Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Cavedigger
    The line between creative ambition and risky obsession is sharply drawn—or rather, carved out of New Mexico sandstone—in the life and work of wholly motivated artist Ra Paulette.
  2. A Single Shot
    David M. Rosenthal's sturdy, nasty rural noir, based on Matthew F. Jones's novel, is so sharp and rusted through that, after taking it in, you'll likely need a tetanus shot.
  3. Casting By
    While Dougherty clearly had an almost eerie sense of how a particular actor might inhabit a part, this film also shows that she may have single-handedly created a filmmaking craft and then made it indispensable.
  4. Our Children
    Can a film that holds no surprises be of value? In the case of Our Children, which masterfully plays with stylistic conventions and all-too-common instances of real-life matricide, the answer is decidedly yes.
  5. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    The slippages and contradictions between who people are, imagine themselves to be, and present themselves as being inform the structure of Machine, a kind of loose container into which people step and out of which they extract more ideal selves.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    What is shocking is seeing the aggressive and malicious response to the movement.
  7. Muscle Shoals
    Greg "Freddy" Camalier's engaging new doc Muscle Shoals stands as a winning tribute to the coastal Alabama studio, musicians, and engineers who laid down some of the greatest pop tracks of the late '60s and early '70s.
  8. Paradise: Faith
    Though we're never allowed a close-up, Hofstätter's performance comes off as an unselfconscious tour de force, painfully real and culturally lost.
  9. The Student
    Racing handheld camerawork and a pulsing rock score energize Roque's bargaining and bribing for the sake of changing an institution's antiquated customs.
  10. Birth of the Living Dead
    What distinguishes this doc from much of the tedious critical prose Romero has inspired is the fan-boy and fan-girl ardor that fuels its smarts--both behind and in front of the camera.
  11. Ted 2
    MacFarlane's comedy may not be sophisticated on its face, but the mechanisms behind it are delicately calibrated.
  12. Wampler's Ascent
    From cinematographer Corey Rich's beautifully framed footage, Wampler's wife, Elizabeth, making her directorial debut, has assembled a stirring film that's part documentary, and part promotional tool.
  13. Night Moves
    That patience of Reichardt's, and her dedication to showing us exclusively the things that we must see, makes the scenes of preparation — boat parking, fertilizer buying — hypnotic and suspenseful and practical all at once.
  14. The Last Christeros
    A war film consumed with waiting.
  15. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's modern-day retelling of a Korean fairy tale is an experiment in space, narrative and physical.
  16. GMO OMG
    A documentary that is by turns exasperating, illuminating, and intentionally infuriating.
  17. Out in the Dark
    The movie is involving, the romance affecting, the sex sound, and the catch-as-catch-can handheld camerawork smartly appropriate for the scenario.
  18. The Dirties
    Matthew Johnson's The Dirties explores high school violence from a refreshingly original angle.
  19. Newlyweeds
    Debut writer-director Shaka King dramatizes her characters' descent into disarray with disarming intimacy.
  20. Stonehearst Asylum
    With Stonehearst Asylum, director Brad Anderson doles out a vintage Halloween treat — a straightforward Poe adaptation of the sort that Vincent Price used to star in — and gives it a freshness and complexity that make it a delight.
  21. Hawking
    Finnigan wisely seizes on the gentle strength and charisma of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. She imprints on the film as fully as her former husband.
  22. The Wind Rises
    An emotionally generous and expansively detailed romantic fantasy.
  23. Herb & Dorothy
    Watching the Vogels mull over art that they don't need to understand only makes their delight more infectious.
  24. The Double
    The Double, with its inviting alienation, nails a curious mood that's been too long absent from contemporary film: the anxious admission that the world might be weighted against the plucky individual, and that prickling you feel just before such thoughts make a sweat break out.
  25. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is a breeze, enjoyable both for its sweetness and its unapologetic silliness.
  26. Joe
    Joe is Cage's periodic reminder that he's one of his generation's great talents.
  27. Philomena
    The grande dame's performance, alternately goofy and grave, is an absolute tour de force.
  28. Great Expectations
    Newell's film doesn't supplant Lean's, of course. The yearning is more vague, the gloom less consummate. But it's the best since, rich in feeling and dark beauty, alive with the superior scenecraft, chatter, and imagination of the most beloved of novelists.
  29. Dark Touch
    Dark Touch, like much of the best horror, works the fears that connect to real life.
  30. Dislecksia: The Movie
    Dislecksia: The Movie is an exuberantly didactic documentary, and director Harvey Hubbell has done his homework.
  31. Winter Nomads
    Von Stürler offers raw footage of the four-month trek itself, which is often mesmerizing in its austere beauty; there's no narration, intertitles, or any other authorial hand-holding to trump up the message the images already convey on their own.
  32. The Square
    [A] powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt's struggle for meaningful change.
  33. Big Ass Spider!
    This is squirmy, hilarious fun.
