Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,114 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 7.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Stories We Tell
Lowest review score: 0 Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,671 out of 11114
  2. Mixed: 4,543 out of 11114
  3. Negative: 1,900 out of 11114
11114 movie reviews
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    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.
  2. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Wages of Fear rides for a cheap fall. Clouzot has copped out with cheap irony. [25 May 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jul 1, 2020
  3. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    By telling this story through the children’s eyes with a magical-realism element, López makes the tragically unthinkable somehow more palatable.
  4. On Her Shoulders
    Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.
  5. Bisbee '17
    The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.
  6. Destination Wedding
    Levin at times seems rather too taken with the verbosity of his own dialogue, but here and there, his quips and situations match perfectly with his actors’ sensibilities.
  7. Let the Corpses Tan
    More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful.
  8. Active Measures
    Active Measures is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the mind. By coming on so strong, so fevered, Bryan achieves the dubious feat of making his host of documented facts, reasonable inferences, and alarming subjects for further research all seem seem less persuasive than if they had been presented more soberly.
  9. The Little Stranger
    Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.
  10. Reprisal
    It’s downright sad watching Willis go all half-assed in another movie. I guess we’re gonna have to wait for Glass to come out next year to see if Willis can do a movie in whole-assed form again.
  11. Inventing Tomorrow
    We’re privy to the students’ backgrounds and get a tiny glimpse into their futures, but the film skims a lot in favor of showcasing the ISEF gathering. Still, as in the spelling-bee doc, these are moving stories of nerdy children, kids who are pragmatic about the forward march of industry yet believe societies can, and must, find cleaner ways to advance.
  12. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    By sticking to his impressionistic perspective, by fracturing his narrative, Ross achieves something genuinely poetic — a film whose very lightness is the key to its depth.
  13. Operation Finale
    Rather than the cagey, caged mastermind who later would play dumb at trial, this Eichmann is just another movie bad guy — and Operation Finale is just another movie.
  14. Pick of the Litter
    What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?
  15. What Keeps You Alive
    Minihan’s ambitions are towering, so it’s only right to note that he doesn’t quite get there. The ideas, even the emotions, don’t develop and grow.
  16. The Oslo Diaries
    The Oslo Diaries is a striking document, mixing never-before-seen footage shot by the negotiators themselves and current reflections from participants, including the final interview of former Israeli president Shimon Peres.
  17. An L.A. Minute
    Daniel Adams’s An L.A. Minute makes you suffer through it all and never redeems itself, despite the potentially interesting duo of Gabriel Byrne and Kiersey Clemons as leads. The stars seem out of place with each other and in this movie, with creators who have no idea what they want to say.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot to Trot
    The cameras caress landscapes, skylines, domesticity, and sequined dancers with equal fervor, but one longs for more of what a competition official calls “a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.”
  19. Blue Iguana
    From the characters to the purposely perplexing plot, it’s all hollow and artificial to the point of being downright grating. Blue Iguana is another exercise in sarcastic, self-referential, postmodern pulp whose time has so come and gone.
  20. Arizona
    Director Jonathan Watson’s super-violent Arizona is a well-done but chilly and essentially unlovable black comedy with one tiny spark of warmth — Rosemarie DeWitt’s performance.
  21. The Happytime Murders
    Some viewers, perhaps, might be shocked at the association of Mr. Rainbow Connection with scenes set in porno shops, strip clubs, and drug dens. What jolted me, though, was seeing the Henson name all over a project that’s so often bland and listless, so tame in its designs, so limited in its imagination, so joyless in its execution.
  22. Maison du Bonheur
    Bohdanowicz undertook the project without having previously met her subject, but for both the filmmaker and her audience, making Sellam’s acquaintance proves a rare pleasure.
  23. Support the Girls
    Bujalski frames most of Support the Girls as an almost real-time delineation of chaos, but his storytelling elegance — delicate, nearly invisible foreshadowing; cogent evocations of backstory — adds reflective layers to the surface anarchy.
  24. The Bookshop
    Though nearly nothing happens in this movie besides a woman opening a shop and beginning a standoffish friendship with a reclusive man, I still found myself drawn in, just as I was drawn to Iain’s discreet disaster of a baked Alaska (please check it out if you haven’t seen this TGBBS episode); sometimes the quiet is enticing.
  25. Searching
    Though the script by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian is taut and surprising, I’ve felt more absorbed in an episode of Murder, She Wrote than I did in this film, because, there, it’s story and performance that we’re invited to savor, not just tech and technique.
  26. Papillon
    This new version, directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer, brings to the story a refreshing intensity and sweep, and even a sense of adventure.
  27. Crime + Punishment
    Stephen Maing’s searing documentary Crime + Punishment offers a fuller look at the question of what can be accomplished from inside, revealing both the personal toll fighting the system can exact but also the urgent necessity of such battles.
  28. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    Faraut’s film doesn’t just put us courtside — it steeps us in the legend’s boiling mind.
  29. Songwriter
    Songwriter sells the “nice boy” bit well, but if you aren’t already a fan, it eventually becomes tiresome. There are occasional glimmers of a real person (wishing to topple Adele, laying down a “no Snapchat” rule at his house, etc.) but rarely is a feature film so bluntly just marketing.
  30. The Ranger
    By the time the killings start, the film already feels draining, with no characters worth caring about, much less watching.
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