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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  1. Whitney
    By the time Whitney winds to an end, that massive talent feels like a dangerously valuable resource, one that even the people who were supposed to protect Houston couldn’t resist exploiting.
  2. 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.
  3. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    Director Stephen Nomura Schible’s understated and moving Coda does a fine job of presenting the composer’s remarkable career as a revelatory journey.
  4. 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.
  5. Under the Tree
    The first scenes are hilarious, all sharp surprises and adeptly staged physical comedy. But then the story turns, the way that milk does, curdling into tragedy.
  6. The First Purge
    The First Purge actually pulls back somewhat on that sense of bloodthirsty anticipation. The violence here feels more tragic than ever, and it’s also some time coming; when Purge Night does start, the killing doesn’t begin immediately.
  7. 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.
  8. Incident In a Ghostland
    The grisly post-torture-porn horror flick Incident in a Ghostland serves as an effectively punishing critique of the relentless misogyny that has become a staple of every stupid Texas Chain Saw Massacre knockoff that pits sexually active women against emotionally disturbed serial killers.
  9. Never Steady, Never Still
    Usually a tart-tongued scene-stealer, Henderson is devoid of her trademark hauteur in this remarkable performance.
  10. Set It Up
    While the plot is familiar, Katie Silberman’s witty script plays with expectations.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Love, Cecil
    Even though it paints too rosy a picture, Love, Cecil fills out history with sparkling imagery.
  14. 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.
  15. Black Water
    Criminal negligence of Dolph is far from Black Water’s only sin — there’s also the sluggish pacing, murky musical score, and somnambulant lead — but it might be its most egregious.
  16. Hover
    Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.
  17. The Cakemaker
    The Cakemaker is more of a petit four than a belly bomb, but it’s striking in its particularity.
  18. This Is Congo
    McCabe served as cinematographer, and his images here vary from striking to scarifying to magnificent. But his film’s power comes from its voices.
  19. Custody
    Legrand demonstrates great skill as a tactician in this closing third, but his overarching framework for Custody — with its considerable reliance on is-he-or-isn’t-he uncertainty — demands that he sacrifice interior perspectives.
  20. Winter Brothers
    Pálmason can occasionally get bogged down in his ambiguous leanings.... But many moments attest to the high ceiling of Pálmason’s abilities.
  21. Dark River
    It’s in Alice’s battle with her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) that the film is at its most compelling.
  22. 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.
  23. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Del Toro and Moner say everything that’s needed with pained, bewildered eyes. Meanwhile, Graver speaks with relentless American cynicism. He is both funny and unnerving, and maybe more unnerving because he’s being funny.
  24. Mrs. Hyde
    The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.
  25. 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.
  26. Damsel
    Pattinson and Wasikowska deserve better material than the Zellners’ head-scratchingly lazy jokes.
  27. Spiral
    Fairrie’s unfocused examination of anti-Semitism illuminates little.
  28. Araby
    A soundtrack of folk/country classics takes the edge off, but make no mistake: This is a beautiful bummer, giving voice to someone who’s barely a number, but only to remind us that most of us are OK not thinking about numbers at all.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
  31. Beach House
    The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.
  32. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Rather than epic or thrilling, justice becomes an errand, an extension of domestic work.
  33. China Salesman
    China Salesman has got to be one of the most baffling, expensive pats on the back China has ever given itself.
  34. SuperFly
    For all its pulpy, genre-movie intentions, SuperFly is virtually crippled by its own ludicrousness. It incites more giggles than gasps.
  35. 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.
  36. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Through his efforts, McKay captures a genuine sense of the bittersweet reality of the American dream and the people who give up their only weekly day of rest just to keep it alive.
  37. 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.”
  38. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
  39. 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.
  40. Gabriel and the Mountain
    The location photography does much of the film’s heavy lifting, especially visits to Mount Kilimanjaro and Mulanje’s Sapitwa Peak. (The rumor is that a young J.R.R. Tolkien visited there, and Barbosa leans into this a bit for the big finish.) The star of the show, however, is the dialogue between cultures.
  41. Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
    If Five Seasons is the only opportunity viewers have to experience Oudolf’s artistry up close, Piper’s cinematography (whether through a sunny haze or a snowy blanket) and contemplative storytelling have done these gardens justice.
  42. Eating Animals
    As a work of sustained, thoughtful inquiry, Eating Animals is a bust; as a reminder of what we should all be thinking about, though, it’s searing. After seeing it, pretending not to know is impossible.
  43. 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.
  44. Incredibles 2
    Incredibles 2 is at its best — which is to say, its funniest and most exciting — when it tackles the internal dynamics of the family itself.
  45. Nancy
    I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.
  46. The Valley
    In her feature debut, Kariat has touched upon important themes — the immigrant experience, ageism in tech, the performance of traditional family roles, and the toll of depression — but the way she has combined them too often feels slapdash.
  47. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    In his astute look at the artistry and business of food, de Maistre makes the case that haute cuisine serves the same function as haute couture, creating an indelible experience while encouraging new ideas to filter through the industry.
  48. 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.
  49. Hereditary
    In Aster’s story, as in life, the devil is in the details. As the film goes on, these details accumulate, coalesce, and then hang heavy over the characters.
  50. Bernard and Huey
    As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.
  51. The Workers Cup
    Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.
  52. Hearts Beat Loud
    The real reason to see this film is Kiersey Clemons’s Sam and her romance with aspiring artist Rose (Sasha Lane).
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. The Tale
    The Tale is a powerful and clear-eyed examination of sexual abuse and the shifting sands of one’s own memories.
  56. 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.
  57. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Watching this movie is like freebasing sincerity — a scarce resource in our current entertainment hellscape. It’ll give you warm fuzzies for days.
  58. 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.
  59. The Texture of Falling
    While it’s obvious Allred wanted to make a possibly autobiographical, blatantly meta take on how insane young adults get when they fall in love, The Texture of Falling ends up being one baffling, infuriatingly pretentious exercise in indie filmmaking.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
  62. 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.
  63. American Animals
    Rather than plumb the apparent sociopathy that gripped these young men, Layton toys with unreliable narration and the vagaries of collective memory.
  64. Rodin
    The real Rodin imbued his clay with reverent, lusty life, while Doillon merely offers a buffet of nude day players.
  65. Upgrade
    Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.
  66. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it.
  67. The Wild Pear Tree
    Ceylan delivers what might be his funniest, most politically poignant work yet. It also happens to be achingly personal.
  68. 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.
  69. The Misandrists
    As in many of his films, The Misandrists finds the oppressed themselves oppressing others, a warning among all the dizzy outrageousness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who We Are Now
    While Nicholson’s onscreen, it’s impossible to pay heed to anything but her. She scorches the film with her barely bottled ferocity and vulnerability.
  71. Summer 1993
    The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.
  72. The Gospel According to André
    The Talley of before the election presents himself as a man who believes anything is possible if you swallow your anger, work hard enough, and sacrifice all — especially your chance at love — and the Talley of after seems to worry that much of that progress has proved an illusion.
  73. 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.
  74. 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.”
  75. Burning
    Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.
  76. 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.
  77. Happy as Lazzaro
    Lazzaro Felice has genuine sweep and grandeur, and Rohrwacher’s most impressive feat here might be her ability to find just the right narrative and emotional distance for each section of the story, as it moves from rustic drama to picaresque journey to more pointed social allegory; we’re always given just enough information to understand and appreciate the characters’ interactions and motivations.
  78. 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.
  79. Book Club
    Even though it follows the map of every romcom before it, Holderman’s film still offers the too-rare chance to marvel at just how good these women are at their craft, how easily they inhabit the bodies and lives of other people.
  80. Cold War
    Narratively, the music in Cold War is a means to an end; emotionally, however, it’s everything, often expressing what the characters cannot say themselves.
  81. Climax
    Climax isn’t so much about the inevitability of chaos, but about the sadness of watching something beautiful fall apart. And it is never less than electrifying.
  82. BlacKkKlansman
    It’s alternatingly comic, heroic, tragic, horrifying, ridiculous, dead serious, clear-eyed, and confused; it shifts into moments of documentary and even essay film, but it’s also one of Lee’s more entertaining and vibrantly constructed works. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie exploit its tonal mismatches so voraciously and purposefully.
  83. Dark Crimes
    This is one very ugly movie at its heart, not for how Englert photographed it but for how bleak and unrelenting the violence is — even that ending can’t dig Dark Crimes out of its dark hole.
  84. The House That Jack Built
    As a longtime admirer of the director’s work, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but the most shocking thing I found about The House That Jack Built is how tedious it is. A shame, because The House That Jack Built feels like a genuinely sincere attempt on the filmmaker’s part to wrestle with the legacy of his creation.
  85. Disobedience
    As a whole, the film is directionless, with few individual character-study scenes making it compelling enough. It’s almost as though there are miniature, worthy films within this film, and watching for those can be a thrill.
  86. 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.”
  87. Carter & June
    Ultimately, this wannabe dark comedy swindles viewers out of a thrilling caper.
  88. Sollers Point
    Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.
  89. 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.
  90. 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.
  91. First Reformed
    The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing.
  92. Deadpool 2
    Rather than face its own moral incoherence, Deadpool 2 blinks.
  93. Lives Well Lived
    Full of such bon mots, the documentary is the epitome of positive thinking, perhaps the closest thing America has to a state religion. Still, like social worker Wendy Lustbader’s book What’s Worth Knowing, which took a similar tack years ago, it’s an opportunity to connect with souls who’ve been around more than a few blocks.
  94. What Haunts Us
    It’s a painfully familiar story in the era of #MeToo and the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal, with the added agony that parents, teachers, and school officials were, to varying degrees, complicit.
  95. One October
    Shuman’s sprightly, restless film trails the sprightly, restless WFMU host Clay Pigeon through the boroughs as he checks in with the people he meets.
  96. 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.
  97. Measure of a Man
    The portentously titled Measure of a Man is at once an escapist fantasy and sensitive portrait of adolescent transformation.
  98. Always at The Carlyle
    A tone-deaf celebration of Manhattan’s ritzy Carlyle Hotel.
  99. Anything
    Early absorbs Freda’s pain into his own, and McNeil builds a delicate idyll from their defiant embrace of unexpected second chances.
  100. Born Guilty
    This movie is just a stockpiled compendium of terrible decisions, both behind and in front of the camera.
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