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. The Quiet American
    In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.
  2. 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.
  3. The Brothers Grimsby
    Mostly, The Brothers Grimsby simply wants to make you laugh. And it will. Whether you're laughing because the jokes are actually funny or because you can't quite believe that you just saw what you did...well, that's between you and your god.
  4. The Forgotten Space
    Epic in scope, intellectual agility, and the potential to induce panic and despair, this documentary exploration of global trade as an emblem of economic apocalypse avoids (just barely) doom-mongering by virtue of its compassion and visual grandeur.
  5. Eden
    A few moments harp on the sentimental, but overall, this is a powerful addition to the small collection of films dedicated to spreading awareness of this horrific crime.
  6. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    The look of the reference-heavy film, mostly shot on location in Brazil, is impeccably cheesy, but the Nazi humor and awkward sexist and racist eruptions smell a little stale. And yet, given time, the film develops an energy all its own.
  7. The Incredibles
    Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.
  8. Welcome to Me
    This spiky, pushy, sometimes upsetting comedy finds Wiig creating something whole and alive out of her apparent contradictions.
  9. At Any Price
    Quaid has a genius for broadcasting conflicting impulses. His body language twists uncomfortably away from his intentions, and his smile is built on the chassis of a cringe.
  10. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    Ian Edelman's comedy Puerto Ricans in Paris is a much sweeter film than its Snakes on a Plane–caliber title would suggest.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    (Dis)Honesty, a documentary by Yael Melamede about why we lie, shows the extent to which we fib (almost everybody does, it turns out, across nations and gender and social class). Perhaps most interestingly, (Dis)Honesty shows us how we rationalize that mendacity.
  12. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    Gaudet and Pullapilly have a background in documentaries, and there's a convincing naturalism to their storytelling.
  13. Saraband
    Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.
  14. K2: Siren of the Himalayas
    Its considered use of ice and snow-covered vistas against the expanse of blue sky offers great beauty while capturing something of what pulls the adventurous to try to reach the world's second highest peak.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Cantor's Tale
    With its outlandish stories, obsession with masculine ego, and focus on an absurd, forgotten subculture, A Cantor's Tale is the stuff Ben Stiller movies are made of: All that's missing is the part for Owen Wilson.
  16. Gone Girl
    The movie, while entertaining and extremely well crafted, is too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. Ticking along with metronome-like efficiency, it's more slick than sick.
  17. Yogawoman
    Yogawoman clearly is a fan of yoga and of women. And as it gently reminds us, these two special interests have not always been compatible.
  18. Stuff and Dough
    Puiu seems content to embrace the dynamism of youth and possibility; if "Lazarescu" was a movie of dead ends, Stuff and Dough is one, quite literally, of open roads.
  19. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    A frequently uproarious send-up of Jean Bruce's long-running series of spy novels.
  20. In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter
    Fortunately, In No Great Hurry never succumbs to cutesy hagiography.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    It's likely the best anti-Christmas Christmas movie since "Bad Santa."
  22. Summer Hours
    Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.
  23. Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    An exhilarating document.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.
  25. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Louis Black explores the casual philosophizing of his subject's work in Dream Is Destiny, an admiring documentary that wisely lets Linklater do most of the talking in his plainspoken, unpretentious manner.
  26. Harry & Snowman
    The engaging Harry & Snowman shows the impact of a rescue animal on the man who saw his neglected qualities. It's also a succinct demonstration of the difference between a livelihood and a life's work.
  27. Kabbalah Me
    [A] sweetly odd documentary.
  28. Friday Night
    Richer in metaphor than narrative drive.
  29. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    Human characters emerge from photo ops and heroes from the shadows.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vitus
    Charming Swiss import.
  31. August Evening
    Perhaps Eska didn't have to write all of his characters into overlapping crossroads of crisis, but he's more nuanced than overt, and his cast (especially Loren and the nonprofessional Castaneda) sells it.
  32. The Mother
    By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.
  33. Upgrade
    Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.
  34. African Cats
    That visual beauty helps compensate for a script that wastes no opportunity for heartstring tugging, often in the form of adorable tykes playing with each other and cuddling with their elders in close-up.
  35. Kink
    The doc is often terrific fun. But it is a work of observation and advocacy rather than journalism.
  36. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    The characters aren't quite stylized enough; though they have skinny bodies and disproportionately big heads, their just-realistic-enough facial features often veer into the Uncanny Valley.
  37. The Straight Story
    Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.
  38. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes emerges ultimately as a poetic parable of both storytelling and moviemaking, and somehow it all fits together. [12 Nov 1970, p.59]
    • Village Voice
  39. The Matrix Reloaded
    Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.
