Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Annie
    It presumes that children care a great deal about cellphone towers, political campaigns, and Twitter. Still, Quvenzhané Wallis, as Annie, is raw, charismatic, alive, and unpredictable.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Take Care
    It's only in the closing moments when Tuccillo lets up, delivering a skip-into-the-sunset ending that seems a bit canned. Take Care's laughs feel better than its romance.
  3. Tip Top
    Serge Bozon's smart, surprising, marvelously realized French crime-and-sex police drama/comedy distinguishes itself with trenchant plotting, inspired framing, and performances that honor true human feeling even as they lunge into the screwball.
  4. Songs from the North
    In Songs From the North, the South Korean–born, U.S.-based filmmaker Soon-Mi Yoo takes her camera to North Korea and, through a purposeful mix of on-location footage, poetic intertitles ("Is North Korea the loneliest place on Earth?"), and archival media, creates an empathetic snapshot of a country that is almost never depicted in such an accessible light.
  5. Maidan
    Easily the most rigorous, vital, and powerful movie of 2014, Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan may be a perfect Bazinian cinema-machine — reality is captured, crystallized, honored for its organic complexity, and delivered unpoisoned by exposition or emphasis.
  6. Expelled
    Expelled isn't going to change the world, but it's a fun and promising debut film.
  7. Immoral Tales (re-release)
    Immoral Tales works best when its creator is focused on surprising viewers with his perverse imagination, and not his misguided cynicism.
  8. We Are the Giant
    Barker's tactlessness wouldn't be so bad if he weren't too high on his own patchwork rhetoric to ask his subjects what specifically motivates them.
  9. Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
    For a film whose central motif is dance, there's remarkably little dancing done onscreen, and though Rowland and her co-star share moments of tender, revealing conversation, the movie is ultimately underwhelming, its emotional range as limited as that of its characters.
  10. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Sturdy and rudimentary, Magician may be Welles 101, but it's dotted liberally with TV and radio clips of the famously loquacious auteur talking, talking, and doing more talking — and how could anybody with ears and a brain resist that buttery voice, spinning out clause-laden sentences that take more twists and turns than the streets of Venice but always end, somehow, in a place that's ravishingly articulate?
  11. A Little Game
    A Little Game is an OK children's movie that can only be appreciated by kids, who have not yet been callused by the awfulness of both chess metaphors and the old ladies in films who are always spouting gauzy generalities about the magic of life.
  12. Isn't It Delicious
    Too much of Isn't It Delicious is either sketchy or hokey, trading an honest exploration of Joan's destructive self-absorption for a family finding peace through dispassionate compassion.
  13. Free the Nipple
    It's too rare for movies to depict women working together as friends to effect political change, and this one makes it seem righteous, loud, and fun as a rock concert. Free the Nipple won't change the conversation, but it might help start one.
  14. The Color of Time
    Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?
  15. The Captive
    When it isn't TV-movie familiar, Egoyan's film is bughouse crazy, mixing in campy pulp elements that bleed pressure away from the story.
  16. After The Fall
    The movie's flaws — silly plotting and unconvincing psychological groundwork — are Klein's doing.
  17. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    For a story that's pro-poor and anti-wealth, every frame of it looks like it cost as much as human life itself — and that, more than any bludgeoned battle cries for freedom, is the pleasure of the film.
  18. Inherent Vice
    Inherent Vice isn't the towering masterpiece that those who admired There Will Be Blood and The Master were probably hoping for, and thank God for that. It's loose and free, like a sketchbook, though there's also something somber and wistful about it — it feels like less of a psychedelic scramble than the novel it's based on.
  19. Top Five
    Chris Rock couldn't have planned it this way, but his exuberant and wondrous comedy Top Five, opening at just the right time, is like an airdrop of candy over the city, if not the country.
  20. A Small Section of the World
    It can be unsettling, for regular documentary viewers, to take in a film so relentlessly optimistic, communal, and lacking in nostalgia, but those qualities were key to the success of the women of Biolley.
  21. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    Landscapes and lyric conundrums distinguish the first two-thirds of this find-your-own-meaning artflick, which unfurls like some stranger's life you're half reliving.
  22. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    One of the year's best films, Mary Dore's She's Beautiful When She's Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live.
  23. Red Knot
    Scott Cohen's Red Knot exhibits such spot-on, heartbreaking honesty about behaviors that tear many couples apart — passive-aggressiveness, career obsession, seeking validation to soothe one's inadequacies — that it's easy to forgive Cohen his metaphorical excesses.
  24. Pioneer
    The tension never lets up.
  25. Miss Julie
    Despite a few dynamite scenes from Chastain, Miss Julie's cruelty is more potent than its craft.
  26. The Key
    Initially engrossing as it is, the maximalism loses power sometime in the second act.
  27. The Foxy Merkins
    The Foxy Merkins would have made an idiosyncratic and amusing short film; at 80 minutes, it's a one-joke comedy that quickly overstays its welcome.
  28. Dying of the Light
    It's sort of a fascinating mess, a jagged, dark jumble of a thing anchored by Cage's anguished, moony-eyed obsessiveness. It's not bad enough to be fun, but maybe just bad enough to be intriguing.
  29. Concerning Violence
    A commanding indictment of the exploitative nature of geopolitics, and of Europe's and the U.S.'s abuse of native peoples around the world.
  30. Comet
    Sam Esmail’s first film has a visual assurance that suggests the arrival of a gifted director, but the characters he’s created are so off-putting that viewers aren’t likely to appreciate the beauty surrounding them.
  31. By the Gun
    By the Gun is a gangster film wholly devoid of suspense, atmosphere, or grit.
  32. The Barefoot Artist
    The Barefoot Artist, co-directed by Yeh's own son, veers too close to hagiography, and as a result makes Yeh look not so much like a well-meaning global citizen as a bona fide saint.
  33. Life Partners
    Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz's script captures the girls' relationship in fine detail.
  34. Zero Motivation
    Zero Motivation opens as bleak, rebellious comedy but grows into a smart and moving story of entering adulthood.
  35. Wild
    Both the material and the setting seem to have shaken something loose in Witherspoon (who is also one of the movie's producers): She's moved further away from those uptight, humorless romantic-comedy cuties she played in the mid 2000s and more toward the breezy, blunt, self- determined characters of her early career.
  36. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    The longer versions of all Jackson's Middle-earth films have played better (and made more sense) than their theatrical cuts, but this time he's trimmed out something absolutely vital, the one element that, besides his mad gore-minded grandiloquence, has kept everything together five films running: an attention to the emotional lives of his hobbits.
  37. The Historian
    As a performer, he's best at the lectern and interacting with students who share his love of ancient Rome. But as a filmmaker, Doleac can't reconcile all his story lines.
  38. Billy Bates
    The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.
  39. Touch the Wall
    Content to stay on the surface, it's a puff piece posing as a real documentary.
  40. Remote Area Medical
    Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.
  41. Murder of a Cat
    Murder of a Cat has an off-kilter charm, with Greene prizing humor over menace, and Clinton's maturity over plot resolution
  42. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Sunada's critical distance makes Kingdom of Dreams and Madness the clear-eyed celebration that Ghibli's artists deserve.
  43. The Immortalists
    Directors Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado present a study of two eccentrics without pushing too hard against their premise.
  44. The Imitation Game
    Tyldum has robbed his own film of emotional depth — this Turing is as simple as Morse code. Rather than a complex human portrait, this is an assemblage of triumphs, tragedies and tics.
  45. The Babadook
    Jennifer Kent's maternal nightmare The Babadook is the imperial stout of recent fright flicks -- it's the one that will have you walking funny and might rip into your sleep. It's hard to say that you'll enjoy this film, but it's hard not to admire it, if maybe with your eyes half shut.
  46. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    If beauty and revelation is your bottom line, Anthony Powell's rhapsodic Antarctica: A Year on Ice will prove a grand time at the movies.
  47. Horrible Bosses 2
    The miraculous surprise is that Horrible Bosses 2 isn't terrible at all. It's looser, breezier, more confident than its predecessor.
  48. Penguins of Madagascar
    Plays like a sampler of Dreamworks Animation's worst creative impulses: sugar-rush pacing, pandering meta-gags, and a slick, flavorless animation style.
  49. Story of My Death
    Story of My Death is a singular work, and its originality is apparent in every frame.
  50. Flamenco, Flamenco
    Flamenco Flamenco is the most beautifully photographed film in recent memory. Come for the dance, stay for the light.
  51. Stones in the Sun
    Good intentions can be deadly: Benoit runs into the common tripwire of caring more about pitching her cause than she does about movies. Scenes illustrate simple social-injustice points, and the characters are one-dimensional sufferers.
  52. The King and the Mockingbird
    The director invites us in, to play and dream.
  53. Monk With a Camera
    Monk With a Camera hints at answers, but imposes nothing. Like a good photograph, or a wise abbot, it only presents the evidence and allows us to arrive at truth.
  54. Little Hope Was Arson
    Theo Love's mesmerizing documentary Little Hope Was Arson is as evenhanded as it is unsettling.
  55. Four Moons
    The film is earnest and nobly intentioned, though its execution doesn't measure up.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    All Relative
    All Relative requires a strenuous suspension of disbelief. As Harry struggles through this surreality toward love, his mother-daughter love triangle yields few laughs and instead delivers disappointing moments.
  57. The Sleepwalker
    Just in time for Thanksgiving, it's your yearly "hell is family members" film. However, The Sleepwalker distinguishes itself from most entries in this angst-ridden genre by way of superb writing, smoldering performances, and hauntingly beautiful imagery from first-time director Mona Fastvold.
  58. Reach Me
    Writer/director John Herzfeld (15 Minutes, Two of a Kind) earnestly tries and spectacularly fails to dilute the acrid pretentiousness of Reach Me, a tone-deaf everything-is-connected melodrama, by cutting his characters' pseudo-enlightened philosophizing with goony broad humor.
  59. The Mule
    The Mule proves a tough sit, but by the end you might be satisfied you gritted through it.
  60. Late Phases
    The narrative ends up working in a smaller scope than one might expect given the premise of a beast plaguing a community, but the journey getting to the finish is exhilarating all the same.
  61. Happy Valley
    Nothing in this film (and little in any other movie this year) compares to the scenes of Sandusky's adopted son, Matt, recounting his realization that the charges of pedophilia against Sandusky squared with the ways Sandusky had treated him, too — treatment he'd never been brave enough to admit.
  62. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    In the end, this morphing of ideas and styles is more deadpan romantic than sociocritical, and sweeter for it.
  63. Food Chains
    The film fosters a very human connection to these pickers, whose eloquence comes from their plainspoken arguments, the austerity of their situation, and the modesty of their demands.
  64. Extraterrestrial
    All My Children's Brittany Allen proves herself a big-screen presence as the lead earthling; her commitment to each scene's emotional truth is all the more impressive considering that the schoolboyish Vicious Brothers introduce her character ass-first.
  65. V/H/S: Viral
    Each propulsive segment features a handful of disturbing sequences... But such pleasures barely compensate for the vapidity of V/H/S: Viral's sketches.
  66. The Circle
    This is a fascinating and often tumultuous story, which Haupt chronicles through a mixture of interviews with the real Ostertag and Rapp (now married, they appear as a pair) alongside dramatized vignettes that, as the film wears on, feel like annoying interruptions.
  67. Before I Disappear
    What makes this minefield of sphincter-clenching sassy bons mots even harder to stomach is the uninspired photography, which impassionedly pleads for significance through use of slow motion, bokeh-effect streetlights, and close-ups.
  68. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    Habicht has made a lovely film that’s partly about Pulp and partly about Sheffield: It’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins.
  69. Bad Hair
    There’s plenty of prickly tenderness, for both mother and son, at the heart of Bad Hair. All children yearn for things beyond their reach, and if they’re honest about it, adults do too. It’s a feeling you never outgrow.
  70. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    If you break the script down into plot points, it sounds a little silly: The narrative thrust is simply Katniss shooting several pro-revolution commercials. But it works because we're fascinated by media fights — thousands occur online every day.
  71. Love Hunter
    Love Hunter probably counts as a musical, the film's a sad, gentle valediction for a young artist’s dream.
  72. Dumb and Dumber To
    The misfires, including a strange menstruation gag, far outnumber the hits. Dumb and Dumber To is mostly just a kick in the nuts, and not the good kind -- provided there is a good kind.
  73. Calloused Hands
    Too bad that Josh's story, ostensibly the core of the film, is overshadowed by Calloused Hands' retro racial views.
  74. The Playback Singer
    Were it not for Partridge's and Mishra's performances, the generic plot -- Ray becomes inspired after bonding with Ashok, a down-on-his-luck Bollywood singer -- would be completely unmoving and unenlightening.
  75. Brahmin Bulls
    Brahmin Bulls focuses on the individual choices made by Ashok and Sid, but just as Gingger Shankar subtly weaves traditional Indian instrumentation throughout her lovely score, Pailoor touches upon how cultural expectations inform their relationship.
  76. The Toy Soldiers
    As compelling as an individual thread or scene might be, the picture as a whole lacks forward momentum, as is often the case with films with asynchronous timelines.
  77. Occupy the Farm
    The film is riveting from the start, with its ragtag multiculti heroines and heroes meshing multiple identity markers (activist, academic, refurbished hippie), often within individual selves.
  78. Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty
    The film's abrupt ending leaves many crucial questions unanswered, but that weakness doesn't detract from its overall power.
  79. Delusions of Guinevere
    Beneath the rom-com pacing and peppy underscoring of a Lifetime movie, Delusions of Guinevere is a surprisingly dark satire of modern celebrity.
  80. Butter on the Latch
    There are no jump-scares in this sensuous thriller, and the lack of anything corporeal on which to focus our unease only makes Butter on the Latch more darkly exhilarating.
  81. Beside Still Waters
    Lowell hews so close to the reunion-film formula he ends up stifling anything new that may otherwise have resulted.
  82. Wolves
    If you're in the bag for werewolves (or have a thing for hairy dudes smoking distinctive pipes), Wolves is a beckoning howl in the night. As an action movie, however, it's surprisingly tame.
  83. Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    Our glimpses of what's already occurred and what will soon come are vivid and impressionistic, prophetic warnings about which everyone seems powerless to do anything other than silently observe.
  84. Starry Eyes
    The film is far less successful once it delves into body horror that makes Sarah's transformation as ghoulishly physical as it is mental.
  85. Penance
    While it doesn't cohere into anything more substantial than a collection of self-loathing anxieties, Japanese teledrama Penance is effectively unnerving on a scene-for-scene basis thanks to writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's preference for ambience over character-driven drama.
  86. Miss Meadows
    Holmes and Dale are ideal together, turning a polite courtship and charged relationship (including a sex scene that's both giddy and profound) into a twisted, compelling expression of unconditional love.
  87. The Homesman
    Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel offered a rare approach to those Old West stories by shifting the focus to the women and children who often bore its brunt the worst, and Jones has — for the most part — successfully captured this, often in devastating fashion.
  88. Rosewater
    Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice — there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features.
  89. Red Army
    Red Army is a riveting look behind the Iron Curtain.
  90. Foxcatcher
    Foxcatcher is merely a very, very good character study with acting so fine that it's frustrating it's not in the service of a real, emotional wallop.
  91. Beyond the Lights
    A movie isn’t a cliché when it can sing like this.
  92. Bad Turn Worse
    For all its familiarity and rote nastiness, the film's sharply crafted and quite promising.
  93. Always Woodstock
    The rom-com elements don't always work, and the conclusion is a bit pat, but Always Woodstock is never less than charming and funny along the way.
  94. Open Windows
    The new thriller from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is visually dazzling, but the story starts off silly and ends up a confusing, maddening mess.
  95. On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter
    If anything unites On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter's cyclists, it's Brown and Rousseau's inability to highlight their subjects' most singular qualities.
  96. Viva la Libertà
    From Dave to The Dictator, politicians-replaced-by-doppelgängers has long been a favorite comedy movie device — yet never has it been employed for more torturous faux-funny business than in Viva la Libertà.
  97. The Invisible Front
    Befitting a doc about a data-intensive struggle, the movie benefits from a wealth of resources.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Getting to the Nutcracker
    As visually rich and heartwarming as the documentary is, director Serene Meshel-Dillman struggles with pace: The interviews with the young dancers sometimes drag, while the final dance performance is frenetic.
  99. Fugly!
    It's a comedy that's so broad and cartoony that the occasional dramatic pivots seem diminished and ridiculous, like performing a soliloquy on a Chuck E. Cheese stage.
  100. Warsaw Uprising
    Despite its context in a global conflict, Uprising is a strangely intimate film.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »