New York Magazine (Vulture)'s Scores

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For 3,587 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 Daddy's Home 2
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,003 out of 3587
  2. Mixed: 1,255 out of 3587
  3. Negative: 329 out of 3587
3587 movie reviews
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  1. 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."
  2. The Women
    It's fascinating trying to separate the thirties material from the mostly maladroit additions.
  3. 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?"
  4. Hamlet 2
    Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting.
  5. 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.
  6. Elegy
    A spare, melancholy film that is so far in spirit from its source, Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal."
  7. Pineapple Express
    It's empty and formulaic, with plotting that's lazy even by stoner-comedy standards. Without all the yuck-o sight gags, it would be a huge bummer.
  8. American Teen
    The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.
  9. Baghead
    Too bad the movies collapses at the end when we find out what's really going on. Baghead is so much more vivid when it's indefinite.
  10. Boy A
    This is another of those dead-kid dramas in which the terrible event is handled like a striptease--tantalizing flashes until the climax.
  11. The Dark Knight
    The novelty wears off and the lack of imagination, visual and otherwise, turns into a drag. The Dark Knight is noisy, jumbled, and sadistic.
  12. Mamma Mia!
    Seyfried (of Big Love and Mean Girls) is a radiant object and can sing, but I'd like to forget the others--especially Brosnan, whose singing is the best imitation I've heard of a water buffalo.
  13. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    The best scene is when Hellboy and Abe get drunk and sing out raucously, which after "Hancock" suggests a trend toward superhero alcoholism.
  14. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    It would be barely passable under normal circumstances, but in 3-D it's a circus of excellent FX.
  15. The Wackness
    The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
  16. Medicine for Melancholy
    Jenkins is so desperate to give his love story a social and economic context that he stops the movie cold for a bunch of unrelated white people to articulate their grievances over gentrification--it's as if "Annie Hall" had paused for a seminar on agrarian reform.
  17. Stuck
    The film becomes an aria of agony--but with a rousingly yucko finish!
  18. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition--or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves...It's the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is a cosmic nothing.
  19. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Such a clunkerama that it made me rethink all the nice things I wrote about its predecessor, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Could the same people have made both films?
  20. Sangre De Mi Sangre
    Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon.
  21. Mister Lonely
    I'm glad Korine has pulled himself together, but the film is pretty ramshackle, full of obvious group improvisations that fail to spark and an overdose of bathos.
  22. Standard Operating Procedure
    I’m not sure Morris clinches his case, but I’m not sure he wants to: His aim is to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our perception.
  23. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    But even with bits that are crazily inspired, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is depressing. The Apatow Factory is too comfy with its workers’ arrested development to move the boundary posts. If they could find scripts by female writers that dramatize the other side of the Great Sexual Divide, it might be a place of joy--and embarrassed recognition--for everyone.
  24. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    The film is a hodgepodge, and it closes with a whimper. But along the way some lucid voices slip through.
  25. Smart People
    The middling romantic comedy Smart People, which centers on a hyperintellectual dysfunctional family, is of interest chiefly for the first post-Juno role of Ellen Page.
  26. Run, Fatboy, Run
    I wouldn’t believe that Run, Fat Boy, Run was co-written by Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) if he weren’t up there on the screen in teeny briefs and with his gut stuck out, trying to endear himself to the American audience in material maybe a notch above Rob Schneider’s.
  27. Snow Angels
    Scene by scene his (David Gordon Green’s) new film, Snow Angels, isn’t terrible. Parts of it are amusing, and there are wintry images that eat into the mind. But it’s one of the most disjunctive things I’ve ever sat through.
  28. City of Men
    City of Men is clunky and often contrived, but there’s something haunting about fatherless boys in a blighted place fumbling to teach themselves what it means to be a man.
  29. The Other Boleyn Girl
    A brisk feminist melodrama that is, historically speaking, a load of wank. It has the feel of a game of “telephone,” in which information is progressively mangled.
  30. The Signal
    The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.
  31. Be Kind Rewind
    The funniest things in Be Kind Rewind are not the many moments in which Mike and Jerry look like Ed Wood’s worst nightmare, but when the pair finds expedient ways to do for pennies what would take Brett Ratner millions and be less expressive to boot.
  32. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Spiderwick. There’s nothing wrong with it that passion and personality couldn’t fix.
  33. Ezra
    The story is hell to follow--the flashbacks aren’t in chronological order--and the nonacting variable.
  34. In Bruges
    For In Bruges to click, McDonagh needed either to get more real or more fake.
  35. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    It was undoubtedly a great experience for everyone involved, and the show itself might have been a romp. But as a movie, Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show makes you think of the days in which troupes that didn’t deliver were run out of town, bullets pinging off their heels.
  36. Rambo
    The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.
  37. Teeth
    Most of the movie works because the blonde Weixler has a darling-daffy face (a pinch of Alicia Silverstone, a dollop of Drew Barrymore) and a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I ambivalence about sex that’s part realism, part screwball.
  38. Juno
    It’s the writer, Diablo Cody, and the director, Jason Reitman, who have screws loose. Or maybe they’re just desperate to make their film a chick "Rushmore" or "Garden State."
  39. I'm Not There.
    Too often, it’s the MOVIE that isn’t there. What’s meant to be archetypal comes across as superficial.
  40. The Mist
    A derivative horror picture that somehow rises to the level of a primal scream. The premise is simple, by which I mean both easy to understand and feeble-minded.
  41. Margot at the Wedding
    Margot at the Wedding doesn’t develop; it just skips from one squirmy scene to the next.
  42. Southland Tales
    Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.
  43. Lions for Lambs
    Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.
  44. Bee Movie
    The film will be huge. It’s busy. It’s kinetic. It’s a treat for kids. But like much of Seinfeld’s work outside his TV show, it’s impersonal. It doesn’t come from anywhere interesting.
  45. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    At least the movie never bogs down. But you only get a taste of what made the Clash for a brief period the most exciting band on that side of the Atlantic.
  46. 30 Days of Night
    Danny Huston is screamingly funny as the alternately finicky and savage Head Ghoul--he’s like something spewed forth from the bowels of the Politburo. The problem is structural.
  47. Rendition
    The jumping around is as deft as a hippo in a tutu, and the director, Gavin Hood, never finds a rhythm.
  48. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    An unholy mixture of the banal and the bombastic.
  49. The Darjeeling Limited
    Hit and miss, but its tone of lyric melancholy is remarkably sustained.
  50. Into the Wild
    With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.
  51. The Brave One
    Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.
  52. The Nanny Diaries
    As you watch the nannies mistreated and the children left to cry themselves to sleep, the only surprise is that there are no surprises. It’s zombie-land.
  53. 2 Days in Paris
    The movie should be seen with a large, responsive audience--the better to live with it in the moment instead of worrying about where it’s going.
  54. Stardust
    It’s puffed up in obvious ways but disarmingly puckish in others. As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful--yet his gung-ho spirit wins him Brownie points.
  55. Becoming Jane
    A bearable period chick flick with a self-congratulatory “realistic” conceit.
  56. The Camden 28
    The Camden 28 is slapdash: more talking heads, reunion footage with the mother reading from her own testimony, newscasts of the day. But the editing supplies some urgency, and the subjects remain radiant yet down-to-earth--too good-humored to be beatific.
  57. My Best Friend
    The prolific Patrice Leconte takes a break from mythic, life-and-death scenarios with My Best Friend, a sitcom that threatens to take a rockier emotional path before swerving back into the comfy zone. It’s better when it’s threatening, but Leconte knows his audience.
  58. Joshua
    The line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid.
  59. Evening
    The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.
  60. Evan Almighty
    Evan Almighty runs out of comic invention early, and the filmmakers fall back on what real politicians do when they exhaust their small stash of ideas: brainless piety.
  61. La Vie en Rose
    She lip-syncs convincingly to Piaf's songs. Even when she overacts like mad, she makes you think she’s Piaf overacting like mad--the little sparrow with the foghorn pipes.
  62. Mr. Brooks
    If the movie were just these two (Costner/Hurt), bopping around arguing and offing people, it would have been better than the unholy mess it turns into.
  63. Fay Grim
    It's a rich idea -- a Hartley-esque variation on the theme of American Innocents Abroad. And it works superbly until -- well, Grim's the word.
  64. Brooklyn Rules
    Baldwin is so good in the coming-of-age gangster drama Brooklyn Rules that it's like watching a voodoo priest.
  65. The Wendell Baker Story
    If you want proof that Will Ferrell is the most riotously funny straight man since Jack Benny, observe the way his utter sincerity (in the Ralph Bellamy role, as Wendell’s rival for Eva Mendes) lifts this two-ton piece of whimsy into the stratosphere.
  66. Spider-Man 3
    The movie isn't a dud: It has exuberant bits and breathtaking (money money money) effects. But it's supposed to be fun and inspirational, and it's too leaden for liftoff.
  67. Waitress
    I think of Waitress as an overstuffed, overcooked pie--too ungainly to eat all of, too generous to pass up, too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.
  68. Jindabyne
    Scene by scene, Jindabyne has dramatic force, but it's an awfully long slog. Carver's smartest tactic was never outstaying his welcome.
  69. Zoo
    Devor doesn't endorse horse-on-man sex, but he does attempt--with sympathy--to account for the appeal.
  70. Vacancy
    If "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" are the seminal killer-as-voyeur movies, Vacancy is the nasty little runt offspring with no other purpose in life but to gnaw on you.
  71. Shooter
    This is the first big-studio action picture with some of the disgusted, bloody nihilism of the post-Vietnam era.
  72. Pride
    This is familiar terrain jazzed up by unfamiliar voices--principally Terrence Howard and his high-pitched, singsong drawl. You don't quite know what he's thinking; he might even be demented. But he keeps you watching and guessing.
  73. Reign Over Me
    The film is slick when it needs to be raw, tidy when it needs to sprawl, and amorphous when it needs to focus.
  74. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    Working in a mini-genre whose bones would appear to have been picked clean by the likes of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, Glosserman and Stieve find a few pints of fresh blood.
  75. Avenue Montaigne
    Avenue Montaigne would be difficult to stomach if it weren't so light and uninsistent, and if its actors weren't so charming. I still rolled my eyes--but sometimes I do that when I get a really good croissant.
  76. Hannibal Rising
    Hannibal Rising is basically a Steven Seagal vigilante movie with a hero who eats the people he kills. At least it's ecofriendly.
  77. The Decomposition of the Soul
    The decomposition of the soul is the goal of a Stasi incarceration, the promised end for an enemy of the state, and there is something about the movie’s pacing--the silences, the drone of the narration ("The name of your enemy is hope?…?")--that wears you down.
  78. The Situation
    The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work. The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting. The dialogue is flat, and the actors almost never rise above it.
  79. Miss Potter
    Miss Potter hardly deserves ridicule. It's sweet with lovely Lake District vistas and a heartfelt endorsement of land conservation. It will certainly play well with older audiences and the kind of adolescent girls who draw faces in their O's.
  80. Factory Girl
    It was probably hopeless from the start: The Warhol cosmos is too weird and complicated to lend itself to a conventional Hollywood biopic, and this one is conventional down to Warhol's first glimpse of his future "superstar" bouncing up and down vivaciously in tacky slow motion.
  81. 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.
  82. The Good German
    Steven Soderbergh is usually an inspired chameleon, perfectly suiting his style to his content. But The Good German is an ambitious miss...It's all very beautiful, high-minded, and remote.
  83. Breaking and Entering
    This is an ambitious midlife-crisis movie that valiantly weaves together big themes, among them the nagging guilt of the successful, wealthy artist.
  84. The Fountain
    The movie would be more bearable without the unyielding score by Clint Mansell, which somehow melds the worst of Minimalism, art rock, and New Age music. It's what you'd hear if your massage therapist wanted to induce a stroke.
  85. Fast Food Nation
    It gets the job done and then some, but it's ugly and clumsily shaped, and every scene is there to rack up sociological points.
  86. Bobby
    Despite the clunkiness, Estevez's commitment to his father's generation’s idealism (and its murder) commands respect.
  87. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    The tall, cool Kidman works hard to impersonate a woman possessed, but she's not the type of actress to fill in a role that hasn't been filled in on paper.
  88. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    Except for a screamingly funny climax in which he attempts to kidnap Pamela Anderson (who reportedly wasn't in on the joke), I found the Borat feature (directed by Larry Charles, who does similar duties on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") depressing; and the paroxysms of the audience reinforced the feeling that I was watching a bearbaiting or pigsticking.
  89. Babel
    In their last collaboration, "21 Grams," the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.
  90. The Prestige
    The tit-for-tat scenario ought to be wildly entertaining, but the magic is crude, the characters flyweight, and the story protracted and unpleasant.
  91. Little Children
    An unusually powerful mess, a broad satire of suburban self-indulgence with little in the way of a consistent style, and with a character who's serious business: a convicted child molester.
  92. All the King's Men
    As Willie Stark, Sean Penn demonstrates how a great Method actor can make the world’s most unconvincing rabble-rouser.
  93. Jesus Camp
    A frightening, infuriating, yet profoundly compassionate documentary about the indoctrination of children by the Evangelical right.
  94. The Science of Sleep
    The Science of Sleep transports you, but it strands you, too. Apart from the time-machine bit and two or three other daft exchanges, Gondry’s scenes tend to circle around the same drain: the hero’s insufferable narcissism.
  95. The Black Dahlia
    It's a stilted thing--overstylized and inexpressive, like high-school kids playing dress-up, or bad Kabuki.
  96. Al Franken: God Spoke
    With the transformation of Al Franken from comedian to activist, Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus stumbled onto a good subject, but in the documentary Al Franken: God Spoke, they stumble around in it.
  97. Hollywoodland
    Reeves had an easy but peppy presence that was very likable, and Affleck's moroseness doesn't do him justice...and it doesn't help that Adrien Brody--as the film's ­other protagonist, a burnt-out gumshoe--is more actorish than the supposed actor.
  98. Idlewild
    Idlewild is diverting enough to suggest all the unexplored avenues in movie musicals.
  99. How to Eat Fried Worms
    It's the worm set pieces that rule, as our hero must carry out a dare to eat ten worms ten ways between sunup and sundown.
  100. World Trade Center
    A true story of courage and survival, yes. But viewing the destruction of the World Trade Center--in a film called World Trade Center--through this kind of prism represents a distinctly Hollywood brand of tunnel vision.
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