Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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 7.7 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
view
per page
  1. Bleak Street
    Like his onetime mentor Luis Buñuel, Ripstein favors sparse, naturalistic settings populated by pathetic-yet-zany characters and eschews anything that might be considered traditionally beautiful. Instead, he unearths beauty in the mire of his characters' social conditions and in their dedication to each other.
  2. Aferim!
    Quite possibly the only film ever made focused on the centuries-long enslavement of the Romani in Eastern Europe, Aferim! plays like a sleight of hand, amusing us at a distance with vulgarisms and entrancing us with countryside while the bloody work of civilization grinds on out of the corner of our eye.
  3. Ip Man 3
    Stone-faced martial-arts star Donnie Yen does a lot with a little in wuxia weepy Ip Man 3, the rare kung fu film whose sentimental dialogue scenes are just as good as its stripped-down action sequences.
  4. Moonwalkers
    Nothing in Moonwalkers matches Perlman's performance, but he frequently elevates desperate-to-please gags to stoner-comedy greatness.
  5. The Benefactor
    Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.
  6. 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.
  7. A Perfect Day
    A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.
  8. Ride Along 2
    Like your smartphone, it's a testament to the theory of interchangeable parts, a perfectly engineered product that, if you're charitable, you might also think of in terms of art....But every time I started to believe that there's some parodic impulse behind the filmmakers' recasting of clichés, Cube's character would punch a suspect in custody or commit some other violation of civil liberties that the film invites us to cheer.
  9. The Forest
    Before devolving into the same series of demonic faces and jump-scares we've seen time and again, The Forest is a genuinely unnerving mood piece.
  10. 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.
  11. Western Religion
    O'Brien's slow-motion-heavy staging is graceless, and his script is twice as unwieldy. With characters stuffed full of clichéd platitudes about fate, love, honor, and other topics the film isn't capable of addressing in any mature way, it's a fiasco of frontier-wide proportions.
  12. Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
    HGBP too often relies on caricature.... Yet Cone, who is bighearted toward but not uncritical of his Bible-thumping characters, has a keen sense of seemingly incongruous details.
  13. Cherry Tree
    This ungainly B movie makes virtually no sense in terms of either mythology or basic plotting.
  14. The Treasure
    In a manner so sly you could overlook it, Porumboiu invests this tissue-thin premise with the shadows of Romanian history.
  15. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    The film is most illuminating on the prehistory of Land Art.
  16. Sweaty Betty
    This isn't hard-times reportage or a deep-dive ethnography. It's a life-as-it's-lived picture, a chance to meet and loiter with the people in the places the interstates zip past.
  17. Anesthesia
    Anesthesia doesn't cast judgment. Instead, Nelson slowly reveals awful things about his characters after we've decided to like them. I admire the film's vigor, even if at times it feels like a cruel, clumsy trick.
  18. The Abandoned
    Two second-act revelations alter its tired dynamic for the better, but those changes are undone by cheap scares and a climactic revelation that's more ho-hum than horrifying.
  19. Other People's Children
    Nothing ever feels like it's at stake — the drama here is whisper-thin.
  20. Yosemite
    Like Gia Coppola's Palo Alto (2013), a lyric and biting evocation of contemporary well-to-do teendom, Gabrielle Demeestere's Yosemite mines Franco's fiction for its most vital quality: his unsentimental depiction of youthful insecurity, this time among fifth-graders.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jan 1, 2016
  21. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It's both an important part of Ghibli's history and a gem in its own right.
  22. Point Break
    There are two rules that no version of Point Break should disobey: Don't skimp on surfing and never be boring. That’s two unpardonable strikes against new helmsman Ericson Core, who also photographed this stiff, humorless, tension-free remake in drab 3D.
  23. Anomalisa
    Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.
  24. 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.
  25. Joy
    Russell enthusiasts — and I consider myself one — often applaud the director's abiding interest in the messiness of his characters' lives, most vividly on display in American Hustle, a movie animated by flamboyant dissemblers and depressives. But the disorder found in Joy is a reflection not of any quicksilver dynamics among the actors but of the odd tonal shifts in the film itself.
  26. 45 Years
    With 45 Years, [Haigh] has created not only a searching examination of a long-term marriage — and the myths that sustain it — but also a compassionate portrait of a woman reconciling herself with those false notions.
  27. Concussion
    Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.
  28. Daddy's Home
    The performers are all skilled enough to make something of this tired material.
  29. The Genital Warriors
    Like the ravings of a keyed-up screenwriter, there's conviction, if not logic, in its madness, and that makes it fun and fascinating.
  30. Hamlet's Ghost
    So gosh-darn terrible in so many ways, the film defies a unified thesis.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »