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. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    Ronit's remarkable sensitivity makes Gett a tough but essential melodrama.
  2. Seventh Son
    Jeff Bridges's abysmally campy performance may be the worst thing about disposable sword-and-sorcery fantasy Seventh Son, but it's also the only memorable thing.
  3. Jupiter Ascending
    The movie's a fascinating mess, grand and gaudy, often hilarious.
  4. On the Way to School
    The film quietly reveals these four small stories as epically heroic and timeless journeys.
  5. Lovesick
    LeBlanc and Larter carry the day with a spectrum of charm missing from too many entries in this shaky, persistent genre.
  6. Love, Rosie
    The message is more pedestrian than passionate: Life is long, and full of instant messages.
  7. Mad As Hell
    If Napier hadn't shown up with a camera, Uygur would likely have continued filming himself, because his "firebrand" commentary is only ostensibly about politics; it's mostly about projecting the world onto his own ego and making it Cenk Uygur–shaped.
  8. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    Josue tries to reclaim his narrative with this intimate, positive portrait, but while Shepard's brave and resourceful parents encourage her, they realized long ago that his death means he no longer belongs solely to them.
  9. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The film itself is solidly and conventionally crafted. Newsreels and stock footage alternate with fresh interviews with friends and scholars, steadfast supporters and unabashed detractors. The political life it maps out fascinates.
  10. Project Almanac
    Project Almanac could have been fun, but its creators don't seem to know what fun looks like.
  11. The Voices
    The Voices is a perfect film that's hard to watch.
  12. The Loft
    The Loft's boorish leads aren't sensible enough to be worth caring about, making the film's character-driven conclusion feel like a self-defeating cop-out.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Enter the Dangerous Mind
    Despite its pretensions to social awareness — most clearly embodied in Scott Bakula's concerned-caseworker character — the film displays a luridly exploitative attitude toward mental illness.
  14. Call for Help
    Etziony and Hanuka's on-the-fly footage suggests that DIRT's desire to help in Haiti was noble, but that its success in making a difference was minimal at best — thus leaving the film feeling primarily like a critical snapshot of how dysfunctional Western humanitarians often use overseas crises for their own ends.
  15. Ballet 422
    Ballet 422 is more visually sumptuous than most narratives you're likely to see this year, featuring careful compositions that make watching the film an aesthetic experience as much as an intellectual one.
  16. City of Gold
    Gold is merely the conduit for the film's real focus: Like his own reviews, City of Gold is a love letter to L.A.
  17. Above and Beyond
    It will only be criticized — rightfully — for its skirting over the resulting plight of Palestinian refugees, but Grossman is surely capable of making an equally absorbing, entertaining film on that subject.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Suburban Gothic
    Despite the cast's genuine charm, Suburban Gothic's script and characters are too familiar and sophomoric to sustain half its runtime without the gross-out death sequences that define its genre.
  19. Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of
    Show 'Em What You're Made Of convincingly argues that these boy-men have something to say about the fickleness of fate — something they knew more about as young men than any of the cynics who dismissed them for dancing in unison. The hardest part will be convincing people to listen.
  20. Wild Card
    Overstuffed and distractible, this episodic redo feels like a couple episodes of some Showtime series stitched into a feature.
  21. Timbuktu
    The film is consistently visually stunning in a way that's ever more rare, and Sissako's bravura moment of filmmaking is embedded in a scene on a river that seals the Tuareg patriarch's fate.
  22. Supremacy
    [A] dour, dreary drama.
  23. The Devil's Violinist
    Bernard Rose's elegantly staged but tonally flat biopic embraces the myth, even underscoring Paganini's rising fame, scandalous hedonism, and womanizing as an anachronistic form of rock-star fantasy.
  24. My Name Is Hmmm...
    A hodgepodge of artistic gestures grafted onto a traditional narrative, neither fully linear nor experimental.
  25. Hard to Be a God
    Textually, the setting's brutalist conflation between the far future and the distant past makes the film timeless, an elusive fable told with the viscous immediacy of a life on the diseased edge of civilization.
  26. Alien Outpost
    The promise of the multi-screen future-history info-dump that kicks off Alien Outpost isn't enough to mask this military sci-fi indie's repetitive familiarity.
  27. Girlhood
    Raw and insistent, bold and brawling, Girlhood throbs with the global now, illustrating the ways an indifferent society boxes in the people who grow up in project-style boxes.
  28. Black or White
    Occasionally, the film rouses into something thoughtful, even daring.
  29. Amira & Sam
    Writer-director Sean Mullin gives us some of the usual beats, but he and his performers invest them with rare persuasive power.
  30. Mortdecai
    The hard part will be convincing audiences to shake off their Depp fatigue and embrace a film that's daffy, dated, and precisely as intended.
  31. Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter
    You need not be a student or scholar of dance to be completely enthralled by Greg Vander Veer's documentary Miss Hill.
  32. Song One
    Hathaway's performance is brave, strong, wistful, and misty, and she's especially affecting when being wooed, gently, by Flynn, playing an indie-folkstar.
  33. Son of a Gun
    Like so many meathead action thrillers, it's too busy fogging the windows with hot air to see the big picture.
  34. Salvation Army
    Despite stilted camerawork often locked in the medium shot, Salvation Army is a touching ode to the freedom to finally be who we want to be — if we can ever find where we belong.
  35. R100
    You'd expect more yucks from the country that bequeathed tentacle porn unto the world.
  36. Manny
    Throughout, the complexities of the charismatic fighter's life are only cursorily referenced so that the celebratory tone may not be marred, with Manny ultimately content to treat its subject with kid gloves.
  37. Killers
    Amateurishly realized sensationalism trumps character-driven drama throughout Killers.
  38. Americons
    Playing like the redundant child of The Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room, Americons has its heart and justifiably outraged politics in the right place; it just lacks artistry or real insight.
  39. We'll Never Have Paris
    Throughout, Helberg's awkward-anxious routine proves insufferable, and it's made no more tolerable by supporting turns from Zachary Quinto, Alfred Molina, and Judith Light, who are given so little to do that their presence in this mess feels downright cruel to both them and us.
  40. The Wedding Ringer
    Hart rants, Gad fidgets, and together this pair barrels through the plot, shaping between them a surprisingly potent friendship.
  41. Mommy
    Mommy is first and foremost a mother-and-son story, but it's also a surprisingly delicate exploration of lonely lives, and the temporary islands of companionship that make them bearable.
  42. Cake
    Aniston gives the character personality and heft, but the script gives the character nothing to do.
  43. The Humbling
    Levinson and Pacino's willingness to explore the creakier end of life isn't a drawback; it's what gives The Humbling its bittersweet vitality.
  44. Black Sea
    Black Sea is so almost-terrific that it's ultimately more disappointing than a movie that's merely badly or carelessly made.
  45. The Duke of Burgundy
    Strickland builds the film, artfully, into a complex and ultimately moving essay on the privileges of victimhood and the nuances of what it means to suffer for love.
  46. The Boy Next Door
    The movie's not built for belief. It's built for dumb, shivery, sexed-up pleasure, and it delivers, albeit somewhat modestly.
  47. Spare Parts
    This blatantly big-hearted product isn't half as vibrant as the original 2005 Wired article on which it's based, and myopically neglects to address Arizona's troubling anti-immigration legislation through even a splash of hindsight.
  48. The Guitar Mongoloid
    Distant, enigmatic, fragmented, and possessing a dead-eyed steeliness in the tradition of Michael Haneke, Tsai Ming-liang, and Ulrich Seidl. The Guitar Mongoloid is a quilt of moments, set pieces, and voyeuristic opportunities building to no specific thematic idea.
  49. Play
    It's the rare contemporary film that's as majestically and gruelingly rigorous in its form as in its thematic interrogations.
  50. Involuntary
    Involuntary doesn't simplify its stories into a single point of view or idea; rather, Östlund is merely visiting these high-pressure moments in which Swedish culture frays, melts down, and betrays its ultra-civilized idea of itself.
  51. Northern Borders
    It's easy to get lost in the natural beauty of Vermont, and Mosher (who worked on the film with several students as part of a Marlboro College program) clearly takes joy in doing so. The liveliest counterpart to that striking landscape isn't Dern, but rather Jessica Hecht as his wayward daughter, who hits all the grace notes the rest of the film tends to miss.
  52. Vice
    The film unspools with a momentum that mitigates its artless brutality, kinda, but it's a high-pressure firehose of stupid.
  53. Still Alice
    The triumph of Still Alice is that it’s not about an illness; it’s about a person.
  54. Still Life
    When it's all over, Still Life feels disembodied and perfunctory, like a very respectful eulogy for no one in particular.
  55. Loitering with Intent
    This is an indifferently filmed, sloppily conceived story that finds infrequent life through resourceful production design (Gigi's house is strewn with Modelo, Red Bull, and scribbled-on note cards) and on-edge work from Tomei and Rockwell.
  56. Little Accidents
    All the secrets, lies, and consequences feel as authentic as the Appalachian milieu, but the film lacks the memorable idiosyncrasy of a River's Edge, or more fittingly, the myth-making lyricism of Matewan.
  57. Joy of Man's Desiring
    Undeniably, the rhythms — of clanging machines, of humans at work and repose — seen and heard here are the tempo of the quotidian and the repetitive. Yet even in their mundanity, these factory routines are not without their exalted moments.
  58. Gangs of Wasseypur
    The killing is bloody, the power struggles involving, the history-class examinations of the relations between mines and unions and gangsters fascinating, and the tough-guy routines, while sometimes tiresome, never less than credible.
  59. Diving Normal
    For most of its running time, Diving Normal doesn't work, and then it does, which makes it both maddening and memorable.
  60. Appropriate Behavior
    Forget its generic title, its breakup setup, and its indie-standard Brooklyn walk-and-talks: Writer/director Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behavior is the freshest comedy of life and love in the city since Obvious Child.
  61. Match
    Writer-director Stephen Belber's inspiriting, generous Match is so good that it's like some kind of trick.
  62. Human Capital
    The biggest suspense: As everything gets worse for everyone, will this consummate director's outraged worldview afford anyone any pity? At first you'll seethe — then your heart will ache.
  63. Paddington
    The scale of the occasional mayhem is heightened, but its spirit and ingenuity doesn't feel wholly at odds with the books.
  64. Blackhat
    There’s visual thinking everywhere you look in Blackhat, which is great until you realize that it’s bled into a kind of overthinking — the movie is too much of a good thing, an exercise that flattens any potential exhilaration or excitement into the sensation of grading a term paper.
  65. Taken 3
    Taken 3 isn't brilliant, but it's a hell of a lot of dumb, head-smacking fun.
  66. La Última Película
    Martin and Peranson, a savvy pair, appreciate their outsider status here, and they remain uncommonly sensitive to even the subtlest ways that ignorance and entitlement may manifest themselves — both in art and in our relationship to it.
  67. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints is a marvel of neorealism, with nonprofessional actors facing the same hurdles as their characters and writer/director Syeed improvising in shifting circumstances.
  68. It's All So Quiet
    The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.
  69. Dark Summer
    Eventually succumbs to the weight of plot contrivance.
  70. The World Made Straight
    On-the-nose monologues on the cyclical nature of centuries-old blood feuds ultimately feel more like stuffy lectures than living history; ditto the film as a whole.
  71. Something, Anything
    This is a sure-handed, complex portrait of one woman's attempts to feel alive.
  72. Preservation
    Christopher Denham's Preservation is a violent yet agreeably goofy throwback to the survival-in-the-woods genre.
  73. Predestination
    The Spierigs had the framework for something wonderful here, if only they’d trusted themselves to keep things simple.
  74. Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    The film is as vacuous and undeserving of regard as any of its characters.
  75. Beloved Sisters
    Although there's nothing sensationalistic about his approach, [Graf] treats the characters' tentative, often problematic bohemianism as a wild, brave, and precious thing, and the lead actors — restrained where it counts and bold where it matters — are a pleasure to watch.
  76. Black November
    Oddly, that extra star power makes Black November look cheap. It's threadbare for an action flick... The story Amata wants to tell is much simpler, and he might have been more successful sticking to his own guns and staying with his sturdy, empathetic heroine.
  77. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    Flawed but genuinely creepy ghost story The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is disappointing, but only because it comes close to greatness.
