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. Hard Labor
    The film's brittle and quiet, on occasion touched with the techniques of horror, especially as Helena stalks her store after hours. It's also trenchant, stinging, and acted with great frumping subtlety.
  2. Our Brand Is Crisis
    David Gordon Green's Our Brand Is Crisis is a horror film wrapped in fast-talking political comedy.
  3. Flowers
    Pulled in too many directions, the film's subtle mood-building starts to feel intentionally oblique, the force of its characters and symbols lessened by a frustrating circuitousness.
  4. Heneral Luna
    At a minimum, the film might inspire some people to hit up Google for a crash course on this historical narrative.
  5. The Royal Road
    As personal as it is political, Olson's meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history — and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory.
  6. Making Rounds
    Making Rounds demonstrates the real value of medicine with a human touch.
  7. Love
    The couplings have an artful intensity lacking in pornography, which favors athleticism and disconnectedness, and the lighting — well, the best thing in the movie is the look of it all, which in a tony sex-flick counts for a lot.
  8. The Wonders
    The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.
  9. The Armor of Light
    [An] electrifying documentary.
  10. India's Daughter
    The film is undeniably compelling, and the fury and protest with which women across India responded to Singh's murder was explosive.... Yet there's something worrisome in the sensationalist tone.
  11. Tokyo Tribe
    Tokyo Tribe is Sono cackling hysterically while smashing a keytar. Sure, there are a few sour notes, but he's made a great blast of noise.
  12. The Last Witch Hunter
    The story works out like you might expect. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness.
  13. Jem and the Holograms
    Chu and screenwriter Ryan Landels's take on fame is more fascinating than most of the film's drab, slow drama.
  14. Breaking Through
    For a movie all about passion and the need to express yourself artistically, it is the most halfhearted "you got served" to hit theaters this year.
  15. The Tainted Veil
    The Tainted Veil is a long conversation, wide in scope and geography, but nonetheless intimate.
  16. The Looking Glass
    An overlong but deeply felt film.
  17. Difret
    Difret is painful but profound, skirting the pitfalls of the inspirational biopic for something more grounded and remarkable. Its authenticity extends beyond its central characters, conveying a very real sense of what is at stake.
  18. The Diabolical
    It might be asking too much for The Diabolical to fully live up to its cheesy-ominous title, but the sheer unadulterated inanity of these proceedings suggests that it'll soon be teleported to the far corners of the B-movie streaming-video abyss.
  19. The Pearl Button
    The voiceover is lyric, the oceanscapes majestic, the anthropology fascinating, and the connections more quizzical and uncertain than in Nostalgia for the Light. This time you have to look harder to follow him.
  20. Nasty Baby
    Nasty Baby isn't satisfying. But on Silva's terms, it makes sense.
  21. I Smile Back
    Silverman has taken serious, or at least semi-serious, roles before, but she's never had a part that demanded so much of her. She has been open about her own battles with depression, but what makes her turn here work is that it isn't nakedly expressive.
  22. OzLand
    The final result of all this, if a mixed bag, is still a more accurate rendering of the books' spirit than Oz the Great and Powerful.
  23. Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk is an odd duck, a bowlegged western with slasher influences, a penchant for lengthy conversational meanderings, and a genuine interest in character.
  24. Rock the Kasbah
    The film often plays like everyone making it agreed that some on-set idea was so funny it had to be included, whether or not it suited the story.
  25. Heart of a Dog
    Her documentary sporadically locates profound truth amid its myriad musings about the momentous and the everyday. Often, however, Anderson's hushed-tone articulations of her thoughts on these subjects prove affected, and her stream-of-consciousness style, though acutely constructed, is more alienating than inviting.
  26. Jason and Shirley
    Jason and Shirley is imprecise, even maddening history, but it's hair-raising as historicity: Exposed here is the longstanding and somewhat vampiric process of white artists extracting for their work minority perspectives and experiences.
  27. Tales of Halloween
    There's much to like here, and ample scares for your brains.
  28. The Boy from Geita
    The Boy From Geita has some fascinating subjects but absolutely no idea how to present them.
  29. Field Niggas
    Allah, a street photographer of deserved renown, has achieved something here beyond the familiar documentary impulse to show us the people who live on the streets. His immersive, unsettling techniques dig at a sense of what it might feel like to be among them.
  30. Room
    Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.
  31. All Things Must Pass
    The director's native warmth and sympathy are extended here to the store and the personalities that made it a billion-dollar, globe-bestriding colossus.
  32. Truth
    Vanderbilt, the screenwriter of Zodiac, here making his debut as a director, masters the heady pulse of high-end, high-stakes journalism.
  33. The Russian Woodpecker
    The Russian Woodpecker is very much like Fedor himself — eccentric as hell, smart as a whip, and, at the end of the day, a heartbreaker.
  34. Mi America
    Fontaine, also the writer and director here, aims high and crashes spectacularly, unable to keep the Jenga tower of a story together — or from being uninteresting.
  35. Momentum
    Longtime camera operator Stephen S. Campanelli's directorial debut is frustratingly by-the-book, with all the trappings of a movie marketed to rowdy fifteen-year-old boys.
  36. Meadowland
    The filmmakers take great pains not to stack the deck or overstate the couple's self-evident trauma, but watching the movie is ultimately like being one of their friends: You understand their pain on a conceptual level but can't feel it the way they do.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tab Hunter Confidential
    The movie follows Hunter's life after leaving the Warners, the bad movies and years on the dinner-theater circuit. And it reveals something stronger: the quiet refusal, beneath Hunter's affable, casual manner, to be anything less than he is, neither the "sigh guy" nor a convenient symbol of gay pride.
  38. A Ballerina's Tale
    In A Ballerina's Tale, director Nelson George paints a moving portrait of Copeland that underscores her triumphs over bodily and historical limitations.
  39. The Assassin
    Hou uses very few close-ups here, preferring to tell his story mostly through movement: combat, dance, the act of passing through a landscape of satiny green firs or silvery birch trees and just watching. Shu conveys complicated feelings — longing, regret, anxiety — with little more than the tilt of her chin or the set of her shoulders.
  40. Experimenter
    The movie is itself a rat-maze of one-sided mirrors, windows upon windows, anonymous hallways, compartmentalized instances of watching, being watched, seeing and not-seeing.
  41. Goosebumps
    Especially in its superior first hour, Goosebumps has a loose comic rhythm at odds with what we see in effects-heavy would-be blockbuster junk like Pan.
  42. Bridge of Spies
    What Spielberg seems to want most from this respectable lark is for audiences to notice the parallels between the 1950s and today.
  43. Crimson Peak
    Though this movie waltzes to its own strange rhythm, del Toro hits every note.
  44. Trash
    Trash's creators never say anything thoughtful or useful about the extreme violence they liberally — and irresponsibly — use to characterize third-world adolescence.
  45. Neorealism: We Were Not Just Bicycles Thieves
    All this history and critical appreciation is lightened by Lizzani's genial goofiness.
  46. Short Skin
    However brightened by some fast dick-and-pussy banter and lovely Tuscan scenery, the film's slow boil makes it fairly unconvincing, and Creatini is one of modern European movies' least palatable, and least animated, protagonists.
  47. In the Shadow of Women
    In so shrewdly exploring the illusions — namely (self-) deception — required to keep a dyad functioning, Garrel shows just how much we all remain, consciously or not, in the dark.
  48. Manhattan Romance
    The director is all at sea with the choppy Manhattan Romance, finding nothing new in New York while self-consciously making a blander version of a Woody Allen romantic comedy.
  49. Yakuza Apocalypse
    If you can get on its wacko wavelength, it's a uniquely crazed, compelling midnight-movie whatsit.
  50. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    Winter on Fire's thrilling rebellion is neither the beginning nor the end, but it is at least a truly heartening middle.
  51. In My Father's House
    This intimate film's creators presume that the audience is familiar with the facts and wants a human story about what it's like to get your dad back.
  52. Dukhtar
    Dukhtar is an issues film with the twisted, heart-pounding feel of a road-trip thriller, but Nathaniel based her script on a true story, and there's a low-key quality to the conversations that feels real, intimate, and all the more urgent for it.
  53. Xenia
    Xenia has a winning streak of oddness.
  54. A Woman Like Me
    In Sichel's inspired conceit, the self-reflexive truth-through-fiction ethos of the Iranian New Wave meets a sensitive documentary exploration of trying to live at the ends of life.
  55. Reversion
    Though mildly engaging, this Reversion doesn't delve deep enough to distinguish itself.
  56. Knock Knock
    The best villains are those whose motivations prove uncomfortably persuasive, and Knock Knock's drop-dead-gorgeous home invaders predicate their cruel game on too shaky a foundation to truly unsettle.
  57. Victoria
    This sparse marvel leaves the audience rattled by how small decisions lead to big consequences. Still, you're most likely to leave the theater gushing about the cast's bravura unbroken performances.
  58. The Final Girls
    The heart of this mostly bloodless picture is Max's relationship with her mother's film character, and there are some genuinely touching moments about grieving and the acceptance of loss.
  59. The Forbidden Room
    The experience is two-thirds thrilling to one-third enervating, a winning ratio for what's essentially a tightly curated anthology film.
  60. (T)error
    Inevitably, this tense comedy dips into tragedy, with our fearful intelligence agencies getting everything wrong and the filmmakers using their rare access to chart each mistake as it happens.
  61. Godspeed: The Story of Page Jones
    While his story is moving, Godspeed would perhaps have been more powerful if Barry spent more time balancing Jones's relative good fortune with the monumental hurdles faced by the less fortunate with similar injuries, instead of touching upon the issue in the film's final minutes.
  62. Pan
    Jackman occasionally wins a laugh, when he manages to impose himself over the movie's restless clamor.
  63. Steve Jobs
    This is a swift and searing attempt to pull back the curtain on Jobs and, in the process, investigate the relationship between the myth and the man.
  64. Narcopolis
    There's simply too much going on to establish characters.
  65. Movement and Location
    Despite its sci-fi hook, Movement and Location turns out to be a surprisingly resonant film about how impossible it is for most people — no matter their cosmic time zone — to carve out a life that's emotionally honest.
  66. Deathgasm
    Cawthorne's performance underpins the resulting power fantasy with genuine emotion.
  67. Gravy
    The fast-paced Gravy is kind of like a Rob Zombie film by way of Bobcat Goldthwait's Shakes the Clown... and succeeds where so many other horror-comedies fail by remembering to be funny first and shocking second.
  68. Northern Soul
    This debut feature by Elaine Constantine has no shortage of style, but ultimately relies a lot on cliché.
  69. Freeheld
    Beneath the clichés of prestige filmmaking beat the hearts of a couple it's a privilege to get to know.
  70. The Creeping Garden
    Heady and rigorous, The Creeping Garden is an illuminating science documentary that tickles the imagination.
  71. This Changes Everything
    This Changes Everything isn't a game-changer, but it is jarring enough to be scary.
  72. A Christmas Horror Story
    The anthology is a mixed stocking; if you reach inside, something's likely to grab you.
  73. Shanghai
    Cusack's low-simmering performance keeps the drama at a tediously low boil.
  74. Partisan
    Cassel is never less than transfixing as a savior with a semi-sinister smile, but Partisan's lack of interest in providing necessary context — especially about the ill-defined larger society that Gregori rejects — leaves it operating on a hazy psychological level.
  75. Labyrinth of Lies
    It's to the film's credit that truth-telling here looks as hard as it does noble, and that the Holocaust is not treated just as a suspense story's macguffin.
  76. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    There's something wonderful in how these scenes, so breezy and funny, reveal so much.
