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. East Side Sushi
    This lovely debut film contains all the ingredients of a culture-clash drama, which Lucero handles with a light touch.
  2. Olvidados (Forgotten)
    In showing how some men derive primal, perverse senses of pleasure and power from their brutality, how small men make themselves feel large and invincible, the film distills the roots of terror (political, cultural, religious) to truths that are tragically evergreen.
  3. Racing Extinction
    When they devote most of their film to the horrors wrought by humanity and barely ten minutes to their solutions, and when those solutions are all about mitigating problems, it's hard to feel anything but despondent.
  4. The Man Who Saved the World
    The emotional and narrative core of the story is how much tragedy swirls through Petrov's personal life — from his parents pushing him into the military at the age of seventeen to his marriage to the unraveling of his circumstances after his heroic decision. It is heart-wrenching stuff that you might wish the filmmakers had trusted more.
  5. Uncle John
    Thanks to Ashton's brilliant, career-defining performance, we're made to see that the only thing worse than doing evil deeds is being nice enough to feel guilty about them.
  6. The Martial Arts Kid
    The film is rife with homages to the "bullied kid learns martial arts" classic, The Karate Kid, but never quite finds its own footing in the ring. The editing is choppy and the dialogue sophomoric, however hard the actors try to deliver it dramatically.
  7. Some Kind of Hate
    Like so much teen-targeting modern horror, it opts for dull angsty brooding over the very sort of grim-and-gruesome sleaziness that might have made its premise interesting.
  8. Sicario
    Villeneuve's proven he's got a strong punch. The trouble is, he barely aims.
  9. The New Girlfriend
    Ozon sacrifices his sharp portrayal of grief and rebirth to clumsy convention.
  10. Hellions
    Hellions is unsettling, but in all the wrong ways.
  11. Everest
    Everest is visually splendid, though it loses a few points for its murkiness in rendering its main characters as distinct individuals.
  12. The Cut
    Ultimately, the film's wearying qualities pay off both as verisimilitude — you do feel like you've been through something — and as awe-inspiring history, making visceral art out of a global migration.
  13. Black Mass
    Black Mass is a tightly wound piece of work, and Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) keeps its many small parts moving with ease. He's skillful at merging telling, minute details with bigger, looping schemes.
  14. Pawn Sacrifice
    Pawn Sacrifice clicks along with crisp efficiency. Zwick, the director behind movies like Glory and Blood Diamond, is old-school in his attention to craftsmanship, alive to telling details.
  15. Prophet's Prey
    Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly.
  16. Cooties
    Infectious horror-comedy Cooties is an energizing juggernaut until its seemingly inexhaustible ensemble cast members are outpaced by their respective characters' quirks.
  17. The Fool
    Bykov's moral tale is clear-eyed and callused over, worrying not over individual lives but over a nation's soul.
  18. 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.
  19. The Transporter Refueled
    it's overstuffed, undercooked, and needlessly complicated.
  20. The Visit
    The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an eleventh feature, is its writer-director's best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it's the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what's-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan's basement-wandering simulator, with the crack scripting and meta-cinematic surprises of Shyamalan's best early films.
  21. The Beauty Inside
    Worse than the latent silliness of such a premise is how little the filmmakers ultimately do with the world of narrative possibilities it presents; in attempting to show the universality of love, The Beauty Inside succeeds in showing the opposite.
  22. Paul Taylor: Creative Domain
    A dance is not only motion, but emotion. This fascinating film reminds us how closely the two are linked.
  23. The Moving Creatures
    A puzzling film that despite being saturated with feeling leaves only a vague impression.
  24. Goodnight Mommy
    Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.
  25. Listening
    Rather than pioneering into the frontiers of the mind, Listening slogs through the most well-traveled pits of screenwriting.
  26. Finders Keepers
    Most docs are lucky to have one wild character. The phenomenal Finders Keepers has two.
  27. Wolf Totem
    Wolf Totem itself becomes a pitched battle for supremacy between the breathtaking glories of nature and the grinding banality of man. Here, as ever, nature loses.
  28. Meet the Patels
    Meet the Patels is a good-natured documentary that plays like a romantic comedy.
