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. Saint Laurent
    It's rare to see process — the making of anything — dealt with as clearly and poetically as it is in Saint Laurent. It's too bad the movie feels like a confusing, misshapen muslin.
  2. Preggoland
    There's satiric comedy to be mined from the conflicting messages society still sends about pregnancy, motherhood, and women's worth, but the script isn't smart enough to explore them.
  3. Playing It Cool
    Proving that its chosen genre is best when its tropes are treated with a balance of sincere sweetness and wink-wink absurdity, Playing It Cool thrives through sheer liveliness, as well as the chemistry of its perfectly paired stars.
  4. Noble
    The movie works because Christina's desire to help these kids feels natural, and because she herself shoulders burdens that would drive most people to the grave, all without losing her faith.
  5. Maggie
    While zombie drama Maggie seems intended as a showcase for Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting range, the star's performance is smothered by the film's deeply affected style.
  6. Intrepido: A Lonely Hero
    Amelio might just be trifling around, and sometimes that's how the film feels — rudderless and unsure of its own purpose. If fuzzy thematic thrust doesn't bug you, however, the essence of Albanese as a shrugging everyman for post-debt-crisis Europe may be its own reward.
  7. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    I like what I Am Big Bird is trying to do — I just wish it were a little less Bird-nice, and a little more Grouch-frank.
  8. The D Train
    The D Train has one great idea, a couple strong jokes, and a void at its center — a man who is only believable when he briefly becomes specific.
  9. Bravetown
    Aside from a showy opening (a tracking shot that snakes through a club, cribbing freely from Carlito's Way, Boogie Nights, etc.), the movie satisfies mainly due to its affecting ensemble and considerable emotional intelligence.
  10. 5 Flights Up
    What starts as a somewhat charming — if prosaic — story of love in the time of gentrification inexplicably spends most of its third act mired in the finer points of apartment hunting, like a tastefully lit HGTV show.
  11. 1001 Grams
    This portrait of an introverted soul brought out of her shell is not without its charms.
  12. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    The 100-Year-Old Man's equal-opportunity irreverence doesn't often translate to cleverness.
  13. Maya the Bee Movie
    Maya the Bee Movie does what it does very well, moving along at a brisk pace and with a strong underlying message for its young audience.
  14. Welcome to Me
    This spiky, pushy, sometimes upsetting comedy finds Wiig creating something whole and alive out of her apparent contradictions.
  15. Ride
    There's a wry sweetness to this picture.
  16. Marie's Story
    To play Marie today, Améris found the non-actor Ariana Rivoire at the Institute for the Deaf. And Rivoire is a revelation — showing what it's like to be in, and then break out of, a world of total darkness and silence.
  17. Hyena
    The film's convoluted moral trajectory to hell may be as unoriginal as quoting Taxi Driver, and the pervasive violent menace can be needlessly punishing (including a drugged sexual assault), but as stylish, scorched-earth entertainment, it'll get you in its teeth.
  18. Gerontophilia
    Though its imagery is tame by LaBruce's standards, Gerontophilia follows his fascination with taboo sexual behavior.
  19. Far From Men
    Its plotting is often a tad too plodding, but with the charismatic Mortensen exuding understated internal crisis (in a French- and Arabic-speaking role), Oelhoffen's film proves a compelling portrait of individuals striving to cope with, and at least somewhat overcome, cultural dislocation.
  20. Far from the Madding Crowd
    As written by Hardy, Bathsheba is bracingly whole and human; here she’s been outlined, and thus circumscribed, by an eager student’s highlighter.
  21. Days of Grace
    Most of this frantic moviemaking is more disorienting than riveting.
  22. Cas & Dylan
    Leading man Richard Dreyfuss is so irrepressibly charming that he almost saves Jason Priestley's dismal buddy comedy Cas & Dylan from its awkward humor and trite sentimentality.
  23. Soul Boys of the Western World
    In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.
  24. Iris
    Like all good documentaries, Iris is about much more than what we see on the surface, no matter how dazzling that surface may be.
  25. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    [Whedon] wants to give us everything, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat. Age of Ultron is a middling film, yet it's so heavy with his sweat that it never feels like a lazy cash-in — which for a preordained summer megahit is an accomplishment.
  26. WA-SHOKU ~Beyond Sushi~
    Wa-shoku isn't as contemplative as Kanai and his acolytes, though it might still make you feel like a dilettante if your Japanese palate begins and ends with California rolls.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    See You in Valhalla
    See You in Valhalla struggles to assemble a cohesive conflict for its ensemble cast to overcome.
  28. Revolution
    Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring.
  29. Misery Loves Comedy
    Misery Loves Comedy reveals artists adept at sounding out the darkest depths of our lives — and then transmuting what they find to laughter, a gift I bet sad young poets might ache for.
  30. Laugh Killer Laugh
    Conversations meander and fizzle; characters repeat themselves, speaking in banalities and clichés.
  31. Kung Fu Killer
    Director Teddy Chan's glossy thriller pays tribute to martial-arts cinema by casting enough Hong Kong industry legends to rival the cameo count of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's a pity, then, that it's an undeniably bland film in style and story, despite a few elaborately staged fight sequences.
  32. The Human Experiment
    The problem with The Human Experiment as an actual film and not just an anti-chemical treatise is that, though these people and the troubling statistics they cite are on the level, we're too rarely afforded the opportunity to reach our own conclusions based on them.
  33. Helicopter Mom
    It is impossible to overstate how grating Nia Vardalos is as the title character in Helicopter Mom. Throughout her career, her default setting has been something like "Jack Russell terrier after an amphetamine bender." No surprise that she's exhausting here.
  34. Anita B.
    Just as it seems on the verge of yielding a nuanced view of the Holocaust’s emotional and psychological fallout, Anita B. recedes into platitudes and cliché.
  35. The Forger
    The film works marginally well as the story of a broken family trying to heal itself, but the third act is a whole different movie.
  36. Because I Was a Painter
    Cognet's work is more devoted to thought about aesthetics than aesthetics themselves. His modest film represents a break from the rigorous historical work typically associated with documentaries about the Holocaust, and its open-ended nature is a fitting analogue to ongoing questions about testimony and healing.
  37. Little Boy
    Examinations of faith on film don't have to be noxious.
  38. The Great Museum
    Holzhausen is respectful but not reverential, portraying the museum as a living thing that's being cared for with meticulous diligence.
  39. The Water Diviner
    Crowe's visual framing and dramatic staging are as assured as his compelling lead performance. Yet as his story becomes weighed down by issues of cross-cultural understanding, forgiveness, and second chances...the film comes to feel like a slight, straightforward tale distended to tedious lengths.
  40. Adult Beginners
    Married-in-real-life screenwriters Liz Flahive (Nurse Jackie) and Jeff Cox (Blades of Glory) can do poignant (not tossing family memorabilia) and clever (connecting Skype, hairspray, and stepparents), though the humor is intermittent.
  41. Emptying the Skies
    Emptying the Skies performs a grand and aching love by telling its story with a power that enrages.
  42. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    Don't Think I've Forgotten is a testament to how much a song can mean: You can destroy the vinyl it's been recorded on, but the sound itself, and all it stands for, is indestructible. Groove is in the heart.
  43. 24 Days
    This retelling is more concerned with black-and-white morality, which drains it of suspense.
  44. Child 44
    This is a dignified piece of filmmaking, and one that uses brutality to great effect.
  45. Roar
    Roar is a thrilling bore, an inanity with actual peril in every scene.
  46. Welcome to New York
    Surprisingly -- and pleasantly -- restrained in its delivery, Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York is the sort of picture that withholds judgment of its protagonist so that viewers have space to make their own.
  47. Unfriended
    Director Levan Gabriadze is adept at the sinking something's not right creepiness too few horror films dig into. His techniques are certain to be copy-pasted by imitators.
  48. The Squeeze
    Like many, many films starring Christopher McDonald, the best thing about The Squeeze is Christopher McDonald.
  49. 1915
    Because atrocious backstage drama 1915 is meant to address a great global tragedy -- the Turkish government–mandated extermination of 1.5 million Armenians -- the film's creators smother its putting-on-a-show narrative with ponderous diatribes about "denial," "ghosts," and "acting."
  50. True Story
    Especially for a movie that springs from a horrific and grisly crime, True Story feels undershaped and indistinct; it’s too dispassionate to be genuinely chilly.
  51. The Road Within
    This is, of course, a movie about affliction, and it ultimately succumbs to the bland, sentimental uplift we've come to expect from such outings.
