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 7.5 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. 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.
  2. John Wick: Chapter 2
    This new film doesn’t have the emotional grounding of the original, and it probably dwells too long explaining things we never cared about. But it’s still a visceral, cathartic and — most important — gorgeous two hours of kinetic, poetic bloodshed.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witnesses
    The Witnesses forms a magnificent trilogy with "Son Frère" (2003), Patrice Chéreau's devastating account of fraternal devotion in the face of death, and the amazing, acerbic "Before I Forget," a brooding and bitter tale of survival coming soon from Jacques Nolot, here lending an iconic cameo as the proprietor of Manu's hooker hotel.
  4. How to Train Your Dragon
    Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.
  5. Side Effects
    If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh's final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls.
  6. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    That Battered Bastards is practically a hagiography doesn't negate the fact that it has more anti-establishment joie de vivre in any given scene than most talking-head docs about previously unheralded mensches contain in their entire run times.
  7. Oceans
    Océans is a jaw-dropper as a visual travelogue--even its anthropomorphic indulgences (an ocean floor is turned into a rough neighborhood, complete with trespassers and shy weirdos) are winning.
  8. That Evening Sun
    More than once, the director inserts a gooey flashback to a tender moment between the farmer and his late wife (Dixie Carter) that not only extends an already overlong movie, but also fatally undercuts the artful rigor of its leading man.
  9. Blindspotting
    It’s wild and singular, often beautiful, a feast and feat of self-definition through verbal dexterity. It’s shaking with laughter, teeming with insights and tense as hell when the police roll up.
  10. The Invisible War
    The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.
  11. Metropolis
    Metropolis is "A.I." without tears.
  12. The Motorcycle Diaries
    Lovely to look at but insipid.
  13. The Wolfpack
    The Wolfpack is more like a diorama of the Angulos' unusual childhood than an explanatory documentary.
  14. 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.
  15. Little Children
    This overly long movie, made sluggish by a superfluously novelistic narrator, feels divided against itself, driven by opposed impulses of tragedy and dark humor that make it impossible for us to identify with these lost souls' break for freedom or wait for them to grow up.
  16. 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.
  17. Another Road Home
    Politics hover at the edges of even the most affectionate encounters among Danae, her parents, and the Obeidallah family. Amos Elon's negativity regarding the future of the Jewish state mars the film, yet Another Road Home moves beyond dark predictions.
  18. Rich Hill
    Rich Hill does not add up to more than a series of vignettes. What it offers is a compassionate look at the intricacies of American poverty, where joblessness is only one factor.
  19. Dark Days
    Singer achieves remarkable intimacy with his subjects.
  20. Captain America: Civil War
    I never found myself genuinely wondering what was going to happen next; the moves are too familiar. Even the big fight, entertaining as it is, feels like it's there not because of dramatic inevitability, but because somebody behind a desk decided it had to be. It's just a bunch of stuff.
  21. The Ister
    The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.
  22. The Desert of Forbidden Art
    It's a must-see for anyone interested in art.
  23. Finding Vivian Maier
    Because her tale is so fascinating, movie-making formula is all that's needed.
  24. Super Dark Times
    Both a thriller and meditation on the loss of innocence, Super Dark Times is rich with the minutiae of a bygone era...but Phillips and screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski press hard against the instinct for nostalgia.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Middle of Nowhere
    A slow-motion-enhanced kiss scene, with Corinealdi in top I-don't-give-a-f--- strut, is a startling example of DuVernay's ability to conjure drama that at once takes place in a character's head and in a recognizable real world. It's beautifully nuanced and confidently ambiguous - and so is the movie.
  26. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    The movie's only discernible purpose is as publicity for the book. An admitted egomaniac, Evans is no Hollywood villain, and yet this grating showcase almost makes you wish he'd gone the way of Don Simpson. Instead, he'll probably get an Irving Thalberg award.
  27. Startup.com
    Has all the hallmarks of a Pennebaker production. The editing is seamless, the drama builds throughout, and the arc of the central character is as shapely as in a Hollywood fiction.
  28. Harry Is Here to Help
    Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.
  29. Roger Dodger
    First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.
  30. Liberty Heights
    Buoyant with quiet smiles and unpretentious fondness.
  31. The Deserted Station
    Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's "Leila," makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable.
  32. Kitchen Stories
    Slight but sardonic, Norwegian director Bent Hamer's deadpan Kitchen Stories makes a taciturn comedy of nothingness out of color-coordinated '50s coziness and Scandinavian social planning.
  33. The Square
    This Down Under noir confuses incoherent body pileups with "twists."
  34. The Thieves
    Easier to like than it is to follow, Choi Dong-hoon's glossy caper boasts all the pomp and cajolery of the true international blockbuster.
  35. Intent to Destroy
    Intent to Destroy sometimes plays like a DVD extra that might have accompanied The Promise, but it does have value of its own in its interviews with historians, philosophers, and filmmakers and its vintage photos and footage.
  36. Les amitiés maléfiques
    Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dial M for Murder
    If the things here are homelier and less loved than, say, Marnie's neon yellow purse or Cary Grant's glowing glass of milk, and the film itself no one's idea of major Hitch, it remains a fascinating investigation of a stillborn process from one of cinema's most dedicated inquisitors of structure.
  38. 2 Autumns, 3 Winters
    Despite this gender imbalance, 2 Autumns, 3 Winters extends tremendous compassion to all of its characters, gently exploring their hopes and anxieties as they try to settle into adulthood.
  39. Graceland
    Striking the right balance between interior and exterior can mean the difference between compelling drama and accidental melodrama. Writer-director Ron Morales just misses equilibrium in the visually arresting Filipino thriller Graceland.
  40. Whitney
    By the time Whitney winds to an end, that massive talent feels like a dangerously valuable resource, one that even the people who were supposed to protect Houston couldn’t resist exploiting.
  41. Catch Me If You Can
    DiCaprio is far more successfully cast here than in Gangs of New York: His performance is all about acting; it's a mild kick to see how he'll manage to talk his way out of nearly every scrape.
  42. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Future Past starts fast and never slows down. There's not a line of dialogue that isn't exposition... What fun there is slips in through director Bryan Singer's visuals.
  43. Land of Mine
    The film is sometimes too sentimental, too predictable in its drift, but electric in individual moments.
  44. Miss Violence
    Miss Violence honors the thoroughly creepy work of Avranas's countrymen, but in his turn of the screw, Avranas marshals the abstract qualities of art cinema to comment upon concrete horror.
  45. Thoroughbreds
    Working with Lyle Vincent as director of photography, Finley continually offers up striking, emotionally resonant compositions, including a wide variety of inventive two shots in which the leads talk at or simply regard each other. Either actress could command the frame; when they share it, the air between them trembles.
  46. Black Girl (1966)
    Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966) is dense with cool fury.
  47. Treeless Mountain
    Treeless Mountain is skillfully unsentimental--because of, but also despite, the presence of two irresistible, unself-conscious performers in virtually every scene.
  48. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The LEGO Batman Movie is entertaining, but it also sometimes feels less like a spin-off of The LEGO Movie and more like one of its targets.
  49. 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Prairie Home Companion
    Keillor's modest subservience to Altman's group dynamic feels downright gallant, and in the context of the veteran director's most humanistic movie by a wide margin, it certainly has its rewards.
  51. Mid-August Lunch
    Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it's hard to believe writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody mafia hit "Gomorrah."
  52. Afterimage
    Though Wajda admires this struggle, the artist’s final pursuit never seems redemptive in the depths of Strzemiński’s isolation and misery.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caterpillar
    It's cinema that risks blunt silliness to achieve emotional and experiential seriousness.
  54. Must Read After My Death
    Dews helps Allis hold out a gendered posthumous snapshot of an era whose smug surface, barely masking oceans of suffering, makes "Revolutionary Road" look like a tea party.
  55. Baadasssss!
    Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.
  56. Trainwreck
    Schumer, writing and performing a character close to the one she’s been presenting to the public, may never be this funny again, but funny she is.
  57. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    For an hour and a half, this charming little movie, with its chatty talking heads and its sweet-natured subjects, offers a glimpse into the lives of two fascinating people whom I had never heard of, and who shared an unlikely life filled with achievements and setbacks, wonder and pain.
  58. The Specialist
    An austere and fascinating documentary.
  59. Secret Ballot
    Methodical, measured, and gently tedious in its comedy, Secret Ballot is a purposefully reductive movie—which may be why it's so successful at lodging itself in the brain.
  60. The Believer
    Bean has built a bonfire of contradictions and the ensuing conflagration illuminates a bit of the world.
  61. About a Boy
    Since the central odd couple have no rapport, their bond never seems to progress past mutual usury.
  62. In This World
    Winterbottom was set on bare-bones realism, and so the scalding lyricism of ferocious terrain and sociopolitical absurdity seen in, say, "Kandahar" or "A Time for Drunken Horses," is never resourced.
  63. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.
  64. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.
  65. 10,000 km
    It's ultra-serious, confined almost entirely indoors, and, with its Facebook pages and Google Maps walk-throughs, inextricably tied to the way we live right now. It's also well crafted and strikingly intimate.
  66. Peace Officer
    The film suffers from some rookie problems.... But through it we can see the history and ramp-up of the military-esque police methods that have become our current crisis.
  67. Point Blank
    No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.
  68. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    [A] vivid and enlightening documentary.
  69. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    This is an intimate portrait of the artist in recent years as she returns to Jamaica, the country of her birth and childhood, for a family reunion.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy the Kid
    I have seen more than 25 documentaries this year, and after a while they all start to run together, both structurally and thematically. Billy the Kid is utterly original in both respects.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jar City
    Here, the movie's urgency lies mostly in its convincing cast, its varied urban-to-pastoral locations (in light that ranges from harsh to bilious), and its cold-pro handling of familiar genre machinery, made fresh by unusual detail--such as the investigator's fast-food predilection for sheep heads.
  72. Plot for Peace
    The film's editing is masterful, though, and with ample footage from the time and up-to-date storytelling from many key players from the African, Cuban, and U.S. governments, among others, Plot for Peace proves enthralling.
  73. Okja
    There’s a lot to chew on here, but in the end, I wish Okja simply worked better as a movie.
  74. National Bird
    National Bird shows that war will always be hell, even for those who aren’t on the battleground. Kennebeck directs with a cold, distant eye, almost giving her subjects the same treatment they gave all those poor souls they targeted.
  75. Omar
    The movie is so brisk, even-handed, and realpolitik you're never quite sure if it has anything to say.
  76. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    An Egyptian feminist tale told with both affecting compassion and made-for-TV corniness.
  77. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes emerges ultimately as a poetic parable of both storytelling and moviemaking, and somehow it all fits together. [12 Nov 1970, p.59]
    • Village Voice
  78. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    The older Cruise gets, the more he relies on his fists. (And his abs, and his nerves — he'll never let you forget he does his own stunts, and why should he?) His body is the wonder-gizmo, and Christopher McQuarrie, writer and director of the fifth entry, Rogue Nation, keeps the camera on him like a nature show about a hungry lion.
  79. In the Last Days of the City
    It is not easy to describe In the Last Days of the City, an immersive visual experience with a wisp of a story and a wellspring of ideas.
  80. Frozen
    Frozen is a fun ride with some catchy tunes.
  81. Solas
    The fierce rigor of María Galiana's performance keeps this film from ever falling into sentimentality.
  82. Shot in the Heart
    A small-screen aesthetic is evident in the abundant close-ups and tight framing, but Holland makes it work for her.
  83. On the Run
    At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]
  84. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bitter Money
    We are not, as in so many a contemporary documentary, made to merely identify with the position of cameraperson, but are forced to consider and find our own ethical and political positions.
  86. 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waitress
    Waitress won't set the world on fire, but it glows.
  88. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    Nichols has actually committed all the classic errors of the sophisticated stage director let loose on the unsophisticated movies. For starters, he has underestimated the power of the spoken word in his search for visual pyrotechnics.
  89. Prodigal Sons
    As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation.
  90. The Skeleton Twins
    What's singular here isn't that the stars are playing brother and sister, or that they stir such sublime and anxious joy from each other. It's that the real love story isn't even between the damaged-but-lovable characters. It's between two profoundly depressed people and life itself.
  91. Oklahoma City
    Goodman also doesn’t state overtly why the story of the Oklahoma City bombing is so relevant today. He doesn’t have to. His methodical recounting of the rise of white nationalism and fringe movements reverberates with today’s world, in which racist violence and conspiracist lunacy has been emboldened and brought troublingly into the mainstream.
  92. Terribly Happy
    Cedergren is a little too bland, but that works with Hansen's air of haplessness and sets him apart from the colorful locals. His self-inflicted reckoning is a horizon visible throughout the movie, and the bog outside of town is a thudding but effective metaphor of willful repression.
  93. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    She's trying to access a shared humanity, to foster an unusual intimacy with viewers - to strip herself, often literally, to a naked and undeniable truth.
  94. The Bridesmaid
    Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Natural Born Killers
    More bombast than bombshell, Natural Born Killers is still sufficiently schizoid to infect a viewer with a nasty case of ambivalence. [30 Aug 1994]
    • Village Voice
  96. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    It’s so carefully designed to feel laid-back that its breeziness comes off like a calculation; its emotional pull is sometimes irresistible, which may make you want to resist it all the more. But the movie has flashes of wit and originality and feeling.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Rabbi's Cat
    An absorbing, nuanced, and vividly animated tale of adventure, ambivalent morality, colonial injustice, talking animals, and the vagaries of religious zeal and colonialism.
  98. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Willow Tree
    There's very little explicit exposition here; instead, Majidi presents us with a series of glistening tone poems.
  100. The Woodmans
    Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.
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