  29. A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.
  30. Breathe
    It's a chilly, elegantly assured little picture, a horror story with its roots not in fantasy but in the reality of hurt feelings.
  31. The Challenger
    Even the gravitas of Merkerson and Duncan can't save this flimsy construct of boxing-movie clichés. Moran casts himself as a cinematic upstart with The Challenger, but he's punching above his weight.
  32. Sleeping with Other People
    Headland's film might have been more engaging if it were about its supporting characters.
  33. Welcome to Leith
    [A] fascinating, unnerving documentary.
  34. Coming Home
    Coming Home obviously has historical and political significance for Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution, and for families that were torn apart by it. But Zhang tells this particular story in a deeply personal way — the time and place of its setting have a specific meaning, but its emotional contours spread out into something bigger.
  35. Time Out of Mind
    Time Out of Mind is an experiment in empathy, an examination of bureaucracy and streetlife mundanity, and a movie that many will find a tough sit.
  36. Dirty Weekend
    While Les eventually becomes more tolerable, LaBute's cloying dialogue makes it impossible to appreciate what turns out to be a bracingly pragmatic sense of optimism.
  37. A Sinner in Mecca
    Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.
  38. Creep
    Superior found-footage horror film Creep tellingly loses steam after it stops being a rote but tense game of chicken between a normcore derangoid (he likes hikes, hugs, and pancakes) and his wary victim.
  39. Blind
    This is a haunting puzzle of a movie, one to pick at, to unpeel, to see a second time through eyes that have adjusted to it. It's also alive with tender, tremulous feeling.
  40. Contracted: Phase II
    The virus is spreading, but the filmmakers don't appear fully committed to the idea of a zombie apocalypse, so no sense of dread (or suspense) ever takes hold.
  41. Chloe and Theo
    Chloe and Theo is a film that operates entirely on a vague sense of uplift.
  42. Break Point
    Karas showcases the actors' surprisingly good tennis skills, like the continuous volley they do while reciting the lyrics to "Bust a Move" and the deft way Sisto spins his racquet. But rather than develop these two as characters, Break Point tries to score too many points.
  43. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    Gibney dissects Jobs's image with the calm curiosity of a coroner.
  44. A Walk in the Woods
    It has its charming, lively moments, but also many that just feel tired and listless, as if the filmmakers were working off a checklist of all the things two well-past-middle-age travelers would say and do while trekking through the wilderness.
  45. Dragon Blade
    The picture never quite finds its tone: It's neither go-for-broke outrageous enough to be consistently funny, nor energetic enough to be viscerally entertaining. It's neither as bad as you might fear, nor as much fun as you might hope.
  46. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    The film, with its traditional mix of talking heads and vintage footage, does not try to hide the Panthers' advocacy of violence.
  47. The Golden Dream
    For all its heart and strong performances, there's little new here. Still, the ending is perfect, triumphant and heartbreaking all at once, demonstrating that Quemada-Diez gets the reality of U.S. life.
  48. My Voice, My Life
    Director Ruby Yang doesn't even try to upend the clichés that practically define the kind of inspirational documentary she's made about art transforming the lives of at-risk and disabled students. She embraces them while pushing the film toward an eye-misting ending you'll see coming from the opening moments.
  49. Butterfly Girl
    Throughout Butterfly Girl, Abbie jokes, rolls her eyes, and pushes herself to take chances despite the pain she always faces.
  50. I Touched All Your Stuff
    Bühler and Mariani make their process part of the narrative, deconstructing the documentary form while delving into Kirk's copious digital life.
  51. Zipper
    Wilson is a charismatic and underused actor, perfect here as a guy with a talent for convincing others of his virtue. Headey, as Sam's wife, creates a surprisingly complex portrait of a woman shattered by her husband but hungry for higher social position.
  52. When Animals Dream
    Avoiding the genre's typical werewolfism-as-puberty metaphors, director Jonas Alexander Arnby instead casts his material as a drawn-out character study — the problem being that his characters are all one-note dullards, which turns his slow, portent-heavy drama into a giant slog.
  53. Memories of the Sword
    Memories of the Sword stands apart from other action films because Park wisely imagines violence as an elemental clash of dispositions.
