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. Django
    Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.
  2. In Between
    Hamoud’s three bright actresses bring such a sense of authenticity to their roles that this all feels new.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    David Barba and James Pellerito’s doc foregrounds Marcelo Gomes’s beautiful body even as it revels in his good brain, excellent spirits, flawless dance technique, and sense of humor.
  4. The Green Fog
    It’s not so much an assemblage as it is a conjuring. You don’t just watch these clips — you see through and between them. The juxtapositions create vital, cosmic connections.
  5. In the Land of Pomegranates
    The film is a jumble, with no sense of meaningful interaction.
  6. Blame
    Quinn Shephard’s directorial debut, Blame, leans heavily on this persistent despair, yes, but also leverages it in innovative and occasionally startling ways.
  7. Stratton
    The rest of the characters...are equally unvivid, serving only to advance the vague plot through chunky reams of dialogue.
  8. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.
  9. All the Money in the World
    It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.
  10. Empathy
    A hybrid documentary distinguished by emotional tenderness and compositional elegance.
  11. The Rape of Recy Taylor
    The film is a haunting, damning unpacking of history that also reminds us how little progress we’ve made.
  12. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    Moshe relates his tale of can-do vengeance with an unfussy clarity and an obvious fondness for the oaters of yesterday’s Hollywood — an affection that, as in Burden, imparts a winning sincerity.
  13. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is its own unique, damaged creature.
  14. Pitch Perfect 3
    The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.
  15. Molly's Game
    Chastain seems at times to be both the lead and her own supporting actor in this story, as she oscillates between traditionally feminine and masculine modes of behavior, sometimes inhabiting both at once.
  16. Hangman
    Even with all its grisly, gory absurdity, Hangman actually tries to be a sincere salute to all the badge-wearing men and women who risk their lives on the regular to catch bad guys. But you may not take a single frame of this movie seriously.
  17. The Greatest Showman
    Hugh Jackman is charming as ever, and two dance scenes are mildly inventive and well-executed, yet Jackman’s goodwill and a splash of inspired choreography are not enough to earn the greatest in the title.
  18. Happy End
    As with so many of his films, Haneke asks: Why? Why abide by the rules? Why go on? Here, he’s created two characters — Georges and Eve — I want to see exploring those questions and a handful I really don’t.
  19. Hostiles
    Cooper has yet to elevate his sensibility beyond a choked, self-inhibiting intensity.
  20. Phantom Thread
    Most tales of people finding love present hard, angular worlds and allow romance to soften the edges. Phantom Thread does the opposite: It presents a soft, even sensuous world, and shows us how sometimes love can come in the cuts and the tears.
  21. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The material is often weak, but the stars earn their paychecks.
  22. Downsizing
    The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.
  23. Woodshock
    Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.
  24. Bill Frisell: A Portrait
    Franz’s doc, unlike too many about jazz musicians, actually makes room for jazz music, capturing the clean-cut, restlessly inventive Frisell in live performance in a variety of ensembles.
  25. Beyond Skyline
    Beyond Skyline is pretty fun, even if it’s completely nonsensical.
  26. Miss Kiet's Children
    Much like a day at elementary school, this vérité wonder called Miss Kiet’s Children is exhausting, heartening, raucous, tender, occasionally dull, sometimes tearful, and ultimately a vital public good.
  27. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve, and visual charm.
  28. November Criminals
    What follows is something like Veronica Mars, only set in snowy D.C. and on heavy sedatives.
  29. I, Tonya
    Those expecting camp or catfights won’t find them in Gillespie’s movie, which instead offers thoughtful and somewhat objective critiques, plus much seriously dark humor that’ll elicit a lot of uncomfortable gasps of laughter — and invites you to ponder difficult truths.
  30. The Shape of Water
    It speaks both to del Toro’s confidence and generosity that, having designed this world so thoroughly, he essentially hands the whole thing over to Hawkins — not just so she can breathe life into her own character, but so she can conjure all the emotional connections required for any of this to work on any level. And my god, how she runs with it.
  31. Naples '44
    It’s basically a high-caliber book-on-tape augmented with actual (as opposed to horror-movie fake) found footage — a missing link between full-on dramatization and simply reading the book while imagining visuals.
  32. Big Time
    Director Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s gorgeous film is informed by that same charm and intelligence the way a sailboat is informed by 7 knots of westerly breeze.
  33. Hollow in the Land
    The stench of needlessly convoluted derivativeness lingers throughout this flick.
  34. Bullet Head
    A gonzo ten-minute standoff between Adrien Brody and a man-eating pitbull single-handedly justifies the existence of the otherwise uninspired heist thriller Bullet Head.
  35. Quest
    [A] tender, humane, gently probing film.
  36. Kaleidoscope
    Jones and Reid are hemmed in by the screenplay’s schematic nature.
  37. The Post
    The Post is a tale that weaponizes nostalgia. It depicts how this long-established system of chummy collusion between politicians and press, one at times recalled with some anxious wistfulness by both Bradlee and Graham, came to be shattered. And it shows us how a strong press was instrumental in that shattering.
  38. What Happened in Vegas
    Denison keeps up the pace — those television skills coming in handy — and unpacks a lot. But he also allows in some light. There are plenty of Las Vegas police officers who want things to change, and Denison gives them, and the victims’ families, a voice.
  39. Kepler's Dream
    Kepler’s Dream is a study in family dynamics that’s sweet without being too saccharine.
  40. The New Radical
    It’s hard to know whether it’s intentional that The New Radical, Adam Bhala Lough’s slick documentary about “techno-anarchist” Cody Wilson, famous for developing a 3-D-printable plastic gun, presents its subject as a shallow pseudo-intellectual man-child.
  41. Cuba and the Cameraman
    Cuba and the Cameraman distills thousands of hours of footage into 113 lively, whirlwind minutes, covering big news events — the Mariel Boatlift; a Castro visit to the United Nations; the Communist leader’s death in 2016 — but also always taking the time to capture the everyday drift of life.
  42. Mr. Roosevelt
    Mr. Roosevelt may be slight, but it’s buoyed by Wells’s self-deprecating humor.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Dancer
    The strength of the film is its portrait of a female artist at work, doing all the complex backstage and business chores her career requires.
  44. The Disaster Artist
    Franco’s own movie works best as a portrait of the complicated friendship between Greg and Tommy, and it’s an inspired idea to have real-life brothers Dave and James play best friends — we can sense alternating undercurrents of exasperation and affection beneath every exchange.
  45. Love Beats Rhymes
    Love Beats Rhymes is more of a showcase for star Azealia Banks than director RZA, but his influence is still felt in this formulaic hip-hop romance.
  46. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.
  47. Shadowman
    [A] heartbreaking doc.
  48. The Other Side of Hope
    For all the deadpan comedy and eccentric characterization, Kaurismäki anchors the film in Khaled’s story and his immigration anxieties, all depicted with quiet humanity that never feels exaggerated. It’s a beautiful companion piece to Le Havre, and a film that will gently warm your cold, cynical heart.
  49. Voyeur
    An article, a book, and now a film, Talese’s fascination with Foos’s voyeurism still hasn’t resulted in anything like rigorous journalism. The movie, though, at least lets us be the witnesses to something unsettling rather than just asking us to take some dude’s word for it. That means these cameramen are journalists.
  50. Wonder Wheel
    The camerawork in Allen’s customary long takes is fluid, even arresting, but Winslet’s performance would benefit from the kind of editing these long takes don’t allow. Rather than loose, the ensemble often seems underrehearsed, and too many of Winslet’s lines have little impact.
  51. Loveless
    Two representative moments define Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless — and they are among the most devastating, harrowing things I’ve ever seen on a screen.
  52. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman — “I’m a very simple, complicated person” — finally gets her due.
  53. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    The movie — based on Les Standiford’s novel — is pleasantly simpleminded, often assembled from parts of other movies.
  54. Wonder
    It tempers its fairly blunt narrative approach by constantly shifting its perspective. It starts off as the portrait of a troubled child, but expands to become a film about community.
  55. Coco
    Yes, Coco thrills with its of-the-moment visual invention, but its core elements — dead relatives, family photos, the power of loving memory — couldn’t be more timeless. When Pixar made me cry this time, it wasn’t just for the characters on the screen. It was for the people I remember, and the ones I hope will remember me.
  56. Darkest Hour
    Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes.
  57. Porto
    All of this is attractive, yet I felt nothing for these people, their pain, or their possible lost future.
  58. The Breadwinner
    It’s notable that since her hair is cut short and she’s wearing male clothes, none of the men suspect that she’s not a boy despite her chosen male name being only slightly less conspicuous than “McLovin.” Being evil is not the same thing as being intelligent or observant.
  59. Big Sonia
    The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.
  60. Soufra
    In the nourishing documentary Soufra, Thomas Morgan shows the claustrophobic living conditions and dangerous infrastructure of the tightly packed concrete towers, and chronicles how Lebanese government bureaucracy maintains the camp’s invisible borders and keeps occupants in a permanent state of legal limbo.
  61. Holy Air
    The humor in Shady Srour’s Holy Air isn’t entirely satirical, but the bone-dry wit is breathtaking.
  62. Angelica
    Queer writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein (the mind behind the vagina dentata horror-comedy Teeth) and an impressive team of collaborators inspire laughs and/or terror out of the libidinal hang-ups of frail stay-at-home mom Constance (Jena Malone) and her unfulfilled spouse, Joseph (Ed Stoppard).
  63. Sweet Virginia
    The concepts Sweet Virginia explore through this setup — lives intersecting after a tragedy in a small town and a dangerous outsider tearing through a community — aren’t new for noir or westerns, but the understated, intense performances of Dagg’s cast make this slow burner a standout.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebels on Pointe
    Serious balletomanes will find much to appreciate here; people who delight in seeing the form lampooned will find more. These guys (among whom are three married couples) are gorgeous dancers, respectful of ballet’s 400-year-old tradition; they’re brash and funny, they’re changing the world, and they have power to spare.
  65. Justice League
    The joints show, and the cuts are sometimes awkward — there was clearly a longer, more d-r-a-w-n o-u-t version of this at some point — but what’s left after the cutting is fun and engaging enough, and it’s all anchored by terrific lead performances. There were even times when (gasp) it moved me.
  66. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Knowing the real-life inspiration for On the Beach at Night Alone may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better. But the movie’s charms work on a much more immediate level, in the way it captures the ever-shifting dynamic between men and women, and the difficulty of matching one’s feelings to one’s words.
  67. Mudbound
    Voiceovers build on top of voiceovers, and we feel as if we’re simply getting to know these people a little better, even while Rees is gesturing toward things to come. The result is a deeply engrossing film — its two-plus hours whiz by — about stumbling one step forward and two steps back toward a more enlightened existence.
  68. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    The drama is mostly interior, and Washington’s quiet performance tends to reveal the jittery surface rather than the tortured soul. Neither it nor the script is incisive enough to make Israel’s abandonment of his principles fascinating.
  69. Hello Again
    What Gustafson has achieved is certainly artful, and sometimes, through montage and smart camerawork, suggests correspondences between these century-crossing assignations that the stage show could not. But even at its best, this Hello Again struck me as an uncertain, even ancillary work.
  70. Thelma
    Yes, Thelma is a horror movie — a lovely, transfixing one — but don’t look to it for cheap scares. The terror here cuts far deeper.
  71. Intent to Destroy
    Intent to Destroy sometimes plays like a DVD extra that might have accompanied The Promise, but it does have value of its own in its interviews with historians, philosophers, and filmmakers and its vintage photos and footage.
  72. Bitch
    While it’s refreshing to see a portrait of a woman’s unraveling that doesn’t romanticize mental illness, and that’s actually directed by a woman, it’s easy to wish Bitch probed a bit deeper into the protagonist’s pre-dog life.
  73. Murder on the Orient Express
    Despite the bright cinematography, there’s something quaint and comforting about this film and its brand of old-fashioned storytelling, where coincidences are extremely likely, everyone somehow knows a countess, and a man puts honor above all else.
  74. No Stone Unturned
    Gibney may encourage viewers to condemn the police, but his self-righteous editorializing doesn’t make up for the lack of convincing evidence.
  75. Mayhem
    I’m sure the movie was made for Yeun (who also serves as executive producer) to finally have a chance to prove he has leading-man chops — and Hollywood should start giving him movie-star, action-hero gigs, like, yesterday.
  76. Santa & Andrés
    With quiet precision, Lechuga (Melaza) charts Andrés’s resilience and Santa’s awakening, using a naturalistic visual style and sparse dialogue that reveals how these characters instinctively read between the lines.
  77. mother!
    Art itself should seek a restraining order against anyone who insists, “Here is the one thing that Mother! means!”
  78. Window Horses
    Many independent animated films in recent years have adopted a hand-drawn and/or collage-heavy aesthetic, but few are quite as heartfelt and charming as Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming.
  79. Requiem for a Running Back
    Carpenter isn’t a polished interviewer, but her candor and longstanding connections to the sport provide access that we wouldn’t see otherwise.
  80. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    McDormand could have carried this film all the way through a minefield of touchy topics, singed but with all parts in the right place, primed for a painful laugh. But goddamnit if the cops in this story didn’t ruin all the fun.
  81. Dream Boat
    For all the outrageous cosplay and assless trunks on display, director Tristan Ferland Milewski is more interested in exploring the interior lives of gay men.
  82. Gilbert
    In Neil Berkeley’s documentary Gilbert, we’re gifted with intimate moments from the comedian’s life.
  83. No Dress Code Required
    Cristina Herrera Borquez’s elegant documentary No Dresscode Required is a masterful, layered story of commissar-crossed lovers.
  84. Frank Serpico
    Most hilarious is the revelation that the first director assigned to the film Lumet eventually made, the manic John G. Avildsen, wanted the eccentric, bearded hipster ex-cop to play himself. On the basis of this exceptional portrait, he very well could have.
  85. Wait for Your Laugh
    Rose Marie was — and is — a fabulous talent, but this off-kilter documentary doesn’t completely make the case.
  86. A River Below
    The intoxicating A River Below contains elements of immersive nature documentaries and shocking wildlife exposes (like Blackfish and The Cove), but director Mark Grieco’s profile of two driven conservationists tells a more slippery tale.
  87. LBJ
    LBJ slips from an examination of a sometimes admirable leader into a hagiographic daydream, a fantasy of a father figure to save us all. That’s a matter of Reiner’s politics, of course, but even more so a matter of his instincts as a popular filmmaker: He’s offering us an American presidency to escape to.
  88. My Friend Dahmer
    My Friend Dahmer is both sensitive and fascinating, distinguished by a stellar, mouth-breathing performance of insecurity from Lynch.
  89. 11/8/16
    This minute-by-minute rundown is priceless history, alive with the anxious textures of American life right then, a film that in twenty years will reward attentive viewing. It’s also, for many of us alive in the now, probably too much too soon, the tearing open of wounds that only are just starting to scab over.
  90. Princess Cyd
    While the chemistry between Pinnick and Spence is sweet and familial, I couldn’t help but think so much of this film is just…nice. It’s that pretty feather you found in the grass. And maybe you’ll take it home, but will likely forget you did.
  91. A Gray State
    Friends, family, and reporters offer invaluable insight in interviews, making this the somewhat rare documentary that’s actually as illuminating as good print reporting on the same case.
  92. 1945
    Collaborating with DP Elemér Ragályi, Török also invests the movie with strong visual motifs, perhaps most prominently a consistency of shots that peer at characters through everyday barriers (windows, curtains). The resultant sensation of uncomfortable prying underlines the boiling suspicions that power the plot.
  93. Blade of the Immortal
    Come for the gory swordplay, stay for the half-serious melodrama.
  94. Most Beautiful Island
    As a rumination on the experiences of undocumented immigrants, Most Beautiful Island presents an extreme example of what people will do to scrape by — but it does so without belittling its vulnerable characters.
  95. Last Flag Flying
    It’s somber and respectful, and even has a couple of genuinely powerful moments, but none of that’s enough to transcend its oppressive dreariness.
  96. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Seeing the breadth of Didion’s work and its impact on the culture represented cumulatively delivers an unexpected shock to the system.
  97. God's Own Country
    In his debut feature, Lee has crafted a mature love story centered on an immature man facing the fear of even admitting that he needs love at all. It’s a film to prize.
  98. Lady Bird
    A heartfelt coming-of-age story that perfectly captures the bittersweet transition from adolescence to dawning adulthood, Gerwig’s directorial debut is a joy from start to finish, a warm, generous snapshot of teenage vulnerability and exuberance.
  99. Thor: Ragnarok
    In its own weird little way, Thor: Ragnarok manages to poke fun at the constant churn of myth and entertainment of which the movie itself is a part. It’s a candy-colored cage of delights, but it is a cage nevertheless — and it doesn’t hide that fact.
  100. Félicité
    Gomis’s handheld cameras work to keep up with the actors, who seem to move with rare freedom, but he also stages some exquisite and complex flourishes.
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