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 Lunchbox
    Batra isn't ambitious with the visuals, but he creates an effective, unfussy sense of urban space, both indoor (cramped apartments, crowded buses) and outdoor (even leafy residential streets seem to be swarming with playing children).
  2. Kids for Cash
    The documentary is stellar, despite some vague visual-metaphor stuff involving dioramas in an attic. Bring something you can punch, as you will be furious.
  3. HairBrained
    Billy Kent's charming HairBrained comes from a long legacy of collegiate comedies but still finds its own identity.
  4. Non-Stop
    In the end, Non-Stop is a waste of a perfectly good Neeson, and of our time and goodwill. Please make it stop.
  5. The Bag Man
    The trouble is that Grovic's attempts to generate suspense by keeping character identities and motivations unknown leaves the proceedings feeling vague and slapdash.
  6. Almost Human
    With acting this wooden even among those not playing zombies, though one at least attempts a rural Maine accent, the suspense lies less in who will die than in how grisly the means.
  7. Barefoot
    The gradual revelation that there's more to Daisy than meets the eye is no great surprise, but it does at least negate — too late! — some of the more troubling subtext.
  8. 3 Days to Kill
    Of course, the movie doesn't work. But Costner does. No matter now nonsensical and uneven 3 Days to Kill gets, he's miraculously consistent.
  9. Highway
    The degree to which Highway candies up Veera's slumming toward freedom feels so fundamentally out of touch with the realities of poverty that it skirts into offensiveness.
  10. Pompeii
    Anderson distinguishes himself as the rare action director who shows us real bodies in real space in real reaction to each other, who prizes legibility over quick-cut dazzlement, who stages his fights with comic-book zeal rather than puffed-up graphic-novel miserableness.
  11. 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.
  12. One Candle, Two Candles...
    The overall comic premise is both clumsy and truly icky, because how exactly do you make progressive good on a "parody of violence against women" logline?
  13. Holy Ghost People
    Director Mitchell Altieri helms the thriller with a sure hand.
  14. Chaplin of the Mountains
    Self-taught Kurdish-American filmmaker Jano Rosebiani's mostly English-language drama...is deadened by milquetoast characters, uninspired landscape photography, and no perceptible stakes.
  15. Angels in Stardust
    the film's occasional fits of comic inanity — locals ranting about aliens, conversations about two-headed dogs — are certainly embarrassing. But its attempts at melodrama are outright repugnant.
  16. In Secret
    In Secret boasts vigor and thematic richness, that feeling of artists expressing something vital.
  17. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    The kind of movie fans will be quoting for the rest of their lives, Shoot Me, from director-producer Chiemi Karasawa, is as much a playdate as portrait, a jumble of salty highlights attesting to the pleasure of her company.
  18. Child's Pose
    With Child's Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute bourgeoisie life cracks and opens wide.
  19. Black Out
    A self-aware, borderline self-reflexive action-comedy from the Netherlands, Arne Toonen's Black Out is derivative in a way that undermines its wry sense of self.
  20. About Last Night
    Far from a film about sharks sharking and love not working out, this About Last Night revels in friendship, fidelity, and something too rarely seen in the movies today: the idea that being young and black in Los Angeles can be glorious.
  21. Date and Switch
    Date and Switch isn't a gay movie. It's a zippy, happy, buddy flick.
  22. Endless Love
    This film is a sunny, overlong pastiche of tropes, the kind that suggest love involves nothing more than holding hands and jumping off a dock into a lake, or having slow, teary-eyed sex in front of a fireplace, inexplicably blazing in mid-June.
  23. Lucky Bastard
    The film is most successful when humanizing the people behind the objectification, with lives beyond the smut.
  24. Down and Dangerous
    Forsman — whose loose inspiration was Snowblind, a 1976 memoir by his retired drug-smuggler father — brings a refreshing crispness to the foot chases and fights, and there's a fun cameo that supports the retro-'80s vibe nicely.
  25. Beijing Love Story
    So far removed from any original signal — there are several direct references to Titanic, so it's timely, too — this nuance-free affair registers as little more than noise.
  26. The Returned
    The film suffers from a series of unsatisfying endings, but it's nonetheless refreshing to see a zombie movie with brains behind the camera instead of on the menu.
  27. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    Not fully understanding its own merits, Easy Money is accidentally fascinating in some moments, but purposefully formulaic in many more.
  28. Jimmy P.
    Amalric's impish dexterity and Del Toro's mild catatonia make for a memorable mismatch, but Jimmy P.'s profound slow burn might be too clinical for some to consider dramatic.
  29. Girl on a Bicycle
    Girl on a Bicycle is like Micki + Maude minus the outrage, complexity, or crack timing.
  30. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    For all its comic panache, A Fantastic Fear of Everything too often feels forced rather than funny — the strain evident in the setup is rarely worth the payoff, and the result simply proves exhausting.
  31. Winter's Tale
    Winter's Tale, however imperfect, is that rare beast on the movie landscape: an unapologetic romance (for the first two-thirds, anyway), with attractive stars and special effects designed to give audiences something other than the experience of watching worlds get blown up.
  32. Adult World
    Adult World captures beautifully, and with a great deal of self-deprecating humor, what it's like to feel trapped in a place you think is too small to hold you.
  33. RoboCop
    Every bit of it is more advanced: The actors are better, the plot is tighter, the special effects sleeker, the messages more heartfelt. Yet it lacks Verhoeven's bloody, biting scream.
  34. The Outsider
    Fairbrass proves a hulking wannabe ass-kicker without much distinctive charisma, and his leaden performance is matched by sleepy, one-note supporting turns by the slumming-it Patric and Caan.
  35. Nurse 3D
    If the onscreen serial killer isn't having fun, how can we?
  36. Vampire Academy
    For smart, strong girls and the guys who like them, Vampire Academy will hit a vein.
  37. After the Dark
    After the Dark is a shaggy dog story but an intriguing and frequently beautiful one.
  38. Alphaville
    Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, it's a thing of insensible beauty.
  39. Demi-Soeur
    The film indulges in much wannabe-funny wailing, shrieking, and flopping about by Nénette and Paul, only to then lace its buffoonish material with semi-serious undercurrents.
  40. Mars at Sunrise
    Using its narrative as a launching pad for abstract visuals, the picture reminds viewers that even the most striking images demand context to create anything like drama.
  41. Welcome to the Jungle
    Welcome to the Jungle, directed by Rob Meltzer from a script by Jeff Kauffmann, is satanically bad.
  42. Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    It's an ominous, claustrophobic, unhappily sapphic work whose thunderclap of a climax instills terror and awe of the fates' petty, whimsical cruelties.
  43. The Pretty One
    Kazan holds together a decent coming-of-age script that's emotionally sincere if tonally unfocused.
  44. Love & Air Sex
    What's remarkable is that despite the sweaty overdetermination of the film's dude-bro interactions and the whole prefabricated concept of performance air sex, the love story has actual depth and sadness.
  45. A Field in England
    It's sweaty, disorienting, thrilling. Rarely has a narrative feature so marvelously integrated a sequence of experimental filmmaking, and that sequence alone guarantees A Field in England should thrive on the midnight circuit.
  46. Cavemen
    A tiresome film that itself knows nothing but other rom-com plots.
  47. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    Buirski clearly shows that the spark that made her great couldn't be snuffed out so easily.
  48. 7 Boxes
    The film surges by, powered by high spirits, well-plotted surprises, and the directors' admirable attention to both the real and romantic.
  49. The LEGO Movie
    Lord and Miller do great work within constraints, taking pre-made pieces and fashioning them into feats worthy of applause. It's no wonder they made a Lego movie — and it's no wonder it's so good.
  50. The Monuments Men
    The Monuments Men fails in its grand ambitions, but it's still satisfying in bits and pieces, like a busted statue. Even a tribute made of shining fragments counts for something.
  51. Let's Ruin It with Babies
    The film's worldview is so sunny and relaxed that it keeps you rooting for its self-obsessed inhabitants.
  52. That Awkward Moment
    While it's easy to tease first-time writer-director Tom Gormican's raunchy rom-com, the trio has a shaggy chemistry, and most of the jokes hit.
  53. Somewhere Slow
    Gilsig's transformation is quietly convincing, but the film itself is flatter and less cinematically gratifying than most television dramas.
  54. The Wait
    The pained, textured performances of Sevigny and Malone enrich their scenes, but when it ranges away from its leads, The Wait can seem like an anthology of moments rather than a narrative whole, although those moments do accumulate into a mood of chilly, gently surreal isolation.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    Brook offers himself as a teacher whose goal is to help his students discover brief, ephemeral moments of bliss.
  56. May I Kill U?
    Too bad that Urban's stab at black-comedy satire is hobbled by the obviousness of his characters.
  57. Labor Day
    Labor Day is so self-conscious and phony, it must be the work of a pod person. Humans, film lovers, and fans of Reitman's till-now-flawless filmography: We've gotta fight back.
  58. Hank: 5 Years from the Brink
    Joe Berlinger's Hank: 5 Years From the Brink is more workaday and less transfixing than projects of his like "Brother's Keeper" or "Paradise Lost."
  59. Brightest Star
    It's either much smarter and more profound than it's letting on, or it doesn't add up to anything at all. Or maybe both — it's all relative.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breaking the Frame
    Director Marielle Nitoslawska's faith in the power of imagery over pedantic exposition rewards the audience with a heady catalogue of Schneemann's luscious paintings, expressionistic collages, hand-illustrated journals, visceral photographs, and excerpts from her corporeal films.
  61. Best Night Ever
    At best a fascinating sociological document of what happens when an all-male writing and production team portrays a girls' night out, Best Night Ever seems marketed to women but made for frat house consumption.
  62. At Middleton
    Farmiga and Garcia give it their all, and their chemistry keeps certain scenes afloat.
  63. 12 O'Clock Boys
    What lingers in Nathan's documentary isn't the swaggering trails of diesel fumes. It's the sadness of watching Pug narrow his options.
  64. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Charlie Victor Romeo shows us how much of life's weight and meaning can be packed into one second of thought or action; it's a work of shivery intimacy.
  65. Love Is in the Air
    Wrapped in slick direction (including plenty of split-screen), this goes down easy, but it's wholly unbelievable. Worse, it's instantly forgettable.
  66. I, Frankenstein
    It doesn't come close to working, but it's sweet that they tried.
  67. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    While some of the workers' chitchat is translated via subtitles, long passages of it are not. Oreck's imagery of the forbidding Arctic landscape through its seasonal transformations (the movie covers roughly a year) is eloquent enough.
  68. Visitors
    Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.
  69. Stranger by the Lake
    Stranger abounds with precision and detail, evinced not just in the spectacular visual composition but also in the observation of behavioral codes in carnally charged spaces.
  70. Run & Jump
    Maxine Peake is a revelation in Run & Jump, communicating vitality and extraordinary optimism that practically bleeds out and infects the visuals.
  71. Papirosen
    Solnicki's spliced-together, back-and-forth approach at first seems a jumble, but of course his choices are deliberate, and they pile up into revealing art.
  72. Old Goats
    [An] eager-to-please but creaky and shambling movie.
  73. Naked As We Came
    Naked plays like a gay-themed August: Osage County without all the histrionics.
  74. Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America
    All his film can do to make its case for Sosa's significance is trot out subjects who compare her to Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and, most puzzlingly, "Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney in one," without elaboration.
  75. Gimme Shelter
    Though the arc of the film is as saccharine as a Precious Moments figurine — and it'll play that way for audiences who can't be bothered to look closer — Hudgens is too honest to believe in simple, happy endings.
  76. G.B.F.
    Here's to hoping lax multiplex security allows teenagers to sneak in to this very funny and thoughtful take on how straights often objectify queers — and how increased visibility in the media can result in an expectation to conform to stereotypes.
  77. Enemies Closer
    Enemies Closer captures the feel of action flicks of yore -- unsurprising, given that some of them were directed by Hyams himself -- in a way that only limited-release and straight-to-video titles seem allowed to these days (aside from the latest Riddick, that is).
  78. 24 Exposures
    Swanberg has made an inspiring career out of rejecting the aesthetic crimes of Hollywood. It's dispiriting, then, that he so doggedly indulges in its tradition of male gazing.
  79. Devil's Due
    Devlin's script tips its hand so early on that Devil's Due lumbers toward a woefully flat, predictable ending, and the unwelcome promise of something truly demonic — sequels.
  80. Omar
    The movie is so brisk, even-handed, and realpolitik you're never quite sure if it has anything to say.
  81. Generation War
    Generation War seeks the epic, creating multiple, lavishly realized worlds and moving with confidence between them. What it finds of both history and its individuals is less complete.
  82. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    The ending has a surfeit of sugar, but writer-director Arvin Chen's story jaunts along, a cheery rom-com tinged with dream visions and a somewhat daring conceit.
  83. When I Saw You
    Yet another first-rate film from a Middle East rich with them.
  84. Summer in February
    The characters are broadly defined and tedious, which makes sitting through the film's 100 minutes something of a chore.
  85. Ride Along
    Forget going soft — Ride Along proves Ice Cube's got bigger image problems than kiddie movies and Coors Light commercials.
  86. The Nut Job
    Good-natured and completely forgettable.
  87. 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.
  88. Life of a King
    Life of a King isn't setting out to reinvent cinema, or even a genre, but rather just to be a moderately uplifting tale that makes watching chess interesting.
  89. Like Father, Like Son
    It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.
  90. Jamesy Boy
    Director Trevor White frames the former teen gang member's life as an uplifting coming-of-age prison drama that feels entirely disconnected from the realities of incarceration.
  91. Indigo Children
    Chaney attempts a dreamlike quality by alternating between footage of the young couple together, doing mostly nothing, with admittedly gorgeous scenes of their sylvan landscape. This works to a point.
  92. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is half silliness, half swagger, but Branagh's arms-akimbo impudence as a director makes it work. He takes it all seriously, but with a wink.
  93. Back in the Day
    It's good for a couple of fart jokes and otherwise utterly forgettable.
  94. Big Bad Wolves
    Even though Papushado and Keshales raise some ticklish questions, it's hard to know exactly what they're going for, beyond some mischievous, grisly thrills. At least they're skillful at delivering those.
  95. The Legend of Hercules
    Renny Harlin's Legend of Hercules fulfills every silly, flimsy promise that it makes in the first place: There are lots of battles (albeit rather jerkily rendered ones), some grand-looking horses decked out in handsome metal headdresses, and lots of well-oiled beefcake.
  96. The Rocket
    The Rocket's ample pleasures come from Mordaunt localizing this tested formula rather than trying to reinvent it.
  97. Truth
    Truth is hammier than Easter brunch, but its depictions of rejection transfiguring into violence are always affecting and distressing.
  98. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    This sequel comes off as both sillier and crueler than the original, mixing sight gags and labored puns with a vicious assault on a sex-ed teacher, and, well, "duck rape."
  99. Chander Pahar (Mountains Of The Moon)
    Chander Pahar is an unfocused adventure-cum-travelogue.
  100. Loves Her Gun
    Has a lived-in, almost documentary-like realism to it, but as drama it's occasionally inert.
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