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. 1000 Rupee Note
    The film takes an allegorical, symbolic story and sets it within a milieu that suggests authentic life. But it never quite reconciles the tonal dissonance at the heart of this idea — there's great emotional potential here, but we experience the whole thing at a remove.
  2. Ordinary World
    Armstrong, who's mostly played himself in previous forays into acting, has a low-key charm suggesting that, if he desired it, he could get more onscreen gigs in between albums.
  3. Ocean's 8
    Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast.
  4. The Son of Joseph
    Amalric enlivens episodes of limp satire by wholly embracing his unrepentantly self-serving libertine character.
  5. The Anthropologist
    The film is saved by its illuminating — if heartbreaking — examination of isolated locales rarely seen on film.
  6. You've Been Trumped Too
    If you don't know who to vote for by now, whatever you do, don't see this movie. It's only going to tell you bad things. We're having fun here, right?
  7. All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone
    All Governments Lie is worthy testimony that many journalists are in it for the truth.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Asperger's Are Us
    The team's own comedy is an acquired taste. You'll appreciate these dudes for making the effort to literally break out of their comfort zones in order to change people's views on autism. However, there is a strong possibility you may not laugh at or with them during this whole doc.
  9. Railroad Tigers
    With heart, humor and some breathtaking special effects, Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers charms and thrills.
  10. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    The doc is gorgeously filmed, well edited, and works in close-up, but the result is more voyeuristic than revealing, except to show that desolation is among those things that cannot be seen or touched.
  11. Rooted in Peace
    The film is not without its trenchant moments, most rooted not in peace but in science.
  12. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    It feels like a rushed journey through a vital, many-pronged debate.
  13. The Ardennes
    In the end, for all the artistry on display, The Ardennes is more admirable than inspiring. It has style, and even suspense, but relatively little imagination.
  14. The Sunshine Makers
    For a documentary about two men who were big-time drug dealers back in the day, The Sunshine Makers is a quaint, damn-near-adorable bit of nostalgia.
  15. Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer?
    Director/producer Eve Marson doesn't characterize Hurwitz as devious or nefarious. Instead, she presents him as a naïve, way-too-trusting schnook — an even more troubling diagnosis.
  16. Cézanne et Moi
    The film gains power in the final third...one wishes Thompson had chosen to view the great artist's lives through the eyes of the women who loved (and tolerated) them
  17. A Ghost Story
    “Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence.
  18. Strike a Pose
    The six surviving members of the original seven are always excellent company, though Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan's film at times seems frustratingly under-researched.
  19. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    For all its frantic eager-to-please-ness, Hotel Transylvania 3 doesn’t quite achieve the blissfully reliable drumbeat of hilarious throwaway gags that the earlier films managed.
  20. Midsummer in Newtown
    [A] slightly uneven yet deeply affecting documentary.
  21. Aftermath
    The story necessitates ceaseless sadness, which can grind, but for the most part Aftermath glides just above the wreckage with its leads’ performances. Lester, however, can’t resist throwing in some easy, cheesy symbolism to slop it up.
  22. Berlin Syndrome
    As Berlin Syndrome proceeds, however, we start to feel like we’re drowning in atmosphere, and it gets harder and harder to stay interested in what happens next.
  23. Crown Heights
    Most of Crown Heights, which is based on an episode of public radio’s This American Life, suffers from structural confusion.
  24. Novitiate
    There’s a lot of great filmmaking in Novitiate, but there’s also quite a bit still missing.
  25. Lavender
    Gass-Donnelly (The Last Exorcism Part II) blends supernatural elements into a psychological thriller for a kind of spectral therapy, but his experimentation ultimately conforms to genre conventions.
  26. Sex Doll
    Sex Doll, flat though it may sometimes be, is shrewdly aware of the countless clichés surrounding sex work.
  27. Viceroy's House
    Using the trappings of old-fashioned romanticism, Chadha envisions the cataclysmic upheaval of millions in the traumatic lives of a few.
  28. Django
    Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.
  29. You're Killing Me Susana
    Roberto Sneider's You're Killing Me Susana (Me estás matando Susana) is a culture-clash comedy in which the clash happens both onscreen and off.
  30. Dig Two Graves
    Dig Two Graves isn't the most original horror film, nor is it the scariest, but most of its short runtime offers passable suspense and an engaging protagonist.
  31. Okja
    There’s a lot to chew on here, but in the end, I wish Okja simply worked better as a movie.
  32. The Most Hated Woman in America
    The Most Hated Woman in America suffers from tonal whiplash.
  33. The Sting
    The plot has many twists, few surprises, and one gaping hole, which becomes apparent only after you walk out of the theater and have a chance to think. But pure popcorn like this is hardly worthy of serious analysis...Fortunately, the stars have not lost their charm and authority.
  34. Past Life
    Past Life does add up to more than the sum of its heavy-handed miscalculations.
  35. Live Cargo
    The need to tell a story and the desire not to collide in Live Cargo, the narratively uneven but visually exquisite debut feature from writer-director Logan Sandler.
  36. SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
    The talking heads (lower case) are fine, but the dream-drama music-video theater piece of Rock on a gurney while nurses and doctors consult around him takes too much time away from the reason people want to see this: what Rock saw.
  37. Burden
    [A] densely packed but occasionally facile documentary.
  38. In Search of Israeli Cuisine
    History and politics are present in this film, but over at the kids table.
  39. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    McDormand could have carried this film all the way through a minefield of touchy topics, singed but with all parts in the right place, primed for a painful laugh. But goddamnit if the cops in this story didn’t ruin all the fun.
  40. A Dark Song
    The performances are strong and the scenecraft absorbing.
  41. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    Well-written and inoffensively directed by Jeff Grace, the film suffers from an overall brown color.
  42. Stronger
    It’s almost as if, in their fascination with trauma, the filmmakers have forgotten entirely what everyday life looks like.
  43. For Here or to Go?
    It's enjoyable spending some time with dreamy Vivek and Shveta (Melanie Kannokada, also known as Melanie Chandra), who are lovely together despite their clumsy communication.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Polina
    Images planted early in the film betray the path Polina will take; when we watch her move freely in the woods and commune with a moose, we guess that ballet may not be the last stop on her professional train.
  45. A Silent Voice
    It has some interesting visuals, but A Silent Voice demands investment in the redemption of someone who’s impossible to root for.
  46. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    While overstuffed and scattershot, this episodic documentary makes a vital argument: That American popular music, especially the blues and rock ’n’ roll, owe much more to Native Americans than has been commonly credited.
  47. The Exception
    Whenever Plummer is onscreen, The Exception is scintillating entertainment. Unfortunately, it gets bogged down.
  48. Happy End
    As with so many of his films, Haneke asks: Why? Why abide by the rules? Why go on? Here, he’s created two characters — Georges and Eve — I want to see exploring those questions and a handful I really don’t.
  49. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    The film doesn’t use enough of Houston’s music.
  50. Handsome Devil
    As the flick teeters between feel-good message movie and a burlesque of gay panic, the director scratches the surface in order to show how people rarely look beyond the surface of others.
  51. Elián
    The film assumes a familiarity with the story most won't have, leaving out crucial details.
  52. Woodshock
    Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.
  53. The Glass Castle
    Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Walls’s book of the same name just often enough bursts to raucous life.
  54. The Last Shaman
    On occasion, director Degan attempts to capture the plant's power via psychedelic montage, layering colors over jungle footage and Freeman's home movies, but more fascinating are the details of the rituals, the river-trek photography, Freeman's frankness about his struggles with depression, and Degan's quick portraits of the people Freeman meets along his way — none of whom gets enough screen time.
  55. Lost in Paris
    Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel’s signature style blends screwball and romantic comedy with playful fantasy, but Lost in Paris lacks the magical elements of their previous features.
  56. The Villainess
    The Villainess is entertaining enough, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that we should be caring more for this character as the film goes on, not less.
  57. The Boy Downstairs
    The writer-director’s first feature is warmly affectionate and maddeningly vague, with half-formed characters, limp plotting, and performances of captivating delicacy, especially from Zosia Mamet as a novelist guided by uncertainty.
  58. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    The movie — based on Les Standiford’s novel — is pleasantly simpleminded, often assembled from parts of other movies.
  59. Letters from Baghdad
    Unfortunately, the doc is devoid of any real context, including how work such as Bell’s helped lead to the quagmire that has unsettled the region for decades.
  60. Moscow Never Sleeps
    Moscow Never Sleeps is ambitious to a fault. While O’Reilly flexes an ability to tie together several narratives, he introduces so many characters that some of their stories must fall by the wayside. It’s a shame, because that muddles the more interesting vignettes.
  61. Tag
    No matter how much they remind us that this is all based on a true story, at heart Tag is still a dumb, goofy Hollywood comedy with big stars running around making glorious asses of themselves. It’d be a pretty good one, too, were it not so afraid to embrace its essence.
  62. Moka
    Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense.
  63. Last Flag Flying
    It’s somber and respectful, and even has a couple of genuinely powerful moments, but none of that’s enough to transcend its oppressive dreariness.
  64. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    There’s no self-reflexive media criticism in Nobody Speak, only the simple plea for Americans to resolutely support journalism, in both principle and practice.
  65. The General
    The General is a refined, traditional movie about a character who is never more traditional than when he imagines himself outside the law. It’s a great paradox, but it barely comes alive on the screen.
  66. All the Money in the World
    It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.
  67. The Leisure Seeker
    For all its occasional familiarity, this first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzì (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia, even when the story skirts toward sensationalism.
  68. Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey
    Smitten with his characters, Sanders takes the elements of teen exploitation films and fashions a simple, placid return to innocence.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Death Wish
    An enjoyable bad movie instead of a purely offensive one. [01 Aug 1974, p.67]
    • Village Voice
  70. Te Ata
    Nathan Frankowski’s biopic has the saccharine, deliberate feel of a Hallmark movie, that doesn’t make the woman at its center any less inspirational.
  71. After Love
    I walked away from After Love feeling like I knew precious little about these characters. Lafosse gets so many critical things right about this decaying relationship that, at first, I did not wonder too much about the lack of specificity or detail about them as people. But later, it gnawed at me.
  72. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    Manolo might be a hard sell to moviegoers who aren’t already interested, but for fashion enthusiasts, it’s an enjoyable confection.
  73. Gerald's Game
    With rasps and desperate eyes, Gugino communicates Jessie’s thinking and planning so powerfully that cutaways to that other Jessie, the chatty vision, egging her on, prove redundant.
  74. Killing Gunther
    It’s little more than a diverting sketch, but its characters justify its ninety minutes, and Killam’s unremitting enthusiasm is occasionally contagious.
  75. Jungle
    While the horror director successfully distills Ghinsberg’s spare prose into a succession of terrifying images, McLean can’t seem to help straying into the tackier elements of horror.
  76. Red Trees
    In the end, this relentlessly scenic travelogue/valentine is Willer literally giving her old man peace of mind.
  77. Beast
    Revisiting Beast may prove more satisfying than just visiting once. The first time through, the film simply proves too successful at capturing the listless ennui it’s depicting.
  78. On Chesil Beach
    A movie can and should stand on its own, of course, but it still needs to find a way to give weight and scope to this intimate miniature. And while Dominic Cooke’s film succeeds at much of what it attempts, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a dimension missing.
  79. Wasted! The Story of Food Waste
    As with many recent environmental documentaries, the filmmakers’ call to action is simple and upbeat: This isn’t so hard, people, we can do it if we try!
  80. Woodpeckers
    An uncharacteristically melodramatic final act...betrays how grounded (and true to real life) the rest of the movie is.
  81. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    It’s all a curious humanist experiment with anecdotal surprises and whimsy, but its motives aren’t in sharp focus like Doyle’s hotshot imagery.
  82. The Final Year
    The filmmakers offer us glimpses of the diplomatic life but too little telling detail.
  83. Naples '44
    It’s basically a high-caliber book-on-tape augmented with actual (as opposed to horror-movie fake) found footage — a missing link between full-on dramatization and simply reading the book while imagining visuals.
  84. AlphaGo
    The horror film of 2017 is AlphaGo, a documentary about an artificial intelligence program designed to play Go – the oldest and most complex board game in the world – that feels like it’s sounding the alarm for the human race’s impending extinction.
  85. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    Garner erupts and expectorates with winning zeal.
  86. Trafficked
    The makers of Trafficked walk a fine line, embedding their advocacy in an action film and conveying the horror of sexual slavery without edging into exploitation.
  87. Architects of Denial
    By uniting the measured voices of human rights advocates and impassioned pleas from the Armenian diaspora, they lay out the importance of a few words in the long quest for justice.
  88. Mayhem
    I’m sure the movie was made for Yeun (who also serves as executive producer) to finally have a chance to prove he has leading-man chops — and Hollywood should start giving him movie-star, action-hero gigs, like, yesterday.
  89. Beyond Skyline
    Beyond Skyline is pretty fun, even if it’s completely nonsensical.
  90. Deliver Us
    The filmmakers observe rather than interview or investigate, and much of the film is footage of actual church-sanctioned exorcisms.
  91. Princess Cyd
    While the chemistry between Pinnick and Spence is sweet and familial, I couldn’t help but think so much of this film is just…nice. It’s that pretty feather you found in the grass. And maybe you’ll take it home, but will likely forget you did.
  92. The New Radical
    It’s hard to know whether it’s intentional that The New Radical, Adam Bhala Lough’s slick documentary about “techno-anarchist” Cody Wilson, famous for developing a 3-D-printable plastic gun, presents its subject as a shallow pseudo-intellectual man-child.
  93. Voyeur
    An article, a book, and now a film, Talese’s fascination with Foos’s voyeurism still hasn’t resulted in anything like rigorous journalism. The movie, though, at least lets us be the witnesses to something unsettling rather than just asking us to take some dude’s word for it. That means these cameramen are journalists.
  94. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    In the actor’s final role, Landau’s expressive power plays out in the soft folds of his gaunt face. Weiner offers a comforting vision of unlikely friendship and the peace an important man can find by embracing his ordinariness.
  95. The China Hustle
    Rothstein’s film, for the most part, is more well-reported exposé than it is cliché-driven agitprop, a film that blows the whistle on ongoing financial crimes.
  96. Lu Over the Wall
    Even by anime standards, Lu Over the Wall is best enjoyed by disconnecting your logic circuits and just enjoying the pretty colors and sounds.
  97. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    If there’s one thing that Van Sant does very well here, it’s creating a humanizing anchor at the center of the story. Despite some distracting narrative choices and sketchy character development (especially with Mara’s character, who, of course, turns into a love interest), the film does eventually find its footing.
  98. Generation Wealth
    By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.
  99. Inventing Tomorrow
    We’re privy to the students’ backgrounds and get a tiny glimpse into their futures, but the film skims a lot in favor of showcasing the ISEF gathering. Still, as in the spelling-bee doc, these are moving stories of nerdy children, kids who are pragmatic about the forward march of industry yet believe societies can, and must, find cleaner ways to advance.
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