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. Expelled
    Expelled isn't going to change the world, but it's a fun and promising debut film.
  2. The Great Wall
    As pure spectacle, The Great Wall is absolutely dazzling. It may be a studio release, but the constant sense of invention, the go-for-broke intricacy of its battle scenes, feels very much of a piece with Chinese action fantasy flicks.
  3. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain may not always be as grand as it should be, but its thrills compensate for its shortcomings.
  4. Kill Me Three Times
    The flick, written by debut screenwriter James McFarland, is twisty, clever, and totally Nineties.
  5. Star Trek Beyond
    Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams–ified Trek era. That is to say, it's the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do.
  6. It's All So Quiet
    The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.
  7. The Mountain Between Us
    Despite some frightening (and effective) scenes of slippery slopes and aggravated wildlife, the film’s heart lies in watching these characters discover in themselves and each other the will to press on.
  8. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The film itself is solidly and conventionally crafted. Newsreels and stock footage alternate with fresh interviews with friends and scholars, steadfast supporters and unabashed detractors. The political life it maps out fascinates.
  9. La Última Película
    Martin and Peranson, a savvy pair, appreciate their outsider status here, and they remain uncommonly sensitive to even the subtlest ways that ignorance and entitlement may manifest themselves — both in art and in our relationship to it.
  10. Testament of Youth
    Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), simultaneously poignant and powerful as Vera Brittain, the writer who fought her way into Oxford then chucked that to go to the front as a nurse, gives another indelible performance.
  11. Gangs of Wasseypur
    The killing is bloody, the power struggles involving, the history-class examinations of the relations between mines and unions and gangsters fascinating, and the tough-guy routines, while sometimes tiresome, never less than credible.
  12. Salvation Army
    Despite stilted camerawork often locked in the medium shot, Salvation Army is a touching ode to the freedom to finally be who we want to be — if we can ever find where we belong.
  13. All the Wilderness
    In spite of the tatty "coming of age" familiarity, Johnson's vision seems fresh and vibrant.
  14. A Girl Like Her
    A Girl Like Her focuses on the characters' emotional traumas while eschewing moral panic about how Kids These Days are so wrapped up in their phones and the internet.
  15. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    Josue tries to reclaim his narrative with this intimate, positive portrait, but while Shepard's brave and resourceful parents encourage her, they realized long ago that his death means he no longer belongs solely to them.
  16. James White
    When James White really digs in, it's an affecting portrait of grief and of feeling lost in life.
  17. Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of
    Show 'Em What You're Made Of convincingly argues that these boy-men have something to say about the fickleness of fate — something they knew more about as young men than any of the cynics who dismissed them for dancing in unison. The hardest part will be convincing people to listen.
  18. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    It’s so carefully designed to feel laid-back that its breeziness comes off like a calculation; its emotional pull is sometimes irresistible, which may make you want to resist it all the more. But the movie has flashes of wit and originality and feeling.
  19. Nasty Baby
    Nasty Baby isn't satisfying. But on Silva's terms, it makes sense.
  20. The Overnight
    Though an accomplished farce, The Overnight is most interesting when confronting its genuine emotional stakes.
  21. Results
    While the polish of good-looking Hollywood types shot in clean, well-lit spaces doesn’t quite connect with Bujalski’s writing style, the film's tone is honestly unorthodox, a quality missing from most mid-budget comedies.
  22. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    Even simply sticking to the facts, the film is a painful watch.
  23. Digging for Fire
    Digging for Fire affably drifts by, bolstered by some strong set pieces.
  24. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    Augmenting his talking heads with animation and inspired stock footage, Gibney dignifies Hubbard with the capacity to conjure feelings of connection and magnificence, never losing sight of what brings people into the fold, which makes their attempts to escape it all the more harrowing. Still, the richness of detail of Wright's book is lost.
  25. I Smile Back
    Silverman has taken serious, or at least semi-serious, roles before, but she's never had a part that demanded so much of her. She has been open about her own battles with depression, but what makes her turn here work is that it isn't nakedly expressive.
  26. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    While its unconventional approach eventually becomes a tad wearisome, Morgen’s film proves a uniquely revealing exploration of the development, and eventual disintegration, of the heart and mind (and spirit) of a musician incapable of finding solace in, or transcendence through, his angst.
  27. Misery Loves Comedy
    Misery Loves Comedy reveals artists adept at sounding out the darkest depths of our lives — and then transmuting what they find to laughter, a gift I bet sad young poets might ache for.
  28. The Summer of Sangaile
    Lesbian coming-of-age tales can be sensationalistic and leering, but this film (directed by a woman, Alanté Kavaïté) casts a sensitive eye on the understated story of Sangaile (Julija Steponaityté), a shy, troubled girl who begins a relationship with the more ebullient Auste (Aisté Dirziuté).
  29. Ten Thousand Saints
    The movie has a lilting, generous spirit: Springer Berman and Pulcini, the filmmaking team behind the 2003 American Splendor, have a feel for human eccentricities and weaknesses, and they know how to draw the best from their casts.
  30. October Gale
    The performances in October Gale subvert genre expectations: Clarkson displays toughness and resolve without turning into Liam Neeson, and the distressed Speedman is as vulnerable as he is determined.
  31. Wild Canaries
    The story Levine spins out of this premise has a rambunctious, woolly quality, though in the end there may be too many stringy loose ends for him to weave in properly. Still, Wild Canaries has its quiet charms.
  32. Fresh Dressed
    Fashion is about that clash between commercialism and individuality — how can I stand out while fitting in? — and Sacha Jenkins's streetwear doc Fresh Dressed nods its Kangol hat to that irony.
  33. Two Men in Town
    Blethyn is wonderful as an all-too-rare character, a middle-aged woman who holds her own in a position of authority over violent men.
  34. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Fans will clamor for Wyrmwood 2; the brothers have the talent to aim higher.
  35. Welcome to Me
    This spiky, pushy, sometimes upsetting comedy finds Wiig creating something whole and alive out of her apparent contradictions.
  36. Cut Bank
    Without his usual tics, Malkovich is a wonder, quietly transforming an unassuming town fixture into Cut Bank's conscience. But the revelatory performance is Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) as Derby Milton.
  37. Kung Fu Elliot
    Documentary character study Kung Fu Elliot starts off as a cringe-humor portrait of a delusional would-be action star, but gradually transforms into a thoughtful examination of its title character's naïveté.
  38. Spring
    The suspense and pleasure of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's talking-and-tentacles horror romance Spring lies in discovering what shape the film is going to take.
  39. Snowden
    Stone seems genuinely interested in the slow and steady process by which Edward Snowden came to distrust the government that he worked for, and the director has made a slow and steady movie to go with it.
  40. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Even in its longueurs Young Bodies yields beauty and surprise, and there are inklings of some grand conception, even among scenes that feel haphazardly chosen.
  41. Alex of Venice
    Messina, making his directorial debut, keeps it simple. Alex undergoes a surprising amount of personal maturation in a week, but Winstead never lets the character bog down in excessive navel-gazing.
  42. Bluebird
    For all its piteousness, [it's] often moving, always well acted, and distinguished by rare stillness and beauty.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Widowmaker
    The Widowmaker is important and terrifying, enough that I became nervously aware of my heartbeat throughout.
  44. La Sapienza
    A picture that balances heart and mind with nuance.
  45. Cupcakes
    This musical comedy is sugary and sincere.
  46. Avenged
    Avenged is an action-horror mash-up that's very silly, quite gruesome, and a whole lot of fun.
  47. An Honest Liar
    The film's heart, like Randi's, is in the penetration of illusion, rather than its manufacture.
  48. Hyena
    The film's convoluted moral trajectory to hell may be as unoriginal as quoting Taxi Driver, and the pervasive violent menace can be needlessly punishing (including a drugged sexual assault), but as stylish, scorched-earth entertainment, it'll get you in its teeth.
  49. 3 Hearts
    The film is so unabashed in showing the place of passion in a bourgeois world, how a missed connection can screw up a life forever, that plot implausibilities are forgiven.
  50. Tangerines
    Interior scenes focus theater-like on the dining room table-as-vortex: Threats and insults whip about, but, finally, so do forays of friendship.
  51. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence won’t blow you out of the theater, but you might be surprised at how well it works — how genuinely funny it is — given the familiarity of this concept.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man Up
    Pegg's comic chops elevate even the most juvenile of jokes, but it's Bell's daring and impolite performance that steals the show.
  53. The Founder
    The Founder slowly reveals itself as a don't-let-the-devil-into-your-house parable, one that uses all the techniques of inspirational moviemaking to disguise that devil's intentions, even from the devil himself.
  54. Félix And Meira
    The restrained performances of Dubreuil and Yaron (Fill the Void) gradually reveal the flaws and strengths of this fragile couple, while Twersky is quietly devastating as an abandoned husband who fully understands devotion and sacrifice.
  55. Candlestick
    Presswell's stylized dialogue, whose rapid-fire banter often hardens into self-conscious artifice, is biting and witty, but is thankfully absent either endless pop-culture references or cloying self-consciousness of its own cleverness.
  56. The Hand That Feeds
    López is a singularly tender, compelling, and articulate campaigner in this high-stakes struggle for justice, filmed with the urgency and suspense of a Hitchcock thriller.
  57. The Forecaster
    The story of espionage and duplicity that financial adviser Martin Armstrong relates in Marcus Vetter's documentary The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel.
  58. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    Informative and workmanlike, Antarctic Edge is more a bad-news rundown than one of the meditative masterpieces of the genre
  59. In Country
    O'Hara and Attie never judge the players, letting their words and actions speak, though those actions are often intercut with footage from the real war.
  60. In the Courtyard
    Thoroughly nonjudgmental in its observations, Pierre Salvadori's In the Courtyard ranks as one of the funnier films about victims of depression and mental illness.
  61. Song from the Forest
    Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian... But Obert also slips in powerful critiques of Sarno with the lightest of touches — some so light they might be accidental.
  62. Bravetown
    Aside from a showy opening (a tracking shot that snakes through a club, cribbing freely from Carlito's Way, Boogie Nights, etc.), the movie satisfies mainly due to its affecting ensemble and considerable emotional intelligence.
  63. Below Dreams
    As the waves of this cinematic dream break, the profundities left behind come not from character arcs, but observed states of being that feel subjectively experienced.
  64. The Final Girls
    The heart of this mostly bloodless picture is Max's relationship with her mother's film character, and there are some genuinely touching moments about grieving and the acceptance of loss.
  65. 10,000 km
    It's ultra-serious, confined almost entirely indoors, and, with its Facebook pages and Google Maps walk-throughs, inextricably tied to the way we live right now. It's also well crafted and strikingly intimate.
  66. All Things Must Pass
    The director's native warmth and sympathy are extended here to the store and the personalities that made it a billion-dollar, globe-bestriding colossus.
  67. Roar
    Roar is a thrilling bore, an inanity with actual peril in every scene.
  68. The Secret Life of Pets
    The Secret Life of Pets is an ADD-addled mess of a movie — and that, amazingly, is its charm.
  69. The Great Museum
    Holzhausen is respectful but not reverential, portraying the museum as a living thing that's being cared for with meticulous diligence.
  70. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The LEGO Batman Movie is entertaining, but it also sometimes feels less like a spin-off of The LEGO Movie and more like one of its targets.
  71. Because I Was a Painter
    Cognet's work is more devoted to thought about aesthetics than aesthetics themselves. His modest film represents a break from the rigorous historical work typically associated with documentaries about the Holocaust, and its open-ended nature is a fitting analogue to ongoing questions about testimony and healing.
  72. Marie's Story
    To play Marie today, Améris found the non-actor Ariana Rivoire at the Institute for the Deaf. And Rivoire is a revelation — showing what it's like to be in, and then break out of, a world of total darkness and silence.
  73. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    I like what I Am Big Bird is trying to do — I just wish it were a little less Bird-nice, and a little more Grouch-frank.
  74. Noble
    The movie works because Christina's desire to help these kids feels natural, and because she herself shoulders burdens that would drive most people to the grave, all without losing her faith.
  75. Animals
    Schiffli and Dastmalchian deliver a sweet, elegiac concluding moment that offers a measure of hope without making a lot of unbelievable promises.
  76. Maya the Bee Movie
    Maya the Bee Movie does what it does very well, moving along at a brisk pace and with a strong underlying message for its young audience.
  77. Irrational Man
    It works better than most of Allen's recent films because it's a trifle without pretense, and because the director's finally smartened up — a little — right when everyone's written him off.
  78. Anesthesia
    Anesthesia doesn't cast judgment. Instead, Nelson slowly reveals awful things about his characters after we've decided to like them. I admire the film's vigor, even if at times it feels like a cruel, clumsy trick.
  79. La La Land
    La La Land...reaches for the stars, doesn't quite grab them all, and then is still kind of OK in the end.
  80. Barely Lethal
    Barely Lethal's combination of bawdy humor and earnest affection for its high-school-aged protagonists is surprisingly well-balanced.
  81. Legend
    Legend reminds us how easily a pretty star can get us to feel for people we'd deplore in real life — a monster's a monster, no matter how big its heart or soulful its strut.
  82. The Nightmare
    Ascher sometimes indulges in jump scares, and there's one unconvincing burst of gore. At first, these horror techniques seemed to me a mistake, but his subjects themselves continually link their experiences to movies they've seen, especially Communion and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
  83. The Farewell Party
    [Depicts] the end of life not as an isolated horror (as in Michael Haneke's Amour) or as the contested site of legal and political factions, but as a complex social phase, its wobbly moral scale hinging on empathy.
  84. Into the Grizzly Maze
    What keeps Maze humming is Hackl's firm sense of narrative tension. He knows character and dialogue are icing in films like this, so it's taut pacing, editing, and sound design that are crucial. (The actors are all fine, playing everything straight, sans irony.) The final showdown is ludicrous and thrilling -- as it should be.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    (Dis)Honesty, a documentary by Yael Melamede about why we lie, shows the extent to which we fib (almost everybody does, it turns out, across nations and gender and social class). Perhaps most interestingly, (Dis)Honesty shows us how we rationalize that mendacity.
  86. Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk is an odd duck, a bowlegged western with slasher influences, a penchant for lengthy conversational meanderings, and a genuine interest in character.
  87. Love at First Fight
    Rejuvenating the romantic comedy through its unusual premise — in which training for an elite army unit releases a flood of pheromones — Cailley's film is also buoyed by its enormously appealing leads, Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.
  88. Something Better to Come
    Perhaps even more disturbing than the Dickensian in extremis ordeal of Svalka life — including her rational yet heartbreaking decision to give up her baby rather than raise it in the dump — is Yula's straightforward acceptance of her situation.
  89. A Perfect Day
    A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.
  90. What We Did on Our Holiday
    Jones and Connolly have terrific chemistry, particularly as Lottie works through the fact that adults encourage dishonesty and lying when it suits their own needs, and that secrets are more pervasive than openness.
  91. The Little Prince
    There’s a lot of charm, thought, and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.
  92. Yakuza Apocalypse
    If you can get on its wacko wavelength, it's a uniquely crazed, compelling midnight-movie whatsit.
  93. Land and Shade
    You might not want to live here, but the imagery makes for a nice postcard.
  94. Charlie's Country
    Whether laughing, crying, mumbling to himself, or projecting a valiant stoicism, Gulpilil — beneath a white beard and a blanket of shaggy hair — commands the screen in close-ups liable to run for minutes at a time.
  95. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men visit rural Uganda, Canadian oil fields, Zuccotti Park, and a climate change conference in Copenhagen, but in its best moments this loopy yet informative doc becomes a buddy movie.
  96. Runoff
    Kimberly Levin's Runoff deals with an old-as-time moral quandary — how far will you go to protect your family? — but the movie achieves an understated resonance through Levin's emotionally sensitive compositions and her clued-in portrayal of life in a middle-American farming community.
  97. Glass Chin
    Writer-director Noah Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man.
  98. Do I Sound Gay?
    Thorpe offers charming, intimate glimpses of his life, including memorable chats with friends and experts, and he's adept at drawing winning quotes from interview subjects — one of the most moving moments comes from George Takei.
  99. Rubble Kings
    Rubble Kings, an impassioned examination of New York's gang culture of the late 1970s, isn't just a fascinating piece of urban history. It's also a challenge to common assumptions about that culture, and a testament to the power of organization within a community.
  100. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    Silver's empathy often produces moments of emotional catharsis.
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