Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,162 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Hooligan Sparrow
Lowest review score: 0 Followers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,708 out of 11162
  2. Mixed: 4,553 out of 11162
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11162
11162 movie reviews
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    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
    Viewers who haven’t studied their Neon Genesis DVD box sets in advance will find the plot incomprehensible—Old Testament gibberish mixed with political intrigue at the global defense agency headed by Shinji’s aloof father. But the sentiments are clear: “I guess I want Dad to praise me,” says our wavering hero. And his courtship of Asuka is downright charming.
  2. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Wages of Fear rides for a cheap fall. Clouzot has copped out with cheap irony. [25 May 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jul 1, 2020
  3. Destination Wedding
    Levin at times seems rather too taken with the verbosity of his own dialogue, but here and there, his quips and situations match perfectly with his actors’ sensibilities.
  4. Active Measures
    Active Measures is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the mind. By coming on so strong, so fevered, Bryan achieves the dubious feat of making his host of documented facts, reasonable inferences, and alarming subjects for further research all seem seem less persuasive than if they had been presented more soberly.
  5. Inventing Tomorrow
    We’re privy to the students’ backgrounds and get a tiny glimpse into their futures, but the film skims a lot in favor of showcasing the ISEF gathering. Still, as in the spelling-bee doc, these are moving stories of nerdy children, kids who are pragmatic about the forward march of industry yet believe societies can, and must, find cleaner ways to advance.
  6. Operation Finale
    Rather than the cagey, caged mastermind who later would play dumb at trial, this Eichmann is just another movie bad guy — and Operation Finale is just another movie.
  7. Pick of the Litter
    What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?
  8. What Keeps You Alive
    Minihan’s ambitions are towering, so it’s only right to note that he doesn’t quite get there. The ideas, even the emotions, don’t develop and grow.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot to Trot
    The cameras caress landscapes, skylines, domesticity, and sequined dancers with equal fervor, but one longs for more of what a competition official calls “a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.”
  10. Arizona
    Director Jonathan Watson’s super-violent Arizona is a well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy with one tiny spark of warmth — Rosemarie DeWitt’s performance.
  11. Searching
    Though the script by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian is taut and surprising, I’ve felt more absorbed in an episode of Murder, She Wrote than I did in this film, because, there, it’s story and performance that we’re invited to savor, not just tech and technique.
  12. Songwriter
    Songwriter sells the “nice boy” bit well, but if you aren’t already a fan, it eventually becomes tiresome. There are occasional glimmers of a real person (wishing to topple Adele, laying down a “no Snapchat” rule at his house, etc.) but rarely is a feature film so bluntly just marketing.
  13. Memoir of War
    While clearly adoring Duras’s work, Finkiel doesn’t credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience.
  14. The Little Mermaid
    The effect is like strolling through a lovely display of early-twentieth-century Americana, admiring the streamlined beauty of mass-produced objects that mimicked the handiwork of artisans, all while encountering a cast of bubbly historical park re-enactors.
  15. Down a Dark Hall
    Ultimately, Down a Dark Hall falls victim to familiar teen horror tropes: a brooding lead with a heart of gold, predictable jump scares, wincingly bad romantic tension, and obvious villains.
  16. Do You Trust this Computer?
    The doc never goes much deeper than the information and arguments on AI that can currently be found in the Sunday papers.
  17. The Meg
    Turteltaub is too buoyant for horror — the deaths and danger never sink in.
  18. BuyBust
    Though the film becomes a slog, it has a saving grace in Curtis and Vera’s performances, which serve as neat complements to each other in temperament as well as fighting styles.
  19. Elizabeth Harvest
    Gutierrez works some twists on the familiar premise, and one standout thrill of a chase scene employs Brian De Palma’s signature split screens. But as it nears the two-hour mark, the film becomes exhausting, shedding very little light on the futuristic implications of the story.
  20. Calling All Earthlings
    There isn’t much marijuana use in Jonathan Berman’s documentary Calling All Earthlings, but its elliptical, ramshackle structure could make one question the merits of legalization.
  21. Night Comes On
    All through the film, you pray it doesn’t go down the bleak routes that films like this usually go — and, most of the time, it does. Night Comes On is an assured first shot from Spiro but, damn, I couldn’t wait for this fucking thing to be over.
  22. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Most of the gags in this pandering spoof are about their own schematic nature — they’re jokes about how you’re smarter than the jokes.
  23. Dead Night
    Crampton’s performance, the squelchy sound design, and spurts of blood provide occasional jolts, but Dead Night ends up being muddled, never committing to either solemn supernatural horror or its elements of camp.
