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. Truth
    Truth is hammier than Easter brunch, but its depictions of rejection transfiguring into violence are always affecting and distressing.
  2. Trainwreck
    Schumer, writing and performing a character close to the one she’s been presenting to the public, may never be this funny again, but funny she is.
  3. Maps to the Stars
    The fact that Cronenberg directed almost works against Maps to the Stars: We expect greatness from him, not just proficiency, and he doesn't exactly have a gift for comedy, not even the black kind. But the movie still has the darkly glittering Cronenberg touch, even if it's just a light brushing.
  4. She's Funny That Way
    There are some modest pleasures to be mined from Peter Bogdanovich's romantic caper She's Funny That Way, which at least strives for buoyancy.
  5. Love & Air Sex
    What's remarkable is that despite the sweaty overdetermination of the film's dude-bro interactions and the whole prefabricated concept of performance air sex, the love story has actual depth and sadness.
  6. The Longest Ride
    A good romance can make us endure an implausible plot as long as the leads have heat. Luke and Sophia's connection feels true. Who cares about the mechanics? By the time The Longest Ride runs right off a cliff, we're already strapped in to the passenger seat. Give in and enjoy the plunge.
  7. Life After Beth
    It's not quite as crazy as it needs to be: There's something listless about Life After Beth — it starts out as a reflection on the potentially morbid nature of grief and then doesn't seem to know where to go.
  8. Wish I Was Here
    Wish I Was Here is at least stretching toward something, and even if its reach exceeds its grasp, Braff's earnest determination as a filmmaker and performer helps smooth out some of the awkward bumps.
  9. Omar
    The movie is so brisk, even-handed, and realpolitik you're never quite sure if it has anything to say.
  10. Dinosaur 13
    Unfortunately, Dinosaur 13 never manages to display the story's many complex parts in a way that enables viewers to grasp the whole beast.
  11. Finding Fela!
    Once it gets going, it's fine, a somewhat scattered précis of the life and accomplishment of one of the 20th century's towering musicians, activists, and curiosities.
  12. I Origins
    The story proceeds with all the flighty unreality of a film unconcerned with real-world scientific rigor... but Cahill manufactures enough conspiracies, coincidences, and extraordinary turns of plot to keep his thinking audience too busy to care.
  13. White Bird in a Blizzard
    If the results are occasionally broad and schematic, the actors (Woodley especially) are anything but, and Araki has an absolute field day adorning his kitschy, 1950s-ish view of suburban Los Angeles with a string of showoffy colors.
  14. Listen Up Philip
    The vainglorious pas de deux between Philip and Zimmerman is entertaining for a while, though the novelty gradually wears off.
  15. Hellion
    Hellion offers Paul his most adult screen role so far, and he's very fine, but the movie belongs to Wiggins, a newcomer whose innate gifts are a perfect echo of Paul's.
  16. Camp X-Ray
    For much of its running time, Camp X-Ray stands as the fullest on-screen imaginative treatment of two of the defining developments of the last 15 years of American life: the deployment of women in our volunteer army, and the indefinite detention of men we think, but can't quite prove, deserve it.
  17. After the Dark
    After the Dark is a shaggy dog story but an intriguing and frequently beautiful one.
  18. The Returned
    The film suffers from a series of unsatisfying endings, but it's nonetheless refreshing to see a zombie movie with brains behind the camera instead of on the menu.
  19. Odd Thomas
    Sommers's script relies on rapid-fire banter between Odd, girlfriend Stormy Llewellyn (Addison Timlin) — yes, that's her real name — and Chief Porter (Dafoe), but occasionally feels forced.
  20. Special ID
    All the performers are supremely entertaining while dealing or defying horrible deaths... but Yen unfortunately lacks the kind of charisma that can elevate a genre film to a higher level of satisfaction.
  21. Cheap Thrills
    Katz stages the contests with infectious energy... Too bad the last half hour feels like Katz is rubbing our face in the several turds he shows us, reminding us that people are awful. Of course they are. What else do you have to tell us?
  22. A Coffee In Berlin
    Gerster and Schilling are more successful when they allow Niko's behavior to be their main subject.
  23. No God, No Master
    Green's historical diligence proves rewarding... But the movie, shot largely in Milwaukee in 2009, can still be dry.
  24. 13 Sins
    [Webber's] performance is crazy good, and so emotionally charged that viewers may be forgiving of a finale overloaded with silly twists.
  25. Rich Hill
    Rich Hill does not add up to more than a series of vignettes. What it offers is a compassionate look at the intricacies of American poverty, where joblessness is only one factor.
  26. Land Ho!
    Land Ho! feints toward pathos and perversity, only to decide that it's better off giving us abridged, postcard emotions.
  27. Hank: 5 Years from the Brink
    Joe Berlinger's Hank: 5 Years From the Brink is more workaday and less transfixing than projects of his like "Brother's Keeper" or "Paradise Lost."
  28. The Fault in Our Stars
    The Fault in Our Stars doesn't quite capture the discreetly twisted humor, or the muted anger, of Green's book, and its problems can be attributed to a constellation of little annoyances rather than any one serious, North Star–size flaw.
  29. Let's Ruin It with Babies
    The film's worldview is so sunny and relaxed that it keeps you rooting for its self-obsessed inhabitants.
  30. A Long Way Down
    The group's surprising anchor is Maureen, the single mother of an adult son with cerebral palsy; her fierce love and stifling isolation are contained by careful routine. Collette wears that armor, and cracks it, to devastating effect.
  31. Down and Dangerous
    Forsman — whose loose inspiration was Snowblind, a 1976 memoir by his retired drug-smuggler father — brings a refreshing crispness to the foot chases and fights, and there's a fun cameo that supports the retro-'80s vibe nicely.
  32. The Legend of Tarzan
    The fights are quick and brutal and bloodless, with too much slo-mo and sped-up stuff, and some clever camera angles that get cut from before you can work out what you're looking at.
  33. Two Lives
    The film takes one entire act too long to shake its mopey fog and get crackling.
  34. Fatal Assistance
    Peck's documentary is not a penetrating look at at Haiti's post-quake problems, but a scattered, impressionistic one.
  35. The Protector 2
    Director Prachya Pinkaew's hectic editing and breakneck pacing turns the action spastic, and his lack of interest in anything approaching coherent drama renders the proceedings one long showcase for its lead's Muay Thai combat skills. Luckily, those are considerable.
  36. Dark House
    Dark House is one nutty horror movie, but what's crazier still is how well it works — until it doesn't.
  37. Junk
    The film is frequently amusing but indulges too often in flights of fancy.
  38. Ride Along 2
    Like your smartphone, it's a testament to the theory of interchangeable parts, a perfectly engineered product that, if you're charitable, you might also think of in terms of art....But every time I started to believe that there's some parodic impulse behind the filmmakers' recasting of clichés, Cube's character would punch a suspect in custody or commit some other violation of civil liberties that the film invites us to cheer.
  39. Just a Sigh
    Just a Sigh's day-long liaison sustains interest largely for the appeal of Devos and Byrne, its accomplished leads — they share what is known in the rom-com lexicon as "chemistry," and this quality invigorates their time together, in bed and out.
  40. Harmontown
    Berkeley includes some of the writer's unpleasant moments on the tour. But what Harmon wants, as any Community fan knows, is real connection with other human beings.
  41. Stay
    The film's quiet demeanor, exacerbated by wide shots of lonely, sprawling bogs, sometimes comes off as dull rather than reflective. Still, it does capture the maddening silence of waiting for an absent lover to make contact.
  42. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Carbone minimizes dialogue and focuses instead on gestural specificity; he makes a useful inventory of boys-will-be-boys behavior — wrestling in fields, poking at scars or dead critters, shutting down on parents — and stages it in tellingly muted vignettes within the ample copses of rural New Jersey.
  43. Being Ginger
    Harris is wistful, funny, and articulate about his romantic neuroses and insecurities... Unfortunately, he sometimes fails to go deeper.
  44. Blood Glacier
    It's all rather familiar, but the key image of a glacier glazed over with something like gore proves majestic, and tension throbs throughout a scene of a scientist following his dog into a blood-veined tunnel inside that glacier.
  45. The Hero of Color City
    Frank Gladstone's animated kids' movie The Hero of Color City is a perfectly pleasant pastiche of other movies, the most obvious antecedent being the Toy Story films.
  46. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    Because the battle for legalization is still being fought in most other states, the lack of an up-to-date perspective is frustrating.
