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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    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Padmaavat
    The finished work itself is actually a stellar achievement, its raucous meta-narrative more than worthy of a spot in Bhansali’s visually splendid canon.
  2. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Legends of the Mountain’s narrative fuse may be long, but Hu knows exactly when to light it and when to snuff it out.
  3. 24 Frames
    We like cows and crows and snow, but it’s Kiarostami’s phenomenological presence that somehow turns every image or camera posture into a question about living, seeing, empathy, and essence.
  4. A Fantastic Woman
    A Fantastic Woman shows that the obvious insults a trans person may endure will, of course, weigh on the psyche, but the death by a thousand well-meaning cuts hurts as well.
  5. Braven
    Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.
  6. In the Intense Now
    Immersive, involving, sometimes revelatory, sometimes curiously naive, and on occasion thuddingly obvious, João Moreira Salles’s found-footage study of revolutionaries in the streets of Paris, Prague, and other countries in 1968 would stand as an invaluable assemblage simply on the basis of its archival finds alone.
  7. Shot in the Dark
    It’s a vital, intimate snapshot of a handful of people who have been touched by gun and gang violence.
  8. Have a Nice Day
    The surprisingly vibrant, hand-drawn images of Have a Nice Day revitalize the story’s more tired elements. It may not give us anything new, but Jian Liu’s film looks lovely and, at 77 minutes, doesn’t overstay its welcome. And sometimes that’s enough.
  9. The Last Family
    The movie sticks in the mind not as a full-on, time-honored biopic but as a queasily warts-and-all peeling back of a family dynamic that happened to involve a figure of cultish renown.
  10. Kickboxer: Retaliation
    A hysterically entertaining train wreck.
  11. 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.
  12. Psychotic!
    Psychotic! is best when it leavens the terror with comedy, slipping moments of ridiculousness into horror tropes.
  13. The Clapper
    The Clapper unsuccessfully attempts to be sincere and embrace the absurdity of its characters’ lives.
  14. West of the Jordan River
    The maddeningly unfocused Israeli documentary West of the Jordan River doesn’t reveal anything insightful about Gaza settlers’ reasons for either supporting or rejecting a two-state solution.
  15. Like Me
    Timlin so fully embodies the role of the sociopathic Kiya that this often-gruesome buffet of wild imagery bathed in hot pink impresses even with a thin, nearly nonexistent story. And Mockler’s and Jessalyn Abbott’s artfully chaotic editing style...elevates Like Me to video art.
  16. 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.
  17. Den of Thieves
    Between the candy of the Federal Reserve robbery itself — which features a marvelous running bit about the process of delivering Chinese food in a government-surveilled building — and the merry nonsense of Butler chugging Pepto-Bismol during a strategy session, Den of Thieves earns a nice spot in the watch-forty-minutes-on-a-rainy-day canon.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan
    [Kirchheimer's] arguments — delivered in declarative voiceover by Dylan Baker and scored to music from Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis — have power, but what stirs the mind and the heart, here, is his photography and editing.
  21. The Final Year
    The filmmakers offer us glimpses of the diplomatic life but too little telling detail.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Dim the Fluorescents
    The film’s examination of the artistic grind is promising, but Dim the Fluorescents clocks in at over two hours, proving tiresome at times. Luckily, Skwarna and Armstrong’s quirky chemistry keeps the lights on in this overlong debut.
  25. Saturday Church
    With Saturday Church, Cardasis has crafted a beautiful story about young, queer people of color championing one another and finding themselves.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bitter Money
    We are not, as in so many a contemporary documentary, made to merely identify with the position of cameraperson, but are forced to consider and find our own ethical and political positions.
  27. 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.
  28. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    Mary and the Witch’s Flower and its eye-popping cavalcade of creations and colors speak not to the shock and awe of technology but to the can-do magic of human achievement.
  29. A Ciambra
    A Ciambra is at its best when Carpignano captures the textures of everyday life, suggesting the neorealists with his use of nonprofessional actors and on-location shooting.
  30. Beuys
    Veiel’s refreshingly open-ended approach invites you to find your own answers.
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