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
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Like Killing Flies
    A curiously tasty dish, one that could leave even a vegan with a burning desire to sample Shopsin's lamb chops.
  2. Letters from Baghdad
    Unfortunately, the doc is devoid of any real context, including how work such as Bell’s helped lead to the quagmire that has unsettled the region for decades.
  3. Big Sonia
    The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.
  4. Donnie Darko
    Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.
  5. Bliss
    Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose.
  6. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    American Radical shows--albeit with great reluctance--how a formidable intellect partnered with an absolutist disposition can get you absolutely nowhere.
  7. Tomorrow
    What Laurent and Dion do best is present pockets of progressive change as blueprints for idealism in action.
  8. The Boys of Baraka
    The Boys of Baraka's heart may be in the right place, but its portrait of poor Baltimore kids selected to attend boarding school in Kenya is rife with suspect perspectives.
  9. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Games of Love and Chance
    Unlike American counterparts "Kids" or "Dangerous Minds," this highly intelligent comedy (which cleaned up at this year's Césars) doesn't seek to shock or inspire, but merely documents teen moodiness in all its tedious unpredictability.
  11. Tikkun
    Shot like a photo album, gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, it continually suggests that crisis and struggle can be beautiful when viewed from the right angle.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mrs Henderson Presents
    This is Dame Judi's show. However extraordinary an actor she may be, she cannot conceal the obvious fact that she's having the time of her life here. Isn't that delicious?
  13. Sworn Virgin
    Cutting between present, childhood, and recent past, Bispuri constructs a subtle, richly emotional collage.
  14. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    To have been in junior high school when rhapsodic fugues of yearning like "Spanish Harlem," "Uptown," or "Be My Baby" first poured from the radio is to have a sensibility, if not a fantasy life, in some way molded by this monster of self-absorption; to see The Agony and the Ecstasy is to be discomfitingly haunted by the specter of that long-ago innocence.
  15. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    Neville briefly showcases individual musicians but never sticks with them long enough to highlight their skills.
  16. 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.
  17. Double Dare
    Micheli's documentary finds a fresh angle via the intersecting stories of two stuntwomen.
  18. The Motel
    The Motel, Michael Kang's modest Sundance applause reaper, doesn't deserve to be shotgunned for the sins of 30 other movies. But the underwhelming syncopation of make-nice clichés is too familiar.
  19. Yossi & Jagger
    At 71 minutes, the movie is scarcely more than an anecdote. But vivid as it is in establishing a specific milieu, its economy is its strength.
  20. Prisoners
    Torn between making sense and arguing that the world itself makes no sense, Prisoners is a captive of its own ambitions.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Year of the Dog
    Mike White, writer of "Chuck & Buck" and "The School of Rock" (and oddball actor in both), here directs his latest geek's revenge fantasy like a psychotherapeutically treated Todd Solondz.
  22. Batman Begins
    Nolan and his co-screenwriter David Goyer can only press the big buttons so hard—it's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.
  23. 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.
  24. Earth Days
    There's great archival footage.
  25. Bad Company
    A considerably more unsettling tale of one-sided amour fou, reportedly inspired by an actual case of teenage prostitution, Jean-Pierre Améris's Bad Company puts the coy prurience of American high school films in brutal perspective.
  26. Rhythm 'n' Bayous: A Road Map to Louisiana Music
    The performances are uneven, but the spirit never flags.
  27. The Tao of Steve
    Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?
  28. Hamlet
    Stylish, funny, and smart...but only up to a point.
  29. Quills
    Kaufman's earnestly overblown celebration of the Marquis de Sade.
  30. Cure
    Cure has a generic resemblance to "Seven," but it's far more oblique, and that much more troubling.
  31. Amélie
    The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.
  32. Empathy
    Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    Pollock drags when Horton's offscreen, and with its NPR-inflected narration and executive producer Don Hewitt, the film might have fared better as a PBS special.
  34. Bal
    Though this graceful film is a minor addition to the canon of Middle Eastern cinema in which nothing and everything happens, Bal is still a beauty.
  35. The Last Circus
    Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast) is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes "Pan's Labyrinth" look like "Sesame Street."
  36. The Yellow Sea
    If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.
  37. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    What gives the film its human dimension are the conflicting memories of former residents.
  38. Exit Elena
    Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Herblock: The Black & the White
    Herblock: The Black & The White falters in cheesy dramatizations of young Herblock with his father, or the off-putting and confusing scripted—based on the real Herblock's speeches and writings—interview with older Herblock (Alan Mandell), but it makes up for it by showing history through Herblock's art.
  40. Fatal Assistance
    Peck's documentary is not a penetrating look at at Haiti's post-quake problems, but a scattered, impressionistic one.
  41. Bird People
    Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Widowmaker
    The Widowmaker is important and terrifying, enough that I became nervously aware of my heartbeat throughout.
  43. Song from the Forest
    Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian... But Obert also slips in powerful critiques of Sarno with the lightest of touches — some so light they might be accidental.
  44. A Murder in the Park
    Directors Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber piece the story together via fresh interviews, vintage footage, and too many iffy reenactments and close-ups of news stories. But the matter here transcends the artlessness.
  45. Our Last Tango
    Viewers will sense that the history of these compelling figures entails more frustration and complexity than can be examined in a short running time.
  46. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    You don't watch prolific doc-master Wang Bing's new film about a Chinese mental hospital so much as get imprisoned within it, pacing its dingy corridors and rooms like a zoo animal.
  47. Chapter & Verse
    The story, scripted by Beaty and poet/author-turned-filmmaker Jamal Joseph (who himself did five-and-a-half years in Leavenworth) dips into sloppy, melodramatic heavy-handedness, sullying the occasional spurts of fresh perspective.
  48. Never Steady, Never Still
    Usually a tart-tongued scene-stealer, Henderson is devoid of her trademark hauteur in this remarkable performance.
  49. Standard Operating Procedure
    Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.
  50. I Love You, Man
    The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the meet-cute, love-at-first-sight, break-up-and-make-up, racing-to-the-altar slapstick weepy that's been a staple of cinema since the invention of cinema.
  51. Ushpizin
    As directed by Gidi Dar, Ushpizin has a disarming folk quality.
  52. The Walk
    The Walk, in its last half at least, is a dazzling piece of work, particularly in 3-D; even so, its most luminous effect is an actor.
  53. The Barbarian Invasions
    Shear away the film's pretensions, and it's a soap opera of assholes.
  54. Dior and I
    Dior and I is a great fashion movie, but it's also a superb picture about the art of management, applicable to any field.
  55. Long Way North
    Where most post-Shrek animated films are manic and all too eager to please, Rémi Chayé's deliberately paced Long Way North tells its story with clarity and an urgent calm.
  56. Maidentrip
    Schlesinger seems in such a rush to guide us to the end unscathed that she sometimes loses sight of the small details that make this journey unique.
  57. Friday Night Lights
    Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members.
  58. Wait for Your Laugh
    Rose Marie was — and is — a fabulous talent, but this off-kilter documentary doesn’t completely make the case.
  59. The Cup
    The lovability quotient is as high as the altitude.
  60. Shadow Boxers
    As smooth and powerfully packed as its protagonist.
  61. Swimming Pool
    Less a thriller than a comedy, and a formulaic one at that, predicated on an amusing but bizarrely simplistic clash of personalities and cultures.
  62. Sweet and Lowdown
    It's the prettiest movie of the year, maybe of Allen's career.
  63. Narc
    Hardly a scene goes by without a digitally fractured flashback or spasm of editing punctuation, rupturing the movie's otherwise carefully wrought sense of authenticity.
  64. Galaxy Quest
    The many eight-to-11-year-olds in the audience seemed completely enthralled.
  65. A Moment of Innocence
    A meditation-brilliant, humorous, and moving-on history and memory.
  66. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    The Broken Circle Breakdown crashes as frequently as it soars, but the ache at its center feels real.
  67. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    Expertly measured, emotional look at the life of a guitar prodigy cut down by ALS.
  68. Passione
    Works best when its director tamps down his impulse to enhance the performances with florid narratives, focusing on just the singer and the song.
  69. Portrait of Wally
    Shea's documentary is a well-arranged if rather drawn-out parade of talking heads telling Wally's story, including a trenchant and funny Morley Safer, never missing a chance to knock the art world.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bound for Glory
    Ashby--working through a magnificent performance by Carradine--has converted technical virtuosity to his own ends, creating a richly ambiguous character study that sings and provokes and celebrates. [13 Dec 1976, p.45]
    • Village Voice
  71. Art Bastard
    Victor Kanefsky's documentary nonetheless manages to be as cursory as it is intimate, skimming over so much of Cenedella's life and career that it imparts only a hazy impression of who he is and what he believes.
  72. King Corn
    King Corn will put you off corn for a long, long time, but this is as much a thoughtful meditation on the plight of the American farmer as it is a rant against our expanding waistlines.
  73. All These Sleepless Nights
    Marczak has captured the specifics of these young folks as they reel through a city that’s been born again, but the film should stir something true in the chest of anyone who ever was lucky enough to run free in their youth, even if only for a night.
  74. East of Havana
    A vital look at Cuba's tenaciously grassroots hip-hop scene.
  75. Gabrielle
    Archambault is fluent in small, self-contained moments. Even as their guardians are forced into difficult conversations, Gabrielle and Martin's private exchanges ring true.
  76. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Allen has crafted a wry and thoughtful film about the peculiar stirrings of the heart that is certainly his most accomplished piece of work since 2005's "Match Point" and arguably his funniest in the eight years since "Small Time Crooks."
  77. Public Enemies
    Mann's exhilarating movie exists in a state of perpetual forward motion.
  78. Tsotsi
    A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as "City of God" relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc.
  79. Lost Embrace
    Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.
  80. Countdown to Zero
    This is another well-intentioned but preaching-to-the-choir doc, and boring as well.
  81. Final Portrait
    Final Portrait is, in the end, a cheer for craftsmanship.
  82. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    There was so much joy in their remake, but Raiders! is often dispiritingly preoccupied with adult issues of financing. But when they talk about their alienated childhoods, broken families, and absent fathers, it's pretty clear why their cinematic role model was so meaningful.
  83. The Nice Guys
    As an action comedy, R-rated division, The Nice Guys is hard to beat. Black knows how to pace and escalate a fight and a film, and he springs wicked surprises all along — scene after scene dances around trapdoors that the audience falls into.
  84. The Little Prince
    There’s a lot of charm, thought, and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.
  85. Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
    There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.
  86. A Ciambra
    A Ciambra is at its best when Carpignano captures the textures of everyday life, suggesting the neorealists with his use of nonprofessional actors and on-location shooting.
  87. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Benjamin Button is to the first half of the 20th century what "Gump" was to the second -- a panorama of the American experience as seen from the perspective of a wide-eyed Candide. Here as there, Roth reduces our complex times to a parade of shockingly straight-faced kitsch.
  88. Devils on the Doorstep
    By the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.
  89. Owning Mahowny
    Owning Mahowny shares the earlier ("Love and Death on Long Island") film's crisp precision, but it's a far more rigorously sublimated and abstract account of l'amour fou.
  90. Girlfight
    A near-irresistible button-pusher that's agile enough to hold a mirror to its own aspirations: The Sundance prize-winning filmmaker and her prize discovery, Michelle Rodriguez, merge in the image of a self-invented amateur boxer.
  91. Warrior of Light
    The best moments feature Uerê's children themselves.
  92. Spring
    The suspense and pleasure of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's talking-and-tentacles horror romance Spring lies in discovering what shape the film is going to take.
  93. Out of the Blue
    There's some nifty soft-focus cinematography and fine performances, but otherwise, not much to resonate on this side of the pond.
  94. More Than Honey
    More Than Honey isn't just 91 minutes of dead bees. Who could bear that? Instead, it's a delightful, informative, and suitably contemplative study of the bee world and the bee-population crisis, though in the end it does offer enough dewdrops of hope to fill up a bluebell or two.
  95. Nakom
    Nakom is sometimes slow-moving and occasionally succumbs to heavy-handed symbolism, contrasting images.... But the movie is commendable for centering on an atypical hero.
  96. The Oslo Diaries
    The Oslo Diaries is a striking document, mixing never-before-seen footage shot by the negotiators themselves and current reflections from participants, including the final interview of former Israeli president Shimon Peres.
  97. Colossal
    Engaging ideas bubble up every so often in Colossal, a film that carries out magical thinking to its extreme. But the audacity of its conceit is inexorably tamed, becoming an all-too-familiar lesson on saying no.
  98. Blank City
    Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular "Please Kill Me" model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine grudging that made that tome so entertaining.
  99. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
    Tyrnauer transforms what could be a staid profile film into an urgent story about the dangers of “urban renewal,” something Jacobs herself would admire.
  100. Electric Shadows
    Electric Shadows is committed to movies-as-escape swoonery, but the script's late disasters are also predicated on cinema and filmgoing, suggesting an ambivalence the rest of the film seems oblivious to.
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