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. Don Verdean
    Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way.
  2. American Hero
    The filmmakers blend tones like a child mixing fountain drinks into one unidentifiable flavor.
  3. Boy and the World
    Tension between the city and the country has been a fertile topic for as long as there've been cities, and Alê Abreu's phantasmagoric The Boy and the World explores the eternal conflict in a familiar yet wholly original way.
  4. In the Heart of the Sea
    Howard is great at capturing the timbre of the ship, the creaks and snaps and the whir of the hemp lines, and the sonar clicks of the whales strategizing below. All his sound and fury has a befuddling purpose. His emotional climax is about, well, disaster insurance.
  5. The Big Short
    McKay's bumptious movie awkwardly combines fourth-wall-breaking gimmickry and flaccid indignation with the goofball energy that defines his comedies.
  6. Night Owls
    Charles Hood's Night Owls is a mostly satisfying two-hander that never quite lives up to its full potential.
  7. The Wannabe
    Director Nick Sandow relies on a drab color palette that suits the generally humorless script.
  8. Youth
    Sorrentino, as always, invests his scenarios with a feeling and beauty that transcends the dreary specifics
  9. Krampus
    Krampus, sad to say, is a disappointment. It's alternately funny and intense (don't take the wee ones), but never enough of either to form a cohesive whole.
  10. The Messenger
    The filmmakers, like the songbirds they advocate for, are only messengers, but their message is persuasive and terrifying.
  11. dream/killer
    This is a real-life horror story, raw and galling — but not surprising. The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured.
  12. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
    The usual doc mix of interviews and vintage photos is moving and surprisingly funny.
  13. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
    Finlay tells this story with the usual doc techniques. The interviews are marvelous, especially the ones with Ellis's exes, who attest not just to his weakness for groupies but to his collection of trophies.
  14. The Letters
    Riead's reverential portrait belies Teresa's thorny complexities and turns her into a single-minded proponent of work hard, pray hard.
  15. My Friend Victoria
    My Friend Victoria has a specific vibrancy as delicate and understated as Lessing's social critique. It's an accumulation of small moments: telling gazes, sour notes in the dialogue, the persistent impression of a woman who's in a room but never fully present.
  16. Macbeth
    This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.
  17. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    This is a masterpiece not because it culminates in some redemptive catharsis or clinching argument for social change, but because, by disavowing such facile ends, it meets the mess of life on its own clear and true terms.
  18. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    The stories have an almost dreamlike sweep and imaginative energy, and the film never exhausts that exuberance. More extraordinary still is its emotional depth.
  19. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    However you enjoy its nearly four hundred minutes, I expect you'll be held rapt till the last second by a film of abundant wit and generous heart.
  20. Christmas, Again
    Christmas, Again is a low hum of a downer, but maybe that's appropriate.
  21. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    Every Thing Will Be Fine is torturously slow and hopelessly mannered.
  22. Dementia
    As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.
  23. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.
  24. A Royal Night Out
    The film relies heavily on the coltish charms of its young leads, and Powley's effervescent, well-timed performance as the younger princess (she calls herself "P2") is skillful enough to bring out the screwball latencies in an otherwise bland screenplay.
  25. MI-5
    Led by the honorably dour Firth and the charisma-free Harington, MI-5 is convoluted and dull, though Harry's revenge against that dastardly mole is pleasingly diabolical. But it's too little too late.
  26. Uncle Nick
    Posehn, flaunting his insulin-resistant physique and middle-aged dong, is the perfect counterpoint to the wretched American Beauty, providing a way more accurate portrayal of midlife creepiness.
  27. Bikes vs Cars
    It's not that anyone is opposed to bikes; they're opposed to anything that might threaten the profits of car manufacturers and oil companies.
  28. The World of Kanako
    Yakusho's breathless, riveting performance grounds The World of Kanako even as it threatens to devolve into an unbearable series of nihilistic plot twists and gory set pieces.
  29. The Lady in the Van
    It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.
  30. Mustang
    The film could do with fewer panty shots of the listless sisters flopped across each other like kittens. Yet it manages to capture the lethargy of watching your life goals winnow into wifely servitude.
  31. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it.
  32. Karski & the Lords of Humanity
    In their abstraction, a number of striking animated sequences prove more effective in conveying these horrors than the talking-head segments that contextualize them.
  33. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
    [A] lighthearted and immensely entertaining doc.
  34. TransFatty Lives
    A doc as vibrant as its auteur's mind, even as his body is rendered immobile.
  35. Stink!
    Though not as funny as Moore's earliest work, Jon Whelan's Stink! is way more emotionally affecting.
  36. Iraqi Odyssey
    Heartrending throughout, Iraqi Odyssey is everything you want in a documentary — informative, involving, and eager to decipher complex, often paradoxical historical conundrums. Everything, that is, except visually interesting.
  37. Close Range
    It's as unsubtle as a boot to the head, but its dour-and-campy lo-fi style is far preferable to the spastic flash of its big-budget genre compatriots.
  38. Killing Them Safely
    Footage of the now-wealthy Smiths being deposed is damning, the brothers' legal jiujitsu is appalling, and the stories of deaths are heartbreaking.
  39. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.
  40. The Danish Girl
    If The Danish Girl dared to critique its main characters, it'd be brave. If it had celebrated a modern marriage that worked for 26 years — much longer and stranger than the film lets on — it'd be truly pioneering. Real life is full of kinks, mistakes, and selfish behavior. Biopics, however, are made of formulaic virtue.
  41. I Remember You
    [Sparrow] zigs where you expect her to zag (not always in the best of ways), and though I Remember You ends up exactly where you expect it to, the windy, circuitous path it takes doesn't feel like time misspent.
  42. The Good Dinosaur
    It's smart in surprising ways, daring in a few minor ones, moving in the right ones.
  43. Creed
    Creed wants all of the Rocky drama but invests in none of the smarts.
  44. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    [A] vivid and enlightening documentary.
  45. Kingdom of Shadows
    Though at times too splintered by its various points of interest, Bernardo Ruiz's up-close-and-personal documentary is nonetheless harrowing in its details.
  46. Censored Voices
    Oz is the best-known novelist in Israel, notorious for supporting a two-state solution. If you don't yet understand why he does, watch this film. If you're already on Oz's side, keeping the wound open might be worth it.
  47. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    [A] tender and low-key documentary.
  48. Mediterranea
    The film proves a piercing character study whose narrow view frustrates complete empathy.
  49. Democrats
    As excellent a documentary about politics as you will ever see.
  50. The Summer of Sangaile
    Lesbian coming-of-age tales can be sensationalistic and leering, but this film (directed by a woman, Alanté Kavaïté) casts a sensitive eye on the understated story of Sangaile (Julija Steponaityté), a shy, troubled girl who begins a relationship with the more ebullient Auste (Aisté Dirziuté).
  51. Frame by Frame
    Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography, Frame by Frame is about embedded journalists (the photographers) fighting the power, not kowtowing to it.
  52. Sweet Micky for President
    The energy never falters as the film jumps from talking-head testimonies to on-the-streets footage of rallies and riots.
  53. Criminal Activities
    The script veers from comic, narrated episodes to surprising violence, planting early narrative seeds that yield some effective surprises later, a dynamic range that's pretty comfortable to old hands Travolta and Travolta's Chili Palmer wig after all these years.
  54. Legend
    Legend reminds us how easily a pretty star can get us to feel for people we'd deplore in real life — a monster's a monster, no matter how big its heart or soulful its strut.
  55. #Horror
    Not every gamble works: The girls' intrusive Bejeweled-like social-media game annoys at every turn, and the plot itself is murky. But #Horror mesmerizes nonetheless, filled with tension, cruelty, and can't-look-away style.
  56. Drone
    In her provocative documentary Drone, Tonje Hessen Schei shows how, actually, the U.S. and its military-industrial complex treat war like a video game.
  57. Carol
    Carol is a film you want to reach out and touch, if only you could reach anywhere near the top of the pedestal it's perched on. It is itself an unattainable love object, the goddess Venus disguised as a movie.
  58. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    Most astonishingly, with the franchise's powerful climax, Lawrence has managed to align her parallel Hollywood lives and reinvent the prestigious popcorn flick, a crowd-pleaser with intelligent class.
  59. The Night Before
    At first the laughs are Hangover III–spare and the picture is too shambling to lunge for them. But these leftovers warm up eventually. The usual setups at last develop variations, and you might be reminded of why audiences first responded to Rogen back in Knocked Up.
  60. Coming Home
    Viko Nikci's undeniably poignant doc surprisingly chooses to follow threads of hope and forgiveness over the angers of injustice.
  61. Condemned
    So what do the tea leaves say? They're hard to read through the over-the-top grossness and weak acting, but it's probably that gentrification is good, poor people and assorted lowlifes don't deserve prime real estate, and Sean Penn's baby girl needs a better agent.
  62. Love the Coopers
    What a difference a comma makes — or would make, in the case of Jessie Nelson's lumpy, wretchedly unfunny Love the Coopers, whose title commands us to love people it's impossible even to like.
  63. Out of My Hand
    The story spins out in painful directions that feel surprising yet inevitable.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man Up
    Pegg's comic chops elevate even the most juvenile of jokes, but it's Bell's daring and impolite performance that steals the show.
  65. Sex, Death and Bowling
    The movie's flair for soap-opera-style pile-on becomes emotionally draining rather than moving.
  66. Addiction: A 60's Love Story
    While Bornstein stumbles along his rocky road to redemption, Addiction lacks the narrative focus to make it more than a glorified home movie.
  67. Landmine Goes Click
    It's an exploitation film that never gets its audience off, even with cheap thrills — what a dud.
  68. Sand Dollars
    Guzmán and Cárdenas present this tropical island as both Anne's romantic refuge and Noelí's exploitative landscape, a beautiful, enchanting — and realistic — Eden where snakes are merely snakes.
  69. Entertainment
    Entertainment is a painful, poetic watch.
  70. Funny Bunny
    Funny Bunny may be effectively alienating, but never in a commendable way.
  71. Rock in the Red Zone
    Bialis's growing immersion in the town is poignant, even admirable.
  72. Heist
    You've seen neo-noirs like this before, but you probably haven't had this much fun with a modern B movie in a while.
  73. Shelter
    Shelter is a well-intentioned film that edges into misery porn.
  74. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    If Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's exhilarating documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, were merely a testament to McQueen's stubbornness and irascibility, it would still be a damned entertaining portrait.
  75. The Funhouse Massacre
    Amateurish direction and generic characterization make a light premise — serial killers slaughter a rural carnival's haunted-house patrons while pretending to be carnies — feel like a slog.
  76. The 33
    The 33, directed by Patricia Riggen, makes a valiant effort to tell this harrowing story onscreen, and there are moments when every shifting plate clicks right into place. In the end, though, the picture stumbles, and it may not completely be the fault of the filmmakers.
  77. By the Sea
    The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.
  78. James White
    When James White really digs in, it's an affecting portrait of grief and of feeling lost in life.
  79. Palio
    While Spender spends enough time with both new and retired jockey legends to collect a gold mine of macho, bullheaded rapport, you wish she delved deeper into the more sinister, behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealings.
  80. In Jackson Heights
    It's a work of community portraiture that slowly develops into collective drama
  81. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    Despite a melodramatic title, the film is keen and measured. Drama builds in the small moments.
  82. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    A rambling daydream that aims literally to supplant your life, it's in effect a serial, in eight ninety-plus-minute chapters, TV-ready but defined by Rivette as a consuming theatrical experience. It consumes, all right, like a drug that won't fade, but it's also a lark, a metafiction without any reality, a magnificent irrelevance.
  83. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
    Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history.
  84. Of Men and War
    This film is raw in the truest sense, yet refined in its sympathy and scope.
  85. Lost in the Sun
    While his images have been composed with care, Nelson's screenplay is a far less impressive invention.
  86. In the Basement
    Seidl's study reminds us, with each new basement, that the places where we're most ourselves might as well have grown off us like the shells of mollusks.
  87. Hot Sugar's Cold World
    Over the course of the film, Koenig, a sallow, heavy-lidded youth who looks like he could be aged anywhere between 19 and 36, is revealed to be both an unspiring artist and an odious protagonist.
  88. Miss You Already
    Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke's cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate.
  89. Sembene!
    Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo's heartfelt doc is rich in footage and access.
  90. Theeb
    Novice actor Hwietat is terrific in the lead role, and even if we go in knowing the historical backstory, we still discover it all from his point of view — and never stop wondering how the wolf will survive.
  91. The Hallow
    The Hallow offers plenty of scares and is unnerving from wire to wire, wrapping up the second act with a bang and red-lining the tension until the end.
  92. Trumbo
    The film fails as a portrait, and it's not much better at drama.
  93. Brooklyn
    The film serves as an authentic examination of the mid-twentieth-century immigrant experience — and an intimate exploration of one woman's attempt to understand who she is and where she wants to belong.
  94. Spotlight
    Spotlight feels both timeless and modern, a dexterously crafted film that could have been made anytime but somehow feels perfect for right now.
  95. The Peanuts Movie
    What's surprising — even wondrous — is how often Schulz's precisely crooked line work informs the big-budget gloss.
  96. SPECTRE
    In the end, Spectre is just too much of a good thing. Though each scene is carefully wrought, there's little grace, majesty, or romance in the way the pieces are connected. The whole is bumpy and inelegant — entertaining for sure, but hard to love.
  97. McCullin
    Famous for his war photography, McCullin's gift is his sensitivity, a capacity to feel the pain of other people that informs both the images he produced and the ones he refused to take.
  98. Bare
    Natalia Leite, here making her feature directorial debut, does have a knack for capturing a sense of place. Both the Nevada landscapes and a supermarket where Sarah works early on have a pleasing clarity and recognizable feeling of malaise. The environment says more than the characters ever do.
  99. Asthma
    A fascinating character study.
  100. Burnt
    The movie gets duller and less focused as it wears on.
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