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. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    This is one of the greatest missed opportunities in recent cinema history: Del Toro looms more impressively on camera than he does in the marketing material, embodying a wicked man's perverse sense of family, honor, and self-interest.
  2. Big Game
    Predictably ridiculous.
  3. Runoff
    Kimberly Levin's Runoff deals with an old-as-time moral quandary — how far will you go to protect your family? — but the movie achieves an understated resonance through Levin's emotionally sensitive compositions and her clued-in portrayal of life in a middle-American farming community.
  4. The Little Death
    Lawson's wishy-washiness about tone doesn't prevent the actors from nailing the comic exchanges.
  5. 7 Minutes
    Unlike guilty-pleasure Guy Ritchie crime films, in which vivid characters and unlikely subplots converge in lush visual mayhem, 7 Minutes is humorless and perfunctory, its heavies and protagonists never so much as aspiring to transcend or challenge the stereotypes they represent.
  6. A Murder in the Park
    Directors Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber piece the story together via fresh interviews, vintage footage, and too many iffy reenactments and close-ups of news stories. But the matter here transcends the artlessness.
  7. Felt
    This strange, quiet film takes social narratives about romance and gender and upends them, often seeming like one thing until it's another.
  8. A Little Chaos
    Appropriately hunky but neutered of the brute sexuality he exhibited in Bullhead and Rust and Bone, Schoenaerts and his lack of bodice-busting tension with Winslet mirrors the film's transparent, often anachronistic inauthenticity.
  9. Advantageous
    Challenging viewers this way — denying clean resolutions, chucking out the urgent drama of the first hour of movie — is bound to alienate some audiences. But from its arresting first scenes, Phang's film is as much about why? as it is what next?
  10. Phantom Halo
    Sleepy domestic-abuse/coming-of-age melodrama Phantom Halo never goes anywhere memorable because its two main characters don't consistently act like they're afraid of their big bad dad.
  11. The Tribe
    It's a staggering film, but not a brilliant one — a superior version would have played more with the gulf between our senses and theirs.
  12. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Thorny issues regarding patient-caregiver relationships, cost-vs.-care tensions, and morality-vs.-rules dynamics are handled with a minimum of didacticism by Lilti, whose handheld camerawork provides a measure of immediacy without calling undue attention to itself.
  13. Inside Out
    For all the distractions and gags, Inside Out argues a more complex idea: that sometimes, Sadness deserves to steer, and that as we age, our happy memories deepen when tinted a wistful blue.
  14. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    Silver's empathy often produces moments of emotional catharsis.
  15. The Wanted 18
    This movie about violence and how it comes into intimate spaces refuses to make even animals only animal. It's beautiful and important and very strange.
  16. Rubble Kings
    Rubble Kings, an impassioned examination of New York's gang culture of the late 1970s, isn't just a fascinating piece of urban history. It's also a challenge to common assumptions about that culture, and a testament to the power of organization within a community.
  17. Manglehorn
    As is to be expected from Green in his pensive mode, there are lovely images in Manglehorn... But Manglehorn is also the latest entry into the tiresome Sad Man Learning to Love Again genre.
  18. Burying the Ex
    Dante took what could have been B-movie exploitation, and he turned it into jokes Charlie Sheen would shoot down.
  19. Dope
    Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it's not new at all.
  20. The Overnight
    Though an accomplished farce, The Overnight is most interesting when confronting its genuine emotional stakes.
  21. The Face of an Angel
    The Face of an Angel may not be like any other whodunit you've seen, but it's also only superficially smarter than the genre it defines itself against.
  22. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Much of what happens in Infinitely Polar Bear could be unbearably painful, but Forbes sees the cracked humor in everything
  23. Eden
    A quiet, raggedly beautiful mini-epic, Eden isn't a success story; it's a failure story. But it's also a glittering acknowledgement of the fact that failing is the only path toward growing.
  24. Redeemer
    Redeemer may not be as good as its star, but it does give Zaror enough room to shine.
  25. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World is pretty good fun. Especially for a here-today, gone-tomorrow summer blockbuster, the picture is better-crafted than it needs to be: If you ignore some extraneous plot threads, and the stop-the-presses revelation that, in the end, “what really matters is family,” Jurassic World hangs together surprisingly well.
  26. Set Fire to the Stars
    An energetic, well-acted, handsomely mounted b&w literary tell-all whose script would be laughed out of the room by its famous subjects.
  27. Madame Bovary
    Lead Mia Wasikowska looks convincingly miserable in the role of a young wife who's driven to seek her pleasures outside the marital bed, but whatever complexities roil in the character's heart and head are nowhere to be found on her face.
  28. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men visit rural Uganda, Canadian oil fields, Zuccotti Park, and a climate change conference in Copenhagen, but in its best moments this loopy yet informative doc becomes a buddy movie.
  29. Chagall-Malevich
    There's a great deal of rhetoric about revolution and radical art, but Chagall-Malevich is staid and conventional.
  30. Live From New York!
    Fortunately, Live From New York! isn't all overblown hagiography.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Soaked in Bleach
    The problem is, when facing down Love's and Cobain's outsize, junked-up personalities, Grant seems a total naïf.
  32. The Wolfpack
    The Wolfpack is more like a diorama of the Angulos' unusual childhood than an explanatory documentary.
  33. 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.
  34. Patch Town
    These grating characters frequently burst into songs that are not only ill-fitting, but also — as with every other aspect of this indie — awful.
  35. An Open Secret
    Berg might have proven that there's a circle of powerful creeps, but not that the blame for this goes straight to the top.
  36. Dawn Patrol
    The developments keep getting more outrageous from there, with the psychologies of the characters becoming increasingly bizarre.
  37. Charlie's Country
    Whether laughing, crying, mumbling to himself, or projecting a valiant stoicism, Gulpilil — beneath a white beard and a blanket of shaggy hair — commands the screen in close-ups liable to run for minutes at a time.
  38. Insidious: Chapter 3
    Tepid ghost story Insidious: Chapter 3 tries and fails to emphasize character-driven drama over cheap, jump-scare-intensive thrills.
  39. Every Last Child
    This film is a wakeup call in the best sense: urgent, clear, understated.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    United Passions
    As propaganda, United Passions is as subtle as an anvil to the temple. As drama, it’s not merely ham-fisted, but pork-shouldered, bacon-wristed, and sausage-elbowed.
  41. Doomsdays
    Doomsdays is winsome because it embraces its narcissistic subjects without asking viewers to forget that they've just befriended a couple of selfish dillholes.
  42. Seeds of Time
    Fowler's work is bureaucratic, institutional, Western-focused. Which shouldn't matter, because it's good work, but as a story of salvation it feels too familiar.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wild Horses
    Despite the hogtied narrative momentum, Duvall has crafted a lifelike portrait of rural Texas life.
  44. We Are Still Here
    Early scenes overplay the shock of these phantasms, but just as you expect Geoghegan to crank up the effects, the film mixes in some subtler scares.
  45. Survivor
    The overarching sense is of a thriller awkwardly stitched together in the editing room, and still failing to fix its many flaws.
  46. Testament of Youth
    Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), simultaneously poignant and powerful as Vera Brittain, the writer who fought her way into Oxford then chucked that to go to the front as a nurse, gives another indelible performance.
  47. The Nightmare
    Ascher sometimes indulges in jump scares, and there's one unconvincing burst of gore. At first, these horror techniques seemed to me a mistake, but his subjects themselves continually link their experiences to movies they've seen, especially Communion and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
  48. Hungry Hearts
    Hungry Hearts owes much to early Polanski (especially Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby), but Costanzo prizes ambiguity over tension.
  49. Freedom
    Using a slavery narrative to advance an unrelated agenda is pretty tasteless, bordering on offensive.
  50. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    Some critics find Andersson's latest redundant, arguing that its sketches lack the freshness of those in Songs From the Second Floor. I found it the fullest flowering yet of his approach, with Andersson orchestrating his finest dada — and even risking tenderness and horror.
  51. Love & Mercy
    The beauty, and the horror, of Bill Pohlad's exhilarating and inventive Love & Mercy...is the sense it gives us of the world passing through Brian Wilson's ears.
  52. Spy
    It's a comedy of exasperation where, for once, the joke isn't on McCarthy, but on everyone who can't see her skills.
  53. Entourage
    It may be not much more than a heavily branded romp through a Hollywood fantasyland, but it’s got a pulse. It’s easy fun. No one ever died from reading People magazine.
  54. Aloha
    Cameron Crowe writes movies like he's calling us in eighth grade with his heart on fire.
  55. John's of 12th Street
    A mere hour long, the movie could stand to be more discerning with its material.
  56. Sunset Edge
    The way the two story lines come together, involving paintball guns and morphsuits, is more mundane and less spooky than the tone up to that point suggests, but the point of Sunset Edge isn't really the surface narrative.
  57. Uncertain Terms
    The film is brisk, brief, well acted, smartly crafted, and shrewdly judged.
  58. San Andreas
    San Andreas can't wait for the carnage. The problem is, it's too chicken to ask us to comprehend it. It's all big, distant, unfathomable wreckage -- all shattering skyscrapers and rippling cityscapes -- with no sense of the human cost.
  59. Unfreedom
    Though it starts off as a cautiously optimistic conversion narrative, the pseudo-progressive, banned-in-India LGBT drama Unfreedom quickly devolves into an absurdly pessimistic provocation.
  60. The True Cost
    Even if, like me, you agree with the points that it's fumbling toward, The True Cost will likely read as dopey and insulting.
  61. Results
    While the polish of good-looking Hollywood types shot in clean, well-lit spaces doesn’t quite connect with Bujalski’s writing style, the film's tone is honestly unorthodox, a quality missing from most mid-budget comedies.
  62. I Believe in Unicorns
    The performances are strong, the imaginary visions are suggestive and fleeting, and the film as a whole is swoony, tender, skittish, a little scary — in short, this is what young love feels like. More Meyerhoff, please!
  63. Club Life
    Ferrara, best known as "Turtle" on HBO's Entourage, plays what is essentially a muted version of that character. Abeckaser is more believable, which is unsurprising, since the movie is loosely based on his own experiences.
  64. Barely Lethal
    Barely Lethal's combination of bawdy humor and earnest affection for its high-school-aged protagonists is surprisingly well-balanced.
  65. Heaven Knows What
    In the thinly veiled version of her life that appears onscreen, the actress unforgettably shows the deadening toll of always being on the move, only to return to the exact same place.
  66. Gemma Bovery
    Fontaine handles the assignations with sympathetic shorthand — we see what Martin sees, but we see more, too, enough to understand that Gemma's dalliances are vital to her but not overwhelming. She has a handle on them.
  67. Poltergeist
    The remake grows less interesting as it goes, with final scares dipping into surprising lameness.
  68. Something Better to Come
    Perhaps even more disturbing than the Dickensian in extremis ordeal of Svalka life — including her rational yet heartbreaking decision to give up her baby rather than raise it in the dump — is Yula's straightforward acceptance of her situation.
  69. When Marnie Was There
    At its most beautiful, Yonebayashi's picture is about the magic of female friendship at its purest.
  70. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").
  71. Sunshine Superman
    You may not leave Sunshine Superman wanting to emulate Carl and Jean, but you will feel like you've vicariously bonded with them.
  72. Love at First Fight
    Rejuvenating the romantic comedy through its unusual premise — in which training for an elite army unit releases a flood of pheromones — Cailley's film is also buoyed by its enormously appealing leads, Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.
  73. Güeros
    What makes Güeros fascinating, besides the joyous invention of Ruizpalacios's craft, is how the director emphasizes rather than hides his own authorial engagement.
  74. The Farewell Party
    [Depicts] the end of life not as an isolated horror (as in Michael Haneke's Amour) or as the contested site of legal and political factions, but as a complex social phase, its wobbly moral scale hinging on empathy.
  75. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    The film is fascinating, even if you're resistant to this dark star's gravity.
  76. Aloft
    The writer-director's ideas about our connection to the land and the many other animals roaming it may well be profound, but they're buried under layers of superfluous storytelling devices. A better title would have been Adrift.
