Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Winter in the Blood
    Every time a story thread seems to be getting somewhere, Winter in the Blood vaults to something else, with little regard for the tale’s rhythms — the movie doesn’t feel like a puzzle to solve; it’s a puzzle to assemble.
  2. Krampus
    Krampus, sad to say, is a disappointment. It's alternately funny and intense (don't take the wee ones), but never enough of either to form a cohesive whole.
  3. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    It's serviceable.
  4. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Would that Harris had simply let the images and their historical context speak for themselves. His narration is simplistic and narcissistic... and the textual ideas he and his interviewees present about the intersection between race and imagery are hardly fresh.
  5. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    With its harmonica-heavy score and rousing shots of these horse-riding antiheroes, Kundo's early and late scenes resemble a Western as much as the historical epic its middle section gradually turns into.
  6. The Damned
    It's all well acted and expertly crafted — quick edits that play mind and visual games with the viewer, music that heightens tension, some cool special effects — but most of the victims are people you want to slap even before their secrets are spilled.
  7. At the Devil's Door
    In his second feature, McCarthy shows he's mastered the things we already know scare us onscreen; next, how about something we don't expect?
  8. Shadows from My Past
    The Kaufmans are amateurs, in the sense that this is a labor of love but also in that the film lacks the technical and storytelling caliber of more professional work. Many cuts are awkward and the sound is terrible. Still, it’s another full box revealing how people narrowly escaped brutalities, and how some didn’t.
  9. Days and Nights
    At 92 minutes, Days and Nights feels choppy and hurried, pushing the narrative toward inevitable tragedy rather than exploring how these dispirited people got there.
  10. Thunder and the House of Magic
    The story is serviceable enough.
  11. Cake
    Aniston gives the character personality and heft, but the script gives the character nothing to do.
  12. Hungry Hearts
    Hungry Hearts owes much to early Polanski (especially Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby), but Costanzo prizes ambiguity over tension.
  13. A Little Chaos
    Appropriately hunky but neutered of the brute sexuality he exhibited in Bullhead and Rust and Bone, Schoenaerts and his lack of bodice-busting tension with Winslet mirrors the film's transparent, often anachronistic inauthenticity.
  14. Madame Bovary
    Lead Mia Wasikowska looks convincingly miserable in the role of a young wife who's driven to seek her pleasures outside the marital bed, but whatever complexities roil in the character's heart and head are nowhere to be found on her face.
  15. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    Flawed but genuinely creepy ghost story The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is disappointing, but only because it comes close to greatness.
  16. Hellaware
    A broad and occasionally disjointed indictment of the New York art scene and horrorcore rap that leaves no broad side of a barn untargeted.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Björk: Biophilia Live
    The visual tricks lose their potency before the halfway mark, leaving the energy of Biophilia Live to rise and fall with the music.
  18. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.
  19. Taken 3
    Taken 3 isn't brilliant, but it's a hell of a lot of dumb, head-smacking fun.
  20. Breakup Buddies
    Chinese comedian Huang Bo justifies his status as a record-breaking mega-star in Breakup Buddies, a tone-deaf buddy comedy that's like 10 by way of Due Date.
  21. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
    Rather than the currency itself, the film's most compelling subject ends up being the separatist psychology of its self-regarding fanatics.
  22. The Water Diviner
    Crowe's visual framing and dramatic staging are as assured as his compelling lead performance. Yet as his story becomes weighed down by issues of cross-cultural understanding, forgiveness, and second chances...the film comes to feel like a slight, straightforward tale distended to tedious lengths.
  23. Black Sea
    Black Sea is so almost-terrific that it's ultimately more disappointing than a movie that's merely badly or carelessly made.
  24. The Way He Looks
    The shuffling of who's an important/close friend transcends the specificity of being gay and disabled, and that experience is rarely depicted as realistically as this. But the film crosses into self-parody.
  25. Botso
    Too bad the filmmaking never rises to the level of its subject.
  26. I Am Ali
    It’s unfortunate that, even with this wealth of uncovered materials, I Am Ali still plays as a greatest-hits version of its subject’s life, offering little depth or insight into any one element of it.
  27. Relationship Status: It's Complicated
    In the end, Relationship Status is wan when it tries to be scandalous.
  28. Imagine I'm Beautiful
    Imagine I'm Beautiful is a thematically ambitious character study trapped inside the limiting strictures of a crazy-roommate thriller.
  29. The Night Before
    At first the laughs are Hangover III–spare and the picture is too shambling to lunge for them. But these leftovers warm up eventually. The usual setups at last develop variations, and you might be reminded of why audiences first responded to Rogen back in Knocked Up.
  30. Jem and the Holograms
    Chu and screenwriter Ryan Landels's take on fame is more fascinating than most of the film's drab, slow drama.
  31. Lakay
    There's an off-putting self-absorption in [Tirf's] self-examination-slash-ode-to-Haiti, and it weakens the whole project.
  32. The Hadza: Last of the First
    Last of the First is effective as a classroom tool for conservationist ideals (Jane Goodall herself gives an interview, as does the director of the African branch of the Nature Conservancy), but it fails to interrogate the forces that make those ideals necessary.
  33. 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.
  34. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 aims to please with breathtaking set pieces that’ll convince you to delete all your old diatribes about CGI ruining the movies. But no matter how funny writer-director James Gunn wants this film to be — the one-liners move at lightspeed — too many of the punch lines are referential.
  35. Starry Eyes
    The film is far less successful once it delves into body horror that makes Sarah's transformation as ghoulishly physical as it is mental.
  36. Hail, Caesar!
    The brothers' latest also has a certain buoyancy...The fizziness, though, proves fleeting, and Hail, Caesar! too often goes flat.
  37. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
    It's an unsolved mystery in Hollywood why so many based-on-true-life polemical films end up so unremarkable.
  38. The Toy Soldiers
    As compelling as an individual thread or scene might be, the picture as a whole lacks forward momentum, as is often the case with films with asynchronous timelines.
  39. Goodbye to All That
    The title indicates a major transition, but despite assertions that the dissolution of a marriage is a life-altering event, divorce doesn't change Otto as much as rouse him from stupefaction, and Schneider deftly balances bewilderment with resolve.
  40. The DUFF
    There's freedom in facing the truth. There would be even more freedom in a heroine finishing the film in her favorite ugly overalls, but we haven't gotten there yet.
  41. Son of a Gun
    Like so many meathead action thrillers, it's too busy fogging the windows with hot air to see the big picture.
  42. After The Fall
    The movie's flaws — silly plotting and unconvincing psychological groundwork — are Klein's doing.
  43. The Historian
    As a performer, he's best at the lectern and interacting with students who share his love of ancient Rome. But as a filmmaker, Doleac can't reconcile all his story lines.
  44. Southpaw
    Southpaw is an exhausting brutalist melodrama, but if nothing else, Fuqua always works with fine actors, and he's got a passel of them here.
  45. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    Landscapes and lyric conundrums distinguish the first two-thirds of this find-your-own-meaning artflick, which unfurls like some stranger's life you're half reliving.
  46. No Escape
    No Escape, while cruel, is often uncommonly suspenseful. And by pitting its white leads against the citizen hordes of Southeast Asia, No Escape is also uncommonly honest about the fears and assumptions that fuel adventure fiction — here, the Other is not abstracted away to orcs or aliens.
  47. Immoral Tales (re-release)
    Immoral Tales works best when its creator is focused on surprising viewers with his perverse imagination, and not his misguided cynicism.
  48. Black November
    Oddly, that extra star power makes Black November look cheap. It's threadbare for an action flick... The story Amata wants to tell is much simpler, and he might have been more successful sticking to his own guns and staying with his sturdy, empathetic heroine.
  49. Dark Summer
    Eventually succumbs to the weight of plot contrivance.
  50. White Rabbit
    Unfortunately, White Rabbit's grave, problematic conclusion attempts to broaden the movie's scope in a way that ultimately feels more unwarranted and distasteful than it does organic to the material.
  51. Ghost in the Shell
    Ghost in the Shell looks great, sounds great and has a gaping hole at its center — where its emotional core should be.
  52. Boychoir
    Hoffman, naturally, makes his character interesting in the way that genius actors always do. Yet the film's storytelling struggles to match his level of skill.
  53. My Name Is Hmmm...
    A hodgepodge of artistic gestures grafted onto a traditional narrative, neither fully linear nor experimental.
  54. The Boss Baby
    Aside from the slightly fresh take on a familiar concept, The Boss Baby is barely a moderate success as a kid's flick. Perhaps it will come as good news to studio and audience alike that it works much better as an existential horror movie.
  55. Concussion
    Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.
  56. The D Train
    The D Train has one great idea, a couple strong jokes, and a void at its center — a man who is only believable when he briefly becomes specific.
  57. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It's dispiriting that a film about a humor magazine that broke and rebuilt the forms of both humor and magazines is itself so staid — and so lacking in sociologic sweep.
  58. People Places Things
    People Places Things crackles to life whenever the camera turns to one of Will's students, Kat (The Daily Show's Jessica Williams), and her professor mother, Diane (Regina Hall).
  59. Creed
    Creed wants all of the Rocky drama but invests in none of the smarts.
  60. Diary of a Chambermaid
    Star Léa Seydoux — in her second collaboration with Jacquot (the first being 2012's Farewell, My Queen, in which she plays an adoring reader to Marie Antoinette) — further demonstrates, with each sly, gap-toothed grin, a keen understanding of power and impotence.
  61. The Business of Disease
    The brisk, informative film wants to press the urgency of this perfect storm of capitalistic opportunism but is weakened by a frequently overwrought score and cheap graphics that often give Business something of a histrionic undertone.
  62. My Life Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
    Corfixen celebrates her husband for being open in his work, but never shows us how his real-life concerns translate into commendable creative risk-taking.
  63. Champs
    There's nothing especially new or vital to these familiar scenes; ditto a late excursion into the realm of concussions — undoubtedly an epidemic for athletes of all stripes, but one that further muddles an already unfocused film.
  64. Backcountry
    Writer-director Adam MacDonald's direction creates an ominous sense of rural-nowhere isolation, and his script avoids contrived banter while shrewdly suggesting it's headed toward horror before unexpectedly veering into survival-story territory. Nonetheless, such misdirection can't compensate for hopelessly routine action.
  65. The Dead Lands
    The film is undeniably elevated by its exotic milieu. It's a shame, then, that it's stuck with such a familiar coming-of-age call to adventure.
  66. Allure
    At times there's no way to be sure whether what's on screen is scripted or candid, a formal tension that keeps the film on its toes while also underscoring that it's more effective as an experiential mood piece than it is as a drama.
  67. Free State of Jones
    Diligent and informative but also fragmented and inert, it plays like a series of scenes and notes for a longer, more fleshed-out movie.
  68. The Face of an Angel
    The Face of an Angel may not be like any other whodunit you've seen, but it's also only superficially smarter than the genre it defines itself against.
  69. The Connection
    It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.
  70. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Rogue One's creators clearly want to move us deeply — several major plot developments should pack an overwhelming emotional wallop — but they haven’t given this talented cast enough to work with. It’s fast, loud, even lovely — and not terribly engaging.
  71. Beauty and the Beast
    The clock, Cogsworth, serves as a perfect metaphor for the production itself: The movie’s just as poky and lumbering as he is while huffing up the staircase to escort Belle to her bedroom.
  72. Ghoul
    Ghoul rewards attention for much of its running time with subtle scares and growing unease, before squandering it in a shaky chase through twisted corridors that goes nowhere unexpected.
