New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

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For 3,572 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 0.8 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 The Call of the Wild
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,995 out of 3572
  2. Mixed: 1,250 out of 3572
  3. Negative: 327 out of 3572
3572 movie reviews
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  1. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The non-ending turns the whole movie into an elaborate tease, too creepy to dismiss, too shallow to justify its "ambiguities."
  2. The Skin I Live In
    It's the only Almodóvar movie in which feeling, emotional or sexual, doesn't suffuse the imagery and hold the ramshackle melodrama together.
  3. The Ides of March
    It's tempting to praise The Ides of March as a realistic depiction of how low we've sunk. But that would mean accepting the second-rate writing and third-rate melodrama and incredible shrinking characters.
  4. Margaret
    This is the first bad movie that has ever made me call for a sequel - to get it all right.
  5. Drive
    Every bit as dumb as August's "Conan the Barbarian" but awash in neon-lit nightscapes and existential dread, with killings so graphic that you can't entirely believe what you're gagging at.
  6. I Don't Know How She Does It
    Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.
  7. Colombiana
    Luc Besson's Jumping Frog Action Factory looks mighty lame in Colombiana.
  8. The Help
    It's a tough, beautifully judged performance (Davis) - it gives this too-soft movie a spine.
  9. Cowboys & Aliens
    An agreeable time-killer, but I'll bet a couple of clever kids could make a livelier movie with a Woody puppet and a Predator doll.
  10. The Future
    This could be the premise of a zany comedy, but the mood of The Future is, from the outset, defeatist - annoyingly defeatist, to be frank.
  11. Larry Crowne
    The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.
  12. Green Lantern
    Apart from having no particular reason to exist onscreen, especially at these prices, it's not half bad.
  13. Super 8
    It would be easy to dismiss as 100 percent ersatz if it didn't rekindle at least some of the old excitement - and if the magic of Spielberg's older movies didn't filter through, like light from a distant galaxy.
  14. The Beaver
    Gibson is better in the later scenes, when Walter tries to escape the Beaver's nefarious influence. And Gibson's never bad. It's just that we know how much is missing. As a raging nutcase, he's capable of so much more.
  15. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    When the film shifts to Shanghai and the club Casablanca, there's too much lustrous-hued loitering and too few martial­-arts set pieces.
  16. Meek's Cutoff
    For all its indirection, Meek's Cutoff is an utterly conventional film. But it's worth asking whether Reichardt's drowsy rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage add up to something illuminating. And here's where she earns at least some of those plaudits she's been getting.
  17. The Conspirator
    The screenwriter, James Solomon, does the poor job only a liberal could at making the case for a Cheneyesque "dark side," and he isn't helped by Kline's wooden acting. Too bad. The Conspirator is eloquent enough to let the other side have its say.
  18. In a Better World
    Bier dramatizes our ambivalence so earnestly that it's tempting to give her awards rather than admit that the movie is a crushing bore.
  19. Insidious
    The thing is scary as hell when it's all creaks and thumps and doors swinging open. Then come the explanations, the special effects, and the inevitable feeling of been-there-been-­bombarded-by-that.
  20. The Adjustment Bureau
    The doughy Damon and aristocratic Blunt don't match up physically, and they never get any Hepburn-Tracy rhythms going that might create some current.
  21. The Dilemma
    Perhaps the late Blake Edwards could have found a balance between slapstick and psychodrama, but Ron Howard can't get the pacing right, and Allan Loeb's script is even wordier than the one he wrote for "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps."
  22. The Green Hornet
    At least The Green Hornet is likable, and a refreshing change from the heavy, angst-ridden superhero pictures so beloved by obnoxious fanboys.
  23. Love and Other Drugs
    Love & Other Drugs is crazily uneven, jumping back and forth between jerk-off jokes and Parkinson's sufferers sharing their stories of hope. It's the sort of movie in which half the audience will be drying their eyes and the other half rolling them.
  24. How Do You Know
    The sad part is that How Do You Know is nowhere near as dumb as it looks. A couple of comic set pieces are inspired-or would be, if Brooks's timing weren't off.
  25. TRON: Legacy
    With a million times more computing power at its disposal than its 1982 predecessor, Tron: Legacy still looks like Disco Night at the jai alai fronton.
  26. The Tempest
    The drama is so muddled that Shakespeare seems to be getting in the way of Taymor's spectacle, the magic long gone by the time Prospera hurls her staff off into the sea.
  27. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    I hope that in Part 2, Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves give Fiennes a better send-off than Dame J.K. did in her less-than-wizardly climactic wandathon. Having made us sit through two and a half hours with no payoff, they'd better not go all Muggle on us. Next time, we want magic, people.
  28. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    As in his pithy, tuneful songs-many written from different perspectives, in different styles-Merritt is committed to stylizing his misery instead of boring you with it.
  29. Welcome to the Rileys
    Ken Hixon's script contrives a lot of mutual-healing set pieces and then sadly but shrewdly aborts them: That makes the drama more Chekhovian than "quite real."
  30. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    Larsson is renowned for his attention to marginal details, which gives his prose a rambling, one-thing-after-another pace that many readers find soothing. Onscreen, the lack of acceleration makes for one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.
  31. Hereafter
    Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.
  32. Lizzie
    The problem is the enervated pacing and ludicrous depiction — after much fancy skipping back and forth in time — of the murders themselves.
  33. I Think We're Alone Now
    After its intriguing start, the movie gets dumb and dumberer. “Third-act problems,” concluded many in the Sundance audience. But the first two acts have issues, too.
  34. The Social Network
    It's an entertainingly cynical small movie. Aaron Sorkin's dialogue tumbles out so fast it's as if the characters want their brains to keep pace with their processors; they talk like they keyboard, like Fincher directs, with no time for niceties.
  35. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    The sequel to an influential eighties motion picture is so loaded with characters and crosscurrents that we wonder why it isn't a thirteen-hour cable mini-series instead of an impacted two-hour mess. The film is like my portfolio: full of promise, with minuscule returns.
  36. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    The film is repetitive, top-heavy: Wright blows his wad too early. But a different lead might have kept you laughing and engaged.
  37. Eat Pray Love
    In the golden turd that is Eat Pray Love, everyone helps Julia Roberts find herself so she can then experience true love.
  38. Inception
    Inception manages to be clunky and confusing on four separate levels of reality.
  39. Holy Rollers
    Holy Rollers fuses a somber, old-world palette with a jittery urban unease--a good mix of tones. It’s also wonderfully acted.
  40. Babies
    Better approached as an “oooooh” and “awww” fest.
  41. Date Night
    Movies are the lesser medium for Fey and Carell. They’re the stars of two relatively sophisticated, media-savvy network sitcoms, yet their big-screen comedies are retro.
  42. Chloe
    Few films go as obviously and bewilderingly wrong as Chloe, but for the first hour it’s a potent little melodrama in which the smooth, super-controlled storytelling contains the theme of unruly obsession like a straitjacket.
  43. The Runaways
    In patches it's agreeably lurid, but it's otherwise ho-hum.
  44. Green Zone
    It's also rather tawdry. The climax is as ludicrous as any Jack Bauer adventure, and Greengrass is always on shaky ground. Literally.
  45. Shutter Island
    The ending is powerful..., but Shutter Island is a long slog.
  46. District 13: Ultimatum
    It’s campier than its predecessor, but its gung ho union of black, white, and Asian gangs against reactionaries who’d destroy them is a virtuosic assertion of punky Parisian multiculturalism.
  47. Saint John of Las Vegas
    The film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss.
  48. Extraordinary Measures
    Extraordinary Measures has a soppy piano-and-strings score, but the primal fear of loss sharpens every scene.
  49. 44 Inch Chest
    It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.
