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. Race
    Were it not so committed to telling the official story in bullet points, Race might have found a more provocative angle about athletes and artists who work through and around the powers that be.
  2. Marguerite & Julien
    The widescreen intimacy of small moments — the flush of a rain-soaked cheek — humanizes Donzelli's grand folly and the couple who challenge the parameters of morality.
  3. Backtrack
    Between the generic shadowy cinematography and a gothic score that manages to telegraph even the film's jump-scares, there's no tangible tension by which to build an effective climax.
  4. The Last Man on the Moon
    The Last Man on the Moon puts you there and then asks why in the world we haven't gone back.
  5. Who's Driving Doug
    The road-trip drama Who's Driving Doug is earnest but not overly sweet — a blessing for a film with built-in sentimentality traps.
  6. Jack of the Red Hearts
    It's rare that a drama shows such specificity with respect to the experience of coping with autism, and that sensitivity goes a long way.
  7. Triple 9
    The story isn't complex, but its telling is tangled, often willfully so.
  8. The Witch
    The Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners. It literalizes the fevered terrors of our God-mad ancestors — and then brags that it's all steeped in research.
  9. Embrace of the Serpent
    Colombian director Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent is a legitimate stunner, a river-trip that will mesmerize and jack with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day.
  10. Glassland
    Barrett faces the daunting task of trying to contain Collette's tumultuous performance, and he struggles to make Reynor's more restrained turn work in the same space. The film trudges along in Collette's wake, fumbling for something to focus on apart from the bleeding wound just offscreen.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crazy About Tiffany's
    Were Miele to parse out Tiffany's early-Aughts identity crisis or why it is that the brand has only ever had one female design director, maybe then his documentary would be something to get crazy about.
  12. Rolling Papers
    Without coming across as a soapbox for narcs or unserious stoners, Rolling Papers gives a clearheaded account of things as they stand and where they might be headed.
  13. We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!
    It's all steak, no sizzle — the opposite of Twisted Sister.
  14. Forsaken
    Amid Kiefer's narrow-eyed glowering, Donald's exhausted-sage routine, and Moore's approximation of rural homeliness, only Wincott seems to fit in, exuding a poised, laconic cold-bloodedness that stands in stark contrast to the film's inert phoniness.
  15. How to Be Single
    No matter how much fibrous real talk it's wrapped in, How to Be Single has a heart made of sugary-sweet white chocolate.
  16. Cabin Fever
    Zariwny's conflicted retread is both too harsh and too judgmental.
  17. Zoolander 2
    Wiig's cheering presence in an otherwise depleting project/cross-promoted product highlights the fact that Zoolander 2 is a referendum on dying industries: not just the portfolio of Condé Nast titles that Wintour oversees as artistic director, but also the Frat Pack.
  18. A War
    Perhaps the best film yet set against the mess of the ongoing Middle Eastern wars, Tobias Lindholm's latest is a scrupulous, unglamorized examination of battlefield decision-making — and its potentially devastating impacts, both there and back home.
  19. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    Many filmmakers have tried in recent years, but few have nailed the elusive formula of the two-hander romantic comedy quite like Emily Ting with Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong.
  20. Bad Hurt
    Grief unleashes the possibility of change in this wrenching drama, allowing for an unexpected emotional thaw that rewards both stubborn optimism and traumatic resilience.
  21. Where to Invade Next
    By exposing his soft belly, the aging documentarian is reconquering his own legacy. He's spent 25 years bellowing about our problems. Now it's time to solve them. If we don't think we can, just remember Berlin.
  22. Touched With Fire
    With high spirits and great tenderness, Dalio and his actors stir up what might be the greatest of youthful feelings: that as you get to know someone new, someone whose thinking rhymes with yours, you're also becoming ever more yourself.
  23. Standoff
    Standoff holds up as a welcome alternative to its more strident brethren.
  24. Mountains May Depart
    It's a powerful idea in the abstract, the culmination of three acts that cover a 25-year catastrophe with a time-lapse breathlessness. It just never leaves the abstract and becomes flesh.
  25. Deadpool
    Deadpool might even stand as one of the strongest and most inventive films of the high-early-late superhero baroque — if we could just turn off its built-in commentary track.
  26. Fort Buchanan
    It's squirrelly, surprising, and elusive, but this beaut of a debut is no curio.
  27. Monday at 11:01 A.M.
    Instead of beckoning viewers to follow along, Agron's script drags us toward its conspicuous landmarks.
  28. Southbound
    Just as most of them can't outrun their pasts, neither can they escape familiar plot contrivances that try too hard and achieve too little.
  29. Tumbledown
    Neither comedy nor melodrama (though bearing traces of both), Tumbledown ends up a modest study of two fairly unremarkable, prickly characters.
  30. Convergence
    Convergence ends up squandering too much of its setup time and rushing to a largely unsatisfying conclusion instead of actually coming together in a meaningful way.
  31. The Pack
    Ultimately, these feral pooches pose no danger that couldn't be solved by staying inside, boarding the windows, and barricading the doors. It's not a bad approach to the film itself.
  32. Misconduct
    The new thriller Misconduct is getting kicked to the curb by its distributor, which is too bad, because director Shintaro Shimosawa's debut feature boasts an elegant visual style and a mystery plot with so many absurd twists that the film becomes enjoyable high melodrama.
  33. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    Call it parody, pastiche, remix, whatever — for some thirty minutes of its running time, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transcends its goof of a premise to become something fresh and full-blooded.
  34. The Club
    It's all well acted, especially the interrogations, and its specifics haunt and disturb. But as it aspires to parable it slumps into dark melodrama, with competing scenes of mob violence and individual characters freighted with so much allegoric significance that they stop feeling like people.
  35. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Rigorous and outrageous, Greenaway's defiant approach to narrative only offers insight into his character, not Eisenstein's.
  36. Rams
    The movie, wry and melancholy, doesn't linger over its artistry.
  37. Hail, Caesar!
    The brothers' latest also has a certain buoyancy...The fizziness, though, proves fleeting, and Hail, Caesar! too often goes flat.
  38. The Finest Hours
    Just as Pine's Bernie Webber grits his teeth and pilots his 36-foot Coast Guard boat into seas that rise up like angry gods, Gillespie steers head-on into clichés, powering through. They never quite capsize his film, but it does take on some water.
  39. JeruZalem
    Not much substance is buried beneath the irritating style.
  40. Kung Fu Panda 3
    The movie undercuts its own undercutting.
  41. Mountain Men
    Writer-director Cameron Labine seems to want to prove the obsolescence of the lovable-slacker stereotype even as he flogs it for entertainment value.
  42. Rabin, the Last Day
    By glamorizing struggle and ideology across the Israeli-Jewish political spectrum, it once more invites identification with only half of those locked in the conflict Rabin was trying to solve.
  43. Lazer Team
    Because it's made by people who understand the importance of a clever script and want their audience to have fun, Lazer Team may just prove to be 2016's most entertaining superhero movie.
  44. Martyrs
    The co-directing brothers Goetz prove adept at building escape-the-bad-guy action sequences, but they continually run up against the story's Marquis-de-Sade underpinnings.
  45. Naz & Maalik
    It's no news that a filmmaker's debut is mostly 90 minutes of a couple kids gabbing on the streets of Brooklyn. But writer/director Jay Dockendorf's buoyant, tragic, richly textured walking-and-talking job Naz & Maalik exhibits none of the shambling narcissism that so often characterizes such projects.
  46. All Mistakes Buried
    Even when all the puzzling pieces of Sonny's existence don't quite fit, Trammell's beautifully unhinged performance offers a compelling vision of a grieving narcissist burrowing into the rabbit hole of his own mind.
  47. Synchronicity
    An admirably complex tale of time travel, corporate espionage, and high emotions you'll just have to take everyone's word on, Jacob Gentry's science fiction puzzler Synchronicity is so ambitious — and so canny, on occasion — that you might be willing to forgive its indie infelicities.
  48. Mojave
    Is Mojave's twisty purposelessness showing how producers ruin the work of screenwriters, or is it evidence that screenwriters often need another set of eyes?
  49. Monster Hunt
    There are some scary moments among the slapstick, and the picture surprisingly doesn't pull its punches during its Harry and the Hendersons–style denouement, but Monster Hunt is hindered by its overlong running time and often mawkish sentimentality.
  50. Prescription Thugs
    It's unusually confessional and often moving, but Bell's film is unsatisfying as a piece of documentary journalism.