  77. The Walk
    The Walk, in its last half at least, is a dazzling piece of work, particularly in 3-D; even so, its most luminous effect is an actor.
  78. Western
    The film, a hard jewel of beauty and reportage, demands and rewards that second viewing.
  79. Brand: A Second Coming
    Though it includes parts of a live comedy performance, the film is a documentary with an attention span about as long as its subject's.
  80. Stonewall
    Stonewall aspires to be a sweeping tale of social change and hardscrabble street life, but at every moment it feels like a musical whose numbers have been cut.
  81. The Anomaly
    The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.
  82. Radicalized
    It's almost unbelievable how much people talk, in Slovick's two hours, without saying very much at all.
  83. Jeremy Scott: The People's Designer
    Yudin's surface-level portrait looks for deeper truths, but finds them in unexpected ways.
  84. Forever
    The film twists tension in the viewer's gut as the clock ticks toward a day of reckoning. But the script could be tougher-minded.
  85. Shah Bob
    Shah Bob may be languid, interrupted by Rockford-style freeze-frames, but it's also intimate and captivating, and it calls to mind indie films from before Sundance made them mostly another Hollywood commodity.
  86. The Martian
    The Martian is only partly a story about a man in peril; it's mostly a story about men (and a few women) taking control of the uncontrollable. It's confident, swaggering sci-fi, not the despairing kind. That may be why, as elaborate and expensive-looking as The Martian is, it's almost totally lacking in poetry.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mission to Lars
    But the biggest frustration is that the film's abrupt ending fails to show whether Kate and William really did rebuild their relationship with Tom on the Ulrich quest, and, either way, what that outcome means for the rest of us.
  88. Wildlike
    Greenwood brings his usual A-game, generating great chemistry with Purnell in their ad hoc paternal relationship, but she's the revelation.
  89. Misunderstood
    Both Aria and the film as a whole are very much in their own head, which is a nice place to visit but probably not the healthiest environment to grow up in.
  90. Mississippi Grind
    Bitterly funny gambling comedy Mississippi Grind transcends its generic lovable-losers-on-a-bender plot by foregrounding exceptionally well-developed skid-row protagonists and weirdly charming dive-bar ambiance.
  91. The Keeping Room
    The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.
  92. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It's dispiriting that a film about a humor magazine that broke and rebuilt the forms of both humor and magazines is itself so staid — and so lacking in sociologic sweep.
  93. Becoming Bulletproof
    Becoming Bulletproof extols that virtue of inclusivity by not only showing the diverse actors onscreen, but giving them the chance to share their behind-the-scenes stories as well. Unfortunately, the documentary never transcends its rather conventional structure, relying instead on the do-good intentions of its audience to see it through.
  94. Ashby
    It doesn't hurt to have excellent support from the likes of Emma Roberts (as Ed's love interest Eloise) and Sarah Silverman, surprisingly winning as Ed's affection-starved mother. But it's Wolff and Rourke who have to carry the load, and for the most part they do.
  95. 99 Homes
    The film is more closing argument than portrait of life in the downturn, but it's thrillingly vigorous in its damning.
  96. The Green Inferno
    Roth amplifies that exploitation flick's least interesting components (gore, cruelty) at the expense of all others.
  97. The Intern
    The spongy subtext of this and every Meyers movie is "We're being serious, but we're also being FUN!" No viewer must ever be made to think too much, feel too much, or be left out. She doesn't so much tell a story as lead a team-building exercise.
  98. Eden
    Eden wants you to know what people are really like outside your smothering bourgeois cocoon.
  99. Pay the Ghost
    The script doesn't know the difference between being something scary and pointing at something scary. It's less a film than a series of imitative gestures, a bunch of horror signifiers pointing to nothing.
  100. A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story
    A Brave Heart is not very sophisticated, flitting between Lizzie the internet celebrity, Lizzie the anti-bullying activist, Lizzie the beloved eldest daughter of a close-knit family, and Lizzie the young woman whose health challenges make her advocacy even harder.
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