  52. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Green seems to be asking: In the face of beasts whose scale and life cycles we can't begin to grasp, how can we allow our fellow human beings to be so unknowable?
  53. Félix And Meira
    The restrained performances of Dubreuil and Yaron (Fill the Void) gradually reveal the flaws and strengths of this fragile couple, while Twersky is quietly devastating as an abandoned husband who fully understands devotion and sacrifice.
  54. The Dead Lands
    The film is undeniably elevated by its exotic milieu. It's a shame, then, that it's stuck with such a familiar coming-of-age call to adventure.
  55. Beyond the Reach
    Madec and Ben's showdown becomes a battle to see which type of man is best equipped for survival: the well-funded scoundrel or the honest grunt. The film is too honest itself to always give us the answer we want. It's also too dully on-the-nose to entertain.
  56. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    Informative and workmanlike, Antarctic Edge is more a bad-news rundown than one of the meditative masterpieces of the genre
  57. Alex of Venice
    Messina, making his directorial debut, keeps it simple. Alex undergoes a surprising amount of personal maturation in a week, but Winstead never lets the character bog down in excessive navel-gazing.
  58. Tangerines
    Interior scenes focus theater-like on the dining room table-as-vortex: Threats and insults whip about, but, finally, so do forays of friendship.
  59. Monkey Kingdom
    The moment-to-moment inventions are great fun, but the larger narrative inventions are less inspired.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Reset
    At least Bojack had the decency to bring this turgid, self-indulgent doodle in at a slim 79 minutes.
  61. Candlestick
    Presswell's stylized dialogue, whose rapid-fire banter often hardens into self-conscious artifice, is biting and witty, but is thankfully absent either endless pop-culture references or cloying self-consciousness of its own cleverness.
  62. Below Dreams
    As the waves of this cinematic dream break, the profundities left behind come not from character arcs, but observed states of being that feel subjectively experienced.
  63. Dial A Prayer
    Director Kiley is mostly successful at keeping Hallmark banalities at bay, relating Cora's crime in a series of tense flashbacks, and populating the film with funny characters played by a top-notch cast.
  64. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    While its unconventional approach eventually becomes a tad wearisome, Morgen’s film proves a uniquely revealing exploration of the development, and eventual disintegration, of the heart and mind (and spirit) of a musician incapable of finding solace in, or transcendence through, his angst.
  65. Song from the Forest
    Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian... But Obert also slips in powerful critiques of Sarno with the lightest of touches — some so light they might be accidental.
  66. In the Courtyard
    Thoroughly nonjudgmental in its observations, Pierre Salvadori's In the Courtyard ranks as one of the funnier films about victims of depression and mental illness.
  67. In Country
    O'Hara and Attie never judge the players, letting their words and actions speak, though those actions are often intercut with footage from the real war.
  68. The Sisterhood of Night
    It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.
  69. Rebels of the Neon God
    Tsai isn't without mischief — one key to this film's hypnotic power is humor so subtle it's practically subliminal — but his preferred takeaway is the pathos, the still-universal frustration, of an unanswered ringtone.
  70. Kill Me Three Times
    The flick, written by debut screenwriter James McFarland, is twisty, clever, and totally Nineties.
  71. Desert Dancer
    The film plays too safe with its narrative. Fortunately, like its characters, it's most daring when it's in motion.
  72. Dior and I
    Dior and I is a great fashion movie, but it's also a superb picture about the art of management, applicable to any field.
  73. The Longest Ride
    A good romance can make us endure an implausible plot as long as the leads have heat. Luke and Sophia's connection feels true. Who cares about the mechanics? By the time The Longest Ride runs right off a cliff, we're already strapped in to the passenger seat. Give in and enjoy the plunge.
  74. Ex Machina
    It's a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It's also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes double as threats, and vice versa.
  75. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The movie's true center, the meteorological phenomenon that makes it so pleasurable to watch, is the half-prickly, half-affectionate interplay between Binoche and Stewart.
  76. About Elly (2009)
    This superb, suspenseful film, completed in 2009, opens as a playful comedy of vacationing couples and awkward romance, one that might be set in the French countryside, but by the end has become a moral drama likely to corrode your certainties.
  77. Black Souls
    The makers of Black Souls, a superior Italian gangster movie, deserve praise for executing with atypical sensitivity a generic times-are-changing/nostalgia-for-an-imaginary-chivalrous-yesteryear scenario.
  78. Death of a Tree
    Death of a Tree, written and directed by John Martoccia, is filled with so much unintentional humor that it quickly slips into the realm of parody — and stays there.
  79. The Forecaster
    The story of espionage and duplicity that financial adviser Martin Armstrong relates in Marcus Vetter's documentary The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel.
  80. The Hand That Feeds
    López is a singularly tender, compelling, and articulate campaigner in this high-stakes struggle for justice, filmed with the urgency and suspense of a Hitchcock thriller.
  81. Woman in Gold
    What Woman in Gold has over nonfiction portrayals is emotion, and director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) milks every scene for its heart-tugging potential.
  82. That Guy Dick Miller
    That Guy Dick Miller is a cheery and likable film, one that bops along the surface of its story with lots of interviews, too-quick film clips, and spazzy-quirky-tootling music meant to let us know how fun all this is.
  83. Ned Rifle
    Hartley's humor and intellectual musings are, as always, fully present, but by anchoring them to a genuinely compelling story of familial retribution, he's made his best film in years.
  84. Manos Sucias
    It's not news, of course, that it's a terrible thing to extinguish a life, but it's a relief, when the shoot-'em-ups of Summer Movie Season are bearing down on us, to see a film that regards killing with pained awe. Wladyka's hands are clean.
  85. Last Knights
    While Kiriya can shoot a sword fight, his preferred pace is glacial. He wants to make sure the audience feels every plot point.
  86. Lambert & Stamp
    Cooper's interest is in the collaboration between the talent and its managers, in the way the duo urged their charges to begin to conceive of their sound, look, marketing, and live performances as all expressive of a singular vision.
  87. The Girl Is in Trouble
    Sampled old newsreel and security-camera footage flesh out the narrative, and the film's visually arresting, but it's the performances that hold it all together.
  88. Electric Slide
    Patterson seems more concerned with getting the surfaces right (costume design, production design) than tapping any of the adrenaline that should be pumping through bank robberies, love scenes, and confrontations with barking loan sharks — adrenaline we should feel even if the protagonist is meant to be cucumber-cool.
  89. Effie Gray
    You can feel the good intentions vibrating off the screen, but it's still a listless affair, one that takes forever to go almost nowhere. The picture struggles so valiantly to be a woman's empowerment fable that it leaves you wishing for just a little romance.
  90. Cut Bank
    Without his usual tics, Malkovich is a wonder, quietly transforming an unassuming town fixture into Cut Bank's conscience. But the revelatory performance is Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) as Derby Milton.
  91. Boychoir
    Hoffman, naturally, makes his character interesting in the way that genius actors always do. Yet the film's storytelling struggles to match his level of skill.
  92. 5 to 7
    There's no credibility to Arielle and Brian's romance. We get why he likes her — who wouldn't? But what does she see in this nine-years-younger naif she treats like a slow child?
  93. Furious 7
    For all the full-throttle dazzle of Furious 7, the best scenes are the quietest ones, in which these characters make observations about love, life, and family that would seem overcooked in any other movie.
  94. A Wolf at the Door
    As with so much of Brazilian cinema, the framing of the plot as a social allegory instead of a psychological portrait doesn't yield the most emotionally satisfying experience. But Wolf serves as an important feminist correction -- and a compelling reminder that predators can come from anywhere.
  95. Home
    If director Tim Johnson -- adapting Adam Rex's book The True Meaning of Smekday -- can't do much with the story's confused, if well-intentioned, agenda, at least he's got some charming, vivid characters to work with.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Barber
    Only Glenn, whose taciturn performance is punctuated by flashes of genuine menace, lifts The Barber to "watchable."
  97. Marfa Girl
    The film is as shallow as its characters' oversexed conversations.
  98. White God
    When the violence gets unbearable, take comfort in the troop of trainers on the sidelines who prove that, for now, man and beast still make a good team.
  99. While We're Young
    Baumbach has made some fine pictures (Frances Ha) and some deadening, hermetic ones (Margot at the Wedding), but it's While We're Young that really fulfills the promise of his brash but fine-grained debut.
  100. Serena
    Screenwriter Christopher Kyle touches on hot-button issues of class conflict, land use, and no-holds-barred capitalism. He also strips Serena of moral ambiguity, turning deeply twisted relationships into a doomed romance where transgressors punish themselves.
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