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 7.6 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
view
per page
  1. Stray Dogs
    An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).
  2. Honeymoon
    While its ending descends into standard horror tropes that fail to completely satisfy its promise, the film nevertheless achieves emotional resonance due to how effectively it joins its source of horror with the stuff of everyday human anxieties.
  3. My Old Lady
    It sounds like a recipe for comedy (and Kline seems to think so too, waltzing and prat-falling through Mathias's alcoholic foibles), but Horovitz's screenplay guns instead for an emotionally and financially tangled melodrama, and ends up feeling aggravatingly inconsistent.
  4. The Skeleton Twins
    What's singular here isn't that the stars are playing brother and sister, or that they stir such sublime and anxious joy from each other. It's that the real love story isn't even between the damaged-but-lovable characters. It's between two profoundly depressed people and life itself.
  5. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Just because a film holds back the truth doesn't make the truth suspenseful. It merely shortchanges the filmmaker and the audience from exploring what that truth means.
  6. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.
  7. Bird People
    Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.
  8. The Drop
    The Belgian Roskam, making only his second feature film, and his first in English, displays remarkable assurance, with both the actors and the film’s very American setting. He creates an escalating sense of dread, tinged with Lehane’s brand of mordant humor.
  9. Thunder and the House of Magic
    The story is serviceable enough.
  10. Rocks in My Pockets
    With an insightfulness born from firsthand experience, Rocks in My Pockets posits depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia as conditions that, though potentially lethal, remain manageable, if only through persistent battle.
  11. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    Guedes's complex performance leaves no doubt regarding the fragility of Veronica's psyche.
  12. Falcon Rising
    Beyond isolated moments of dickish charm — and his climactic four-way fight involving a sword, a crucifix, and two steel pipes — Chapman just comes across like another pseudo-heroic American behaving badly abroad.
  13. The Longest Week
    Lacking any significant character arc or motivation, The Longest Week is little more than a series of insipid conversations between bored aristocrats who snark at each other in monotone.
  14. Kelly & Cal
    Amy Lowe Starbin's script offers a welcome directness and some sly observations about acceptance and compromise.
  15. Wetlands
    Helen's extreme behavior is at once a reaction to, and rebellion against, her mother and father (and their separation), which, along with a captivating go-for-broke lead turn by Juri, lends the film a poignancy to help offset the juvenile shock-tactic impulses.
  16. No No: A Dockumentary
    There's enough diamond lore here to please baseball diehards, but Ellis's outsize life will grip even casual fans.
  17. Memphis
    Sutton's Memphis framed in fascinating layers -- leaves and tree limbs, wig shops and overgrown gravel roads. It's a movie of a place and a character rather than about them.
  18. Levitated Mass
    With a deft hand, Pray juxtaposes a history of Heizer's revolutionary career as a "negative space" sculptor with an insider's view of the insanely complex planning it took to move the two-story monolith.
  19. Last Days in Vietnam
    Vital, illuminating, and terrifying, Rory Kennedy's Last Days in Vietnam probes with clarity and thoroughness one moment of recent American history that has too long gone unreckoned with.
  20. Innocence
    Hilary Brougher's YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn's novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody spook-out images, and a movie-wrecking hypoglycemic listlessness.
  21. The Identical
    A cardboard cutout of a movie.
  22. Gringo Trails
    Vail's film earnestly interrogates authenticity even as her camera lingers on a beach without footprints, inviting the viewer to walk.
  23. God Help the Girl
    Browning captures Eve's weariness and enthusiasm, and her lovely voice and crisp delivery gives Murdoch's labored lyrics a vulnerable immediacy.
  24. Frontera
    Berry isn't afraid to use melodrama as a tool to highlight injustice. It's his very un-flashiness that makes Frontera effective.
  25. Canopy
    Despite Wilson’s early control and aesthetic confidence, there isn’t a single scripted idea of weight or emotionality that pays off.
  26. As Above, So Below
    As Above, So Below is sometimes creepy but mostly silly, which is too bad because the film's cramped subterranean setting is inherently unnerving.
  27. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    There are too many vaguely defined interpersonal dynamics and marginal characters (hi, Liv Tyler and Judy Greer!) that distract needlessly from the earnest tone of an outrageous set-up.
  28. The Calling
    The Calling breathes new life into a moribund genre by touching oft-ignored themes and offering a bit of introspection to go along with the obligatory slashed throats and biblical portents.
  29. The Congress
    Like its actress, it's an ambitious knockout that doesn't quite live up to its potential. But its argument is worth hearing: Instead of crying for the collapse of one actress, Folman is crying for the collapse of civilization, the triumph of the synthetic over the real.
  30. Life of Crime
    The comedy's too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story about anxious waiting.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »