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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  1. Southside with You
    Both actors occasionally hit stumbling blocks with the wordy script and Tanne's direction, neither of which allows quite enough room for the characters to think and feel onscreen.
  2. Kate Plays Christine
    Kate Plays Christine is a documentary, but often a totally fake one, cheekily defining itself as its own making-of DVD supplement and documenting its own evaporation into near-nothingness. Every scene cries — or whines — about the entire project's inherent impossibility.
  3. Spaceman
    Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.
  4. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Kampai! feels like a manic ensemble drama that should have been a tight three-man show.
  5. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    Making a Killing feels oddly static, like any fact-dense sermon to the choir.
  6. Morris from America
    In Chad Hartigan's lighthearted drama Morris From America, there are a whopping two African-American characters. The difference between this film and most others, however, is that these two are fully yet subtly drawn. They interact in ways that feel genuine, the actors portraying a heartfelt father-son relationship and the director fighting the urge to get either too preachy or mushy.
  7. Ben-Hur
    In paring down and streamlining its source material, this new version also saps its heft.
  8. 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.
  9. Spa Night
    There have been upbeat coming-out films (But I'm a Cheerleader) and tragic, infuriating ones (Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain). Andrew Ahn's Spa Night is executed on a significantly smaller scale, a deliberately anticlimactic one, which makes it all the more doleful.
  10. When Two Worlds Collide
    The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.
  11. Ixcanul
    Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.
  12. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Herzog smartly takes a broad, bird's-eye perspective of our early techno-evolution.
  13. War Dogs
    The film’s breezy drive and bursts of comic energy largely divert attention from the flatness of its world and characters.
  14. Kubo and the Two Strings
    From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.
  15. Operation Chromite
    The result is like something Michael Bay might produce at his least self-indulgent.
  16. 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.
  17. Joshy
    Joshy could easily be a film about loss, but it instead ends up as a prickly exploration of forced fun.
  18. My King
    The tears and recriminations, eruptions and reconciliations hold a begrudging fascination for about an hour.... After that, though, the volume is never turned down and these characters are never less than the most unendurable company.
  19. Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary
    Though sometimes clumsy or nostalgic, the film is an engaging oral history of Leary and Dass's friendship.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lost Arcade
    The film meets the open door, come-as-you-are community on its own level, freely following both new and recurring faces over its diffuse 79 minutes and avoiding the forced, interwoven three-character structure that far too many works of American nonfiction seem obliged to employ.
  21. Ghost Team
    The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.
  22. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    This doc is a tearjerker, but it's also enraging.
  23. Hell or High Water
    When the movie just sits with the characters on front porches or in backyards, Mackenzie's generous, hands-off approach with his actors — most of the conversation scenes play out in long takes with minimal camera movement — yields poignant rewards.
  24. Disorder
    [Winocour] elevates the action hero beyond his physical assets, drilling through his psyche to offer a rare and welcome lens into a type of man usually reduced to stoicism or sulking, hiding behind a rubber mask.
  25. 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?"
  26. Will You Dance with Me?
    An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.
  27. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Louis Black explores the casual philosophizing of his subject's work in Dream Is Destiny, an admiring documentary that wisely lets Linklater do most of the talking in his plainspoken, unpretentious manner.
  28. The Little Prince
    There’s a lot of charm, thought, and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.
  29. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    Riley doesn't portray this fellowship of black athletes as victims, but as pioneers proving themselves against white supremacy behind enemy lines. And yet this doc also pulls them back down to earth as mere men and women competing against the odds, human to human.
  30. The Tenth Man
    In his lovely new film, Argentine director Daniel Burman mixes reality with fiction in inventive ways.
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