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. Deepwater Horizon
    [Berg] keeps things simple, tight and taut, and does right by the folks who were there for the real thing. He’s made them the heroes of a genuinely exciting action movie.
  2. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
    Palast slices through all the B.S., and while he may be over-the-top in his presentation, keep in mind, he’s got just the facts, ma’am.
  3. The Ruins of Lifta
    Grounded in the art of listening, The Ruins of Lifta builds a powerful, personal, political conversation between Palestinians and Israelis looking to live differently.
  4. I.T.
    Whatever cautionary point I.T. may be trying to make about privacy gets lost in the formulaic ugliness, and not even the constant stream of facepalm moments make it entertaining or watchable.
  5. Chronic
    Chronic forces viewers to look closely at things they might rather ignore, and intentionally holds its emotions at a distance.
  6. Seed: The Untold Story
    It's a wonder of photography, animation, and sound, and it's a testament to its editors that the many interviews with activists and scientists are compelling and informative, sometimes even poetic.
  7. The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith
    The film is a treasury of photographs and anecdotes, of fleeting peeks at the celebrities (Carla Bley, Steve Reich, Jimmy Giuffre, Dalí) who passed through, but it too rarely slows down and really lets us listen — Fishko is always on to the next striking image that will too quickly pass.
  8. Generation Startup
    It looks like the recruitment appeal that it is; it will probably be pretty effective on campuses.
  9. 1000 Rupee Note
    The film takes an allegorical, symbolic story and sets it within a milieu that suggests authentic life. But it never quite reconciles the tonal dissonance at the heart of this idea — there's great emotional potential here, but we experience the whole thing at a remove.
  10. The Age of Shadows
    You may have seen parts of The Age of Shadows before, but they're rarely this well assembled.
  11. The Good Neighbor
    A film that — from its basic set-up to its dearth of tension — plays like the tedious inverse of Don't Breathe.
  12. The Lovers and the Despot
    The film is brisk and fascinating, ultimately moving, but also less rich than it might have been.
  13. Closet Monster
    [A] superb coming-of-age drama.
  14. Queen of Katwe
    Nair's immersive, energetic style, combined with her talented cast's ability to invest even the most obvious lines with genuine feeling, gives Queen of Katwe a powerful clarity.
  15. Finding Altamira
    Hugh Hudson's Finding Altamira is a rote but engaging historical drama about the eternal debate between truth and mythology.
  16. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    The perfect storm of homophobia, racism, and moral panic that sent the San Antonio four to prison is almost too much to cover in a ninety-minute documentary, but Esquenazi paints a tragic and humane portrait of the women who ended up in its center.
  17. The Vessel
    Quintana's emphasis on Jungian dream logic gives his otherwise spartan parable a compelling mythic dimension. The Vessel may bring Malick to mind, but it also feels like a major work by an exciting new talent.
  18. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    Ron Howard's documentary often plays as an advertorial gunning for maximum intergenerational appeal.
  19. Tanna
    Subtly visualizing the connection shared between the land and its people (and their interior conditions), Tanna proves rich in both sociological detail and roiling emotions.
  20. A Family Affair
    It’s a potent psychodrama, pitting Marianne’s reality against the one Fassaert is documenting
  21. Operation Avalanche
    It's often more The Office than le Carré, and none of it's anywhere as interesting as the great counter-historical gag at the film's heart.
  22. Blair Witch
    Blair Witch’s comparatively maximalist approach shows too much and scares too little.
  23. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
    The film combines agonizing scenes of didactic earnestness about gun violence with the absolutely soul-crushing ennui of flaccid marriage jokes.
  24. Cardboard Boxer
    By emphasizing the uglier aspects of his most complex character, Lee turns an otherwise down-to-earth slice-of-life drama into an unconvincing morality play.
  25. Silicon Cowboys
    Director Jason Cohen (the Oscar-nominated short Facing Fear) wants his documentary history of Compaq computers to be fun — and indeed, compared to the overly earnest clips of Halt and Catch Fire inserted for contrast, the real slow-talking Texans in the tale are a hoot.
  26. Snowden
    Stone seems genuinely interested in the slow and steady process by which Edward Snowden came to distrust the government that he worked for, and the director has made a slow and steady movie to go with it.
  27. Bridget Jones's Baby
    As much as this latest installment draws on affection for the snappy first film, it's the differences that make Bridget Jones's Baby the warmest and most satisfying of the series.
  28. Come What May
    Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.
  29. Sully
    There is in Sully — as there is in Sniper — a purposefully conflicted reckoning with the very tenets of American heroism.
  30. The Apostate
    Ogalla makes it happen: Bedroom-eyed and shaggy, looking every inch like a reincarnation of dead-too-soon ‘70s French star Patrick Dewaere but without the haywire intensity, he's an amiable spectacle.
  31. Equal Means Equal
    Despite the gravity and breadth of the subject matter, Lopez herself is a frequent subject of the camera.... These awkward inclusions can’t diminish the horror and injustice she catalogs, but they will make Equal Means Equal a difficult sell to anyone outside its intended audience of socially progressive, politically empowered women.
