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 7.5 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
view
per page
  1. Revenge
    Fargeat is thoughtful about the elements of her genre, flagrant in her inversions of them but also ferocious in her commitment to them. She has an eye for landscape, a love of light — relish the infernal glare of the dust whenever a driver here hits the brakes at night — and an all-too-rare mastery of geography in an action scene.
  2. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Boom makes the case that the scene Basquiat came from was more fascinating than Basquiat himself. Even though many of the artists, admirers, and friends interviewed for this doc praise him and his gonzo genius, several of them suggest that he strived to be more of a rock star than a punk artist.
  3. Everything Else (Todo Lo Demás)
    Almada deserves credit for creating a portrait of a character so often passed over onscreen: Doña is a woman in her sixties with a decidedly unglamorous life. But the relentless darkness here (both figuratively and literally — some of the shots of Doña in her home are shrouded in blackness) often proves more alienating than illuminating.
  4. Strangers on the Earth
    Pilgrimages have potential: Geoffrey Chaucer gave us 24 good yarns in his Canterbury Tales. But there isn’t even one in the otherwise gorgeous documentary Strangers on the Earth.
  5. The Guardians
    Unassumingly powerful details make The Guardians one of the year’s most affecting love stories.
  6. The Desert Bride
    The story works largely on the level of metaphor, but it’s never overbearing or suffocating; there’s life here. A lot of credit should go to the actors, particularly the lead. As the film moves along, García’s face seems to change dramatically.
  7. Angels Wear White
    Qu unpacks much that matters in Angels Wear White, including the abuse of power and importance of status and wealth in Chinese society, but her most thoughtful, nuanced observations involve female sexuality.
  8. Tully
    Tully encapsulates the psychological process of maturity with pithy humor and vertiginous insight. Tully’s appearance may have seemed like a magical interlude, but she solidifies Marlo’s reality by exposing the path that led her there.
  9. Bad Samaritan
    There’s frightfully little atmosphere to this film — anything from creepy sound design to evocative cinematography — rendering the flaws in the story all too visible.
  10. The 12th Man
    Harald Zwart’s thrilling The 12th Man, based on the true story of a Norwegian soldier who escaped the Nazis in World War II, is a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart but also an unexpectedly tender adventure that is as celebratory as it is tense.
  11. In the Last Days of the City
    It is not easy to describe In the Last Days of the City, an immersive visual experience with a wisp of a story and a wellspring of ideas.
  12. Love & Bananas
    Noi Na’s subsequent acclimation to her new home in the refuge is hopeful, but Chailert’s bravery, sacrifice, and manifest love are the only redemption the film holds out for humans.
  13. Modern Life Is Rubbish
    For those who delight in candy-coated nostalgia, writer Philip Gawthorne’s familiar, cliché-heavy script offers a twee jaunt down memory lane. For everyone else, even a killer Britpop soundtrack teamed with the leads’ palpable chemistry can’t save the film from overtrodden territory.
  14. Bye Bye Germany
    The story digs deep enough that the cheese Garbarski lays on at the end feels well-earned. It’s a charmingly made film.
  15. Supercon
    More than anything else, Supercon is a drag: The heist plot offers none of the excitement typically associated with the genre. If you find repeated use of the phrase “ball cancer” hilarious, you’ll be well served; if you don’t, well, it’s a tough sit.
  16. The Test & The Art of Thinking
    It’s a brutal takedown of a practice now warping K-12 education and should embarrass every school that still requires them.
  17. Ava
    Foroughi’s movie surveys how the mounting external pressures in Ava’s life bring her to a near-breaking point, and the director has devised (with the cinematographer, Sina Kermanizadeh) an explosive visual grammar to approximate the depths of Ava’s isolation and pain.
  18. Backstabbing for Beginners
    The film is less a distillation of the real Soussan’s memoir than a radical simplification of it.
  19. Duck Butter
    I’m still hopeful about Shawkat’s screenwriting career — especially since her performance always feels so genuine, adding substance to an otherwise deflated story. But other than the script’s daring premise, the material doesn’t rise up to the potential she hints at here: a comedy of ingenuity that takes advantage of Shawkat’s fearless frankness.
  20. Let the Sunshine In
    An existential whirlwind even when it seems sitcom-flippant, Sunshine sees Denis continuing on an elevated cinematic plane.
  21. Avengers: Infinity War
    The Russos and the hundreds of craftspeople who worked on this film have dreamed up marvelous battles — especially the one where a motley assortment of heroes take their cracks at the purportedly unstoppable Thanos. But only once here did an intergalactic vista catch my breath the way a splash page in a Silver Surfer comic might.
  22. The House of Tomorrow
    The House of Tomorrow sticks to a time-tested coming-of-age template that’s as common in the indie world as the superhero origin story is in the studio world. But there’s good news, too: When it’s not busy hitting the usual notes, Peter Livolsi’s film, which is based on a novel by Peter Bognanni, manages to be a touching exploration of what “tomorrow” actually means.
  23. Nana
    Nana’s most stirring moment comes when Dykman and her mother reveal the moment when they went from merely knowing about the Holocaust to truly understanding it.
  24. 44 Pages
    Anyone who’s worked in editorial or a similar environment will recognize the staff’s focus, creativity, and sharpness.
  25. Wanderland
    There’s no rhyme or reason to Alex’s journey, which makes the whole of it equally disarming and daffy.
  26. After Auschwitz
    The structure of After Auschwitz may be simple (talking heads and archival footage), but the cumulative effect of six women revealing the physical, psychological, and emotional toll taken on Holocaust survivors is a powerful testament to individual humanity emerging from inhuman horrors.
  27. This Is Our Land
    At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.
  28. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Salomé would be better served by a story that focuses more explicitly on her intellectual life rather than on her personal one, but considering how stodgy biopics can be, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free offers a mostly engaging portrait of a charismatic and brilliant figure.
  29. Kodachrome
    Netflix’s Kodachrome is good fall-asleep-with-the-TV-on fare, and I mean you should snooze out immediately unless you want to be subjected to a criminally mediocre family drama.
  30. Little Pink House
    Like Erin Brockovich for eminent domain, Little Pink House does well to explain the thorny legal issue at its center without getting bogged down in minutiae. Although Susette’s story unfolds in small-town Connecticut, Balaker hammers the point home: This could happen anywhere.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »