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. Solomon Kane
    It is, for a contemporary CGI-fraught fantasy-slash-living-video-game, not at all bad, dotted with moments of Bosch and steady on its storytelling feet.
  2. Headshot
    The awesome shit's awesome; the ponderous is ponderous; and the bloody corpses are arranged as artfully as wedding bouquets.
  3. Looper
    Thrilling in its deft juggling of complex narrative elements, utterly clear in its presentation, and unfolding with what feels like serious moral purpose, Looper still can't help but suggest that its larger ambitions are something of a put-on, a nice thematic polish to set off its interpersonal drama.
  4. Hotel Transylvania
    Although it doesn't worry itself with dialectic complexities, Hotel Transylvania succeeds on the level of entertainment.
  5. House at the End of the Street
    Working from a story by all-around genre specialist Jonathan Mostow, director Mark Tonderai steers the story cleanly around its queasy hairpin turns, perversely toying with one of pop cinema's most cherished clichés: the audience's inculcated desire to side with the underdog.
  6. Tears of Gaza
    This is the very unsterile subject of the film: the unimaginable violence with which families were sundered, to which this film makes you a witness. The cameras linger on the faces of children as they tell their stories, unaffected and open.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    17 Girls
    So what does 17 Girls, the debut feature film from sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, add to the "pregnancy pact" canon? A lot of style, but not much substance.
  8. Head Games
    While Head Games does feature a number of articulate and consistently intelligent talking-head interviews, it's ultimately not a satisfying advocacy documentary.
  9. Backwards
    Subplots are introduced only to be resolved within minutes, characters jettisoned at a moment's notice. Those who can't do, teach; those who settle apparently end up pretty happy.
  10. End of Watch
    As social insight, End of Watch is useless, but as engrossing entertainment, it's irresistible, thanks to Ayer's gift for dialogue, the relentless pacing set by film editor Dody Dorn, and gorgeous performances by Gyllenhaal and Peña.
  11. Switch
    A methodical, occasionally remedial survey of the energy crisis and its possible solutions, Switch fits a subject often treated polemically into a more benign, continuing education mold.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fred Won't Move Out
    Mostly, it captures how old age decimates even the people who don't suffer from it.
  13. My Uncle Rafael
    An insufferable import indebted to "Mrs. Doubtfire" in which a man in prosthetics helps a family cope with, and overcome, divorce.
  14. Doctored
    Sheehan largely omits the voices of skeptics, resulting in a considerable - but possibly overdue - slant in favor of chiropractors.
  15. Blinky & Me
    Tomasz Magierski's lovely and lovingly made portrait of Gross's life and career...
  16. Three Stars
    Hachmeister's understatement results in a narrative plateau somewhere in the last third of the film, and viewers who showed up hungry may become impatient.
  17. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    And yet it still works, so buoyed is the film by its open and honest take on a subject that would have been all too easy to turn into another marketable tragedy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    Chbosky plays this CW serial stuff for maximum earnestness, stressing the teenage tendency to assume that every new thing they're feeling is unprecedented in human history, keeping the tone just-moist-eyed throughout.
  19. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    O'Nan and Weston's rapport is engagingly prickly but their "Shins meets Sesame Street" tunes have a tweeness also found in the director's music montages and lens flares. Only in its even-handed treatment of Alex's fundamentalist-Christian brother (Andrew McCarthy) does the film feel like something less than a corny cornucopia of manchildren-grow-up clichés.
  20. Radio Unnameable
    Now 79, the man with the snow-white ponytail in the radio booth hasn't flagged; as one of Fass's contemporaries says, "He can let someone go on and on and on."
  21. Hellbound?
    To the atheist, the various interpretations might seem as so many angels dancing on the head of a pin, but any admirer of good talk will be impressed by the scholasticism and pulpit-trained oratory here, as well as some choice fighting words: "Evangelicism in America is what the pharisees were to ancient Egypt."
  22. Dredd
    Dredd is proudly degenerate - and it never feels compelled to slow down and explain itself.
  23. Trouble with the Curve
    Here is the irony: Trouble With the Curve embodies all of the values it espouses - it is an old-fashioned, proficient, amiable, and decent movie - but it has no instinct.
  24. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The outsize ideas, creativity, and spirit of this birdlike, unconventional-looking woman - called "my ugly little monster" by her mother, Vreeland resembles John Hurt in a jet-black wig - still dominate a project occasionally lacking the same attributes.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    About Cherry
    Setting out to reassure that certain decisions do not necessarily have fatal consequences for one's sexual morality, though, About Cherry only manages to seem inconsequential.
  26. How to Survive a Plague
    Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."
  27. Resident Evil: Retribution
    Anderson['s] lavish visual imagination is matched to a placeholder idea of character that's almost avant-garde in its generic stylization, dialogue buffed of personality by passing through 10,000 previous movies.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Trouble with the Truth
    There isn't a false note in either the dialogue or the performances. The characters as written and played have such intricate backstories, such complicated mixtures of motive, that their evening grows uniquely, movingly suspenseful.
  29. The Stand Up
    For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.
  30. The Manzanar Fishing Club
    The historical road less traveled - shot in re-enactments that are obviously familiar with the terrain - is beguiling enough.
  31. Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution
    "Beautiful clothes on good-looking people just moving across the stage" to the sounds of Barry White and Al Green. "It was the presence of these African-American models that really animated the stage," notes Harold Koda of the Met's Costume Institute-- a sentiment that fashion historian Barbara Summers expresses more memorably: The crowd was "peeing in their seats because these girls were so fabulous."
  32. Mulberry Child
    A documentary -- based in part on Jian Ping's autobiographical book of the same name -- whose poignancy is lessened by its awkward formal devices.
  33. Liberal Arts
    Still, in the central relationship, the writer-director shows an understanding of human interaction that marks his second feature as a quantum leap beyond his stilted debut, "Happythankyoumoreplease."
  34. I'm Carolyn Parker
    In both "The Agronomist" and here, Demme looks at real people defined by their civic-mindedness and explores their politics biographically.
  35. Francine
    Reveals itself to be a project of few interesting ideas.
  36. Branded
    Branded has ideas, but unfortunately, the ideas are reeking batshit nuts, especially once the cheaply animated "brand" monsters, which might not actually exist, start flying around like Ghostbusters mistakes biting one another. You've been warned.
  37. Arbitrage
    Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere himself, this intricate fiscal thriller takes a dead bead on extreme privilege.
  38. 10 Years
    10 Years is an uncommonly magnanimous project, kind not only to its stumbling characters but also to audiences tired of films pruned of unruly emotions.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Master
    It's a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem.
  40. The Words
    Hoariest of all are the exhortations to make distinctions between "fiction" and "life."
  41. Serving Up Richard
    Glory's inconsistent characterization defeats rather than builds tension, and the tepid soon gives way to the ridiculous.
  42. [REC] 3: Genesis
    Giddy shots of the undead slogging through a decimated party-scape materialize the decadence and instability of upper-crust family life, even as groom and (pregnant) bride prepare to give birth to another generation of the Spanish elite.
  43. Hollywood to Dollywood
    Even at a lean 81 minutes, though, Hollywood to Dollywood occasionally gets tiresome; what it does minute to minute is often less interesting than what it represents.
  44. Girl Model
    The radiant sadness of its two subjects - one a soulfully impassive stripling, one a symmetrical husk - forms the center of Girl Model, and that is enough.
  45. Breathing
    A film of unreconciled impulses, Breathing is by turns vaguely sentimental and cooly detached in a manner that's ultimately more off-putting than it is complementary.
  46. Las Acacias
    Watching this taciturn man grow close to mother and child - close enough that he experiences twinges of jealousy and abandonment toward the end of Las Acacias - is one of the most satisfying spectacles in a movie this year, a time-lapse of emotions rendered perfectly.
  47. The Eye of the Storm
    Narrative unevenness notwithstanding, those hang-ups are given delicious life by a superb Rush, Davis, and Rampling (the latter often confined to a bed and encased in elderly makeup), who prove a regally dysfunctional trio par excellence.
  48. For Ellen
    Dano, with his remarkably guileless meta-teen puss, is thoroughly convincing, which is more than can be said for the film's shameless climactic steal from "Five Easy Pieces."
  49. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Britishly, the movie has a knack for inflating little sap bubbles as if mostly for the joy of popping them.
  50. Hello I Must Be Going
    With a digital sheen exacerbating the aura of slightness, Hello vamps along in its low indie-rom-com key toward a climactic mother-daughter moment not nearly as harrowing as the one in Lynskey's 1994 debut, but moving nonetheless.
  51. Bachelorette
    The trajectory for all four characters is toward acknowledgment of the emptiness their indulgences can't fill. It's kind of heartening that Becky has that all worked out, pretty much, even if the film doesn't quite get there.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Detropia
    The filmmakers pay elegy to the Detroit of the Motown era, with its thriving middle class supported by manufacturing. At the same time, they're honest about the fact that the version of Detroit local partisans yearn for is long gone and most likely not coming back.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Keep the Lights On
    With its naked but never self-indulgent depictions of sex and all manner of addiction, Keep the Lights On is disarmingly, at times exhilaratingly, human.
  54. The Possession
    Bornedal's fondness for punctuating abrupt cuts to black with a solitary piano-key note is so pathological that it soon turns risible.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Bullet Vanishes
    When two charming detectives are sent in to detect stuff, the movie comes to life with their antsy, noose-escaping, quasi-vaudevillian kinetics.
  56. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Flying Swords might not live up to the promise of Detective Dee, Hark's recent comeback, but it does deliver frequently and always when it counts most.
  57. The Day
    Ashley Bell stands out as a Heroic Fighter With a Dark Secret. Harbor only the expectations aroused by a production of WWE Studios and don't get too attached to any hobbits.
  58. The Tall Man
    Once you get through the flaming, Bowser's Castle–like gauntlet of the rest of the story's implausibilities, you end up in a different movie than the one on the creepy poster.
  59. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    If today's youngsters grow up thinking of Christopher Lloyd as the old guy with the bongos from The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, at least they'll be thinking of Christopher Lloyd at all.
  60. The Good Doctor
    The film is anchored and greatly bolstered by Bloom, who delivers a performance of quietly escalating madness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ambassador
    The Ambassador's wrap-up is vague and sudden, and necessarily so: In order for the movie to work, you need to wonder if maybe, at some point, Brügger stopped acting and really became the crooked international asshole he was supposedly just pretending to be. The magic of Brügger's performance is that it earns that suspension of disbelief.
  62. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    A funky, nonfiction tribute to the great avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Ornette upends the staid portrait-of-the-artist formula, and it tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio documentary just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.
  63. Little Birds
    The dialogue is as stock as the characters, and James's visual palette never surpasses the adequate.
  64. For a Good Time, Call...
    Lauren and Katie aren't defined by their attitudes toward men; they're defined by being fu--ing funny and awesome.
  65. Lawless
    The narrative often seems at odds with the director's pictorialism, trudging when it should be striding toward the climax, isolating the performers on their marks when everything depends on taut blood-ties interconnection.
  66. The Apparition
    The Apparition is not a great or even good haunted-house movie, but it does have the advantage of a memorable setting.
  67. Premium Rush
    There is a lot of silly bike-is-life philosophy, including Wilee's personal credo of "Fixed gear, steel frame, no brakes," none of which I can speak to because I don't care a tinker's damn about bikes, but I do have an abiding fondness for compact and coherent action movies, and this is surely one.
  68. Knight Knight
    Making fun of such an inoffensive, amateurish production would be easy and mean, like punching a baby.
  69. Somewhere Between
    Knowlton never delves far enough into her subjects' stories for Somewhere Between to feel more nuanced than, say, a good commercial for international child-adoption services.
  70. Samsara
    The film's imagery is epic and trance-inducing. It's the "guided" part where Samsara stumbles.
  71. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    Even its most interesting human subjects can't compare to the beauty and enigma of the wild horses who, after a life of running free, find themselves forced to two-step and bow to bizarre commands.
  72. The Victim
    It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.
  73. The Revenant
    The Revenant kind of aspires to be a horror-comedy in the vein of "Shaun of the Dead" but keeps tripping on its own misanthropy.
  74. Teddy Bear
    These self-imposed limitations prevent Teddy Bear from having the breadth of a great work, but they give it the coherence of a good tale, simply told.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sleepwalk with Me
    [Rides] a weird tonal line, maybe aiming to split the difference between comedy and terror but coming off as afraid to really go for it on either.
  76. Side by Side
    At its most fascinating, Side by Side examines the idea that changing formats means changing not just the way movies are made but watched, adjusting the essence of what looks and feels "real."
  77. Neighboring Sounds
    A tightening of the two-hour-plus running time might have enhanced the balance between Filho's epic, evocative style and his smaller story about a certain mode of modern life, its lonely confrontations, and the stubborn legacies of the past.
  78. Little White Lies
    Of sole interest is Benoît Magimel's Vincent, who sheepishly confesses a same-sex attraction to one in the cabal; his moments on-screen provide the only break from this slog.
  79. Hit and Run
    That even the criminal class has gone sensitive and finicky eco-conscious has some potential for comedy-or drama, as in Oliver Stone's undervalued Savages-but there's no single detail that might convince a viewer that the characters played by Dax Shepard and Bradley Cooper might ever have been compelled to steal for a living, and this alienates the crime picture from any social context or sense of actual danger, making it essentially a celebrity goof-off.
  80. Sparkle
    The forebear's underwritten melodrama has been supplanted by Tyler Perry–like soap operatics and much jawing about the Lord, riots in the Motor City, marriage proposals, and maternal heartbreak and disapproval.
  81. Why Stop Now
    An unbearable 90-minute trip with a trio of loud, needy egotists.
  82. We Women Warriors
    The director's DV cinematography can be rough and ungainly, but it provides sterling glimpses of both family intimacy and its larger social context.
  83. True Wolf
    Spongy with equanimity and stronger on introspection than exposition, the movie amounts to a crude assembly of sincere testimony, somehow too long at 76 minutes and maybe actually a job for Werner Herzog instead.
  84. This Time
    Tantalizing snippets from their combative history and rotating membership are tossed to the sidelines; the members' personality clashes and mutual psychoanalyzing hint at a much better story left untold.
  85. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    What follows is a film as odd as its title character. Timothy flings grown-up ideas at the viewer but rips the teeth from them rather than risk our discomfort.
  86. The Matchmaker
    An old-fashioned Mediterranean coming-of-age story set in the young heart of the Levant, The Matchmaker combines the tender tone of a film like "Cinema Paradiso" with a clear-eyed, street-level vantage on Israel's summer of the Six-Day War.
  87. The Expendables 2
    Has the parallel between the actor and the mercenary's trade ever been so overt?
  88. The Awakening
    Hall's committed performance validates even the maddest developments, and she slips into the period well, recalling Virginia Woolf in her lank, swan-necked bearing and tremulous suffering.
  89. ParaNorman
    Butler called it "John Carpenter meets John Hughes," and that does just about sum ParaNorman up, though the actual math still feels a little fuzzy.
  90. Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    The whole thing can be hard to follow, but the energy (and pulchritude) of the cast make it a perfectly fine bit of popcorn escapism.
  91. Death by China
    The bulk of the film contains as much hysterical rhetoric as sober analysis.
  92. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    At first, Hoffman appears to be juxtaposing the savoir faire and genuine deprivation of the Depression society with the spoiled, consumption-crazed world we have now, but then he merely lapses into a vague Occupy-ish indictment of the 1 percent and the collapse of community as a cultural foundation.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cosmopolis
    To the extent that Cosmopolis functions as a super-literal conceptual exercise, it's simultaneously irritating and fascinating.
  94. Compliance
    Compliance lets neither men nor women off the hook.
  95. Chicken with Plums
    The evocation of passionate love is palpable, what with Amalric's sad longing and Farahani's Nobel Prize–winning face and everything, and the honest undercurrent of melancholy keeps the whole thing from becoming unmoored.
  96. Beloved
    A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.
  97. Sundowning
    Role reversals, many mirrors, and a lesbian brushstroke indicate someone involved might have recently taken film courses on female melodrama; other thematic red herrings flip-flop, too irritatingly clichéd to recount.
  98. The Lion of Judah
    It is an affecting movie - who cannot be affected by the mountains of discarded eyeglasses and shoes and children being dumped by way of slides into mass graves? - but ultimately, The Lion of Judah is no more essential than the sum of its stock footage.
  99. Supercapitalist
    Even caped do-gooders couldn't save Supercapitalist, a dramatic dud whose title refers not to some big-business hero but rather to wheelers and dealers living lives of swank suits, fast cars, loose women, plentiful drugs, and goofy corporate-espionage spy games.
  100. Almayer's Folly
    One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.
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