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 Truth About Emanuel
    Despite the psychological extremes, writer-director Francesca Gregorini presents her characters as recognizably human balls of complexity, nudging but never forcing them toward a sad, beautiful conclusion.
  2. Raze
    The stark prison Sabrina and a half dozen final contestants inhabit make the torture chambers of Hostel look inviting, but to their credit (perhaps), screenwriter Robert Beaucage and director Josh Waller never sugarcoat their grim tale.
  3. Open Grave
    The road to the finale is littered with dead bodies and red herrings, but Open Grave is more notable for its laid-back approach to storytelling than for its plot twists. That's a kind way of saying it's sort of boring.
  4. Hamlet
    Peter Wingfield delivers an engagingly oily Claudius, and Lara Gilchrist's Ophelia is radiant. But Ramsay's Hamlet's madness never really overcomes the character's traditional emo temperament.
  5. If You Build It
    Creadon unveils his story in a haphazard, backwards-unfolding way.
  6. Free Ride
    The film is content to merely document certain happenings and hope you find them as interesting as it does.
  7. Divorce Corp
    Despite the film's hyper but insubstantial presentation of its information, there likely is a story here.
  8. Dumbbells
    Dumbbells manages to be pleasant and largely inoffensive despite early indications that it might turn into a T&A-fest.
  9. Cold Comes the Night
    Most of the film's major happenings are either illogical or, much more damningly, not especially thrilling.
  10. In Bloom
    This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.
  11. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    If The Marked Ones is mildly brilliant in the first half, it stumbles witlessly into its own dumb pentagram in the second.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    This time around, we enter the now 19-year-old's world while he sits behind the piano, hitting a melody that's not nearly as memorable as the focused expression that we will see repeatedly throughout the movie.
  13. Hollywood Seagull
    Guinzburg's retool is full of unintentional humor, high-school-theater level acting, and shoddy writing.
  14. Interior. Leather Bar.
    It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.
  15. The Best Offer
    Vertigo this ain’t, but there’s some quasi-Gothic charm in the baroque premise and eccentric marginal details, including a mathematically gifted dwarf.
  16. In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter
    Fortunately, In No Great Hurry never succumbs to cutesy hagiography.
  17. Beyond Outrage
    It's somewhat surprising to find the filmmaker's sequel marked by such a lack of urgency. The action here seems dutiful, devoid of the indignation at criminal vileness that seethed below Outrage's surface.
  18. 47 Ronin
    This Hungarian-shot bore is so indistinct it reeks of no place more than Hollywood, where the fascinating specifics of history and legend are ground into universal mush.
  19. Lone Survivor
    Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film: the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods.
  20. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it.
  21. August: Osage County
    August: Osage County, however, bitterly funny in some places and numbingly earnest in others, is just too much Streep. But all is not lost. Some of her fellow actors are resourceful enough to reconstruct themselves after being obliterated.
  22. Grudge Match
    Segal's gearbox gets jammed between recession-era sports drama and brainless comedy, especially as Hart hollers pop-culture punch lines like he's the squirrel sidekick in a CGI kiddo flick.
  23. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Stiller balances his big ambitions with small, grounded truths.
  24. Wrong Cops
    Wrong Cops is a tedious exercise in self-consciously hip lowbrow comedy.
  25. Breakfast with Curtis
    A small gem of a film, Breakfast is a lovely tapestry of subtlety, full of sly, smart humor and unforced insights into human nature.
  26. A Journey to Planet Sanity
    This is a guy who seeks to mock idiocy? Physician, heal thyself.
  27. The Great Passage
    A compelling portrait of Japan's stagnant economy and its disheartening effect on younger workers.
  28. Dancing on a Dry Salt Lake
    The cast (which includes familiar character actors like Nicolas Coster and David Leisure) is wildly uneven, talent-wise, and there's a stiltedness to the film's earnestness, but its sincerity is palpable.
  29. Adventures of the Penguin King
    The dull Adventures of the Penguin King is definitely the laziest of the waddle-coms to win theatrical release.
  30. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There are hints of greatness, one or two artfully constructed scenes that remind you why you look forward to new Scorsese films in the first place. But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad behavior in the financial sector, Wolf is pushy and hollow, too much of a bad thing.
  31. The Selfish Giant
    Devastating in its simplicity and honesty, The Selfish Giant is a colossus of feeling.
  32. The Past
    Bolstered by performances that convey profound grief and remorse without look-at-me histrionics, The Past is steeped in the believable micro details of its scenario while also expanding to universals.
  33. The New Rijksmuseum
    A guided tour of a struggle.
  34. Her
    Instead of just being desperately heartfelt, Her keeps reminding us — through cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema's somber-droll camera work, through Phoenix's artfully slumped shoulders — how desperately heartfelt it is.
  35. Coyote
    The narrative hinges at every turn on moments of human connection, scary confrontations other films would resolve with violence finding unexpected (and probably unlikely) detours into humor and empathy.
  36. All the Light in the Sky
    [A] tediously naturalistic and fairly pointless no-budget indie about the compromises of middle-aged femininity.
  37. Beatocello’s Umbrella
    [A] well-intentioned but terribly clunky film.
  38. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    The funniest Madea film in a fair stretch... It's also, of course, not good by any definition.
  39. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    The good news is that Anchorman 2 is pretty funny. It's also more rambling and hit-or-miss than its predecessor, which means, thankfully, that it's less likely to become what we euphemistically call iconic: In other words, fewer annoying guys will be inspired to quote it.
  40. What's in a Name?
    The French chamber dramedy What's in a Name is frequently delightful, full of ribald humor and compelling, intelligent debate.
  41. Sweet Talk
    The mustiness of many of the script's ideas hardly detracts from what feels like a radical premise, at least in film — that a woman can get off with a stranger and leave it at that. Erica Jong would be proud.
  42. Friend 2: The Legacy
    The most compelling thing about Friend 2 is its trifurcated plot, a structural gimmick borrowed from The Godfather Part II.
  43. Tricked: The Documentary
    The film is wisely sparing of melodramatic flair, allowing the inherent drama of the situation to horrify and harrow on its own.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Dec 10, 2013
  44. Nuclear Nation
    Employing straightforward, music-free aesthetics that express the grim realities of his story, director Funahashi captures both grief and outrage in equal measure.
  45. Some Velvet Morning
    Tucci and the English-born Eve make a riveting team, and although the film's final twist undercuts all that has come before, Some Velvet Morning is provocation of the most artful kind.
  46. Saving Mr. Banks
    Saving Mr. Banks, a fictionalized account of two weeks Travers spent on the lot in Burbank, is proof that Walt has thawed and secretly reclaimed Disney's reins.
  47. Liv & Ingmar
    Liv & Ingmar is an anecdotal treasure chest for cinephiles, but more than that, it's a beautifully told love story.
  48. The Last of the Unjust
    There are no simple denials, nor anything simple at all in Last of the Unjust. Only stories, recovered and retold, of a reality beyond their reach.
  49. Here Comes the Devil
    Bogliano is not a subtle director — check his sudden zooms on items of portent — but he painstakingly shows us Caro opening her mind to the possibility of supernatural evil, and he's careful not to tip his hand too soon as to whether it's real or imagined.
  50. Hours
    The film stirs richer, truer feelings once it becomes a one-man show. This is due both to Heisserer's and Walker's skill — the tension is strong, the scenario elemental, and Walker's harried, urgent hero is compelling — but also the fact that the movies are really good at dudes doing things, especially when those things are scrappy, desperate, and heroic.
  51. The Crash Reel
    Walker never has Pearce explain why he wants to return the lifts, and he never has to. The heights speak for themselves.
  52. American Hustle
    There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what a curtain!
  53. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    Sure, all the studios offer anymore are big, dumb adventure spectacles, but that's not a knock against the achievement of this one, which at least parades wonders before us, not the least being the greatest dragon in the history of movies.
  54. UnHung Hero
    As the film dissects various cultural norms and goes behind the scenes of the $5 billion penis enhancement industry, it transcends the concerns of one man to show the flipside of the gender equality movement.
  55. Paradise: Hope
    Seidl's visual style -- bitter-comic three-walled tableaux -- makes the scenario's tension between desire and reality almost unbearable, but Melanie offers hope by simple virtue of her youth, her unformed romantic folly, and her guileless courage.
  56. Jump
    [A] clever but emotionally unengaging movie.
  57. Crave
    Hey, Crave, the jerk store called, and they're running out of you.
  58. Khumba
    Resoundingly terrible.
  59. Merry Christmas
    What's really absent from this fiasco is a sense of purpose or an interest in character, as the participants in this weekend-getaway contest are ciphers defined mainly by their degree of obnoxiousness.
  60. Night Train to Lisbon
    Gentle has its charms, and August's vision of the world, archaic though it may willingly be, is appealingly urbane .
  61. Live at the Foxes Den
    Live at the Foxes Den's heart is certainly in the right place, but its content is culled from so many different movies that it seems the end product of a particularly unfocused pitch meeting.
  62. White Reindeer
    If White Reindeer's satirical elements feel off the rack, that's because what they're satirizing in our real lives is, too.
  63. Twice Born
    Sergio Castellitto's Twice Born irresponsibly appropriates the horrific siege of Sarajevo to serve as aesthetic backdrop for a story that exhibits no real interest in the conflict.
  64. Tim's Vermeer
    Penn and Teller are bright guys, and their act can be fun in small doses. Yet Tim's Vermeer accentuates one of their worst impulses: They think they're mischievously raining on our parades when, really, they're not telling us much at all.
  65. Swerve
    The photogenic cast's looks far exceed their featureless performances, and any mood of sunshiny malevolence is undercut by too many studied directorial compositions.
  66. S#x Acts
    S#x Acts works as a crash course in sexual ethics, but it also fails to transcend its genre trappings as a morality tale about the dangers of low self-esteem.
  67. Commitment
    When Commitment isn't a perfectly forgettable action film, it's either an oil-thin melodrama or a charbroiled treat for meatheads.