  40. Double Lover
    It’s a buffet of psychosexual delicacies, borrowed and otherwise, all staged with hot-blooded, straight-faced vigor.
  41. Wrong
    The film's heady buzz is invigorating, and there are substantial pleasures—and laughs—to be found in all its real-life-just-gone-sour strangeness.
  42. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    At times it's dense and sluggish, too much like a novel. But there is some exhilaration to be had.
  43. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Thanks to some brilliant casting, Venus Beauty Institute provokes ideas about women, movies, sexuality, and age that extend beyond its frothy fiction.
  44. The Decomposition of the Soul
    The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.
  45. Exiled
    By Hong Kong standards, To's policiers have been fairly down-to-earth, but Exiled--which begins with a tribute to Sergio Leone and ends by acknowledging Sam Peckinpah--exists solely in the world of the movies.
  46. Mean Dreams
    For better or for worse, Paxton's performance will be the focus of viewers’ attention, so it is decidedly to the good that he doesn't just deliver. He gives a sort of master class on why we've loved him: Paxton was amazing in the role of regular guys, and equally compelling as the subversion of same.
  47. A Wrinkle in Time
    I was transported by DuVernay’s adaptation to the mind-set of my girlhood — embarrassing insecurities and all. This is not a cynic’s film. It is, instead, unabashedly emotional.
  48. Carrie Pilby
    In her directorial debut, Susan Johnson balances the character's haughty brilliance and aimless privilege with an underlying vulnerability.
  49. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
    The film has its insights, but perhaps its greatest value is in how it offers something of a record of what time with the talkative, tireless Hentoff is like.
  50. Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
    Devotees will perhaps find something new in this deep pool of archival footage, and newcomers will get an appropriate introduction to the beguiling charisma of a most media-savvy isolationist.
  51. Tupac: Resurrection
    Though the edits can be too living-room smooth, the passion and pathology on display transcend the Tabitha Soren overload.
  52. The We and the I
    At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments
  53. The Corporation
    A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hot Tub Time Machine
    A fundamentally lazy comedy that will probably make you laugh like an idiot.
  55. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.
  56. 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    Instead of the affectless soundtrack of mopey indie rock, a trip through the Anthology of American Folk Music would have better served the landscape.
  58. Stations of the Cross
    The ending's a touch too cute, but the best scenes here stand as potent, empathetic, well-observed broadsides against fundamentalism.
  59. 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.
  60. The Congress
    Like its actress, it's an ambitious knockout that doesn't quite live up to its potential. But its argument is worth hearing: Instead of crying for the collapse of one actress, Folman is crying for the collapse of civilization, the triumph of the synthetic over the real.
  61. All Mistakes Buried
    Even when all the puzzling pieces of Sonny's existence don't quite fit, Trammell's beautifully unhinged performance offers a compelling vision of a grieving narcissist burrowing into the rabbit hole of his own mind.
  62. Betting on Zero
    The situation is heartbreaking and frustrating. But the film is so persuasive that it could help finally tank Herbalife's shares and validate Ackman's gamble — possibly preventing thousands of others.
  63. Out of Time
    In apparent atonement for whatever wayward thinking led him down the Freeman-Judd path, Franklin has transformed Out of Time into a highly felicitous comedy of infidelities and busted-up romances.
  64. Standing Tall
    Paradot exposes every last nerve and manages to be appropriately sensitive and confused between outbursts of rage. He benefits, too, from direction (by On My Way's Emmanuelle Bercot) that's unafraid to make Malony look terrible.
  65. The Calling
    The Calling breathes new life into a moribund genre by touching oft-ignored themes and offering a bit of introspection to go along with the obligatory slashed throats and biblical portents.
  66. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Burns's job as director is differentiating and spotlighting everyone in this large ensemble, a storytelling challenge to which he responds with a brisk pace and an eye for revealing moments. The film recalls his 1995 debut, "The Brothers McMullen," grounded in Irish family traditions and comedic chemistry among performers.
  67. Tickling Giants
    Tickling Giants comes off as both a fact-based look at fighting fire with funny and a prescient cautionary tale.
  68. Flower
    Flower is messy and imperfect and above all else a star-making role for Deutch, who carries this film from funny to tragic and back again.
  69. Catching the Sun
    Liberals and conservatives both make appearances, as do people of color and international activists. If we would only all work together, the film seems to suggest, we could enact a green revolution of global proportions.
  70. Helena from the Wedding
    The group is frequently drunk, but writer-director Joseph Infantolino's handling is lucid, a necessity to keep up the sense of vague dread and walking-on-eggshell egos.
  71. Icaros: A Vision
    Once in a while a narrator relates facts about the forest; occasional CGI flourishes don’t disappoint so much as they remind us of the challenges of summoning to the screen what the brain simply creates. Icaros comes closer than most movies manage.
  72. To the Wonder
    For all the absurdity, there's also something strangely touching about it, maybe because for once Malick has allowed himself to be unsure. To the Wonder is an irresolute piece of work, a sketchbook of a movie, one made by a human being rather than an august master.
  73. 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.
  74. Farewell, Home Sweet Home
    The movie exudes a cheerful energy--laying out a deck of narrative cards, then reshuffling them in the final 10 minutes.
  75. The Host
    Gross-out horror is never far from comedy and The Host, Bong Joon-ho's giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old "Mad" magazines.
  76. They Came to Play
    A welcome twist on the now-ubiquitous kiddie competition doc, They Came to Play centers on the Van Cliburn Foundation's gathering of the world's best amateur pianists over the age of 35.
  77. Lost in Thailand
    Zheng errs on the side of improvisatory and lazily assembled Apatow-esque narrative episodes; many of those scenes are amiably goofy, but it all holds together based on his cast's charm and energy.
  78. Noble
    The movie works because Christina's desire to help these kids feels natural, and because she herself shoulders burdens that would drive most people to the grave, all without losing her faith.
  79. Life During Wartime
    Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons--race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Attenberg
    While Tsangari may have borrowed Attenborough's "British phlegmatic tenderness," as she calls it, Attenberg is worlds away from a nature documentary.
  81. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Deraspe returns specificity, intimacy, and human weirdness to this international scandal.
  82. A Man Called Ove
    A Man Called Ove — preaching tolerant togetherness as the key to happiness — earns its sentimentality by striking a delicate balance between barking-mad comedy and syrupy melodrama.
  83. Chaos
    Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)
  84. The Bubble
    Given the upbeat, tender rhythms of the movie's love story, the climax--a cry of bottomless despair--comes as a profound shock. It's meant to, and though the ending is touched by the goofy absurdities of melodrama, Fox's mix-and-match sampling of apparently incompatible genres nails the nervous blend of vitality and desperation that is Israel today.
  85. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    Against the prevailing cheerlessness, these intensively choreographed fights, many shot in audacious, roving single takes, are like glimpses into a dream world.
  86. 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.
  87. Silent Water
    Sumar's debut feature could scarcely be more relevant to Pakistan's present, or, given this country's history of backing such repressive regimes, to ours.
  88. Roar
    Roar is a thrilling bore, an inanity with actual peril in every scene.
  89. Detonator
    An insightful, often funny, never glib character-driven tale about class angst, withered dreams, and the costs of adulthood.
  90. More Than the Rainbow
    On treks through the city, camera in hand, Weber's expertise, tenderness, and taste for the absurd become clear. Wechsler runs with it, interspersing decades of Weber's often gritty photographs with expert cinematography.
  91. Paul Williams Still Alive
    Johnny Carson loved him, and Williams had the credits to back himself up: As with Jimmy Webb, you could probably sing many of his songs without knowing that he's the author.
  92. State of Fear
    An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.
  93. No Sex Last Night
    Compelling viewing, even if there's nothing pretty (pictorially or emotionally) about it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Puffy Chair
    Like "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's casually raw 2002 faux–cinema vérité indie about a bunch of shiftless twentysomethings, The Puffy Chair uses simple, unadorned dialogue and intimate, off-the-cuff performances to get at the underlying issues.
  95. But I'm a Cheerleader
    Not as skillful, subtle, or hilarious as "Some Like It Hot," but its anti-essentialism vis-à-vis gender roles is just as sharp and exhilarating.
  96. Salvo
    Viewers looking for a shoot-em-up will be disappointed, but those hankering for an old-school Italian broodfest will find plenty to soak in.
  97. The Notebook
    Szász's harrowing film roots that coming-of-age process in suffering, depicting it with a grim solemnity that, by never wavering, ultimately leads to a tempered measure of unexpected hopefulness.
  98. Avenue Montaigne
    Not that Thompson's films lack for romance. She shoots Paris like Woody Allen shoots New York--ritzy, golden, and packed with chance meetings between highly strung arty types.
  99. Alone in Berlin
    While not the most formally adventurous or action-packed picture, it is a film of compelling urgency.
  100. Arctic Tale
    A smarmy score, some orgiastic farting from a herd of walruses, and a modicum of cutesy anthropomorphism from narrator Queen Latifah prove a small price to pay for this stunningly photographed narrative documentary about a year in the endangered life of Arctic ice floe.
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