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. Equal Means Equal
    Despite the gravity and breadth of the subject matter, Lopez herself is a frequent subject of the camera.... These awkward inclusions can’t diminish the horror and injustice she catalogs, but they will make Equal Means Equal a difficult sell to anyone outside its intended audience of socially progressive, politically empowered women.
  2. The Ruins of Lifta
    Grounded in the art of listening, The Ruins of Lifta builds a powerful, personal, political conversation between Palestinians and Israelis looking to live differently.
  3. Bill Frisell: A Portrait
    Franz’s doc, unlike too many about jazz musicians, actually makes room for jazz music, capturing the clean-cut, restlessly inventive Frisell in live performance in a variety of ensembles.
  4. River of Grass
    Reichardt pays clear homage to Breathless and Badlands, but her movie, the title of which is a local name for the Everglades, operates in its own ecosystem, teeming with the droll, shrewd observations about downwardly mobile life explored more solemnly in Reichardt's next two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.
  5. Mad Hot Ballroom
    Like "Spellbound's" glimpse of the darker side of childhood competition, Mad Hot Ballroom--a look at New York City schools' fifth-grade ballroom dance program--is best when exploring issues of class and gender and definitions of success.
  6. Mr. Gaga
    Writer/director Tomer Heymann's uneven doc Mr. Gaga offers a character study of Israeli dance choreographer Ohad Naharin, but the scope and power of Naharin's art only becomes clear when the dancers illustrate rather than comment on his distinctively twitchy, animalistic "gaga" style of movement.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only the Young
    Only the Young captures the lyricism of late childhood and the bewilderment of the road ahead. As for the skate footage, it's shot for pure glory and for all the world, like Wild China or Blue Planet, beautiful beings struggling in exotic habitats: abandoned houses, red-gold bluffs, and run-down mini-golf courses.
  8. Bronson
    Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."
  9. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The remake is an altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.
  10. The Last Laugh
    [An] insightfully open-ended inquiry into the role of humor as it relates to unspeakable tragedy.
  11. Shadow Dancer
    The film rests on the desperate chemistry of a paunchy, weathered Owen and a tense, quietly ferocious Riseborough.
  12. Syndromes and a Century
    Syndromes and a Century, which was commissioned by the New Crowned Hope festival to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, is a movie of long serene takes and gentle absurdities.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horton Hears a Who!
    Horton Hears a Who! has blessedly been conceived and executed in reverence to Seuss's story, padding out the original narrative with some meaningful new ideas and casting a mercifully muzzled Jim Carrey as the titular beast.
  14. Cash Only
    Cash Only features many familiar action movie markers, but it's distinguished by a raw energy and strong sense of place.
  15. The Nomi Song
    Made with considerable wit and style, Horn's thoughtful celebration of the era and its most uncanny diva could function as the show's ("East Village USA") supplement.
  16. Collapse
    Smith lets Ruppert's plainspoken autodidactic skepticism get gradually shriller until his arguments dissolve into tears of grief and frustration. There's an element of Errol Morris in the film, which implicitly psychologizes its subject and watches as he talks himself deeper and deeper into the hole.
  17. Sweaty Betty
    This isn't hard-times reportage or a deep-dive ethnography. It's a life-as-it's-lived picture, a chance to meet and loiter with the people in the places the interstates zip past.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mansfield Park
    In trying so hard to entertain, ends up sabotaging itself.
  19. Divan
    Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest.
  20. Deadline
    What Deadline lacks in heft it makes up for in common sense.
  21. Next Stop Wonderland
    The style of the filmmaking, the freewheeling handheld camera movement, the associative editing, and the buoyant Brazilian score convey Anderson's sense that chance plays a major role in our lives and that what's happening on the periphery is often more important than what's staring us in the face.
  22. The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story
    A grassroots refutation of Discovery Channel/National Geographic dispassion, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story is hot and sweaty with fetching curves.
  23. No Date, No Signature
    No Date, No Signature presents a story of flawed but generally decent people trying to put right what went so horribly wrong.
  24. Macbeth
    This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.
  25. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    This gripping movie is essential viewing for any Irish history buffs who found In the Name of the Father a tad corny.
  26. Warrior
    Old line-gargler Nolte remains an effortlessly moving presence, while Hardy and Edgerton embody their archetypes and handle the physical demands.
  27. I Will Follow
    Its elegantly simple structure filled in with startling, understated force, I Will Follow is a modestly framed portrait of grief in its first season.
  28. Far from the Madding Crowd
    As written by Hardy, Bathsheba is bracingly whole and human; here she’s been outlined, and thus circumscribed, by an eager student’s highlighter.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sleepwalk with Me
    [Rides] a weird tonal line, maybe aiming to split the difference between comedy and terror but coming off as afraid to really go for it on either.
  30. Pleasantville
    Funny for about half an hour, Pleasantville thereafter becomes an increasingly lugubrious, ultimately exasperating mix of technological wonder and ideological idiocy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bergman Trilogy
    As little more than an extended interview, it remains hobbled by determinedly uninspired cinematography and a mundane televisual setup.
  32. Requiem for a Dream
    May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.
  33. Separate Lies
    Fellowes's larger goal seems to be making sympathetic characters of Anne and Bule, who for all their lovey-doveyness never emerge as much more than rich twits à la "The Great Gatsby."
  34. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    Persian Cats is likeable but undistinguished filmmaking.
  35. Where the Wild Things Are
    Wild Things isn't overlong, but it is underwhelming.
  36. Paint It Black
    No matter her influences, Tamblyn has filmed for us something singular.
  37. Run & Jump
    Maxine Peake is a revelation in Run & Jump, communicating vitality and extraordinary optimism that practically bleeds out and infects the visuals.
  38. Animals
    Schiffli and Dastmalchian deliver a sweet, elegiac concluding moment that offers a measure of hope without making a lot of unbelievable promises.
  39. Ingrid Goes West
    It is entertaining, and often touching, even if it pulls back right when it should be going totally nuts.
  40. In Search of Beethoven
    The film's real resource is its impressive array of talking heads, their intimate familiarity with the music, and their ability to impart graspable insight.
  41. Blood Brother
    There are undoubtedly several moving moments in the film, and the kids are gorgeous and heartbreaking, but none of that is strong enough to balance Braat's galling and enabled narcissism, which pervades the film.
  42. As It Is in Heaven
    Overbay's palette is carefully lyrical, at a benumbed Martha Marcy May Marlene pitch, he pays attention to the verdant landscape and keeps his cast at a pensive and watchful low boil.
  43. RBG
    As a work of feel-good advocacy, it checks pretty much all the boxes, making its way through the key cases of her career, while also offering a personal look at the woman herself. Yet it’s hard not to want more from RBG, precisely because its subject is so remarkable and her ideas so consequential.
  44. Roman de gare
    This goofy tale of self-emancipation, a love story made by a mature man wise to the possibilities of the improbable, is also a thriller with an unexpectedly dark edge.
  45. Earth
    Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."
  46. Carnage
    Dead flesh is a ruling motif, but Gleize's airy, observant personality makes even the graphic dismemberment of the bull, scored with flamenco stomps, buoyant and fascinating.
  47. WTC the First 24 Hours
    Actually manages a fresh perspective. The director, camera in tow, had unimpeded access to the devastation for a full day before being shooed away by officials, and the footage he captured (sans commentary) is both gut-wrenchingly familiar and disconcertingly foreign.
  48. Carandiru
    Carandiru's every scene is cut from factory-issue prison-genre cloth to fit jailhouse stock characters.
  49. Twin Falls Idaho
    Neither as weighty nor as weird as it would like to think.
  50. A Woman Is a Woman
    Godard light, but not lite: Its breezy postures front for melancholia.
  51. Shadow of the Vampire
    Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.
  52. Collateral
    Collateral is a slim drink of thin beer, remarkable only as evidence that Mann might have a modern masterpiece in him if he were cut loose and allowed to roam around in his own obsessions.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    House of Sand and Fog
    The clunky manipulations of plot, and the sorry fate awaiting everyone in this foggy House is less wrenching than acted.
  54. Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
    Grbavica is a womanly movie in the best sense: Zbanic has a deeply feminine sense of how crisis gets filtered through the domesticity of daily life.
  55. The Tenant
    it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby" to "Bitter Moon" and "The Pianist."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lourdes
    The film delves deeper into the pain and pleasure of watching other people experience the wonderful things you dream of happening to you. In that sense, Hausner has crafted a kind of meta-riff on the masochistic lure of cinema itself.
  57. Starry Starry Night
    Lin fills in the gaps with some handsome CG-fantasy sequences and a rather obvious central metaphor involving a missing puzzle piece, but he can't make up for the fact that the film wants to say more about the fragility of childhood than it's capable of communicating through its characters and their delicate, perpetually uncertain situations.
  58. Don't Breathe
    Alvarez proves adept at springing surprises in these moments, a skill that combines all the art and technique of moviemaking with the architecture of 3D level-planning and the carny showmanship of building a professional haunted house.
  59. Neshoba
    Though Neshoba is standard-issue in terms of craftsmanship, the tools used to tell the tale (newsreels, family photos, crime scene and autopsy photos) are masterfully employed.
  60. Molly's Game
    Chastain seems at times to be both the lead and her own supporting actor in this story, as she oscillates between traditionally feminine and masculine modes of behavior, sometimes inhabiting both at once.
  61. Beyond the Gates
    Though hobbled by its anxious impulse to teach history to an audience that by now surely knows the basic contours of Rwanda's tragedy, the script apportions blame where it belongs (on high), while leaving smaller fry--including an admirably un-cute BBC journalist--dangling, however sympathetically, on the hook.
  62. Training Day
    Antoine Fuqua's propulsive, elegantly written police thriller, offers the unsettling spectacle of Denzel Washington.
  63. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Berlinger covers lots of territory, including heartrending accounts from the family members of some of Bulger's victims. The whole exercise is fascinating, if vaguely unsatisfying.
  64. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    I like what I Am Big Bird is trying to do — I just wish it were a little less Bird-nice, and a little more Grouch-frank.
  65. Strongman
    Levy's deeply sorrowful but wonderfully affectionate doc depicts the wistful link between humanity and celebrity.
  66. Aliens of the Deep
    Often thrilling almost-feelie.
  67. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Engaging, if ultimately wearisome.
  68. Home
    Warmhearted but never sentimental or condescending, Home finally proves most affecting as an unsparing glimpse into the psychology of poverty.
  69. The Sky Turns
    Nothing speaks more elegantly to the bewilderment of the locals than a long shot of newly built windmills lining a distant hilltop while a villager, made tiny by Álvarez's framing, looks on in the foreground, swallowed up by the forces of history.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sketches of Frank Gehry
    This enjoyably breezy portrait of genius architect Frank Gehry is drawn doodle-style by first-time documentarian Sydney Pollack.
  71. The Big Picture
    For most of the film, Lartigau creates the tension of a Hitchcockian thriller solely through Paul's interior struggle.
  72. Breath
    If only Baker and the gang had fleshed out horny hero Pikelet’s journey with the same earthy details that make Pikelet and Loonie’s friendship seem real enough to be worth mourning.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    It's likely the best anti-Christmas Christmas movie since "Bad Santa."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    In July
    A nimbler approach to border crossing, German-born director Fatih Akin's In July resembles a shaggier "Serendipity," with a similar moony conflation of coincidence and destiny.
  75. Tape
    The movie takes shape as an entertaining psychological armwrestle between rank belligerence and blustery condescension.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Injury to One
    A deft, ambitious exercise in old-school socialist agitprop crafted with the precise multimedia flair of a corporate PowerPoint presentation, Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One retells the gritty class struggles of the previous century through smoothly contemporary digital means.
  77. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Will test the ideological mettle of law-and-order conservatives and lefty peaceniks alike.
  78. Black Book
    Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
  79. Girls Trip
    Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind last year’s uneven Barbershop: The Next Cut — pops with next-level ribaldry and smack talk, especially in its first half. But in the remaining hour, the laughs arrive less often as the gender politics grow weirder.
  80. Next Goal Wins
    If you find other people worth your time and attention, Next Goal Wins will stir you.
  81. The Way He Looks
    The shuffling of who's an important/close friend transcends the specificity of being gay and disabled, and that experience is rarely depicted as realistically as this. But the film crosses into self-parody.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Walk on the Moon
    Tony Goldwyn, making his directorial debut, lets his cast do the work for him, and they hold up well.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dragonslayer
    Nothing like a traditional social-issue doc, Patterson's one-of-a-kind hybrid captures a socio-historical moment with the kind of charged authenticity that only comes from a willingness to embrace contradictions: It's discursive and hypnotic, laconic and urgent.
  84. Remote Area Medical
    Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.
  85. The Farewell Party
    [Depicts] the end of life not as an isolated horror (as in Michael Haneke's Amour) or as the contested site of legal and political factions, but as a complex social phase, its wobbly moral scale hinging on empathy.
  86. Francofonia
    Skipping across ages and genres, this cine-essay beguilement from Russian Ark director Alexander Sokurov considers the Louvre — and the miracle of the transmission of art and culture across its history.
  87. Mavis!
    Edwards is content with presenting Mavis as she sees herself: as the conduit for a song's message, and a voice to uplift the weary.
  88. Drinking Buddies
    With dexterity and care, Swanberg illuminates our muddled perceptions of our own relationships. He fixates on the minutiae of hanging out, the stuff of little loves and lies, the feints and thrusts we make in sorting matters of head and heart.
  89. The Theory of Everything
    The film is striking, at times even piercing, for the way it infiltrates some universal realities of marriage.
  90. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.
  91. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Descent
    In the great B tradition, Marshall gets a lot out of nothing.
  93. Rana's Wedding
    It's tempting to read Abu-Assad's view of his ostentatiously wealthy heroine and her debutante narcissism as satirical of a certain cross-section of modernized Palestinians amid the occupation, but the placid, earnest way her dilemma takes up emotional space in his film suggests half-bakery.
  94. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Mainly, Fix the World is about the beauty of the riff. The Yes Men are funniest when addressing a straight audience, making outlandish claims in favor of the free market and the benefits of unregulated catastrophe--the Black Plague gave us capitalism!
  95. The Road
    Call it a haircut of "Psycho" with ectoplasmic additives, The Road still has a whispering menace and visual grandeur all its own.
  96. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    Even Mastroianni cannot hold our attention for over three hours.
  97. Sunshine
    Despite Sunshine's historical scope and multiplicity of characters, it doesn't shed half as much light on its subject -- identity and anti-Semitism -- as does, for example, Agnieszka Holland's claustrophobic chamber piece "Angry Harvest."
  98. Rain
    The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.
  99. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    Richet proves maddeningly loath to edit his material, and his charismatic star, Vincent Cassel, does not delve deep into the character.
  100. Get On Up
    Get On Up isn't a perfect-picture; there are moments of awkwardness, little gambles that don't quite pay off. But it's one of those experiments that's both flawed and amazing, a mainstream movie (with Mick Jagger as one of its producers) that fulfills old-fashioned, entertainment-value requirements, even as it throws off flashes of insight.
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