  47. Captain America: Civil War
    I never found myself genuinely wondering what was going to happen next; the moves are too familiar. Even the big fight, entertaining as it is, feels like it's there not because of dramatic inevitability, but because somebody behind a desk decided it had to be. It's just a bunch of stuff.
  48. A Fragile Trust
    While mostly well made, and certain to serve as a handy précis for the J-school set, A Fragile Trust is more a soiling reminder than a revelation for anyone already familiar with Blair's case.
  49. If I Stay
    [Cutler] approaches all these teenage hyperfeelings with respect and sensitivity. It doesn’t hurt that he has Moretz in his corner.
  50. Cesar's Last Fast
    Equally lionizing but richer in detail than the recent Michael Peña-led biopic César Chávez, this occasionally stirring doc portrait of the late Latino labor organizer and civil rights icon frames his legacy around a single act of protest.
  51. Visions of Mary Frank
    After seeing Visions, it's easy to walk away feeling like you know of Frank, but still don't know her with any intimacy.
  52. Short Peace
    The whole never becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
  53. Bright Days Ahead
    Ultimately, this is all about Caroline, and it's refreshing to see an optimistic story about an older woman who is funny, smart, and desirable, even if her happy life doesn't leave much room for conflict.
  54. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band
    While his obsessiveness seems neurotic, and watching this film is not always comfortable, it also seems to be all part of the process.
  55. Mortdecai
    The hard part will be convincing audiences to shake off their Depp fatigue and embrace a film that's daffy, dated, and precisely as intended.
  56. The One I Love
    Some of the surprise works, but the final gotcha won't getcha.
  57. Unclaimed
    The man who might be Robertson is both the point and the best part of the film. He comes across as sincere, his childlike vulnerability and the depiction of his life in Vietnam demanding sympathy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anna
    Taissa Farmiga (sister of Vera) is a marvel in the title role.
  59. Ricki and the Flash
    Demme's film plays out like a catnapping afternoon dream. We recognize the world, yet the logic is screwy.
  60. Broken
    Jung Jae-young gives a physical, full-bodied performance in the main role.
  61. Wolf
    It's refreshing that director Jim Taihuttu is more interested in the humdrum goings on of those who split their time between illegal and legitimate activities.
  62. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    Fantastic Beasts is often lovely to look at, at times even stirring, but there's very little to hold on to, story- or character-wise.
  63. It Follows
    Mitchell's unwillingness to define the parameters of the specter haunting Jay leads to a finale that's muddled and confusing, and definitely not scary.
  64. Frequencies
    Fisher never subordinates his big ideas to the usual chase scenes or manufactured love conflicts less confident filmmakers use to candy up such material. That's great — too bad that, in the final third, the movie also doesn't subordinate those ideas to its own story, or to its earlier elegance of construction.
  65. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    Vincent Guastini's makeup effects are the star here, a refreshing change from the inky CGI morphing of too much modern horror.
  66. The Possession of Michael King
    After a promising start, rote possession imagery eventually becomes the focus, culminating in a by-the-numbers ending.
  67. Max
    It's another modest, functional success from a director who used to work on the margins.
  68. Burt's Buzz
    Shapiro seems far more invested than his subject in telling the story, which sometimes makes the film feel a bit underhanded.
  69. Ivory Tower
    What the film does accomplish is making you think, especially about how universities are spending their ever-increasing tuition on top-notch campus amenities and their own disastrous loans, and how state governments and federal agencies are similarly passing off their education cuts onto the young people who they expect to one day run the economy and society.
  70. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Whatever its flaws may be — and there are many — John Ridley's Jimi: All Is By My Side is compelling for one specific reason: It's more attuned to the women in Hendrix's life than it is to Hendrix himself.
  71. Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago
    Driving both the filmmaker and her subjects is wonder and wanderlust. Their enthusiasm for the Camino is contagious, and it might make you drop everything and head for Spain.
  72. Fonzy
    The comic plot of Fonzy is outrageous, but to writer-director Isabelle Doval, it's just an armature that supports its gently funny characters and its themes of emotional and filial connections.
  73. The Good Lie
    Despite its weighty material and some moving scenes (much of the Sudanese cast are survivors of the war), this aggressive crowd-pleaser is slighter than its subject matter deserves.
  74. Under the Electric Sky
    Under the Electric Sky manages to be amusing even while it’s annoying you.
  75. Beyond the Edge
    With the facts so poignant, there's little that needs dramatizing.
  76. Fanny
    Fanny has a stagy sensibility, but Auteuil displays flashes of genuine, old-school craft.
  77. Honour
    Khan’s orchestration of suspense impresses.
  78. The Tribe
    It's a staggering film, but not a brilliant one — a superior version would have played more with the gulf between our senses and theirs.
  79. Last Weekend
    Last Weekend is too enamored of this nouveau riche household to be satirical, instead offering unexpected moments of genuine warmth as a calling card for goodness.
  80. The Almost Man
    To his credit, even as his material begins spiraling into less amusing territory, Lund alleviates the growing gloom with goofball levity.
  81. May in the Summer
    May in the Summer's biggest obstacle is Dabis, who isn't a strong enough actress to sell the subtle humor.
  82. Found
    Writer-director Scott Schirmer eschews the ironic approach, thankfully, and instead works to pull genuine tension from his material. He does that quite well, and any unintentional laughs (or eye rolls) are icing.
  83. The Martian
    The Martian is only partly a story about a man in peril; it's mostly a story about men (and a few women) taking control of the uncontrollable. It's confident, swaggering sci-fi, not the despairing kind. That may be why, as elaborate and expensive-looking as The Martian is, it's almost totally lacking in poetry.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Fuller Life
    Two things are clear in this documentary. The first is that Samuel Fuller was brilliant, optimistic, talented -- an auteur in every right -- and well deserving of all the praise and admiration he inspired. The second is that this is a product of a first-time director, not quite experienced enough to take full advantage of the medium or know how to bring every element together.
  85. A Will for the Woods
    While the film also captures many private, sometimes heartbreaking scenes, it takes a lot of time to make its simple point.
  86. Weaving the Past: Journey of Discovery
    At 126 minutes, Weaving the Past is both engaging and indulgent, shifting between the personal and political, the historical and contemporary.
  87. Ben-Hur
    In paring down and streamlining its source material, this new version also saps its heft.
  88. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    The film is playful throughout... Unfortunately, the shoddy treatment of the film's sole LGBT character and a tendency to use people in wheelchairs as punchlines mar this otherwise delightful gruesome confection.
  89. McFarland USA
    It works, kind of, despite its broadness, its obviousness, and its howlingly awful opening.
  90. Lilting
    Khaou creates a compelling tension between Whishaw's stricken, almost febrile performance and Cheng's stubbornly dignified one.
  91. Canopy
    Despite Wilson’s early control and aesthetic confidence, there isn’t a single scripted idea of weight or emotionality that pays off.
  92. Take Me to the River
    Take Me to the River takes a while to find its groove and capture what Charlie Musselwhite calls "that secret, Southern, Memphis ingredient."
  93. The Riot Club
    Director Lone Scherfig’s stagings of these suspenseful set pieces are masterful, but the rest of the thriller is a fairly predictable manifesto against Britain’s de facto oligarchy.
  94. Autumn Blood
    The structure of Autumn Blood and its metaphors are obvious, but what makes it engaging, even haunting, are the messy flesh-and-blood characters.
  95. Extraterrestrial
    All My Children's Brittany Allen proves herself a big-screen presence as the lead earthling; her commitment to each scene's emotional truth is all the more impressive considering that the schoolboyish Vicious Brothers introduce her character ass-first.
  96. Elsa & Fred
    This occasionally charming November-December romance has elements of a Douglas Sirk woman's weepie... but the movie eventually goes into Woody Allen territory in the best way possible.
  97. The Houses October Built
    [An] uneven but intriguing found-footage horror flick.
  98. Sex Ed
    Mildly funny and about 15 minutes too long, Sex Ed has a funny cast, particularly a kid played by Isaac White, who gets some hilariously rude dialogue.
  99. Last Hijack
    The filmmakers have gotten extraordinary access to Mohamed and ravaged Somalia... But it's disappointing that they did not capture more scenes of Mohamed's wife and her family, who in the end are the ones who make the most momentous decision.
  100. Bitter Honey
    Lemelson's interviews can be repetitive in their direct staging, but there's inspiration in his conceit of using a shadow-puppet performance set to gamelan music as interludes.
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