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. Ali and Nino
    It's all very tasteful, if not terribly exciting.
  2. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    In 120 frames a second, both Alwyn and Stewart came off as hopelessly stilted; at 24 frames, they breathe with life. But lose the flicker, and you lose the spell.
  3. Nocturnal Animals
    Ford has given us a surprisingly candid peek into the creative process, into the strange little hurts — perceived or real, toxic or justified — that make up the soul of an artist. No, we may not like what we find in there. But I’m not sure he does, either.
  4. Disturbing the Peace
    Directors Stephen Apkon and Andrew Young reverse the usual act of border-crossing, and they do not differentiate between Arabic and Hebrew, allowing their subjects to switch between the two and subtitling both in English, signaling that the film is a space for listening, for trying to understand.
  5. The Love Witch
    Anna Biller's ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love.
  6. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    Fantastic Beasts is often lovely to look at, at times even stirring, but there's very little to hold on to, story- or character-wise.
  7. Manchester by the Sea
    A poignant, surprisingly hilarious depiction of death, grieving, and small-town life.
  8. The Edge of Seventeen
    The scenes that work just make me ache for more of them, signaling that if Craig finds her groove, she’ll be a force to reckon with.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Uncle Kent 2
    Uncle Kent 2 is an even more rambling ball of nonsense than the original, which at least had its feet planted in reality.
  10. Come and Find Me
    Most like-minded films spend approximately twenty minutes on the same material covered by the entirety of Come and Find Me — a fact that leaves this mystery from writer/director Zack Whedon (brother of Joss) feeling insufferably drawn out.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Asperger's Are Us
    The team's own comedy is an acquired taste. You'll appreciate these dudes for making the effort to literally break out of their comfort zones in order to change people's views on autism. However, there is a strong possibility you may not laugh at or with them during this whole doc.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreamland
    Schwartzman's film is bawdy in its exploration of sexual fantasies, some of them extravagant. But it's a safer movie than its slick, retro look and subject matter would have you believe.
  13. The Anthropologist
    The film is saved by its illuminating — if heartbreaking — examination of isolated locales rarely seen on film.
  14. Almost Christmas
    Writer-director Talbert similarly follows formula for the overcrowded and overplotted Noel-season movie, ladling out too-generous portions of churchiness, multigenerational dance-off, and Mars vs. Venus sermonizing.
  15. Arrival
    For most of its running time, Arrival is entrancing, intimate, and moving — a sci-fi movie that looks not up at the stars but rather deep within.
  16. Don't Call Me Son
    A hazy drift through vast subjects — the fluidity of adolescence and the fragility of family — Anna Muylaert's Don't Call Me Son works best when it goes small.
  17. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.
  18. Loving
    Loving downplays the historical significance of its subject in favor of a quiet humanity.
  19. Hands of Stone
    The bouts are all muddles lacking sustained choreography or a sense of trajectory, with crowd-reaction shots and sports-announcer voice-over carrying the slack.
  20. All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone
    All Governments Lie is worthy testimony that many journalists are in it for the truth.
  21. You've Been Trumped Too
    If you don't know who to vote for by now, whatever you do, don't see this movie. It's only going to tell you bad things. We're having fun here, right?
  22. Trash Fire
    Bates (Suburban Gothic) plays with horror tropes, juggling black comedy and suspense in scenes that tease a gory release but ultimately only emphasize how much members of the creative class can underestimate their backward kin.
  23. Rainbow Time
    Lynskey is a luminous counterpoint to Phillips's energetic earthiness, but they can't lift a story with so much killjoy ballast.
  24. We Are X
    Die-hard X Japan fans may enjoy seeing Yoshiki talk about his past, but everyone else will leave We Are X wondering who X Japan is.
  25. Oasis: Supersonic
    As a music comedy, this is up there with Popstar, but with better-defined characters. It's thick with tales of brawls, breakups, stage-walkoffs, busted hotel rooms and astonishing rudeness.
  26. Inferno
    Take the Dan Brown out of a Dan Brown movie and all you’re left with is Tom Hanks jogging in mild irritation.
  27. Trolls
    Trolls is a pretty standard piece of subpar DreamWorks product: loud and shiny, more than a tad frantic despite a generic set of characters.
  28. Hacksaw Ridge
    As a filmmaker, Gibson understands that there is something fundamentally irreconcilable about Doss’ love of peace, his abject and visceral revulsion at battle and a war movie’s embrace of violence. Somehow, the director has made a film that can contain that contradiction — that remains irreducible. He breaks his own movie, and somehow the movie is better for it.
  29. Doctor Strange
    It's not all that strange, but it's restlessly arresting and always technically impressive. Unlike most studio franchise fantasies, Doctor Strange rewards the eye rather than assaults it.
  30. Finding Babel
    This lit-doc travelogue gains in power, insight, and urgency as it journeys.
  31. A Billion Lives
    Demonstrating an egregious contempt for science, Biebert and his subjects attack the call for research into the effects of electronic cigarettes as nothing more than shilling for tax collectors and Big Pharma.
  32. By Sidney Lumet
    It's workmanlike and impassioned, but ultimately preaching to the choir.
  33. Gimme Danger
    The frontman's reminiscences, though, are invariably eloquent, witty, and often moving.
  34. The Unspoken
    This film is in dire need of some atmosphere and a rewrite to make the twists work.
  35. Portrait of a Garden
    Meditative in its slowness and exquisite beauty, Portrait of a Garden is more than a fine documentary — it's a balm for the soul.
  36. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
    I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is the very best of gothic horror, that which needles at your insecure core and whispers in your ear what you already suspected: You will never be all right.
  37. In a Valley of Violence
    A slow approach requires careful atmosphere-building, and these days West is actually stronger at writing funny dialogue than he is at creating atmosphere.
  38. Fire at Sea
    The breach between these two worlds is part of Rosi’s formal and moral gambit.
  39. 31
    Rob Zombie can do better than 31. For proof, just watch any other Rob Zombie movie.
  40. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Like The Conjuring and the many immersive spook-house thrillers inspired by it, Origin of Evil demands and rewards attentiveness, inviting scrutiny of its frames, study of its negative space.
  41. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    There’s no mystery, and the action is thoroughly disposable, but what works this time around are the interactions between Reacher and Turner, mostly thanks to the efforts of Smulders, who brings an impassioned frustration to her character.
  42. Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    The biggest surprise: Older, un-messianic, and mostly eschewing cute stunts, Moore somehow makes his one-man show seem almost humble. It plays less like "I'm still here!" attention-seeking than it does a concerned citizen's act of hope.
  43. Before the Flood
    It's far more convincing — and enraging — when focused on the lives of real people. In these heartbreaking moments, Before the Flood grows more aggressive in its imagery and argumentation, becoming the climate-change documentary Americans need to see.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Autumn Lights
    Autumn Lights examines love while embracing that philosophy of melancholia, and it manages to do so without plunging into tragedy or melodrama. Like the remote region of Iceland where it’s set, the film offers a quiet, thoughtful escape.
  45. The Terrorizers (1986)
    Yang keeps all of the balls in the air, resisting definitive answers and conjuring a lean-in sense of intimate dread. Practically every sneaky, off-center image seems to hold a clue, but the takeaway is failed connections and disastrous modern discontent.
  46. A Stray
    Writer-director Musa Syeed has conjured a drama rich with incident...but most of the turns of plot feel organic, ours to discover, as long as we're paying attention.
  47. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    It’s as if somebody wrote out the basic setup, figured they would flesh out the character bits and plot twists and jokes later … and then never got around to it. It’s dispiriting and infuriating all at once.
  48. The Uncondemned
    The film is a riveting feat of editing considering the material, the legalistic conundrums, and the profusion of detail.
  49. It Had to Be You
    The film takes a few jumps in time and employs some mildly experimental techniques. Unfortunately, most of the humor doesn't stick.
  50. The Whole Truth
    This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.
  51. King Cobra
    The unique setting aside, there's just not much to sink your fangs into.
  52. Moonlight
    A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins's wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: "Who is you, man?" The beauty of Jenkins's second feature...radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions.
  53. Creepy
    What's the opposite of a jump scare? Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has mastered it in the superb Creepy, revealing the upsetting details with such slow-build subtlety that you don't notice your skin crawling until it's halfway out the door.
  54. The David Dance
    Scimé and Adkins have real chemistry, but the script is forever cutting back to quirky, talkative Katie, and any chance of exploring the complexities of a relationship between two men, one of whom is intractable, is lost.
  55. The Red Pill
    Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016.
  56. Jack Goes Home
    There might be a good story somewhere deep inside this tangled narrative, but Dekker seems more focused on creating a succession of "scary" images than he is on that.
  57. Ordinary World
    Armstrong, who's mostly played himself in previous forays into acting, has a low-key charm suggesting that, if he desired it, he could get more onscreen gigs in between albums.
  58. Desierto
    Sam's racist behavior may be intended to make him a menacing sign of our times, but such unbelievable mustache-twirling makes him as threatening as a C-grade Freddy Krueger knockoff.
  59. Asura: The City of Madness
    Winningly over-the-top Korean gangster drama Asura: The City of Madness is what you'd get if you combined The Wire with a really good soap opera.
  60. Coming Through The Rye
    Regardless of its capable performances and understated direction, and no matter that it was inspired by Sadwith’s own hunt for Salinger, Coming Through the Rye comes across as a cute conceit incapable of sustaining a substantial feature.
  61. Miss Hokusai
    Keiichi Hara's episodic anime Miss Hokusai is a lovely biopic, even if it never quite picks up and focuses on a single thread. (Then again, neither does life.)
  62. Tower
    Through the recollections of witnesses and victims, the film simultaneously builds a present-tense narrative while portraying the terrifying resilience of memory and trauma.
  63. Christine
    By the end of Christine — and of Christine — the reporter is at once burdened with too many signifiers (is Chubbuck a tragic heroine of second-wave feminism? of our current macabre newsscape? of untreated depression?) and a cipher. As with most biopics that resort to maximalism, more is less.
  64. Certain Women
    Certain Women is a kind, loving, and deeply moving portrait of bighearted small-town people.
  65. Aquarius
    Brazil might not want you to know it, but Aquarius is something special.
  66. The Accountant
    Here's two hours of grimly serious puzzle-box dramatics and beat-downs starring Ben Affleck as an Affleck-shaped void.
  67. Houston, We Have a Problem!
    The underlying point of this elaborate stunt is that modern audiences are all too willing to believe (and be manipulated by) anything sold in a familiar nonfiction package. No matter how valid that theory might be, there are surely more compelling ways to offer it than via a one-note, 88-minute-long joke.
  68. Shadow World
    The director posits that the world is now shaped by clandestine arms deals conducted, often illegally, by the U.S. and Great Britain, but Shadow World sells its argument about the West's criminality not with reporting but through paranoid propaganda.
  69. The Birth of a Nation
    The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power. Parker knows how to juice a crowd.
  70. Newtown
    Newtown is an act of memorialization, a demand that this most distractible of countries look close and continue to care.
  71. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    [An] inspiring cinematic journey — full of overwhelming beauty, and ready to set the curious viewer's mind aflame.
  72. All in Time
    All in Time is best when it's not forcing its slight narrative toward fantasy.
  73. London Town
    All the ingredients for a gritty — if familiar — coming-of-age story are here. But London Town, though spirited, is consistently tension-free.
  74. The Lennon Report
    The Lennon Report loses some steam in its second half as the immediacy of the operating theater dissipates in press conferences and obituary voiceovers. Even so, Profe does an admirable job walking us through the day's events, weaving together the accounts of people on the scene.
  75. 37
    For all its postures of humanism, the film is remarkably cold toward the victim herself, who appears only briefly.
  76. Flock of Dudes
    Lifeless bromantic comedy Flock of Dudes has all the celebrity cameos and latent sexism of Judd Apatow's adult coming-of-age stories but none of the lowbrow wit and sensitivity.
  77. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    [A] hokey but effective adaptation.
  78. Do Not Resist
    Do Not Resist is an order to the viewer: watch.
  79. Blue Jay
    Lehmann shot Blue Jay in a gorgeous black-and-white that looks like silver gelatin prints (a photographic process that captures boundless gradations of gray), which complements the story's heartfelt simplicity.
  80. The Late Bloomer
    Though Pollak's direction in his first narrative feature is solid, The Late Bloomer is mostly an excuse for predictable sex jokes and ample toplessness.
  81. Theo Who Lived
    This film is valuable on account of its singular vantage point, and not just because of the firsthand description of the jihadist group’s brutality, which is unsurprising.
  82. The Girl on the Train
    The Girl on the Train, though an enjoyable enough ride, goes idle once it slows down long enough for you to take in the full view of things.
  83. Masterminds
    The film is competent in its framing and editing in a way that most comedies aren’t (compare/contrast with Neighbors 2, which is barely a movie except in the most technical sense) and avoids dead-end-obvious improv.
  84. 13th
    Few films shake and astonish like this one, even though nothing in it should be a surprise.
  85. Among the Believers
    Each person’s actions here are not theirs alone, but part of a network of complicated needs and conflicting ideologies that make up contemporary Pakistan. Some of the stories are difficult to hear, but they must be listened to.
  86. Harry & Snowman
    The engaging Harry & Snowman shows the impact of a rescue animal on the man who saw his neglected qualities. It's also a succinct demonstration of the difference between a livelihood and a life's work.
  87. Denial
    The movie is fascinating in its approach to legal arguments, forensic evidence, and the uses and abuses of history — but, like the courtroom at its center, it doesn't have much feel for the feels.
  88. A Man Called Ove
    A Man Called Ove — preaching tolerant togetherness as the key to happiness — earns its sentimentality by striking a delicate balance between barking-mad comedy and syrupy melodrama.
  89. Passage to Mars
    Passage to Mars is almost apologetic about being stuck on our world; to make up for it, it continually cuts to digital explorations of Mars itself, while Quinto asks more haunting questions. It's a thrill to see so careful a re-creation — and some actual footage — of Martian geography.
  90. Danny Says
    Toller's film is narrated entirely by Fields via a series of lengthy recorded interviews that unwind jerkily, like a misshapen bolt of yarn over hundreds of still photos, Super-8 footage, and hand-drawn animations.
  91. Long Way North
    Where most post-Shrek animated films are manic and all too eager to please, Rémi Chayé's deliberately paced Long Way North tells its story with clarity and an urgent calm.
  92. Sand Storm
    In short, Zexer's film — scraped of sentiment but still coursing with feeling — is an ethnographic melodrama, rich in cultural specifics but also universal longings.
  93. American Honey
    The majority of American Honey has Arnold working overtime to make her movie seem important or scandalous.
  94. The Free World
    Jason Lew's lost-soul drama The Free World offers a modest exploration of innocence and guilt, with occasional interludes of both violence and romance
  95. The Dressmaker
    Unfortunately, The Dressmaker does not deliver on this early promise.
  96. Storks
    In between Storks' bumptious best and worst are its uncertain quiet patches.
  97. The Magnificent Seven
    You get enough of a sense of this place and these men — and that widow! — that it's a disappointment when, in the end, we just have to watch it all blow to hell.
  98. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Burton scales his finale down to the size of a tourist boardwalk for an unexpectedly gripping crowd-pleaser of an action scene.
  99. Command and Control
    Despite the high stakes, Command and Control is morbidly fun to watch, in the manner of good suspense thrillers and disaster films.
  100. Chicken People
    Haimes seems less interested in examining this unfamiliar world and the people involved than in shoving them into feel-good platitudes about following your dreams.
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