  54. 7 Chinese Brothers
    A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it's hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might send you screaming for the multiplex.
  55. Z for Zachariah
    The film works on its own terms, capturing, at least, the mournful vibe of O'Brien's book. What's more, Zobel's revision opens up plenty of space for the three actors who inhabit this circumscribed little world, all of whom are terrific.
  56. Queen of Earth
    Queen of Earth is also a semi-comedy, often funny in an intentionally bleak way. And that, besides Moss, is what makes it work.
  57. We Are Your Friends
    Remake The Graduate today, and an adult might corner Benjamin Braddock and whisper, "Startups." Debut director Max Joseph gives that a good shot, though the result — the EDM-fueled, drug-laced dream-crusher We Are Your Friends — is so sweaty and silly people may not notice.
  58. No Escape
    No Escape, while cruel, is often uncommonly suspenseful. And by pitting its white leads against the citizen hordes of Southeast Asia, No Escape is also uncommonly honest about the fears and assumptions that fuel adventure fiction — here, the Other is not abstracted away to orcs or aliens.
  59. The Curse of Downers Grove
    The Curse of Downers Grove coasts on pulpy fumes thanks to its creators' effective emphasis on circumstantial peril over character-driven drama.
  60. Top Spin
    With sleek and informative onscreen graphics and thrilling slow-motion demonstrations of game technique, Top Spin packs a lot of information into its 80-minute running time, arguing that a great table tennis player is one part boxer, one part chess master.
  61. The Park Bench
    The script plays like something by an English major overstuffed with knowledge of lit but whose real-life experience is drawn largely from movies -- and whose simplistic views on race and class are straight out of the white liberal's "But I mean well..." handbook.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Station to Station
    Director Doug Aitken's trick of turning 62 one-minute clips into a single feature turns out to be less a shattering of narrative than a segmentation.
  63. The Boy
    Craig William Macneill's The Boy tries so hard to be ominous that it nearly strains itself in the process.
  64. The Mend
    It's a tough film to shake, a slice-of-life that slices, knifelike. It's a funny drama of brothers that first makes you hate its prickly leads but then, after steeping you in their bottomed-out day-to-day, might inspire you to hope for them.
  65. The Second Mother
    As we switch sympathies from scene to scene, Muylaert forces us to think big about the clash between idealism and acceptance, a philosophical war that spills beyond the walls of this small story into every corner of our own lives.
  66. Slow Learners
    While it has a few funny moments (including the uncomfortable date that begins the film), Slow Learners mostly feels like a collection of exaggerated performances of drunkenness and mean-spiritedness that leads to a very predictable end.
  67. Youth
    Elegantly shot to emphasize the suffocating atmosphere of its believably frightening scenario, the film speaks clearly about generational expectations and the disintegration of the middle class, even when the brothers communicate without using words.
  68. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    Anti–romantic comedy Some Kind of Beautiful starts with a dialogue scene that baldly explains to viewers what kind of casually chauvinistic narrative it's not going to be. That promise is gracelessly and repeatedly broken thanks to neophyte screenwriter Matthew Newman's clichéd characterizations and helmer Tom Vaughan's incompetent direction.
  69. The Iron Ministry
    It's always political when regular people speak plainly about their circumstances — here, it's also moving, revelatory, and often funny, offering plenty to mull over during the long shots of train workers trundling their food carts.
  70. Learning to Drive
    The filmmakers' hearts might be in the right place, but the film's doesn't kick in until well after you might already have declared it dead.
  71. Guidance
    The crime-spree-driven final third feels more like a sordid movie of the week than the sprightly comedy that preceded it.
  72. Grandma
    It gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that's not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.
  73. Being Evel
    He may not be likable, but he remains fascinating. The film is on firm ground when examining Knievel's actual measurable impact: the action/extreme sports that have flourished since his retirement.
  74. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery makes us question not only art, but the experts who claim to understand it best.
  75. She's Funny That Way
    There are some modest pleasures to be mined from Peter Bogdanovich's romantic caper She's Funny That Way, which at least strives for buoyancy.
  76. After Words
    Feldman, having established all his stereotypes, refuses to push them beyond the motions you know they have to go through from the first scene of lonely Jane crying into her cat's fur.
  77. Digging for Fire
    Digging for Fire affably drifts by, bolstered by some strong set pieces.
  78. American Ultra
    Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year.
  79. People Places Things
    People Places Things crackles to life whenever the camera turns to one of Will's students, Kat (The Daily Show's Jessica Williams), and her professor mother, Diane (Regina Hall).
  80. Amnesiac
    The plot develops confidently (if unsurprisingly), abetted by coincidence and shoddy police work, but it's the tone that grates.
  81. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Though it's made with lots of modern tricks and technology, it's old-fashioned in the best sense, and not just because it's set in the Sixties.
  82. Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango
    The musical interludes of rarely heard recordings are an impressive find, but the movie's messy approach to telling tango's hidden history seems at odds with itself.
  83. Air
    Walking Dead isn't the model, here — it's Lost, specifically the business involving that buried bunker with the outdated tech and the mystery button that must be mashed every time a Rolodex-style flip-clock counts down to zero. All of that has been copy-pasted into Air, which, sadly, doesn't even improve on Lost's resolutions.
  84. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    Rose is a pleasant affair, but you might want to know far more about Blank and far less about, say, pot-au-feu.
  85. Paulette
    It's all pure hokum, perfect for a Shirley MacLaine remake, but it's lovely to see Lafont carrying a film so effortlessly.
  86. The Lost Key
    At least the filmmakers are Jewish — and in their admirable quest for an understanding of what makes good sex and relationships, they've created a mightily silly but occasionally insightful, and certainly entertaining, film.
  87. Tom at the Farm
    That the most vicious homophobes are often closet cases is not news, but Dolan seems less concerned with that self-evident fact and more about creating a mood of unease.
  88. Fort Tilden
    Allie and Harper are basically unlikable, but played with a light touch and just enough distance from their own unthinking cruelty to remain funny.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prince
    Like a purple Lamborghini — or an adolescent boy's first, er, encounter — the film is too fast but almost unquestionably fun.
  90. Meru
    This is a crowd-pleaser, and it's no surprise it snagged the audience award for documentaries at Sundance last winter. Getting to these moments is a bit of a climb itself, though.
  91. Return to Sender
    Even with the dramatic buildup, Mikati hesitates to make Return to Sender an all-out revenge fantasy, and the characters are too sketchy for an effective psychological thriller.
  92. Big Sky
    Jorge Michel Grau's Big Sky masquerades as a psychological thriller, but underneath it's a meditation on the worthlessness of men.
  93. One & Two
    [Palermo] demonstrates an affinity for all things ethereal, even as he occasionally struggles to make space for himself in the long shadow of his estimable influences and reference points.
  94. Rosenwald
    Kempner's film, which has an eat-your-vegetables quality, runs long and suffers from a lack of focus.... Still, it's inspiring how Rosenwald, who took full advantage of capitalism's potential, also shared, passionately and generously, his windfall.
  95. We Come as Friends
    Moments of pain and revelation keep coming, all varied and surprising. These accrete into a mountain of evidence for Sauper's thesis: South Sudan might be new, but the forces shaping it are the same that have damned Africans for centuries — the rest of the world's lust for resources and conversions. That everything is beautiful just makes it hurt all the more.
  96. Ten Thousand Saints
    The movie has a lilting, generous spirit: Springer Berman and Pulcini, the filmmaking team behind the 2003 American Splendor, have a feel for human eccentricities and weaknesses, and they know how to draw the best from their casts.
  97. Straight Outta Compton
    It's clear that Straight Outta Compton is at once too padded and too thin. It's as if the story of these real-life legends was so unruly and dangerous that the filmmakers became the cops, forcing it into submission.
  98. Mistress America
    Like Brooke's dream business, a café/convenience store/hair salon, Mistress America is a mishmash of ideas — fortunately, Kirke gives a fantastic performance that quietly grounds the film.
  99. The Great Man
    While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.
  100. Dark Places
    [Paquet-Brenner] squanders Dark Places' icky setup for a rote investigation to find the real killer, a revelation greeted not with a "What?!" but with a "Whatever."
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