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. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    It feels like a rushed journey through a vital, many-pronged debate.
  2. Fraud
    Fraud adds up to little more than a formally provocative but thematically tired stunt.
  3. We Are the Flesh
    Filmgoers who brave We Are the Flesh may regret seeing it. Forgetting it is another matter entirely.
  4. They Call Us Monsters
    Yes, this film is important for its insistence that we see these boys as capable of rehabilitation in the right environment. But it’s the movie’s daring structure and humanity that make it worthy of the Lear name.
  5. The Sunshine Makers
    For a documentary about two men who were big-time drug dealers back in the day, The Sunshine Makers is a quaint, damn-near-adorable bit of nostalgia.
  6. Antarctica: Ice and Sky
    The film itself is more a record than a narrative: proof to the future that, yeah, we knew.
  7. Strike a Pose
    The six surviving members of the original seven are always excellent company, though Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan's film at times seems frustratingly under-researched.
  8. Starless Dreams
    The world needs to see this spare, revelatory film and hear these girls' pained and sometimes proud confessions.
  9. Saving Banksy
    Saving Banksy, in documenting the struggle of art consultant Brian Greif to preserve a single Banksy painting — one of the artist's trademark Che Guevara rats — inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong.
  10. The Bye Bye Man
    If you miss the slasher icons of old and have little patience for the reboot attempts they get periodically, it's nice to see at least a worthy attempt to add to that pantheon.
  11. Split
    McAvoy is impressive as he switches personalities, but never scary or moving; the script gives him many chances to exhibit virtuosity but too few for soulfulness.
  12. Ma
    It's audacious enough to warrant attention.
  13. Staying Vertical
    As always with Guiraudie’s films, Staying Vertical shrewdly (and often hilariously) captures both the seriousness and the absurdity of sex.
  14. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Nowhere has Cohen's inner turmoil been better illuminated than in Tony Palmer's lost-and-found 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire.
  15. The Founder
    The Founder slowly reveals itself as a don't-let-the-devil-into-your-house parable, one that uses all the techniques of inspirational moviemaking to disguise that devil's intentions, even from the devil himself.
  16. Claire in Motion
    Howell and Robinson go all-in on Claire’s measured mourning, and while it may be realistic, that detachment — along with a relentlessly clinical gray-tinged color palette — ultimately bogs down whatever momentum Claire in Motion might be working up to.
  17. Bad Kids of Crestview Academy
    There’s very little fun to be had with the camp of Bad Kids.
  18. Reset
    Reset often seems like Demaizière and Teurlai's attempt to indoctrinate a new generation. Their glorious recruitment film espouses individual expression and athletic grace, while also pinpointing the limits of star power.
  19. The Crash
    Of the many disheartening things about The Crash — a script filled with platitudes, casting an able-bodied actor as a wheelchair-bound tech expert, near-criminal underuse of Maggie Q — the worst is its habit of slapping the audience over the head with symbolism.
  20. Alone in Berlin
    While not the most formally adventurous or action-packed picture, it is a film of compelling urgency.
  21. Everybody Knows... Elizabeth Murray
    Zea's sharp eye for detail is evident when Murray speaks of being inspired by rural upstate New York (where she had a second home), and we see the same bright colors in tree trunks and a barn that are in the fractured, turning, twisted pieces that make up Murray's canvases.
  22. Go North
    Alongside electricity and clean drinking water, one of the casualties of Go North's Armageddon was artistic inspiration.
  23. The Son of Joseph
    Amalric enlivens episodes of limp satire by wholly embracing his unrepentantly self-serving libertine character.
  24. Vince Giordano: There's a Future in the Past
    When the Nighthawks light into an arrangement, they're not aping a record you could spin or download at home — they're attempting to discover what it might have been like to hear those bands of back then blowing the doors off a joint.
  25. Worlds Apart
    Neophyte writer/director Christopher Papakaliatis eventually shows an affinity for filming two people in love, but his actors often lack the chemistry to make us believe that their bond transcends all socioeconomic boundaries.
  26. Underworld: Blood Wars
    Menzies should be just the spark to bring Underworld back to life, but it doesn’t happen. Screenwriter Cory Goodman (The Last Witch Hunter) isolates Marius from Selene and the other major players so that Menzies is left adrift, like a great fighter without a worthy sparring partner.
  27. One Piece Film: Gold
    Only Yesterday it ain't, and you probably already know whether One Piece Film: Gold will make you ecstatic or not.
  28. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
    German Concentration Camps Factual Survey may not teach us today much that Schindler's List, your local rabbi, or a quick Google search can't, but it remains a vital artifact of a time when Dachau and Auschwitz were not synonymous with "genocide."
  29. Railroad Tigers
    With heart, humor and some breathtaking special effects, Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers charms and thrills.
  30. The Ardennes
    In the end, for all the artistry on display, The Ardennes is more admirable than inspiring. It has style, and even suspense, but relatively little imagination.
  31. Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America
    Davis holds forth memorably on the histories of country, blues, and rock 'n' roll. (He played with Chuck Berry.) But neither he nor Accidental Courtesy has much time to consider the scene with the BLM activists, who, in the film's schematic presentation, get depicted as something like a Klan equivalent — just less friendly.
  32. Between Us
    Illingworth aims to capture a vital relationship at a crucial turning point, but Between Us fails because Dianne is half-formed. She's just another projection of male desire and fear, easily led and passive-aggressive, everything but a woman who knows her own mind.
  33. Arsenal
    The main enticement is getting to see Cage go full bore. And he does, gesticulating wildly and assuming an unplaceable accent, but as the only combustible element in this otherwise lackadaisical film, his energy ends up bouncing around with nowhere to go.
  34. Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
    Seeing the film now makes you weep for the passing of both actresses, of course. It also drives home the magnitude of losing Carrie Fisher’s hilarious, acerbic, insightful voice at a time when it seems more vital than ever. You leave the movie wanting so much more of her, it hurts.
  35. Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer?
    Director/producer Eve Marson doesn't characterize Hurwitz as devious or nefarious. Instead, she presents him as a naïve, way-too-trusting schnook — an even more troubling diagnosis.
  36. 20th Century Women
    Despite the movie's title and Bening's central role, women are oddly peripheral.
  37. Paterson
    With each step, the film gains depth. Small variations in routine start to feel monumental, and the briefest encounter can seem like a sign of something great.
  38. Live by Night
    Somewhere inside the 128-minute Live by Night is a reasonably solid 168-minute movie struggling to get out. No, that’s not a typo: You can sense the contours of an absorbing story as writer/director/star Ben Affleck’s slapdash and fragmented assemblage limps along. Most of the pieces are there, but they remain pieces.
  39. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    Without the serious acting talent of its leads, this color-saturated gross-out horror could have devolved into a mess, but The Autopsy of Jane Doe proves imperfect fun even when it starts to play like CSI: Salem.
  40. Hidden Figures
    Hidden Figures, directed by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent), is a canny and necessary crowd-pleaser in which not one moment feels like life itself. But, together, in their superb Hollywood falseness, they accrete into a portrait of our best idea of our national character while still exposing bitter truths about who was allowed to be what back in that age of presumed "greatness."
  41. The Ataxian
    Some of the biking footage is pretty in a generic way; for the most part, we're told rather than shown how astonishing the riders' athletic feats are. More off-putting is the film's reflexive canonization of its subject.
  42. The Bad Kids
    Desert flowers can be hard to spot, but are often distinctly beautiful, and The Bad Kids has them in focus.
  43. Toni Erdmann
    Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature from writer-director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest.
  44. Julieta
    While Almodóvar may move his characters around like a god (or at least a moralist), his attention to detail and his fondness for unexpected bits of tenderness give these people shape and dimension and keep the narrative from becoming schematic.
  45. Assassin's Creed
    The Assassin's Creed movie is about all the parts you might skip in the games.
  46. Short Stay
    The longer exposure to this universe opens up its cruelty and indifference.
  47. Two Lovers and a Bear
    Reckless love, life and death and a talking polar bear (voiced by Gordon Pinsent) are all given equal time but not a trajectory we can follow.
  48. Passengers
    It would be easy to call Passengers out for its troublesome sexual politics or its way-too-predictable genre contrivances, but really, that’d be giving it too much credit. The problem lies deeper, in the fact that it’s a clever set-up in search of an execution.
