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. Death Metal Angola
    While hardly the first or most accomplished film of its kind, Death Metal Angola's focus on the ability of abrasive music to act as a healing agent builds toward genuine moments of renewal and serenity.
  2. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
    It's an unsolved mystery in Hollywood why so many based-on-true-life polemical films end up so unremarkable.
  3. Sex Ed
    Mildly funny and about 15 minutes too long, Sex Ed has a funny cast, particularly a kid played by Isaac White, who gets some hilariously rude dialogue.
  4. West
    Schwochow's intimate, handheld camerawork often feels like surveillance, which transforms mundane events into the menacing moments of a psychological thriller.
  5. The Theory of Everything
    The film is striking, at times even piercing, for the way it infiltrates some universal realities of marriage.
  6. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.
  7. National Gallery
    Like so much of his celebrated work, documentarian Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery is long, leisurely paced, wide-ranging, meticulously crafted, intellectually intricate, and touched with profundity.
  8. Jessabelle
    Greutert's savvy enough to sprinkle some white folks among his houngans and mambos, but Jessabelle still plays out as Haitian traditions ruining the life of a nice-ish white lady.
  9. Elsa & Fred
    This occasionally charming November-December romance has elements of a Douglas Sirk woman's weepie... but the movie eventually goes into Woody Allen territory in the best way possible.
  10. Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6 is easier to admire than to love. It veers from chipper to noisy to dark stretches where it grapples with adult-sized grief.
  11. Virunga
    The fights Virunga documents couldn't feel more urgent. This is one of the year's most compelling and important films.
  12. Hangar 10
    Found-footage horror flicks laboriously source the provenance of every shot, letting us know which camera each image comes from, but they demand that we never wonder who has edited those images together — and to what purpose.
  13. The Better Angels
    Kruger and Clarke do their best to look steadfast with a camera swooping around them like a wounded bird, but there's no rescuing this imprecise family portrait from its own impulses toward obscurity.
  14. Actress
    Greene seems fascinated by the contradictory identities — each a kind of real-life performance — that Burre endeavors to reconcile, and he is profoundly sensitive to the emotional truth these performances describe.
  15. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.
  16. True Son
    With sharper on-the-ground footage, True Son might have been as sharp a doc as it is inspiring a story.
  17. Interstellar
    Whatever his strengths may be, Nolan lacks the human touch. His movies are numbingly sexless, and by that I don’t mean they need sex scenes or nudity -- those things are rarely really about sex anyway. But in all of Nolan’s films, human connection is such a noble idea that it’s beyond the grasp of flesh-and-blood people.
  18. Before I Go to Sleep
    If the story is a smidge predictable, at least the movie is pleasingly old-fashioned and grown-up, with a ’90s paranoid-thriller vibe.
  19. The Aviation Cocktail
    The scenery looks just fine, however; it's the performances and dialogue that wobble and creak.
  20. The Way He Looks
    The shuffling of who's an important/close friend transcends the specificity of being gay and disabled, and that experience is rarely depicted as realistically as this. But the film crosses into self-parody.
  21. Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show
    Unstudied to the point of utilitarianism, the film nonetheless has wide scope, and Doyle effectively gets his arms around this huge, nebulous, weird job.
  22. Private Peaceful
    O'Connor tries mightily to contextualize the suffering of the Peaceful brothers at home and abroad, making a better case for the British class system's demise than for their survival.
  23. Plot for Peace
    The film's editing is masterful, though, and with ample footage from the time and up-to-date storytelling from many key players from the African, Cuban, and U.S. governments, among others, Plot for Peace proves enthralling.
  24. Missionary
    The tension in Missionary is surprisingly effective, especially given how easy it should be to put out an APB on a guy on a freaking bicycle, and there are enough scares to remind you to keep the chain latched when those polite young men in the slacks and neckties drop by.
  25. Life of Riley
    Resnais's lightheartedness is infectious as he dispenses with the cinematic "reality" he never quite trusted, shooting the six-person farce on obvious sets, with curtains for doors and flat theatrical lighting.
