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. Boulevard
    Director Dito Montiel aspires to sensitive drama, but Douglas Soesbe's script too often mires Williams in pat situations.
  2. Tangerine
    In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.
  3. 10,000 km
    It's ultra-serious, confined almost entirely indoors, and, with its Facebook pages and Google Maps walk-throughs, inextricably tied to the way we live right now. It's also well crafted and strikingly intimate.
  4. Minions
    It's all perfectly OK, and even, at times, delightful.... Yet Minions doesn't add up to all that it should.
  5. Stations of the Cross
    The ending's a touch too cute, but the best scenes here stand as potent, empathetic, well-observed broadsides against fundamentalism.
  6. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank's long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer.
  7. Cartel Land
    Cartel Land is interested in how idealism becomes corrupt.
  8. Closer to God
    The drama plays out as expected — the ending, particularly, seems too pat — but offers several well-executed moments of tension along the way.
  9. Zarafa
    Beautifully animated and often moving.
  10. In Stereo
    In Stereo is not without its merits, but it doesn't really get going until the last ten minutes, which play like the opening of a movie that would be much more interesting than the one that preceded them.
  11. Jackie & Ryan
    The tepid Jackie & Ryan's only real strength is its supporting cast.
  12. Jimmy's Hall
    [Loach] and his longtime scriptwriter Paul Laverty combed Irish history to find a figure you might see as Loach's intellectual double; maybe this accounts for some of the speechifying dialogue as various political positions are explained, jarring at times in a film of action shots and escaping out windows.
  13. A Borrowed Identity
    Traditional coming-of-age films like A Borrowed Identity don't often come from Israel, which is one of the film's points.
  14. Into the Grizzly Maze
    What keeps Maze humming is Hackl's firm sense of narrative tension. He knows character and dialogue are icing in films like this, so it's taut pacing, editing, and sound design that are crucial. (The actors are all fine, playing everything straight, sans irony.) The final showdown is ludicrous and thrilling -- as it should be.
  15. L.A. Slasher
    L.A. Slasher isn't perceptive, shocking, or funny, and if it's remembered for anything, it will be for the tastelessly tone-deaf decision to have the Slasher kill a black actress by dragging her behind a van.
  16. Gone Doggy Gone
    The film's sweetness, its story line, and the script's cartoony characters recall Raising Arizona, though Gone Doggy Gone isn't as tightly structured. But, being looser, it has a little more room to breathe.
  17. Saugatuck Cures
    No one in the movie rises above the level of a stock character, so over-the-top in their familiar jokes as to barely even register as satire.
  18. Max
    It's another modest, functional success from a director who used to work on the margins.
  19. Stray Dog
    Granik, director of Winter's Bone, captures scenes of rare power.
  20. Amy
    A surprisingly seamless biographical documentary, one that, even though it's been constructed largely from found elements, feels gracefully whole.
  21. Mala Mala
    This film does not pander. Rather, it demands that the viewer rise to the occasion.
  22. Magic Mike XXL
    He's selling nonsense fantasy in a movie that's nonsense fantasy, but boy is Tatum the real deal.
  23. Terminator Genisys
    Genisys is all bullets and bombs, action without pause, as though if the ride stops the whole thing will collapse under its own weight.
  24. Fresh Dressed
    Fashion is about that clash between commercialism and individuality — how can I stand out while fitting in? — and Sacha Jenkins's streetwear doc Fresh Dressed nods its Kangol hat to that irony.
  25. Batkid Begins
    Batkid Begins wants audiences to celebrate the everyday heroes who donated their time and energy to Miles's dream. Absolutely, we should. Still, take a minute to ask what the disproportionate investment and interest in Batkid's adventure says about our own maturity — and how the internet allows us to feel like champions for rallying for one afternoon, while overlooking the years of unglamorous doctor appointments before it.
  26. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.
  27. Ted 2
    MacFarlane's comedy may not be sophisticated on its face, but the mechanisms behind it are delicately calibrated.
  28. The Midnight Swim
    Less is often more when it comes to depicting such rituals onscreen, and Smith is highly attuned to the simple power of, say, characters cryptically chanting under their breath.
  29. Bound to Vengeance
    Bound to Vengeance strains credibility (seriously, she never calls the cops?) and swerves dangerously close to exploitation often enough that its semi-clever premise can't keep it on course.
  30. Glass Chin
    Writer-director Noah Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man.
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