Vanity Fair's Scores

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For 643 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Under the Skin
Lowest review score: 10 Bright
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 429 out of 643
  2. Mixed: 171 out of 643
  3. Negative: 43 out of 643
643 movie reviews
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  1. Eileen
    The movie is deliberately alienating, but Oldroyd has not done enough to earn our devotion before he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The movie is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to back up the joke, try as its game performers might to make it all mean something. I found myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—so much of the film’s innate potential goes unutilized. At least there is Hathaway’s glowing star turn, both reminding us of what we knew she could do and introducing us to something new.
  2. Emancipation
    Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment.
  3. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The displacement Jimmie feels pervades most every shot of Talbot’s film and gives it all a slow-churning aura of foreignness and melancholy, a diasporic sadness that’s interesting to see in the context of a film about an African American, rather than a recent immigrant.
  4. The Front Runner
    In this grim reality, The Front Runner feels quaint, almost a hopeful thing, crafted in the old ways with a pitiable naïveté.
  5. The Batman
    The reality is that there is probably nothing truly novel to be done with Batman at this point. He’s been thoroughly mined for both fun and pathos; try as Reeves and his co-screenwriter Peter Craig might, they can’t squeeze much higher-meaning blood out of a fatally depleted stone. Pattinson, moody and saturnine, does what he can, but he’s not afforded much beyond growling and scowling.
  6. Gladiator II
    The sequel is epic in length and spectacle, but not in feeling.
  7. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    As this process unfolds, Reijn and DeLappe manage some moments of shivery suspense. Reijn makes expressive use of the house, tearing up staircases and down shadowy corridors with giddy abandon. But narratively, the film grows awfully repetitive, some version of the same argument taking place in one dark room after another.
  8. Eddington
    Eddington gradually shifts away from the hyper topical and into a despairing, bleakly amusing look at an America prone to violent fantasy and deed, entrenched in escalating conflict, caught in a terrible entropy. When Aster finally knuckles down and ramps up the action, Eddington takes strange flight.
  9. Not Okay
    Had the movie pitched itself on a one-way trip into the black, Deutch would no doubt have been up to the task. She’s a squirmy wonder in the film, loathsome and pitiable and, perhaps, grimly relatable. At times, Shephard overstates Danni’s detachment from polite society, but otherwise she and Deutch keep things in frightfully believable bounds.
  10. Jurassic World Dominion
    Though the script, by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael, does occasionally surprise with a little fugue of sharp writing, Dominion mostly seeks to drag us along for its indulgent 150-minute run in the hopes that it will exhaust us into thinking we’ve been served a rich, satisfying meal. There is at least some nice seasoning throughout.
  11. The Lighthouse
    There needn’t be some deeper theme or intent behind a movie like this, but The Lighthouse is an awfully trying experience to end with such a sneering shrug of the shoulders. I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Lighthouse is simply an exercise, an overeager writing class project from a guy who’s just read Sartre, Beckett, and, I dunno, Stephen King.
  12. Wildlife
    Dano shows technical promise as a director, but I hope his taste in material has a bit more range. Now that he’s gotten a rather passionless passion project out of his system, hopefully he’ll lift his gaze up in search of other, more vibrant lives—out there in the vastness, hungry for perfect lighting.
  13. Wonder Woman 1984
    In its best stretches—the first hour of the film, let’s say—WW84 sweetly revels in its old-school trappings, its hokey mystery, its goofy villain, its resourceful hero. The film is light on its feet, colorful and playful in a way not seen elsewhere in the DC Universe.
  14. Mountainhead
    Maybe the few moments when Mountainhead does take on a chilling relevance—when it seems to pick at something nightmarishly real—are enough to justify the sillier stuff. And, we must sadly admit, that silly stuff may not actually be that silly.
  15. Skywalkers: A Love Story
    Skywalkers might be the first of a new genre: extended vlog (or TikTok, or Instragram reel) as feature film, existing somewhere between fact and fiction and all in service of promoting a brand.
  16. Falling for Christmas
    It’s a story of reinvention for an actor trying to do the same. It mostly works a treat. Lohan’s performance is perky and agreeable, a shimmer of that old Mean Girls (or, hell, Parent Trap) charm dancing around her for the first time in a while. I’d happily watch her in more after this—though preferably in something a bit meatier than a Hallmark knock-off.
  17. Alien: Romulus
    If it hadn’t had someone of Álvarez’s care and attention at the helm, Romulus could certainly have been a lot worse.
  18. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    What I will say is that director Jon Watts handles this grand convergence of properties old and current with enough verve to almost sustain the long run of the film. But there’s so much brand Frankensteining to be done that there’s really no time for quirk and texture; much of the bounce and sparkle of the past two Holland films is lost.
  19. The Forgiven
    Chastain pulls focus whenever she can, operating as one of the film’s main resources of levity and acerbic bite. I wish the movie had more of that energy—McDonagh keeps the proceedings oddly muted given the circumstances—but at least Chastain is there, pepping things up a bit.
  20. Palm Springs
    Palm Springs endeared me to Samberg and Milioti quite a bit, and that's not nothing. The movie, though, doesn't amount to much.
  21. Anyone But You
    Anyone but You is undoubtedly a cut above most rom-coms we’ve been served in recent years, and its many efforts to feel big and luxe do not go unnoticed. But it’s curiously unromantic and is only clever in fits and starts. If the movie were to approach me at a coffee shop, smug grin gleaming away, I’d probably only commit to a fling.
  22. Blade Runner 2049
    While it certainly stimulated and overwhelmed my senses, Blade Runner 2049 rarely got my mind whirring the way one always hopes this kind of artful, serious-minded sci-fi will.
  23. Meg 2: The Trench
    Meg 2 is confident in its schlock, piling on one ridiculous conceit after another at such a pace that the audience can’t help but be swept up in it. That is a harder needle to thread than many filmmakers seem to think—it’s not enough to just be stupid.
  24. A Quiet Place Part II
    The film’s self-seriousness bogs down what should be a mad and skittering thing, jangling us with all its agonizing silence. We should be having more fun as we watch through our fingers.
  25. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade is an exciting directorial debut for Burnham, a precocious teen phenomenon who seems to have grown into a thoughtful adult—one who intimately knows of what he speaks. He’s made an alarmingly perceptive film that only rarely goes for the easy joke or verges toward cliché
  26. Everybody Knows
    There’s nothing wrong with a good soap opera—and when one looks as bespoke as this one, and has such fine actors in it, it should go down a treat. But Everybody Knows lumbers and frustrates as it goes.
  27. Bones and All
    Bones and All has its merits, but the film is only a decent side dish at the feast of Guadagnino. You’ll likely leave the theater still feeling hungry.
  28. Blindspotting
    Blindspotting never settles into a consistent cadence. This isn’t exactly a problem, in theory—movies can contain multitudes, of course—but in this trio’s overeager execution, all that chaos renders the movie curiously inert.
  29. F9: The Fast Saga
    F9’s attempts at classical drama, all its reckoning with dynastic sin, do weigh the thing down quite a bit. Those going to the theater simply for the kicky, bad-joke, MacGuffin charms of F&F may find themselves a little bored and distracted, as I was, by all the turgidity.
  30. The Color Purple
    While grandly moving at the close, too much of this Color Purple relies on memories of Color Purples past.
  31. Joy Ride
    There’s great stuff in Joy Ride, the jumbled atoms of a classic comedy all waiting to be gathered into a cohesive whole. If they didn’t quite get it together on this outing, they certainly prove their potential.
  32. Causeway
    There is a fine line between creating a laconic, closed-off character and simply not creating a character at all—a line that Causeway transgresses. Lynsey is a frustrating cipher, seemingly guided more by the beats of the script than by any internal impulse or logic.
  33. The King
    Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.
  34. Terminator: Dark Fate
    What I found uniquely depressing about Dark Fate, though, is how resigned it is to the reality of its title. How it organizes itself as a paean to tireless scramble and triage, to the fight not for something better but for less of something worse. It’s a bitterly pessimistic film. It may be a realistic one, too.
  35. The Chronology of Water
    A too-close-to-the-case ardor for the material does the film a disservice, as can sometimes happen when a cherished object is adapted.
  36. Air
    Jordan’s absence from this film leaves a big, leaping void at the center. We’re forced to root for marketing executives instead of the phenomenon being marketed. Without its raison d’etre, there is not enough juice to sustain the film. It all feels a bit silly by the heartstring-tugging end.
  37. The Greatest Showman
    The film may be a vessel for some noxious, platitudinous cynicism, but there’s nevertheless something still quaint about it. It mostly just wants you to have a nice time, it insists; to feel cheered and uplifted as a big, lumbering elephant carries us off a cliff.
  38. The Phoenician Scheme
    Anderson rescues his film from oblivion in the end, closing out his story with a disarmingly sweet—and, in some ways, provocative—moral argument.
  39. Napoleon
    Phoenix has always been good at depicting this kind of pathetic tyranny, deftly (and swiftly) shifting from bratty, toothless insouciance to genuine menace. The actor seems to get both the joke and the seriousness of the film, though I wish Scott were better at communicating that tone to the audience.
  40. Dolemite Is My Name
    It feels at times like a Tracy Jordan spoof of a movie, and not always for the better. But that doesn’t stop Dolemite from being funny, or from giving Murphy room to do the things he likes to do.
  41. Joker
    The movie is, for a good stretch, a troubling and arresting character study, one done with nervy conviction. Eventually, though, Phillips has to more tightly attach this downward spiral to the larger Gotham mythology, which is where the provocative ambivalence of the film gives way to veneration.
  42. The World to Come
    The film offers a small bit of emotional rescue at its very end—a graceful tribute to the escapes of memory and fantasy—but by then the dourness of its conclusions has blotted out any rounder sense of meaning.
  43. Elio
    Elio is a spirited, engaging 98 minutes. But its tired attempts at the gentle profundity of old—that Wall-E wallop, that Up uplift—are emblematic of a studio that’s running out of ways to whimsically allegorize human experience. Alien experience, too.
  44. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    Farrelly shows us the formative experience, but only a little of its consequence. Perhaps too much consideration of that would make the whole thing seem something less than great.
  45. Yesterday
    Yesterday isn’t nearly as fantastical, sweet, or light on its feet as it could be—and maybe that’s because of that darn premise. It’s somehow both too basic and too rich. There’s too much one could do with it, but too little vision in what Boyle and Curtis ultimately put forward—even as real tensions, real sticks in music history’s craw, populate the margins.
  46. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    If all we’re really taking from a movie about a man who murdered 30-plus women is “Zac Efron sure is surprising,” then I don’t think that movie has earned its existence. Yes, it is all shockingly wicked and evil and vile. Shouldn’t we maybe just leave it at that?
  47. Cherry
    There’s a sort of bell curve of tolerance; the film begins loud and over-egged, gradually settles into a sad and gnarly bildungsroman, and then burns itself out with an operatic finale. It’s an exhausting experience, which I realize may be the point.
  48. Jurassic World Rebirth
    There is some flair and wit to be found in Rebirth, and its performances are by and large likable and engaging. There are worse exercises in IP-extension out there in the marketplace. But it is hard to imagine what possible basis there could be for an eighth Jurassic film.
  49. Civil War
    Garland didn’t decide to make this particular movie on an un-sourced whim; its very existence is a response to something hanging in the air. Yet he refuses to connect Civil War with that obvious context—which feels more like a cop out than high-minded restraint or elegant equanimity.
  50. The Goldfinch
    I wish all of Tartt’s tender and moving allegory—the way she pours the density of growth and regret into a solid thing that can pass hands—had space to bloom in the film. It doesn’t, and I left the film appreciative of its style and strong performances, but not emotionally altered in any lingering way.
  51. House of Gucci
    There’s some art to be found here, for sure. But there’s not nearly enough of the pop.
  52. Nope
    As Nope swerves and reels, it often seems distracted by itself, unable to hold its focus on any one thing long enough for deeper meaning, or feeling, to coalesce.
  53. Murder Mystery
    The movie proves a cheery enough diversion, during a summer movie season leaden with underwhelming blockbuster offerings.
  54. Wrath of Man
    It’s all pleasingly robust and cinematic, if fleeting.
  55. Unhinged
    Unhinged is a nasty piece of work, jarringly rough but also, in fits and starts, bracing entertainment.
  56. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    In Day’s magnetism, the film does enough justice to Holiday’s memory that its shagginess is almost forgiven. The rest of the orchestra could use a tune up, but Day, at least, makes for an exciting solo act.
  57. Ammonite
    Whatever the truth of Anning and Murchison’s time in Dorset together was, Ammonite could have done whatever it wanted. It chooses instead to do close to nothing, and leaves us, quite like its central pair, helplessly grasping for more.
  58. The Witches
    Most vitally, the film has frightening, wiggly moments that ought to send young viewers happily scooting forward on the couch, or just as happily hiding under a throw pillow. The film, at its best, is gross and silly and amiably unsettling, which may be all that counts.
  59. Miss Americana
    The film looks away from that pure artistry too often, turning instead to its limited, and far less satisfying, view of Swift’s complicated star profile.
  60. Mid90s
    What works best about Mid90s is what’s casual about it—but what makes it verge on being genuinely original is all the weirdo stuff at the margins, which is too pronounced to be subtext and too minimally handled to really mean something to the movie.
  61. Annette
    It’s a lot of nervy construction built around very little substance. Driver and Cotillard are admirably committed, and the film does occasionally soar to giddily surreal, big-burst musical highs. Not near often enough, though.
  62. The French Dispatch
    The film—structured as an issue of a New Yorker-esque magazine—is fussy and ornately detailed and difficult to grasp. Where Anderson’s past elaborate worlds have invited us in with all their cozy detail, The French Dispatch’s seems to haughtily sniff in our direction; it doesn’t much care if we get it.
  63. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Though some zesty flair has been added—particularly a new heroine—this hyper-aggro spin-off of a beloved franchise over does it while under-delivering.
  64. The Lodge
    The Lodge falls into the more common trap of spinning its wheels in a mudbath of obviousness and red herrings, dredging up anxieties and questions that it doesn’t quite know how to push forward, or inward.
  65. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    Watching Snyder’s intermittently rewarding epic—if nothing else a spectacle of completed vision—stirred up surprising emotions. Not about what happens to the people (and aliens) in the film, but about what happened to its maker, and to the course of human events while Justice League 2.0 wrestled its way into being.
  66. The Gentlemen
    The Gentlemen is a homecoming film, reuniting Ritchie with his once-signature style of narrative jumble and jocular menace. Watching it, I felt the calm of familiarity wash over me, the dim feeling like I’d somehow folded back into a time simpler only for having already happened.
    • Vanity Fair
      • Posted Jan 23, 2020
  67. The Dead Don't Die
    By its muddled and probably intentionally frustrating conclusion, I’d lost the thread of Jarmusch’s argument (or arguments). The movie ends with the sting of unrealized potential, Jarmusch flippantly kicking at fertile terrain and then shuffling off.
  68. Bumblebee
    Say what you want about Michael Bay, but at least his movies have their own identity. They occupy their own territory—albeit one I don’t necessarily want to visit often. But Bumblebee could have been made by anyone, as long as they were working from the right style guide.
  69. Mickey 17
    On the whole, though, Mickey 17 tests our patience. While the dispensable clones premise is intriguing, and opens a door to the kind of socioeconomic commentary so signature to Bong, the film quickly grows distracted by other matters entirely.
  70. Creed II
    Where Coogler’s movie runs hot, Caple’s runs warm; where Coogler dwells, steeping every scene in a sense of shared history and a love of Philadelphia, Caple takes for granted that this ground has already been sowed.
  71. Outlaw King
    It’s funny to be watching a movie about nationalism—something of a hot topic right now—that gives off so little heat. Not because it’s unexpected—but because the missed opportunity seems both so obvious and so beside the point.
  72. Ready Player One
    Because Spielberg seems as eager as Wade to get back to the digital fantasy world he’s created, a lot of the human element is elided or glossed over.
  73. Don't Look Up
    Where Don’t Look Up finds its strength is in its lead performances, which can’t be undone even by the film’s exhausting, rapid-fire editing and McKay’s aggressive indicating toward his own punchlines.
  74. Snow White
    Those who feel that this Snow White is unnecessary or even worse should know that it is not the total disaster they were fearing. There’s some value to the film, even if that value will mostly be found by younger audiences
  75. Madame Web
    Madame Web is a muted affair—not outright terrible but certainly not good, neither inert nor as meme-worthy as hoped. It’s a strange movie whose tortured existence is the most compelling thing about it.
  76. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    I Wanna Dance with Somebody is a mighty testament to Houston’s catalog, the cathedral highs and sultry lows of her singular voice. Those songs, at least, are eternal. If a movie that simply presses play on the mix tape is what it takes to remind us of Houston’s special power, then that’s reason enough for the film to exist. But the story behind the songs probably deserves more, and better.
  77. Death on the Nile
    Christie’s cool flint is swapped out for tearful ruminations on lost love in Death on the Nile, an intermittently entertaining but otherwise tiresomely lugubrious trip down crocodile-filled waters.
  78. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    Here is an opportunity for a wild and sorrowful confluence of gay dream and national nightmare. Alas, this Kiss of the Spider Woman gives us a competent but glancing rendering of the easier, more palatable aspects of a story that should be anything but.
  79. The Human Voice
    The Human Voice’s images tend to call out in vain; not an utterance is heard. They are symbols suspended in time and space, indicators of something that doesn’t seem to matter very much.
  80. Murder on the Orient Express
    Murder on the Orient Express isn’t a bore, exactly. It’s just not what it might have been had simplicity won the day instead of big intentions.
    • Vanity Fair
      • Posted Dec 9, 2017
  81. Thunderbolts*
    On occasion the film is wryly amusing. But too often the humor is strained, playing as meek attempt to laugh through the pain—for the characters, the movie itself, the entire franchise, even.
  82. On the Rocks
    The film never achieves lift-off, drifting instead through a series of scenes that repeat and repeat the movie’s few, basic themes before sputtering to a too easily resolved—and patly rendered—conclusion.
  83. Argylle
    To be fair, toward the end of the film, Vaughn does up the ante to stage one utterly ridiculous fight scene that teeters between amusing and embarrassing. At least he is trying for something there. Otherwise, Argylle lacks the inventive physics and gaudy flair we have come to expect from him.
  84. The Turning
    Somehow, a James novella whose subtext has been debated for over a century has been rendered almost free of subtext—and it sort of works.
  85. Nosferatu
    Nosferatu is a sensory pleasure. But on a story level, it leaves much to be desired.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Infinity Pool
    The nightmare that unfolds is certainly effective. At the same time, there's an emptiness at the movie's core.
  87. Lizzie
    Lizzie isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t accomplish all that it wants to—and all I wanted it to. We’re never as immersed in its psychological swirl as we should be, and every character in it is either such a creep or a flinching headcase that it’s hard to get our emotional hooks in any of them.
  88. The Little Mermaid
    McCarthy’s sly, amoral performance is far and away the best part of the film. Every time she’s onscreen, the movie finally seems, well, animated.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cavalcade
    In picture form, Cavalcade is a superlative newsreel, forcibly strengthened by factual scenes, good music, and wonderful photography. It is marred by pat and obvious dramatic climaxes, and by a conclusion which is anti-climactical and meaningless.
  90. Don't Worry Darling
    Director Olivia Wilde has made an obvious and intermittently entertaining sci-thriller, one that borrows heavily from many better things but uses those pilfered parts effectively enough. For a while, anyway.
  91. Reminiscence
    The film doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, or to retain audience interest. Jackman, dutiful thespian as always, gives it his all, but the specter his character is running after doesn’t have enough shape, or meaning.
  92. Bad Times at the El Royale
    I remain as curious as ever to see what Goddard does next. But this film, for all its canny presentation, is a mishmash of compelling narrative premises clumsily fused together. It manages to be both overwrought and under-developed, disappointing less for what it is than for what it could have been.
  93. Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein never gets its blood up, essentially playing as a casual mood piece rather than full-bodied horror or romance or comedy.
  94. Irresistible
    Its preference is for plucking the lowest hanging fruit and, more urgently, letting its own audience off the hook. Though Irresistible occasionally lands a point—a soul surfaces briefly, thanks to Cooper—the movie ultimately doesn’t have the guts to be the movie it needs to be.
  95. The Craft: Legacy
    Lister-Jones has a lot of good ideas that are given short shrift in this film. The potency of their implications is sapped by, among other things, the film’s seemingly hyper-conscious worry that it might put a foot wrong, especially within such a limited run time. Which may actually be The Craft: Legacy’s most modern dimension: it probably should have been a Netflix series.
  96. The Killer
    The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.
  97. Greta
    Huppert and Jordan are certainly capable of turning up the volume, but for whatever reason they pull back in Greta, getting stuck somewhere between shlockly art and arty schlock. That’s not a good place to be, even if it is a Greta one.
  98. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    Now 80 years old, Ford still glows with that unique charisma. It’s a shame, then, that Dial of Destiny doesn’t do right by its heroes—both Ford and Dr. Henry Jones, archeologist adventurer.
  99. Free Guy
    Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.
  100. Glass
    Glass is simply Shyamalan giving a book report on the basic structure of comic-caper narratives. There’s something endearing about his eagerness to explain these simple things, to show us what he knows. But Glass still suffers for that pedantic self-seriousness.
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