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 7.5 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
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  1. They Came to Play
    A welcome twist on the now-ubiquitous kiddie competition doc, They Came to Play centers on the Van Cliburn Foundation's gathering of the world's best amateur pianists over the age of 35.
  2. Last Letters from Monte Rosa
    Ari Taub's film is a rich tale of moral complexity tinged with an invitingly surrealist air.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Louis
    Louis may superficially resemble movies of a bygone age, but it lacks their essence: masterful effortlessness.
  4. Trust Us, This Is All Made Up
    Jagodowski and Pasquesi establish and travel between a host of characters with a deft use of voice, gesture, and, of course, responsive instinct. The moments of triumph are best witnessed live, but Karpovsky captures enough of the thrill to make this film a destination of its own.
  5. Make-Out with Violence
    The product of a genuinely unique sensibility, the sort-of-zombie-movie Make-Out With Violence is inventive without being twee, quirky without being overly Wes Anderson, and suffused with a late-adolescent sense of longing as palpably felt as it is understated.
  6. Baghdad Texas
    Hickey's overarching arguments about war, diplomacy, and American intelligence aren't just muddled, but altogether nonexistent, leaving his comedically challenged film Iraqi-desert-level barren.
  7. Tibet in Song
    Make no mistake about his ability to make social studies entertaining: A montage about Tibet's many supporters is set to the Beastie Boys playing "Sabotage" live.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    GasLand
    With its jolting images of flammable tap water and chemically burned pets, New York theater-director-turned-documentarian Josh Fox's Sundance-feted shocker makes an irrefutable case against U.S. corporate "fracking."
  9. Walkaway
    Walkaway has an intimate understanding of the push-pull experienced by its gallery of twentysomethings who are comfortable with Western customs, but drawn by an ineluctable bond to a culture they can't shake.
  10. A Small Act
    Arnold just expects her audience to accept that Mburu's doing the best he can and revere him for it.
  11. Mars
    Using a combination of hand-drawn, 3-D, and rotoscope animation to tell his story of an unlikely trio's voyage to Mars in 2015, Marslett struck upon a unique look and tone, spacey, soothing, and strange.
  12. Mundane History (Jao nok krajok)
    The ultimate break comes with a glorious full-screen CGI zoom into blazing heavenly bodies, a refutation of the title's modesty.
  13. Beijing Taxi
    The highlight is the crop-cut woman of the group, Wei Caixia, resoundingly vivid in her mix of ambivalence and confidence and worth her own film. Why not this one?
  14. Satan Hates You
    The film's one-note premise is only as fitfully affecting as watching caricatures hit rock bottom over and over again.
  15. The Sound of Insects
    Without additional context surrounding its subject's life, sharing the man's final excruciating moments eventually devolves into an exercise in morbidity, an experience considerably more ponderous than profound.
  16. Blackmail Boys
    A wispy mix of boy-boy romance and noir-lite potboiler, the Shumanski brothers' (Wrecked) latest wastes a promising premise by loading up on tender whimsy and skimping on grit.
  17. Port of Memory
    Quietly and atmospherically touches on the Kiarostamian Uncertainty Principle, with Aljafari liberally corrupting his demi-documentary with scripted dialogue, rehearsals, and even digital effects.
  18. Bereavement
    Bereavement-miraculously as dull as its title-is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything Strange and New
    The film conveys the intimate sense of reading a diary and provides no more consolation than we feel in writing in our own.
  20. A Good Man
    Director Safina Uberoi struck gold with her title subject, a congenital joker with an implacable will whose load-bearing personality could prop up at least three documentaries.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dear Lemon Lima
    Still, Lima's "Be yourself, and you'll eventually find your tribe" moral is so well-meaning that we might as well be generous and grade on a curve-it's more appealing than anything Hollywood has recently offered the eight- to 13-year-old female demographic.