  32. Starving the Beast
    The gutting of America's public universities is, as Steve Mims says in his documentary Starving the Beast, "one of the nation's most important and least understood fights." His film goes far in correcting that, thanks not just to his thorough research, but also a strong narrative and compelling cinematography.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    As I Open My Eyes
    This debut feature earns its grown-up wisdom without selling out its youthful idealism.
  34. Brother Nature
    There's nothing new in the friction between these characters, but it's fun to watch a couple of pros showboating on the field, even when the stakes aren't high.
  35. Ithaca
    It's the rare film to miss its every mark.
  36. Transpecos
    Transpecos distinguishes itself with a sharp ear for dialogue, keen attention to ground-level detail, and an ending that unexpectedly chooses cautious optimism over blanket cynicism.
  37. Other People
    Despite a strong sense of its characters, however, Kelly rarely generates much melodramatic or amusing momentum.
  38. Cameraperson
    All this could have easily become a cacophony of disconnected sights and sounds, but Cameraperson unfolds with beauty and purpose — mixing the fluidity of a dream with the acuity of an essay. Johnson teases out themes and finds echoes across the years.
  39. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    All that bravura filmmaking — the elaborate camera moves and colorful images and unexpected angles — is fascinating from both technical and aesthetic standpoints, and it certainly held my attention. But don’t be surprised if you start to suspect that, for all the film’s ornamentation, it might not be leading up to something revelatory.
  40. White Girl
    This is one of those films that merits a long cold shower afterwards. That might actually be a compliment — Wood wants to provoke.
  41. Klown Forever
    So long as they're only stupidly endangering themselves along the way, it's easy to watch this with a sort of libertarian detachment. It's also annoyingly predictable this time around, though the leads at first maintain their strong chemistry and essential likability.
  42. Zoom
    Director Pedro Morelli's neon-and-grime aesthetic and a solid cast of mostly Canadian character actors (including a campy, animated Don McKellar and a creepy Michael Eklund) are the grounding factors.
  43. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    This reboot smartly doesn't try to escalate the material to bigger and better status, keeping things small and scrappy and relying on the fighters to be the best special effects.
  44. Summer of 8
    Summer of 8 may be as sincere as a Hughes movie, but it's as shallow as a kiddy pool.
  45. Skiptrace
    Skiptrace proves that nothing can stop Jackie Chan, not even poor judgment.
  46. Morgan
    Even if his film's plot is predictable, the younger Scott is returning the ensemble thriller to its roots with something far more important than an airtight story: compelling, well-drawn characters and the talented actors to play them.
  47. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
    A warm and heartfelt but too often desultory and disorganized tribute to the down-to-earth intellectual.
  48. The Light Between Oceans
    The sense of authenticity that marks The Light Between Oceans at its best has everything to do with the acting — and if all Cianfrance ever gives us is that, it's worth the price of his lagging third act.
  49. Complete Unknown
    While [Rachel Weisz] is a compelling performer, the film is ultimately a Hitchcock-inspired thriller without too many real thrills.
  50. The Academy of Muses
    In effect, [Guerín] seems to be making Pinto's case — the intellectual necessity of passion and Muse-force, in order to compel men toward Art — while utterly enjoying the messy, unpredictable, real-world tumult the women make of it.
  51. Yoga Hosers
    Yoga Hosers is lazy, unfunny, and self-indulgent.
  52. Max Rose
    Occasionally, Noah, who wrote and directed, hits onto something that feels like life.
  53. Fatima
    Faucon has built his story around very gentle, glancing blows. But this is not the focused austerity of a Robert Bresson; the director’s level distance and jaded eye lead more to lifelessness than a revealing simplicity of expression.
  54. Is That You?
    This is a maudlin, manipulative film, and while it's never aggressively annoying, that's only because it severely lacks energy. It registers like a pesky little sister who's doped out on Vicodin.
  55. I Am Not a Serial Killer
    It's not a riot, though the Midwest textures are sharp (especially for an Irish filmmaker in an entirely Irish production), and the idea of witnessing a killing spree from the p.o.v. of a town's funeral home is full of rich discomfort.
  56. Level Up
    Director Adam Randall keeps the action tightly paced and the dialogue to a refreshing minimum, helping to heighten Matt's growing isolation.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ace the Case
    A caper movie runs on calibrated chaos. Too much randomness makes the gears grind; too little and it feels overdetermined. Ace the Case has both problems.
  58. Happy Hour
    Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.
  59. Don't Breathe
    Alvarez proves adept at springing surprises in these moments, a skill that combines all the art and technique of moviemaking with the architecture of 3D level-planning and the carny showmanship of building a professional haunted house.
  60. Mia Madre
    Mia Madre may be a delicate film, but don't be surprised if, in the end, the cumulative power of its humanity obliterates you.
  61. Southside with You
    Both actors occasionally hit stumbling blocks with the wordy script and Tanne's direction, neither of which allows quite enough room for the characters to think and feel onscreen.
  62. Kate Plays Christine
    Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.
  63. Spaceman
    Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.
  64. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Kampai! feels like a manic ensemble drama that should have been a tight three-man show.
