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. Atomica
    Atomica's slapdash script is a hasty aggregation of screenwriting and science fiction clichés, barely feature-length and possibly written over a single weekend.
  2. Mean Dreams
    For better or for worse, Paxton's performance will be the focus of viewers’ attention, so it is decidedly to the good that he doesn't just deliver. He gives a sort of master class on why we've loved him: Paxton was amazing in the role of regular guys, and equally compelling as the subversion of same.
  3. The Belko Experiment
    Don't expect style or invention, much less satire. Its only interest as an experiment is that, out of duty, the roomful of critics I saw it with all stuck around until the end.
  4. Frantz
    The savage derangements of grief so guttingly explored by Ozon in Under the Sand (2000), a career-revitalizing project for Charlotte Rampling, are decorously treated in Frantz.
  5. After the Storm
    I walked out of After the Storm wanting to be a better person — and further convinced that Hirokazu Kore-eda isn't just one of the world's best filmmakers, but one of its most indispensable artists.
    • 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.
  7. 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.
  8. The Other Half
    Maslany and Cullen's characters seem intended to be psychologically realistic, but they're only as complex as The Other Half's surface-deep style.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Canners
    This film shows that canners (he interviews 18 of them, from different backgrounds) are industrious, resourceful and hardworking.
  10. Brimstone
    The filmmaker isn't as nimble as he is ambitious, though, and you'll feel all 148 minutes of Brimstone's runtime — just maybe not in the way Koolhoven wants you to.
  11. This Beautiful Fantastic
    There is such a thing as too sweet, and after this film, you'll feel a toothache coming on.
  12. My Scientology Movie
    The film's a little choppy as Theroux takes side trips to interview other former Scientologists, but it comes together as a chilling look at America's most famous 20th-century homegrown religion.
  13. The Ottoman Lieutenant
    This movie's got everything except gravity or a sense of emotional coherence.
  14. Cries from Syria
    His interviews are informative and captivating, but the film’s gut-punch immediacy comes from the astounding visuals caught by participants on digital cameras and cellphones, including shocking images of Assad’s torturers at work.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uncertain
    Uncertain is a film content to be small, one that knows that every atom is a universe.
  16. Suntan
    Structurally, there’s little that’s new in Suntan. The tale of a middle-aged man delusionally pursuing youth and beauty reaches back to Thomas Mann and beyond. But Papadimitropoulos has a feel for the physicality of this world, for contrasting postures and gestures.
  17. Raw
    Raw isn’t derivative — it’s fresh, funny, and grounded in reality. Underneath all the blood and guts, this is the story of a woman whose body demands love in extremity and the only person who’ll ever understand her fully: her sister.
  18. Personal Shopper
    When one goes to see Kristen Stewart — among the most quicksilver of her generation's performers — in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, a shape-shifting, resolutely of-this-moment ghost story that features her in nearly every frame, one goes not to watch her act but refract.
  19. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible.
  20. Kiki
    Jordenö, in a recurring motif, honors the kiki denizens the most when she captures them motionless, staring directly into the camera, regal and indefatigable.
  21. The Human Surge
    Surreal and wordlessly unsettling, Eduardo Williams’ globe-crossing feature The Human Surge is intimate and pleasurably inscrutable.
  22. The Last Laugh
    [An] insightfully open-ended inquiry into the role of humor as it relates to unspeakable tragedy.
  23. Headshot
    With Uwais choreographing the insane fights and Indonesian genre vets the Mo Brothers catching every bloody, manic minute, both fists and bullets get dished out with equal, frenetic fury — and the movie offers plenty of "Oh shit!" moments.
  24. Junction 48
    Junction 48 mostly sticks to uplifting formula, rarely offering anything particularly fresh or interesting.
  25. Table 19
    Everything you would expect happens, but little of it is funny or affecting.
  26. Love & Taxes
    As a writer, Kornbluth is vivid, funny and skilled at conveying characters, qualities he actually matches in performance.
  27. The Freedom to Marry
    Rosenstein makes this a suspenseful legal yarn and an essential history lesson.
  28. Nakom
    Nakom is sometimes slow-moving and occasionally succumbs to heavy-handed symbolism, contrasting images.... But the movie is commendable for centering on an atypical hero.
  29. Don't Kill It
    Those who favor gore above all else will be at home amid the blood and guts, but others should heed the obvious warning invited by the title: don't watch it.
  30. Wolves
    There's real turmoil in Freundlich's script (abuse, a crumbling marriage, pregnancy) but the problems sometimes seem tacked on for added crisis.
  31. 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.
  32. The Settlers
    What Dotan has to say — in arresting new footage — about today’s Hilltop Youth, a right-wing Jewish Israeli settler organization that unites and mobilizes young people to occupy territory in the West Bank, is crucial and, in the American context, frighteningly familiar.
  33. Kong: Skull Island
    In the struggle between sober subtext and monster-movie goofiness, the goofiness mostly wins out.
  34. Donald Cried
    In a bitterly funny performance, Avedisian lets Donald's freak flag fly, a big-toothed grin lighting up his face, framed by a shaggy haircut not deliberate enough to be a mullet.
  35. Catfight
    In its blunt, inelegant, but surprisingly gripping way, Catfight is the (im)perfect movie for our rotten times.
  36. Apprentice
    In a finale rife with twisted feelings of resentment, fury, and self-loathing, the film transforms into a grave meditation on the corrosive shadow cast by the decisions, and crimes, of yesterday.
  37. Contemporary Color
    The approach is experiential, a you-are-there-and-overwhelmed dazzlement, rather than a definitive record of each squad's big moment.
  38. Before I Fall
    Russo-Young gives this teen parable the thriller treatment to ward off any cheese, and watching Deutch learn her lesson with that expressive face of hers is a singular, moving experience.
  39. Les Hautes Solitudes (1974)
    Les Hautes Solitudes is both ravishing portraiture and wordless biography, a life and aura distilled to glances and gestures.
  40. Fist Fight
    Thanks to that cast, and some savvy direction, you might very well enjoy Fist Fight. But don’t be surprised if it also leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
  41. The Girl with All the Gifts
    The Girl with All the Gifts is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.
  42. My Life as a Zucchini
    Though never sentimental, the picture is hopeful about breaking the cycle of violence.
  43. Punching Henry
    Well observed and sometimes hilarious, Punching Henry stands as a better film than The Comedian, but many fewer people will see it. That might be its truest punch line.
  44. Bitter Harvest
    A subject like the Holodomor demands something more than a TV-movie aesthetic and pitched battle scenes featuring a couple dozen combatants.
  45. As You Are
    Constructed as a mystery, As You Are offers glimpses into intense adolescent bonds, just enough to remind baffled onlookers that they don't have a clue.
  46. Logan
    In Logan, we have an example of a superhero story taken to new extremes and a franchise to a spare, sad, apocalyptic finish (or “finish”), with R-rated action scenes that are both rousing and unbearably violent.
  47. Get Out
    Get Out is fully surprising in both concept and craft, with the scares never coming just when you expect them and the secrets more audacious than you might be guessing.
  48. The Great Wall
    As pure spectacle, The Great Wall is absolutely dazzling. It may be a studio release, but the constant sense of invention, the go-for-broke intricacy of its battle scenes, feels very much of a piece with Chinese action fantasy flicks.
  49. 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.
  50. My Name Is Emily
    My Name Is Emily gets lighter as it goes along, releasing tension and pretension for a pleasant, routine ride.
  51. Lovesong
    Like its central not-couple, two women tongue-tied about their desire for each other, So Yong Kim's Lovesong frustrates with its lack of articulation.
  52. 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.
  53. Everybody Loves Somebody
    Everybody Loves Somebody won’t reinvent the (third) wheel, but the knowing dialogue and convincingly human characters are a refreshing break from the norm and worthy of your attention.
  54. American Fable
    The film beguiles more than it thrills, its plotting never quite measuring up to its atmosphere or its suggestions of deeper meanings.
  55. XX
    I’d rather see these shorts included in a co-ed anthology, which would allow each director’s piece to gain resonance via proximity to works of shared themes. Still, if it takes segregating the sexes to climb up to gender parity, I can overlook a slightly mismatched directing combo.
  56. Get the Girl
    By the time the final half-hour rolls around, the film descends into twist-ridden, ridiculous madness. It becomes as messy and unattractive as the blood and brain matter that gets scattered throughout.
  57. 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.
  58. Fifty Shades Darker
    Despite the nonstop banality, Johnson remains the sole source of allure: Her sleepy eyes suggest nights devoted to pleasure inconceivable to James.
  59. Sex Doll
    Sex Doll, flat though it may sometimes be, is shrewdly aware of the countless clichés surrounding sex work.
  60. Speed Sisters
    Although Speed Sisters is not comprehensive, it's vital.
  61. Youth in Oregon
    Oregon is more than a bittersweet look at a man deciding to end his life before he’s too invalid to have a say in the matter: It’s a study of how plain ol’ stubbornness can keep a family forever brimming with dysfunction.
  62. 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.
  63. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    Anonymous haters on YouTube can say Gigi is fake, but her enthusiasm here, and the enthusiasm her teen girl fans have in meeting her, is totally genuine.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Rings
    No matter how hard anyone tries to save her, this soggy nightmare just keeps on creeping out of the TV like it’s her job. It’d be even better if everyone just let her be evil.
  65. Don't Hang Up
    Basically, Don't Hang Up is a hire-me sign masquerading as a slasher film.
  66. 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.
  67. Land of Mine
    The film is sometimes too sentimental, too predictable in its drift, but electric in individual moments.
  68. A United Kingdom
    Asante’s already proven she can world-build while wrangling a romance with her indie hit Belle, but she needs a jewel of a script, and this one is no diamond.
  69. Left on Purpose
    An anguished and compassionate chronicle of Schein and Vishner's relationship.
  70. Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends)
    This poignant documentary champions the curative powers of rock 'n' roll — and also reminds us: Always know your exits.