  24. Killer Bees
    Unfortunately, the narrative focus constantly shifts and never coalesces.
  25. Hot Summer Nights
    Elijah Bynum’s messy debut film is only bearable thanks to Chalamet’s charisma.
  26. Puzzle
    Since it’s hard to buy the character, it’s hard to buy the story, no matter how good Macdonald is.
  27. Generation Wealth
    By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.
  28. Occupation
    The cast, led by Dan Ewing, Temuera Morrison, and Stephany Jacobsen, delivers sturdy character work, and the action is clear and well-executed, but none of it ventures beyond well-trod ground.
  29. Unfriended: Dark Web
    For all its inventive and impressive technique, the film lacks fun; a lot of folks, myself included, need very little reminding that the Internet is a threat and that terrible men are actively out there abducting and terrorizing girls and women for lulz.
  30. The Equalizer 2
    It’s hard to appreciate the hero’s crafty planning when we can’t really make out what he’s crafted.
  31. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    If there’s one thing that Van Sant does very well here, it’s creating a humanizing anchor at the center of the story. Despite some distracting narrative choices and sketchy character development (especially with Mara’s character, who, of course, turns into a love interest), the film does eventually find its footing.
  32. Path of Blood
    Documentary is an inherently tricky field, requiring objectivity, but Path of Blood leans so far into it that any sense of narrative or purpose dissolves.
  33. The Night Eats the World
    Unfortunately, the best and worst thing about director Dominique Rocher and his two co-writers’ scenario is its familiarity.
  34. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    For all its frantic eager-to-please-ness, Hotel Transylvania 3 doesn’t quite achieve the blissfully reliable drumbeat of hilarious throwaway gags that the earlier films managed.
  35. Fireworks
    Where Your Name’s star-crossed protagonists were fully formed characters who held equal weight in the narrative, Fireworks is very much told from the male point of view, and Nazuna seldom rises above “free-spirited object of desire.”
  36. Bleeding Steel
    The closest comparison for this film is 2017’s joyfully schlocky Beyond Skyline, though that boasted far more original set pieces. Bleeding Steel seems content to rehash old ones, cutting and pasting Chan into familiar scenes, with the welcome exception of one battle that takes place atop the Sydney Opera House — but I’ll be damned if I could figure out why or how they got there.
  37. A Skin So Soft
    Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté holds up a shallow mirror to the world of bodybuilding in the underwhelming experimental documentary A Skin So Soft.
  38. Distorted
    If there’s one thing I can say for this movie, it’s that the cast is delivering, even if the story they’re in cannot.
  39. Woman Walks Ahead
    The good intentions it carries out to the plains don’t make up for the tentative falseness at its center, a hero who could herself benefit from a portraitist’s clear vision.
  40. Boundaries
    Where Feste best succeeds in Boundaries isn’t in the father-daughter relationship, which finds her straining for a tight resolution, but in the mother-son one, where the two actors vibe easily and persuasively off each other.
  41. Love, Cecil
    Even though it paints too rosy a picture, Love, Cecil fills out history with sparkling imagery.
  42. Rock Rubber 45s
    Bobbito’s storytelling is infectious, and the scenes of community outreach are heartwarming. May all such vanity projects have such a friendly beat.
  43. Hover
    Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.
  44. Winter Brothers
    Pálmason can occasionally get bogged down in his ambiguous leanings.... But many moments attest to the high ceiling of Pálmason’s abilities.
  45. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    It’s disjointed, and cluttered, but it’s also entertaining in spurts. Is that enough? Just about, and not quite. Ant-Man and the Wasp overloads and underachieves, but it also never entirely squanders the first film’s good will.
  46. Mrs. Hyde
    The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.
  47. The King
    Honestly, I’d probably love this film’s wandering spirit and Elvis-is-everywhere philosophizing if it were half as fast or twice as long, if it pinned any thought down long enough to really TCB. Instead, it’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs Seventies stage banter.
  48. Damsel
    Pattinson and Wasikowska deserve better material than the Zellners’ head-scratchingly lazy jokes.
  49. Spiral
    Fairrie’s unfocused examination of anti-Semitism illuminates little.
  50. The Catcher Was a Spy
    Lewin’s film is directionless, so muddied by Berg’s bloated résumé that the payoff never comes. Berg was an enigmatic and underappreciated Renaissance Man, and we leave the film not especially enlightened.
  51. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    The film is about being overwhelmed by Los Angeles, its sprawling indifference, but also about finding your place in it — and even, at times, its welcoming warmth.
  52. Believer
    A better doc would have used its superstar lead as a linchpin, structuring it so that he’s absorbed into the cause, gradually upstaged by those directly affected by sanctioned bigotry. Instead, director Don Argott (of the more dynamic music docs Rock School and Last Days Here) fills the running time with borderline Akerman-esque mundanity.
  53. The Yellow Birds
    What Moors offers that’s new is a kind of unfolding mystery, as we come to find what really happened to Murphy in the war zone. Too bad that the pacing is botched and that the whole narrative becomes one long dirge of “and then, and then, and then.”
  54. Straight Into a Storm
    The messy but charming concert doc Straight Into a Storm works best if you treat unfocused on-camera interviews with the members of Rhode Island–based folk/grunge-rock group Deer Tick like an unintrospective but affectionate video memoir of the group’s rise to alt-rock prominence.
  55. Tag
    No matter how much they remind us that this is all based on a true story, at heart Tag is still a dumb, goofy Hollywood comedy with big stars running around making glorious asses of themselves. It’d be a pretty good one, too, were it not so afraid to embrace its essence.
  56. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    The fact that you can sense Westwood’s disillusionment with the documentary project while watching it creates some interesting tension, but director Lorna Tucker doesn’t fully exploit it or turn it into meta commentary.
  57. Hearts Beat Loud
    The real reason to see this film is Kiersey Clemons’s Sam and her romance with aspiring artist Rose (Sasha Lane).
  58. Hotel Artemis
    Whether it’s the too-harried pacing or too many central people vying for attention, the film’s heart never quite coalesces. Seizing it is like trying to grab a cloud. Pearce seems to want this movie to be both a neon pulp plot-heavy piece and a character-driven drama, and there’s just not enough time in a single film for all of it to work.
  59. Ocean's 8
    Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast.
  60. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    It looks and feels familiar, and in an era where studio filmmaking has increasingly become an extension of brand management, that should make a lot of people happy. But I can’t say it made me particularly happy.
  61. A Kid Like Jake
    Howard, who is trans himself, approaches the film with sensitivity, but it ends up feeling like a conversation to be continued, not resolved. At least there’s some classic Claire Danes crying.
  62. Breath
    If only Baker and the gang had fleshed out horny hero Pikelet’s journey with the same earthy details that make Pikelet and Loonie’s friendship seem real enough to be worth mourning.
  63. Yadvi - The Dignified Princess
    The Singhs aren’t able to make Yadvi more distinctive than any other women whose fate is controlled by the hubris of men, or who’ve lost the wealth their titles once afforded them.
  64. The Doctor from India
    Sometimes a filmmaker is so taken with a subject that a documentary fizzles into hagiography, a problem of Jeremy Frindel’s The Doctor From India, a film about Vasant Lad, who brought the ancient Indian healing practice of Ayurveda to the U.S. in the late 1970s.
  65. American Animals
    Rather than plumb the apparent sociopathy that gripped these young men, Layton toys with unreliable narration and the vagaries of collective memory.
  66. Rodin
    The real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.
  67. Mary Shelley
    Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter. Its Mary Shelley may walk and talk, kiss and rage, but she has no more of the true spark of life than that specimen in that lab.
  68. In Darkness
    The first third of the story then presents her like a typical Hitchcock ingenue before branching out into a promisingly ambitious mystery. Too bad that story ultimately loses focus and its protagonist’s point of view.
  69. Sorry Angel
    Honoré’s scenes feel at once composed and curiously mundane, as if he’s trying to take the precision of his earlier work and mix it with a more realist impulse — or, if we’re being less charitable, as if he’s trying to will his aesthetic into something more “mature.”
  70. Under the Silver Lake
    Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that’s not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement.
  71. On Chesil Beach
    A movie can and should stand on its own, of course, but it still needs to find a way to give weight and scope to this intimate miniature. And while Dominic Cooke’s film succeeds at much of what it attempts, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a dimension missing.
  72. That Summer
    Offhandedly, in a movie that itself is offhanded to a fault, Little Edie cuts to the core of the whole Grey Gardens phenomenon during one of her moments alone with the camera. “[To] dig up the past, I think, is about the most cruel thing anybody can do.”
  73. Carter & June
    Ultimately, this wannabe dark comedy swindles viewers out of a thrilling caper.
  74. The Most Unknown
    Much of the film is beautiful — hot springs, the ocean’s depths, and deep space are photogenic — although Cheney preserves a few too many mundane “hello, how do you do”s, and the science isn’t deeply explained.
  75. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.
  76. Deadpool 2
    Rather than face its own moral incoherence, Deadpool 2 blinks.
  77. The Last Horsemen of New York
    Mary Haverstick and Michele Mercure’s documentary is the kind of movie that tests the limits of subjectivity when it comes to documentary filmmaking, as it comes down so squarely on the side of the carriage drivers that it begins to feel like a conspiracy thriller.
  78. Lu Over the Wall
    Even by anime standards, Lu Over the Wall is best enjoyed by disconnecting your logic circuits and just enjoying the pretty colors and sounds.
  79. The Seagull
    Onstage, we get to choose which face to regard, to watch each hard truth or unexamined lie crash against each character’s carefully maintained set of illusions. Here, we mostly see one face at a time. Those faces are grand enough that this Seagull still has much to recommend.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    I Had Nowhere to Go
    Mekas, who has built his career on recording his memories, seems like the ideal subject for Gordon. It’s just that Nowhere to Go is unilluminating; it doesn’t have the theoretical puckishness of 24 Hour Psycho or Zidane. I Had Nowhere to Go might prove more effective as an installation piece, where people can drift in and out at intervals, but as a 100-minute film, it’s just tedious.
  81. Beast
    Revisiting Beast may prove more satisfying than just visiting once. The first time through, the film simply proves too successful at capturing the listless ennui it’s depicting.
  82. Everything Else (Todo Lo Demás)
    Almada deserves credit for creating a portrait of a character so often passed over onscreen: Doña is a woman in her sixties with a decidedly unglamorous life. But the relentless darkness here (both figuratively and literally — some of the shots of Doña in her home are shrouded in blackness) often proves more alienating than illuminating.
  83. Backstabbing for Beginners
    The film is less a distillation of the real Soussan’s memoir than a radical simplification of it.
  84. Duck Butter
    I’m still hopeful about Shawkat’s screenwriting career — especially since her performance always feels so genuine, adding substance to an otherwise deflated story. But other than the script’s daring premise, the material doesn’t rise up to the potential she hints at here: a comedy of ingenuity that takes advantage of Shawkat’s fearless frankness.
  85. This Is Our Land
    At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.
  86. Kodachrome
    Netflix’s Kodachrome is good fall-asleep-with-the-TV-on fare, and I mean you should snooze out immediately unless you want to be subjected to a criminally mediocre family drama.
  87. Little Pink House
    Like Erin Brockovich for eminent domain, Little Pink House does well to explain the thorny legal issue at its center without getting bogged down in minutiae. Although Susette’s story unfolds in small-town Connecticut, Balaker hammers the point home: This could happen anywhere.
  88. Godard Mon Amour
    Although writer-director Hazanavicius based the biopic on Wiazemsky’s memoir, Un An Après (One Year Later), Wiazemsky gets portrayed as a passive observer, a minor character in her own story.
  89. The Devil and Father Amorth
    It’s stuck between earnest examination of a case and exploitative hustle — and is unlikely to please the audiences interested in either.
  90. I Feel Pretty
    Schumer remains likable, and the film has its moments, but there are so many excellent opportunities here for poignant cringe comedy that more often than not I Feel Pretty feels like a missed opportunity — and a slow, ponderous one at that.
  91. Borg vs. McEnroe
    The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology.
  92. Rampage
    Compared to Rampage, King Kong and Godzilla have James Brown levels of soul. Peyton has just made another movie about the Rock running through rubble.
  93. The Broken Tower
    The Broken Tower is sincere, amateurish, and misguided.
  94. Wildling
    The attention paid to images does not translate to character development, story, or dialogue, leaving little emotional resonance, while making me seriously wonder if the men telling these stories understand much at all about female sexuality.
  95. Flock of Four
    It’s atmospheric, and all the music is lovely, but unfortunately nostalgia can only do so much of the heavy lifting.
  96. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    The script is only lightly didactic and well-paced, and it nods toward the adults in the audience mainly by not insulting their intelligence.
  97. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    Cut out thirty minutes, and this might have been a lean, mean Eighties-thriller throwback blessed with a killer lead performance.
  98. ACORN and the Firestorm
    ACORN and the Firestorm fumbles with the media story, offering cable-news talking heads in montage but not digging deeply into how the story spread — or why elected Democrats believed they had to shut Acorn down. That sense of fumbling shapes the film.
  99. The Heart of Nuba
    If Catena has flaws, filmmaker Kenneth Carlson declines to feature them, perhaps because they’ve been friends since their Brown University days thirty years ago. Still, the doctor has earned the adulation, and a visit to a leper colony shows why.
  100. Big Fish & Begonia
    Liang and Zhang’s young heroes would be far more universal if they were just credibly hormonal.
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