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. Aurora
    Call it a mental workout that (although considerably less arduous than reading Sartre) some might find exhausting and others exhilarating. Aurora is not a movie to make you glad that you exist; it's a movie that makes you aware that you do.
  2. Fast & Furious 6
    Everyone involved at last seems to understand that the mode here is comic. Previous entries suffered from self-important glumness that gummed up the fun whenever the cars weren’t racing.
  3. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.
  4. The Ward
    Carpenter does what he's always done well here: individualizing shorthand personalities in a group under siege. This is Carpenter's first all-female ensemble, and the inmates are uniformly well-played.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Farmageddon
    A lesser effort in the burgeoning canon, it's still effective in its goals: illuminating how denigrated and dangerous our food supply is.
  6. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Annenberg's attitudinous Shakespeare riff is a unique blend of psychodrama, ethnographic experimentation, and high-concept hustle.
  7. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    Granito becomes both a humanitarian legal thriller and a quest to find justice through cinema.
  8. Where Soldiers Come From
    Much of what's presented is familiar territory, but it's the moments that fracture prejudices and expectations that stick with you.
  9. Point Blank
    No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.
  10. Star Trek Into Darkness
    Cumberbatch, a tweedy Brit with an M.A. in Classical Acting and a face like a monstrous Timothy Dalton, has beefed up to become a convincing killer. He's brutal and bold, and the film around him isn't bad either.
  11. This Is 40
    Much like marriage, This Is 40 is somewhat formless, and it almost never hurries up. But life is improved by having the option.
  12. 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.
  13. Fire in Babylon
    Riley shrewdly maintains focus on how the players co-opted the merciless tactics of their invective-hurling adversaries for their own, and the region's, self-actualization.
  14. 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.
  15. Psychohydrography
    A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Tucker & Dale piquantly tweaks every '80s ax-murderer flick you've ever seen, though it provides the same satisfaction of watching bratty undergrads perish one by one. Admittedly, the spoof loses steam in its last reel (i.e., when it runs out of frat kids to kill), but the film strikes an enjoyable tone of congenial gore.
  17. The Last Stand
    Kim finally lets loose, and the imaginatively choreographed mayhem that ensues - culminating in two fast cars chasing each other across a pesky cornfield - can be a wonder to behold.
  18. Khodorkovsky
    Though the PR bit is right on, Khodorkovsky goes some way toward questioning the guilt.
  19. Epic
    Epic certainly manages to tell a compelling tale. Yet in a post-Up era where animated films can pulse with profound truths, the question remains: Is mere entertainment enough?
  20. The Mouth of the Wolf
    A collection of "small great stories," in the words of its unobtrusive narrator, Pietro Marcello's singular doc/fiction hybrid salutes the crumbling grandeur of the northern Italian seaport Genoa.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Margaret
    It's less successful as a human drama than as a near-Brechtian exercise in what human drama looks and sounds like - a distanced but often car-crash compelling portrait of a teen as an unfinished being.
  22. 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.
  23. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Catching Fire suffers from the movie equivalent of middle-book syndrome: The story is wayward and rangy, on its way to being something, maybe, but not adding up to much by itself. Still, it’s entertaining as civics lessons go, and it’s a more polished, assured picture than its predecessor.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summer Pasture
    Summer Pasture is remarkable not merely for documenting the disappearing way of life, but for registering the depth of Yama and Locho's uncertainty about moving on from it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bad Posture
    Bad Posture, the first narrative feature from director Malcolm Murray, is sure to unsettle those who prefer films to pass clear judgment on not-so-upstanding types, but it's hard not to admire such a drolly off-kilter pass at the domestic regionalist indie.
  26. World War Z
    Forster's meticulousness—coupled with ample excuses to blow stuff up—isn't enough to turn World War Z into one of those class-A end-of-everything movies that leaves you feeling just a little bit queasy, momentarily uncertain of your own small place in this unmanageable world.
  27. Revenge of the Electric Car
    Sleekly designed (Tim Robbins narrates) with excellent mileage, Revenge is a balm for beaten-down times. In lieu of a business case for ethics, it tells the story of that rare moment when the bottom line finally dovetails with the greater good.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Monk
    The finale, in which godly rites are juxtaposed against the vilest of sins, builds to an unholy power.
  29. Outrage
    Like one of its yakuza bigs, Outrage commands respect but no affection.
  30. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    It's the latest installment in what now forms a lightly likable trilogy of films based on Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid books.
  31. Blackthorn
    This modest oater should tickle western fans.
  32. Iron Crows
    Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.
  33. Tales from the Golden Age
    Sardonic as it may be, Tales From the Golden Age is basically affirmative - its true subject is resilience. Romania suffered under a regime of dangerous stupidity. Drawing on popular memory, Mungiu has orchestrated a contribution to local folklore, a suite of stories in which those rendered witless by oppression were compelled by circumstance to live off their wits.
  34. Bullet to the Head
    Stallone looks great (even if his face doesn't quite move when he talks), while Hill (48 Hours, The Warriors) brings lean economy to the film's bloody, unapologetic mayhem.
  35. Bunraku
    Insular and indulgent as it is, though, the movie is never less than a visual treat.
  36. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    Scenes showing the tricky process of acclimatizing a child to new surroundings, and the patchwork of experiences that make up an education - both Asia's and Tairo's - are grounded by entirely affectless performances, not least that of little Asia Crippa.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    Resurrect Dead works splendidly as a threadbare urban mystery, teasing out details and complications without withholding too much information.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miss Bala
    The character is intentionally lightly drawn: Laura's suffering is symbolic, a surrogate for the suffering of a society helplessly caught in the crossfire.
  39. Silent Souls
    Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.
  40. Echotone
    Too vital for elegy, Echotone tells an old story whose beginning - the inception of a vibrant creative hub - remains mysterious, although the end is easy to predict.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy, Happy
    The questionable black-historical shorthand detracts from what is otherwise a well-performed and fitfully amusing film.
  42. Sound It Out
    Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.
  43. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Still, the tapes are great. More than just a flophouse Punch and Judy show, the Raymond vs. Peter dustups elevate cruel bickering to a ritual through which we live life's pain.
  44. Anna Karenina
    Just as the characters created by Tolstoy the artist got the advantage of Tolstoy the polemicist - at least until the end of his life - so these confoundingly good performances gradually win the movie from Wright's puerile conceit, giving us an Anna Karenina if not for the ages, than at least for an evening.
  45. Journey from Zanskar
    Although the film might be forced to rely rather heavily on Richard Gere's narration simply to situate the Western viewer, the actor does unify a bumptious collection of material that, taken together, relates what has to be admitted is a remarkable story.
  46. Wuthering Heights
    Heathcliff does not get the revenge he wants because he wants to escape the specific traumas of his adolescent past, shown in the film's first half. And because Arnold traps her viewers with Heathcliff's murky version of events. There's no room for enriching subtext in this version of Wuthering Heights because all the information we need is inscribed on the film's glassy surface.
  47. Surrogate Valentine
    A rambling valentine to San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura, Surrogate Valentine is a stylish pseudo-portrait that refracts Nakamura's gently impassive persona and lilting indie pop ballads through several lenses.
  48. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    A love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, it solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever - furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song.
  49. Oka!
    Oka!, a loose-limbed tapestry of cultural nuances, atmosphere, and song, is a tuneful tribute to the Bayakan spirit.
  50. Trouble with the Curve
    Here is the irony: Trouble With the Curve embodies all of the values it espouses - it is an old-fashioned, proficient, amiable, and decent movie - but it has no instinct.
  51. The Great Gatsby
    It's an expressionist work, a story reinvented to the point of total self-invention, polished to a handsome sheen and possessing no class or taste beyond the kind you can buy. And those are the reasons to love it.
  52. Stuck Between Stations
    There's an overapplication of split-screen and woozy soundtrack cues to this end, but Lister Jones and Rosen do an appealing back-and-forth with lively dialogue, not dulled in the interest of realism.
  53. In the Family
    With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don't feel stretched out so much as given room to breathe, In the Family proves that smart direction and an innate feeling for one's material trumps potentially precious subject matter.
  54. The Assault
    Taut, forceful, ritualistic, and all those other flattering adjectives applied to thrillers that actually thrill, this skyjacking docudrama showcases yet another genre (in addition to shock horror) the French are kicking our asses in.
  55. The Conquest
    Aided by an excellent ensemble cast, director Xavier Durringer and his co-scripter, Patrick Rotman, don't refrain from showing this truly repellent side of Sarko during his rise from minister of justice in 2002 to the highest elected office.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rampart
    Here the director pulls off the formidable task of marrying two unwieldy performances: Harrelson's, a volatile and vulnerable feat of showboating, and Ellroy's, whose writing voice is unmistakably the voice of the movie.
  57. The Innkeepers
    It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness - until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain.
  58. Letters from the Big Man
    Its quiet plea for reconnection with the non-human world is persuasive, and the engaged, agile meditation on the limits of communication at its center aligns it with Munch's earlier work. Oregon's million-dollar scenery, a sweet cameo by Karen Black, and Rabe's tough/tender performance sweeten the pot.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Garbo: The Spy
    Some of this footage feels like filler, but Roch's concept is strong: He's creating a dialogue between the fictions Pujol created to help win the war and the fictions Hollywood created to memorialize that victory.
  60. Knuckle
    Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.
  61. 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.
  62. Perfect Sense
    Perfect Sense beautifully captures the ache and counterintuitive thrill of "the days as we know them, the world as we imagine the world" fading away by degrees.
  63. Roadie
    Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.
    • 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.
  65. Lads & Jockeys
    Director Benjamin Marquet mingles black-and-white footage of students past with that of his current focus - three 14-year-olds in their first year of a jockey apprenticeship - to build a sense of specificity and continuum into a timeless passage.
  66. The Yellow Sea
    If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.
  67. London River
    Director Rachid Bouchareb brings a measured hand to this intimate, occasionally overdetermined sketch of the aloneness at the center of our global confluence.
  68. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.
  69. Captain Phillips
    Even if Captain Phillips treads into some ideologically rough waters, there's one thing that's hard to find fault with: Hanks gives a performance that goes from good (through the first 124 minutes) to extraordinary (in the last 10).
  70. El Sicario: Room 164
    Our subject retains a noticeable streak of pride in his expertise, though falters when discussing the killing of women. Hoping for his own salvation, the converted killer now claims the scales have fallen from his eyes, but his executioner's hood remains in place to the end - as does the mephitic air of timeless evil that hangs over El Sicario.
  71. Last Days Here
    An affectionate look at a self-destructing maniac and his supporters that bluntly reveals Liebling's total abjection without mocking him.
  72. Thin Ice
    Working the long con and damn near getting away with it, this kissing cousin to "Fargo," "Cedar Rapids," and "Win Win" makes for a surprisingly entertaining and nonderivative February time-passer.
  73. Chico & Rita
    The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés's story - though real-life figures including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and a Cuban songstress who bears some resemblance to Rita Montaner are featured as characters - but it's a dazzling thing to behold.
  74. The Front Line
    Tightly directed and well acted (even though many characters are cut-outs from every war movie you've ever seen), The Front Line shoehorns little known history into a familiar format, and it works.
  75. Scalene
    Although Scalene slows to a drip in places, strong performances and a Hitchcock-trained eye build unnerving tension into its depiction of the intimate stress of caring for an invalid and the ways people might or might not crack under it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goodbye First Love
    Like "Father of My Children," Goodbye First Love loosely fictionalizes lived experience in order to capture the ineffable - in this case, emotional maturation or, as Sullivan phrases it, "becom[ing] a real person."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Keyhole
    The film is infectiously somnambulant, so convincingly and unrelentingly dreamlike that its sudden end mimics the sensation of snapping awake from deep sleep.
  78. Chronicle
    Chronicle, with its found-footage storytelling and superpowered teens, at least playfully transcends its "Cloverfield meets Heroes" pitch.
  79. Pretty Poison (1968)
    Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Gelb might flit around a bit too much, but his appealing documentary always comes back to its subject's determination (sometimes overbearing) to leave the most meaningful possible legacy to his family and his craft.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    This impressionistic approach eschews traditional biography, instead giving the viewer the feeling of being inside a moment, without necessarily providing all the information we might need to contextualize what we're seeing.
  82. Buried Prayers
    With the survivors' physical presence amongst Nazi slaughterhouses as its own powerful statement, Buried Prayers is a nonfiction work that confronts Holocaust atrocities from a piercing ground-level view.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements
    With so many voices, Color Me becomes a rock version of "Rashomon," and what the film lacks in music and live footage, it more than makes up for with obsessive detail and heated debate. Who's right? Everyone.
  84. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    She might not be our kin, but filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour's anecdotal, warm-humored tribute to his grandmother - and, to a limited extent, to her cultural heritage - taps into the universal desire to hang onto loved ones in their waning years.
  85. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    What gives the film its human dimension are the conflicting memories of former residents.
    • 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.
  87. Escape Plan
    With its fun script and cheap visuals, Escape Plan evokes the halfwit cheesiness of 1980s-era Cannon films, but it also recalls the deft pacing and legibility of their action sequences.
  88. The Forgotten Space
    Epic in scope, intellectual agility, and the potential to induce panic and despair, this documentary exploration of global trade as an emblem of economic apocalypse avoids (just barely) doom-mongering by virtue of its compassion and visual grandeur.
  89. Good for Nothing
    Good for Nothing has a nice comic sense of the brushfire eruptions of Western violence.
  90. The Fairy
    While every scene is art-directed with zest and innovatively staged, The Fairy rarely inspires outright laughter. At least it respects its influences more than does "The Artist."
  91. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality.
  92. 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.
  93. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Even non-fans will appreciate what a tough act Reatard is to follow, though, and anybody with a shred of respect left for rock 'n' roll will feel loss and anger at his passing.
  94. The Salt of Life
    Di Gregorio's performance sets the tone of dim hope and quiet forbearance, telling the story through reactions: an ever-accommodating smile that shades into a wince; sparkling, heavy-lidded eyes betrayed by vexed brows.
  95. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    A tender, thoughtful paean to geek community.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Safety Not Guaranteed
    A viewer's patience with some of Safety's more rote stretches is rewarded in the film's final 15 minutes, when the plot takes a truly unexpected turn. As a DIY answer to the Spielberg generation's nostalgia for movie magic, the film's fully earnest, fantastic climax beats something like "Super 8" at its own game for a fraction of the cost.
  97. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    The ravishing and kitschy Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away is the rare movie whose title serves as an accurate indicator of whether you will enjoy seeing it.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fun Size
    The fundamental Schwartz touch applies: In the guise of a narrowly targeted tween flick, he has delivered a smart and emotionally satisfying slice of wish fulfillment, tracing how a threatened family finds harmony.
  99. For a Good Time, Call...
    Lauren and Katie aren't defined by their attitudes toward men; they're defined by being fu--ing funny and awesome.
  100. Surviving Progress
    The film trots out a who's who of great thinkers - Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood, assorted scientists and historians - who are riveting as they walk us through the question of whether we will or can survive progress. The anticapitalism prognosis is grim, and the hope offered is slim indeed.
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