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. Kinyarwanda
    Cast with both professional and novice actors (which results in uneven performances), the beautifully shot film is filled with exquisite moments.
  2. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Deraspe returns specificity, intimacy, and human weirdness to this international scandal.
  3. Fair Game
    Penn's lachrymosity and hotheaded indignity seem cartooned against Watts's contained conviction-though more incongruous couples have certainly existed-but the film's assertion of Plame and Wilson as real people rather than characters consists mostly of draining them of anything compelling.
  4. Good Morning, Night
    Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.
  5. World's Greatest Dad
    The particular stew of midlife and pubescent despair that clogs a single-father male-child household has rarely been achieved so well.
  6. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Most of the gags in this pandering spoof are about their own schematic nature — they’re jokes about how you’re smarter than the jokes.
  7. Romantics Anonymous
    Améris's recipe here calls for everything in moderation, resulting in a movie that never threatens to offend nor, particularly, to delight, though it does offer a good view on a modestly charming actors' duet.
  8. Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary
    Though sometimes clumsy or nostalgic, the film is an engaging oral history of Leary and Dass's friendship.
  9. The Drop
    The Belgian Roskam, making only his second feature film, and his first in English, displays remarkable assurance, with both the actors and the film’s very American setting. He creates an escalating sense of dread, tinged with Lehane’s brand of mordant humor.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Company Men
    The Company Men is maybe best understood as a chick flick about dicks: Before its too-easy conclusion, the movie offers a multifaceted glimpse at what can happen when the connective tissue between a man and his source of income is cut, and rarely suggests that it could be anything less than excruciating to stop the bleeding.
  11. Chicago 10
    However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied.
  12. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Goyangileul butaghae
    As rich in incidental detail as it is narratively diffuse.
  14. Divided We Fall
    In its compassionate absurdism and underlying dark humor, the movie seeks to reestablish contact with the Czech new wave.
  15. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Fun and smart, but undeniably thin, the first installment of Tarantino's action epic is a fanboy fever dream. The clichés are out in maximum force, tempting any critic fool enough to go one-on-one with the master. (The prize: a Ph.D. in Tarantinology.)
  16. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    A kindred exercise in ensemble cheer and cozy humanism -- not as sentimental as it might be but cheerfully affirmative in dispelling the darkness of its premise.
  17. 3 Backyards
    Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's "Judy Berlin" is devoted to finding descriptive correlatives to liminal emotional states through the cast's eloquent reaction shots and the camera's depiction of homely environments - with ornate, flowing visual vocabulary.
  18. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    As he did in "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", Wright immerses his heroes in pop culture's detritus and diversions, but doesn't drown them in it. You don't have to be dazzled or tickled by the movie, or get every joke, to be touched by it, too.
  19. 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).
  20. Fear(s) of the Dark
    Though multi-director projects are patchy by definition, Fear(s) of the Dark hits with an all-star batting average.
  21. Operation Filmmaker
    A fable for our reality-TV reality, Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker is as much virus as video documentary. This essentially comic tale maps a contagion of mutual exploitation that seems to have burnished the careers of everyone involved.
  22. Performance
    Performance seems more like eye candy than castor oil in the brave new world of "Freddy Got Fingered."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    This Sinbad misses the verve, the exuberant high spirits, of the best of Fairbanks and Flynn, but it's wonderfully good-natured all the same. [16 May 1974, p.109]
    • Village Voice
  24. Above and Beyond
    It will only be criticized — rightfully — for its skirting over the resulting plight of Palestinian refugees, but Grossman is surely capable of making an equally absorbing, entertaining film on that subject.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crazy Love
    However sick this tabloid star may be, Crazy Love is a celebrity doc by definition, with all its attendant trade-offs, and even the director admits that his access wasn't free.
  26. Eva Hesse
    Eva Hesse relies too heavily on ventriloquism to recapitulate the high and low points of the artist
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man Up
    Pegg's comic chops elevate even the most juvenile of jokes, but it's Bell's daring and impolite performance that steals the show.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Exploding Girl
    Girl is narratively slight, but aesthetically and psychologically complex. At times, it feels more like an illustrated audio collage than a movie.
  29. Dayveon
    Amman Abbasi’s lush and tender here’s-what-life’s-like debut, Dayveon, captures, in scenes of pained beauty, an adolescent wanderlust that Abbasi’s camera just seems to be observing.
  30. Starter for 10
    The result is something altogether more formulaic, but Starter for 10 nonetheless goes down easy, thanks in large part to the up-and-coming talent from across the pond and a steady infusion of the Cure, Wham!, and Tears for Fears on the soundtrack.
  31. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    Kim's filmmaking is generally cartoonish in a bad sense, as he squanders his set pieces, flashbacks, and other attention-getting with sometimes downright wretched staging.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kurt Cobain About a Son
    About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    Serves up a gripping look at skate history through an investigation of one of its darker moments.
