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. Dancing in Jaffa
    Medalia, as an Israeli, knows this bumpy territory well and serves up her story sensitively, but with its difficulties unvarnished and unsolved. She focuses on a few children whom we get to know well enough to care very much about their progress.
  2. In the Blood
    Carano’s badass-beauty charm notwithstanding, it’s a grim, formulaic saga in desperate need of some genuine B-movie fury and flair.
  3. Flex Is Kings
    The film is more an on-the-fly glimpse of the scene than a deep-dive exploration, but that doesn't make it any less electric.
  4. Watermark
    Watermark is a documentary filled with images both beautiful and wrenching, yet the film as a whole is a disappointment.
  5. Goodbye World
    The soapy material is at odds with the largely distant catastrophe, which often feels too abstract to be a real threat.
  6. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    Goldfine and Geller pace and structure The Galapagos Affair like the true-crime tale that it is, its mysteries rich and involving, its characters enduring in the imagination long after the film has ended.
  7. Frankie & Alice
    It's occasionally imaginative, and, most importantly, never boring.
  8. Under the Skin
    Very little in Under the Skin is clear at all. Its secrets unspool in mysterious, supple ribbons, but that's part of its allure, and its great beauty.
  9. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    Nymphomaniac is a jigsaw opus, an extended and generally exquisitely crafted riff. Story, theme, and character (despite Gainsbourg's captivations) bow to von Trier's gamesmanship, which makes his own promiscuities the film's true subject.
  10. Alien Abduction
    Credit this spirited, uncommonly effective found-footage thriller for breaking the templates promised by its genre and title.
  11. Alan Partridge
    An often funny workplace hostage comedy that doesn't demand prior knowledge of the character.
  12. 10 Rules for Sleeping Around
    The whole film is pretty enraging, hideously acted apart from the main quartet, and ends up viewing like a particularly racy Lifetime Original.
  13. The Unknown Known
    Rumsfeld's impenetrability makes him fascinating, but only to a point.
  14. Dom Hemingway
    If only Shepard's movie lived up to his leading man. It's merely a frame for a character portrait, with Shepard's camera screwing our eyes to Law's performance and pasting in supporting actors and situations for no larger purpose than to see his reaction to them.
  15. Sabotage
    This is the disreputable, even disgusting diversion the Expendables pictures should've been.
  16. Noah
    Noah is here not to set the record straight, but to set it on its head. This isn't a lavish work of mad genius, it's a movie designed to be a lavish work of mad genius, and there's a difference.
  17. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The script is solid, and the fight scenes are excellent.
  18. Blood Ties
    Though it takes a long while for the many moving parts to click into place, the final minutes redeem not only a few characters but also Blood Ties itself -- not enough to make up for prior transgressions, perhaps, but enough to leave a favorable last impression.
  19. Boys of Abu Ghraib
    Too by-the-numbers for the emotional impact to resonate as long as it could and should have.
  20. Locker 13
    Locker 13 brings the hurt, and not in a good way.
  21. Jews of Egypt
    [Ramsis] achieves many poignant moments, especially when his subjects express that they have never felt at home anywhere outside Egypt.
  22. Blumenthal
    Fisher's filmmaking, aside from a couple scenes between Ethan and his best friend (Alexander Cendese) that are nicely composed in long-take two-shots, is too consistently flat to make the material spark.
  23. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Carbone minimizes dialogue and focuses instead on gestural specificity; he makes a useful inventory of boys-will-be-boys behavior — wrestling in fields, poking at scars or dead critters, shutting down on parents — and stages it in tellingly muted vignettes within the ample copses of rural New Jersey.
  24. Refuge
    Even at its well-meaning best, Refuge is listless.
  25. The Raid 2
    The raw ingredients of Raid 2 are superb. But the overall effect is gluttonous and queasy.
  26. Mistaken for Strangers
    Mistaken for Strangers doesn't reveal anything about Tom but his own insecurity.
  27. Go Down Death
    Schimberg, in this debut, demonstrates rare assuredness in shooting and staging scenes, coaxing unexpected but true-feeling flourishes from his cast of mostly amateurs blessed with extraordinary faces.
  28. Finding Vivian Maier
    Because her tale is so fascinating, movie-making formula is all that's needed.
  29. Cesar Chavez
    The careless diminishment of every other character that isn't Chávez — including wife Helen, played by an utterly wasted America Ferrera in a grape-sized role — might be worth overlooking if the film provided any insights into its subject.
  30. Breathe In
    Drake Doremus's Breathe In is a star-crossed romance where your enjoyment level will depend on your tolerance for what feels an awful lot like potential statutory rape.
  31. Divergent
    It'd be easier to root for lead Tris's (Shailene Woodley, the go-to girl for drab roles with grit) quest to escape her Abnegation roots and those ghastly gray skirts to prove herself a worthy Dauntless if director Burger felt committed to the concept.
  32. The French Minister
    Mannered and often very funny.