  49. The Wasted Times
    The majority of the characters murder or are murdered in short order, so finding someone to root for or a storyline to follow in this strangely empty Shanghai (even the train station looks abandoned) is difficult.
  50. Rooted in Peace
    The film is not without its trenchant moments, most rooted not in peace but in science.
  51. Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi
    It's the closest most of us will get to spending time with fellow humans who have extraordinary perspectives on ordinary things — and ordinary perspectives, too.
  52. Solace
    This paranormal cops-versus-serial-killer procedural is never not ridiculous, but it's often entertaining as well.
  53. Fences
    This screen adaptation...is vital because it has the potential to reach marginalized communities. But it also stands as an aching, lyrical, performance-driven masterpiece in its own right, a film so intense and engrossing that movie houses really should screen it with an intermission.
  54. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Rogue One's creators clearly want to move us deeply — several major plot developments should pack an overwhelming emotional wallop — but they haven’t given this talented cast enough to work with. It’s fast, loud, even lovely — and not terribly engaging.
  55. The Hollow Point
    Lyew kills the story with implausible twists, but he does craft some effective, original set pieces.
  56. Neruda
    Referents and identities are always slightly unfixed in Neruda, a film that reaches dizzying, exhilarating velocity by flouting the conventions of its hidebound genre.
  57. Silence
    Not since The Tree of Life has Christianity been explored onscreen in such serious, conflicted terms, but Scorsese has crafted a far less grandiose experience than Terrence Malick did five years ago. Silence is restrained, austere, even ascetic.
  58. Collateral Beauty
    Maybe you'll be at a dinner. Maybe nobody will believe you. Or maybe they will, and someone will say, "Hollywood is terrible at making movies about trauma.”
  59. Office Christmas Party
    As dull and impersonal as a sheaf of open-enrollment insurance forms, Office Christmas Party brings together — and underutilizes — several funny performers from TV shows (Silicon Valley, Veep, SNL) that pinpoint what this dim comedy does not: the specifics of workplace environments and their particular pathologies and joys.
  60. Slash
    It's both funny and enlightening, a nuanced yet strikingly bold look at how teens see themselves, not how adults would like to see them. Parents: Take note. Teens: Relax, you'll figure it out.
  61. Burn Country
    The movie — at first scrappy and strange but an increasingly tough sit as it goes — never fixes its gaze on any singularly compelling idea.
  62. On the Map
    The film mounts a competent offense as it shows how the Israeli squad overcame superior foes on the court and prejudice off of it.
  63. All We Had
    The film’s haphazard episodic structure never coheres.
  64. Frank & Lola
    The film's success depends upon the tension between Frank and Lola, and even this cast can't overcome what feels like an essential disconnect in the central relationship.
  65. The Brand New Testament
    Testament is full of bad jokes (like a man repeatedly throwing himself from great heights to prove he won't die) and, in spite of Groyne's grave, determined presence as Ea, is borderline offensive.
  66. Harry Benson: Shoot First
    In his singular dedication to brilliant work, Benson was rarely home, even on holidays, but he expresses scorn for people more concerned with others' feelings than their images.
  67. Contract to Kill
    Even the most masochistic filmgoers should avoid Waxman and Seagal's latest collaboration, a boring vanity project that doesn't even competently flatter its star.
  68. La La Land
    La La Land...reaches for the stars, doesn't quite grab them all, and then is still kind of OK in the end.
  69. I Am Not Your Negro
    Readers of Baldwin’s work already know that it’s as timely and relevant today as it was when he wrote it decades ago. I Am Not Your Negro powerfully highlights this point for today.
  70. Goodnight Brooklyn - The Story of Death by Audio
    The footage relies more on idealistic testimonies than a cinematic experience showcasing DBA's vitality.
  71. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    This gripping movie is essential viewing for any Irish history buffs who found In the Name of the Father a tad corny.
  72. SiREN
    Bishop isn't afraid to leave the club behind, confidently expanding beyond the seedy premise to become a three-way chase among the bachelor party guys, the club management, and a ferocious supernatural force.
  73. The Duelist
    What's most arresting is the way Mizgirev's vision of 1860s Russia shines through in the perspiration on Champagne goblets, the flicker of candlelight on faces, and the sheen of polished-steel dueling pistols.
  74. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    The doc is gorgeously filmed, well edited, and works in close-up, but the result is more voyeuristic than revealing, except to show that desolation is among those things that cannot be seen or touched.
  75. Things to Come
    As we watch this woman lose her family, her status, and maybe even some part of her pride, we sense both the horror and the intoxication of freedom.
  76. Jackie
    Every scene is visceral. Every note played tells a story.
  77. Behind 'The Cove'
    The movie is not without some appeal, mainly due to the fact that the whaling town of Taiji is beautiful to look at, and principals from the original The Cove, Louie Psihoyos and Ric O'Barry, gamely give interviews to explain that of course they want to hear both sides.
  78. National Bird
    National Bird shows that war will always be hell, even for those who aren’t on the battleground. Kennebeck directs with a cold, distant eye, almost giving her subjects the same treatment they gave all those poor souls they targeted.
  79. Apparition Hill
    It is fascinating seeing people come to a holy place — a place that's more about love and spirituality than religion — with their hearts and minds open, just looking for guidance. And whether you believe in God or not, isn't that what we all want?
  80. The Eyes of My Mother
    I've been watching horror films since I was three years old. They've never given me nightmares. Until now.
  81. Tank 432
    A last-minute flurry of action and a final plot twist aren't enough to redeem this busy but tedious thriller.
  82. Seasons
    The movie starts in an ice age, as I've said, so you can guess where it's all heading, but what you'll remember from it is the vision of a plump ol' bear snoozing in a tree in the rain.
  83. Lion
    Commercial filmmaking still fumbles interiority and moral complexity. So it’s fortunate for the filmmakers that Brierley's book also is thick with the kinds of things that crowdpleasers ace.
  84. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    Okazaki gets close to, but never sheds enough light on, Mifune's elusive personality.
  85. Baden Baden
    Lang is uncommonly assured for a first-time director, capturing her scenes in fluid master takes, rarely cutting from one character to the next, letting things unfold at the pace of in-the-moment human feeling.
  86. Always Shine
    Always Shine is a potent psychological thriller, all right. But it's also a powerful statement on the very industry that produced it.
  87. Miss Sloane
    Miss Sloane, with all its Capitol Hill gloss, sometimes feels too much like a primetime political television drama.
  88. Evolution
    Clinical in the extreme, Evolution aims for open-endedness, but the film, unlike its pint-size protagonists, remains impenetrable.
  89. Bad Santa 2
    God bless Kathy Bates, because she scalds with the darkest, mindfuckiest burns as the ultimate Mommy Dearest. And this script is in dire need of her.
  90. Moana
    It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath everything, is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat.
  91. Allied
    Allied doesn’t deliver any particularly shocking twists or turns; the real surprise here is how much a well-told, well-acted tale can still resonate.
  92. Notes on Blindness
    By having their actors lip-sync along to Hull and his family's own voices, the staged re-creations that so often pad nonfiction films here achieve a peculiar formalist beauty.
  93. Uncle Howard
    A bit disjointed but also vibrant and loving.
  94. The Illinois Parables
    Stratman often juxtaposes static, serene landscape footage with an increasingly agitated soundtrack, arriving at an odd consonance amid so much dissonance.
  95. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden's documentary Ne Me Quitte Pas is a grimly funny deep dive into sustained alcoholism with a classical three-act structure.
  96. Magnus
    Ree makes things easy for people who don't play chess, deftly pacing Carlsen's triumphs and failures and milking the suspense as "the Mozart of chess" employs his intuition to win, in an age when many players depend on computers to hone their skills.
  97. Life on the Line
    The country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.
  98. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    It's like an odd storybook you'd find in the attic and have trouble putting down — the more quixotic Lian's journey becomes, the more you want her to see it through to the bitter end.
  99. Blood on the Mountain
    As consistently depressing as this movie is, it thankfully shows you that before you dismiss the denizens of an entire region as poor white trash, you should listen to their story.
  100. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Sondheim, Prince, and Furth discuss their creative processes and why they think the show failed. These stories make up the bulk of this film, which is sure to satisfy theater wonks, Sondheim fans, curious moviegoers and lovers of Broadway. All others need not apply.
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