  34. Intimacy
    Authentically British or not, Intimacy is squarely in the indigenous kitchen-sink style -- a far cry from the absurdly chic, sentimental pseudo-worldliness of something like "An Affair of Love."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cuckoo
    Well-intentioned but sugarcoated anti-war allegory.
  36. Adorenarin doraibu
    Little more than a cartoon, and not a funny one at that.
  37. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Unusual in its ambition to pose deep spiritual questions, but its enticing surfaces -- including the beautiful working girls and Isabelle Adjani's surprise cameo as a Bardot-esque starlet -- are the best thing about it.
  38. Changing Lanes
    Smitten by the symmetry of his parable, director Roger Michell crosscuts emphatically between the preening leads -- a strategy that only draws attention to the numerous lapses in logic and unpersuasive changes of heart while sidelining the lively supporting cast
  39. Itzhak
    The makers of the irresistible character-study doc Itzhak capture Itzhak Perlman’s characteristic warmth and bravado through short, anecdote-centric scenes that make the Israeli American violinist sound like a big-hearted raconteur who’s just dying to tell you everything about himself.
  40. Hitler's Children
    Interweaving interviews and footage of Rainer Hess's first trip to Auschwitz, Hitler's Children is a powerful and well-judged presentation of the stories and their impossibilities.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ong Bak
    The ferocious fighting moves (adapted from ancient Muay Thai manuals by veteran Thai martial arts director Phanna Rithikrai) that constitute Ong-Bak's money shots are often truly astonishing.
  42. Do Not Resist
    Do Not Resist is an order to the viewer: watch.
  43. We Live in Public
    Timoner takes Harris's erratic pulse--and diagnoses society.
  44. Sightseers
    Sightseers is a jet-black comedy that understands exactly how absurdist it is, and its murders are always played for laughs.
  45. The Milk of Sorrow
    In this wonderfully strange, hypnotically beautiful second feature from writer-director Claudia Llosa, the traumatic experience of the 1980s civil war on Peruvian women is passed down through song and, it is said, through their mothers' milk.
  46. Uncertain Terms
    The film is brisk, brief, well acted, smartly crafted, and shrewdly judged.
  47. Compliance
    Compliance lets neither men nor women off the hook.
  48. Infamous
    It's just a lesser version, light in weight and absent the ache that permeated the movie for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award. It can't withstand the comparisons. It's good, especially during its first half, just not good enough.
  49. Star Trek Beyond
    Star Trek Beyond might be the Star Trekkiest film of the new, J.J. Abrams–ified Trek era. That is to say, it's the one that feels the most like a turbo-loaded episode of the original series, and has at least some of that classic spirit of exploration and derring-do.
  50. A Sinner in Mecca
    Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.
  51. Icarus
    A real-life absurdist thriller that, in its electric coverage of one Russian scandal, can’t help but illuminate another ongoing one.
  52. BuyBust
    Though the film becomes a slog, it has a saving grace in Curtis and Vera’s performances, which serve as neat complements to each other in temperament as well as fighting styles.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Primo Levi's Journey
    Primo Levi's Journey is almost willfully opaque about the actual circumstances of Primo Levi's journey. Who exactly was this man we're meant to be paying homage to, and why did it take him so long to get home?
  54. North Country
    Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.
  55. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
    The director doesn't bother to interview the experts-only those who knew the man best.
  56. Bullhead
    The sentiment, just like the repeated shots of Jacky lying in the fetal position in a tub, shadowboxing, and erupting into a bestial 'roid rage, typifies the film's habit of flattening an idea rather than developing it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Business of Being Born
    Epstein and Lake have crafted an absorbing, thought-provoking inquiry into what modern birth has become and how to make it better.
  58. 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.
  59. Like Crazy
    The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance - this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction.
  60. Terms and Conditions May Apply
    A wide-ranging, if shallow, exploration of intrusive government surveillance practices.
  61. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    By focusing on the small details of Byong-man and Gye-yeul's life — from their humble, secluded home to their touches and glances — the film paints a sweet yet tragic portrait.
  62. Art and Craft
    Despite some cutesiness, the film’s a fascinating portrait of loneliness, of talent undirected toward purpose, of the mysteries of the mind.
  63. The Hunger Games
    Like the pacing of the novel, the film, even at almost two and a half hours, moves briskly, continuously drawing us in.
  64. A Housekeeper
    In a flawless performance, Bacri lets us glimpse the tender desperation beneath his character's harsh, curmudgeonly exterior.
  65. The War Zone
    We may not want another film about incest, but there's a necessity about this one that won't be denied.
  66. In My Skin
    Without deploying reductive backstory or simplistic psychology, this fearless movie -- easily the year's best debut feature -- illuminates Esther's pathology as an extreme response to the mind-body split.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Yes Men
    Though at times the film is snortingly funny, too much of the humor here rests on presupposed opinion about globalization.
  68. Jump Tomorrow
    The relationship between the hysterical Gerard and the careful, compulsive George is classic screwball material and more compelling than the relationship between George and Alicia.
  69. Così ridevano
    Exploring a specific generational moment in mid-century Italy's social weft, Amelio's family saga might be his grimmest film, if only for the tragic exploitation of fraternity.
  70. Valentino: The Last Emperor
    Dedicated follower of fashion Matt Tyrnauer crafts the slick, superficial portrait that you might expect from a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
  71. A Somewhat Gentle Man
    The grungy setting and unflattering photography are only camouflage for callow, creeping sentimentality.
  72. Moscow, Belgium
    We're not talking the Dardennes brothers here, but fellow Belgian Christophe Van Rompaey gives this light May-to-December pair-up an agreeably mussed, pedestrian milieu.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Casino Jack and the United States of Money
    Indispensable viewing.
  74. 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.
  75. Akira
    Some kind of fever-dream masterpiece, easily the most breathtaking and kinetic anime ever made and one of the most eloquent films about atomic afterclap.
  76. Applause
    Usually an enervating process to witness onscreen, Steen's subtle calibrations of self-hatred and raging narcissism exhilarate.
  77. 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smash His Camera
    Gast's documentary portrait has a freewheeling charm that perfectly matches its subject.
  79. Addiction Incorporated
    With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy, Stupid, Love
    Shooting on grainy, high-speed film stock with an often handheld camera, working with a suite of actors who are game to both play light and silly and dig deep, Ficarra and Requa lend a naturalism to highly contrived, patently absurd situations.
  81. Deepwater Horizon
    [Berg] keeps things simple, tight and taut, and does right by the folks who were there for the real thing. He’s made them the heroes of a genuinely exciting action movie.
  82. Death Metal Angola
    While hardly the first or most accomplished film of its kind, Death Metal Angola's focus on the ability of abrasive music to act as a healing agent builds toward genuine moments of renewal and serenity.
  83. End of Watch
    As social insight, End of Watch is useless, but as engrossing entertainment, it's irresistible, thanks to Ayer's gift for dialogue, the relentless pacing set by film editor Dody Dorn, and gorgeous performances by Gyllenhaal and Peña.
  84. Apocalypto
    Not just a walk in the park with Mel and the guys (in this case a large cast of mainly Mexican Indians speaking present- day Yucatec), this lavishly punishing picture is the third panel in Gibson's "Ordeal" triptych. The Martyrdom of the Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ have nothing on The Misadventures of the Jaguar Paw.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Potiche
    Like its heroine, Potiche is deceptively lightweight, its camp screwball fizziness giving way to a surprisingly cogent feminist parable, in which the personal proves again and again to be the most volatile variable in the political.
  86. Girls Can't Swim
    Falters when it takes a final, violent turn into melodrama.
  87. Alice et Martin
    Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.
  88. Burnt Money
    Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.
  89. Chopper
    Bana, who appears in nearly every shot, talking all the while, gives a remarkably mercurial performance.
  90. The Adventures of Tintin
    Adventures is an awesome movie mechanism, but awe comes at a cost. The Tintin character is something like a blank spot at the movie's center, most vivid (unfortunately) as a plucky, priggish motivational speaker when he coaches Haddock out of a drinking problem.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Becket (re-release)
    Dully overcomposed, the film evinces a Disneyed sense of palace life and reaches a laughable apotheosis when Henry and Becket's rendezvous on a beach is staged as a reunion between scorned lovers. In 1964, the film's innuendo might have seemed daring; today it's close to ridiculous.
  92. The Conjuring
    The Conjuring's problem, beyond its lack of a conjuring, is how its otherworldly hokum is stubbornly of this world.
  93. The World's Fastest Indian
    The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.
  94. A Place at the Table
    A Place at the Table attempts to document its subject with the progressive angle and emotional effect of such docs as "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman."
  95. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    You can call me fanboy, but this is the best anime I've ever seen.
  96. I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House
    I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is the very best of gothic horror, that which needles at your insecure core and whispers in your ear what you already suspected: You will never be all right.
  97. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    And yet it still works, so buoyed is the film by its open and honest take on a subject that would have been all too easy to turn into another marketable tragedy.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Here
    The dreamy, feverish beauty of these sequences just barely balances out the pretension of the exposition. The film falters the further it drifts from that overheated, slightly delusional mood; the more precisely it's scripted, the less it feels true.
  99. Sembene!
    Jason Silverman and Samba Gadjigo's heartfelt doc is rich in footage and access.
  100. Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    As bluntly humanist and free-ranging as its subject, this brisk take on the life of poet, sociologist, educator, psychologist, and general pain-in-the-ass gadfly Paul Goodman is as much endangered-species doc as biography.
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