  78. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain may not always be as grand as it should be, but its thrills compensate for its shortcomings.
  79. The Search for General Tso
    Most of The Search for General Tso is a breezy survey of the history of Chinese-American cuisine.
  80. A Most Violent Year
    Grand in its aims but tepid in its conclusions, A Most Violent Year burns slow and gives off very little heat. It's not really that violent. But it sure feels like a year.
  81. Li'l Quinquin
    A Dumont film that paints its small-town milieu with as much humor as violence (though there's a fair dose of that, too) and finds some tenderness in life's absurdities.
  82. Barbecue
    Eric Lavaine's midlife-crisis dramedy piles on dreary subplots involving Antoine's grating pals and their one-dimensional romantic and/or financial problems, but his material is unfunny and superficial to the point of inertia.
  83. Leviathan
    This is a dense, multilayered picture, one firmly rooted in a specific landscape, a dramatic coastal spot dotted with the carcasses of decrepit fishing boats, as well as the magnificent skeleton of one long-dead whale.
  84. Selma
    With Selma, DuVernay has pulled off a tricky feat, a movie based on historical events that never feels dull, worthy, or lifeless; it hangs together as a story and not just part of a lesson plan. The movie is at once intimate and grand in scope.
  85. Two Days, One Night
    What anchors Two Days, One Night, and eases its gaps, is Cotillard's extraordinary performance.
  86. The Gambler
    The pleasures offered by The Gambler are simple, but don’t hold that against it. Wyatt, director of the 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brings some bristly, swaggering energy to the thing, and that in turn may have loosened Wahlberg up: He’s both more intense and freer than he’s been in years.
  87. Big Eyes
    Fortunately for Burton, Big Eyes is actually good. Not great, but good enough -- the perfect middlebrow portrait of the ultimate middlebrow artist.
  88. American Sniper
    The humble Kyle onscreen is Kyle with his flaws written out. We're not watching a biopic. We're watching a drama about an idealized soldier, a patriot beyond reproach, which bolsters Kyle's legend while gutting the man.
  89. Unbroken
    Unbroken wants it all: the big cinematography, the close-up grit, the postcard flashbacks, and the grisly Götterdämmerung that earns directors awards. But it aches for a lighter touch -- the facts of Zamperini's life more than stand on their own.
  90. Life of an Actress: The Musical
    A timid and slapdash musical.
  91. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    The third installment, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb may be the best, and even the generally wound-too-tight Ben Stiller — once again playing a bemused Museum of Natural History guard — is easy to tolerate.
  92. The Interview
    The more desperately a comedy tries to be outrageous, the less likely it is to be outrageous -- or even just funny. And that's the fate that befalls The Interview, which offers a few moments of casual brilliance... but otherwise trips itself up in the threads of its contrived absurdity.
  93. Song of the Sea
    The picture is beautifully rendered in pencils and watercolors, with some CG, giving it an appropriately timeless storybook look, even though it's set in a mostly modern world of buses and 3-D glasses.
  94. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.
  95. Inside the Mind of Leonardo
    [A] goof/stunt of a movie.
  96. Into the Woods
    Rob Marshall simply cuts from one tale to the next, isolating his actors. There's little sense that the fairytale space is a shared one -- it's just a bunch of noisy incident transpiring in unrelated treestands.
  97. If You Don't, I Will
    While you may be left craving more emotional fireworks than you get, Fillières's intelligent film is accomplished in its portrayal of a marriage in crisis, the union's last gasps rife with poignant exchanges.
  98. Goodbye to All That
    The title indicates a major transition, but despite assertions that the dissolution of a marriage is a life-altering event, divorce doesn't change Otto as much as rouse him from stupefaction, and Schneider deftly balances bewilderment with resolve.
  99. Winter Sleep
    This patient, beautiful, painful, engrossing film pits husband and wife against each other and their world in a series of extended conversations/confrontations.
  100. Mr. Turner
    Leigh, Spall, and cinematographer Dick Pope — who borrows lots of lighting tricks from Vermeer and Ingres and even Turner himself, to glorious effect — have gently atomized Turner's character, breaking it into small, potent fragments that affect us in ways we don't see coming.
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