  73. Kung Fu Killer
    Director Teddy Chan's glossy thriller pays tribute to martial-arts cinema by casting enough Hong Kong industry legends to rival the cameo count of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. It's a pity, then, that it's an undeniably bland film in style and story, despite a few elaborately staged fight sequences.
  74. Our Man in Tehran
    Informative but tedious talking-head doc Our Man in Tehran is for anyone who watched Argo and then wished to hear a ditzy, history-obsessed uncle ramble about the real-life political stakes of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
  75. The Sisterhood of Night
    It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.
  76. Dial A Prayer
    Director Kiley is mostly successful at keeping Hallmark banalities at bay, relating Cora's crime in a series of tense flashbacks, and populating the film with funny characters played by a top-notch cast.
  77. Live From New York!
    Fortunately, Live From New York! isn't all overblown hagiography.
  78. Break Point
    Karas showcases the actors' surprisingly good tennis skills, like the continuous volley they do while reciting the lyrics to "Bust a Move" and the deft way Sisto spins his racquet. But rather than develop these two as characters, Break Point tries to score too many points.
  79. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Paley's segment proves that The Prophet is more of a missed opportunity than an ambitious folly.
  80. The Little Death
    Lawson's wishy-washiness about tone doesn't prevent the actors from nailing the comic exchanges.
  81. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    In 120 frames a second, both Alwyn and Stewart came off as hopelessly stilted; at 24 frames, they breathe with life. But lose the flicker, and you lose the spell.
  82. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    The series’ borrowings often have about them a whiff of playful improvisation, the logic of kids with action figures saying, “And what if then they had to drive into that tunnel from The Stand and it was full of zombies?” As The Death Cure grinds on, though, they become less inspired.
  83. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    The 100-Year-Old Man's equal-opportunity irreverence doesn't often translate to cleverness.
  84. Time Lapse
    That Bradley King's debut Time Lapse half-succeeds is a small miracle.
  85. 24 Days
    This retelling is more concerned with black-and-white morality, which drains it of suspense.
  86. Where Hope Grows
    Writer-director Chris Dowling handles that worrisome premise with a more even hand than this genre's ill-advised predecessors.
  87. 5 Flights Up
    What starts as a somewhat charming — if prosaic — story of love in the time of gentrification inexplicably spends most of its third act mired in the finer points of apartment hunting, like a tastefully lit HGTV show.
  88. Skin Trade
    Skin Trade's action is all blood and sinew, but its camerawork and choreography are nothing if not graceful.
  89. The Benefactor
    Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.
  90. Paulina
    The film is ultimately frustrating for the unending opacity of Paulina’s psychology.
  91. The Club
    It's all well acted, especially the interrogations, and its specifics haunt and disturb. But as it aspires to parable it slumps into dark melodrama, with competing scenes of mob violence and individual characters freighted with so much allegoric significance that they stop feeling like people.
  92. Chagall-Malevich
    There's a great deal of rhetoric about revolution and radical art, but Chagall-Malevich is staid and conventional.
  93. The Equalizer 2
    It’s hard to appreciate the hero’s crafty planning when we can’t really make out what he’s crafted.
  94. Daddy's Home
    The performers are all skilled enough to make something of this tired material.
  95. Dragon Blade
    The picture never quite finds its tone: It's neither go-for-broke outrageous enough to be consistently funny, nor energetic enough to be viscerally entertaining. It's neither as bad as you might fear, nor as much fun as you might hope.
  96. Samba
    Samba's relationship with Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a volunteer at an immigration advocacy center, has moments of sweetness, but is painted in too-broad brushstrokes.
  97. The New Girlfriend
    Ozon sacrifices his sharp portrayal of grief and rebirth to clumsy convention.
  98. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.
  99. Staten Island Summer
    The best that can be said about teen sex comedy Staten Island Summer is that it goes down easy.
  100. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    It looks and feels familiar, and in an era where studio filmmaking has increasingly become an extension of brand management, that should make a lot of people happy. But I can’t say it made me particularly happy.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »