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. Unfinished Song
    Shamelessly manipulative, it's a highly effective if not very good film, its success entirely due to the talents of its cast. They bring heart to a script that is unabashedly about pushing buttons.
  2. Maniac
    Khalfoun makes the audience privy to Frank's memories, migraines, and jarring hallucinations of his mother's recalled abuses.
  3. A Hijacking
    Danish director Tobias Lindholm's wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the shape of believable fiction, although the movie is most remarkable for everything it doesn't show.
  4. Monsters University
    Monsters University feels not like the work of artists eager to express something but like that of likable pros whose existence depends on getting a rise out the kids. It's like the scares Sully and Mike spring on those sleeping tykes: technically impressive but a job un-anchored to anything more meaningful.
  5. World War Z
    Forster's meticulousness—coupled with ample excuses to blow stuff up—isn't enough to turn World War Z into one of those class-A end-of-everything movies that leaves you feeling just a little bit queasy, momentarily uncertain of your own small place in this unmanageable world.
  6. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.
  7. Call Me Kuchu
    What makes Kuchu work as taut agitprop, and ultimately to devastating emotional effect, is that Wright and Zouhali-Worrall allow the enormity of the film's political concerns to be telegraphed through the stories, experiences, and astute analysis of ordinary queer folk and their hetero allies.
  8. In the Fog
    In the Fog has the inevitability of an avalanche, and only our overfamilarity with Nazi-tribulation scenarios, and perhaps its excessively punctuated ending, could slow it down. A better anti-summer blockbuster is hard to imagine.
  9. Berberian Sound Studio
    Berberian may sound like it's more fun to pick over afterward than watch, but it's also masterfully crafted.
  10. Vehicle 19
    Mukunda Michael Dewil's film has the makings of a taut little thriller, but the writer-director has the twin disadvantages of needing to include dialogue and to rely on the services of Paul Walker to embody his protagonist.
  11. Storm Surfers 3D
    The stunning visuals captivate for much of the picture, but as the novelty wears off, and the beauty turns from stunning to repetitive, the non-surfers in the theater may begin to grow restless.
  12. The Guillotines
    A corny saga of social and generational conflict, it's ultimately yet another Chinese period epic that functions as a thinly veiled treatise on the nobility of socialist equality.
  13. Hatchet III
    There's no shortage of visceral, gross-out thrills.
  14. 20 Feet from Stardom
    It does what the most powerful films and music have always done, which is to spark contemplation of our own lives and choices, and our place in the world, while also stoking compassion and empathy for lives far removed from our own.
  15. Pandora's Promise
    The proceedings, no matter how logical their contentions, come off as merely one side of the debate.
  16. The Stroller Strategy
    Writer-director Clément Michel can't escape the usual infant-related movie pitfalls.
  17. Aliyah
    A marvelous film, stripped of false urgency.
  18. The Bling Ring
    Even though Coppola is one of our most compassionate storytellers, she can't bring herself to like these kids much. She's not cynical enough to turn this story into satire.
  19. This Is the End
    After going this far, both in raunchy bad-boyism and mock-apologetic love-us shamelessness, they've effectively blown up their own formula. That's not a bad thing. This is the end; now it's time to try for more.
  20. Man of Steel
    It’s a relief just to watch the actors act once in a while, and thankfully, Snyder is astute enough to punch some breathing holes in this steel-clad colossus.
  21. The Internship
    For those of you on a really tight entertainment budget, you'll be paying at least 8 cents per minute not to laugh. Your money is better spent on beans and rice.
  22. More Than Honey
    More Than Honey isn't just 91 minutes of dead bees. Who could bear that? Instead, it's a delightful, informative, and suitably contemplative study of the bee world and the bee-population crisis, though in the end it does offer enough dewdrops of hope to fill up a bluebell or two.
  23. Hey Bartender
    Watching the documentary Hey Bartender is like spending a night at a good bar: It's fun, easygoing, and it lasts just a little longer than it should. And the conversation, while delightful in the moment, often seems banal the next morning.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Finding Joy
    Carlo De Rosa's comedy bears some resemblance to Garden State, although it's a little less depressing and more random in its oddities.
  25. I Send You This Place
    Even at a lean 68 minutes, it's a vanity project that's the very definition of insufferable.
  26. Fame High
    The dilemmas Fame High's four subjects face are real, and Kennedy gets plenty of drama from the prospect of failure and disappointment.
  27. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
    The women of Pussy Riot have an idea of what the new Russia should sound like; Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer shows just how hard it is to make that new world audible.
  28. Much Ado About Nothing
    With its interrogations of gender, feminism, and marriage, Shakespeare's comedy is an apt vehicle for Whedon's own storytelling agenda.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Free China: The Courage to Believe
    Free China, with its aggressive narration, haunting music, and disturbing photographic evidence of crimes against humanity, wants you to walk away outraged at the injustice of it all, and most likely, you will.
  30. Free Samples
    Vibrant cameo performances by two of our most engaging young actors—Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Ritter—along with one film legend—Tippi Hedren—transform this modest comedy into something special.
  31. Violet & Daisy
    The key relationships are well drawn, if not especially revealing of anything human, and director Fletcher sometimes dares some welcome absurdity. But if you've seen movies built from the same parts as this one, you'll likely find this too familiar—but energetic, well-acted, and distinguished by artfully artless chatter.
  32. Wish You Were Here
    Stories built around a mystery can have a difficult time creating a satisfying answer, and this picture is no exception.
  33. Hello Herman
    The dialogue is all surface: Emotions are laid out on the autopsy table for the audience to dissect and analyze, but rarely feel.
  34. Tiger Eyes
    An engaging (if somewhat slender) portrait of the violence of adolescent maturation.
  35. The Prey
    If the thrills it yields are expected ones, the pleasure in the formula remains.
  36. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    Perhaps the richest of Resnais's recent efforts.
  37. Dirty Wars
    Dirty Wars is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know how we wage war right now; it's also a chilling prologue for what's likely a global future of endless war and blowback.
  38. Rapture-Palooza
    Always amusing, if never screamingly funny.
  39. The Rambler
    The narrative is haphazard, and by the middle of the film, it's apparent that Reeder isn't even trying to make sense. Unconventional storytelling can be entertaining, too, but The Rambler just seems weird for its own sake and in love with cheap shock value.
  40. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    The film is like his life: scabrous, upsetting, kind of moving, funny as hell, alive with hints of how we've become what we are.
  41. The Purge
    As in so many Hollywood spectacles, the message and medium are at hopeless odds... Still, the set-up is arresting, the domestic scenes well observed and acted, and the payoffs involving that Roomba toy excellent. Also, a late-film twist isn't a surprise, exactly, but it is delicious.
  42. Now You See Me
    When functioning like a magic trick, this breathlessly entertaining picture delights in its showmanship, but the more entertaining the trickery, the tougher the explanation, and when the truth is revealed the answer can't help but fail to satisfy.
  43. After Earth
    Jaden is fine at running, jumping, fearful trembling, and affecting steely resolution. He doesn't yet have his father's charisma; perhaps to help him out, dad opted not to bring that charisma to the set.
  44. London - The Modern Babylon
    Temple and editor Caroline Richards demonstrate that the London mob (it can seem like there's been only one mob through the ages) time and again rescues the city from its complacency—and safeguards it from the suffocation of class-bound England.
  45. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    This is powerful reportage, beautifully shot and gracefully laid out; too bad that Kendall ties it all up with more deep thoughts from the bus itself, thoughts that sound like outtakes from a TED Talk on the interconnectedness of all living things.
  46. I Do
    Ross's on-the-nose script offers little subtext or nuance, and the film—for all the inherent drama of the situation—has very little real-life grit.
  47. Sirius
    Amardeep Kaleka's documentary often seems like little more than preaching-to-the-converted, New Age drivel.
  48. Student
    Psychological violence is constantly present and reflected in the film's physical violence, which is typically suggested rather than seen.
  49. American Mary
    This Canadian film seems to be trying to make some points about body dysphoria or modern fame, but the one point it's absolutely sure of is that [Katharine] Isabelle is a startlingly beautiful woman with a well-proportioned (and exploitable) body.
  50. The East
    For all its empathy and equilibrium, The East has nowhere to go after the script backs itself into a corner.
  51. The Wall
    For all its stellar nature photography, its low hum of suspense, and Gedeck's raw and affecting performance, the film often feels like an illustrated audiobook rather than narrative drama.
  52. Hannah Arendt
    The writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt is brought to life by a mesmerizing Barbara Sukowa in Margarethe von Trotta's film.
  53. Shadow Dancer
    The film rests on the desperate chemistry of a paunchy, weathered Owen and a tense, quietly ferocious Riseborough.
  54. Triumph of the Wall
    Triumph of the Wall is often painfully boring and rather shapeless, not so much a crafted film as a compendium of one guy's musings. Regardless, in an era when seemingly every documentary is tied to a hot-button issue, making one about a guy building a wall is endearing.
  55. The History of Future Folk
    Even as an apocalyptic plot-pushing rescue mission unfolds, slapstick police chases keep the level of diverting quirk high, and the husband-wife/father-daughter dynamics remain central.
  56. The Kings of Summer
    The Kings of Summer plays like an extended sitcom episode, and not a very special one at that.
  57. Epic
    Epic certainly manages to tell a compelling tale. Yet in a post-Up era where animated films can pulse with profound truths, the question remains: Is mere entertainment enough?
  58. Ping Pong
    Ping Pong shows us people piquantly aware of the deterioration of their bodies and that they don't have much time left.
  59. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    Gibney, a prolific and skilled documentarian, marshals and organizes a raft of information as deftly as anyone could wish. But his conclusions are murkier than they might be.
  60. Fill the Void
    Burshtein's lush visual sensibility, and the subtle performances of the excellent cast, create an aching portrayal of longing and interdependence that transcends the boundaries of the family's small world.
  61. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight—visually stunning, in a late-summer way—is more vital and cutting than another recent marriage picture, Michael Haneke's old-folks-together death march Amour; it has none of Amour's tasteful restraint, and in the end, it says more about the nature of long-term love.
  62. A Green Story
    Vlahakis's tale should be compelling, but a weak script and mostly dull performances (one exception: Billy Zane . . . I know!) make A Green Story more monotonous than mythic.
  63. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Directors Tom Bean and Luke Poling never shy away from the possibility that Plimpton at times was more a personality than a serious writer.
  64. The Hangover Part III
    With The Hangover Part III, director Todd Phillips continues to occupy an apt (and very lucrative) niche, casting rich, entitled fraternity dicks as underdog heroes beset by shrewish women, foreigners with funny accents, and even animals-often cute animals with big, dewy eyes.
  65. Hating Breitbart
    A shapeless, uncritical documentary.
  66. Fast & Furious 6
    Everyone involved at last seems to understand that the mode here is comic. Previous entries suffered from self-important glumness that gummed up the fun whenever the cars weren’t racing.
  67. The Girls in the Band
    The retro photos and footage are also bountiful and, natch, jazzily edited enough that the standard talking-head techniques are instantly forgivable.
  68. Go Goa Gone
    Most jokes don't translate very well in Go Goa Gone, a Bollywood horror comedy influenced by Shaun of the Dead.
  69. Charge
    There's no dearth of adrenaline as engineering teams face challenges every bit as bumpy, winding, perilous and exhilarating as the famous course itself.
  70. Re-emerging: The Jews of Nigeria
    In the face of the authenticity of Shmuel's faith, the evidence for or against the Judaic heritage of the Igbo is beside the point.
  71. Valentino's Ghost
    A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.
  72. Old Dog
    Old Dog has the look and feel of a documentary, which adds senses of urgency and immediacy to a tale that moves at a languid, but never boring, pace.
  73. Augustine
    The film is something of a paradox, simultaneously passionate and dispassionate, its ending tethered to both bruised triumph and a sense of things falling apart.
  74. Black Rock
    The story and its violence are deeply silly, but there's something nervy and upsetting that distinguishes the film's incidental excitement.
  75. Star Trek Into Darkness
    Cumberbatch, a tweedy Brit with an M.A. in Classical Acting and a face like a monstrous Timothy Dalton, has beefed up to become a convincing killer. He's brutal and bold, and the film around him isn't bad either.
  76. Becoming Traviata
    A spare and ravishing doc.
  77. Elemental
    Elemental isn't essential, but it's a fascinating if limited portrait of the diversity of eco-warriordom today.
  78. 33 Postcards
    The script's programmatic feel-goodery smooths out everything strange and noteworthy about Dean and Mei Mei's relationship into an unmemorable and unconvincing blandness.
  79. Frances Ha
    Frances Ha is a patchwork of details that constitute a sort of dating manual—not one that tells you how to meet hot guys, but one that fortifies you against all the crap you have to deal with as a young person in love with a city that doesn't always love you back.
  80. The English Teacher
    A respectable cast and much noisy boisterousness isn't enough to generate a single laugh.
  81. Erased
    A thriller whose storytelling ingredients are so familiar that one could watch it with the sound off and still know what's going on.
  82. Pieta
    After establishing a central parent-child relationship rife with wacko biblical undertones, the director finds nowhere to take his story except into standard vengeance territory.
  83. State 194
    The best part of State 194 is its domesticity, its low-key approach to a conflict that has been widely sensationalized in the media.
  84. Bidder 70
    Tim DeChristopher, proves a fascinating subject for Beth and George Gage's new documentary.
  85. The Painting (Le Tableau)
    With striking visuals reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall and a refreshingly (for domestic animation audiences) grown-up storyline, The Painting is almost reminiscent of, well, a work of art.
  86. Aftershock
    Aftershock is incompetently made and morally muddled, but since talent, morality, and Mr. Roth have never been on speaking terms, we're not exactly surprised.
  87. The Second Meeting
    The meeting itself is genial but sparkless, with an air of artifice.
  88. Sightseers
    Sightseers is a jet-black comedy that understands exactly how absurdist it is, and its murders are always played for laughs.
  89. Assault on Wall Street
    An hour of these repetitive, predictable disasters should wear down all but the most bailout-hating viewers.
  90. No One Lives
    Director Ryûhei Kitamura (The Midnight Meat Train) is too talented for material this retro-junky, but he and screenwriter David Cohen keep the action coming hard and fast.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
    The dialogue is unspeakable, the scenes unplayable, the waste of talent unpardonable.
  92. Peeples
    While she doesn't quite achieve the screwball zaniness she strives for, Chism deserves commendation for crafting a farcical work that feels like it concerns real characters.
  93. He's Way More Famous Than You
    As unhinged as it is hilarious.
  94. Pilgrim Song
    So little occurs, and so little seems to be at stake, that the action takes on the quality of a tossed-off, not-especially-melodic country-music ditty.
  95. The Fruit Hunters
    The filmmakers' focus is fleeting. Factoids about the origins of names like Haas avocados, Macintosh apples, Clementines and Bing cherries feel like patches of solid ground, while interludes of terrible acting to illustrate fruit-related historical moments leave a bitter taste.
  96. Shootout at Wadala
    No amount of hyper-stylized, Guy Ritchie–inspired posturing can save a film whose lead antihero is so unrepentantly vile.
  97. How Sweet It Is
    An extraordinarily undistinguished comedy from director Brian Herzlinger.
  98. The World Before Her
    With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.
  99. Java Heat
    Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through this tepid buddy-cop action flick.
  100. What Richard Did
    The film feel[s] like a Bergman homage without earning the clunky label "Bergmanesque."
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