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. On Beauty
    The short documentary On Beauty is all surfaces, skimming, lightness, flash.
  2. The Dressmaker
    Unfortunately, The Dressmaker does not deliver on this early promise.
  3. Sneakerheadz
    In its 70-minute runtime, Sneakerheadz offers only the briefest glimpse of issues larger than what's in the shoebox.
  4. The Great Man
    While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.
  5. Rosenwald
    Kempner's film, which has an eat-your-vegetables quality, runs long and suffers from a lack of focus.... Still, it's inspiring how Rosenwald, who took full advantage of capitalism's potential, also shared, passionately and generously, his windfall.
  6. Paulette
    It's all pure hokum, perfect for a Shirley MacLaine remake, but it's lovely to see Lafont carrying a film so effortlessly.
  7. Wolf Totem
    Wolf Totem itself becomes a pitched battle for supremacy between the breathtaking glories of nature and the grinding banality of man. Here, as ever, nature loses.
  8. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    There’s no mystery, and the action is thoroughly disposable, but what works this time around are the interactions between Reacher and Turner, mostly thanks to the efforts of Smulders, who brings an impassioned frustration to her character.
  9. Race
    Were it not so committed to telling the official story in bullet points, Race might have found a more provocative angle about athletes and artists who work through and around the powers that be.
  10. The Warriors
    If the movie is not as dangerous as its detractors claim, neither is it as glorious and memorable as some of its less discriminating admirers would have it. I find the spectacle fading from my memory in a jumble of dislocated colors and motions. In retrospect, it seems too studiously unreal.
  11. Hardcore Henry
    You have a movie with everything it needs save one crucial element: emotion.
  12. Right Now, Wrong Then
    In the end, Right Now, Wrong Then is a two-piece puzzle that's less than the sum of its parts.
  13. Born to be Blue
    Budreau's variation on the theme of Chet Baker doesn't play out as an inspired improvisation, settling instead into the familiar grooves of a redemptive melodrama
  14. High-Rise
    Ben Wheatley's muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that examine the pathologizing effects of modern technology and convenience — suffers from being both too literal and too obtuse in its alterations.
  15. A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story
    A Brave Heart is not very sophisticated, flitting between Lizzie the internet celebrity, Lizzie the anti-bullying activist, Lizzie the beloved eldest daughter of a close-knit family, and Lizzie the young woman whose health challenges make her advocacy even harder.
  16. From Afar
    Despite From Afar's lumbering solemnity, Castro, a Chilean actor best known for his collaborations with compatriot Pablo Larraín, proves ever supple.
  17. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.
  18. Risen
    Cliff Curtis is appealingly low-key as Christ, humble in a way that the film around him would have done well to emulate.
  19. The Boy and the Beast
    Mamoru Hosoda's The Boy and the Beast works with many common anime tropes but doesn't find anything new to say about them.
  20. Northern Soul
    This debut feature by Elaine Constantine has no shortage of style, but ultimately relies a lot on cliché.
  21. Darling
    There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.
  22. Kill Your Friends
    Steve's voiceover monologues and dealings with a detective investigating a murder are straight out of the Patrick Bateman playbook, but turning the sociopathic cynicism up to eleven tends to be ineffective unless wit and insight are included in the mix.
  23. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    In the end, The Man Who Knew Infinity never allows itself to transcend the sad irony of such biopics — that people known for thinking outside the box are always given film portraits that refuse to do so.
  24. Dangerous Men
    To Rad, Dangerous Men was a life's work, and to sit through it feels like honoring the dreamers of the world who at least get shit done. Is it terrible? Of course. Is there belly-dancing? Duh.
  25. Band of Robbers
    The directors of Band of Robbers, brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, have set out to modernize the stories of Mark Twain but end up with a cutesy caper that isn't as memorable as you might hope.
  26. The Girl on the Train
    The Girl on the Train, though an enjoyable enough ride, goes idle once it slows down long enough for you to take in the full view of things.
  27. Prescription Thugs
    It's unusually confessional and often moving, but Bell's film is unsatisfying as a piece of documentary journalism.
  28. Noma: My Perfect Storm
    Deschamps never ventures below the surface of Redzepi's wildly successful experiment, and while the pictures are pretty, no one judges food on appearance alone.
  29. Close Range
    It's as unsubtle as a boot to the head, but its dour-and-campy lo-fi style is far preferable to the spastic flash of its big-budget genre compatriots.
  30. Dementia
    As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.
  31. Sky
    Fabienne Berthaud's Sky is a road movie that never quite makes the right turns.
  32. The Brand New Testament
    Testament is full of bad jokes (like a man repeatedly throwing himself from great heights to prove he won't die) and, in spite of Groyne's grave, determined presence as Ea, is borderline offensive.
  33. The Fencer
    The Fencer is ultimately too staid: It’s at its best when Nelis shows the art of fencing to his students and the elegant yet dangerous swords are wielded.
  34. Love Beats Rhymes
    Love Beats Rhymes is more of a showcase for star Azealia Banks than director RZA, but his influence is still felt in this formulaic hip-hop romance.
  35. Synchronicity
    An admirably complex tale of time travel, corporate espionage, and high emotions you'll just have to take everyone's word on, Jacob Gentry's science fiction puzzler Synchronicity is so ambitious — and so canny, on occasion — that you might be willing to forgive its indie infelicities.
  36. The Himalayas
    For all the big-budget spectacle on display, it's the scenes that look to have been shot on a GoPro that most excite -- only in these few sequences does The Himalayas begin to distinguish itself from its blockbuster ilk.
  37. 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.
  38. Unlucky Plaza
    Kwek's refreshing focus on his terrorized protagonists' pre-abduction lives keeps Unlucky Plaza afloat once it invests in generic ticking-clock thrills.
  39. Southbound
    Just as most of them can't outrun their pasts, neither can they escape familiar plot contrivances that try too hard and achieve too little.
  40. Early Man
    Aardman Animations (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit, and Shaun the Sheep) generally invests a great deal of care and precision into its storytelling, but this picture is somehow both simple and nonsensical. Early Man is the convoluted, caveman-populated skewering of FIFA that nobody asked for.
  41. Tallulah
    The film's premise rests on one contrivance too many as it is...and Heder keeps raising the stakes instead of settling into the groove established so well by her two leads.
  42. American Honey
    The majority of American Honey has Arnold working overtime to make her movie seem important or scandalous.
  43. 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.
  44. Complete Unknown
    While [Rachel Weisz] is a compelling performer, the film is ultimately a Hitchcock-inspired thriller without too many real thrills.
  45. Indignation
    An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.
  46. The Free World
    Jason Lew's lost-soul drama The Free World offers a modest exploration of innocence and guilt, with occasional interludes of both violence and romance
  47. Operation Avalanche
    It's often more The Office than le Carré, and none of it's anywhere as interesting as the great counter-historical gag at the film's heart.
  48. Eva Hesse
    Eva Hesse relies too heavily on ventriloquism to recapitulate the high and low points of the artist
  49. Glassland
    Barrett faces the daunting task of trying to contain Collette's tumultuous performance, and he struggles to make Reynor's more restrained turn work in the same space. The film trudges along in Collette's wake, fumbling for something to focus on apart from the bleeding wound just offscreen.
  50. Jane Wants a Boyfriend
    Jane Wants a Boyfriend offers a sweet but slight look at the oft-misunderstood subject of navigating relationships with a person on the autism spectrum.
  51. A Country Called Home
    Poots, who's quietly distinguished herself in a number of supporting roles over the last few years, brings a documentary-like naturalism to the familiar plotting; you'll care about her even if you begin to lose interest in the movie as a whole.
  52. White Girl
    This is one of those films that merits a long cold shower afterwards. That might actually be a compliment — Wood wants to provoke.
  53. Echo Park
    Echo Park doesn't circumvent expectations, but it's worth a watch for those small moments of two humans relating to each other on a realistic plane. Just don't expect to learn anything about Echo Park, its residents, or how people deal with gentrification.
  54. Fatima
    Faucon has built his story around very gentle, glancing blows. But this is not the focused austerity of a Robert Bresson; the director’s level distance and jaded eye lead more to lifelessness than a revealing simplicity of expression.
  55. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    You can fully enjoy Belladonna of Sadness if you either overlook or participate in the objectification of a gorgeous victim.
  56. The Trust
    In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film quickly loses focus and forgets the quirky characters that make the city — and the story — special.
  57. The First Monday in May
    Rossi provides an attractive overview of the exhibition for those who did not attend it, but we are left feeling something like Wong, seeing a lot of pretty things surrounded by vapidity.
  58. In a Valley of Violence
    A slow approach requires careful atmosphere-building, and these days West is actually stronger at writing funny dialogue than he is at creating atmosphere.
  59. Men & Chicken
    Mikkelsen, blessed with the rare ability to class up a joint while also being the most menacing guy in the room, is cast against type as a mustachioed philanderer; based on the evidence, his estimable talents are better suited to Hannibal.
  60. The Infiltrator
    Unfortunately, as he performs the acting equivalent of triple backflips, Cranston isn't given much of a safety net from the script or direction.
  61. A Cure for Wellness
    The director conjures some chills with a cold plunge into an enchanting and frightful world — the imagery’s straight out of a Kubrick and Lynch nightmare — but the story unravels as he tries to overexplain his evil doctor’s devilish plot.
  62. Sold
    All the characters are broadly sketched, though well acted. Beyond that, the innate tension of the subject matter — and the shamelessly manipulated emotions — carries the film to its uplifting ending.
  63. Art Bastard
    Victor Kanefsky's documentary nonetheless manages to be as cursory as it is intimate, skimming over so much of Cenedella's life and career that it imparts only a hazy impression of who he is and what he believes.
  64. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    Co-directors Jeff and Michael Zimbalist stick to the playbook throughout, from typical moments of uplift to a Pelé cameo only slightly less fan-serving than Stan Lee's Marvel spots.
  65. It
    The critic seems less interested in the scares and the suspense — a shame, since IT is filled with them — and more in the kids themselves.
  66. Time to Choose
    If An Inconvenient Truth served to scare us, then Time to Choose offers hope, presenting what amounts to an hour-and-45-minute commercial for renewable technology that might inspire confidence in scientific progress even as it reminds us that it isn't cheap being green.
  67. Dough
    A mirthful, edgeless dramedy.
  68. Pali Road
    Chen's full-bodied commitment to her role adds something new to this familiar scenario, which also benefits from its idyllic island setting; psychodrama and Hawaii pair surprisingly well.
  69. 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.
  70. The Other Side
    It's all shocking, of course, but it also often looks staged and performed rather than merely observed.
  71. Two Lovers and a Bear
    Reckless love, life and death and a talking polar bear (voiced by Gordon Pinsent) are all given equal time but not a trajectory we can follow.
  72. Anthropoid
    It's all sickeningly accomplished, with incidents so tense and audacious that you might not have the headspace to wonder until afterwards, "Hey, wait, what was the point in grinding us through so many terrifying minutes of that?"
  73. Carnage Park
    Much of Carnage Park is merely a sun-bleached desert creepshow, a murky soup of a murderer toying with his victims simply because he's cra-a-azy.
  74. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    Neville briefly showcases individual musicians but never sticks with them long enough to highlight their skills.
  75. Parched
    Too bad writer-director Leena Yadav only infrequently uses innuendo-driven sex talk to break up a monotonous series of confrontations between misogynistic alpha males and their unhappy wives.
  76. 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.
  77. Shelley
    Director Ali Abbasi excels at atmosphere, understanding that any beautiful landscape can be made terrifying with the right sound design and that a cut to a silent interior can be as jarring as any jump scare. His script, unfortunately, is not as interesting.
  78. Operation Chromite
    The result is like something Michael Bay might produce at his least self-indulgent.
  79. Edge of Winter
    Director Rob Connolly may well think he's upping the stakes by plunging his film into borderline horror territory, but in fact he's minimizing them.
  80. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    All that bravura filmmaking — the elaborate camera moves and colorful images and unexpected angles — is fascinating from both technical and aesthetic standpoints, and it certainly held my attention. But don’t be surprised if you start to suspect that, for all the film’s ornamentation, it might not be leading up to something revelatory.
  81. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    By focusing on his subject's unwavering moral certainty, Kraume denies his ethical complexity and diminishes the difficulties of his challenging stance to educate the society that wanted him dead.
  82. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    This reboot smartly doesn't try to escalate the material to bigger and better status, keeping things small and scrappy and relying on the fighters to be the best special effects.
  83. Don't Worry Baby
    Unsurprisingly, the film doesn't live up to its Beach Boys–quoting title. Things turn out all right, but there's little real emotional force.
  84. 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.
  85. Level Up
    Director Adam Randall keeps the action tightly paced and the dialogue to a refreshing minimum, helping to heighten Matt's growing isolation.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    T2 Trainspotting
    It's as if the filmmakers recognized the wanness of the material and settled on a strategy of padding it out with empty high style on the one hand and clever meta awareness on the other.
  87. Salt and Fire
    Despite the bad acting, self-importance and general Herzogian ridiculousness, the director actually has a deep sense of beauty and a genuine talent for communicating humanity’s scale against immense natural forces and the absolute howling vastness of time.
  88. LBJ
    LBJ slips from an examination of a sometimes admirable leader into a hagiographic daydream, a fantasy of a father figure to save us all. That’s a matter of Reiner’s politics, of course, but even more so a matter of his instincts as a popular filmmaker: He’s offering us an American presidency to escape to.
  89. Viva
    About half an hour of this was enough for me—long before the orgy, LSD drugging, and hallucination animation, I'd gotten the joke—though Biller's re-creation is not only right-on but rigorous.
  90. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Kampai! feels like a manic ensemble drama that should have been a tight three-man show.
  91. Generation Startup
    It looks like the recruitment appeal that it is; it will probably be pretty effective on campuses.
  92. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    Making a Killing feels oddly static, like any fact-dense sermon to the choir.
  93. The Late Bloomer
    Though Pollak's direction in his first narrative feature is solid, The Late Bloomer is mostly an excuse for predictable sex jokes and ample toplessness.
  94. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
    A warm and heartfelt but too often desultory and disorganized tribute to the down-to-earth intellectual.
  95. Come What May
    Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.
  96. London Town
    All the ingredients for a gritty — if familiar — coming-of-age story are here. But London Town, though spirited, is consistently tension-free.
  97. Blair Witch
    Blair Witch’s comparatively maximalist approach shows too much and scares too little.
  98. We Are X
    Die-hard X Japan fans may enjoy seeing Yoshiki talk about his past, but everyone else will leave We Are X wondering who X Japan is.
  99. Colossal
    Engaging ideas bubble up every so often in Colossal, a film that carries out magical thinking to its extreme. But the audacity of its conceit is inexorably tamed, becoming an all-too-familiar lesson on saying no.
  100. Coming Through The Rye
    Regardless of its capable performances and understated direction, and no matter that it was inspired by Sadwith’s own hunt for Salinger, Coming Through the Rye comes across as a cute conceit incapable of sustaining a substantial feature.
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