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. Tallulah
    The film's premise rests on one contrivance too many as it is...and Heder keeps raising the stakes instead of settling into the groove established so well by her two leads.
  2. Into the Forest
    This isn’t torture-porn dystopia; it’s a singular, honest, heartfelt portrait of sisterly devotion at the end of the world
  3. Indignation
    An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.
  4. Gleason
    So while Gleason is the slick, moving, sincere documentary you might expect from this material, there’s something else going on beneath the Oscar-friendly polish: This is a remarkably physical film.
  5. Lace Crater
    Slight though it may be, Lace Crater's mix of Andrew Bujalski–style naturalism and Roman Polanski–style body horror is at least off-kilter enough to keep one absorbed throughout.
  6. Hollywood Beauty Salon
    These are stories crafted with care, with glimpses of the filmmaking process — a chance to see the camera operators and director themselves at times in awe of the fortitude they're witnessing.
  7. Ants on a Shrimp
    Like a well-executed fine-dining experience, this sleek documentary entertains, delights, and makes viewers comfortable without evident sweat.
  8. Can We Take a Joke?
    Ted Balaker's Can We Take a Joke? is a surprisingly self-righteous and unfunny documentary in which shelf-dated comedians spend 74 minutes misinterpreting the First Amendment to mean that behaving like an asshole should have no social consequences.
  9. Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    The most fascinating moments in Hieronymous Bosch come from art historians once they’ve turned to the work of history: creating meaning and context, wrestling with these questions. The film renders this conversation beautifully, and in moments begins to feel urgent in spite of itself.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homo Sapiens
    Instead of uncovering artifacts from long ago, Homo Sapiens shows us our own relics in the making.
  11. The Land
    The violence, when it comes, is ugly and tragic, as it should be — The Land makes no promises about glory. But the hangout moments fizz with the boys' likable chemistry, and the scenes of suspense, which pick up toward the end, are always arresting and mostly understated, scored to nervous breathing and the ambient bustle of streets at night.
  12. Pete's Dragon
    More than anything, this is a slice-of-life tale, whisper-thin but still full of feeling and a generous sense of place. With the world's most adorable dragon at the center of it all.
  13. Nerve
    The city and the plot points wheel right by, the leads fetchingly entranced with each other. If one patch of dares disappoints, there's another coming right up, and the directors stage and shoot them with swooning neon kinecticism.
  14. Miss Sharon Jones!
    Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.
  15. Jason Bourne
    Even when it comes to life, Jason Bourne offers very little that could stand on its own; its best scenes remind you of even better ones in the earlier films. There's a greatest-hits quality to the movie, only the band is tired and its heart isn't in it.
  16. Quitters
    What do you do with a loathsome hero? Noah Pritzker isn't sure. His aimless first feature (co-written with Ben Tarnoff) is built around slippery teenage manipulator Clark Rayman (Ben Konigsberg), who goes from a little Machiavellian to big-time creepy with no rhyme or reason.
  17. Fight Valley
    Rob Hawk's cheap, barely competent action movie Fight Valley is by and for Ultimate Fighting Championship fans, but they deserve better.
  18. The President
    Makhmalbaf makes you feel the enormity of the president's loss of self even if you don't actually feel for him.
  19. The Seventh Fire
    The movie is less about making a grand social statement and more about conveying the ground-level desolation of this world. Riccobono films it all with intelligence, sensitivity, and a feel for offhand poetry; his camera captures moments of intimacy and tension without ever quite intruding.
  20. Shelley
    Director Ali Abbasi excels at atmosphere, understanding that any beautiful landscape can be made terrifying with the right sound design and that a cut to a silent interior can be as jarring as any jump scare. His script, unfortunately, is not as interesting.
  21. Free to Run
    The philosophical underpinnings of Swiss director Pierre Morath's well-paced documentary about the evolution of long-distance running evoke the motto of neighboring France: liberté, égalite, fraternité.
  22. The Childhood of a Leader
    Little of what happens will come as a surprise, but Corbet's narrative restraint coupled with his formal daring makes for a gripping experience. It's a slow burn, but the fuse attached had me holding my breath.
  23. Don't Worry Baby
    Unsurprisingly, the film doesn't live up to its Beach Boys–quoting title. Things turn out all right, but there's little real emotional force.
  24. Train to Busan
    Yeon's patient direction and clever plot twists make Seok-woo's transformation from selfish antihero into brave caregiver consistently compelling.
  25. Hooligan Sparrow
    Wang's film allows the public activist to be privately human, showing Ye at home with her lively daughter, sharing moments of friendship with other women activists or clearing brush and describing the hard rural lives of her family.
  26. Don't Think Twice
    Mike Birbiglia's Don't Think Twice stands as the best, most revealing film about comedy people and one of the best about artistic collaboration. It's a boisterous and sensitive work of many facets.
  27. For the Plasma
    For the Plasma finds genuine, almost innocent-seeming delight in its own swerves in style and rhythm.
  28. Summertime
    For all of its wise, welcome focus on the libidinal, Summertime additionally succeeds in presenting the liberationist fervor of the time without devolving into school-play pageantry.
  29. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    The art of physical comedy is alive and well with Saunders and Lumley, who precisely calculate each well-timed tumble.
  30. Lights Out
    When Sandberg isn’t spinning his wheels in the why, he’s capable of doling out a steady diet of scares.
  31. Star Trek Beyond
    Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams–ified Trek era. That is to say, it's the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do.
  32. Undrafted
    With characters who range from mildly aggravating to out-and-out intolerable, and revolving around a game whose outcome is of no meaningful consequence, this underdogs-make-good fairy tale is a dramatic and comic rainout.
  33. Outlaws and Angels
    Despite worthy performances from the entire cast, this movie’s a prime example of a director admiring some great movies but only having a cursory, superficial understanding of what it was that made them work.
  34. Garnet's Gold
    The movie meanders (Perkins seems as distractingly lost as Frost), but it can stir real sympathy.
  35. Phantom Boy
    Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's superhero story Phantom Boy is no April and the Extraordinary World — but still fine for what it is.
  36. How He Fell in Love
    Meyers allows takes to run long, staging naturalistic conversations on sidewalks and in apartments. The result is hit or miss: We may not know what the characters feel, but we're way up to speed on how many steps it takes them to walk to a bar.
  37. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.
  38. Lucha Mexico
    The film's most worthy detour is into the history and personal significance of masks.
  39. The Infiltrator
    Unfortunately, as he performs the acting equivalent of triple backflips, Cranston isn't given much of a safety net from the script or direction.
  40. Our Little Sister
    Our Little Sister often vibrates with such tenderness of feeling that it’s difficult to dismiss outright. The excellent performances from the four lead actresses help offset the occasional heavy-handedness of the script, with Kore-eda alive to their distinctive tics and gestures.
  41. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    [An] intense and dazzling new documentary.
  42. Equals
    We're left with an idea of passion instead of a real depiction of it. And a movie that can't stop wallowing in its own emptiness.
  43. Café Society
    Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Café Society to make it worth your while — and also to make you wish it were better.
  44. Ghostbusters
    There is an easy camaraderie and chemistry among the central quartet, a harmony that continues when Chris Hemsworth, charmingly stupid, enters as the phantom-vanquishing squad's receptionist. Yet the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths.
  45. Indian Point
    Even when it's ruining lives, bureaucracy is boring. And Indian Point, Ivy Meeropol's new documentary about a nuclear power plant of that name, is riddled with tiresome bureaucratic wrangling at local and national levels.
  46. Cell
    King's decision to co-write the script and turn it into a CliffsNotes version of The Stand only makes things worse.
  47. Fathers and Daughters
    While Fathers and Daughters has a strong cast (including a brief appearance by Jane Fonda), it largely saddles them with one-dimensional roles and too-obvious emotional cues.
  48. At the Fork
    Despite the complexities, though, it's enjoyable, thanks to the crew's substantial expertise.
  49. Men Go to Battle
    This isn't a film about the Civil War; it's about the minds of white folks so removed from plantation life that they feel they have no stake in it at all. It's not about back then — it's about being.
  50. The Secret Life of Pets
    The Secret Life of Pets is an ADD-addled mess of a movie — and that, amazingly, is its charm.
  51. The Purge: Election Year
    If The Purge: Election Year is ultimately still engaging, it’s largely because of the irresistibility of the basic concept itself. But this new movie also makes a pretty good case for why the series should end here: Things have not only come to their logical conclusion, but you get the curious sense that the filmmakers have run out of ideas.
  52. Life, Animated
    Life,Animated is rich with insight about the role our popular culture plays in child development, but it's richer still in love.
  53. The Innocents
    Where "Ida" takes a drearier, more realistic approach to the story, The Innocents, despite its dark focus on a group of women living in fear of getting repeatedly raped by their allies, actually has a mightier finish, something of a crescendo to cut through the quiet grief.
  54. Roseanne for President!
    And this is the film's buried lede: Hakeem busts her ass for the candidate while Barr conducts her entire campaign from her house via Skype.
  55. Carnage Park
    Much of Carnage Park is merely a sun-bleached desert creepshow, a murky soup of a murderer toying with his victims simply because he's cra-a-azy.
  56. The Legend of Tarzan
    The fights are quick and brutal and bloodless, with too much slo-mo and sped-up stuff, and some clever camera angles that get cut from before you can work out what you're looking at.
  57. Three
    70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.
  58. T-Rex
    While the narrative is familiar — athlete from rough background trains fiercely, with the sport as a means of salvation — directors Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper make sure the story is all Shields's, keeping her charisma at the center.
  59. The Fundamentals of Caring
    As in Ant-Man, there's lots of shopworn redemption-plotting to get through here, and a sense that the filmmakers find the kind of jobs actually available to Americans a little beneath someone as twinkly-cute as Paul Rudd. But — also like in Ant-Man — the pleasures of Rudd overpower the programmatic elements.
  60. From This Day Forward
    No, love isn't sweeping; it's putting brush to canvas and hand to hand. It's accepting imperfections. But it's also being willing to recognize the people we love for who they are, to note our own flaws and work to change them.
  61. Septembers of Shiraz
    While the film aims for humane evenhandedness, recognizing both Farnez's lower-class condescension and the revolutionaries' hypocrisy, the characters are so skin-deep that we never respond to them as people.
  62. Right Now, Wrong Then
    In the end, Right Now, Wrong Then is a two-piece puzzle that's less than the sum of its parts.
  63. Yarn
    The film offers fascinating insight into what yarn can do in the talented hands of those determined to elevate mere craft to high art.
  64. Les Cowboys
    The strange, ever-changing result is, at times, as original as loose remakes come, with Bidegain using his hallowed source material as a springboard for something rare: a "writer's movie" that loses nothing in the jump from script to screen.
  65. The Phenom
    The Phenom unfolds as a series of quiet, incisive conversations that showcase subtle, insightful performances.
  66. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    One of the most sincere and funny portraits of family life to come along in a while.
  67. The Kind Words
    The chemistry between the siblings carries the film; they share a rich banter and subtle physical affection that feels real, built on years of shared intimacy — and this new experience of ignorance.
  68. Nuts!
    This marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid couldn't have come along at a better time.
  69. Free State of Jones
    Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it plays like a series of scenes and notes for a longer, more fleshed-out movie.
  70. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence won’t blow you out of the theater, but you might be surprised at how well it works — how genuinely funny it is — given the familiarity of this concept.
  71. Breaking a Monster
    They're still thirteen-year-olds, which leads to Breaking a Monster's funniest moments.
  72. The Neon Demon
    Whether or not you connect with Refn's brand of over-the-top violence, you can't deny that his attention to color, texture, and music is nearly unmatched by other directors working today.
  73. Parched
    Too bad writer-director Leena Yadav only infrequently uses innuendo-driven sex talk to break up a monotonous series of confrontations between misogynistic alpha males and their unhappy wives.
  74. Land and Shade
    You might not want to live here, but the imagery makes for a nice postcard.
  75. Cosmos
    Everyone's reeling from dreads and reveries they can't quite comprehend, and Zulawski's daft incidents, comic sketches, and stabs of profundity will likely put you into a similar awed stupor.
  76. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    By focusing on the small details of Byong-man and Gye-yeul's life — from their humble, secluded home to their touches and glances — the film paints a sweet yet tragic portrait.
  77. Seoul Searching
    Every character gets to learn a lesson, and while the humor is nothing new, the situations are.
  78. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    There was so much joy in their remake, but Raiders! is often dispiritingly preoccupied with adult issues of financing. But when they talk about their alienated childhoods, broken families, and absent fathers, it's pretty clear why their cinematic role model was so meaningful.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Argentina
    Shot in an old barn in Buenos Aires' La Boca barrio, the film draws you in until nothing matters but the concentration of this population on their heritage and their pride.
  80. Finding Dory
    Finding Dory might be messy, but through its central interplay — between present and past, light and dark, joy and pain — it manages an emotional complexity that puts most supposedly grown-up movies to shame.
  81. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    Ian Edelman's comedy Puerto Ricans in Paris is a much sweeter film than its Snakes on a Plane–caliber title would suggest.
  82. Therapy for a Vampire
    The strongest aspect of Therapy for a Vampire is its exquisite visual homage to the vamp films of old, and also the screwballs.
  83. Len and Company
    You think you can guess what happens next, but the beauty of Tim Godsall's film, adapted from a play by Carly Mensch, is that it eschews the obvious arcs and come-to-Jesus moments of your typical Bad Dad pics.
  84. Careful What You Wish For
    Allen attempts to build a sense of mounting anxiety via the increasing suspicions of a tenacious insurance investigator, unexpected testimony from eyewitnesses, and Lena's squirrelly behavior, but pop star Jonas is incapable of making simple facial expressions, let alone evincing existential dread.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Cab to Darwin
    Sims imbues his characters with rich thought and heart, particularly in regards to the understated, racially complicated, on-again/off-again relationship between Rex and Polly.
  86. Call Her Applebroog
    The film is a vehicle for Applebroog-appreciation, daughterly and otherwise.
  87. Warcraft
    In short, Warcraft is the most wearying kind of bad movie, a dull and sad one that's less engaging a watch than just seeing the studio's millions run bill by bill through a shredder for two hours.
  88. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    You don't watch prolific doc-master Wang Bing's new film about a Chinese mental hospital so much as get imprisoned within it, pacing its dingy corridors and rooms like a zoo animal.
  89. Germans & Jews
    For a film encompassing generations of fraught history, Germans & Jews is awfully short, but hardly superficial.
  90. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    Neville briefly showcases individual musicians but never sticks with them long enough to highlight their skills.
  91. Traded
    The film likens prostitution to a continuation of the slavery that was eradicated two decades earlier by a certain Proclamation, but never bothers letting any of the working girls emancipate themselves.
  92. King Jack
    This is thankfully no wallow in working-class miserablism.
  93. Tikkun
    Shot like a photo album, gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, it continually suggests that crisis and struggle can be beautiful when viewed from the right angle.
  94. Diary of a Chambermaid
    Star Léa Seydoux — in her second collaboration with Jacquot (the first being 2012's Farewell, My Queen, in which she plays an adoring reader to Marie Antoinette) — further demonstrates, with each sly, gap-toothed grin, a keen understanding of power and impotence.
  95. De Palma
    Paltrow and Baumbach don't get fancy with the filmmaking. They're smart enough to let De Palma's own resonant images — his gorgeous compositions, his smooth camera moves — do much of the work.
  96. From Afar
    Despite From Afar's lumbering solemnity, Castro, a Chilean actor best known for his collaborations with compatriot Pablo Larraín, proves ever supple.
  97. The Conjuring 2
    Wan is coming off the world-conquering success of his wildly entertaining automotive action sequel Furious Seven, and he sometimes seems to be trying to bring the splashy cacophony of that movie into a world that thrives on sparseness and focus. It doesn’t work.
  98. Andron
    The movie gets wilder and weirder as it goes.... But then, at some point, it all gets ponderous, especially all the vague political machinations.
  99. The God Cells
    The God Cells isn't the first documentary to take on a controversial subject, but through some impressive rhetorical jujitsu, it might be one of the few to change some minds.
  100. Gurukulam
    In their equanimous portrait of an Indian religious community, Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal contemplate enlightenment through an earthly source. They capture the quiet activity of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, an ashram in the lush hills of Tamil Nadu, with an observational documentary style that trades dispassionate distance for sympathetic immersion.
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