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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    While the evidence of his spotty post-1970s work is hard to refute, Gonzo proves what a vapid, overvalued commodity edginess is, championing Thompson's best work for brass-tacks insight more than brass-balled outrage.
  2. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    The sort of movie that believes coolness is next to godliness, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang trades heavily and successfully on Downey's unflappable likability.
  3. Three Monkeys
    The heavy mood of indolence and rage, calibrated with ellipses in action, is stifling--everyone seems to move in a queasy haze.
  4. Bowfinger
    Never hits a note of high hilarity.
  5. The New World
    Malick's long, moody, diaphanous account of love and loss in 17th-century Jamestown--shot, more or less, on location--rarely achieves the symphonic grandeur it seeks. As an epic, it's monumentally slight.
  6. The Camden 28
    Fond, stinging, and finally instructive, the film assembles a comprehensive look back at the actions, arrest, and prosecution of a group of political malcontents (most of them young Catholics and some of them priests) in the summer of 1971.
  7. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    The Virgin script occasionally resets a gold standard for refined crudery.
  8. A Royal Affair
    Director Arcel handles the material with a stately grace that compensates for the story's predictable trajectory, though humdrum period detail and monotonous pacing too often leave the proceedings feeling only partially aroused.
  9. Herman's House
    Herman's House coasts on the strength of its portrait of two systemic outsiders.
  10. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Puffy Chair
    Like "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's casually raw 2002 faux–cinema vérité indie about a bunch of shiftless twentysomethings, The Puffy Chair uses simple, unadorned dialogue and intimate, off-the-cuff performances to get at the underlying issues.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Attenberg
    While Tsangari may have borrowed Attenborough's "British phlegmatic tenderness," as she calls it, Attenberg is worlds away from a nature documentary.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Original Kings of Comedy
    Simultaneously hilarious and reprehensible.
  14. Innocence
    Something lured Paul Cox down memory lane, but he should have stayed at home.
  15. Shattered Glass
    The Sarsgaard slow burn is only marginally more compelling than the Christensen simper; like its subject, the movie is self-important yet insipid.
  16. Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    Slow and pretty and duller than you'd hope for from an art-house sophisticate like Zhang.
  17. War of the Worlds
    Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway
    Producer/director Dori Berinstein knows her way around a Broadway show -- she's produced 11 of them, including her latest, Legally Blonde -- and her insider status no doubt helped secure behind-the-scenes access as she tracks one season in the life of four musicals, and explains the unusual level of intimacy between interviewer and subjects.
  19. I Believe in Unicorns
    The performances are strong, the imaginary visions are suggestive and fleeting, and the film as a whole is swoony, tender, skittish, a little scary — in short, this is what young love feels like. More Meyerhoff, please!
  20. Love & Basketball
    Prince-Bythewood gives the film a style that's easy on the eye but also has muscle -- on and off the court.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thirst
    The most intriguing aspect of Thirst is the steady erosion of Sang-hyeon's ethics, slackened from "do not" to "do not kill" to "do not kill the undeserving" by the lure of those O+ cocktails.
  22. Notes on a Scandal
    Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work -- "Fatal Attraction" for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny.
  23. Good Manners
    Rojas and Dutra have created a singular fable where anxiety and fear are directed inward, even when the danger is all too real.
  24. The Fall of Fujimori
    The Fall of Fujimori is more-or less-than the flip side to last week's Film Forum Peru primer "State of Fear": It's a prismatic shudder, a maddening manifestation of historical ambivalence.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blood Tea and Red String
    A sickly-sweet stop-motion animation 13 years in the making, Blood Tea and Red String is a genuine piece of outsider art.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The City of Lost Children
    City of Lost Children is so extravagantly cluttered, so packed to the portholes, it's hard to sort out, or even see, what's there. Under the overload, however, it has some perfectly lovely elements. [19 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
  27. Approved for Adoption
    Watching the animated memoir Approved for Adoption can stir a serenity like skipping stones on water for a delightfully long time.
  28. That's Entertainment!
    After two hours of which I felt almost every minute, I could find only a handful of positive things to say about this production. [25 Jul 1974, p.67]
    • Village Voice
  29. Sing Your Song
    Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer's political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography.
  30. Uprising (2013)
    In his concise, accessible oral history of Egypt's 2011 revolution, director Fredrik Stanton stitches together voices of the activists and organizers at the center of the events that led to the end of President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year reign.
  31. A Picture of You
    Sensitive and understated, J.P. Chan's A Picture of You balances humor and sentiment with an instinctive hand, skillfully unearthing honest, unexpected laughs amid intense grief.
  32. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary - a standout in last spring's New Directors/New Films - assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson.
  33. The Blue Room
    Co-writer/director/proudly nude star Amalric cuts everything to the quick: Most shots have the feel of still photos, the camera firmly planted, and the movie always hustles us to the next, back and forward in time, the effect part Resnais and part staccato Kodak slideshow.
  34. Almost Holy
    Steve Hoover's film (which was executive-produced by Terrence Malick) doesn't feel dishonest in its behind-the-scenes glimpse at its subject.
  35. Amreeka
    There's nothing bitter or cynical about Amreeka, which is directed with impish wit, an observant visual competence, and an open, conciliatory spirit.
  36. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    Cogitore's movie is at once otherworldly and firmly tethered to stark reality.
  37. Stevie
    Foreigners often comment on the peculiar American combination of superficial friendliness and profound indifference. Stevie epitomizes a related national trait -- the belief in the curative powers of publicity.
  38. A Song for Martin
    Scenes from a marriage unfolding at the limits of love and personality.
  39. Road to Perdition
    Visually more coherent than "American Beauty," but despite the burnished mahogany of Conrad Hall's cinematography, Mendes still doesn't quite know how to fill a frame. Like the Hanks character, he's a slow study: The action is stilted and the tabloid energy embalmed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    More buff than historian, McKay chats with anyone who can tell him about the good old days, a vaguely defined period that sprawls from the mid '40s to the late '60s.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dish & the Spoon
    For once, an American indie's muted modesty at least makes emotional sense, suiting a bittersweet romance that, by nature, has neither a name nor a future.
  42. Climates
    A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.
  43. Skate Kitchen
    In Skate Kitchen, the kids come as they are, and they’re wildly fascinating.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone Baby Gone
    In his strikingly downbeat directorial debut, Affleck has created something of a blue-moon rarity: an American movie of genuine moral complexity.
  45. Iron Crows
    Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.
  46. Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    Though hewing to a too-conventional structure, Bowser's film is densely researched enough to yield insights not just into its overlooked subject, but also into his overly analyzed era.
  47. Where Is Kyra?
    The way Dosunmu shoots her, she feels somehow both fragile and unchanging: It wouldn’t take much to turn Kyra herself into a blur, to erase her from the screen completely; but the broader sorrow that she represents will never go away. Where is Kyra? She’s in the midst of disappearing, but she’s also everywhere.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magic Mike
    The highly calculated Magic Mike is pure Hollywood self-mythology - a neo-Depression musical, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for shitty times, an origin-of-the-star story, and a projection of that star's hoped-for future.
  49. Straight Outta Compton
    It's clear that Straight Outta Compton is at once too padded and too thin. It's as if the story of these real-life legends was so unruly and dangerous that the filmmakers became the cops, forcing it into submission.
  50. Tale of Tales
    Tale of Tales is the most faithful and creatively rendered fairytale onscreen to date, bizarrely satisfying and totally worth a patient, focused viewing.
  51. White Palms
    The bulk of White Palms--and the more riveting, grim storyline--is seen in flashback to the early 1980s.
  52. Scarecrow
    A flawed, fascinating testament to a time of discovery in Hollywood: of how stories could be told onscreen, of what great actors might find within themselves, of just what in the hell this country had become in the late-'60s crackup.
  53. Joy of Man's Desiring
    Undeniably, the rhythms — of clanging machines, of humans at work and repose — seen and heard here are the tempo of the quotidian and the repetitive. Yet even in their mundanity, these factory routines are not without their exalted moments.
  54. Call Her Applebroog
    The film is a vehicle for Applebroog-appreciation, daughterly and otherwise.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebels on Pointe
    Serious balletomanes will find much to appreciate here; people who delight in seeing the form lampooned will find more. These guys (among whom are three married couples) are gorgeous dancers, respectful of ballet’s 400-year-old tradition; they’re brash and funny, they’re changing the world, and they have power to spare.
  56. There Was a Crooked Man...
    I thoroughly enjoyed There Was A Crooked Man for its inhaling the fresh air of liberty on today's screen without its gagging on the fumes of gratuitous license. [31 Dec 1970, p.39]
    • Village Voice
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New York Doll
    In the end, this is less a film about a rock and roller than a film about a Mormon. And Napoleon Dynamite it ain't.
  58. All the Money in the World
    It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.
  59. One Week and a Day
    Rambling in the best manner imaginable, it’s an amusingly heartbreaking (and hopeful) portrait of misery’s messiness.
  60. Still Mine
    [A] pitch-perfect, deeply affecting film.
  61. A Screaming Man
    The characterizations never comfortably accommodate Haroun's pat metaphor, though his stoic visual storytelling has an oblique gravity.
  62. The Island President
    The Island President also shows how the most high-minded idealists inevitably become deal-makers: The toothless agreement eventually ratified in Copenhagen - which calls for but doesn't require CO2 reductions - is lauded by Nasheed as "a very good, planet-saving document."
  63. Our Nixon
    In the end, though, Our Nixon is an elusive piece of work. It doesn't add much to our understanding of the man himself, though admittedly, there may not be much more that we want or need to know, anyway.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cabin in the Woods
    A horror comedy with a structural twist intended to emit an air of being something more, Cabin has an off-putting vibe of cocky self-confidence, a "don't you get it" conviction that it's something special. As with people, it's not a charming quality in a movie.
  65. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    Mesrine's promised end in November 1979 arrives as history recorded it, but, by that time, you're hoping the next vogue in biopics is the short film.
  66. Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
    Devotees will perhaps find something new in this deep pool of archival footage, and newcomers will get an appropriate introduction to the beguiling charisma of a most media-savvy isolationist.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.
  68. Headhunters
    Plenty of twisty scripting makes the queasy damage seem conceptually neat and tidy, as if that's a good idea, but what we need here is a little more meat.
  69. Quinceañera
    Saucy, rowdy, heartfelt, and terribly sweet movie.
  70. Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    The daring of the conception is matched only by the brilliance of the execution.
  71. The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    Circumspect documentary.
  72. Stone Reader
    I've never seen a movie that paid more heartfelt tribute to the power of artistic invention.
  73. All or Nothing
    Though more cathartic than redemptive, this sob-racked confession is the payoff for two hours of low-grade misery.
  74. Bowling for Columbine
    It's poorly structured, a half-hour too long, and devotedly fixated on the filmmaker's persona.
  75. Alléluia
    Sensuous and arresting, Alleluia constantly feels as though a séance or ritual murder is about to be performed; the actual deaths, when they arrive, turn out to be rather unceremonious affairs.
  76. Millennium Mambo
    In a sense, Millennium Mambo is a mildly prurient portrait of Shu moving, drinking, smoking, and changing clothes -- it's analogous to one of Andy Warhol's Edie Sedgwick films, but without the existential drama. Who really cares what costume this poor girl will wear to all tomorrow's parties?
  77. Half Moon
    Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi's picturesque road trip is less about preserving a musical heritage than accepting one's fate, a mythic trek that's both heartrending and boisterous--often as hauntingly absurdist as a Kusturica carnival.
  78. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.
  79. Easier with Practice
    From the virtuoso 10-minute single shot that encompasses the initial phone call, to a long, traveling shot of Davy all but running from a humiliating sexual encounter, Alvarez trusts Geraghty's fear-and-wonder-filled eyes to tell the tale. These two need to make more movies together.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Murphy has never been a typical rock star, and Shut Up is by no means a conventional rock documentary.
  81. The Wedding Plan
    What makes the film work is Koler's magnetic performance as Michal, who has screwball energy and a mind of her own.
  82. Love, Simon
    Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes.
  83. Diplomacy
    Arestrup and Dussollier originated these roles on stage, but Schlöndorff (who directed the Hoffman/Malkovich Death of a Salesman) gives it the immediacy of a life-and-death encounter.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crime After Crime
    Potash's first feature-length documentary otherwise does justice to its subject's wrenching story.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dogtooth
    Director Giorgos Lanthimos lays out the rules largely through action rather than exposition, which allows Dogtooth to play as a richly satisfying, blackly comic mystery in spite of its delayed, horror-sourced housebreak plot.
  86. True Son
    With sharper on-the-ground footage, True Son might have been as sharp a doc as it is inspiring a story.
  87. Prick Up Your Ears
    As a portrait of a relationship and a creative partnership, Prick is ever alert to the shifts in power, to the narcissistic wounds that can never be salved when a teacher is surpassed by his pupil.
  88. The Sons of Katie Elder
    The spectacle of people in Hollywood trying to do something different in a western at this late date is curiously reassuring. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]
    • Village Voice
  89. In the House
    In the House is a mystery, but it investigates a far tougher riddle than what makes Claude tick—it's trying to figure out why, exactly, voyeurism and mystery delight us so. In the process, it delights us.
  90. The Thomas Crown Affair
    A sealskin-slick, cat-and-mouse romance-caper trifle with a hard-on for wealth that feels downright Trumpian.
  91. City of Gold
    Gold is merely the conduit for the film's real focus: Like his own reviews, City of Gold is a love letter to L.A.
  92. Rejoice and Shout
    The best bits - the powerful instrument called Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, for example - more than speak for themselves.
  93. In Bloom
    This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Berlin
    A concert film by technicality, a cinematic trance in practicality.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Grew Tired of Us
    A borderline lazy but nonetheless compelling documentary co-produced by National Geographic.
  96. LOL
    The characters are a bit too OCD for LOL to work as the definitive commentary on technology and human relationships that it strives to be...But the movie is unusually attentive to the ironies of communications technology.
  97. Aimee & Jaguar
    Relies on the hefty talents of its two leading ladies.
  98. The Big Carnival
    Ace in the Hole is a movie about the fascination of disaster that is itself a fascinating disaster.
  99. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Pays off in laugh-out-loud lines, adorably ditsy but heartfelt performances, and sparkling, bittersweet dialogue that cuts to the chase of the modern girl's dilemma.
  100. Seabiscuit
    More mystical than mysterious, Seabiscuit is a proudly cornball sentimental epic -- a reverential paean to a vanished America that's steeped in inspirational uplift and played for world-historical pathos.
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