  33. Stay
    The film's quiet demeanor, exacerbated by wide shots of lonely, sprawling bogs, sometimes comes off as dull rather than reflective. Still, it does capture the maddening silence of waiting for an absent lover to make contact.
  34. Nothing Without You
    There isn't the faintest glimmer of lived experience to be found here, not the briefest flash of truth.
  35. Brothers Hypnotic
    We see Phil's sons honoring him while going their own ways in a years-long effort to find the right pitch.
  36. Big Joy: The Adventures of James Broughton
    Even at its most on-the-nose, Big Joy serves the greater good of introducing viewers to its subject, whose voice rings clear throughout.
  37. Awakened
    This needlessly incoherent thriller treats its convoluted nonsense with grave seriousness. It's mawkish, maudlin, and tongue-tied — countless scenes end with characters excusing themselves to go to bed, and you may want to join them.
  38. Anita
    Too much of the movie feels like notes toward a portrait rather than the portrait itself, and Mock's failure to nail down the Thomas case drains the power from the victory-lap scenes of Hill addressing adoring crowds.
  39. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
    This film is one of our best documents of the civil rights era, but it is also a portrait of someone with a singular perspective, a big mind, and a joyous aptitude for conversation.
  40. Rob the Mob
    The stickups, while plenty funny... lack any sense of dread or danger. And while De Felitta has a knack for slaphappy eroticism — with the feisty Arianda on board, the sex scenes have genuine heat — he also resorts too often to sappy lyricism.
  41. The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture is so immediate, so vital, it practically breathes. Not all memoirs need to exist. But the gentle urgency of Panh's story is right there in the filmmaking. This is a story that had to be told. Even in its stillness, it moves.
  42. McCanick
    [A] numbingly inert series of dirty-cop clichés that abruptly builds to an ephemerally poignant climax.
  43. Maladies
    The social construction of illness is certainly a worthy topic, but Carter situates his characters far from any semblance of a plot and even further from his heart.
  44. Just a Sigh
    Just a Sigh's day-long liaison sustains interest largely for the appeal of Devos and Byrne, its accomplished leads — they share what is known in the rom-com lexicon as "chemistry," and this quality invigorates their time together, in bed and out.
  45. Cheap Thrills
    Katz stages the contests with infectious energy... Too bad the last half hour feels like Katz is rubbing our face in the several turds he shows us, reminding us that people are awful. Of course they are. What else do you have to tell us?
  46. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    While it doesn't quite encompass everything, the film's still a bit too busy for its own good.
  47. Jodorowsky's Dune
    At least we have this gem, the rare tease of what could have been that actually proves satisfying enough on its own.
  48. It Felt Like Love
    It Felt Like Love is brilliantly, brutally tactile.
  49. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    If the off-kilter pleasures of Volume I is von Trier enticing us to watch the rest, consider me seduced.
  50. Muppets Most Wanted
    The story matters only in that it creates opportunities for heaps of ridiculousness, and writer-director James Bobin (who also directed The Muppets), along with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, mines them skillfully and breezily.
  51. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    As ever, he has the last laugh. This is How Stella Got Her Groove Back, for the Pop-Tart crowd, a wish-fulfillment weepie that not only narrowly clears Perry's low bar, thanks mostly to McLendon-Covey and Brown, but has already sold the TV sitcom rights to Oprah.
  52. Tiger & Bunny: The Rising
    Tiger & Bunny: The Rising indulges in homosexual stereotypes that would have been regressive in the 1980s, let alone in a spin-off of a 2011 television series, and it's a damn shame.
  53. Junk
    The film is frequently amusing but indulges too often in flights of fancy.
  54. Xingu
    The white saviors are flat, 2D manifestations of virtue... And the film's Indians? They aren't characters at all.
  55. Sparks
    This comic noir is best when it's more comic, in both senses of the word.
  56. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    A compelling but ultimately unsatisfying film.
  57. Teenage
    The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.
  58. Southern Baptist Sissies
    Southern Baptist Sissies might have benefited from some judicious editing.
  59. Shirin in Love
    There's very little to distinguish this from every other characterless rom-com with a demographically marketable hook.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Right Kind of Wrong
    Jeremiah Chechick's The Right Kind of Wrong has more wrong than right and plays like an ode to testicle jokes.
  61. Patrick: Evil Awakens
    It's a techno-thriller of brain-dead proportions.
  62. On My Way
    Its realism is patient and inclusive.
  63. Himizu
    Intermittently refreshing yet thoroughly unpleasant.
  64. Guilty of Romance
    Mostly, Guilty of Romance seems content allowing characters to verbally abuse each other before eventually reaching the inevitable conclusion that life is a burden and all love is illusory.
  65. Exposed
    Like burlesque itself, Exposed is at its best when it shows rather than tells.
  66. Ernest & Célestine
    Ernest & Celestine -- a contender for this year's best animated film Oscar -- is pure delight.
  67. The Den
    The Den's commitment to its presentational conceit leads to a number of implausible scenarios, but what's more disheartening is the gore-fest it turns into once the curtain is thrown back on the mystery propelling both Elizabeth and the narrative.
  68. Dark House
    Dark House is one nutty horror movie, but what's crazier still is how well it works — until it doesn't.
  69. The Cold Lands
    In the thoughtful and touching coming-of-age tale The Cold Lands, writer-director Tom Gilroy examines self-reliance as a philosophy and way of life.
  70. Big Men
    This film, a great one, demands a follow-up.
  71. Better Living Through Chemistry
    Never feels as triumphant or as affecting as it should, but the script boasts some amusing meanness of spirit.
  72. The Art of the Steal
    The Art of the Steal doesn't advance the nerdy intertextuality that has distinguished ironic crime films since Guy Ritchie, but writer-director Jonathan Sobol knows the ropes.
  73. The Activist
    Morin's idea of wedging a political thriller into this historical moment is brilliant, but he undermines his story with broad caricatures and a phlegmatic pace.
  74. Le Week-End
    The great insight in director Roger Michell's fourth collaboration with writer Hanif Kureishi is its vision of Paris as an arena equally amenable to romantic comedy and sulking tragedy.
  75. Enemy
    Denis Villeneuve's shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelganger while watching a movie and mines every bit of tension and oddity from it — there's hardly a scene that doesn't exude menace.
  76. Bad Words
    Bateman, as both director and star, digs his heels in too hard to make the movie's points, using lots of ho-hum close-ups and wriggly camera work along the way.
  77. Veronica Mars
    If you've never seen the show, it's a great excuse for binge-watching. And if you loved the show, the movie is a welcome homecoming. It has the feeling of a story that has been, against all odds, loved into existence. Probably because that's exactly what it is.
  78. Need For Speed
    Scott Waugh's moronic flick has multiple personalities — it's the Sibyl of street racing, with a script that doesn't feel so much typed as button-mashed.
  79. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The whole thing has an amiable, gag-to-gag vibe for most of the first hour.
  80. War of the Worlds: Goliath
    Like a feature-length Saturday morning cartoon with dashes of violence so graphic you'd swear you'd just stepped into Ralph Bakshi's Wizards. Which isn't to say that Goliath is good so much as compellingly weird on occasion.
  81. Special ID
    All the performers are supremely entertaining while dealing or defying horrible deaths... but Yen unfortunately lacks the kind of charisma that can elevate a genre film to a higher level of satisfaction.
  82. Particle Fever
    Levinson follows the ups and downs of bringing that beast of a collider online, but the movie's deepest thrill lies in what these men and women will theorize next, and how they will test it.
  83. Journey to the West
    The camera swoops and whooshes about but never generates any compelling energy — Chow's film proves endlessly manic but devoid of much mirth.
  84. The Island of St. Matthews
    At its best, the film does the job of the albums lost to the floods: It captures a town's history.
  85. Honey
    With striking compositions and cuts that reveal a deep appreciation of cinema's possibilities, Valeria Golino's Honey could be about anything at all and still demand and hold your attention; that the narrative is as moving as the film is aesthetically precise is an added delight.
  86. In Fear
    In Fear traffics in suspicion, ratcheting tension, and shocks — including a few really effective ones — more than in satisfying explanations.
  87. Haunt
    The frustration here comes from the filmmakers' inability to present characters with dimension, so that we might come to identify with them and their fears.
  88. Grand Piano
    Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.
  89. The Face of Love
    Bening and Harris have excellent chemistry.
  90. Bethlehem
    Refusing to take sides or vilify his characters, Adler finds the humanity in all parties.
  91. Awful Nice
    It's often funny, and the writers are smart, but the film is like an arcless, extended episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
  92. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    Grand Budapest is Anderson's most mature film, and his most visually witty, too. It's playful without being self-congratulatory, and somehow lush without being cloying.
  93. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Rise of an Empire might have been essentially more of the same, but for one distinction that makes it 300 times better than its predecessor: Mere mortals of Athens, Sparta, and every city from Mumbai to Minneapolis, behold the magnificent Eva Green, and tremble!
  94. Son of God
    Son of God is a narrative shambles, more thudding than thunderous, shot with no spirit or distinction, always feeling like a sprawling TV miniseries cut up to fit into theatrical running time.
  95. Fatal Assistance
    Peck's documentary is not a penetrating look at at Haiti's post-quake problems, but a scattered, impressionistic one.
  96. Chlorine
    Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.
  97. Bottled Up
    The jokes are not always consistent but highly effective when they strike.
  98. Two Lives
    The film takes one entire act too long to shake its mopey fog and get crackling.
  99. Stalingrad
    Lush with feeling that could easily be mistaken for sentimentality, Stalingrad is more like a 19th-century novel than a 21st-century blockbuster. It's theatrical and intense, sometimes in an overbearing way, but it's never boring.
  100. Odd Thomas
    Sommers's script relies on rapid-fire banter between Odd, girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn (Addison Timlin) — yes, that's her real name — and Chief Porter (Dafoe), but occasionally feels forced.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »