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 Double
    The Double, with its inviting alienation, nails a curious mood that's been too long absent from contemporary film: the anxious admission that the world might be weighted against the plucky individual, and that prickling you feel just before such thoughts make a sweat break out.
  2. Devil's Knot
    Egoyan musters some of the power he brought to The Sweet Hereafter, another lost-children tale, but little of the lyric beauty or sense of a community coming unglued.
  3. Stage Fright
    Stage Fright's lopsided tone wouldn't be so confounding if the horror elements worked or if writer-director Jerome Sable's music, co-composed with Eli Batalion, weren't so forgettable.
  4. Sol LeWitt
    Chris Teerink's superb film documents the work of artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), whose legacy lies not only in past accomplishments, but in the work he left for others to complete.
  5. Palo Alto
    The movie perfectly captures the vibe of late high school, in a way that's both of its time and timeless.
  6. Neighbors
    Nicholas Stoller's hilarious Neighbors splashes into summer with the satisfying swish-plop-hooray of a winning beer pong serve.
  7. Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film
    Banks seems to hope that merely spending time with her subject will somehow create an illusion of intimacy. But her film's secretive opacity only makes Callahan a little prince, far away on his own planet.
  8. Don Peyote
    At its best, this descent into madness plays out like a millennial stoner's take on Jacob's Ladder. More often, it recalls a sobering truth: Nobody likes listening to someone ramble while high.
  9. Farmland
    There's no drama illustrating the thanklessness of their jobs, and potential wisdom about fiscal instability, animal welfare, or GMOs waft by without much argument.
  10. Water & Power
    From the cool voiceover to the crisp dialogue, the script strikes the perfect balance between stylized and naturalistic language that is profane, poetic, and prophetic.
  11. Where We Started
    A compelling look at the pitfalls of being a grownup, Where We Started will resonate with anyone who's ever clicked with the right person at the wrong time, or who's wondered what it might be like.
  12. Mr. Jones
    Mr. Jones is the stuff of both conspiracy theories and collegiate discourse, and Mueller's elliptical exploration and creation of that mythology sets the bar a bit too high for his much-less-interesting protagonists to fully clear.
  13. Chef
    Chef is so charmingly middlebrow that it's exactly the cinematic comfort food it mocks: Favreau has made not a game-changing meal to remember, but a perfect chocolate lava cake.
  14. Decoding Annie Parker
    Decoding Annie Parker is a better living-with-disease drama than medical mystery.
  15. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    In the end, all NOW reveals is that talented people did a difficult thing in far-off places — and that now they have a video scrapbook.
  16. Unclaimed
    The man who might be Robertson is both the point and the best part of the film. He comes across as sincere, his childlike vulnerability and the depiction of his life in Vietnam demanding sympathy.
  17. Blood Glacier
    It's all rather familiar, but the key image of a glacier glazed over with something like gore proves majestic, and tension throbs throughout a scene of a scientist following his dog into a blood-veined tunnel inside that glacier.
  18. For a Woman
    Visually, Kurys offers a mostly conventional, period-handsome widescreen style, which suits her capable actors just fine. The real drawback, though, is the spoon-feeding frame narrative, which takes away from the urgency.
  19. Altered States of Plaine
    Altered States of Plaine, like indies Pi and Primer, harbors ambition that towers over its super-saver discount budget.
  20. The Protector 2
    Director Prachya Pinkaew's hectic editing and breakneck pacing turns the action spastic, and his lack of interest in anything approaching coherent drama renders the proceedings one long showcase for its lead's Muay Thai combat skills. Luckily, those are considerable.
  21. More Than the Rainbow
    On treks through the city, camera in hand, Weber's expertise, tenderness, and taste for the absurd become clear. Wechsler runs with it, interspersing decades of Weber's often gritty photographs with expert cinematography.
  22. The M Word
    In The M Word, Jaglom smartly sees a parallel between midlife hormone upheaval and sudden workplace superfluousness, but his unstructured-gabfest approach makes rather a mess of it.
  23. Jobriath A.D.
    Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. is an exceptional example of this subgenre, a cubist portrait of an unknowable man and a dramatic whodunit about an artist-victim who died by a thousand cuts.
  24. Ida
    Ida unfolds partly as chamber play and partly as road movie, following the two women on a search for their dead beloveds' anonymous graves.
  25. Friended to Death
    You can sense the director, Sarah Smick, gearing up to make a point. It proves rather obvious: Real connections are meaningful and too much Facebook is bad. But isn't the real problem more insidious?
  26. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    Gaudet and Pullapilly have a background in documentaries, and there's a convincing naturalism to their storytelling.
  27. Bad Johnson
    Bad Johnson is probably the most thoughtful movie possible about a penis that takes human form.
  28. Belle
    There's a great story here, but Asante — who has made one previous feature, the 2004 drama A Way of Life — can't quite harness its power.
  29. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Never a disaster but only fitfully inspired, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 doesn't quite end well, but it does end promisingly.
  30. The Other Woman
    The Other Woman doesn't give these actresses much to do except look ridiculous, if not sneaky and conniving.
  31. Grand Slammed
    If characters are going to ignite into blazes of unchecked emotion every five minutes or so, you've got to make sure your actors have the chops. These, unfortunately, aren't sharp enough to bite.
  32. Tanzania: A Journey Within
    This film shows what was clearly a profound set of experiences for both Ndibalema and Kenney, but it is not much more than a well-made vacation slideshow or an extended Facebook post, complete with exclamation points.
  33. Walking with the Enemy
    As with many other WWII films, it takes genuinely stirring source material -- a young Hungarian man poses as a Nazi to find his dislocated family -- and reduces it to its most shopworn components.
  34. Next Goal Wins
    If you find other people worth your time and attention, Next Goal Wins will stir you.
  35. Marvin Seth and Stanley
    Shot in '70s naturalism, the film's cinematography only invites unfavorable comparisons to the more ambitious, psychologically searching interpersonal dramas of that era.
  36. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band
    While his obsessiveness seems neurotic, and watching this film is not always comfortable, it also seems to be all part of the process.
  37. Documented
    Vargas lingers for long stretches over his personal story and his complicated relationship with his mother, still in the Philippines -- a place he dare not visit for fear of being unable to return. But his story is a vivid illustration of the pickle we're in.
  38. Desert Riders
    None of the reliably irritating qualities of the social issue documentary gall quite so acutely as the tendency to venerate mere awareness.
  39. Chinese Puzzle
    With each of these movies, Klapisch reiterates a core sentiment behind all the romantic comedy: that lives are continuously pieced together, broken, and rearranged in different settings. All that screwing and screwing up in between? Totally necessary.
  40. Buttwhistle
    The virgin-whore dichotomy between the two female characters flattens the film into something much less interesting than it could have been, and the tonal discrepancies occasionally threaten to take it into experimental territory.
  41. Bright Days Ahead
    Ultimately, this is all about Caroline, and it's refreshing to see an optimistic story about an older woman who is funny, smart, and desirable, even if her happy life doesn't leave much room for conflict.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bible Quiz
    Bible Quiz may sometimes feel tentative, but it's also vulnerable and charming.
  43. Ape
    Potrykus offers a variety of intriguing suggestions about the relationship between laughter and violence, performance and destruction.
  44. Bears
    Sincere and unexpectedly good.
  45. The Anonymous People
    There's little new information here, and the structural monotony of The Anonymous People's voiceover and talking-head presentation often makes it feel less like dynamic, insightful filmmaking and more like a well-intentioned PSA.
  46. Young & Beautiful
    Young & Beautiful is more interesting once Isabelle's secret is out, when it's more about the way other people react to this prematurely jaded girl who seems to have stepped out of a Lorde song.
  47. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    It all remains cohesive, even poetic, and puts what had to have been formidable reporting to excellent use.
  48. The Machine
    If the proceedings prove far too familiar, director Caradog W. James delivers a few striking images... as well as a sinister cautionary-tale finale made all the more unsettling by its use of a sterling John Carpenter-style synthesizer score.
