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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burn! (re-release)
    A flawed, but intriguing work, it offers, here and there, proof of Pontecorvo's gift for ecstatic epic filmmaking.
  2. Always Shine
    Always Shine is a potent psychological thriller, all right. But it's also a powerful statement on the very industry that produced it.
  3. A Secret
    Deepened by its complex back-and-forth chronology, deft shifts in perspective, and a significantly counterintuitive color-coding of past and present, A Secret suggests that it's not illicit passion, but rather the crime of denial, that has screwed up this family down the generations.
  4. King Jack
    This is thankfully no wallow in working-class miserablism.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    3-Iron
    Taut even when ridiculous, with flashes of comedy, 3-Iron has less to offer than its predecessors, but at minimum it's the playful exhaustion of a formal constraint.
  6. Happy End
    Haneke has delivered the Haneke film that Haneke-haters see in their heads when they think of a Haneke film: a series of disjointed, narratively oblique episodes showing people being inhumane to each other.
  7. Burden
    [A] densely packed but occasionally facile documentary.
  8. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    Gibney dissects Jobs's image with the calm curiosity of a coroner.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strike
    This is Iron Curtain porn at its most shameless--a rousing industrial rock song plays in the background every time Schlöndorff wants to invoke the Spirit of Labor--but Thalbach's Agnieszka is irresistible.
  10. Aliyah
    A marvelous film, stripped of false urgency.
  11. Princess Cyd
    While the chemistry between Pinnick and Spence is sweet and familial, I couldn’t help but think so much of this film is just…nice. It’s that pretty feather you found in the grass. And maybe you’ll take it home, but will likely forget you did.
  12. Big Fish & Begonia
    Liang and Zhang’s young heroes would be far more universal if they were just credibly hormonal.
  13. Bone Tomahawk
    Bone Tomahawk is an odd duck, a bowlegged western with slasher influences, a penchant for lengthy conversational meanderings, and a genuine interest in character.
  14. Risk
    Though it could benefit from less hopping around in time and space, and it bears the scars of Poitras’ multiple edits — she showed one cut to Assange, who hated it — if you care about what’s happening to the internet and to global politics, it’s essential viewing.
  15. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    [Nicholson's] clear affection for the sights and personalities that make Coney Island what it is gets in the way of a hard-hitting investigation of why it hasn't maintained its luster.
  16. 7 Boxes
    The film surges by, powered by high spirits, well-plotted surprises, and the directors' admirable attention to both the real and romantic.
  17. Exhibition
    A film that's all airy, abstract pretentiousness.
  18. Superman Returns
    The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blindsight
    Blindsight works best when it casts off the constraints of the adventure tale it wasn't meant to be and settles into a deft and humanistic treatment of blindness in Tibet.
  20. Good Hair
    Breezy, superficial documentary.
  21. Young Dr. Freud
    Structured to suggest an extended psychoanalytic session or an episode of "The Twilight Zone."
  22. Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy
    As the monks themselves threaten to nod off, the film's impressive narcotic effect enters the bloodstream-or so it may seem only for the unenlightened like me.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Czech Dream
    Hey, Prague--you got punk'd! In this subversive Central European slice of reality TV, Czech film students Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda protest the kudzu creep of globalization with a stunt worthy of the Yes Men.
  24. Tony Manero
    Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain's alarming Tony Manero--named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever"--is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.
  25. The Mouth of the Wolf
    A collection of "small great stories," in the words of its unobtrusive narrator, Pietro Marcello's singular doc/fiction hybrid salutes the crumbling grandeur of the northern Italian seaport Genoa.
  26. The Bitter Buddha
    The Bitter Buddha is very funny, and for all its bitterness, Eddie Pepitone's comedy is a taste that's easy to acquire.
  27. Food Evolution
    Kennedy unabashedly admires scientists, and Food Evolution is his rallying cry to make advocacy as important as lab work.
  28. Wreck-It Ralph
    As with its narrative, Wreck-It Ralph's themes don't develop by branching out in wild, unpredictable ways; instead, they simply become narrower and more monotonous.
  29. First They Killed My Father
    This is Jolie’s most accomplished work yet.
  30. ParaNorman
    Butler called it "John Carpenter meets John Hughes," and that does just about sum ParaNorman up, though the actual math still feels a little fuzzy.
  31. Let It Rain
    Aiming to be a seriocomic movie of ideas but desperate not to offend or challenge, Let It Rain soon settles for being another smug comedy of bourgeois manners.
  32. The Rocket
    The Rocket's ample pleasures come from Mordaunt localizing this tested formula rather than trying to reinvent it.
  33. A People Uncounted
    What Yeger stirs up is profoundly unsettling and deeply moving.
  34. Being Evel
    He may not be likable, but he remains fascinating. The film is on firm ground when examining Knievel's actual measurable impact: the action/extreme sports that have flourished since his retirement.
  35. Paul Williams Still Alive
    Johnny Carson loved him, and Williams had the credits to back himself up: As with Jimmy Webb, you could probably sing many of his songs without knowing that he's the author.
  36. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    Brian Knappenberger's The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz connects the dots of Swartz's past, assembling a vivid portrait of a sensitive genius with a strong moral sense.
  37. Only the Brave
    Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding, and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tunnel
    Director Roland Suso Richter skillfully wields the wall as a metaphor for isolation, but his pacing needs work: He cuts from an emotional death to a rowdy scene of sex on a kitchen table. Well, that's one way to mourn.
  39. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    It's an admittedly hagiographic film, an unabashed celebration of the man and his work and worldview. The few mild naysayers are largely set up to be knocked down, but as such the film is invigorating.
  40. The Search for General Tso
    Most of The Search for General Tso is a breezy survey of the history of Chinese-American cuisine.
  41. Breaking a Monster
    They're still thirteen-year-olds, which leads to Breaking a Monster's funniest moments.
  42. Tell Them Who You Are
    Busting with clips from films Haskell Wexler shot and directed, the doc is a rare thing: an ingenuous portrait of a thoroughly Four-Square Artist, Assembled With Love And Rockets Inside A Family's Spite-Tainted Gates.
  43. Hellboy
    To his credit, del Toro does not flinch from the ridiculous. But he is equally sensitive to Hellboy's pulp poetry.
  44. Radio Unnameable
    Now 79, the man with the snow-white ponytail in the radio booth hasn't flagged; as one of Fass's contemporaries says, "He can let someone go on and on and on."
  45. Violette
    Provost's film, like its heroine, is full of active, sparking nerves.
  46. Betting on Zero
    The situation is heartbreaking and frustrating. But the film is so persuasive that it could help finally tank Herbalife's shares and validate Ackman's gamble — possibly preventing thousands of others.
  47. America America
    The director's deepest instincts are less epic than dramatic, with the result that he gets sidetracked more often than his errant hero. The picturesque is gained too often at the expense of the picaresque, and the contour of a legend is obscured time and again by the pointless intimacy of a close-up. [09 Jan 1964, p.12]
    • Village Voice
  48. Hail, Caesar!
    The brothers' latest also has a certain buoyancy...The fizziness, though, proves fleeting, and Hail, Caesar! too often goes flat.
  49. 4
    Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty.
  50. When I Saw You
    Yet another first-rate film from a Middle East rich with them.
  51. The Lure
    The film's messages are cleverly wrapped in Smoczynska's entertaining, original vision. It's sexy, fearless, fun, and unrepentantly nasty.
  52. Mistaken for Strangers
    Mistaken for Strangers doesn't reveal anything about Tom but his own insecurity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Igby Goes Down
    Culkin broods and freaks out ably, but Igby's snotty, dysfunction-derived malaise remains off-putting, mostly because his lines aren't half as clever or empathic as Steers would believe.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Safety Not Guaranteed
    A viewer's patience with some of Safety's more rote stretches is rewarded in the film's final 15 minutes, when the plot takes a truly unexpected turn. As a DIY answer to the Spielberg generation's nostalgia for movie magic, the film's fully earnest, fantastic climax beats something like "Super 8" at its own game for a fraction of the cost.
  55. Christine
    By the end of Christine — and of Christine — the reporter is at once burdened with too many signifiers (is Chubbuck a tragic heroine of second-wave feminism? of our current macabre newsscape? of untreated depression?) and a cipher. As with most biopics that resort to maximalism, more is less.
  56. Bubot Niyar
    Observing the close relationships they develop with clients, the openly gay Heymann becomes, both hilariously and wistfully, part of a community that possesses in spades what's missing in his own life--the gift of happiness and living well in unfriendly surroundings.
  57. Saturday Church
    With Saturday Church, Cardasis has crafted a beautiful story about young, queer people of color championing one another and finding themselves.
  58. Star Trek Into Darkness
    Cumberbatch, a tweedy Brit with an M.A. in Classical Acting and a face like a monstrous Timothy Dalton, has beefed up to become a convincing killer. He's brutal and bold, and the film around him isn't bad either.
  59. Dope
    Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it's not new at all.
  60. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
    The women of Pussy Riot have an idea of what the new Russia should sound like; Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer shows just how hard it is to make that new world audible.
  61. The Great Invisible
    Unfortunately, given both its content and the media's collective failure to fully report the (ongoing) story, the film only intermittently has a pulse.
  62. Monkey Kingdom
    The moment-to-moment inventions are great fun, but the larger narrative inventions are less inspired.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    Mazursky's difficulty in making the transition from dramatic middle-shots to long shots, with the accompanying impulse to "universalize" his theme, indicates that he has not yet learned to trust his material, or appreciate his own sublime gift of being able to approach the secret of life through comic misunderstanding rather than cosmic understanding. [15 Aug 1974, p.63]
    • Village Voice
  64. Lovers of Hate
    A 2010 Sundance favorite, this inventive (and inventively thrifty) character study from Austin indie stalwart Bryan Poyser never flinches from the intractable sibling resentment at its core.
  65. Pieta
    After establishing a central parent-child relationship rife with wacko biblical undertones, the director finds nowhere to take his story except into standard vengeance territory.
  66. 9 Star Hotel
    Like all good political documentaries, 9 Star Hotel is more anthropology than agitprop, a portrait of life among the young, poorly educated men who are caught between Israeli exploitation and Palestinian Authority corruption.
  67. Adela
    With its art-perfect snapshot of a community-in-flux, Adela calls to mind Pedro Costa's similarly rigorous slum-life portrait "Colossal Youth."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bellflower
    In the end, Glodell's bona fide B-movie is monumentally dumb but damn near undeniable - although perhaps only a midnight drive-in screening in rural Texas, beat-up Chevys dripping muffler fluid and steam hissing from hot gravel, could do it proper.
  69. Wuss
    A witty black comedy with sociological aspirations that hits unexpected emotional marks while nimbly sidestepping clichés.
  70. Every Last Child
    This film is a wakeup call in the best sense: urgent, clear, understated.
  71. India's Daughter
    The film is undeniably compelling, and the fury and protest with which women across India responded to Singh's murder was explosive.... Yet there's something worrisome in the sensationalist tone.
  72. Finding Oscar
    Suffern strikes a respectful, not entirely hopeless tone throughout.
  73. Blade of the Immortal
    Come for the gory swordplay, stay for the half-serious melodrama.
  74. Summer in the Forest
    It’s quite a story, one that, like all good stories, turns out to have meaning for anyone.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    50/50
    Although it veers maudlin in its final act - 50/50 mostly succeeds as a movie about a young man fighting cancer that doesn't give in to sap or sentiment.
  76. Full Battle Rattle
    Set off by sprightly graphics and shimmering with over-bright colors, Full Battle Rattle has a fake transparency. The movie arouses, without gratifying, a desire to see the camera.
  77. 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.
  78. Super 8
    A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams's much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory.
  79. War Horse
    Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.
  80. The Untamed
    The director’s strength is in crafting fully drawn, sympathetic characters you root for — a big accomplishment when they have to compete for audience attention with a sex monster.
  81. The Aristocrats
    The Aristocrats is a veritable talent show itself, albeit one that feels inescapably slight. To rejigger another ancient joke: The food at this place isn't terrible. But the portions are really small.
  82. Lake Tahoe
    Eimbcke's droll rhythms are reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki--here stylistically appropriate for a film about social and emotional inertia.
  83. Easy A
    As far as teen comedies informed by 10th-grade English syllabi go, Easy A, partly inspired by "The Scarlet Letter," is remedial ed compared with "Clueless" and "10 Things I Hate About You."
  84. Zheng hun qi shi
    An intelligent, perceptive film. It's good enough to make you wish Chen hadn't sacrificed emotional complexity for a last-minute surprise.
  85. The Mother
    By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.
  86. New Waterford Girl
    A tender and hilarious vision of female adolescence.
  87. Army of One
    If you can handle the truth, Sarah Goodman's entropic doc is as exquisite a basic training in banal U.S. Army culture as you're likely to find.
  88. Censored Voices
    Oz is the best-known novelist in Israel, notorious for supporting a two-state solution. If you don't yet understand why he does, watch this film. If you're already on Oz's side, keeping the wound open might be worth it.
  89. The Oath
    Early in Laura Poitras's outstanding documentary The Oath, we learn that one of its subjects, Abu Jandal, a cabdriver living in Yemen, was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard in Afghanistan.
  90. Priceless
    Priceless begins as standard, unconvincing, assembly-line French farce and ends as a cop-out, feel-good rom-com. In between, it develops into something considerably more interesting.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transsiberian
    Just as nasty as the titular mode of transport is the script's wanton declaration of theme and a cynical and fashionable belief in moral grayness that may complement the frosty setting but nonetheless feels easy.
  92. Armadillo
    While much of Armadillo echoes last year's "Restrepo," the unprecedented access of director Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree reveals the alternating waves of frontline tedium and terror with fresh immediacy.
  93. Charlotte Sometimes
    Using vagueness as a crutch, Charlotte Sometimes makes a fetish of opacity. Still, whether or not it's a pose, the film's poised reticence is refreshing in context -- a rebuke to the contemporary crop of blabbermouthed American indies.
  94. Brothers Hypnotic
    We see Phil's sons honoring him while going their own ways in a years-long effort to find the right pitch.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Canners
    This film shows that canners (he interviews 18 of them, from different backgrounds) are industrious, resourceful and hardworking.
  96. Golden Exits
    The more microscopic and incidental the movie gets — as in this candlelit conversation — the grander its cumulative force becomes.
  97. First Position
    The result is a film that eschews in-depth insight in favor of easily digestible who's-going-to-win suspense, a tack that's aided by Kargman's rather poignant (and visually graceful) evocation of pre-performance anxiety but ultimately leaves the material feeling deflated once the winners emerge.
  98. Pusher
    As botched-drug-deal tales go, Pusher digs surprisingly deep— its surface clichés give way to an existential despair that finally swallows the movie whole.
  99. The Final Master
    Xu (The Sword Identity) may not be a household name, but The Final Master proves that he's the next big thing in martial-arts cinema.
  100. Gimme Danger
    The frontman's reminiscences, though, are invariably eloquent, witty, and often moving.
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