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 7.5 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. The Little Hours
    This isn’t a laugh-a-minute movie; it’s more a succession of snickers, punctuated by genuine emotion.
  2. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Spider-Man: Homecoming is comics, unapologetically, as close as blockbuster filmmaking gets to cartooning.
  3. 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.
  4. City of Ghosts
    Heineman’s film urges us not to take any horrors for granted. It is invaluable, as both moral instruction and documented history.
  5. The Reagan Show
    Rather than reveal a showman, The Reagan Show in the end imitates one.
  6. VooDoo
    Writer/director Tom Costabile's found-footage conceit is painfully hackneyed, although not nearly as enervating as his actual drama.
  7. Baby Driver
    Baby Driver is an almost perfect pastiche, a thoroughly enjoyable object. But sue me, I kind of miss the losers of the Cornetto Trilogy.
  8. Dirty Grandpa
    Call it a dissenting opinion if you must, but Dirty Grandpa has sporadic moments of hilarity.
  9. The House on Coco Road
    This documentary doesn’t just tell the ill-fated story of the failed Grenada utopia — which failed because of American intervention. The House on Coco Road is instead a sprawling tale of African-American migration, the search for peace, and America’s relentless sabotage of black escape.
  10. War for the Planet of the Apes
    The effects are incredible, the action is exciting, the music is great, and Andy Serkis, once again embodying a non-human character through motion-capture technology, remains terrific. But there’s something more here.
  11. The Bad Batch
    No matter how confounding the story gets, details and humor ground the narrative, and a simple guiding premise about the importance of human connection and artistic expression fills in the blanks.
  12. In Transit
    The film is gently thrilling, often revealing, alive with talk and scenic beauty and well-observed vignettes.
  13. Happy End
    Haneke has delivered the Haneke film that Haneke-haters see in their heads when they think of a Haneke film: a series of disjointed, narratively oblique episodes showing people being inhumane to each other.
  14. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    The Meyerowitz Stories doesn’t quite have the drive and stylistic panache of other recent Baumbach efforts, but it makes up for that with sincerity, as well as moments of subtle satirical genius.
  15. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    As things spun out of control, getting ever stranger, I started to wonder if the director had merely written himself into a corner and was doubling down on weirdness to get himself out. And yet the film never quite loses its mythic drive. You walk out feeling like you’ve truly had an experience.
  16. The Beguiled
    Coppola’s a master at taking something that could be portentous and rendering it delicate, thereby reclaiming its depth.
  17. Transformers: The Last Knight
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  18. The Ornithologist
    Though full of mysteries, and, like all of Rodrigues’s work, consistently unpredictable from scene to scene, The Ornithologist may be the director’s most conventional narrative.
  19. The Book of Henry
    The Book of Henry is just a lunkheaded tearjerker that you’ll wish was even half as smart as its allegedly gifted protagonist.
  20. bwoy
    For most of its running time — thanks to director Young’s visual rigor and the excellent performances of its leads — Bwoy keeps us in this cinematic fugue state, where reality only peeks through in brief flashes.
  21. My Journey Through French Cinema
    The key word in the title is My. Bertrand Tavernier’s three-hours-and-change film-essay is not a history lesson. It’s an invitation to take the seat next to a renowned director as he shares the movies that mean something to him.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    All Eyez on Me
    Simply put, Shipp Jr. fails to capture Pac’s multiplicity, much less portray the depth of his talent.
  23. Moka
    Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense.
  24. Maudie
    Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway.
  25. Harmonium
    Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada’s film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.
  26. Lucky
    Compounding the action’s lack of originality are both the amateurishness of every performance and the wobbly-camera aesthetics. Worse, though, is the wholesale absence of any political point of view on its immigrant-horror-story subject matter, leaving the film feeling like the thinnest type of retread.
  27. Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It All
    John Griesser’s film about Srila Prabhupada, founder of the Krishna movement, is not so much a documentary as it is a hagiography.
  28. The Journey
    The film is buoyed by its sharp, witty lead performances, with Spall’s holier-than-thou imperiousness clashing suitably with Meaney’s more affable obstinacy.
  29. Kill Switch
    Kill Switch is an ungainly hybrid of two totally disparate mediums that have been Human Centipede-d together: film and first-person-shooter video games. Film is not the front end of this configuration.
  30. 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.
  31. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    Score may be little more than a superficial primer on a dizzyingly expansive subject, but Schrader offers just enough to satisfy both film-music novices and dyed-in-the-wool fanatics.
  32. War Machine
    It’s a complex subject, to say the least. And the film struggles at times with trying to make parodic jabs at a serious topic – it never quite seems to go far enough with its satire. But Pitt’s ridiculous, wildly over-the-top performance somehow keeps it all together. Whenever he’s onscreen, the film finds its soul, its heart, and its funny bone.
  33. Rough Night
    The movie is glazed in flop sweat, moist with the producers’ fear that if the wildness lets up for a heartbeat, we’ll be bored.
  34. Cars 3
    The thoughtful, thrilling finale retroactively complicates and improves much of the film that it caps, and it left me thinking something else impossible: I’d kind of like to see what happens in Cars 4.
  35. Megan Leavey
    Megan Leavey is a rarity in Hollywood: a true story of a woman in combat, directed by a woman. This representation, combined with the undeniably lovable canine at its center, elevates it above the typical war film.
  36. Raising Bertie
    Raising Bertie charts nothing less than what it’s like to try to grow up free in the prison capital of the world.
  37. Night School
    As an introduction to its arresting, charismatic subjects, Night School is invaluable.
  38. The Hunter's Prayer
    Even though the movie tries to sneak in some subtext about children paying for the sins of their fathers, the biggest sin The Hunter’s Prayer commits is being too dumb to enjoy.
  39. 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.
  40. Ascent
    In Fiona Tan’s glorious ode to a Japanese volcano, Mount Fuji is both geological marvel and malleable symbol, its solidity and grandeur inspiring conquest and contemplation.
  41. Beatriz at Dinner
    Beatriz, a person committed to doing good in the world, can be obtuse in reading social cues and fatiguingly sanctimonious, her wearisome traits finely calibrated by Hayek.
  42. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure, and the revelation of how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by virtue of Dawson City’s fading away in the twentieth century, proves a sweet narrative reward.
  43. My Cousin Rachel
    Tense and at times downright frightening.
  44. Camera Obscura
    Though it’s not very scary, the film mines suspense from Jack’s attempts at luring his victims and hiding his tracks.
  45. It Comes at Night
    A soul-crushingly dark examination of human nature amid an invisible and unnatural threat.
  46. The Mummy
    The Mummy turns out to be a drab, nonsensical affair that squanders its potential for humor, atmosphere and sweep.
  47. Baywatch
    Like the show, it’s about an insanely attractive lifeguard crew whose members really throw themselves into their work. But the product teeters between absurdity and earnestness.
  48. Sami Blood
    Matter-of-fact in its scenecraft but searing in its content, Sami Blood is about girlhood and racism, passing and escape.
  49. Band Aid
    I like this couple. And their songs aren’t bad! Not so the gender-binary Mars-Venus mumbo jumbo that dominates the resolution. Still, these are quibbles with an otherwise charming and honest marriage story.
  50. God of War
    The athleticism on display shames much of Western action cinema’s quick-cut hand-to-hand editing, and the final swordfight between Qi and Japanese general Kumasawa (Shaw Brothers mainstay Yasuaki Kurata) ranks as high as any in recent memory.
  51. Finding Kim
    It’s a well-meaning portrait, with heartfelt moments — especially as Kim recounts childhood hardships — but it’s often muddled, especially in its selection of talking heads.
  52. 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.
  53. Past Life
    Past Life does add up to more than the sum of its heavy-handed miscalculations.
  54. Vincent N Roxxy
    By the end, the point-blank murders might make you queasy, but Kravitz still manages to project composure, even when her face is covered in blood. All through, she’s battered but defiant.
  55. 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.
  56. Radio Dreams
    The film examines, with wit and patience, the hard work of community-building — and the toll on someone far from home, doing work that’s not his calling.
  57. The Exception
    Whenever Plummer is onscreen, The Exception is scintillating entertainment. Unfortunately, it gets bogged down.
  58. Churchill
    Cox’s delivery of Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” D-Day speech surely ranks among the best, but it’s a problem when a narrative feature’s most powerful scenes are drawn from historical text.
  59. The Incomparable Rose Hartman
    The Incomparable Rose Hartman is a gorgeously shot, sharply edited portrait of photographer Hartman.
  60. Wonder Woman
    When the separatist compound must accommodate an interloper — Steve Trevor, fished out of the sea by Diana after his plane goes down — any hopes that Wonder Woman will sustain its appealing misandry are soon dashed.
  61. In the Fade
    Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.
  62. You Were Never Really Here
    A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.
  63. Black Butterfly
    Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.
  64. 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.
  65. Hermia & Helena
    There are a few different potential films within Hermia & Helena — a Shakespeare adaptation, a tale of romantic relationships, a tale of family — but the totality proves a sunny and affable literary collage.
  66. 96 Souls
    That some of the super-visions manage to disturb regardless is arguably a testament to writer-director Stanley Jacobs, but he’d have been better off keeping this as his demo reel and showing whatever he does next to the public at large.
  67. Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
    While acknowledging some missteps (such as jumping into a strenuous project too soon after surgery), Saffire and Schlesinger exhibit Whelan’s grace in dance and in life.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Long Strange Trip
    If the story is known, this telling is lusher than any before, the film stuffed with rare archival footage and performance clips. The effect is one of coasting along amid a vast, noisy, variegated parade, vividly rendered. And that works just fine.
  69. The Women's Balcony
    This light and predictable movie, with its overwhelming box office success, still offers tremendous insight into day-to-day Israeli society.
  70. Okja
    There’s a lot to chew on here, but in the end, I wish Okja simply worked better as a movie.
  71. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    The proportions of good parts to not are more generous than they’ve been in years, though there’s still much too much of the usual undead sea dogs killing their prisoners and rumbling on about curses.
  72. Paint It Black
    No matter her influences, Tamblyn has filmed for us something singular.
  73. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    By focusing on the Sungs, [James] puts real, human faces to this corporation, leaving little doubt they’re the ones to root for.
  74. Afterimage
    Though Wajda admires this struggle, the artist’s final pursuit never seems redemptive in the depths of Strzemiński’s isolation and misery.
  75. 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.
  76. Legion of Brothers
    It’s clear in their eyes that they’ve seen some shit—and this doc not only gives us a glimpse of it too, but adds valuable context in a way not many others do.
  77. Icaros: A Vision
    Once in a while a narrator relates facts about the forest; occasional CGI flourishes don’t disappoint so much as they remind us of the challenges of summoning to the screen what the brain simply creates. Icaros comes closer than most movies manage.
  78. Wakefield
    Swicord turns what could be a dark or one-note premise into a sometimes charming, sometimes heartbreaking meditation on a man’s loss of self after having set out to conquer the job, wife, house, and kids he thought would make him happy.
  79. The Survivalist
    Directed with a muted tone but a scenic eye by Brit first-timer Stephen Fingleton, The Survivalist, like most postapocalyptic movies, is both dire and oddly poetic.
  80. 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.
  81. Whisky Galore!
    Instead of glorifying the amber liquid, Whisky Galore! is a love letter to an isolated community trapped in amber.
  82. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    Well-written and inoffensively directed by Jeff Grace, the film suffers from an overall brown color.
  83. Tracktown
    Although Tracktown presents itself as adorably, harmlessly twee, I wished Pappas had tapped deeper into the dark side she hints at — the side that makes her protagonist more concerned about being a winner than about being a person.
  84. Hounds of Love
    Hounds may be predictable in plot, but it succeeds in making a psychological web of this troubled threesome.
  85. The Drowning
    The deeper Tom wades into this psychological morass, the more Danny's volatile behavior seems dictated by the screenwriters' convenience rather than by any plausible depiction of a tortured mind.
  86. Dead Awake
    Under the direction of Phillip Guzman, the whole affair plods along in by-the-numbers fashion, and the characters are all types, displaying little evidence of interior lives.
  87. The Wedding Plan
    What makes the film work is Koler's magnetic performance as Michal, who has screwball energy and a mind of her own.
  88. Elián
    The film assumes a familiarity with the story most won't have, leaving out crucial details.
  89. Manifesto
    The actress is equally committed, regardless of whether content and context click, but she soars when they do.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    Aenne Schwarz and Barbara Sukowa give strong performances as the author’s second and first wives, respectively, but this is Hader’s movie. His is one of the great performances of recent years.
  91. Paris Can Wait
    Imagine The Trip meets Lost in Translation (Coppola’s daughter Sophia’s debut), but with stale dialogue and neither much romance nor comedy
  92. Lowriders
    Other than a from-nowhere burst of violence that nearly destroys the movie, Lowriders is a refreshingly muted celebration of family and forgiveness, of honoring your roots while being yourself.
  93. Snatched
    The noxious self-absorption of straight white women that Schumer has sent up so blisteringly on her Comedy Central show is extolled more than it is lampooned.
  94. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy.
  95. The Wall
    Liman, for all his action acuity, struggles to make lying behind a wall exciting. He manages some tense and rousing sequences, but between them yawn scenes of the killer jabbering bullshit and the hero passing in and out of consciousness.
  96. Alien: Covenant
    If in the end it doesn’t quite work — if its many fascinating pieces and ideas and odds and ends don’t ever cohere into a whole — lament not what might have been. Instead, be grateful that Ridley Scott has lost none of his ability to provoke, captivate and infuriate.
  97. Take Me
    While the film, to its credit, doesn't become a trite morality play, the ending is thin and contrived nonetheless.
  98. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait
    Though visually expansive, however, the film feels emotionally intimate.
  99. Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia
    Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia is a superbly balanced picture of Cambodia then and now, a nation in a sort of stupor of post traumatic stress syndrome, denial and survivor's' guilt.
  100. A Woman's Life
    The ending is a joy and a heartbreaker, but what lingers from this revelatory life is that compact world Jeanne inhabits, and how each tragedy, each happiness, and each everyday gesture together accrete into the woman we discover again and again.
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