  26. Hit by Lightning
    It's a black-comedy plot without any blackness or actual comedy, unless mugging and bro-heiming by Mad TV's Will Sasso counts as hilarious.
  27. The Hadza: Last of the First
    Last of the First is effective as a classroom tool for conservationist ideals (Jane Goodall herself gives an interview, as does the director of the African branch of the Nature Conservancy), but it fails to interrogate the forces that make those ideals necessary.
  28. Blood Ransom
    Fewer cops and more full-tilt vampire batshittery might not have resulted in a more coherent movie, necessarily, but almost certainly would've made for a more captivating one.
  29. Point and Shoot
    Matthew VanDyke, Point and Shoot's hero/subject, can't forget the mediated, imitative nature of his adventures even when he has dedicated himself to a grand cause.
  30. Magical Universe
    This story is about tenderness and empathy, including Carbee's for his plastic proxies.
  31. Horns
    Most oppressively, every inch of Horns is choked in religious metaphor that strangles the fun from the film. Aja clutters the movie with golden crosses and Garden of Eden snakes, but doesn't dare wrestle with the theology behind them — this is a snapshot of a steak, not a full meal.
  32. All You Need Is Love
    The documentary All You Need Is Love does a nice job of showing how, when it comes to children's lives, the ordinary is inescapable, even in extraordinary circumstances.
  33. Nightcrawler
    On the strength of Gyllenhaal's performance, Nightcrawler works best as a character study. It's chilling, but also wickedly funny and strange, like a good, dark Brian De Palma joke — in short, it's everything the stolid and humorless Gone Girl should have been.
  34. Ouija
    First-time director Stiles White's effective use of long takes and director of photography David Emmerichs's wide-angle digital cinematography make an otherwise generic teen ghost story unexpectedly atmospheric.
  35. Revenge of the Mekons
    What Angio captures, beautifully, is that the Mekons make great music because, together and apart, they’re so alive to the world around them.
  36. The Great Invisible
    Unfortunately, given both its content and the media's collective failure to fully report the (ongoing) story, the film only intermittently has a pulse.
  37. Goodbye to Language 3D
    To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended.
  38. ABCs of Death 2
    Overall, it's a strong sampler, with surprising variety.
  39. Tiger Lily Road
    While not as kinky, dark, or schizoid as debuting director/screenwriter Michael Medeiros intends, Tiger Lily Road succeeds on its own small, claustrophobic level.
  40. Viktor
    Aside from some inspired uses of chiaroscuro lighting, the movie around Depardieu is mostly derivative.
  41. John Wick
    Reeves is wonderful here, a marvel of physicality and stern determination — he moves with the grace of an old-school swashbuckler.
  42. Scream at the Devil
    Stachura turns everything up to 11 almost from the outset, and all escalation from there feels overwrought.
  43. Rhymes for Young Ghouls
    Carefully lit and designed, with a moody and muted color palette, the film effectively conveys the feel of Aila's hardscrabble existence. But the horrific behavior of Popper, who does little other than threaten, beat, and try to rape Indians, becomes problematic.
  44. Pelican Dreams
    The most effective part of Irving's film is how deftly she captures the pelicans' clear anxieties, curiosities, and joys.
  45. White Bird in a Blizzard
    If the results are occasionally broad and schematic, the actors (Woodley especially) are anything but, and Araki has an absolute field day adorning his kitschy, 1950s-ish view of suburban Los Angeles with a string of showoffy colors.
  46. Stonehearst Asylum
    With Stonehearst Asylum, director Brad Anderson doles out a vintage Halloween treat — a straightforward Poe adaptation of the sort that Vincent Price used to star in — and gives it a freshness and complexity that make it a delight.
  47. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Green Dragons wants to be spaghetti with marinara, but it's closer to egg noodles and ketchup.
  48. Low Down
    There are too many notes that, while not false, are neither satisfactorily resolved nor left interestingly unresolved.
  49. Lakay
    There's an off-putting self-absorption in [Tirf's] self-examination-slash-ode-to-Haiti, and it weakens the whole project.
  50. The Heart Machine
    An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.
  51. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    Valedictory and elegiac, Keach's film captures a performer who only truly seems to inhabit himself during the performances.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Fuller Life
    Two things are clear in this documentary. The first is that Samuel Fuller was brilliant, optimistic, talented -- an auteur in every right -- and well deserving of all the praise and admiration he inspired. The second is that this is a product of a first-time director, not quite experienced enough to take full advantage of the medium or know how to bring every element together.
  53. Force Majeure
    Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.
  54. Exists
    Against all good sense, Exists plays its material straight, possibly proving itself the year's most laughably derivative and dreary film.
  55. Citizenfour
    Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie's a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it's underwhelming as argument or cinema.
  56. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Poppe's closeness to the material ensures a level of passion, but he still fails to create a truly specific dynamic for Rebecca and Marcus's family, settling instead for a catch-all representation of the difficulties of maintaining a healthy home life while working in a dangerous profession.
  57. 23 Blast
    Dylan Baker's film bests larger-budgeted fare like When the Game Stands Tall thanks to ace acting, a humble spirit, and all-around sturdy craftsmanship.
  58. Laggies
    Even though Laggies is clearly well-intentioned — and the anxieties it tussles with are completely believable — the film is awkward in ways that are sometimes charming and sometimes off-putting.
  59. E-Team
    The emphasis on the team's daring amid mass chaos seems a bit off: This threatens to become yet another film about white Americans and Europeans telling the stories of Third World people. But the rest of the film does much to redeem that dubious trope.
  60. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The original story was called "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter," but Takahata's title puts the focus where it belongs.
  61. Listen Up Philip
    The vainglorious pas de deux between Philip and Zimmerman is entertaining for a while, though the novelty gradually wears off.
  62. Life Inside Out
    Strong, understated performances from Baird and O'Connell bring real intimacy to their characters' sometimes-strained mother-son dynamic.
  63. Imagine I'm Beautiful
    Imagine I'm Beautiful is a thematically ambitious character study trapped inside the limiting strictures of a crazy-roommate thriller.
  64. A Requiem for Syrian Refugees
    Urgent, deeply painful yet lovely in its aesthetics.
  65. Relationship Status: It's Complicated
    In the end, Relationship Status is wan when it tries to be scandalous.
  66. Algorithms
    [A] slow-moving yet soulful documentary.
  67. Young Ones
    Young Ones is an old-fashioned, worthwhile curio down to the closing credits.
  68. Watchers of the Sky
    Accomplishes the nearly impossible trick of updating viewers on the prevalence of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries without rubbing our noses in our failure to stop it.
  69. Summer of Blood
    Any 30 minutes of Summer of Blood might have me in hysterics. But the sputtering torrent of Eric's yakking proves wearying over 90: Dude's built for speed-dating.
  70. Stations of the Elevated
    A 45-minute proto-hip-hop bliss-out, a masterpiece of train- and tag-spotting dedicated to memorializing the extravagant graffiti on its era's MTA trains and how those trains rumbled across Brooklyn and the Bronx, bearing not just exhausted New Yorkers but gifted artists' urgent personal expression.
  71. Rudderless
    The result, despite a few stellar moments, is a not-quite-tragic-enough meditation on mourning and self-healing, crossed with a not-quite-gritty-enough portrait of indie rockers trying to break big.
  72. Housebound
    Housebound is a tad long, and its murder mystery a bit of a muddle, but that doesn’t matter. The final third is virtuoso.
  73. The Hacker Wars
    The documentary can sometimes feel like a video game, with cartoonish pinging graphics, but the real-life consequences of digital activity, from arrests to CIA monitoring and a total lack of privacy for ordinary citizens, heighten its stakes.
  74. The Good Lie
    Despite its weighty material and some moving scenes (much of the Sudanese cast are survivors of the war), this aggressive crowd-pleaser is slighter than its subject matter deserves.
  75. Felony
    The three lead actors are limited by their characters' kiddy-pool-shallow behavior.
  76. Eternity: The Movie
    The jokes are slow and obvious, and the editor lingers over every one like a sleepy drunk over a basket of tater tots, stoically holding the shot long after any reasonable person would have concluded that a punchline had occurred.
  77. Diplomacy
    Arestrup and Dussollier originated these roles on stage, but Schlöndorff (who directed the Hoffman/Malkovich Death of a Salesman) gives it the immediacy of a life-and-death encounter.
  78. Default
    It sacrifices its voice to the premeditated non-style of a first-person pseudo-documentary, a form that often has the paradoxical effect of making everything it shows us seem more fake than usual.
  79. Dear White People
    The small miracle of the movie is that Simien finds so many laughs in what are genuinely bewildering issues.
  80. Camp X-Ray
    For much of its running time, Camp X-Ray stands as the fullest on-screen imaginative treatment of two of the defining developments of the last 15 years of American life: the deployment of women in our volunteer army, and the indefinite detention of men we think, but can't quite prove, deserve it.
  81. Bitter Honey
    Lemelson's interviews can be repetitive in their direct staging, but there's inspiration in his conceit of using a shadow-puppet performance set to gamelan music as interludes.
  82. The Book of Life
    The film's rote right-makes-might fantasy wouldn't be so obnoxious if pandering to the lowest common denominator wasn't its default mode.
  83. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Birdman is a marvelously entertaining picture, a work of "look at me!" bravado that's energized every minute. Its proficiency, the mechanically fluid kind, works against it in some ways.
  84. Fury
    This is an ugly part of an ugly war, and Ayer wallows in it. Instead of flags and patriotism, Fury is about filth.
  85. I Am Ali
    It’s unfortunate that, even with this wealth of uncovered materials, I Am Ali still plays as a greatest-hits version of its subject’s life, offering little depth or insight into any one element of it.
  86. Evolution of a Criminal
    Vital, thoughtful, and deeply personal, first-timer Darius Clark Monroe's autobiographical doc stands as a testament to the power of movies to stir empathy.
  87. Botso
    Too bad the filmmaking never rises to the level of its subject.
  88. #Stuck
    Acher adroitly juggles all the gimmickry, using it to comment on Holly and Guy's burgeoning relationship.
  89. You're Not You
    The most interesting aspects of the film — the real pressures felt by caregivers; popular perception of the severely disabled — are obliterated by the heavy-handed script and Swank’s inspirational bromides.
  90. Whiplash
    If Whiplash doesn't quite hang together, Chazelle has still managed to pack it with some wonderful ideas.
  91. St. Vincent
    Some moments still work after the movie grows mawkish.
  92. The Pact 2
    The directors demonstrate confident technique in most of the scare scenes, but their uncertain touch with actors and dialogue makes a cock-up of the climax.
  93. The Overnighters
    Jesse Moss's documentary The Overnighters is a heart-wrencher about the clash between economics and ethics. Its story sounds like the sort of dry news blurb you'd skim over in the Sunday paper but unfolds into an epic tragedy.
  94. One Chance
    The film shoehorns Potts's life story into a familiar underdog template, populating the world with near-mythological threshold guardians who exist to assure the hero that he isn't good enough.
  95. The Houses October Built
    [An] uneven but intriguing found-footage horror flick.
  96. Meet the Mormons
    Meet the Mormons isn't substantial enough to screen on the first day of LDS 101; the church's most basic tenets — and controversial aspects — are elided completely.
  97. Kite
    In a film that pits the heroine directly against the sexualization of young women, the camera's gaze itself feels awfully exploitative.
  98. Kill the Messenger
    It doesn't entirely engage, in part because it's so determined to correct the story that it can't let us explore it ourselves.
  99. The Judge
    The Judge has its funny moments but is far more serious at heart, and much more of a slog, too.
  100. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him
    In this unhurried full version, Benson allows grief to transform his characters, with few guarantees and plenty of regrets.
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