  71. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The LEGO Batman Movie is entertaining, but it also sometimes feels less like a spin-off of The LEGO Movie and more like one of its targets.
  72. Kedi
    In its own pleasantly dreamy and lilting way, the film embodies what it preaches: As life gets rougher, people endure not by hardening themselves even further, but by continuing to find the freedom to be kind. In Istanbul, the chaos never really stops. Kedi slyly reminds us that the humanity, too, has always been there.
  73. John Wick: Chapter 2
    This new film doesn’t have the emotional grounding of the original, and it probably dwells too long explaining things we never cared about. But it’s still a visceral, cathartic and — most important — gorgeous two hours of kinetic, poetic bloodshed.
  74. Dark Night
    Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.
  75. Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back
    Wu and Lin have great chemistry, but only because Chow was smart enough to reimagine Journey to the West as a rare character-driven big-budget action-adventure — the kind of thing Americans might love if they knew it existed.
  76. On the Rocks
    Staging multiple sequences as extended Altman-esque tapestries in which overlapping voices uneasily harmonize with the soundtrack's swelling jazz, On the Rocks is like a blood pressure–raising anxiety attack extended to an hour and a half — except funny.
  77. Eloise
    Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.
  78. Sophie and the Rising Sun
    Greenwald and cinematographer Wolfgang Held linger on the idyllic beauty of the salt marsh and trees draped with Spanish moss, using the vivid cerulean of native blue crabs to link her characters.
  79. War on Everyone
    Much of it feels inconsequential compared to his previous films, but McDonagh's unflagging anarchic energy keeps it juicily diverting in the moment.
  80. A Good American
    The movie is slow, quiet, and infuriating, as Binney and his small group are undermined by Gen. Michael Hayden's NSA and inept private contractors.
  81. Oklahoma City
    Goodman also doesn’t state overtly why the story of the Oklahoma City bombing is so relevant today. He doesn’t have to. His methodical recounting of the rise of white nationalism and fringe movements reverberates with today’s world, in which racist violence and conspiracist lunacy has been emboldened and brought troublingly into the mainstream.
  82. 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.
  83. The Lure
    The film's messages are cleverly wrapped in Smoczynska's entertaining, original vision. It's sexy, fearless, fun, and unrepentantly nasty.
  84. My Happy Family
    There isn’t a single second that doesn’t ring as achingly true.
  85. Kung Fu Yoga
    Kung Fu Yoga is a proudly silly cultural melting pot in which kung fu and Bollywood meet amicably.
  86. Midsummer in Newtown
    [A] slightly uneven yet deeply affecting documentary.
  87. Trophy
    Don’t let the beauty of its images fool you; it’s a supremely confrontational, even infuriating work. It’s hard to know what to make of Trophy, and something tells me the filmmakers wouldn’t want it any other way.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Age of Consequences
    Scott's filmmaking does a smooth job of linking A to B to Z, with slick, studiously understated montage and an effective music score, although some of the arguments made seem a bit of a stretch, as if climate change is being shoehorned into things artificially.
  89. My Father Die
    From homophobic start to misogynistic finish, My Father Die is a parade of thrift-store images and scenarios as dull as they are repugnant.
  90. 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.
  91. Lost in Florence
    While writer-director Evan Oppenheimer's tale of love, sport and Italian culture captures the landscape with a pleasant sheen and certainly makes Florence look like a lovely vacation destination, its narrative contains little emotional pull and too few surprises.
  92. I Am Michael
    Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.
  93. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo
    Recalling other cine-duets, both straight (Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise) and gay (Andrew Haigh's Weekend), Paris 05:59 distinguishes itself by seamlessly including a lesson on HIV post-exposure prophylaxis.
  94. A Dog's Purpose
    Because we see so much of ourselves in them, it’s nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize dogs. Which the filmmakers know, and exploit in the same way that a dog exploits an unattended burrito on the counter — enthusiastically, with no compunctions and not a thought in its head.
  95. Gold
    In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.
  96. The Big Sick
    For the vast majority of its running time, The Big Sick astutely pulls you between the twin poles of agony and glee.
  97. The Salesman
    Watching The Salesman, I can’t help but feel that this is the first time Farhadi’s mastery of the particular is undercut by the artificiality with which he’s treated the general. He remains one of the world’s foremost filmmakers, but this time around, his expertise and artistry are undone by phoniness.
  98. Behemoth
    This is a film about the devastation of Inner Mongolia and the systematic annihilation of its migrant workers, but it is no mere coup d'œil of righteous advocacy. It is a work of film art.
  99. The Incredible Jessica James
    The Incredible Jessica James strikes me as little more than an extended sketch – somewhat formless and repetitive. But its saving grace is that, unlike a lot of sketch movies, it doesn’t rely on shtick or wink-wink contrivance.
  100. I don't feel at home in this world anymore.
    Lynskey’s shivering rage and Wood’s Zen incompetence play off beautifully against each other, and Blair deftly juggles the suspense, humor and social overtones of his script. Until, that is, the film’s final 30 or 40 minutes, when he settles for genre schlock and the revelatory film we thought we were watching devolves into a less interesting, more familiar one.
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