  68. All the Way Through Evening
    Spong's documentary isn't a beautiful film... Its value, rather, is archival.
  69. Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth
    Walker's life is so eventful — and her contributions so important — that the hagiography is worth forgiving.
  70. Lenny Cooke
    Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men.
  71. The Last Days on Mars
    It's just zombies versus an international research station on the wastes of the Red Planet, with all that such a premise promises.
  72. Out of the Furnace
    Cooper may have gone overboard in delineating the hardships of blue-collar life in Out of the Furnace. But he has a gift for getting actors to put some muscle into their work, and enough finesse to make sure the sweat doesn't show.
  73. Inside Llewyn Davis
    Although the Coens are consummate craftsmen, they don't always show the lightness of touch or the depth of feeling they do here.
  74. The Unbelievers
    A study in the frustrating insufferableness of people you probably agree with.
  75. Shored Up
    This is a sober look at how seaboards are vulnerable to a rise in ocean levels, made worse by storms and massively worse by massive storms.
  76. The Punk Singer
    It's impossible to watch The Punk Singer and not ask if feminism is dead. That's a fair starting question. But a better one is what if it isn't — what if we've just stopped recognizing it?
  77. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    "Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.
  78. The End of Time
    The awe incited by the world is enough — no pontificating necessary, man.
  79. Cousin Jules
    Thoroughly transporting, the peacefulness and clarity of Cousin Jules can't help but reveal, by contrast, the restlessness and agitation too common to life today.
  80. Caught in the Web
    Amid much overacting, Kaige addresses the subjectivity and unreliability of images through this-isn't-what-it-looks-like scenarios that would make Jack Tripper groan.
  81. Angels Sing
    There's a lot of onscreen music-making, some of it amazing, the rest Santa-related.
  82. Frozen
    Frozen is a fun ride with some catchy tunes.
  83. Homefront
    Director Gary Fleder seems to sometimes suspect Homefront could pass as comedy.
  84. Oldboy
    Colorless and soulless in the extreme, it bears no one's fingerprints at all. There's no reason for this Oldboy to exist. It's so DOA, you stumble out of it wanting to eat something alive.
  85. Die Narbe (The Scar)
    Von Harder ought to have placed his bold mission on the ground; seeing the actual streets where this prolonged oppression unfolded would help generate his intended dread.
  86. This Is Where We Live
    Often threatening sentimentality yet never quite sinking into it, Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca's This Is Where We Live benefits from the good taste of the filmmakers, whose appetite for understatement ensures that the picture maintains dramatic effectiveness and only rarely lurches into histrionics.
  87. JFK: A President Betrayed
    The film offers a solid précis, but it's a curious fact that a well-made doc like this is still only about half as informative or detailed as a long magazine article on the same subject might be.
  88. Home
    Akinnagbe's embodiment of Jack is the most wholly realized accomplishment in the film. His speech, hesitant and stammering, is matched by defensive body language, his walk and posture as guarded and wary as a bird's. It's a truly physical performance in a film that didn't demand it.
  89. Weekend of a Champion
    The result is a pleasure, perhaps as much for audiences as for Polanski; it's a chance to luxuriate in the atmosphere of world-class Formula One, here a lavish free-love party interrupted now and again by a few laps on the track.
  90. Contracted
    There's no payoff to the paranoia.
  91. Cold Turkey
    As a whole, Cold Turkey is too busy and offers no fresh insight on the inner hysteria of seemingly upright WASPs. The actors work hard, but their roles are mostly one-note. It's Witt who generates the laughs and the pathos.
  92. Delivery Man
    Let's not blame Vince Vaughn for this stale cupcake. He's halfway through his Alec Baldwin-like transition from underbaked hunk to charismatic character actor.
  93. Bettie Page Reveals All
    Mori — director of the 1991 documentary Building Bombs — assembles the information here with clarity and sensitivity.
  94. Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury
    Writer-director Luiz Bolognesi's film doesn't push the envelope in terms of technique or style, but its fast-moving story roils with a righteous anger that is mesmerizing as Bolognesi whips up a Zelig-like overview of Brazil's tortured history.
  95. Sex, Love & Salsa
    This character study in rom-com's clothes is ambitiously formula-averse, but too shaggy and unfocused to be satisfying.
  96. Sake-Bomb
    A dismal road trip saga.
  97. Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird
    In this entertaining documentary, the coolest kids in town sing the praises of cartoonist Gahan Wilson, whose work is a brilliant fusion of the personal and the political.
  98. The Insomniac
    For most of its run, the film is a tribute to unimaginative competence, confidently venturing where so many movies have ventured before. But in the last few scenes, the script offers a solid twist and a cynical social critique, the latter coming out of nowhere but still somehow managing to work.
  99. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    Wendy J.N. Lee's Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey powerfully connects the dots between the enormity of global warming as a phenomenon and the havoc it wreaks in ordinary lives.
  100. Narco Cultura
    Schwarz's juxtaposition of the human cost of the drug war alongside the glamorization of its henchmen and their brutality is sobering, even depressing.
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