  51. Bleak Street
    Like his onetime mentor Luis Buñuel, Ripstein favors sparse, naturalistic settings populated by pathetic-yet-zany characters and eschews anything that might be considered traditionally beautiful. Instead, he unearths beauty in the mire of his characters' social conditions and in their dedication to each other.
  52. Aferim!
    Quite possibly the only film ever made focused on the centuries-long enslavement of the Romani in Eastern Europe, Aferim! plays like a sleight of hand, amusing us at a distance with vulgarisms and entrancing us with countryside while the bloody work of civilization grinds on out of the corner of our eye.
  53. Ip Man 3
    Stone-faced martial-arts star Donnie Yen does a lot with a little in wuxia weepy Ip Man 3, the rare kung fu film whose sentimental dialogue scenes are just as good as its stripped-down action sequences.
  54. Moonwalkers
    Nothing in Moonwalkers matches Perlman's performance, but he frequently elevates desperate-to-please gags to stoner-comedy greatness.
  55. The Benefactor
    Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.
  56. Band of Robbers
    The directors of Band of Robbers, brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, have set out to modernize the stories of Mark Twain but end up with a cutesy caper that isn't as memorable as you might hope.
  57. A Perfect Day
    A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.
  58. Ride Along 2
    Like your smartphone, it's a testament to the theory of interchangeable parts, a perfectly engineered product that, if you're charitable, you might also think of in terms of art....But every time I started to believe that there's some parodic impulse behind the filmmakers' recasting of clichés, Cube's character would punch a suspect in custody or commit some other violation of civil liberties that the film invites us to cheer.
  59. The Forest
    Before devolving into the same series of demonic faces and jump-scares we've seen time and again, The Forest is a genuinely unnerving mood piece.
  60. Unlucky Plaza
    Kwek's refreshing focus on his terrorized protagonists' pre-abduction lives keeps Unlucky Plaza afloat once it invests in generic ticking-clock thrills.
  61. Western Religion
    O'Brien's slow-motion-heavy staging is graceless, and his script is twice as unwieldy. With characters stuffed full of clichéd platitudes about fate, love, honor, and other topics the film isn't capable of addressing in any mature way, it's a fiasco of frontier-wide proportions.
  62. Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
    HGBP too often relies on caricature.... Yet Cone, who is bighearted toward but not uncritical of his Bible-thumping characters, has a keen sense of seemingly incongruous details.
  63. Cherry Tree
    This ungainly B movie makes virtually no sense in terms of either mythology or basic plotting.
  64. The Treasure
    In a manner so sly you could overlook it, Porumboiu invests this tissue-thin premise with the shadows of Romanian history.
  65. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    The film is most illuminating on the prehistory of Land Art.
  66. Sweaty Betty
    This isn't hard-times reportage or a deep-dive ethnography. It's a life-as-it's-lived picture, a chance to meet and loiter with the people in the places the interstates zip past.
  67. Anesthesia
    Anesthesia doesn't cast judgment. Instead, Nelson slowly reveals awful things about his characters after we've decided to like them. I admire the film's vigor, even if at times it feels like a cruel, clumsy trick.
  68. The Abandoned
    Two second-act revelations alter its tired dynamic for the better, but those changes are undone by cheap scares and a climactic revelation that's more ho-hum than horrifying.
  69. Other People's Children
    Nothing ever feels like it's at stake — the drama here is whisper-thin.
  70. Yosemite
    Like Gia Coppola's Palo Alto (2013), a lyric and biting evocation of contemporary well-to-do teendom, Gabrielle Demeestere's Yosemite mines Franco's fiction for its most vital quality: his unsentimental depiction of youthful insecurity, this time among fifth-graders.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jan 1, 2016
  71. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It's both an important part of Ghibli's history and a gem in its own right.
  72. Point Break
    There are two rules that no version of Point Break should disobey: Don't skimp on surfing and never be boring. That’s two unpardonable strikes against new helmsman Ericson Core, who also photographed this stiff, humorless, tension-free remake in drab 3D.
  73. Anomalisa
    Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.
  74. The Himalayas
    For all the big-budget spectacle on display, it's the scenes that look to have been shot on a GoPro that most excite -- only in these few sequences does The Himalayas begin to distinguish itself from its blockbuster ilk.
