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. When We Leave
    Kekilli, more than an unofficial spokeswoman for rebellious Euro-Muslim youth, sells a simple and deterministic story through her sheer presence and precise reaction shots.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hanna
    Despite its handsome presentation and cinematic ingenuity, the film never really goes beyond superficial pleasures.
  3. Hop
    Despite its scattered frenzy, Hop-thanks to its fondness for smushing together seemingly incongruous elements and Marsden's goofy, bug-eyed mugging-is just demented enough to deliver a fleeting sugar rush.
  4. Insidious
    We need visionaries-but also solid craftsmen who seem to enjoy their work. Insidious is the product of the latter. It doesn't build a better haunted house but, when on its game, reminds us of the genre's pleasures.
  5. 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.
  6. 13 Assassins
    Perhaps something important was spirited away with the 20 minutes of footage shorn for this U.S. release, but the combatants are scarcely distinguishable here even before disappearing under layers of mud and guts.
  7. Vanishing on 7th Street
    It is creepy enough to make you hope the theater parking lot is brightly lit.
  8. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.
  9. 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beginners
    So Beginners might sound insufferable, but it isn't - or at least not completely. Mills's second feature (after Thumbsucker) has way too many quirks for its own good, although it also flaunts a rare freedom to jump back and forth in time.
    • 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.
  12. Of Gods and Men
    Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.
  13. Conan the Barbarian
    Squeamish types may balk, but the gory cruelty on display here is faithful to the source material and deeply thrilling.
  14. Drive
    Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.
  15. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur was made, in co-production with Sony, by Aardman Animations, the U.K. company best known for Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, and the character animation has some of the same homely charm.
  16. Into Eternity
    It is meant to boggle the mind and inspire awe-and it does.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Damsels in Distress
    The thing that Damsels and its damsels value above all else - outside of well-timed, well-phrased, slyly deployed witticisms (Stillman hasn't lost a step) - is sure to rankle mavericks on both sides of the aisle. Forget the economy - it's about conformity, stupid.
  18. In Time
    A pleasing, often rousing movie for the 99 percent, In Time is not without flaws.
  19. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The plot twists are about as venerable as the cast and predictably affecting when performed with such old-hand proficiency.
  20. 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?
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeff Who Lives at Home
    Jeff is a surprisingly mutable, ultimately poignant day-in-the-life drama about a slacker who genuinely wants to stand tall.
  22. Tower Heist
    More than the marquee names, the second bananas keep the movie bobbing along: Broderick's pharmaceutically vague hangdog act is perfect ("If you need me, I'll be living in this box"), while Peña turns out to be a fine comedian, an enthusiastically yipping dumb puppy here.
  23. Wanderlust
    Though Wanderlust finally laughs off the real discomforting conclusion that it's edging toward, it's gut-busting funny when mocking their hopeless options.
  24. Take This Waltz
    There are enough unexpected delights, such as repurposing "Video Killed the Radio Star" during a critical moment between Margot and Daniel, to keep us interested in their drawn-out, teasing, tantalizing courtship.
  25. Port of Memory
    Quietly and atmospherically touches on the Kiarostamian Uncertainty Principle, with Aljafari liberally corrupting his demi-documentary with scripted dialogue, rehearsals, and even digital effects.
  26. Lovers of Hate
    A 2010 Sundance favorite, this inventive (and inventively thrifty) character study from Austin indie stalwart Bryan Poyser never flinches from the intractable sibling resentment at its core.
  27. We Are What We Are
    This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year's New York Film Festival.
  28. Black Death
    Screenwriter Dario Poloni and director Christopher Smith provide enough sword-and-sorcery hoo-ha to please the "Lord of the Rings" demographic, but the movie's real coup is in how it repeatedly shifts our allegiance from Christians to pagans.
  29. Monogamy
    The film's final plot twist is easy to spot well before it arrives, but that doesn't detract from its crafty, heartfelt, and surprisingly sound affirmation of getting hitched.
  30. Winter in Wartime
    An efficient, absorbing example of the form framed in a boy's coming-of-age story set in a snowbound rural Holland in 1945.
    • 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.
  32. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.
  33. Dolphin Tale
    By the end of the movie, Winter has become a mascot for human disability, especially for children, and Dolphin Tale has enough depth and sensitivity to tap into emotion without feeling manipulative.
  34. Underworld: Awakening
    The entire production is single-mindedly, earnestly devoted to serving up feats of BADASS, and it succeeds in this devotion to the exclusion of everything else. Allegedly in 3-D, though I didn't notice at the time.
  35. A Good Man
    Director Safina Uberoi struck gold with her title subject, a congenital joker with an implacable will whose load-bearing personality could prop up at least three documentaries.
  36. The Human Resources Manager
    Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis's latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion.
  37. Battleship
    And when the F-14s came out for a triumphant flyover, I looked around the room to find the moron who was applauding only to realize that it was me.
  38. Ouija
    First-time director Stiles White's effective use of long takes and director of photography David Emmerichs's wide-angle digital cinematography make an otherwise generic teen ghost story unexpectedly atmospheric.
  39. Bill Cunningham New York
    No passion for fashion is required to enjoy this absorbing portrait of legendary New York Times "On the Street" photographer Bill Cunningham, but a sense of history and tragedy might help.
  40. Bal
    Though this graceful film is a minor addition to the canon of Middle Eastern cinema in which nothing and everything happens, Bal is still a beauty.
  41. 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.
  42. Foreign Parts
    Foreign Parts engages in sociological inquiry without narration or contextual handholding, utilizing incisive, striking aesthetics (a panorama of hanging side mirrors, worn shoes trudging through grimy puddles) to elicit potent subcultural immersion.
  43. Korkoro
    The plotting is two-dimensional, but in the tormented visage of Taloche (James Thiérrée)-a clichéd holy simpleton enlivened by irrepressible physicality-the film seethes with full-bodied fury and anguish.
  44. Queen to Play
    The supporting cast is uniformly fine, but the film rests on the delicate shoulders of Bonnaire, who carries it with a soulful, magnetic presence.
    • 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.
  46. Curling
    In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.
  47. One Hundred Mornings
    Part morality play, part comment on our excessive energy consumption, One Hundred Mornings is often most affecting when it considers the most mundane points.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Skyfall
    As much as it's open about its paranoia of the new, Skyfall's fatal misstep is its slavish hewing to event-movie trends. Like this summer's Spider-Man, Batman, and Avengers movies, Skyfall seems to exist primarily to set up the events of subsequent films.
  49. Rise of the Guardians
    At times, it approaches some of Pixar's best.
  50. Mirror Mirror
    Here, the familiar tale is retold with concessions to feminist self-determination and camp humor, bending the Grimm Brothers' tale without infringing on its basic beauty.
  51. Thunder Soul
    Sometimes you just can't fight the funk; as much as you might resist the film's more maudlin scenes, not succumbing to the band's signature tune, "Head Wiggle," is impossible.
  52. The Elephant in the Living Room
    The film ultimately serves as an edifying (who knew Ohio's Amish were big into exotic-animal auctions?) and unsensational (excepting one horrifying scene involving Brumfield's beloved male lion) look into a peculiar corner of American acquisitiveness.
  53. Bride Flight
    The flashbacks dominate, playing like wet-inked storyboards: pioneer women forced into patriarch games; a baby born in secrecy and raised in deceit; Jewish legacy lost and found. When the men are all dead, the women speak freely, wrapping up two florid hours with a pickled sentence or two.
  54. 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.
  55. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It's a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.
  56. Tabloid
    Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.
    • 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.
  58. 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.
  59. Earthwork
    Like Herd, the movie-which resists peeking above the horizon until its final, poignant skyline shot-strives for a connection with land and labor typically missing from depictions of urban life, and provides a timely model for finding value in lean circumstances and humble company.
  60. The Robber
    Against interpretation, Heisenberg (who is, after all, the grandson of the physicist who gave us the uncertainty principle) has nonetheless created a nimble, dynamic character study of a fiercely guarded loner on the run.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caterpillar
    It's cinema that risks blunt silliness to achieve emotional and experiential seriousness.
  62. True Legend
    In countless over-the-top set pieces, Yuen delivers striking combat clarity without sacrificing the visceral editing and crazy digital effects of modern bloodbaths.
  63. 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?
  64. 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."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    Geographic diffusion aside, Kondracki's fact-based thriller remains somewhat focused on its grim subject, though its principled bid to allure and enlighten the VOD-surfing masses results in a surplus of Hollywood-style eye candy and narrative formula.
  66. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Is the world of the film ruled by its high concept, its low comedy, its demographic credibility, or its romantic screwball realism? Ultimately, Orgy's refusal to be any one thing - including good or bad - forms a kind of epochal statement.
  67. House at the End of the Street
    Working from a story by all-around genre specialist Jonathan Mostow, director Mark Tonderai steers the story cleanly around its queasy hairpin turns, perversely toying with one of pop cinema's most cherished clichés: the audience's inculcated desire to side with the underdog.
  68. American Reunion
    Taken altogether, the Pie movies offer a cohesive worldview, showing each of life's stages as the setting for fresh-yet-familiar catastrophes, relieved by a belief in sex, however ridiculous it might look, as a restorative force.
  69. The Colors of the Mountain
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
  70. Octubre
    There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.
  71. ParaNorman
    Butler called it "John Carpenter meets John Hughes," and that does just about sum ParaNorman up, though the actual math still feels a little fuzzy.
  72. Safe
    A preposterously enjoyable - or enjoyably preposterous - action-thriller.
  73. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    The beloved Kiwi duo, who frequently perform as a rotating cast of corny alter egos, can charm even the crankiest viewers, thanks to their soaring, clarion harmonies and cuddly-butch personas.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    General Orders No. 9
    Much of this commentary, equally in awe of progress and suspicious of it, is strikingly sincere.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Littlerock
    Atsuko the character doesn't speak English; Atsuko the actress, speaking mostly un-subtitled Japanese when she speaks at all, gives a performance that's a marvel of nonverbal reaction.
  76. The Big Uneasy
    Shearer builds an airtight case to prove his thesis, and one of his most chilling arguments is a roll call of brave souls whose lives and careers have been systematically wrecked in pursuit of the truth.
  77. Life 2.0
    At once a disturbing vision of escape, a cautious portrait of liberation, and an exploration of authenticity and artificiality.
  78. Lost Bohemia
    Lost Bohemia's real power, though, is in the impromptu interviews Astor conducted with his neighbors.
  79. Raw Faith
    Shining an intimate light on an individual in order to reveal greater truths about life and the world, Raw Faith focuses on progressive-minded Portland, Oregon, Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Nice
    Though told here with appealing drollness, Marks's story makes an odd vessel for the filmmakers' casually advanced legalization arguments, what with its mischief making on the grandest scale possible.
  81. Rejoice and Shout
    The best bits - the powerful instrument called Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, for example - more than speak for themselves.
  82. One Lucky Elephant
    Admirably, and gently, raises questions about the folly and hubris of a relationship that may only ever be one-sided.
  83. The Woman in Black
    If director James Watkins's second film is about as scary as the haunted house your big cousins made in the basement, Radcliffe, as widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps, at least gives a moving portrayal of grief.
  84. The Guilt Trip
    Pairing Rogen and Streisand turns out to be inspired.
  85. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    It's not enough to call this the rare franchise action movie to bring the goods; it's the even rarer one whose creators seem to understand what the goods even are.
  86. 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.
  87. Hotel Transylvania
    Although it doesn't worry itself with dialectic complexities, Hotel Transylvania succeeds on the level of entertainment.
  88. Film Socialisme
    Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Turkey Bowl
    The director and his actors successfully sell the notion that these are real people whose lives and relationships will continue off the field - and that's more than enough.
  90. Out of the Blue (1980)
    For orchestrating lurid goonishness, Hopper can't be beat.
  91. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    A script that consistently finds fresh outlets for its running gags makes for a sufficiently rollicking pleasure cruise.
  92. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    Turtle still has cinematographer Rory McGuinness's remarkable visuals in its favor, though, and reveals how even innocuous human activites curtail the loggerheads' centuries-in-the-making migration with refreshing subtlty.
  93. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    True to form, Queen of the Sun presents inspiring and direct solutions from the likes of journalist Michael Pollan, activist Vandana Shiva, and biodynamic farmer and author Gunther Hauk, but it also glosses over the question of how migratory beekeepers, among others, would make a living if those fixes were enacted.
  94. Agrarian Utopia
    Raksasad manages to keep the film afloat on the real drama of his nation's political and social issues, bringing an added measure of poignancy to the quiet desperation of his characters.
  95. Donnie Darko
    Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.
  96. Leap Year
    There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.
    • 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.
  98. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    Human characters emerge from photo ops and heroes from the shadows.
  99. Delhi Belly
    Delhi Belly's rare singing-and-dancing production numbers play classical Bollywood glitz for pure kitsch, the Ram Sampath–composed soundtrack otherwise tending toward up-tempo sing-along rock, including a hit song ("DK Bose") with a subliminally dirty chorus.
  100. Small Town Murder Songs
    Boldly succinct yet confident enough to take its time.
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