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. Chicken People
    Haimes seems less interested in examining this unfamiliar world and the people involved than in shoving them into feel-good platitudes about following your dreams.
  2. It Had to Be You
    The film takes a few jumps in time and employs some mildly experimental techniques. Unfortunately, most of the humor doesn't stick.
  3. Sleepless
    Monaghan and Foxx, for all their gifts, can't transcend the material, though they do get more out of it than most others would be able to.
  4. The Circle
    Ponsoldt’s film is caught between comedy and paranoid thriller. I fear he half-asses the latter.
  5. In Pursuit of Silence
    Shen overplays his hand.
  6. Trash Fire
    Bates (Suburban Gothic) plays with horror tropes, juggling black comedy and suspense in scenes that tease a gory release but ultimately only emphasize how much members of the creative class can underestimate their backward kin.
  7. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    Okazaki gets close to, but never sheds enough light on, Mifune's elusive personality.
  8. By Sidney Lumet
    It's workmanlike and impassioned, but ultimately preaching to the choir.
  9. Burn Country
    The movie — at first scrappy and strange but an increasingly tough sit as it goes — never fixes its gaze on any singularly compelling idea.
  10. Ali and Nino
    It's all very tasteful, if not terribly exciting.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreamland
    Schwartzman's film is bawdy in its exploration of sexual fantasies, some of them extravagant. But it's a safer movie than its slick, retro look and subject matter would have you believe.
  12. All We Had
    The film’s haphazard episodic structure never coheres.
  13. Like Crazy
    Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.
  14. 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.
  15. Sleight
    The director builds to one big, beautiful revelation. But the story he tells in the lead-up doesn’t distract so much as it politely asks you to stand up so that it can place the trick card under your ass.
  16. Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America
    Davis holds forth memorably on the histories of country, blues, and rock 'n' roll. (He played with Chuck Berry.) But neither he nor Accidental Courtesy has much time to consider the scene with the BLM activists, who, in the film's schematic presentation, get depicted as something like a Klan equivalent — just less friendly.
  17. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    The film creates a conflicting impression: Here’s a committed wonk and public servant seizing every opportunity he can to combat what appears to be the greatest danger facing our planet. But here’s also a man who would sign off on a movie that so often sets aside his message so that we might admire him and his work.
  18. The Ataxian
    Some of the biking footage is pretty in a generic way; for the most part, we're told rather than shown how astonishing the riders' athletic feats are. More off-putting is the film's reflexive canonization of its subject.
  19. Blind
    Moore’s and Baldwin’s forceful personalities power their performances, and these evenly matched partners have now invigorated both a convoluted thriller (The Juror) and a predictable romance (Blind).
  20. The Dinner
    The beauty of a single-location thriller is how the tension escalates in containment, but Moverman fails to seize that built-in advantage.
  21. Claire in Motion
    Howell and Robinson go all-in on Claire’s measured mourning, and while it may be realistic, that detachment — along with a relentlessly clinical gray-tinged color palette — ultimately bogs down whatever momentum Claire in Motion might be working up to.
  22. One Piece Film: Gold
    Only Yesterday it ain't, and you probably already know whether One Piece Film: Gold will make you ecstatic or not.
  23. Worlds Apart
    Neophyte writer/director Christopher Papakaliatis eventually shows an affinity for filming two people in love, but his actors often lack the chemistry to make us believe that their bond transcends all socioeconomic boundaries.
  24. Fraud
    Fraud adds up to little more than a formally provocative but thematically tired stunt.
  25. 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.
  26. The Incredible Jessica James
    Strouse drops the ball with this meandering, flat film that shows few signs that he effectively coached his actors, as they rush to recite their dialogue.
  27. The Yellow Birds
    What Moors offers that’s new is a kind of unfolding mystery, as we come to find what really happened to Murphy in the war zone. Too bad that the pacing is botched and that the whole narrative becomes one long dirge of “and then, and then, and then.”
  28. Wolves
    There's real turmoil in Freundlich's script (abuse, a crumbling marriage, pregnancy) but the problems sometimes seem tacked on for added crisis.
  29. From Nowhere
    The naturalistic, handheld camerawork aims to create an intimate space for human connection, but the film only skims the surface, taking cues from other touching dramas without ever reaching its own original core.
  30. Mr. Gaga
    Writer/director Tomer Heymann's uneven doc Mr. Gaga offers a character study of Israeli dance choreographer Ohad Naharin, but the scope and power of Naharin's art only becomes clear when the dancers illustrate rather than comment on his distinctively twitchy, animalistic "gaga" style of movement.
  31. Chapter & Verse
    The story, scripted by Beaty and poet/author-turned-filmmaker Jamal Joseph (who himself did five-and-a-half years in Leavenworth) dips into sloppy, melodramatic heavy-handedness, sullying the occasional spurts of fresh perspective.
  32. Stray Bullets
    If we're grading on a curve, though — and seriously, it bears repeating: Fessenden is literally sixteen years old — it's impossible not to give the film kudos for being a not-bad genre exercise that shows promise for its precocious director.
  33. The Ticket
    If Fluk’s film has any impact at all, much of it is thanks to Dan Stevens, who brings an empathy to James that occasionally complicates the director/co-writer’s two-dimensional view of the character.
  34. The Young Karl Marx
    There’s something dazzling in the audacity of applying the most conventional and conservative techniques to the portrayal of radical thinkers and thoughts. That frisson keeps the movie interesting without quite jolting it to life.
  35. Year by the Sea
    It’s less the story of a woman taking a year off from city life and her husband than it is a pleasant revue of sketches and scenarios on that topic.
  36. Danger Close
    By focusing on Quade’s absolute respect for military service and authority, Salzberg and Tureaud miss an opportunity to explore her pragmatic conservatism, lyrically expressed in her profiles of unquestioning heroism.
  37. Little Boxes
    While racist slights remain unfortunately common, Little Boxes doesn't exactly use them to illuminate the nuances of suburban life.
  38. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    It’s hard not to wish, as Scheinfeld's restless film hustles along to touch its next base, that we could just sit and listen to more from Shorter, who actually has insight to share. Lord knows the movie won’t make time to let us hear some John Coltrane.
  39. American Anarchist
    Powell can be evasive and embarrassed at times — who wouldn’t be, faced with the worst of your own youthful mind? But Siskel seems to think this film is exposing a monster in the now rather than witnessing a man wrestle with his past selves.
  40. Battle of the Sexes
    Stone and Carell ace both the warmth and the competitive camaraderie of that relationship. But when Billie and Bobby interact with anyone else in this story — love interests in particular — woo, boy, does Battle of the Sexes whiff the serve.
  41. Karl Marx City
    As too often happens in nonfiction movies, their exploration of these concepts is undermined by ill-considered execution.
  42. God Knows Where I Am
    The Widers opt for much footage of the still-empty house itself, inside and out, shot by gently gliding cameras. This conveys an appropriate lonely stillness, a sense of a soul wandering a static world, especially in early scenes, but by the end the footage seems repetitious – yes, we’ve nosed around this sad doorway before.
  43. Obit
    Obit rarely strays from the anodyne tone of the advertorial.
  44. Tom of Finland
    The film is jammed with incident and detail but there’s little flow to the storytelling.
  45. LA 92
    LA 92 is about what this all looked like on TV, a sort of Los Angeles Burns Itself.
  46. The Tiger Hunter
    Immigrant stories certainly don’t demand tragedy to be legitimate, but The Tiger Hunter, with its pastiche of fish-out-of-water comedy and pointy collared shirts, ultimately feels weightless.
  47. Deadpool 2
    Rather than face its own moral incoherence, Deadpool 2 blinks.
  48. Everything Else (Todo Lo Demás)
    Almada deserves credit for creating a portrait of a character so often passed over onscreen: Doña is a woman in her sixties with a decidedly unglamorous life. But the relentless darkness here (both figuratively and literally — some of the shots of Doña in her home are shrouded in blackness) often proves more alienating than illuminating.
  49. 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.
  50. Godard Mon Amour
    Although writer-director Hazanavicius based the biopic on Wiazemsky’s memoir, Un An Après (One Year Later), Wiazemsky gets portrayed as a passive observer, a minor character in her own story.
  51. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Limehouse Golem
    Director Juan Carlos Medina depicts a grim city perpetually shrouded in fog the color and consistency of pea soup. He makes the murders appropriately gory, but not over the top. Yet a storyline involving anti-Semitism threatens to upend the compelling detective tale.
  53. The King
    Honestly, I’d probably love this film’s wandering spirit and Elvis-is-everywhere philosophizing if it were half as fast or twice as long, if it pinned any thought down long enough to really TCB. Instead, it’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs Seventies stage banter.
  54. Lover for a Day
    The scenario almost seems an apologia for the film’s own subject matter, crafted with the awareness that audiences have outgrown the May-December trope.
  55. 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.
  56. Monogamish
    Instead of finding one answer to his question, Ruspoli takes the film’s title to heart, ending Monogamish on a big ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
  57. The Pulitzer at 100
    It’s nice to see everyone, but the analysis never runs too deep.
  58. Proud Mary
    It’s a sad day when the cinematographer carries the full burden of storytelling, but in this instance, it’s also at least a wonderful opportunity to marvel at Laustsen’s work.
  59. The Only Living Boy in New York
    The boy is but a shell; it’s the men and women around him who truly come to life in this chaotic, awkward, and sporadically moving film.
  60. Souvenir
    While there’s poignancy to be found in Souvenir’s depiction of aging and work, the sexual politics leave something to be desired.
  61. Tyler Perry's Acrimony
    Cut out thirty minutes, and this might have been a lean, mean Eighties-thriller throwback blessed with a killer lead performance.
  62. Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
    Here, as Berry warns, the imagination is limited by the camera. In a world in which I couldn’t buy Berry’s New Collected Poems, I might make an effort to see this again someday, with my eyes shut.
  63. False Confessions
    In Luc Bondy’s largely inert False Confessions, the tedium is broken by the [Isabelle Huppert's] outfits, and by the way she moves in them.
  64. Footnotes
    Though it’s not without charming moments, this story of women standing up to the big bad guys is diminished by unimpressive song-and-dance numbers that feel like Michel Legrand throwaways.
  65. I Feel Pretty
    Schumer remains likable, and the film has its moments, but there are so many excellent opportunities here for poignant cringe comedy that more often than not I Feel Pretty feels like a missed opportunity — and a slow, ponderous one at that.
  66. Amnesia
    Under Schroeder’s direction, Keller and Riemelt deliver wistful, earnest performances that almost make up for the script’s shortcomings.
  67. The Nile Hilton Incident
    The Nile Hilton Incident, despite a stylish, seedy coating, fails to even come close to the canon of greats that have influenced it.
  68. 12 Strong
    Fuglsig is adept at showing choppers and peaks, caves and campfires, at suggesting the great silence at the roof of the world. He’s also a sure hand with the geography of battle, with ensuring we understand why the bullets fly in the direction they’re flying — and both where they come from and where they hit. That said, the firefights do wear on.
  69. England Is Mine
    [A] muted, sometimes arresting drama.
  70. Shot
    The gun-control message is so rote that it’s of secondary interest to the film’s ambitious structure.
  71. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.
  72. Hostiles
    Cooper has yet to elevate his sensibility beyond a choked, self-inhibiting intensity.
  73. Tales of an Immoral Couple
    The film fails to sustain the exhilaration of its initial buildup.
  74. Easy Living
    The film deserves some credit for not becoming a weepie or, conversely, making Sherry the butt of a joke, but while Dhavernas’s performance and director Adam Keleman’s penchant for soft colors in a harsh world add intrigue, it leaves a frustrating aftertaste.
  75. Mrs. Hyde
    The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.
  76. Borg vs. McEnroe
    The film — which is nowhere near as interesting as LaBeouf’s performance — is hopelessly reductive about its subjects’ psychology even as it mocks the press of 1980 for being reductive about its subjects’ psychology.
  77. Wetlands
    A suitably haunted Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje can’t reconcile Babs’s impulsive actions with the character’s implied moral core.
  78. Man in Red Bandana
    The short-subject treatment serves as a challenge that, in eighty minutes, writer-director Matthew Weiss doesn’t meet.
  79. I Love You, Daddy
    Ultimately, C.K., who always has found his strongest and funniest voice when he’s onstage alone with a microphone, struggles to make the movie cohere — it goes limp, the plot fizzles, and Leslie himself fades out of view, a cloudy figure who never really has to answer to anyone.
  80. Elizabeth Blue
    Elizabeth inspires empathy, but it often feels like we’re being told to feel a certain way by being shown so much rather than being allowed to naturally warm up to her.
  81. The Paris Opera
    Unfortunately, the film has nothing much to say other than that the enterprise is inherently complicated — which isn’t point enough for 111 minutes of screen time.
  82. The Ritual
    The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.
  83. Bitch
    While it’s refreshing to see a portrait of a woman’s unraveling that doesn’t romanticize mental illness, and that’s actually directed by a woman, it’s easy to wish Bitch probed a bit deeper into the protagonist’s pre-dog life.
  84. Wait for Your Laugh
    Rose Marie was — and is — a fabulous talent, but this off-kilter documentary doesn’t completely make the case.
  85. Small Town Crime
    Every town possesses a history, culture, lineage and language all unto its own, but in the Nelms’s hands, we see none of that. Here’s a half-boiled mystery and boring bad guys, but the film does have a saving grace: Hawkes’s comic timing.
  86. Hello Again
    What Gustafson has achieved is certainly artful, and sometimes, through montage and smart camerawork, suggests correspondences between these century-crossing assignations that the stage show could not. But even at its best, this Hello Again struck me as an uncertain, even ancillary work.
  87. The Road Movie
    The mayhem is hypnotic, scabrous, scarifying, unpredictable, astonishing, dispiriting, repetitious, clearly both amoral and immoral, and by the end, a little dull. Even over the short running time, you can feel your humanity’s diminishment.
  88. Permission
    This earnest, deadly serious character study has few moments of levity, mostly provided by an arch Gina Gershon, still as intoxicating and seductive as she was in Bound.
  89. Please Stand By
    The film itself is often flat, akin to a very well-directed after-school special crafted exclusively to dramatize what it might be like to either live on the high-functioning end of the spectrum or care for someone who’s there.
  90. Kickboxer: Retaliation
    A hysterically entertaining train wreck.
  91. Under the Silver Lake
    Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that’s not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement.
  92. Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba
    Mama Africa is a rough sketch of Makeba’s complex life and her influence on world music (as well as folk, jazz, and Afropop), but this queen deserves a monarch-sized portrait that fully showcases her part in the tumultuous social, political, and cultural movements that reshaped the world around her.
  93. Our New President
    Our New President merely scratches the surface, and in its own weird way, comes to embody the plague of shallow spectacle it purports to fight against.
  94. The Cured
    Even though The Cured doesn’t quite excel at being both terrifying and thought-provoking, at least it gave Juno the opportunity to become a horror hero.
  95. Bleeding Steel
    The closest comparison for this film is 2017’s joyfully schlocky Beyond Skyline, though that boasted far more original set pieces. Bleeding Steel seems content to rehash old ones, cutting and pasting Chan into familiar scenes, with the welcome exception of one battle that takes place atop the Sydney Opera House — but I’ll be damned if I could figure out why or how they got there.
  96. Puzzle
    Since it’s hard to buy the character, it’s hard to buy the story, no matter how good Macdonald is.
  97. Arizona
    Director Jonathan Watson’s super-violent Arizona is a well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy with one tiny spark of warmth — Rosemarie DeWitt’s performance.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    The exception to a listless cast is Murray Hamilton as the oil-develper villain, an eloquently indirect Southerner with enough shifts in mood to make one whis he had a larger part, but not regret the movie's one payoff--his well staged and satisfactory demise. [14 July 1975, p.58]
    • Village Voice
  99. Pickings
    I wish Morgan had put as much care into the script as he did into his inventive, illustrative style.
  100. Unfriended: Dark Web
    For all its inventive and impressive technique, the film lacks fun; a lot of folks, myself included, need very little reminding that the Internet is a threat and that terrible men are actively out there abducting and terrorizing girls and women for lulz.
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