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 7.6 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. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Ends up an intricate, becalmed take on a soul adrift.
  2. Robots
    Entertaining enough that it leaves one wishing for more in the way of android mythology—a pint-sized Blade Runner or A.I. The screenplay goes on autopilot, grinding toward a happy ending just when it has a shot at something darker and more memorable.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Blackout
    This passionate polemic follows Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney, of Georgia, as she campaigns to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
  4. Surrogate Valentine
    A rambling valentine to San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura, Surrogate Valentine is a stylish pseudo-portrait that refracts Nakamura's gently impassive persona and lilting indie pop ballads through several lenses.
  5. Frida
    Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.
  6. All Together
    Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.
  7. A Walk to Beautiful
    Aside from a few casual digs at the loutishness of the rural Ethiopian male, documentarians Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher feel no need to overlay this health-care calamity with pious outrage; any editorial is implied in the immutable facts from overworked gynecologists and the camera's testament.
  8. 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.
  9. The Take
    Furman draws superb performances from Leguizamo and Perez, two actors whose hyperactive energy has often been a distraction. Here, they're centered and completely believable as a hardworking couple whose life has been turned inside out.
  10. Safe
    A preposterously enjoyable - or enjoyably preposterous - action-thriller.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Audrey the Trainwreck
    Frank V. Ross makes no-budget, impeccably acted, dryly funny, and unpretentiously melancholic movies about the tiny gray area between happiness and misery, and the frustrations of the suburban working-class. In his latest, Audrey the Trainwreck, there is no character named Audrey, and nothing as histrionic as a trainwreck.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Wood
    A diverting but uneven nostalgia trip.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ffolkes
    Floating somewhere between thriller and comedy, ffolkes reunites McLaglen with a very game Moore.
  14. Flushed Away
    What's not to love about a movie in which thousands of rodents stand together against a Big Wave generated by TV-watching soccer fans flushing their toilets at halftime?
  15. Heist
    You've seen neo-noirs like this before, but you probably haven't had this much fun with a modern B movie in a while.
  16. Stink!
    Though not as funny as Moore's earliest work, Jon Whelan's Stink! is way more emotionally affecting.
  17. The Go-Getter
    Modestly rewards with gorgeous sun-spotted cinematography, tender digressions in rather brave quantities, and believably charming dialogue that doesn't all sound like it came from the same brain (listen up, Diablo Cody).
  18. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
    Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.
  19. La sierra
    A stark, relentlessly deglamorized vision of ghetto life, La Sierra is essential viewing for anyone who ponied up for the aestheticized amorality of the Brazilian "City of God."
  20. Zebraman
    The creator of such wicked bloodbaths as "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer" had it in him to craft a nearly family-friendly flick. No doubt, this kitschy CGI-action spoof is still deliciously insane.
  21. Stuck
    Stuck is both darkly comic and disgusting; the name alone reduces the crime to a sick joke.
  22. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Blandly engaging sequel.
  23. The Brown Bunny
    It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.
  24. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    The resulting portrait is a cautionary rejoinder to typical sports-movie uplift, elucidating how athletics remain a dangerously precarious foundation upon which to construct lasting peace.
  25. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    A script that consistently finds fresh outlets for its running gags makes for a sufficiently rollicking pleasure cruise.
  26. Korkoro
    The plotting is two-dimensional, but in the tormented visage of Taloche (James Thiérrée)-a clichéd holy simpleton enlivened by irrepressible physicality-the film seethes with full-bodied fury and anguish.
  27. Iowa
    Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.
  28. Freeheld
    Beneath the clichés of prestige filmmaking beat the hearts of a couple it's a privilege to get to know.
  29. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    Former "Frontline" producer Brian Knappenberger's fascinating, incisive social history of the online network known as Anonymous.
  30. Noi the Albino
    A lightly comic slacker drama that takes the desperation of teenage tedium seriously.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Renoir
    Wisely, director Gilles Bourdos keeps the pace slow, what with all the tensions beneath the surface: Oedipal conflict, career choices, even class struggle.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Menashe
    Weinstein, who is neither a member of a Haredi community nor a speaker of Yiddish (on set, he used a translator), has created a work of interest partially because he is aware of his own distance from his subject matter.
  33. 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.
  34. Asura: The City of Madness
    Winningly over-the-top Korean gangster drama Asura: The City of Madness is what you'd get if you combined The Wire with a really good soap opera.
  35. Santa & Andrés
    With quiet precision, Lechuga (Melaza) charts Andrés’s resilience and Santa’s awakening, using a naturalistic visual style and sparse dialogue that reveals how these characters instinctively read between the lines.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vacancy
    Antal smartly adheres to the no-frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore. And Wilson and Beckinsale superbly execute everything that's required of their characters--namely, yelling and running.
  37. Kung Fu Yoga
    Kung Fu Yoga is a proudly silly cultural melting pot in which kung fu and Bollywood meet amicably.
  38. 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.
  39. American Reunion
    Taken altogether, the Pie movies offer a cohesive worldview, showing each of life's stages as the setting for fresh-yet-familiar catastrophes, relieved by a belief in sex, however ridiculous it might look, as a restorative force.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    The multiple story lines can feel choppy, but the dialogue has snap, and the pants' powers never distract from the teenagers' emotions.
  41. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Thorny issues regarding patient-caregiver relationships, cost-vs.-care tensions, and morality-vs.-rules dynamics are handled with a minimum of didacticism by Lilti, whose handheld camerawork provides a measure of immediacy without calling undue attention to itself.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Just Friends
    A refreshingly mean-spirited breeze through both the holiday movie and romantic-comedy checklists.
  44. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    Inexplicable as it is, the Joan of Arc story encourages contemplation of ourselves as a species. The Messenger is more apt to prompt meditation on the nature of show business.
  45. Such a Long Journey
    The filmmaking is fresh and unemphatic, and the acting is generally gripping.
  46. Zipper
    Wilson is a charismatic and underused actor, perfect here as a guy with a talent for convincing others of his virtue. Headey, as Sam's wife, creates a surprisingly complex portrait of a woman shattered by her husband but hungry for higher social position.
  47. What About Me
    Come for the cult of personality, stay for the nostalgia of a dirtier, dodgier, far cooler scene.
  48. Look Both Ways
    An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.
  49. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
    In much the same fashion as Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin", Auraeus Solito's feature debut confronts the taboo of pre-teen sexuality with a startling mix of openness and sensitivity. No less than precocious Maxi, the film is alarming, endearing, and utterly unflappable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burn
    In this lively and affecting documentary, filmmakers Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez show that Detroit is burning. Literally.
  51. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    The Strangers: Prey at Night, co-written by Bertino and Ben Ketai and directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) has a slow and rather grim first half, but then, in the home stretch, takes a welcome turn into the seriously silly.
  52. The Transfiguration
    The Transfiguration gradually reveals itself to be a coming-of-age tale, one whose central figure reaches a point at which he’s forced to reckon with the evil lurking within himself.
  53. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Salomé would be better served by a story that focuses more explicitly on her intellectual life rather than on her personal one, but considering how stodgy biopics can be, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free offers a mostly engaging portrait of a charismatic and brilliant figure.
  54. One October
    Shuman’s sprightly, restless film trails the sprightly, restless WFMU host Clay Pigeon through the boroughs as he checks in with the people he meets.
  55. Detour
    The performance and filmmaking are invigorating.
  56. Beach House
    The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.
  57. Whores' Glory
    Michael Glawogger's fearless Whores' Glory demystifies trick turning with a bluntness and sneaky artistry that's sure to make even the most jaded of us choke on our next sitcom-hooker-joke chuckle.
  58. The Colors of the Mountain
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
  59. Set It Up
    While the plot is familiar, Katie Silberman’s witty script plays with expectations.
  60. A Trial in Prague
    Justman's A Trial in Prague acts as something of a corrective to the exuberant but oversimplified "Fighter."
  61. Rock in the Red Zone
    Bialis's growing immersion in the town is poignant, even admirable.
  62. L.I.E.
    Preposterous enough to entertain.
  63. Rambo
    A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.
  64. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    Expertly measured, emotional look at the life of a guitar prodigy cut down by ALS.
  65. Promises
    An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.
  66. Red Eye
    Craven's terror-alert white-knuckler is zippy, unpretentious.
  67. 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prince
    Like a purple Lamborghini — or an adolescent boy's first, er, encounter — the film is too fast but almost unquestionably fun.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Stripped of Larsson's social/political minutiae and slimmed down to its thriller chassis, certain clichés become more glaring: Lisbeth's superhuman hacking skills, overfamiliar from a zillion TV procedurals; an exploitative lesbian sex scene that mightn't have pleased the feminist Larsson; the secondary villain, a blond giant incapable of feeling pain--gah!; and the too-comfy manner in which the twin narratives finally interlace.
  70. The Holy Land
    This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.
  71. Holly
    Though the storytelling is haphazard, artistry often transcends mere good intentions. Director Guy Moshe scavenges color from the torn fringes of Phnom Penh, and the composer Tôn-Thât Tiêt provides a spare score, laying bleary sadness over the art-house muckracking.
  72. Honor Flight
    Greatest-generation stoicism meets gushing contemporary sentiment in Honor Flight.
  73. Let Fury Have the Hour
    The film joyfully surveys the evolution of a politically informed artistic movement, set to a soundtrack that includes MC5, Rage Against the Machine, DJ Spooky, and others.
  74. The Yellow Handkerchief
    All three leads are solidly convincing in their candor. And Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission) shoots the hell out of the swampy South to make for a nontoxic diversion.
  75. Incident In a Ghostland
    The grisly post-torture-porn horror flick Incident in a Ghostland serves as an effectively punishing critique of the relentless misogyny that has become a staple of every stupid Texas Chain Saw Massacre knockoff that pits sexually active women against emotionally disturbed serial killers.
  76. Murderball
    What keeps Murderball from devolving into redemptive drivel is its insistence on treating the players it profiles as jocks first and disabled men second.
  77. Titanic Town
    Isn't convincing on every front, but as a political conversation piece, it's potentially effective.
  78. The Ister
    The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.
  79. Cruel Intentions
    A "guilty pleasure" -- only it's the sort of film that would mock anyone who felt guilt in pleasure.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Simply Irresistible
    Scores points for oddball charm.
  81. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    No longer silent but still the lesser talker between them, Ilya is marvelously fluent in spatial forms.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Matador
    The Matador reserves judgment while raising the core issue concerning this traditional ritual: deep, poetic cultural expression or glorified animal cruelty?
  83. Afghan Star
    Marking follows the finalists around on the last leg of their PR campaigns and captures something sweetly goofy, with an edge of creepy, about their aping of smarmy American self-promotion (kissing babies, etc).
  84. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Rise of an Empire might have been essentially more of the same, but for one distinction that makes it 300 times better than its predecessor: Mere mortals of Athens, Sparta, and every city from Mumbai to Minneapolis, behold the magnificent Eva Green, and tremble!
  85. I Heart Huckabees
    There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    96 Minutes
    The narrative machinery grows creakier as the plot advances, and the film is a bit too strident about some of the issues at play, but 96 Minutes is admirably knotty nonetheless.
  87. Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings
    The equally thrilling and exhausting Hong Kong martial arts fantasy Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings boasts more inventive weapons, monsters, and plot twists than most Western audiences will know what to do with.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hard Goodbyes: My Father
    A tender Greek drama.
  89. Fort Tilden
    Allie and Harper are basically unlikable, but played with a light touch and just enough distance from their own unthinking cruelty to remain funny.
  90. I Touched All Your Stuff
    Bühler and Mariani make their process part of the narrative, deconstructing the documentary form while delving into Kirk's copious digital life.
  91. The Ignorant Fairies
    It's this memory-as-identity obviation that gives Secret Life its intermittent unease, reaffirming that long-held illusions are indeed reality, and that erasing them recasts the self. And it's this existential gerrymandering that's most compelling.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    Like his "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter.
  93. The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    The film never lingers too long on any one thing, instead functioning as a survey in which several fascinating cultural moments are vividly evoked, but then left insufficiently probed.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Metroland
    An unflashy tale of memory and desire in suburban London.
  95. Wattstax (re-released)
    Not only documents the soul-titan concert held at L.A. Coliseum seven years after Watts burned, but illuminates the rue and kinesis of a city in full Black Power flower.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Miracle
    Kurt Russell is terrific as coach Herb Brooks, psychological tactician out to redeem his being cut from the 1960 U.S. squad, the last one to beat the CCCP.
  97. Earth Days
    There's great archival footage.
  98. Restless City
    Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery.
  99. Tom at the Farm
    That the most vicious homophobes are often closet cases is not news, but Dolan seems less concerned with that self-evident fact and more about creating a mood of unease.
  100. NightLights
    There are moments in director David Midell's NightLights that play like PSAs, but that earnestness is paved over by wonderfully affecting performances.
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