaster (i.e., life) is just outside the park.
  78. Testament of Youth
    Should you ever be tempted to wax nostalgic for an age in which wars were fought according to the laws of cause and effect and for reasons that may confidently be labeled “rational,” pick up Vera Brittain’s World War I memoir Testament of Youth or steel yourself for James Kent’s mournful, very fine new film starring Alicia Vikander as Brittain.
  79. Like Someone in Love
    Like Someone in Love has rather simple, sentimental, melodramatic underpinnings, but the vantage changes everything. It opens up this world — and the next. It’s an enthralling journey.
  80. Lady Macbeth
    August Wilson knew that, which is why his plays resonate far beyond melodrama. So does Lady Macbeth. It eats into the mind with its vision of evil as a contagion that transforms victims into oppressors.
  81. Inside Man
    I found myself savoring a thriller (as well as a Spike Lee “joint”) that wasn't, for a change, in my face.
  82. Dolemite Is My Name
    Dolemite Is My Name has the glee of a John Waters movie in which it’s freaks-versus-squares, with freakishness the only healthy design for living.
  83. Guardians of the Galaxy
    The film seems content to be the class clown of the Marvel Universe, which is all well and good. But like most class clowns, sometimes you wish it would apply itself — because it seems capable of being so much more.
  84. We Are Little Zombies
    A rainbow-colored scream into the abyss, Nagahisa’s story of a quartet of orphaned tweens who start a chiptune rock band is as rigorous in its exploration of grief as it is stylistically exuberant, and one of the most exciting premieres at Sundance this year.
  85. A Prayer Before Dawn
    So there you have it. A Prayer Before Dawn: Fine entertainment. Fine teaching tool.
  86. In America
    Fortunately, there are more than enough moments when the heavy-handedness gives way to the sheer bliss of ordinary magic.
  87. Red Rocket
    It plays like a movie-length bout of aversion therapy aimed at our instinctive fondness for motor-mouthed strivers with Mikey’s every small victory creating more dread.
  88. 3:10 to Yuma
    As Ben Wade, gang leader and murderer, he gives an ironic performance, but Crowe’s irony is more intense than other actors’ obsession. He turns the idea of having so few emotions--of being beyond caring--into a bloody joke. He upstages everyone with his laughing eyes.
  89. Jane Eyre
    Wasikowska's Jane is as watchful as only a damaged soul can be, and, when challenged, frighteningly fast.
  90. Actress
    One of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen.
  91. Buck
    Meehl, in her directing debut, is attuned to the rhythms of Buck, who's attuned to the horses.
  92. The White Tiger
    Through this unique figure, and through this highly specific portrait of one country, The White Tiger achieves a kind of universality.
  93. Syriana
    A film that transcends its obvious timeliness to say some elemental things about personal loyalty and institutional betrayal.
  94. Dreamgirls
    I know I'm going to bring down the room by saying I think it's just okay. Well, Jennifer Hudson is more than okay.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am: Celine Dion
    The film lands somewhere between hand-holding fan service and brutal portrait of chronic illness.
  96. Outside In
    This is an conversation- and character-driven film with an occasional eye for something more ineffable, but Falco and Duplass’s complicated, nakedly searching performances are the main event.
  97. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    I hope the film inspires a new generation of amateur sleuths. Maybe — thanks to movies like The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson — a wish-fulfilling fictional scenario will come to pass in the real world, and the injustices of history will stand plainly in the living present.
  98. Flight
    No actor is as brilliant, or as cunning, as Denzel Washington at portraying superhuman coolness and the scary prospect of its loss.
  99. 99 Homes
    Bahrani’s casting of Dern is genius. She’s such a profoundly unaffected actress that you instantly buy her aversion to her son’s lucre. She has a moral and aesthetic problem with that tacky mansion on the waterway. She wouldn’t fit in there.
  100. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    This film is one of those exhilarating instances when Sorkin finds a context in which all of his well-established impulses that can be so annoying elsewhere — the self-righteousness, the straw men, the great men, the men who aren’t onstage but are nevertheless digging deep in their diaphragms to deliver their lines to the back row — actually work.
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