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. Blame
    Quinn Shephard’s directorial debut, Blame, leans heavily on this persistent despair, yes, but also leverages it in innovative and occasionally startling ways.
  2. 16 Acres
    It's all here, from the design contests to the farcical series of ribbon-cuttings, including a photo op cornerstone-laying, to the stupid Jeff Koons balloon that recurs as an incidental sight gag.
  3. Paradise
    Steadily maintaining momentum and a meditative mood without narration or editorialization is itself a feat, but more vitally, Paradise appreciates and shares the curious mysteries in the seemingly banal.
  4. Beautiful Something
    Writer-director Joseph Graham isn't solely interested in hookups, and he uses the encounters between these men (both carnal and cerebral) to construct a compassionate romantic drama.
  5. Destiny (Der müde Tod)
    If this movie about the grip of the next life has a mantra, it's this: "Love is stronger than death!"
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Farmageddon
    A lesser effort in the burgeoning canon, it's still effective in its goals: illuminating how denigrated and dangerous our food supply is.
  7. Chalk
    What gives the film extra weight is the sense that these are not just actors trying to enhance their careers but real people seizing a chance for immortality.
  8. Inside Man
    Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Charlotte's Web
    Still, with such stellar source material, this Charlotte's Web won't disgrace your childhood memories -- or your child.
  10. Tales of Halloween
    There's much to like here, and ample scares for your brains.
  11. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
    Guggenheim may not be news to the art world, but for the rest of us the film might stir wishful nostalgia for a breakthrough time in cultural history.
  12. Brooklyn Castle
    We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.
  13. A Perfect Day
    A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Enter the Void
    A mash-up of the sacred, the profane, and the brain-dead, Enter the Void is addictive.
  15. Those People
    Instead of the clinical detachment implied by the title Those People, writer-director Joey Kuhn bathes his first feature in warm compassion.
  16. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Skillfully reinforces Chisholm as a refreshingly quixotic populist, running on fervor and indignation.
  17. Sled Dogs
    Levitt’s film assembles a devastating case against the practices of dog racers and trainers, who often conceive of their animals as tools to be discarded (read: shot) when no longer useful.
  18. Tony Takitani
    Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. Birthright: A War Story
    The doc is thorough.
  22. Breastmilk
    Ben-Ari elegantly conveys the crippling social pressures that arise when a woman suggests that she might be allowed agency over her own body and that of her child, without adding any words of her own.
  23. The Weather Man
    The most supremely odd American film of the year.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deja Vu
    Déjà Vu isn't as sleek a genre pleasure as "Enemy of the State," but it does have a freaky little trick up its sleeve.
  25. Into Great Silence
    Natural light is used to euphoric effect, inevitably summoning the old masters, and Gröning's frames are balanced and symmetrical, in Renaissance-ready emulation of God's perfection.
  26. Buffalo Girls
    There's no missing Kellstein's unstated horror during the fight sequences, which traffic in queasy blood sport absurdity that overshadows "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games," because the cherubs are eight and because it's all too real.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Age of Consequences
    Scott's filmmaking does a smooth job of linking A to B to Z, with slick, studiously understated montage and an effective music score, although some of the arguments made seem a bit of a stretch, as if climate change is being shoehorned into things artificially.
  28. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    The doc is sobering, straightforward, and a bit drab, but to the participants' credit, it's also an entirely nonpartisan endeavor. Good luck telling that to the right once they hear the film is narrated by Sean Penn.
  29. Jimmy's Hall
    [Loach] and his longtime scriptwriter Paul Laverty combed Irish history to find a figure you might see as Loach's intellectual double; maybe this accounts for some of the speechifying dialogue as various political positions are explained, jarring at times in a film of action shots and escaping out windows.
  30. Blinky & Me
    Tomasz Magierski's lovely and lovingly made portrait of Gross's life and career...
  31. Fast Food Nation
    A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.
  32. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    Without the serious acting talent of its leads, this color-saturated gross-out horror could have devolved into a mess, but The Autopsy of Jane Doe proves imperfect fun even when it starts to play like CSI: Salem.
  33. Goon
    When considering the moral implications of such gladiatorial violence, the film comes out squarely in favor, asking what's crueler: enjoying the spectacle of blood on ice or taking away a livelihood from those who can't do anything else?
  34. Moss
    There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.
  35. We Were Soldiers
    Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.
  36. Cinema Novo
    In the end, Rocha succeeds at communicating the restless spirit — if not quite the underlying substance — of the movement he documents.
  37. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade rejects predictable plot points and instead lives on the electric edge of awkwardness and uncertainty and doubt that represents the middle school experience; you never quite know what’s going to happen to Kayla, and that feels right.
  38. Wanderland
    There’s no rhyme or reason to Alex’s journey, which makes the whole of it equally disarming and daffy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bully
    It has a clear and calm approach to storytelling and some interest in the quality of its handheld images.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    Eclipse is the least laughable installment yet in the series, and director David Slade efficiently delivers the fan service that Twihards require.
  41. Digging for Fire
    Digging for Fire affably drifts by, bolstered by some strong set pieces.
  42. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
    Palast slices through all the B.S., and while he may be over-the-top in his presentation, keep in mind, he’s got just the facts, ma’am.
  43. Drive
    Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Josie and the Pussycats
    The excellently irrelevant music is played by excellently irrelevant real-life rockers.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    David Barba and James Pellerito’s doc foregrounds Marcelo Gomes’s beautiful body even as it revels in his good brain, excellent spirits, flawless dance technique, and sense of humor.
  46. Ingenious
    In truth, the film belongs more to the always superb Roberts, but it's fitting that Renner's good fortune has trickled to a movie about two guys who always expect lightning to strike twice.
  47. Rise of the Guardians
    At times, it approaches some of Pixar's best.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rampart
    Here the director pulls off the formidable task of marrying two unwieldy performances: Harrelson's, a volatile and vulnerable feat of showboating, and Ellroy's, whose writing voice is unmistakably the voice of the movie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy the Kid
    I have seen more than 25 documentaries this year, and after a while they all start to run together, both structurally and thematically. Billy the Kid is utterly original in both respects.
  50. The Forecaster
    The story of espionage and duplicity that financial adviser Martin Armstrong relates in Marcus Vetter's documentary The Forecaster is as serpentine and fascinating as a John le Carré novel.
  51. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    As agreeable as it is insidious, Morgan Spurlock's latest exposé of corporate control via immersive humiliation is his best, most formally inventive project yet.
  52. Buck
    Meehl finds the real story in Brannaman's fractured past as a child celebrity trick-roper who, along with his older brother, Smokie, was systematically abused by his alcoholic father.
  53. Gook
    At Gook’s best, Chon captures, with sharply memorable dialogue, both the essence of his particular characters but also the broad drift of generations.
  54. Test
    When Frankie, an understudy in a small dance company, is given his chance to perform, he, and Test itself, come to life.
  55. Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (re-release)
    Too priggish to earn a place alongside its better-known contemporaries "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Last House on the Left," Lemora is nevertheless surprisingly well made.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    This uneven but riveting documentary chronicles Kor's journey to a kind of grace little understood (or appreciated) by many fellow Jews and survivors.
  57. Gravy
    The fast-paced Gravy is kind of like a Rob Zombie film by way of Bobcat Goldthwait's Shakes the Clown... and succeeds where so many other horror-comedies fail by remembering to be funny first and shocking second.
  58. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.
  59. Reno: Rebel Without a Pause
    What seems like a nut-on-a-bar-stool rant morphs into a triumphal evocation of the emotional-political bluster of that time.
  60. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Insult upon injury didn't stop the central figure of Mary Liz Thomson's tough and intriguingly well-told account of the fight between environmentalists and corporate raiders (perhaps abetted, we learn, by the government) from taking the battle to her deathbed.
  61. Bhutto
    Contextualizing the prime minister's rise to power within a larger portrait of a nation under constant internal and external siege, Bhutto conveys a forceful sense of tectonic social and geopolitical shifts, as well as the courageous, heartbreaking personal sacrifices its subject made in service to both her homeland and ideals.
  62. 44 Pages
    Anyone who’s worked in editorial or a similar environment will recognize the staff’s focus, creativity, and sharpness.
  63. I Am the Blues
    Blues is mostly a spirited, rambling trip through the history of this American music, but that journey is under the cloud of a melancholy bleakness.
  64. The Light Between Oceans
    The sense of authenticity that marks The Light Between Oceans at its best has everything to do with the acting — and if all Cianfrance ever gives us is that, it's worth the price of his lagging third act.
  65. 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.
  66. Blue Jay
    Lehmann shot Blue Jay in a gorgeous black-and-white that looks like silver gelatin prints (a photographic process that captures boundless gradations of gray), which complements the story's heartfelt simplicity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fred Won't Move Out
    Mostly, it captures how old age decimates even the people who don't suffer from it.
  68. Delirious
    Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.
  69. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    An appropriately mellow chronicle of a Tribeca nightclub's lifespan.
  70. 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.
  71. The Sleeping Beauty
    Though The Sleeping Beauty ends ambiguously, it remains consistent with the logic that Breillat has laid out: A girl's childhood and adolescence are often culturally sanctioned confinements. But the prisoners aren't always victims; the jails can be escaped through the courage to "go alone into the world."
  72. Giuliani Time
    After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.
  73. Do Not Resist
    Do Not Resist is an order to the viewer: watch.
  74. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Still, the tapes are great. More than just a flophouse Punch and Judy show, the Raymond vs. Peter dustups elevate cruel bickering to a ritual through which we live life's pain.
  75. Knuckle
    Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.
  76. Tibet in Song
    Make no mistake about his ability to make social studies entertaining: A montage about Tibet's many supporters is set to the Beastie Boys playing "Sabotage" live.
  77. Bullet to the Head
    Stallone looks great (even if his face doesn't quite move when he talks), while Hill (48 Hours, The Warriors) brings lean economy to the film's bloody, unapologetic mayhem.
  78. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop.
  79. Hotel Rwanda
    It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.
  80. Puzzle
    The self-esteem booster shot provided by the sudden discovery of a prodigious talent is conveyed in a shy, self-surprised amusement by Onetto, accompanied by the slightest loosening of the joints.
  81. The Way of the Gun
    Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.
  82. Solaris (1972)
    The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made.
  83. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    [A] hokey but effective adaptation.
  84. The Last King of Scotland
    An adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker's sensational turn as Idi Amin.
  85. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    The ravishing and kitschy Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away is the rare movie whose title serves as an accurate indicator of whether you will enjoy seeing it.
  86. The Sense of an Ending
    Batra kills the mystery part of the story and instead pushes the adaptation toward that humanism, which renders a good chunk of the plot a wash. Good thing Batra’s really adept at the human portraits, though.
  87. Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    While secret handshakes are amusingly depicted as the key to building trust and friendship, it's Stephen McHattie's greedy agent...that truly hammers home the film's depiction of the art world as fueled by rapacious, kill-or-be-killed bloodlust.
  88. Detroit
    Bigelow has crafted a portrait of the 1967 Detroit uprising that manages to be both history lesson and incendiary device, even if it sometimes sputters.
  89. The Little Prince
    There’s a lot of charm, thought, and feeling in this film version. It expands on the original without dishonoring it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ballets Russes
    The documentary Ballets Russes enacts its drama with a light editorial hand and unavoidable sentimentality, rather like a roll call of the NBA's "50 Greatest Players."
  91. 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.
  92. Find Me Guilty
    Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.
  93. Honeymoon
    While its ending descends into standard horror tropes that fail to completely satisfy its promise, the film nevertheless achieves emotional resonance due to how effectively it joins its source of horror with the stuff of everyday human anxieties.
  94. Fraulein
    Stylized with a recurring misty focus, the film's economically captured detail shots (gestures, expressions, caught moments) convey genuine sensitivity without the expected weepiness.
  95. We Are the Flesh
    Filmgoers who brave We Are the Flesh may regret seeing it. Forgetting it is another matter entirely.
    • 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.
  97. The September Issue
    Wintour's arctic imperiousness has a way of creating the most masochistic deference, a dynamic that R.J Cutler superficially explores--and becomes prone to--in his documentary The September Issue.
  98. The Wicker Man
    Knowing something is up and knowing just what that is prove to be two very different things for both protagonist and viewer, however, and The Wicker Man is propelled by the thrill of not knowing.
  99. Closer
    Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.
  100. Far From Men
    Its plotting is often a tad too plodding, but with the charismatic Mortensen exuding understated internal crisis (in a French- and Arabic-speaking role), Oelhoffen's film proves a compelling portrait of individuals striving to cope with, and at least somewhat overcome, cultural dislocation.
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