  50. Sherlock Holmes
    By now we’ve seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it’s almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there’s no such thing as too much Downey.
  51. The Road
    Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.
  52. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Weitz’s pacing is so limp you’re going to need the electricity generated by a live audience to keep from yelling, “Hurry it up!”
  53. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    If there’s a sure thing in movies, it’s that if you cast Nicolas Cage in a role in which he goes crazy, he’ll rise to the occasion and keep on rising until he seems even loonier than his character.
  54. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    The elements of Precious are powerful and shocking, but the movie is programmed. It is its own study guide.
  55. Gentlemen Broncos
    The best part is Jemaine Clement as Benjamin’s grandiose genre hero, Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Even if you love him on "Flight of the Conchords," you’ll be unprepared for his genius--and charisma.
  56. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    Works only in spurts.
  57. The Informant!
    This is yet another of Soderbergh’s “exercises in style,” which means he has one big idea and sticks to it. He makes the space shallow and ugly (faces are bathed in orange) and adds groovy sixties titles and Marvin Hamlisch music.
  58. 9
    For all the Saturday-matinee heroics, the movie is dreary and monotonous, the vision junky in more ways than one.
  59. Crude
    Here's what's depressing: that, given the millions spent on defense by multinational conglomerates, our last best hope isn't the courts but the fickle attentions of glossy magazines and the noblesse oblige of celebrities.
  60. Halloween II (2009)
    Freed from the original Halloween template, Zombie is aiming for something hallucinatory, almost abstract: a tone poem of madness and sadism and family ties that bind (and garrote). But the picture runs out of ideas about halfway through, and what’s left is splatter in a void.
  61. Funny People
    Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.
  62. Chéri
    Michelle Pfeiffer is brittle in a way that's not especially French, but she's poignant and very lovely. Rupert Friend, on the other hand, is difficult to warm up to, especially with his features hidden behind all that hair. It's not a good sign when you have to take the movie's word for it that the lovers at its center are really, really into each other.
  63. Whatever Works
    It's hard to get past the primitiveness of Allen’s fantasies.
  64. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Watching this Pelham--a money job from its conception--you can believe that there's no other motivation on Earth.
  65. Away We Go
    Travel--finding the self by escaping the self--is central to the novels of Eggers and Vida, but Mendes knows where he's going before he gets there. And so the subject of Away We Go turns out to be not travel but child-rearing, which is at best well-meaning and anguished and at worst downright monstrous.
  66. Departures
    It will resonate with anyone who has ever buried a loved one and struggled to reconcile the myriad emotions--grief, anger, helplessness. Which is to say, everyone. And yet out of this premise comes glop. Departures needed a little more work in the morgue--like cutting to the bone.
  67. Pontypool
    Pontypool doesn't jell--its pretensions way exceed its reach--yet it's madly suggestive, and it rekindled my affection for the genre.
  68. The Girlfriend Experience
    Most of the dialogue is listless, and no matter how much Soderbergh snips and stitches, the movie is a corpse with twitching limbs.
  69. Terminator Salvation
    With McG's migraine-inducing jerky-cam and monochromatic palette (livened only by splotches of rust), Terminator Salvation puts the numb in numskull.
  70. Angels & Demons
    A shapely, stylish, white-knuckle horror-thriller that hits its marks with blood and thunder. It stinks to heaven, too, but it isn't lame. The streets of Rome haven't run this red since the Inquisition.
  71. The Soloist
    The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright's direction is too slick to elicit much feeling.
  72. State of Play
    It's tricky, it's surprising, and it's largely faithful to the original mini-series, but in context it's a nonevent. It's like a time bomb that's never dismantled but never explodes. The movie is good enough that the ending leaves you … not angry, exactly. Unfulfilled.
  73. 17 Again
    What I can't accept is that the stringy, insipidly earnest teen idol Zac Efron would grow up to be the defensively ironic, twisty-faced Matthew Perry.
  74. American Violet
    If you're in the mood for a liberal message movie in which the only surprise is no surprise, American Violet is the ticket.
  75. Paris 36
    Hopelessly amateurish, the troupe is saved by a remarkably pretty young blonde called Douce with a sweet soprano to match her angel face. The gifted, unknown actress-singer who plays her, Nora Arnezeder, also saves the movie, which would otherwise blur into a mass of droopy, mustached, big-honkered Gallic character actors.
  76. Duplicity
    Duplicity is deeply shallow--cheap reversals all the way down. But it's a passably amusing brainteaser.
  77. Gomorrah
    Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.
  78. Coraline
    Selick has a great fantasy filmmaker's artistry, but he lacks that overflowing Geppetto-esque love that brings puppets to life. In Coraline, he's woozy with his own lyricism.
  79. The International
    It's good enough that you forget how much better Brian De Palma could do it. The rest is a slow road to nowhere, less clunky than "The Interpreter" but bogged down by its own cynicism.
  80. Notorious
    Juicy, revved-up, semi-satisfying biopic.
  81. Silent Light
    This director is too calculating to hold our trust for long, and skepticism will kill transcendence every time.
  82. Good
    As a film, it's overly tidy, and the surreal concentration-camp climax gave at least one viewer an inappropriate fit of giggles.
  83. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Attains a level of quiet grace. It's too bad that I can barely remember the movie after only a week. Nothing lasts, indeed.
  84. Valkyrie
    Directed by Bryan Singer in a break from his gayish superhero movies, it's a low-key procedural with a dollop of suspense--although perhaps not enough to make up for the foregone conclusion.
  85. The Wrestler
    The movie isn't as world-shattering as those bouts: It's a regretful-old-warrior weeper.
  86. Che
    Che is an impressive physical feat, but especially in the second part, which gives you day after day of rebels being killed and indigenous poor people not joining the good fight, you start to look forward to Che getting riddled by bullets. The whole movie is a forced march.
  87. The Reader
    It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" way too literally.
  88. Frost/Nixon
    Unsatisfying even if, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of Nixon-bashing.
  89. Australia
    Jackman has musical-theater chops and knows how to sell material this ham-handed; Kidman isn't quite as deft. I've always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness--but that tightness has now spread to her skin.
  90. Quantum of Solace
    If the staging were as witty as the plotting, Quantum of Solace might have been a corker like "Casino Royale." But when the action starts, art-house-refugee director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) mashes together close-ups in the manner of "The Dark Knight," and every big set piece is borderline incoherent.
  91. JCVD
    At one point, Van Damme delivers a long, tortured soliloquy about his alienating stardom to the camera in a single take. It's the most amazing piece of acting I've ever seen by a martial artist. But the film itself doesn't rise above the level of a good try.
  92. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    It's written and directed by Kevin Smith--and hats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action! Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion.
  93. Synecdoche, New York
    It's heartbreaking how rich this failed project is, with enough poetry for several great movies, but not enough push for one.
  94. W.
    W. isn't gripping enough as drama or witty enough as satire. It's neutered.
  95. Body of Lies
    The film has one indelible asset: Mark Strong, who plays the Jordanian spymaster Hani. He's sleek and lounge-lizard sharp like a young Andy Garcia, and he could be bigger than Garcia. The Jordanian holds all the cards, and opposite two superstars, Strong is the only actor who holds the camera.
  96. Burn After Reading
    Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."
  97. The Women
    It's fascinating trying to separate the thirties material from the mostly maladroit additions.
  98. Towelhead
    The film is superbly acted (especially by Macdissi, who makes the father a borderline hysteric), but it's hard to know what to feel except, "How can any girl navigate this oversexualized culture?"
  99. Hamlet 2
    Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting.
  100. The Rocker
    It's depressing when the best thing you can say about a comedy is that its second-rateness is pleasantly in sync with its unmagnetic hero.
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