  49. Locke
    What director Knight excels at is continually inventive framing and composition, at suggesting, through layers of window and reflected traffic, the mental state of Locke, the hero.
  50. Short Peace
    The whole never becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
  51. Poseidon Rex
    That the movie maintains some momentum during exposition and what passes for character development is thanks to director Lester.
  52. A Haunted House 2
    It may be a low bar, but Michael Tiddes's A Haunted House 2 is actually an improvement over its predecessor.
  53. Fray
    The main strength of writer-director Geoff Ryan's film is its quietude; too many movies exploring the neither-nor status occupied by vets whose experiences "over there" have altered their ability to function back home turn shrill in order to get their point across.
  54. For No Good Reason
    It's a film that paints a potent portrait of an artist of righteous, controlled fury.
  55. Blue Ruin
    As an action film — which in small bursts it is — Blue Ruin is disquieting and raw, like Commando turned inside out.
  56. The Girl and Death
    It's time to return this old painting to the attic.
  57. The German Doctor
    Puenzo dramatizes her material with an overcooked sense of import that generates scant suspense.
  58. Last Passenger
    While certainly a formulaic genre film, it's nevertheless a formula executed with a great sensitivity to visual engagement.
  59. Transcendence
    Transcendence, written by Jack Paglen, is just more business as usual, one of those "control technology or it will control you" sermons that nonetheless enlists the usual heap of technically advanced special effects.
  60. Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache
    A must-see documentary.
  61. Visions of Mary Frank
    After seeing Visions, it's easy to walk away feeling like you know of Frank, but still don't know her with any intimacy.
  62. That Demon Within
    Rock-dumb Hong Kong thriller That Demon Within is exhausting, and only sometimes batshit enough to be engaging.
  63. Soft in the Head
    Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.
  64. Tasting Menu
    A mushy concoction that's not only unfulfilling, it's gag-worthy.
  65. Proxy
    Though Proxy shows early signs of being worthy of that vaunted company, it's brought down by some truly wooden performances and an inability to turn its interesting spark of an idea into a workable story.
  66. A Promise
    No bodices were harmed in veteran French filmmaker Patrice Leconte's chaste and bloodless English-language debut.
  67. On the Other Side of the Tracks
    There are few clichés of the genre that Charhon doesn't indulge in, but he does a few of them well enough for the film to occasionally be funny, even if it's never close to inspired.
  68. Manakamana
    Among the many remarkable qualities boasted by Manakamana, perhaps the most surprising is its humor.
  69. Kid Cannabis
    Kid Cannabis presents its material not as cautionary tale but as celebratory fantasy — which, like Nate's mom turning a blind eye to her son's illegal operation, seems to be the by-product of either inanity or excessive THC.
  70. Heaven Is for Real
    Unlike many of the features targeted to what Hollywood is calling the "faith audience," the movie is well-acted and shot, often thoughtful and (intentionally) funny.
  71. Half The Road: The Passion, Pitfalls & Power of Women's Professional Cycling
    An enraging portrait of entrenched sexism in competitive sports that proves parity is worth fighting for.
  72. The Final Member
    the shock factor was to be expected from the get-go, and so it's not all that shocking. What is compelling, however, is the weird way this film demonstrates the supreme emotional effectiveness of a simple quest narrative.
  73. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is a breeze, enjoyable both for its sweetness and its unapologetic silliness.
  74. Cesar's Last Fast
    Equally lionizing but richer in detail than the recent Michael Peña-led biopic César Chávez, this occasionally stirring doc portrait of the late Latino labor organizer and civil rights icon frames his legacy around a single act of protest.
  75. Authors Anonymous
    Little more than an exercise in sustained contempt, a petty little missive directed at anyone who dares to wield a pen.
  76. 13 Sins
    [Webber's] performance is crazy good, and so emotionally charged that viewers may be forgiving of a finale overloaded with silly twists.
  77. The Players
    An extended riff on marital infidelity, this is the rare omnibus film that isn't just a mixed bag -- it very nearly succeeds at being uniformly bad.
  78. The Jewish Cardinal
    The Jewish Cardinal uses the luscious pleasures of the everyday to underscore and endure the big questions of identity, humanity, and home.
  79. Bad Country
    Despite the shakiness of their collective accents, the cast goes through the paces of this tense, testosterone-driven shoot-'em-up with gusto.
  80. Rio 2
    Rio 2 wants to be a musical, but instead of timing songs to, say, the emotional peaks of the characters, director Carlos Saldanha opts for high-intensity intervals of singing every four minutes.
  81. Draft Day
    This isn't so much a movie about sports as it is a riff on politics in the broad sense of the word, and the ways in which smart, insightful people play along to get along -- and then change the game for the better by following their gut.
  82. Unthinkable: An Airline Captain's Story
    Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean your speculations are sound, your writing and filmmaking skills are passable, or that you're preaching to anyone but the fearfully converted.
  83. Small Time
    The film isn't without mirth and charm... But as Surnow steers into serious waters, the direction of the storytelling becomes increasingly misguided.
  84. No God, No Master
    Green's historical diligence proves rewarding... But the movie, shot largely in Milwaukee in 2009, can still be dry.
  85. The King of Escape
    Weaving numerous influences into a rich emotional tapestry, Alain Guiraudie's The King of Escape skillfully absorbs and updates its assertive cinematic forebears.
  86. Jesus People
    Director Jason Naumann treats the characters with genuine affection and a portrayal of faith that actually has integrity.
  87. Detonator
    An insightful, often funny, never glib character-driven tale about class angst, withered dreams, and the costs of adulthood.
  88. A Fragile Trust
    While mostly well made, and certain to serve as a handy précis for the J-school set, A Fragile Trust is more a soiling reminder than a revelation for anyone already familiar with Blair's case.
  89. The Railway Man
    It's heartening to have a tony war film about PTSD and forgiveness; it would be grander still to have one that dedicated itself more fully to examining the courage it would take to offer that forgiveness, rather than dash its energies upon the dreary cowardice of the crime itself.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Perfect Sisters
    Stanley M. Brooks's directorial debut's attempt to make sense of what happened falters by laboring to tick every item off the timeline checklist instead of focusing on who these Bathtub Girls were underneath the dysfunction.
  91. Oculus
    Replete with superb performances led by a paranoid Sackhoff and unhinged Cochrane, it's the rare horror film to know how to tease malevolent mysteries and deliver satisfyingly unexpected, unsettling payoffs.
  92. Joe
    Joe is Cage's periodic reminder that he's one of his generation's great talents.
  93. Hateship Loveship
    Johnson doesn't seem to trust her star to unclench and act... In contrast, the rest of the cast, down to the gossipy local bank teller (Christine Lahti), feels electrically human.
  94. Hank and Asha
    The film's success rests upon the interest engendered by these characters, but Hank and Asha fail to meaningfully engage us.
  95. Cuban Fury
    Frost can play lovable losers in his sleep, but to succeed, Cuban Fury has to make him dance. A fat man falling down gets a cheap laugh; a fat man with magic feet makes us cheer. Director James Griffiths splits the difference between ridicule and respect, and the resulting comedy is as trite and cloying as a rum and coke.
  96. Miss Violence
    Miss Violence honors the thoroughly creepy work of Avranas's countrymen, but in his turn of the screw, Avranas marshals the abstract qualities of art cinema to comment upon concrete horror.
  97. Only Lovers Left Alive
    Only Lovers Left Alive is silly and deeply serious at once, an elegy with a light touch and more than a dash of hope.
  98. Ilo Ilo
    Small details and incidents accrete into a pointillist rendering of despair.
  99. Hot Guys with Guns
    Hot Guys with Guns has the occasional spark of a clever comedy, but the lack of focus makes it too limp on laughs to fulfill its potential.
  100. Being Ginger
    Harris is wistful, funny, and articulate about his romantic neuroses and insecurities... Unfortunately, he sometimes fails to go deeper.
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