  75. Joy
    Russell enthusiasts — and I consider myself one — often applaud the director's abiding interest in the messiness of his characters' lives, most vividly on display in American Hustle, a movie animated by flamboyant dissemblers and depressives. But the disorder found in Joy is a reflection not of any quicksilver dynamics among the actors but of the odd tonal shifts in the film itself.
  76. 45 Years
    With 45 Years, [Haigh] has created not only a searching examination of a long-term marriage — and the myths that sustain it — but also a compassionate portrait of a woman reconciling herself with those false notions.
  77. Concussion
    Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.
  78. Daddy's Home
    The performers are all skilled enough to make something of this tired material.
  79. The Genital Warriors
    Like the ravings of a keyed-up screenwriter, there's conviction, if not logic, in its madness, and that makes it fun and fascinating.
  80. Hamlet's Ghost
    So gosh-darn terrible in so many ways, the film defies a unified thesis.
  81. Dreams Rewired
    The filmmakers aren't arguing that mass-media tech leads to fascism, but they suggest, with some lightness, that our interconnectedness certainly facilitates it. But Dreams Rewired is no polemic, and it never mocks the past.
  82. The Creation of Meaning
    Rapisarda Casanova's film shows just how much natural splendor dominates the region, here caught at the height of estival glory.
  83. The Emperor's New Clothes
    It can be hard to take someone so pleased with himself seriously, but amid his grandstanding, Brand does offer some solutions to problems many of us rightfully feel are intractable.
  84. The Winding Stream
    The film stands as a reminder of how much it can mean just to listen.
  85. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Star Wars: The Force Awakens steers the franchise back to its popcorn origins. It's not a Bible; it's a bantamweight blast. And that's just as it should be: a good movie, nothing more.
  86. Anguish
    There's not much to be said about Sonny Mallhi's languid psychological drama — moonlighting as a possession-centered horror film — that hasn't already been said by the title.
  87. Noma: My Perfect Storm
    Deschamps never ventures below the surface of Redzepi's wildly successful experiment, and while the pictures are pretty, no one judges food on appearance alone.
  88. The Hateful Eight
    The film's chatty, ingratiating, and then howlingly mean.
  89. Extraction
    Extraction constantly tries to score a flashy TKO — but never lands a decent body blow.
  90. The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
    Dany's mystery may ultimately go one twist too far. But until then, viewers can easily lose themselves while daydreaming about a French dame in distress with bad luck and an alluring look.
  91. He Never Died
    He Never Died is a Tootsie Pop of a movie. It has the outer shell of Taken...but there's an altogether different treat in the center.
  92. Son of Saul
    Nemes does everything he can to connect the audience to Saul's numbness, shielding us as much as possible from the cacophony of human misery that rings in his ears. The chill seeps in regardless, as it should, and Nemes doesn't try to counter it with more than a tiny, stubborn flicker of hope.
  93. Sisters
    Once the bash really gets going, I was swept up in the chaos and happily clicked off my brain. Screenwriter Paula Pell classes up the dumb stuff with a touch of depth.
  94. The Revenant
    If you can work up interest in such meager material, the film is a chilling, stirring, experiential immersion in what life-and-death drama might actually feel like.
  95. Stinking Heaven
    Never a banal depiction of dysfunctional group dynamics, Stinking Heaven, which was shaped, as in Silver's previous work, largely through improvisation, remains consistently absorbing.
  96. Body
    On the surface a typical exercise in horror-film cliché, Body turns out to be a far more thought-provoking creature, a parable of adulthood and a stinging indictment of white-girl privilege.
  97. Sunday Ball
    Trash talk among competitors and spectators alike is a constant background hum, the informal banter taking the place of traditional talking-head documentary interviews.
  98. Almost There
    After guiding his fate, the filmmakers step back and dispassionately capture a series of frustrated caregivers passing the baton, each nudging Anton toward a new life. This decision makes Almost There a richer, more compassionate portrait.
  99. The Girl in the Book
    Cohn is clearly on the right track toward making the kind of nuanced grown-up dramas that sadly are no longer in vogue.
  100. Dixieland
    Writer-director Hank Bedford delivers some tactile, human details.... But the film is slow and often agonizingly predictable.
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