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. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    Like a great amusement park ride, Shaun the Sheep Movie is consistently enjoyable.
  2. Fantastic Four
    The model here isn't adventure pulp. It's dystopian Y.A., junked up with scenes of medical horror too scary for kids and too unpleasant to be enjoyed by anyone.
  3. The Runner
    The film tackles its issues with a furrowed-brow solemnity that eventually spills into outright sluggishness.
  4. Cop Car
    The film soars early as a fantasy steeped in life and crashes into a drag of a crime drama, one ripped from the movies rather than anyone's idea of small-town Colorado.
  5. Assassination
    Assassination is a blast whenever the director doesn't take his melodramatic plot too seriously.
  6. Mateo
    Incisively intimate, it's a small but stirring snapshot of a gifted, hopelessly lonely soul.
  7. Call Me Lucky
    Call Me Lucky is a loving but fair portrait of the artist as a heroic hothead.
  8. Sneakerheadz
    In its 70-minute runtime, Sneakerheadz offers only the briefest glimpse of issues larger than what's in the shoebox.
  9. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Paley's segment proves that The Prophet is more of a missed opportunity than an ambitious folly.
  10. Homme Less
    The film is an adventure, a reason to despair, a chance to hang out with a great talker, and an often beautiful portrait of this city's promise and cruelty.
  11. Ricki and the Flash
    Demme's film plays out like a catnapping afternoon dream. We recognize the world, yet the logic is screwy.
  12. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    [Wiig's] great, but the film's in the pocket of Powley's rib-high corduroys from the second she struts onscreen — and long after she takes them off.
  13. Extinction
    Sometimes, Extinction is a zombie apocalypse story; mostly, it's a meditation on isolation, redemption, and family that could, in its basic outline, be satisfyingly told outside of its genre.
  14. I Am Chris Farley
    Shrewder documentarians than directors Brent Hodge and Derik Murray would have balanced out the sentiment with grit. The movie is saccharine.
  15. Northmen: A Viking Saga
    The battles, occurring every fifteen minutes or so, are brisk and bloody, but in them Northmen leaps too quickly from image to image, sometimes not giving us time to make sense of the mayhem. But the chases, and the Jacksonian sense of an epic journey across a time-lost landscape, will please devotees of the genre, and the flourishes are grand.
  16. Capital C
    This is essential viewing for those who prefer their documentaries nearly 100 percent tension-free.
  17. Staten Island Summer
    The best that can be said about teen sex comedy Staten Island Summer is that it goes down easy.
  18. Bonobos: Back to the Wild
    Tixier never strays far from a worshipful view of André and her sanctuary, but the film evolves into an interesting primer on the differences between life in captivity and the wild.
  19. Counting
    What surprises (a little) and fascinates (a lot) are the town-to-town commonalities Counting invites you to appraise.
  20. 6 Ways To Die
    In its execution, the film becomes a cascading-failure scenario that proceeds from Soumah's intention to bait-and-switch the audience, coupled with a lot of suboptimal acting and amateurish editing choices.
  21. Best of Enemies
    It's fascinating. It's horrible. It's fascinatingly horrible. It's also, as Gladstone points out, a sterling example of the power that television, when it was still a "public square," could have.
  22. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    Coelho's writing may be "more [widely] translated than [Shakespeare's]," as the coda claims, but Paulo Coelho's Best Story never successfully pins down its subject's genius.
  23. The End of the Tour
    [The] conversation peters out as the film grinds on, the men getting competitive and the camera nosing into their faces. Everyone involved sifts the material a little too hard for clues to Wallace's eventual suicide.
  24. Jenny's Wedding
    Lazy, schmaltzy, and on-the-nose from its Hallmark-friendly production design to its rancid pop-music cues and naive dialogue.
  25. A LEGO Brickumentary
    A largely genial but frequently wearying feature-length toy ad.
  26. That Sugar Film
    That Sugar Film suffers from some of the usual stunt-doc laziness.... But Gameau builds his case well.
  27. Two Step
    Extraordinary ordinariness is Two Step's saving grace.
  28. The Seventh Dwarf
    The original Brothers Grimm stories were hardly feminist, but The Seventh Dwarf's female characters are deplorably retrograde on both the script and design levels; they have little to do except be rescued, and Snow White is a vain, buxom sexpot whom the dwarfs leer at.
  29. Listen to Me Marlon
    There's nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley's presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.
  30. Vacation
    This new Vacation is hardly an improvement on the old Vacation, and may in fact be worse. Neither of them, to borrow the immortal words of the Go-Go's, is all we ever wanted.
  31. On Beauty
    The short documentary On Beauty is all surfaces, skimming, lightness, flash.
  32. The Vatican Tapes
    At no point does this film strive to be more than a second-rate version of what it is: a halfhearted attempt to make some scratch while pretending the devil exists. Some trick.
  33. 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.
  34. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Deraspe returns specificity, intimacy, and human weirdness to this international scandal.
  35. Frank the Bastard
    Overlong and slack in suspense, the film is most noteworthy for its patchy accents and the late Ellen Albertini Dow (the "rapping granny" from The Wedding Singer).
  36. Pixels
    Here's a shocker: In Pixels, his latest, Adam Sandler plays a stunted man-child who turns out to be very, very special.
  37. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker
    Though some more exploration of Tucker's influence would be welcome, the documentary does make fine use of archival materials culled from Tucker's immense collection of scrapbooks from every year of her career.
  38. Only You
    Only You is mostly engaging for the ways in which it shows that prophecies reveal more about the receiver's interpretive biases than they do about the secrets of the universe.
  39. Dark Was the Night
    The narrative strikes a mostly sensible (if overly earnest) ratio of inner-turmoil human theater to B-movie monster hunt, before ultimately tilting toward the classic drive-in with climactic siege action and old-school effects.
  40. Big Significant Things
    Reisberg assumes we'll believe that in "real life" (as in, when he's not deceiving anyone about his whereabouts) Craig isn't this selfish, but watching him lie, cheat on his girlfriend, and enthusiastically provide beer to teenagers says otherwise.
  41. Samba
    Samba's relationship with Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a volunteer at an immigration advocacy center, has moments of sweetness, but is painted in too-broad brushstrokes.
  42. Five Star
    New York onscreen is often a fantasy of hustlers, hardened cops, and the spoiled urban yuppies of the Baumbach and Dunham universes. In that sense, writer-director Keith Miller's modest drama Five Star is the kind of depiction the city sorely needs.
  43. Phoenix
    The director's last film was the superb 2012 Barbara, also starring Hoss and Zehrfeld, another romance with a mystery built in; Phoenix is an even finer piece of work, so beautifully made that it comes close to perfect.
  44. Unexpected
    Unexpected isn't about, but rather a product of, class-based condescension in America.
  45. Southpaw
    Southpaw is an exhausting brutalist melodrama, but if nothing else, Fuqua always works with fine actors, and he's got a passel of them here.
  46. Lucky Stiff
    Lucky Stiff shoots for "zany" and lands at "attention deficit disorder," but the songs aren't bad.
  47. Twinsters
    Twinsters is a heartwarming true story that might not have happened without social media, so score one for modern technology.
  48. Famous Nathan
    Terrific documentaries are a dime a dozen; ones this multifaceted are to be cherished.
  49. Steak (R)evolution
    If your vegan stomach and ethics do flip-flops at this spectacle, pull back for the cultural comparisons.
  50. A Hard Day
    Kim Seong-hun's riveting if empty-headed A Hard Day will be remembered for its increasingly ominous jump-cuts to mobiles ringing, vibrating, and flashing profane messages.
  51. Stung
    Though quite silly, none of this feels self-reflexive or -satisfied. It delights in its own stupidity the way a dog rolls in dirt, but is nearly as difficult to get mad at after it muddies up the rug.
  52. Alléluia
    Sensuous and arresting, Alleluia constantly feels as though a séance or ritual murder is about to be performed; the actual deaths, when they arrive, turn out to be rather unceremonious affairs.
  53. Court
    The film is richly detailed, and its acting seems almost invisible — the performers just seem to be these people. Court is one of the strongest debut features in years.
  54. Ardor
    Too bad that Ardor's arrhythmic editing and glacial pacing make it impossible to get lost in its jungles — or to invest in its pseudo-mystical ambiance.
  55. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    Even simply sticking to the facts, the film is a painful watch.
  56. Lila & Eve
    The movie, directed by Charles Stone III — who gave us 2002's likable Drumline — runs hot and cold, suspenseful and well observed, well acted and often affecting, but somewhat tiresome and implausible by the end.
  57. Jellyfish Eyes
    Jellyfish Eyes may be blessedly unpretentious, but it's also immediately unmoving and relentlessly boring.
  58. The Look of Silence
    If it's a far less flashy film than The Act of Killing, it's also a better and possibly more honest one.
  59. Mr. Holmes
    Condon, like this Holmes, can't quite keep everything in his story straight and clear, but he and his film come close just often enough.
  60. Irrational Man
    It works better than most of Allen's recent films because it's a trifle without pretense, and because the director's finally smartened up — a little — right when everyone's written him off.
  61. 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.
  62. SlingShot
    The story demands journalism rather than hagiography.
  63. The Gallows
    The Gallows is only good enough to make you wish its creators did something novel with its formulaic style, plot, and characterizations.
  64. Ant-Man
    Ant-Man is spry and often funny, despite its familiarity.
  65. Self/less
    [Singh's] film is good with physics and lousy at philosophy.
  66. Tap World
    It's rare to find a film that portrays dancers of all shapes, colors, ages, and sizes as beautiful, which they are.
  67. Mad Women
    The biggest problem in Lipsky's scattershot narrative is situational ethics.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meet Me in Montenegro
    The quiet honesty of Anderson and Lina's interactions and raw, often handheld camerawork wash away the film's meandering pace and sometimes grating dialogue.
  69. What We Did on Our Holiday
    Jones and Connolly have terrific chemistry, particularly as Lottie works through the fact that adults encourage dishonesty and lying when it suits their own needs, and that secrets are more pervasive than openness.
  70. Do I Sound Gay?
    Thorpe offers charming, intimate glimpses of his life, including memorable chats with friends and experts, and he's adept at drawing winning quotes from interview subjects — one of the most moving moments comes from George Takei.
  71. Boulevard
    Director Dito Montiel aspires to sensitive drama, but Douglas Soesbe's script too often mires Williams in pat situations.
  72. Tangerine
    In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.
  73. 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.
  74. Minions
    It's all perfectly OK, and even, at times, delightful.... Yet Minions doesn't add up to all that it should.
  75. Stations of the Cross
    The ending's a touch too cute, but the best scenes here stand as potent, empathetic, well-observed broadsides against fundamentalism.
  76. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank's long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer.
  77. Cartel Land
    Cartel Land is interested in how idealism becomes corrupt.
  78. Closer to God
    The drama plays out as expected — the ending, particularly, seems too pat — but offers several well-executed moments of tension along the way.
  79. Zarafa
    Beautifully animated and often moving.
  80. In Stereo
    In Stereo is not without its merits, but it doesn't really get going until the last ten minutes, which play like the opening of a movie that would be much more interesting than the one that preceded them.
  81. Jackie & Ryan
    The tepid Jackie & Ryan's only real strength is its supporting cast.
  82. Jimmy's Hall
    [Loach] and his longtime scriptwriter Paul Laverty combed Irish history to find a figure you might see as Loach's intellectual double; maybe this accounts for some of the speechifying dialogue as various political positions are explained, jarring at times in a film of action shots and escaping out windows.
  83. A Borrowed Identity
    Traditional coming-of-age films like A Borrowed Identity don't often come from Israel, which is one of the film's points.
  84. Into the Grizzly Maze
    What keeps Maze humming is Hackl's firm sense of narrative tension. He knows character and dialogue are icing in films like this, so it's taut pacing, editing, and sound design that are crucial. (The actors are all fine, playing everything straight, sans irony.) The final showdown is ludicrous and thrilling -- as it should be.
  85. L.A. Slasher
    L.A. Slasher isn't perceptive, shocking, or funny, and if it's remembered for anything, it will be for the tastelessly tone-deaf decision to have the Slasher kill a black actress by dragging her behind a van.
  86. Gone Doggy Gone
    The film's sweetness, its story line, and the script's cartoony characters recall Raising Arizona, though Gone Doggy Gone isn't as tightly structured. But, being looser, it has a little more room to breathe.
  87. Saugatuck Cures
    No one in the movie rises above the level of a stock character, so over-the-top in their familiar jokes as to barely even register as satire.
  88. Max
    It's another modest, functional success from a director who used to work on the margins.
  89. Stray Dog
    Granik, director of Winter's Bone, captures scenes of rare power.
  90. Amy
    A surprisingly seamless biographical documentary, one that, even though it's been constructed largely from found elements, feels gracefully whole.
  91. Mala Mala
    This film does not pander. Rather, it demands that the viewer rise to the occasion.
  92. Magic Mike XXL
    He's selling nonsense fantasy in a movie that's nonsense fantasy, but boy is Tatum the real deal.
  93. Terminator Genisys
    Genisys is all bullets and bombs, action without pause, as though if the ride stops the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.
  94. Fresh Dressed
    Fashion is about that clash between commercialism and individuality — how can I stand out while fitting in? — and Sacha Jenkins's streetwear doc Fresh Dressed nods its Kangol hat to that irony.
  95. Batkid Begins
    Batkid Begins wants audiences to celebrate the everyday heroes who donated their time and energy to Miles's dream. Absolutely, we should. Still, take a minute to ask what the disproportionate investment and interest in Batkid's adventure says about our own maturity — and how the internet allows us to feel like champions for rallying for one afternoon, while overlooking the years of unglamorous doctor appointments before it.
  96. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.
  97. Ted 2
    MacFarlane's comedy may not be sophisticated on its face, but the mechanisms behind it are delicately calibrated.
  98. The Midnight Swim
    Less is often more when it comes to depicting such rituals onscreen, and Smith is highly attuned to the simple power of, say, characters cryptically chanting under their breath.
  99. Bound to Vengeance
    Bound to Vengeance strains credibility (seriously, she never calls the cops?) and swerves dangerously close to exploitation often enough that its semi-clever premise can't keep it on course.
  100. Glass Chin
    Writer-director Noah Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man.
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