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. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    In this unhurried full version, Benson allows grief to transform his characters, with few guarantees and plenty of regrets.
  2. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    The film is playful throughout... Unfortunately, the shoddy treatment of the film's sole LGBT character and a tendency to use people in wheelchairs as punchlines mar this otherwise delightful gruesome confection.
  3. Catch Hell
    Catch Hell suffers from both a drowsy start and a dragging ending.
  4. The Canal
    Piers McGrail's nuanced, moody cinematography brings out the best in writer-director Ivan Kavanagh's over-mannered but effectively creepy ghost story.
  5. Dracula Untold
    Too much of the last hour is a muddle of unconvincing, hard-to-read nighttime action scenes.
  6. Autómata
    Automata has moments of tremendous visual and storytelling elegance which are punctuated with ham-fisted characterization and thunderingly terrible acting.
  7. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    While it has its moments, Miguel Arteta's comedy relies too much on gender-shaming and emasculation jokes.
  8. The Innocents
    Clayton's filmmaking, mustering frisson by both candle and blazing daylight, could serve as an object lesson in its genre.
  9. Waiting for August
    What's perhaps most moving in Waiting for August, a quiet film of weight and joy, is its sense of desperate normalcy.
  10. For Those in Peril
    The film's finale is wild and daring and so perfectly executed that it marks Wright as one of the film year's most audacious new voices.
  11. The Culture High
    It’s strongly anti-prohibition, and the film’s structure favors that bias.
  12. Harmontown
    Berkeley includes some of the writer's unpleasant moments on the tour. But what Harmon wants, as any Community fan knows, is real connection with other human beings.
  13. Left Behind
    Perhaps Cage flipped a coin before Armstrong called “Action!” and decided to play this role straight. Alas, he has robbed the irony-attuned audiences of their only reason to go.
  14. The Blue Room
    Co-writer/director/proudly nude star Amalric cuts everything to the quick: Most shots have the feel of still photos, the camera firmly planted, and the movie always hustles us to the next, back and forward in time, the effect part Resnais and part staccato Kodak slideshow.
  15. The Supreme Price
    Lipper does an excellent job of using her film as a vehicle for the voices and concerns of Nigerians, and especially of Nigerian women, who are traditionally expected to stay at home while men operate in the public sphere. But Lipper does not limit her camera to political struggles.
  16. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
    Rather than the currency itself, the film's most compelling subject ends up being the separatist psychology of its self-regarding fanatics.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    Time Is Illmatic goes remarkably deep.
  18. Men, Women & Children
    In 2014, Men, Women & Children feels like a sermon. It's obvious and mundane, "Chopsticks" pounded on the piano.
  19. The Liberator
    Bolivar is eye-rollingly romanticized as a wonderful lover and an even better fighter in Alberto Arvelo's lushly produced, dully reverential The Liberator.
  20. The Hero of Color City
    Frank Gladstone's animated kids' movie The Hero of Color City is a perfectly pleasant pastiche of other movies, the most obvious antecedent being the Toy Story films.
  21. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    It's serviceable.
  22. Drive Hard
    If you’re not expecting too much, Drive Hard is mindlessly entertaining, but it lacks that spark of madness that might have made it truly fun. At least Cusack is able to shed some of his usual overseriousness.
  23. The Decent One
    Most of the documents that Lapa quotes from are, as presented, unrevealing — even offensive.
  24. Copenhagen
    [An] exquisitely beautiful feature debut.
  25. Breakup Buddies
    Chinese comedian Huang Bo justifies his status as a record-breaking mega-star in Breakup Buddies, a tone-deaf buddy comedy that's like 10 by way of Due Date.
  26. Last Hijack
    The filmmakers have gotten extraordinary access to Mohamed and ravaged Somalia... But it's disappointing that they did not capture more scenes of Mohamed's wife and her family, who in the end are the ones who make the most momentous decision.
  27. Pride
    Pride hits some bumpy patches when it switches gears between comedy and gentle pathos, which it does often. But its spirit is bold enough to power through the rough spots. It’s easy to find fault with Pride, but it’s not so easy to resist it.
  28. My Little Pony: Equestria Girls - Rainbow Rocks
    Like much of the anime that influences its source series, the picture is continuity-heavy and not particularly accessible to newcomers, but for the faithful, Rainbow Rocks does, in fact, rock.
    • 1 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Not Cool
    Not Cool is a cautionary tale of how being able to make videos that go viral does not necessarily make someone a filmmaker.
  30. This Ain't No Mouse Music
    Strachwitz's enthusiasm — "This ain't no mouse music!" he's given to shouting — and a brace of choice anecdotes prove compelling on their own.
  31. Print the Legend
    The filmmakers assume, rightly for the most part, that viewers will be invested in the origin story and power struggles at the start-up MakerBot, one of the first companies to make and sell 3-D printers to the public.
  32. The Little Bedroom
    The screenplay is built of small moments and minute details that gradually gain significance, as should be the case in a good character study.
  33. Advanced Style
    Ultimately, Advanced Style presents these women not as objects of curiosity, but as what they truly are: role models.
  34. Harlem Street Singer
    Here's the rare lionizing-a-musician doc that strikes a smart balance between vintage footage, talking-head testimonials, and contemporary tribute performances.
  35. Hellaware
    A broad and occasionally disjointed indictment of the New York art scene and horrorcore rap that leaves no broad side of a barn untargeted.
  36. Field of Lost Shoes
    The film stands as a pinnacle of revisionist bullshit.
  37. It Was You Charlie
    Shirinian has made a swift, moody film, with impeccable art design — Abner's diorama of the car wreck is a kooky marvel — a scarily convincing feel for recurring panic, and a thunderous, heart-rending performance at its center.
  38. Hollidaysburg
    Martemucci intertwines these stories gracefully, and with the charm and charisma of her cast, makes clever banter and script contrivances seem completely natural and unaffected.
  39. Fishing Without Nets
    Cutter Hodierne's gorgeous, harrowing debut feature, Fishing Without Nets, doesn't just ask you to feel a bit for Somali pirates, as Captain Phillips did -- Hodierne puts you in their shoes.
  40. The Two Faces of January
    Mortensen is a pro at the slow burn, and he adds genuinely frightening layers of impulsiveness to this tempest-in-a-teapot scenario. The freshest twist is that each man has a notable advantage over the other.
  41. Plastic
    For a film with shootouts, heists, and high-speed chases, Julian Gilbey's Plastic is a strangely lifeless affair.
  42. Lilting
    Khaou creates a compelling tension between Whishaw's stricken, almost febrile performance and Cheng's stubbornly dignified one.
  43. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    The characters aren't quite stylized enough; though they have skinny bodies and disproportionately big heads, their just-realistic-enough facial features often veer into the Uncanny Valley.
  44. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Whatever its flaws may be — and there are many — John Ridley's Jimi: All Is By My Side is compelling for one specific reason: It's more attuned to the women in Hendrix's life than it is to Hendrix himself.
  45. Gone Girl
    The movie, while entertaining and extremely well crafted, is too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. Ticking along with metronome-like efficiency, it's more slick than sick.
  46. Days and Nights
    At 92 minutes, Days and Nights feels choppy and hurried, pushing the narrative toward inevitable tragedy rather than exploring how these dispirited people got there.
  47. Believe Me
    The movie loses its zip as it becomes more dramatic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Björk: Biophilia Live
    The visual tricks lose their potency before the halfway mark, leaving the energy of Biophilia Live to rise and fall with the music.
  49. The Equalizer
    Fuqua steadily parades his big moments, and the movie works as unhinged spectacle. As a thriller it's less certain.
  50. The Boxtrolls
    The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower, and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film.
  51. We Are Kings
    This movie is only 75 minutes long, so it's too bad that Hubner rushes the finale -- too much triumph, too little emotion -- but when the grooves are this rich, all is forgiven.
  52. The Maze Runner
    The Maze Runner is so bleak that it almost convinces us to take it seriously.
  53. The Scribbler
    Unfortunately, no amount of softcore titillation can compensate for all the cheap special effects and faux-profundity dispensed by this superhero-self-help dud.
  54. Tusk
    Tusk is kind of terrible, annoying and self-congratulatory in all the ways we’ve come to expect from Smith (without even, say, any of the silly sweetness of the 2008 Zack and Miri Make a Porno). But Tusk is at least trying to be about something.
  55. Keep On Keepin' On
    It's part Live at Birdland, part Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all warmly thrilling.
  56. Autumn Blood
    The structure of Autumn Blood and its metaphors are obvious, but what makes it engaging, even haunting, are the messy flesh-and-blood characters.
  57. 108 Stitches
    Its utterly predictable narrative and lazy sexism make for a toxic combination.
  58. Iceman
    The story is unnecessarily muddled and confusing in the telling, and the athletically gifted Yen is overshadowed by largely mediocre CGI effects. Revisit the original instead.
  59. Brush with Danger
    Almost nothing makes sense in Brush With Danger, a bewilderingly incompetent and inexplicably racist Indonesian action film.
  60. Stop the Pounding Heart
    Nothing wrenching happens, just unforgettable moments of piercing isolation and sadness.
  61. Life's a Breeze
    The film's surface naturalism and visual grit simply cover up a screenplay that's as full of crap as the average recent Hollywood comedy.
  62. The Zero Theorem
    Too bad the story tucked around all that production design is such a futuristic drag.
  63. Tracks
    The film’s strength derives from how Wasikowska makes Davidson’s seemingly suicidal wanderlust relatable.
  64. This Is Where I Leave You
    The most charitable thing you can say about This Is Where I Leave You is that it is resolutely innocuous — a nothing of a movie, neutered and sanitary.
  65. Swim Little Fish Swim
    The performances often enliven the stale material... But the script's naïveté is galling.
  66. Space Station 76
    Sympathetic audiences may be diverted by Space Station 76's period design and skilled performances, and by the mystery of what exactly the filmmakers are going for. (The less sympathetic may just ask what the point is.)
  67. Pump
    [A] compelling and cogent documentary.
  68. A Life in Dirty Movies
    Instead of over-glorifying their shared past, Ericsson pays loving tribute to what remains of his subjects' relationship.
  69. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Hector is trying to say something true about a generation of quietly dissatisfied demi-adults who are terrified to take emotional risks. At least it left its comfort zone and tried.
  70. Fort Bliss
    [Michelle Monaghan's] at her best as Army medic/staff sergeant Maggie Swann in writer-director Claudia Myers's Fort Bliss.
  71. Art and Craft
    Despite some cutesiness, the film’s a fascinating portrait of loneliness, of talent undirected toward purpose, of the mysteries of the mind.
  72. 20,000 Days on Earth
    20,000 Days on Earth is meticulously crafted but nonetheless feels casual and heartfelt. It's revelatory, and wonderful, to watch Cave walking (or driving) around, being a real person — if the movie is somewhat staged, it's never stagey.
  73. The Guest
    A transcendent comic chiller, when The Guest's characters are in peril we actually care, and Wingard respectfully makes the kills clean and quick.
  74. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    A Walk Among the Tombstones is an uncommonly well-made thriller.
  75. Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?
    The movie's so slipshod and half-assed that I almost feel for Rand, whose ideas have proved enduring enough that they at least deserve a fair representation, if only for the sake of refutation.
  76. The Green Prince
    Despite being an aesthetic bore, The Green Prince sets itself apart from the nonfiction pack via a recent story of two unlikely comrades’ heroic sacrifice, moral courage, and cross-cultural dedication to peace that’s not only gripping, but all too timely.
  77. The Frontier
    Co-writer/director Matt Rabinowitz doesn’t artfully withhold information so much as lay it all on the table a bit earlier than he might have.
  78. Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s
    The film mounts a compelling case on behalf of what was, perhaps, a sort of genius — a rare gift for identifying talent in others and nurturing it, even amplifying it.
  79. Altina
    In this portrait, we are treated to an acquaintanceship with a woman in an almost constant search for a creative life, and that might be its most moving feature.
  80. Faith Connections
    [A] gorgeous and unsettling documentary.
  81. Believe
    Any movie is improved at least 10 percent by the presence of Scottish actor Brian Cox, even mushy sports drama Believe.
  82. At the Devil's Door
    In his second feature, McCarthy shows he's mastered the things we already know scare us onscreen; next, how about something we don't expect?
  83. Take Me to the River
    Take Me to the River takes a while to find its groove and capture what Charlie Musselwhite calls "that secret, Southern, Memphis ingredient."
  84. The Quitter
    The movie is partly saved by Bonifacio and DP Timothy Nuttall's regular use of patient long shots, as well as their capable grasp of widescreen composition.
  85. Born to Fly
    There's much in Born to Fly to thrill to, dream with, flinch from: dancers leaping from a great whirling wheel and smacking onto mats far below; dancers ducking and leaping a wickedly spinning I-beam or cinderblock.
  86. Archaeology of a Woman
    Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman is a decidedly well-made, unnerving film.
  87. Alumbrones
    Alumbrones's creators talk up their work's restorative value, but never go into great detail about the world beyond their canvases. Donnelly's vague, circuitous questioning is to blame.
  88. The Man on Her Mind
    The Man on Her Mind has a terminal case of the cutes.
  89. Swearnet: The Movie
    Canadian comedy hits rock bottom in this abhorrent meta-infomercial.
  90. I Am Eleven
    "I wanted to make something energetic, optimistic, universal, and real," Bailey announces in voiceover as the movie begins. She's certainly accomplished that, but it's too bad she didn't also aim for vital, illuminating, or consistently compelling.
  91. Stray Dogs
    An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).
  92. Honeymoon
    While its ending descends into standard horror tropes that fail to completely satisfy its promise, the film nevertheless achieves emotional resonance due to how effectively it joins its source of horror with the stuff of everyday human anxieties.
  93. My Old Lady
    It sounds like a recipe for comedy (and Kline seems to think so too, waltzing and prat-falling through Mathias's alcoholic foibles), but Horovitz's screenplay guns instead for an emotionally and financially tangled melodrama, and ends up feeling aggravatingly inconsistent.
  94. The Skeleton Twins
    What's singular here isn't that the stars are playing brother and sister, or that they stir such sublime and anxious joy from each other. It's that the real love story isn't even between the damaged-but-lovable characters. It's between two profoundly depressed people and life itself.
  95. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Just because a film holds back the truth doesn't make the truth suspenseful. It merely shortchanges the filmmaker and the audience from exploring what that truth means.
  96. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.
  97. Bird People
    Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.
  98. The Drop
    The Belgian Roskam, making only his second feature film, and his first in English, displays remarkable assurance, with both the actors and the film’s very American setting. He creates an escalating sense of dread, tinged with Lehane’s brand of mordant humor.
  99. Thunder and the House of Magic
    The story is serviceable enough.
  100. Rocks in My Pockets
    With an insightfulness born from firsthand experience, Rocks in My Pockets posits depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia as conditions that, though potentially lethal, remain manageable, if only through persistent battle.
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