  34. In Secret
    In Secret boasts vigor and thematic richness, that feeling of artists expressing something vital.
  35. At Berkeley
    Wiseman's generally static camera spends prolonged periods of time in the classroom, at student gatherings, and in the halls of educational power, training a multifaceted gaze on opinions regarding an economic shift affecting faculty salaries, subsidized programs, student tuition, and the university's fundamental "public" character.
  36. Horrible Bosses 2
    The miraculous surprise is that Horrible Bosses 2 isn't terrible at all. It's looser, breezier, more confident than its predecessor.
  37. Babygirl
    [A] small, gentle coming-of-age story, exceedingly well-cast.
  38. A River Changes Course
    For the most part, the narrative here feels generational, representative, rather than invested in the specific incidents of specific lives.
  39. God Loves Uganda
    Kudos to the filmmakers for so adeptly laying out the history of American evangelicals' Ugandan mission, and for noting that HIV infection rates there have gone up since the abstinence-only education started.
  40. When I Walk
    It's an often gut-wrenching viewing experience in which the triumphs of the hero are hard won.
  41. The Little Bedroom
    The screenplay is built of small moments and minute details that gradually gain significance, as should be the case in a good character study.
  42. The New Black
    What emerges is an illuminating look at the ways race, specifically blackness, has been cynically portrayed by the mainstream media, rightwing politicians and religious leaders, and even some white queer activists.
  43. Hours
    The film stirs richer, truer feelings once it becomes a one-man show. This is due both to Heisserer's and Walker's skill — the tension is strong, the scenario elemental, and Walker's harried, urgent hero is compelling — but also the fact that the movies are really good at dudes doing things, especially when those things are scrappy, desperate, and heroic.
  44. Breakfast with Curtis
    A small gem of a film, Breakfast is a lovely tapestry of subtlety, full of sly, smart humor and unforced insights into human nature.
  45. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    A film whose sense of urgency and purpose is utterly engrossing.
  46. Faust
    Faust is not your great-granddaddy's selling-your-soul fable, but something new, a dreamy immersion into the messiness of myth, where hubris and desire can get lost in the chaos of time and retelling.
  47. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    Wendy J.N. Lee's Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey powerfully connects the dots between the enormity of global warming as a phenomenon and the havoc it wreaks in ordinary lives.
  48. Jersey Boys
    Eastwood may never show us his boys discovering themselves under that street lamp, but he gives us a clutch of moments worth treasuring — and mostly without overdoing it.
  49. Cousin Jules
    Thoroughly transporting, the peacefulness and clarity of Cousin Jules can't help but reveal, by contrast, the restlessness and agitation too common to life today.
  50. Paddington
    The scale of the occasional mayhem is heightened, but its spirit and ingenuity doesn't feel wholly at odds with the books.
  51. Tracks
    The film’s strength derives from how Wasikowska makes Davidson’s seemingly suicidal wanderlust relatable.
  52. Beyond the Lights
    A movie isn’t a cliché when it can sing like this.
  53. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    Buirski clearly shows that the spark that made her great couldn't be snuffed out so easily.
  54. Grand Piano
    Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.
  55. In Bloom
    This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.
  56. The Rocket
    The Rocket's ample pleasures come from Mordaunt localizing this tested formula rather than trying to reinvent it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    Brook offers himself as a teacher whose goal is to help his students discover brief, ephemeral moments of bliss.
  58. Nightcrawler
    On the strength of Gyllenhaal's performance, Nightcrawler works best as a character study. It's chilling, but also wickedly funny and strange, like a good, dark Brian De Palma joke — in short, it's everything the stolid and humorless Gone Girl should have been.
  59. The Trip to Italy
    Now we know just what to expect from Coogan and Brydon, although as long as you're willing to settle in for the ride, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
  60. 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.
  61. The Homesman
    Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel offered a rare approach to those Old West stories by shifting the focus to the women and children who often bore its brunt the worst, and Jones has — for the most part — successfully captured this, often in devastating fashion.
  62. Song to Song
    Connect with the kineticism of Song to Song, and it might just leave you breathless.
  63. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Much of what happens in Infinitely Polar Bear could be unbearably painful, but Forbes sees the cracked humor in everything
  64. Finding Vivian Maier
    Because her tale is so fascinating, movie-making formula is all that's needed.
  65. Teenage
    The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.
  66. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    While some of the workers' chitchat is translated via subtitles, long passages of it are not. Oreck's imagery of the forbidding Arctic landscape through its seasonal transformations (the movie covers roughly a year) is eloquent enough.
  67. 12 O'Clock Boys
    What lingers in Nathan's documentary isn't the swaggering trails of diesel fumes. It's the sadness of watching Pug narrow his options.
  68. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Charlie Victor Romeo shows us how much of life's weight and meaning can be packed into one second of thought or action; it's a work of shivery intimacy.
  69. Crimson Peak
    Though this movie waltzes to its own strange rhythm, del Toro hits every note.
  70. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    A Walk Among the Tombstones is an uncommonly well-made thriller.
  71. Yves Saint Laurent
    Jalil Lespert's Yves Saint Laurent tries to sweep the evanescent butterfly Yves into its net: The movie isn't enough, but it's something.
  72. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    The kind of movie fans will be quoting for the rest of their lives, Shoot Me, from director-producer Chiemi Karasawa, is as much a playdate as portrait, a jumble of salty highlights attesting to the pleasure of her company.
  73. The Cold Lands
    In the thoughtful and touching coming-of-age tale The Cold Lands, writer-director Tom Gilroy examines self-reliance as a philosophy and way of life.
  74. Honey
    With striking compositions and cuts that reveal a deep appreciation of cinema's possibilities, Valeria Golino's Honey could be about anything at all and still demand and hold your attention; that the narrative is as moving as the film is aesthetically precise is an added delight.
  75. The Only Real Game
    This film is like another work in the canon of baseball poetry.
  76. Brothers Hypnotic
    We see Phil's sons honoring him while going their own ways in a years-long effort to find the right pitch.
  77. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    In the end, this morphing of ideas and styles is more deadpan romantic than sociocritical, and sweeter for it.
  78. Alien Abduction
    Credit this spirited, uncommonly effective found-footage thriller for breaking the templates promised by its genre and title.
  79. A People Uncounted
    What Yeger stirs up is profoundly unsettling and deeply moving.
  80. Pioneer
    The tension never lets up.
  81. The Jewish Cardinal
    The Jewish Cardinal uses the luscious pleasures of the everyday to underscore and endure the big questions of identity, humanity, and home.
  82. Last Passenger
    While certainly a formulaic genre film, it's nevertheless a formula executed with a great sensitivity to visual engagement.
  83. X-Men: Apocalypse
    This film nimbly mixes narrative exuberance and emotional depth, flamboyant displays of power with quietly terrifying exchanges. It zips along, combining the highs and lows of a real comic book – all the feeling, color, and wonder, even some of the dopiness – with gloriously cinematic storytelling.
  84. American Jesus
    A restless, sunnily shot, one-thing-after-another travelogue of the peculiarities of American worship and belief.
  85. Horses of God
    Director Nabil Ayouch depicts the sprawling, ramshackle Sidi Moumen slums with fluid camera movements... He finds the humanity and the hopelessness in its narrow streets, its fields of rubble, monstrous trash dumps, and grim marketplaces.
  86. Gebo and the Shadow
    Gebo and the Shadow is a film about concrete, hard, and material things, as well as one about illusions.
  87. Before You Know It
    Before You Know It is a chronicle of the challenges facing an aging portion of the population, but it doubles as something more universal: a means of cutting through isolation and societal expectation, and finding a stronger self on the other side.
  88. 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.
  89. I Am I
    I Am I is a remarkably assured debut for director Towne, especially since she's onscreen the majority of the time, and her script eschews the rules of the standard Hollywood amnesia plot, instead following its own internal logic while not shying away from the darker implications of its premise.
  90. Code Black
    What will pull viewers in is the empathy of the healthcare workers who battle to retain their idealism in the face of staggering obstacles.
  91. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Gebbe never asks us to believe in Tore's god, but she asks us to honor his beliefs. She's found an incredible conduit in Feldmeier.
  92. Frontera
    Berry isn't afraid to use melodrama as a tool to highlight injustice. It's his very un-flashiness that makes Frontera effective.
  93. Witching and Bitching
    A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia's splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile pukes its outrages at you with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.
  94. Burning Bush
    For all the hurtling plot, and its occasional workaday scenecraft, Burning Bush proves an engrossing historical drama, low-key but in its final moments devastating.
  95. A Picture of You
    Sensitive and understated, J.P. Chan's A Picture of You balances humor and sentiment with an instinctive hand, skillfully unearthing honest, unexpected laughs amid intense grief.
  96. Postman Pat: The Movie
    Postman Pat: The Movie is one of the best family films to come down the pike this year.
  97. Han Gong-ju
    The cumulative impact of the delayed story revelations and Chun's startling vulnerability is both an elegant gut-punch and a furious indictment of a society that treats its victims with inexcusable aggression and hostility.
  98. The Empty Hours
    Full of long takes and matter-of-fact performances, melancholy low-contrast cinematography and desolate vistas suffused with acute loneliness, The Empty Hours captures the feeling of idling away the time, waiting for something to arrive.
  99. Web Junkie
    The slow (albeit unevenly paced) unveiling of the boys' stories is persuasive and chilling.
  100. Silence
    Not since The Tree of Life has Christianity been explored onscreen in such serious, conflicted terms, but Scorsese has crafted a far less grandiose experience than Terrence Malick did five years ago. Silence is restrained, austere, even ascetic.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »