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. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Del Toro and Moner say everything that’s needed with pained, bewildered eyes. Meanwhile, Graver speaks with relentless American cynicism. He is both funny and unnerving, and maybe more unnerving because he’s being funny.
  2. The Karate Kid
    There is the impression, deadly to the sense of fun, that the talent here actually thought they were remaking a classic.
  3. An Amazing Couple
    At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]
  4. 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.
  5. Emmanuel's Gift
    This feel-good profile barely touches on the political and cultural ramifications of Emmanuel's work. Narration by Oprah increases the aura of a civics lesson.
  6. Come Undone
    This self-consciously modern movie contains classical pleasures.
  7. Question One
    Curiously, the most sympathetic figure in Question One might be the co-chairman of the "Yes on 1" campaign. He knows he's on the wrong side of history and is miserable about being ordered by his diocese to fight this horrible fight, but he lacks the courage to say no to them.
  8. Morlang
    Penning's film applies too much force behind its hairpin turns, but broad scripting and acting are counterbalanced by crisp photography, shivery sound design, and well-chosen debts.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Murph: The Protector
    Such an uncomplicated portrait may be faithful to Murphy...Yet, no matter its veracity, that veneration is the only point conveyed throughout, and in cinematic terms, it renders Murph: The Protector a one-note hagiography, no matter how convincing and affecting its portrait of unimpeachable courage.
  10. Butter on the Latch
    There are no jump-scares in this sensuous thriller, and the lack of anything corporeal on which to focus our unease only makes Butter on the Latch more darkly exhilarating.
  11. Past Life
    Past Life does add up to more than the sum of its heavy-handed miscalculations.
  12. Footnotes
    Though it’s not without charming moments, this story of women standing up to the big bad guys is diminished by unimpressive song-and-dance numbers that feel like Michel Legrand throwaways.
  13. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    Those more devoted to the genre can debate whether Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman is the best comic-book movie of the last few years. What's beyond argument, however, is that Vaughn has whipped up the most interesting one, the only to make ferocious, unsettling art out of the great contradiction of superheroic fantasy: jolly do-goodism and its brutalizing sadism.
  14. Otelo Burning
    Tiresomely simple, the film introduces a subplot involving betrayal and political informants in the eleventh hour, but by then you're either smitten by these guileless Zulu lads experiencing "freedom" on the waves or you've checked out.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Watermelon Man
    The method of this film, however, in both its cutting and mise-en-scene ultimately denies any social relevance by creating a limbo surrounding the fantastic characters so that the film loses all sense of reality in both its characters and settings. [16 Jul 1970, p.50]
    • Village Voice
  16. Funny People
    There's so much that's so disarmingly good and sharp about Funny People that you wish the whole movie weren't so much of a shambles.
  17. The Light Between Oceans
    The sense of authenticity that marks The Light Between Oceans at its best has everything to do with the acting — and if all Cianfrance ever gives us is that, it's worth the price of his lagging third act.
  18. Videocracy
    Videocracy is hopelessly infected with the very prurience it means to expose--again and again, Gandini returns to images of pretty women grinding away for the camera in hopes of scoring their 15 minutes.
  19. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.
  20. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    The movie — based on Les Standiford’s novel — is pleasantly simpleminded, often assembled from parts of other movies.
  21. Good Neighbors
    A murder close to home freaks Louise out, but it's a pointed cat poisoning that sends her, and Good Neighbors, over the edge. Tierney offers what preparations he can for the offbeat darkness to come - faint organ chords and a focus on his character's idiosyncrasies build a sense of dread - but at least one part of the perfect, triple-crossing crime that plays out is so black you may want to wear shades.
  22. Like Me
    Timlin so fully embodies the role of the sociopathic Kiya that this often-gruesome buffet of wild imagery bathed in hot pink impresses even with a thin, nearly nonexistent story. And Mockler’s and Jessalyn Abbott’s artfully chaotic editing style...elevates Like Me to video art.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultimate X: The Movie
    Nausea-inducing street luge provides the requisite kinesthetic thrill of this mega-cinematic genre.
  24. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Dull, if not devoid of wit, this shaggy dog longs to frisk through the back alleys of history, but scarcely manages more than a modest, snoozy charm.
  25. Pandaemonium
    The exposition is thick, the characterization choppy, the wigs terrible.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tab Hunter Confidential
    The movie follows Hunter's life after leaving the Warners, the bad movies and years on the dinner-theater circuit. And it reveals something stronger: the quiet refusal, beneath Hunter's affable, casual manner, to be anything less than he is, neither the "sigh guy" nor a convenient symbol of gay pride.
  27. Walking Tall
    Like it or not, Walking tall is saying something very important to many people, and it is saying it with accomplished artistry. [21 Feb 1974, p.61]
    • Village Voice
  28. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    Like the first two Millennium movies, this final installment feels thoughtlessly put together, its script unpruned and rushed through, all to capitalize on the staggering worldwide popularity of its dead author.
  29. What We Become
    Undead fare has to break new ground to stand out from the ravenous crowd, something What We Become never attempts. What might have been the best zombie movie of 2004 can't help looking a little sickly in 2016.
  30. Following
    Following is modest and engaging, but in being strenuously clever, it surrenders any dibs it might have on being relevant, or original.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    Resurrect Dead works splendidly as a threadbare urban mystery, teasing out details and complications without withholding too much information.
  32. The Commune
    The glue that should turn these individual moments into something resembling a unified cinematic experience just isn’t there. The Commune feels like fragments of a far more interesting film, haphazardly stitched together.
  33. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Modelworks
    Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.
  34. Cleopatra
    It is not even bad enough to be perversely amusing. Liz's first entrance is grotesque enough to prepare us for that high point of self-parody when she asks Julius Caesar (Rex Harrison) if he smells anything burning as the library of Alexandria goes up in smpke, but there are not enough of these pungent moments to relieve the soul-destroying tedium of little people lost on big sets in the most expensive session of hide-and-seek ever to masquerade as a movie. [20 June 1963, p.13]
    • Village Voice
  35. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    May be one of the wisest studies of urban loneliness since Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty."
  36. SPECTRE
    In the end, Spectre is just too much of a good thing. Though each scene is carefully wrought, there's little grace, majesty, or romance in the way the pieces are connected. The whole is bumpy and inelegant — entertaining for sure, but hard to love.
  37. Femme Fatale
    A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.
  38. Quality of Life
    Establishes a strong sense of milieu in these street scenes, and while the movie's not without its flaws--much of the dialogue is colorless and Lisa seems a bit too together to be hanging out with Curtis--it's never less than credible.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    Neel is a compelling subject, but she's more alive in one of her paintings than in all of the voluminous video footage her grandson thrusts upon us.
  40. Radiant City
    Enlightening and disturbingly funny.
  41. Asphalt Zahov
    Dryly cynical; the scenarios pit plump, amoral, industrialized Jews against draconian, wife-beating, tribal Arabs.
  42. Luminous Motion
    If Lloyd's performance is the film's near-fatal flaw, Unger's is its saving grace.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Schechter has a broad sub-Chomskian critique of the media's complicity in building support for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lustre
    The film is marred by a reliance on cheap DV effects, but authenticity strains through in the performances.
  46. Headshot
    The awesome shit's awesome; the ponderous is ponderous; and the bloody corpses are arranged as artfully as wedding bouquets.
  47. Iraqi Odyssey
    Heartrending throughout, Iraqi Odyssey is everything you want in a documentary — informative, involving, and eager to decipher complex, often paradoxical historical conundrums. Everything, that is, except visually interesting.
  48. Ghostbusters
    There is an easy camaraderie and chemistry among the central quartet, a harmony that continues when Chris Hemsworth, charmingly stupid, enters as the phantom-vanquishing squad's receptionist. Yet the main performers rarely get to display their individual idiosyncratic strengths.
  49. Them
    The characters in Them are paper-thin: They're mere props to be manipulated by co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud, who want nothing more than to scare you sh--less in what, with its nonstop chase sequences and booby traps, often comes off as a live-action video game.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sheriff
    There's so little meat to his likable subject that the endeavor proves less "Cops" and more "The Andy Griffith Show."
  51. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    When isn't it a good time to show a movie tracing the development of a kind, charismatic yellow Labrador retriever from frolicsome puppy to devoted seeing-eye companion to weary senior?
  52. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Rigorous and outrageous, Greenaway's defiant approach to narrative only offers insight into his character, not Eisenstein's.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Our Idiot Brother
    Its roundelay of shallow types (played by beautiful movie stars) treating one another badly, and having whiny conversations about said treatment, is such a whisper-soft version of social critique that it makes the autobiographical films of Nicole Holofcener (Please Give, Friends With Money) look as cutting as the films of Jean Eustache.
  54. +1
    Director Dennis Iliadis doesn't overdwell on the existentialism of the concept; he lets emotional beats strobe against the WTF experience of the temporal doubles, peppering the action with distinct images and events to make the repetition stand out.
  55. 9
    The result is never as gripping in narrative terms--a well-worn litany of dystopian-future chestnuts--as it is visually.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Where Do We Go Now?
    Like the hashish-laced pastries the ladies make to sedate the male population, the film feels like it has been dosed with sugar to mask its distressingly bitter taste.
  57. The Guys
    Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.
  58. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Carrera's filmmaking is more workmanlike than stylish, but Padre Amaro is richly character driven and, for all its insolent, grotesque humor, straightforwardly humanist in its psychology.
  59. Overnight
    Grim going.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eat This New York
    Though the filmmakers had a great time following the Manhattan restaurateurs around, they abandoned the untidy Brooklyn story before the inevitable downward spiral that might have been our payoff as filmgoers.
  61. The Cake Eaters
    There's no kind of wonderful in Mary Stuart Masterson's directorial debut, yet however slight her ensemble drama--about two distressed families in the Rockwellian framings of time-forgotten rural America--maybe, it's at least convincing in its genuine sweetness.
  62. Kill the Messenger
    It doesn't entirely engage, in part because it's so determined to correct the story that it can't let us explore it ourselves.
  63. Good Ol' Freda
    Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeff Who Lives at Home
    Jeff is a surprisingly mutable, ultimately poignant day-in-the-life drama about a slacker who genuinely wants to stand tall.
  65. Breathe In
    Drake Doremus's Breathe In is a star-crossed romance where your enjoyment level will depend on your tolerance for what feels an awful lot like potential statutory rape.
  66. Actor Martinez
    Whether the real-life Martinez is this hotheaded and quick-tempered is left a mystery, but it matters not a whit, because even five minutes in the company of this Martinez is excruciating.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Rebels
    At least as sharp as "Buena Vista Social Club."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
    Settles for a stilted design and mode of performance that suggests a bloodless screen adaptation of Edward Gorey illustrations.
  69. Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story
    An illuminating history lesson about the Kentucky metropolis's artistic vision and philharmonic orchestra.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Big Bad Mama
    Big Bad Mama is essentially a soft-core porno movie without the courage of Russ Meyer. [02 Dec 1974, p.90]
    • Village Voice
  71. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Uncompromising in its way, the film's portrait of codependent compulsion is so organically conceived, you start to smell the sulfur of traumatized childhood, no exposition needed.
  72. Daybreak
    A studied, overwrought look into Personal Crisis and Redemption.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Casino
    This authoritative, far-reaching documentary by veteran investigative journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn comes off as curiously bloodless.
  74. Sweet Bean
    At first the stakes are as light yet rich as Sentaro's pancakes; then come marvelous cine-essays on bean-soaking and paste-prepping, plus — in the film's tragedy-tinged final third — a change-of-seasons montage for the ages.
  75. Burn Country
    The movie — at first scrappy and strange but an increasingly tough sit as it goes — never fixes its gaze on any singularly compelling idea.
  76. Trumbo
    The film fails as a portrait, and it's not much better at drama.
  77. Everybody's Famous!
    Too brisk and plucky to dislike.
  78. The Importance of Being Earnest
    Tonally, however, Earnest boasts perfect pitch, thanks mainly to the blithe, nimble actors.
  79. Together
    Mawkishly clichéd as it is, Together is an odder hybrid than it first appears -- at once populist and deeply cynical about the price of popularity.
  80. Reconstruction
    That Reconstruction is even remotely involving is due to the quality of its acting.
  81. Signs & Wonders
    Pretension looms, and for many the web of symbolism will be too thick. But Rampling, to her credit, helps hold the nuthouse together.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clearing
    Kidnapping movies invariably crescendo to a fever pitch of procedural complexity. At a terse 91 minutes, The Clearing offers the reverse, a movie that only grows more conceptually minimal as the clock ticks down.
  83. Massoud, the Afghan
    It's not the least of Afghan tragedies that this noble warlord would be consigned to the dustbin of history.
  84. Oranges and Sunshine
    At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.
  85. The Last Five Years
    From moment to moment, this Last Five Years is a robust entertainment, often stirring, sad, and funny.
  86. Any Day Now
    Straining for "teachable moments," the film has one noteworthy, unintentional function: to remind us that though LGBT rights are continually evolving, the laws of kitsch remain immutable.
  87. The Exception
    Whenever Plummer is onscreen, The Exception is scintillating entertainment. Unfortunately, it gets bogged down.
  88. Fightville
    The language of ground-and-pound fighting remains untranslated for those not fluent in MMA, though ample space is given to the men's discussion of their individual warrior philosophies, illustrated with quotes from Nietzsche, P.T. Barnum, and Virgil.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caroline and Jackie
    Clark lures you into the chaos through beautiful visuals like the sparkly evening lights of an L.A. dinner party, and the night's principal characters, two attractive brunette sisters...Both irritate. That's the gist and charm of this family's dynamic, which is so real that at times it's unbearable.
  90. Allied
    Allied doesn’t deliver any particularly shocking twists or turns; the real surprise here is how much a well-told, well-acted tale can still resonate.
    • 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.
  92. Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    This gripping documentary about unleavened bread and the people who need it asks us to consider what we in the world owe one another — and demands that we do better.
  93. Fugitive Pieces
    Fugitive Pieces is a cerebral excavation into history, written in lush cadences meant to be read or recited. It may be unfilmable, and in pursuit of sensitivity, Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa hollows out the novel's urgency in favor of a vaguely spiritual morbidity.
  94. Dredd
    Dredd is proudly degenerate - and it never feels compelled to slow down and explain itself.
  95. A Sidewalk Astronomer
    An unenlightening recitation of lay science and salad bar spirituality that could only resonate with those audiences who last year actually flocked to a movie called "What the Bleep Do We Know!?"
  96. The Adjustment Bureau
    The so-called Plan is derailed!
  97. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    A film whose sense of urgency and purpose is utterly engrossing.
  98. C.O.G.
    What was very funny in print becomes serious and occasionally dour onscreen, with fewer laughs than you would expect from a Sedaris project.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The White Countess
    Alas, The White Countess, the final Merchant Ivory film, is something of a lacquered dud.
  100. American Teacher
    What's made powerfully clear is that we've reached a dire point of crisis that, while largely rooted in economics, is about so much more than dollars and cents.
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