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 Brave One
    Taken literally, almost everything that follows in The Brave One so seriously strains credibility (even by the standards of the genre) as to enter the realm of the absurd. Taken on the level of a menacing urban fairy tale, however--something akin to what Jane Campion was aiming for with "In the Cut"--it's strangely fascinating.
  2. The Promotion
    As to whether a smart comedy about work and family can itself succeed in a marketplace overrun by idiot farces about reluctant bridesmaids (male and female), shotgun Vegas weddings, and finding or losing Mr./Ms. Right . . . this remains to be seen.
  3. One
    Even more than the subtlety of the writing and acting, it's this sophisticated and emotionally potent visual strategy that suggests Barbieri's promise as a filmmaker and lifts One above the low-budget indie heap.
  4. La Sapienza
    A picture that balances heart and mind with nuance.
  5. The Art of the Steal
    The Art of the Steal doesn't advance the nerdy intertextuality that has distinguished ironic crime films since Guy Ritchie, but writer-director Jonathan Sobol knows the ropes.
  6. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    The variations are many, but the theme is as consistent as the crowd that grows and strengthens throughout Savona's inside, traditional, vérité portrait of the uprising.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music from the Inside Out
    A revealing portrait of painfully withdrawn artists navigating the tug between the divine harmony of an orchestral synthesis and the sweaty glow of individual experimentation.
  8. Why We Fight
    Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word FREEDOM cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy.
  9. Justice
    With its unobtrusive visual style, Justice plays like a near-parody of documentary objectivity, subtly suggesting the malleable nature of "truth," both in the courtroom and the movie theater.
  10. Examined Life
    Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor's engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer basks in the intelligence on-screen and, occasionally, soaks up the rays.
  11. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
    Leyser's collation of interviews and stock footage is polished enough to effectively perpetuate the Burroughs legend.
  12. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.
  13. Chashme Baddoor
    Chashme Baddoor's modest charms dissipate quickly, but they're certainly real.
  14. Another Road Home
    Politics hover at the edges of even the most affectionate encounters among Danae, her parents, and the Obeidallah family. Amos Elon's negativity regarding the future of the Jewish state mars the film, yet Another Road Home moves beyond dark predictions.
  15. The Land
    The violence, when it comes, is ugly and tragic, as it should be — The Land makes no promises about glory. But the hangout moments fizz with the boys' likable chemistry, and the scenes of suspense, which pick up toward the end, are always arresting and mostly understated, scored to nervous breathing and the ambient bustle of streets at night.
  16. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the action is more manic and indistinct. But How to Train Your Dragon 2 cuts deeper than the first picture — it will be particularly resonant for anyone who has ever worked with or adopted rescue animals — and there are a few sequences of cartoon grandeur.
  17. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.
  18. The Paperboy
    When not contriving to get Efron out of his clothes, The Paperboy gropes for familiar movie language of its period setting: Soul music swells up excitedly over a jumble of jerky zooms, befuddling cuts, and spatial vagueness. But sometimes hot messiness has its charms.
  19. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.
  20. Body
    On the surface a typical exercise in horror-film cliché, Body turns out to be a far more thought-provoking creature, a parable of adulthood and a stinging indictment of white-girl privilege.
  21. Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo
    There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.
  22. Mister Foe
    The whole thing's poised uneasily somewhere between urban fairy tale and actual human psychodrama, never really landing in one place or the other.
  23. A Haunting in Cawdor
    Although the film attempts to be both a ghastly giallo mood piece and a bloodless teen ghost story, its themes of evolving identity and mental health care elevate it past some of its shock-and-awe trappings.
  24. Massoud, the Afghan
    It's not the least of Afghan tragedies that this noble warlord would be consigned to the dustbin of history.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New York Doll
    In the end, this is less a film about a rock and roller than a film about a Mormon. And Napoleon Dynamite it ain't.
  26. Mozart's Sister
    These subplots hint at what could have been, nudging the film toward biting rather than obvious commentary on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and creativity, and the costs of thwarting expression of any of them. But Féret barely explores this, and the film suffers for it.
  27. Goodnight Mommy
    Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.
  28. Sunday in New York
    A triumph of bounce over banality. [19 Mar 1964, p.12]
    • Village Voice
  29. Mean Girls
    Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason math teacher) aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    3 Idiots
    In writer-director Rajkumar Hirani's tuneful, enjoyable college comedy, 3 Idiots, Khan plays "Rancho," an engineering student so brilliant that he barely has to break a sweat to place first in his class.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Friend
    Shot on DV, the film looks awful, but this homemade quality fosters an authenticity that allows for startling suspense as Yunes's secret life comes to light.
  32. Fast Food Fast Women
    In his film's better moments, Kollek makes us laugh at these visions while also revealing their grace and frailty.
  33. The Amazing Catfish
    Claudia Sainte-Luce's semi-autobiographical indie has a knack for subverting stereotypes without making a big deal about it.
  34. Collaborator
    On one level, it's a dark, funny tragedy, but it's also Donovan's thesis on his own craft.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy, Happy
    The questionable black-historical shorthand detracts from what is otherwise a well-performed and fitfully amusing film.
  36. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dish & the Spoon
    For once, an American indie's muted modesty at least makes emotional sense, suiting a bittersweet romance that, by nature, has neither a name nor a future.
  38. The Slammin' Salmon
    Likably stoopid, the latest from comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) mines plenty of jokes from eating out and being served.
  39. I'm Dangerous with Love
    Negroponte's visuals are Doc 101-he simply points and shoots. But that doesn't matter; the life stories told (particularly Dimitri's) and the experiences of coming clean sell themselves.
  40. Alan Partridge
    An often funny workplace hostage comedy that doesn't demand prior knowledge of the character.
  41. Re-emerging: The Jews of Nigeria
    In the face of the authenticity of Shmuel's faith, the evidence for or against the Judaic heritage of the Igbo is beside the point.
  42. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.
  43. Easy Money
    A hit in its native Sweden as "Snabba Cash," the English title is a piece of cheap irony; this is a crime thriller where no one gets away clean, and every action has its irrevocable reaction.
  44. Strange Fruit
    Mining the song's associative richness, Katz's film works as jazz genealogy, Meerpol bio, Jewish-leftist puzzle piece, performance homage, and exegetic history of lynching.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    GasLand
    With its jolting images of flammable tap water and chemically burned pets, New York theater-director-turned-documentarian Josh Fox's Sundance-feted shocker makes an irrefutable case against U.S. corporate "fracking."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electrick Children
    Electrick Children juggles heavy things, with humor and sobriety in their proper, Book of Ecclesiastes turn. Best of all, Thomas has an aversion to the easy resolution—she knows precisely which mysteries to keep dangling.
  47. The Standbys
    Short and sweet, it's an empathetic and affecting tribute to the great — and vital — artists who all too rarely receive a center-stage encore.
  48. Cupcakes
    This musical comedy is sugary and sincere.
  49. The Workers Cup
    Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.
  50. Rememory
    Palansky had the good sense to let the performances elevate the material, never letting this turn into another cheesy, predictably twisty yarn.
  51. Point Blank
    No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.
  52. Blade Runner 2049
    Careful, dutiful, and beautiful, Blade Runner 2049 cannot achieve the sublime slipperiness of Scott’s masterpiece. Whether it even needs to is up to you.
  53. Blackthorn
    This modest oater should tickle western fans.
  54. Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story
    An illuminating history lesson about the Kentucky metropolis's artistic vision and philharmonic orchestra.
  55. Duck, You Sucker
    As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?
  56. White Chicks
    Harmless slapstick fun.
  57. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Boom makes the case that the scene Basquiat came from was more fascinating than Basquiat himself. Even though many of the artists, admirers, and friends interviewed for this doc praise him and his gonzo genius, several of them suggest that he strived to be more of a rock star than a punk artist.
  58. The Deserted Station
    Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's "Leila," makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fast Five
    Five's few driving set pieces, all economically cut for spectacle over continuity, are pumped to near-Crank levels of absurdity, with Lin transforming his ragtag bunch of fugitives' superhuman knack for escaping certain death into a running joke.
  60. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?
  61. The Imposter
    Thick with reenactments and cute cutaways, the movie evolves into a cultural inquisition, following this stranger through the strange land of bad-news America, where the truth is still waiting to be exhumed.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    10 Things I Hate About You
    Anyone who hates '80s pop will find this movie awfully tiresome, but Stiles and her underage Petruchio (Australian actor Heath Ledger, as hunky as his name) are charismatic and bold enough to carry any romantic comedy.
  64. The Canal
    Piers McGrail's nuanced, moody cinematography brings out the best in writer-director Ivan Kavanagh's over-mannered but effectively creepy ghost story.
  65. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    May be one of the wisest studies of urban loneliness since Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty."
  66. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    If you break the script down into plot points, it sounds a little silly: The narrative thrust is simply Katniss shooting several pro-revolution commercials. But it works because we're fascinated by media fights — thousands occur online every day.
  67. The Other City
    In her absorbing, alarming investigation into the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nation's capital, Koch cuts a cross-section through a bitter D.C. winter, following about half a dozen local victims, caregivers, family members, and activists as they grapple with a disease without the benefit of social awareness or political will.
  68. The Last Laugh
    [An] insightfully open-ended inquiry into the role of humor as it relates to unspeakable tragedy.
  69. The Voices
    The Voices is a perfect film that's hard to watch.
  70. The Girl on the Train
    For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into a tone poem.
  71. Something Better to Come
    Perhaps even more disturbing than the Dickensian in extremis ordeal of Svalka life — including her rational yet heartbreaking decision to give up her baby rather than raise it in the dump — is Yula's straightforward acceptance of her situation.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Baxter
    A sign of The Baxter's charm is that it's essentially spoiler-proof: We know from the get-go which couples will pair off, and the pleasures lie in the spring-stepped vibe, the natty throwback wardrobe, and the intricate goofball patter.
  73. Gimme Danger
    The frontman's reminiscences, though, are invariably eloquent, witty, and often moving.
  74. Heist
    Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cool School
    All told, and well told, this is essential history.
  76. A Girl Like Her
    A Girl Like Her focuses on the characters' emotional traumas while eschewing moral panic about how Kids These Days are so wrapped up in their phones and the internet.
  77. Lives Well Lived
    Full of such bon mots, the documentary is the epitome of positive thinking, perhaps the closest thing America has to a state religion. Still, like social worker Wendy Lustbader’s book What’s Worth Knowing, which took a similar tack years ago, it’s an opportunity to connect with souls who’ve been around more than a few blocks.
  78. The Hand That Feeds
    López is a singularly tender, compelling, and articulate campaigner in this high-stakes struggle for justice, filmed with the urgency and suspense of a Hitchcock thriller.
  79. It Came from Kuchar
    Jennifer M. Kroot's film opens up the careers that followed “Naked.” It's an accessible, professional job, with onscreen testimonials from Waters--whose work owes the most to them, and who has been their most faithful proselytizer--Guy Maddin, and Buck Henry.
  80. Félix And Meira
    The restrained performances of Dubreuil and Yaron (Fill the Void) gradually reveal the flaws and strengths of this fragile couple, while Twersky is quietly devastating as an abandoned husband who fully understands devotion and sacrifice.
  81. Eating Animals
    As a work of sustained, thoughtful inquiry, Eating Animals is a bust; as a reminder of what we should all be thinking about, though, it’s searing. After seeing it, pretending not to know is impossible.
  82. The Little Hours
    This isn’t a laugh-a-minute movie; it’s more a succession of snickers, punctuated by genuine emotion.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rize
    Highly entertaining but underdeveloped documentary.
  84. Edge of Tomorrow
    The Wile E. Coyote fatalities are fun, but it's that repetitive moment of horror that holds this bipolar stunt together: Cruise, bug-eyed and gasping for breath as he shakes off his fear and grimly prepares for the next suicide mission.
  85. The Invisible War
    The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.
  86. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    Geier, who died in 2010, speaks on all subjects - from her son's mortal injury to the nature of her various collaborations - with the contemplative, courtly intelligence of her favorite novels.
  87. The Guard
    One senses that The Guard is McDonagh's eulogy for the brusque, warts-and-all character of a passing generation of tough, working-class Irishmen, much as Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" was for vintage Americanism.
  88. The Girl
    Gorgeously framed by cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the Turner-esque beauty of the landscape at harvest time only adds to the creepiness as the Girl makes do, makes friends, and then unravels in the most creative ways.
    • 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.
  90. Scenes of a Crime
    What's remarkable about Scenes of a Crime, besides Hadaegh and Babcock's ability to stay out of the way of their story and resist flashy graphical flourishes, is the degree to which the events it reveals are business as usual.
  91. A World Not Ours
    Fleifel gathers the messy detritus of everyday living, laughs at it, then shows the viewer what it means.
  92. Malèna
    A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Myth of the American Sleepover
    The constant presence of music - think "Dazed and Confused," with the Magnetic Fields swapped in for Foghat - nails both the teenage fantasy of living life to a personal soundtrack, and a high-schooler's heightened hunger to experience everything all at once.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Year Without Love
    Anahí Berneri's promising feature debut (based on Pablo Pérez's autobiographical novel) is at once unsentimental and sympathetic; she evinces rare insight into a gay man's life and sexuality without cringing, passing judgment, or wallowing in pity.
  95. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    Vardalos's parodies of Greek family values are loving and witheringly hilarious.
  96. Bad Hair
    There’s plenty of prickly tenderness, for both mother and son, at the heart of Bad Hair. All children yearn for things beyond their reach, and if they’re honest about it, adults do too. It’s a feeling you never outgrow.
  97. Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of
    Show 'Em What You're Made Of convincingly argues that these boy-men have something to say about the fickleness of fate — something they knew more about as young men than any of the cynics who dismissed them for dancing in unison. The hardest part will be convincing people to listen.
  98. 21 Grams
    Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
  99. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The film itself is solidly and conventionally crafted. Newsreels and stock footage alternate with fresh interviews with friends and scholars, steadfast supporters and unabashed detractors. The political life it maps out fascinates.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Footnote
    Something between a comedy of everyday absurdity and a family tragedy pushed into the realm of the hyper-real, Footnote uses its characters' differing relationships to authenticity as the basis for an enigmatic riff on representation.
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