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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    On the plus side, 100 percent sober when I watched it, I can say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997's "Nowhere," and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Viewers may not be surprised to learn of Wal-Mart's horrific track record, but they can't deny Greenwald's airtight advocacy.
  3. To the Limit
    Daring enough to appeal to more than just the usual extreme-sports junkies.
  4. Leap Year
    There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.
  5. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    Raluy, a Mexican TV and stage star making her movie debut, is captivating as a woman whose terror at her own behavior is matched only by her bewilderment at the system around her.... But the real star here is Plá, with his total control of the frame.
  6. Sisters in Law
    The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.
  7. Man Push Cart
    Man Push Cart is a diminutive film, finally--vying for a neorealist vibe, it lacks the Italian history makers' narrative urgency, and the sociopolitical conflict at the heart of the immigration "issue" is hardly engaged.
  8. Tadpole
    As sweet and unassuming a film as they come, embraces both perspectives -- it's sympathetic to the batty throes of a first infatuation, but affably demurs at indulging them.
  9. Spy Kids
    Has an intemperate vitality that's hard to resist.
  10. Wonderland
    There's not a false note among the performances: Henderson, Hart, Shepherd, Markham, and in particular McKee add unspoken complexities to their portrayals.
  11. All the Real Girls
    This earnest love story is borderline insufferable, and yet there are moments that, in their bold incoherence, have a startling emotional truth.
  12. Time of the Wolf
    In today's digital bog of empty light and marketing deceptions, this is what early-millennium Euro art-film masterpieces feel like--lean, qualmish, abstracted to the point of parable but as grounded as a gravedigging.
  13. Robinson in Ruins
    A rigorous, agile, scathingly funny reckoning with a city and society in the last stages of decline.
  14. The Raid 2
    The raw ingredients of Raid 2 are superb. But the overall effect is gluttonous and queasy.
  15. Everyone Else
    An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    Does for the black movement what Getting Straight did for the student movement: reduces it to escapist entertainment, cinematic stylishness, and near nonsense. [13 May 1971, p.68]
    • Village Voice
  17. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?
  18. Lenny Cooke
    Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men.
  19. 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.
  20. La Moustache
    A successful novelist and restrained actor's director, Carrére makes the transformation of a silly marital argument into a cosmic upheaval look easy, and profound as well.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Unknown Soldier
    The film eventually becomes one long therapy session for the German nation as it struggles to understand how its brave and good soldiers could have done such bad, bad things. We, the viewers, are forced to take on the uncomfortable role of therapist.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Holes
    Brims with storytelling flourishes and gently deployed life lessons that even accompanying adults may dig
  23. Cookie's Fortune
    Long before it ends, its leisurely immersion in the Mississippi Delta has turned downright lukewarm and even chilly.
  24. One Lucky Elephant
    Admirably, and gently, raises questions about the folly and hubris of a relationship that may only ever be one-sided.
  25. Jerichow
    Jerichow forgoes the prolonged double-crosses of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," its simpler ending made all the more powerful--and a little heartbreaking.
  26. King Leopold's Ghost
    Sleeker and more ambitious than the 2003 BBC-produced "Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," which focused more narrowly on long-suppressed Belgian atrocities of that era.
  27. Thank You for Smoking
    Instead of hitting the gas and allowing the scenario to rock 'n' roll with g-forces, Reitman keeps his movie small, unvaried, slack, and deliberately and oddly, completely smoke-free.
  28. Pete's Dragon
    More than anything, this is a slice-of-life tale, whisper-thin but still full of feeling and a generous sense of place. With the world's most adorable dragon at the center of it all.
  29. My Brother the Devil
    Despite its moral seriousness, the film's a crowd-pleaser, boasting tense set pieces, a raucous polyglot of voices and accents, beauty-in-poverty streetscapes, and two warm, brawling, big-hearted leads.
  30. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    May be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard's tail for him and one-upping the classic anti-cartoon Duck Amuck by submitting to a cunning entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie never moves from square one.
  31. Trashed
    The form is straightforward, if a little meandering, as is the message: We have to fix this.
  32. Gebo and the Shadow
    Gebo and the Shadow is a film about concrete, hard, and material things, as well as one about illusions.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Factotum
    None of it goes anywhere. It's just stylized alcoholism with a tired wink.
  34. The Good Girl
    Like "Chuck & Buck," The Good Girl is a droll, well-acted, character-driven comedy with unexpected deposits of feeling.
  35. Intolerable Cruelty
    Zeta-Jones is merely ravishing, but Clooney owns the film. Ordinarily best at sardonic, man's-man confidence, he strides through Intolerable Cruelty with fantastic screwball zest. To see Clooney tenderize, season, grill, and serve this ham hock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Intimate Strangers
    A bland chamber drama for those who like their French cinema tame, talky, and just a little titillating.
  37. Tropic Thunder
    That's the thing about satire: It doesn't play past its expiration date. And everything about Tropic Thunder already feels antiquated.
  38. Disgrace
    The austere economy of Coetzee's writing, crisply adapted for the screen by Anna Maria Monticelli, plays out the melodrama with quietly brooding menace.
  39. The Tracker
    A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.
  40. Koch
    It's an effective primer on a voluble and charismatic mayor who embodied the spirit of the city he loved.
  41. This Is Martin Bonner
    This Is Martin Bonner isn't exciting, but it's also never dull.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Battle for Brooklyn
    Battle for Brooklyn provides a useful primer on the opposition to Atlantic Yards, but figures who might have made more compelling documentary subjects than the always on-message Goldstein crowd the sidelines.
  43. Mozart's Sister
    These subplots hint at what could have been, nudging the film toward biting rather than obvious commentary on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and creativity, and the costs of thwarting expression of any of them. But Féret barely explores this, and the film suffers for it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    October Sky
    A professionally crafted family film that reserves all its challenging moments for its characters, letting the audience bask comfortably in the approach of a predetermined warm and fuzzy ending.
  45. Mad Dog and Glory
    Murray's performance is successfully skewed, but in the De Niro oeuvre, Mad Dog is one more doughy characterization flecked with raisins. [16 Mar 1993]
    • Village Voice
  46. Red Eye
    Craven's terror-alert white-knuckler is zippy, unpretentious.
  47. Trumbo
    The actors--most unshaven, wrinkled, so goddamned serious--steal the writer's movie, as they wring from his epistles every last drop of blood and sweat spilled by a man punished for believing his country was better than its behavior.
  48. Nocturama
    The film mesmerizes and alienates equally.
  49. Men Go to Battle
    This isn't a film about the Civil War; it's about the minds of white folks so removed from plantation life that they feel they have no stake in it at all. It's not about back then — it's about being.
  50. Travelers and Magicians
    In interviews, Norbu has compared the editing process to meditation. While his pacing echoes that of polestars like Ozu and Makhmalbaf, his edits make striking events out of mundane motions like hands moving under running water and mouths meeting cups of butter tea.
  51. Crossing the Line
    Decaying and illiterate, with a mouthful of metal teeth, Dresnok himself belies his advertisements for the greatness of North Korea.
  52. My Brother Is an Only Child
    Tumultuously shot "rawness" is the stylistic house rule, but it's Elio Germano's Accio who vitalizes the film.
  53. Dolls
    Dolls risks the bank on symbology as gaudy as teen anime and as heavy as a stone temple.
  54. When Two Worlds Collide
    The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tangled
    The movie's real accomplishments are in its look, which was generated inside a computer but is as warm and rich as a painting.
  56. Bestiaire
    Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.
  57. Edge of Tomorrow
    The Wile E. Coyote fatalities are fun, but it's that repetitive moment of horror that holds this bipolar stunt together: Cruise, bug-eyed and gasping for breath as he shakes off his fear and grimly prepares for the next suicide mission.
  58. Three
    70 odd minutes of medical tragedy and cops matching wits with criminals devolves into incongruously balletic gunplay accentuated with CGI blood effects so terrible Sam Peckinpah is doing cocaine in his grave. It’s a weirdly calamitous tonal shift, erasing the scant goodwill we’d felt to this point and putting Three down for the count once and for all.
  59. The Opportunists
    Filled with vivid and likable characters, The Opportunists could be the basis for a TV series as captivating as "The Sopranos."
  60. Benjamin Smoke
    As ethereal, moving, and uncompromising as its subject.
  61. Me & Isaac Newton
    It's a TV show and a facile one at that.
  62. The Embalmer
    Skillfully directed and adroitly acted.
  63. Superstar in a Housedress
    A fabulously fond and entertaining tribute to the quick-witted Lower East Side kid.
  64. Wonderstruck
    There is so much packed in here; Wonderstruck is simultaneously the densest and loosest film Haynes has made. And, like many stories based on books for children, much of it makes more emotional than logical sense.
  65. Rapt
    The growing disgust of both his family and business associates, all hazily drawn, may knock the magnate down, but it's a limp substitute for the public fury that still burns after the fall of 2008.
  66. Theo Who Lived
    This film is valuable on account of its singular vantage point, and not just because of the firsthand description of the jihadist group’s brutality, which is unsurprising.
  67. Hacksaw Ridge
    As a filmmaker, Gibson understands that there is something fundamentally irreconcilable about Doss’ love of peace, his abject and visceral revulsion at battle and a war movie’s embrace of violence. Somehow, the director has made a film that can contain that contradiction — that remains irreducible. He breaks his own movie, and somehow the movie is better for it.
  68. Welcome to New York
    Surprisingly -- and pleasantly -- restrained in its delivery, Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York is the sort of picture that withholds judgment of its protagonist so that viewers have space to make their own.
  69. Deep Blue
    Those looking for a refresher course on the workings of the food chain should be in heaven. All others may yearn for a sushi break.
  70. Le petit lieutenant
    Beauvois, who co-wrote, seems hellbent on making the most realistic cop film of all time, shruggingly consumed with downtime, small talk, minor incident, and dead ends, and he's succeeded--the narrative wouldn't have cut it in a Kojak story meeting.
  71. From Up on Poppy Hill
    This film's gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one's suspension of disbelief.
  72. 22 Jump Street
    22 Jump Street isn't uncharitable or mean-spirited; at worst, it's just confused. Tatum is, predictably, adorable. His Jenko is a pumped-up naïf bumbling through life with a crooked smile, and Hill again makes a great sparring partner.
  73. Black Death
    Screenwriter Dario Poloni and director Christopher Smith provide enough sword-and-sorcery hoo-ha to please the "Lord of the Rings" demographic, but the movie's real coup is in how it repeatedly shifts our allegiance from Christians to pagans.
  74. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
    In essence, the film is a lecture, but Zizek's associative thinking and understanding of the applicability of psychoanalysis makes it a lecture like no other.
  75. A Dark Song
    The performances are strong and the scenecraft absorbing.
  76. We Are What We Are
    It isn't until the ending, which turns the squirm amplifier up to 11 and exceeded even my horrific expectations, that we finally see the story's potential realized.
  77. Young Adult
    Young Adult might be brushed off as curdled rom-com were it not for two things. The first is the depth of Theron's performance...The second, less predictable aspect is the utter absence of the corny rehabilitation found in "Juno" and Reitman's glib, downsizing dramedy "Up in the Air."
  78. Oasis: Supersonic
    As a music comedy, this is up there with Popstar, but with better-defined characters. It's thick with tales of brawls, breakups, stage-walkoffs, busted hotel rooms and astonishing rudeness.
  79. Winnebago Man
    Rebney's good-natured calm and apparent indifference to his Internet notoriety initially foils the filmmaker. Hoping to re-create the original clip reel, Steinbauer is nonplussed and abashed. Was it all an act--or is this? Pay your money and find out.
  80. Gemini
    For all the sharp-witted conversations and pinpoint performances, Gemini most impresses as a piece of clean, confident visual storytelling.
  81. Brad's Status
    Brad’s Status remains grounded in reality — it’s gentle, human and unresolved. I loved it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch it again.
  82. The Pledge
    Though at times it threatens to meander off, Penn's movie fulfills its destiny as an alienated fable of justice and luck, personified by Jack in the twilight of his iconicity, babbling to himself at the crossroads of nowhere.
  83. Nicholas Nickleby
    The entire unwieldy contraption rests on the shoulders of erstwhile "Queer as Folk" jailbait Hunnam: Bleached and bland, earnest and wooden, he's exactly what the film asks him to be.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Real Women Have Curves
    The film stakes out a self-affirming Atkins-free zone that seems unobjectionable in theory, but its speechifying tendencies and familiar familial tensions overwhelm the more delicate scenes.
  85. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Broomfield's investigatory technique remains a frustrating pileup of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity. But when Broomfield travels to her Michigan hometown, he pieces together a life blighted at breech-birth: a grotesque of abandonment, incest, physical and sexual abuse, pregnancy at 13, and homelessness.
  86. The Score
    Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.
  87. The Road Home
    The Road Home is foremost enthralled, however, with its lead actress -- wide-eyed and pigtailed, revered in close-up after stunned close-up.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Santo Domingo Blues
    Wolfe's anecdotal musicology succeeds precisely because of its bare-bones, bawdy yet beautiful approach--just like the music Vargas makes.
  89. Making the Boys
    Crayton Robey's documentary on this queer cultural touchstone admirably presents both sides of the divide.
  90. Nothing Personal
    In her tale of a brusque, prickly young Dutch woman who inexplicably cuts herself off from the world, except for a heavily circumscribed relationship with a man whose isolation is less voluntary, writer-director Urszula Antoniak hits a lot of expected notes.
  91. Lost Bohemia
    Lost Bohemia's real power, though, is in the impromptu interviews Astor conducted with his neighbors.
  92. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    Respectful, loving, but never lionizing, Carl's thorough investigation transcends his personal catharsis to become an enduring treatise on how character flaws affect policy.
  93. Last Days Here
    An affectionate look at a self-destructing maniac and his supporters that bluntly reveals Liebling's total abjection without mocking him.
  94. Scenes of a Crime
    What's remarkable about Scenes of a Crime, besides Hadaegh and Babcock's ability to stay out of the way of their story and resist flashy graphical flourishes, is the degree to which the events it reveals are business as usual.
  95. Copenhagen
    [An] exquisitely beautiful feature debut.
  96. Botso
    Too bad the filmmaking never rises to the level of its subject.
  97. 52 Tuesdays
    Grippingly plotted and exquisitely thoughtful, 52 Tuesdays is a poignant reminder that neither confusion nor crisis is doomed to be calamitous.
  98. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    Rose is a pleasant affair, but you might want to know far more about Blank and far less about, say, pot-au-feu.
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