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 Hornet's Nest
    An important film despite some baffling presentational choices.
  2. Welcome to New York
    Surprisingly -- and pleasantly -- restrained in its delivery, Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York is the sort of picture that withholds judgment of its protagonist so that viewers have space to make their own.
  3. Cold Bloom
    The familiar plot shifts through Shiori's expected reactions, yet Cold Bloom proves fresh and evocative in depicting her changing world.
  4. Amour Fou
    Henriette's last thought will forever be a mystery, but the grandeur of Romanticism is tartly, pleasingly demystified.
  5. The Salvation
    Emphasizing action over the spoken word, The Salvation doesn't break new ground, yet its murderous twists of fate are consistently compelling.
  6. Jimmy's Hall
    [Loach] and his longtime scriptwriter Paul Laverty combed Irish history to find a figure you might see as Loach's intellectual double; maybe this accounts for some of the speechifying dialogue as various political positions are explained, jarring at times in a film of action shots and escaping out windows.
  7. Test
    When Frankie, an understudy in a small dance company, is given his chance to perform, he, and Test itself, come to life.
  8. The Moment
    What's fresh is Weinstock's interweaving of flashbacks, slightly altered versions of flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks, so that viewers must work as hard as Lee to determine past from present.
  9. Korengal
    The frank honesty of these accounts testifies to the trust Junger and Hetherington cultivated among the Second Platoon in 2008.
  10. White God
    When the violence gets unbearable, take comfort in the troop of trainers on the sidelines who prove that, for now, man and beast still make a good team.
  11. Miss Lovely
    Rife with jealousy, treachery, and violence, it's a stylish portrait of the tangled relationship between cinematic and real-world sleaze.
  12. Master of the Universe
    Bauder's film is a diagnosis of a system that is hopelessly sick and not being treated. Bring a stress ball to squish up as you watch.
  13. Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton: This Is Stones Throw Records
    The lack of a critical framework means that some of the most intriguing notions the interviewees put forth are never explored.
  14. The Amazing Catfish
    Claudia Sainte-Luce's semi-autobiographical indie has a knack for subverting stereotypes without making a big deal about it.
  15. 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.
  16. The Homestretch
    The Homestretch is ultimately a humane accomplishment.
  17. Bridge of Spies
    What Spielberg seems to want most from this respectable lark is for audiences to notice the parallels between the 1950s and today.
  18. Siddharth
    The photography fascinates even when the story flags, and the film bristles with small revelations.
  19. Kabbalah Me
    [A] sweetly odd documentary.
  20. K2: Siren of the Himalayas
    Its considered use of ice and snow-covered vistas against the expanse of blue sky offers great beauty while capturing something of what pulls the adventurous to try to reach the world's second highest peak.
  21. Cinemanovels
    Equally seductive as it is inert, Terry Miles' Cinemanovels manages to cast an alluring spell, despite not amounting to much. It sticks in the memory, mostly due to the playful lead performance by Lauren Lee Smith.
  22. Black Mass
    Black Mass is a tightly wound piece of work, and Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) keeps its many small parts moving with ease. He's skillful at merging telling, minute details with bigger, looping schemes.
  23. As It Is in Heaven
    Overbay's palette is carefully lyrical, at a benumbed Martha Marcy May Marlene pitch, he pays attention to the verdant landscape and keeps his cast at a pensive and watchful low boil.
  24. The Kill Team
    The emotional disconnect between a soldier's perception of reality and reality itself is the subject of this documentary, which finds drama in evenhanded storytelling that is the inverse of its characters' emotional shakiness.
  25. A Life in Dirty Movies
    Instead of over-glorifying their shared past, Ericsson pays loving tribute to what remains of his subjects' relationship.
  26. 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.
  27. The Notebook
    Szász's harrowing film roots that coming-of-age process in suffering, depicting it with a grim solemnity that, by never wavering, ultimately leads to a tempered measure of unexpected hopefulness.
  28. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    That Battered Bastards is practically a hagiography doesn't negate the fact that it has more anti-establishment joie de vivre in any given scene than most talking-head docs about previously unheralded mensches contain in their entire run times.
  29. Lost Persons Area
    It's the gestures that elevate the film: What Strubbe's handheld and intimate approach lacks in originality it makes up for in specific and spontaneous tactility.
  30. Young Ones
    Young Ones is an old-fashioned, worthwhile curio down to the closing credits.
  31. Pump
    [A] compelling and cogent documentary.
  32. A Letter to Momo
    The bickering goblins make a boffo comedy team, and while there's a recurring fart joke, it borders on classy. That's the power of good anime.
  33. The Calling
    The Calling breathes new life into a moribund genre by touching oft-ignored themes and offering a bit of introspection to go along with the obligatory slashed throats and biblical portents.
  34. War Story
    Jackson and co-screenwriter Kristin Gore prize ambiguity, allowing for cathartic revelations but no easy resolutions.
  35. What About Me
    Come for the cult of personality, stay for the nostalgia of a dirtier, dodgier, far cooler scene.
  36. 14 Blades
    Come for Ku's joyful choreography, stay for Yen's most memorable post-comeback performance.
  37. ABCs of Death 2
    Overall, it's a strong sampler, with surprising variety.
  38. 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.
  39. NightLights
    There are moments in director David Midell's NightLights that play like PSAs, but that earnestness is paved over by wonderfully affecting performances.
  40. Fort McCoy
    If the film has a major flaw, it's the profusion of subplots in a 100-minute running time. Still, it is a real accomplishment.
  41. No No: A Dockumentary
    There's enough diamond lore here to please baseball diehards, but Ellis's outsize life will grip even casual fans.
  42. 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.
  43. To Be Takei
    To Be Takei is never less than joyful — much like the man himself.
  44. Kink
    The doc is often terrific fun. But it is a work of observation and advocacy rather than journalism.
  45. Kelly & Cal
    Amy Lowe Starbin's script offers a welcome directness and some sly observations about acceptance and compromise.
  46. Wetlands
    Helen's extreme behavior is at once a reaction to, and rebellion against, her mother and father (and their separation), which, along with a captivating go-for-broke lead turn by Juri, lends the film a poignancy to help offset the juvenile shock-tactic impulses.
  47. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The original story was called "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter," but Takahata's title puts the focus where it belongs.
  48. Gringo Trails
    Vail's film earnestly interrogates authenticity even as her camera lingers on a beach without footprints, inviting the viewer to walk.
  49. Magical Universe
    This story is about tenderness and empathy, including Carbee's for his plastic proxies.
  50. 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.
  51. The Nice Guys
    As an action comedy, R-rated division, The Nice Guys is hard to beat. Black knows how to pace and escalate a fight and a film, and he springs wicked surprises all along — scene after scene dances around trapdoors that the audience falls into.
  52. The Gambler
    The pleasures offered by The Gambler are simple, but don’t hold that against it. Wyatt, director of the 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brings some bristly, swaggering energy to the thing, and that in turn may have loosened Wahlberg up: He’s both more intense and freer than he’s been in years.
  53. Archaeology of a Woman
    Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman is a decidedly well-made, unnerving film.
  54. 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.
  55. Dirty Grandpa
    Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity.
  56. Far From Men
    Its plotting is often a tad too plodding, but with the charismatic Mortensen exuding understated internal crisis (in a French- and Arabic-speaking role), Oelhoffen's film proves a compelling portrait of individuals striving to cope with, and at least somewhat overcome, cultural dislocation.
  57. Goodnight Mommy
    Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.
  58. The Keeping Room
    The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.
  59. Pawn Sacrifice
    Pawn Sacrifice clicks along with crisp efficiency. Zwick, the director behind movies like Glory and Blood Diamond, is old-school in his attention to craftsmanship, alive to telling details.
  60. 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.
  61. Playing It Cool
    Proving that its chosen genre is best when its tropes are treated with a balance of sincere sweetness and wink-wink absurdity, Playing It Cool thrives through sheer liveliness, as well as the chemistry of its perfectly paired stars.
  62. 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.
  63. Fort Bliss
    [Michelle Monaghan's] at her best as Army medic/staff sergeant Maggie Swann in writer-director Claudia Myers's Fort Bliss.
  64. All You Need Is Love
    The documentary All You Need Is Love does a nice job of showing how, when it comes to children's lives, the ordinary is inescapable, even in extraordinary circumstances.
  65. Deadpool
    Deadpool might even stand as one of the strongest and most inventive films of the high-early-late superhero baroque — if we could just turn off its built-in commentary track.
  66. Kong: Skull Island
    In the struggle between sober subtext and monster-movie goofiness, the goofiness mostly wins out.
  67. 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.
  68. Advanced Style
    Ultimately, Advanced Style presents these women not as objects of curiosity, but as what they truly are: role models.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. Diplomacy
    Arestrup and Dussollier originated these roles on stage, but Schlöndorff (who directed the Hoffman/Malkovich Death of a Salesman) gives it the immediacy of a life-and-death encounter.
  73. Life Partners
    Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz's script captures the girls' relationship in fine detail.
  74. #Stuck
    Acher adroitly juggles all the gimmickry, using it to comment on Holly and Guy's burgeoning relationship.
  75. Summer of Blood
    Any 30 minutes of Summer of Blood might have me in hysterics. But the sputtering torrent of Eric's yakking proves wearying over 90: Dude's built for speed-dating.
  76. Life Inside Out
    Strong, understated performances from Baird and O'Connell bring real intimacy to their characters' sometimes-strained mother-son dynamic.
  77. Pelican Dreams
    The most effective part of Irving's film is how deftly she captures the pelicans' clear anxieties, curiosities, and joys.
  78. The Last Witch Hunter
    The story works out like you might expect. The joys are in the way director Breck Eisner, like Diesel, is earnest about this goofiness. His direction might not showcase the full wit of the script, but it does honor its inventiveness.
  79. Suicide Squad
    David Ayer's film may not always work, but when it does, it's a perverse delight.
  80. 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.
  81. Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show
    Unstudied to the point of utilitarianism, the film nonetheless has wide scope, and Doyle effectively gets his arms around this huge, nebulous, weird job.
  82. Warsaw Uprising
    Despite its context in a global conflict, Uprising is a strangely intimate film.
  83. True Son
    With sharper on-the-ground footage, True Son might have been as sharp a doc as it is inspiring a story.
  84. Avengers: Infinity War
    The Russos and the hundreds of craftspeople who worked on this film have dreamed up marvelous battles — especially the one where a motley assortment of heroes take their cracks at the purportedly unstoppable Thanos. But only once here did an intergalactic vista catch my breath the way a splash page in a Silver Surfer comic might.
  85. Death Metal Angola
    While hardly the first or most accomplished film of its kind, Death Metal Angola's focus on the ability of abrasive music to act as a healing agent builds toward genuine moments of renewal and serenity.
  86. Always Woodstock
    The rom-com elements don't always work, and the conclusion is a bit pat, but Always Woodstock is never less than charming and funny along the way.
  87. Delusions of Guinevere
    Beneath the rom-com pacing and peppy underscoring of a Lifetime movie, Delusions of Guinevere is a surprisingly dark satire of modern celebrity.
  88. Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty
    The film's abrupt ending leaves many crucial questions unanswered, but that weakness doesn't detract from its overall power.
  89. Love Hunter
    Love Hunter probably counts as a musical, the film's a sad, gentle valediction for a young artist’s dream.
  90. Merchants of Doubt
    This material might be familiar to Frontline viewers and magazine readers, but Kenner's telling of the stories proves independently dramatic.
  91. Food Chains
    The film fosters a very human connection to these pickers, whose eloquence comes from their plainspoken arguments, the austerity of their situation, and the modesty of their demands.
  92. Bad Hair
    There’s plenty of prickly tenderness, for both mother and son, at the heart of Bad Hair. All children yearn for things beyond their reach, and if they’re honest about it, adults do too. It’s a feeling you never outgrow.
  93. Late Phases
    The narrative ends up working in a smaller scope than one might expect given the premise of a beast plaguing a community, but the journey getting to the finish is exhilarating all the same.
  94. Predestination
    The Spierigs had the framework for something wonderful here, if only they’d trusted themselves to keep things simple.
  95. Red Knot
    Scott Cohen's Red Knot exhibits such spot-on, heartbreaking honesty about behaviors that tear many couples apart — passive-aggressiveness, career obsession, seeking validation to soothe one's inadequacies — that it's easy to forgive Cohen his metaphorical excesses.
  96. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Sturdy and rudimentary, Magician may be Welles 101, but it's dotted liberally with TV and radio clips of the famously loquacious auteur talking, talking, and doing more talking — and how could anybody with ears and a brain resist that buttery voice, spinning out clause-laden sentences that take more twists and turns than the streets of Venice but always end, somehow, in a place that's ravishingly articulate?
  97. A Small Section of the World
    It can be unsettling, for regular documentary viewers, to take in a film so relentlessly optimistic, communal, and lacking in nostalgia, but those qualities were key to the success of the women of Biolley.
  98. If You Don't, I Will
    While you may be left craving more emotional fireworks than you get, Fillières's intelligent film is accomplished in its portrayal of a marriage in crisis, the union's last gasps rife with poignant exchanges.
  99. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.
  100. Everly
    Everly has the heaving, bloody bosoms of an exploitation flick, yet Hayek gives the character powerful dignity. She's no victim, nor an off-the-shelf "strong woman."
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