  77. Absolution
    Absolution is an unconvincing showcase for Byron Mann, a new action star to whom Steven Seagal halfheartedly tries to pass a torch.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    (Dis)Honesty, a documentary by Yael Melamede about why we lie, shows the extent to which we fib (almost everybody does, it turns out, across nations and gender and social class). Perhaps most interestingly, (Dis)Honesty shows us how we rationalize that mendacity.
  79. Tomorrowland
    Bird layers on plenty of dazzle... But his heart is what keeps the story motoring and the ending is perfectly engineered, including a coda that encourages all of us to try harder.
  80. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Warped keyhole-size images stack atop one another in a Frankenstein-ian collage that evokes the films of Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Conner. Seeing "the years [slip] out of [Bill's] head" in this 71-minute compendium is nothing short of revelatory.
  81. Miles to Go
    The bigger problem: Quincy Rose, the opaque actor in nearly every scene, and the writer, director, and editor who doesn't distinguish between cinematic intimacy and revealing a character's inner life.
  82. L for Leisure
    What makes L for Leisure more than just a collection of clever, well-photographed jokes is the utter sincerity embedded within the constant sarcasm.
  83. Our Man in Tehran
    Informative but tedious talking-head doc Our Man in Tehran is for anyone who watched Argo and then wished to hear a ditzy, history-obsessed uncle ramble about the real-life political stakes of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
  84. Time Lapse
    That Bradley King's debut Time Lapse half-succeeds is a small miracle.
  85. Where Hope Grows
    Writer-director Chris Dowling handles that worrisome premise with a more even hand than this genre's ill-advised predecessors.
  86. Good Kill
    It's immediate and vital, and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve got all the right answers.
  87. The Film Critic
    Criticism mutated long ago, after the internet's floodgates opened, and that outmoded disconnect between The Film Critic and today's film critics underscores how the persistent references to cinema and film writing are self-awarely mimicking clichés but not subverting them.
  88. I'll See You in My Dreams
    It's crucial to note, too, that this isn't just a nice little movie for older people: There's some real bite to the way it deals with the life questions that come with aging, and whatever sweetness it has is just an undertone, not a feel-good frosting overlay.
  89. One Cut, One Life
    It's a fault of feminism, of artistry, of generosity, for the older woman to envy one younger. And yet. How do we escape the myths into which we are born? We tell them, and show the hard work of telling.
  90. Every Secret Thing
    A cheerless and nonsensical thriller.
  91. Echoes of War
    However you view the western in American filmmaking — as a moth-eaten relic or an eternal form to be resurrected every few years — there's something stale about Kane Senes's tepid historical drama Echoes of War, which utilizes the genre's symbols without delivering on its potential for moral or narrative satisfaction.
  92. The Connection
    It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.
  93. Animals
    Schiffli and Dastmalchian deliver a sweet, elegiac concluding moment that offers a measure of hope without making a lot of unbelievable promises.
  94. Slow West
    Its central journey lives up to the title: Maclean finds time to savor rivers and starscapes and layers of light and mountainous land. The dialogue is flighty yet weighty, each line like some delicate woodcut.
  95. Pitch Perfect 2
    The story is stuffed with subplots and gags that are sometimes fun by themselves but don’t quite cohere into a whole — the picture has a melismatic waywardness, as if it’s singing as fast as it can yet is never quite sure where it’s going.
  96. Mad Max: Fury Road
    For all the ways the movie feels singular and impossible, like something the studio suits couldn't possibly have signed off on, Fury Road also feels entirely of its era.
  97. Skin Trade
    Skin Trade's action is all blood and sinew, but its camerawork and choreography are nothing if not graceful.
  98. Infini
    Infini doesn't go anywhere that superior science fiction films haven't already, but for a while, it's exciting enough to feel brand-new.
  99. Hot Pursuit
    Hot Pursuit is a quiet triumph of tone and timing. Nearly every scene is cut at just the right point, often topped off with a fantastic kicker of dialogue.
  100. The Seven Five
    The Seven Five makes for a fascinating character study, but the doc's drama is also compelling.
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