  22. 0s & 1s
    During his quest to track down his missing laptop, James's unrelenting douchiness and his friends' essential emptiness grow tiresome, but that's precisely the point. As digital media becomes more vivid, people tend to hollow out.
  23. Curling
    In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.
  24. Drawing with Chalk
    Slight and sweet with a bit of a paunch in the middle, Drawing With Chalk resembles the aging would-be rock stars at its center.
  25. An Affirmative Act
    The film veers into the narrow channels of the bare-bulb courtroom melodrama and then the rapids of the lurid conspiracy thriller before washing ashore in pieces.
  26. They're Out of the Business
    The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.
  27. Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer
    In its didactic narration and constant on-screen introductions, the film loses a good deal of the very silence and mystery it venerates.
  28. The Family Jams
    Only a true fanatical follower of the "freak folk" musical scene with a high tolerance for artless verité camerawork will find much merit in Kevin Barker's extended home video.
  29. What on Earth?
    Framed in a series of casual chats, Taylor's subjects make interesting suppositions (invoking particle physics, higher consciousness, and the laws of geometry), but their credibility is sometimes undermined by editorial drift and a beseeching New Age soundtrack.
  30. We Go Way Back
    For all of the film's preciousness, the pungent notion of having your young-teen self gazing in horrified disappointment at the adult you've failed to become is as fresh a thematic undertow as it is disquieting.
  31. Vito Bonafacci
    Factor in the consistently subpar acting and Vito Bonafaccistands as one project better suited to Sunday schools than movie theaters.
  32. The Makioka Sisters (1983)
    The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.
  33. The Colors of the Mountain
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
  34. Lord Byron
    Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vacation!
    The narrative doesn't arc so much as slope down at a 45-degree angle-from the high of innocent fun to the depths of absolute moral vacuity-with a break in the dead center for a visually stunning, perfectly weird acid-trip scene, something like an excerpt from "Inland Empire's" would-be nautically themed sequel.
  36. Raw Faith
    Shining an intimate light on an individual in order to reveal greater truths about life and the world, Raw Faith focuses on progressive-minded Portland, Oregon, Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.
  37. We Are the Night
    Director/co-writer Dennis Gansel compensates for the story's lack of emotional heft with rousing chase scenes and impressive, near-poetic CGI set pieces, and works in a sly suggestion that vampirism is the ultimate expression of consumerist indulgence.
  38. Dirty Old Town
    Directors Jenner Furst and Daniel Levin go for montaged ambience, and Levin's lyrical camerawork limns a beguiling, modestly Wong Kar-wai–ish rhapsody out of very little. When Levin's lens is focused on Shirtcliff's unwashed hair and spectral eyes, the film grabs hold of something sweet and sad.
  39. Le Rayon Vert (1986)
    Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as "The Green Ray"), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lips
    With a minimum of dialogue and backstory, the lead actresses (winners of a single special prize at Cannes 2010) movingly portray the depth of these colleagues' compassion, and their struggle to maintain a front of data-gathering objectivity. Unfolding in a remarkably organic fashion, The Lips pays plaintive tribute to the work.
  41. The High Life
    This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.
  42. Late Autumn
    In remaking the 1966 South Korean film "Full Autumn" and setting it in America, writer-director Kim Tae-Yong uses the melancholic, gray backdrop of Seattle as both character and metaphor, crafting a film that's visually beautiful and incredibly moving.
  43. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    Human characters emerge from photo ops and heroes from the shadows.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flying Fish
    Pushpakumara's debut feature portrays the recent Sri Lankan civil war as a gauntlet of private humiliations, endured by largely nameless, barely individuated villagers - making this would-be multi-strand narrative more of an impenetrable tangle.
  45. Psychohydrography
    A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.
  46. Atrocious
    A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy pre-emptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death.
  47. Iconoclast: Boyd Rice
    The most genial professed social Darwinist you could ever meet, Rice has never stopped to explain how much of his persona is a goof. Likewise, Larry Wessel's documentary portrait Iconoclast doesn't bother to synopsize its subject for the novice before setting off on its four-hour journey.
  48. Red Desert (1964)
    Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.
  49. That Girl in Yellow Boots
    Koechlin, a striking woman with a slim frame, horse mouth, and big turbulent eyes, has screen presence enough to kick along the frequently-stalling psychodrama up to an ending that seems like a tossing up of hands.
  50. Sound It Out
    Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Transit Cities
    At 71 minutes, the film too schematically ratchets up the inhospitality, but its portrait of Amman - Hushki offsets the increasingly claustrophobic domestic scenes with views of the metropolis, which Laila also now finds too Westernized - is welcome.
  52. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.
  53. Deep End (1970)
    Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
  54. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.
  55. All's Well Ends Well
    Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."
  56. The Story of Film: An Odyssey
    More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.
  57. Pretty Poison (1968)
    Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements
    With so many voices, Color Me becomes a rock version of "Rashomon," and what the film lacks in music and live footage, it more than makes up for with obsessive detail and heated debate. Who's right? Everyone.
  59. How to Start a Revolution
    How to Start a Revolution plays like a Nobel Prize–campaign film and never once demonstrates an understanding of the distinction between encomium and inquiry.
  60. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriocracy
    Malone reveals himself to have a stunningly low opinion of his audience's powers of bullshit detection.
  62. The Woods
    A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Come on Eileen
    The film betrays an eager crowd-pleaser's impulse toward on-the-nose dialogue and resolution on command.
  64. God Save My Shoes
    There's no escaping the fact that Benasra's documentary does little more than perpetuate the myth of women - all women - as vapid materialists worshipping at the altar of Manolo Blahnik.
  65. Artificial Paradises
    Olaizola pans across peeling building facades to subtly enhance her portrait of characters crumbling under the weight of self-destructive habits and solitude - a weight that might only be lifted through the selfless compassion of others.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fear and Desire
    Treat it like a wobbly, precocious demo from a 24-year-old with mighty aspirations, filled with hints of what he would become, and you'll be properly enthralled.
  67. Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
    Laughton, of course, is elegant rotundity in motion, a naughty, moonfaced cherub in his drunk scene, later sweetly surprised when finding himself elevated into a man by the Gettysburg Address, a recitation of which is the film's palpitating heart.
  68. Kids of Today
    Refraining images of the mind-controlled sleepwalker Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem to submit Adrien as a Svengali-like figure to the kids, even as his "Iggy used to say . . ." pickups to fresh-faced scenesters don't seem to pay off.
  69. Last Will and Embezzlement
    Mickey Rooney's own ordeal of being swindled by his wife's son gives the material a tiny bit of star power, but his mismatched interview clips merely exacerbate the earnest but graceless documentary's editorial clumsiness, aesthetic flatness, and endless repetition.
  70. Life, Love, Soul
    Admirable only for its sincere responsibility-over-selfishness message and for giving "The Wire" alums Chad Coleman and Jamie Hector some big-screen work, Life, Love, Soul otherwise proves to be just a low-rent Tyler Perry–style melodrama.
  71. Billy Bates
    The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.
  72. Snow on Tha Bluff
    Bluff's portrait of street life has a grungy off-the-cuff realism that's only compromised by some obviously staged incidents.
  73. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    A deeply archived and circumspect history of the Joffrey dance company, Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance does a perfect white swan but has trouble developing much of a personality.
  74. Dolphin Boy
    Dolphin Boy stands as an example of how the pitfalls of potentially mushy material can be overcome by smart and sensitive direction.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    You Hurt My Feelings
    For all of its gradual build and minimalist focus, the film misses out on something essential, something more crucial than clarity, context, and connecting tissue - all of which the film aggressively eschews. It lacks a center, a sense that within its strenuously ambiguous story is a thrumming motor.
  76. Sparks
    This comic noir is best when it's more comic, in both senses of the word.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mahler on the Couch
    Eccentric and expressionistic reverie on love, loss, and the birth of modern marriage.
  78. Never Stand Still
    It's all pretty loose and formless, but there's enough discipline on display to thrill lovers of movement, whether amateur or advanced.
  79. The Woman in the Septic Tank
    The novel and wickedly funny topic is mined for only a portion of its potential, but a little ironic astringency is certainly more unsettling than by-the-book slum drama.
  80. We Won't Grow Old Together (1969)
    "Love" is a quicksilver thing that can't be held in the present tense. It is somewhere between nothing and everything, and no one pinned down more of its complexities and contradictions than Maurice Pialat, hunting barehanded for slippery truths.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Master Qi and the Monkey King
    Quietly admiring of its subjects' skill and dedication, Govenar's straightforward documentary does a capable job of extending that mission.
  82. Ikland
    Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.
  83. Busong
    Splendid vistas and sun scapes add mythic punctuation to the proceedings, but director Auraeus Solito (Tuli) generates too little of the magic that holds a story as tenuous as this one together.
  84. Daisies (1966)
    A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.
  85. Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    Calling the movie simply Buddhist, in form as well as context, might be just another way of saying it's awesome, as in it inspires legitimate awe.
  86. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
    Chodorov follows the first-person tradition accordingly, entering the subject through his own early immersion in these films via his father, television presenter Stephen Chodorov.
  87. The Lion of Judah
    It is an affecting movie - who cannot be affected by the mountains of discarded eyeglasses and shoes and children being dumped by way of slides into mass graves? - but ultimately, The Lion of Judah is no more essential than the sum of its stock footage.
  88. Sundowning
    Role reversals, many mirrors, and a lesbian brushstroke indicate someone involved might have recently taken film courses on female melodrama; other thematic red herrings flip-flop, too irritatingly clichéd to recount.
  89. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    At first, Hoffman appears to be juxtaposing the savoir faire and genuine deprivation of the Depression society with the spoiled, consumption-crazed world we have now, but then he merely lapses into a vague Occupy-ish indictment of the 1 percent and the collapse of community as a cultural foundation.
  90. Knight Knight
    Making fun of such an inoffensive, amateurish production would be easy and mean, like punching a baby.
  91. Hollywood to Dollywood
    Even at a lean 81 minutes, though, Hollywood to Dollywood occasionally gets tiresome; what it does minute to minute is often less interesting than what it represents.
  92. The Stand Up
    For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.
  93. Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution
    "Beautiful clothes on good-looking people just moving across the stage" to the sounds of Barry White and Al Green. "It was the presence of these African-American models that really animated the stage," notes Harold Koda of the Met's Costume Institute-- a sentiment that fashion historian Barbara Summers expresses more memorably: The crowd was "peeing in their seats because these girls were so fabulous."
  94. Blinky & Me
    Tomasz Magierski's lovely and lovingly made portrait of Gross's life and career...
  95. Raaz 3: The Third Dimension
    To Western audiences, the most interesting part of director Vikram Bhatt's Raaz 3 will be the Bollywood-narrative conventions--overamplified melodrama, romantic montages, elaborately choreographed dance numbers. But as a horror film, it's about as ambitious as R.L. Stine.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
    Atwill and other scholars maintain that the Romans were ingenious in pulling off the pacifist hoax, so useful to the ruthless men who administered the Roman empire. They were able to "create a type of Judaism that was benign," says one commentator.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    West of Thunder
    West of Thunder is not a tedious watch at all. In fact, it is oddly absorbing, just not the way writer and star Dan Davies probably meant it to be.
  98. Dear Mandela
    Triumph follows tragedy as the case unfolds and history is caught repeating, but the larger, more complicated story underlying this brief but bracing missive still feels untold.
  99. The Double Steps
    In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Avé
    Outside of a final shot that's more poetically convenient than emotionally convincing, Avé follows a progression that feels intimate even as it mimics things iconic. They, we, move and are moved.
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