  65. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    Making a Killing feels oddly static, like any fact-dense sermon to the choir.
  66. Morris from America
    In Chad Hartigan's lighthearted drama Morris From America, there are a whopping two African-American characters. The difference between this film and most others, however, is that these two are fully yet subtly drawn. They interact in ways that feel genuine, the actors portraying a heartfelt father-son relationship and the director fighting the urge to get either too preachy or mushy.
  67. Ben-Hur
    In paring down and streamlining its source material, this new version also saps its heft.
  68. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    By focusing on his subject's unwavering moral certainty, Kraume denies his ethical complexity and diminishes the difficulties of his challenging stance to educate the society that wanted him dead.
  69. Spa Night
    There have been upbeat coming-out films (But I'm a Cheerleader) and tragic, infuriating ones (Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain). Andrew Ahn's Spa Night is executed on a significantly smaller scale, a deliberately anticlimactic one, which makes it all the more doleful.
  70. When Two Worlds Collide
    The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.
  71. Ixcanul
    Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.
  72. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Herzog smartly takes a broad, bird's-eye perspective of our early techno-evolution.
  73. War Dogs
    The film’s breezy drive and bursts of comic energy largely divert attention from the flatness of its world and characters.
  74. Kubo and the Two Strings
    From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.
  75. Operation Chromite
    The result is like something Michael Bay might produce at his least self-indulgent.
  76. Edge of Winter
    Director Rob Connolly may well think he's upping the stakes by plunging his film into borderline horror territory, but in fact he's minimizing them.
  77. Joshy
    Joshy could easily be a film about loss, but it instead ends up as a prickly exploration of forced fun.
  78. My King
    The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour.... After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.
  79. Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary
    Though sometimes clumsy or nostalgic, the film is an engaging oral history of Leary and Dass's friendship.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lost Arcade
    The film meets the open door, come-as-you-are community on its own level, freely following both new and recurring faces over its diffuse 79 minutes and avoiding the forced, interwoven three-character structure that far too many works of American nonfiction seem obliged to employ.
  81. Ghost Team
    The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.
  82. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    This doc is a tearjerker, but it's also enraging.
  83. Hell or High Water
    When the movie just sits with the characters on front porches or in backyards, Mackenzie's generous, hands-off approach with his actors — most of the conversation scenes play out in long takes with minimal camera movement — yields poignant rewards.
  84. Disorder
    [Winocour] elevates the action hero beyond his physical assets, drilling through his psyche to offer a rare and welcome lens into a type of man usually reduced to stoicism or sulking, hiding behind a rubber mask.
  85. Anthropoid
    It's all sickeningly accomplished, with incidents so tense and audacious that you might not have the headspace to wonder until afterwards, "Hey, wait, what was the point in grinding us through so many terrifying minutes of that?"
  86. Will You Dance with Me?
    An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.
  87. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Louis Black explores the casual philosophizing of his subject's work in Dream Is Destiny, an admiring documentary that wisely lets Linklater do most of the talking in his plainspoken, unpretentious manner.
  88. The Little Prince
    There’s a lot of charm, thought, and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.
  89. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    Riley doesn't portray this fellowship of black athletes as victims, but as pioneers proving themselves against white supremacy behind enemy lines. And yet this doc also pulls them back down to earth as mere men and women competing against the odds, human to human.
  90. The Tenth Man
    In his lovely new film, Argentine director Daniel Burman mixes reality with fiction in inventive ways.
  91. Citizen Soldier
    Paradoxically, this technique both keeps you from getting to know the soldiers better and puts you completely in their boots, understanding directly that (as one character puts it) war is boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
  92. Amateur Night
    Besides the narrative reversal, Montgomery is the only interesting part of the film — smart, obstinate, and ambitious. The gross-out scenes and raunchy banter between the film's sex workers are funny, but its world is pretty small and unsurprising.
  93. Let's Be Evil
    Co-writer/director Martin Owen downplays his conceit's most intriguing aspects — where are these kids' parents? — and instead focuses on monotonous chase scenes.
  94. Five Nights in Maine
    Five Nights in Maine may leave audiences wanting more grounding in the husband-wife/mother-daughter drama that is a constant, foggy presence, but the raw confusion and sadness associated with great loss shines through.
  95. The Brooklyn Banker
    Unfortunately, this low-budget production comes up short in many places: limited performances, barely developed characters, a muddled script. The movie also has a sluggish, lumbering pace, effectively offsetting the paranoid, anxious vibe of Garity's performance.
  96. The Mind's Eye
    The Mind's Eye ought to hit the sweet spot for fans of early David Cronenberg, the more violent X-Men comics, and the kinds of indie horror movies Larry Fessenden always cameos in, as he does again here.
  97. Front Cover
    Come for the breezy chemistry, stay for the thoughtful exploration of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia via a cross-cultural love affair.
  98. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    Cogitore's movie is at once otherworldly and firmly tethered to stark reality.
  99. Little Men
    Sachs, a clear-eyed humanist, honors all his characters' pained perspectives.
  100. Suicide Squad
    David Ayer's film may not always work, but when it does, it's a perverse delight.
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