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 7.5 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 Divine Order
    Though the story has a predictable ebb and flow, the film includes some stunning moments
  2. Moon
    Impressively pulled together on a modest budget, Moon has a strong lead and a valid philosophical premise but, despite Bell's fissured psyche, the drama is inert.
  3. The Sentinel
    What’s remarkable—and Kafkaesque—about La Sentinelle is how Desplechin grounds the phantasmagoric aspects of his tale in the details, routines, and conflicts of daily life.
  4. Last Days in the Desert
    Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.
  5. Band Aid
    I like this couple. And their songs aren’t bad! Not so the gender-binary Mars-Venus mumbo jumbo that dominates the resolution. Still, these are quibbles with an otherwise charming and honest marriage story.
  6. The Captain
    Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical.
  7. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Without Segel bravely channeling "his own anxieties and obsessions into his clowning," as Pauline Kael wrote about Woody Allen 24 years ago, Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been easily forgettable and, one might even say, limp.
  8. Home
    Ursula Meier's confident, appealingly bizarre theatrical debut.
  9. American Promise
    The film ends on up notes, but its strength is that it's not really a feel-good movie, instead shining a light on both how far we have come in terms of race in America and how very far we still have to go.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snow Angels
    What saves this heavy, heavy material from sinking into the chill, familiar turf of the Small-Town Midwinter Tragedy is Green's practiced ear for verbal idiosyncrasy and off-kilter conversation rhythms.
  11. Summer of Sam
    A film in which many things seem to happen twice and others not at all.
  12. Harmony and Me
    Slight, indifferently shot, and entirely lacking in ballast, Harmony and Me's sole justification for being is that it's consistently very funny.
  13. The New Rijksmuseum
    A guided tour of a struggle.
  14. Dig Two Graves
    Dig Two Graves isn't the most original horror film, nor is it the scariest, but most of its short runtime offers passable suspense and an engaging protagonist.
  15. Other People
    Despite a strong sense of its characters, however, Kelly rarely generates much melodramatic or amusing momentum.
  16. Thirteen Days
    A tense and engrossing political thriller.
  17. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    Arik Kaplun's smart, scrappy romantic comedy Yana's Friends displays an insouciance rarely found in Israeli film.
  18. Ghosts of the Abyss
    "Check this out, bro," James Cameron says as he returns to the site of the real Titanic, armed with robots, a 3-D Imax camera, and the same colossal hubris that necessitated a call for silence as he accepted his Oscar on behalf of those who perished.
  19. Almost Peaceful
    French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.
  20. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Jennifer Yuh Nelson's sequel delivers a bevy of superpowered set pieces that are dexterous and delirious, as well as tonally confident.
  21. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slither
    Gunn doesn't reinvent the wheel but he does tighten its spokes a bit with some terrifying sequences and a witty, deadpan screenplay, and he leaves the audience hungry--for "Slither 2."
  23. Children of Invention
    The young director Tze Chun is not a flashy filmmaker, but he understands the vulnerability of immigrant workers in the sleazy sub-rosa economies of a floundering 21st-century America.
  24. Future Weather
    The film is most successful as a character study of a stubborn, prickly girl whose intelligence far outweighs her immediate prospects.
  25. In Bruges
    Bruges may be the movie's rather too-long-running joke, but Farrell's shaggy brow is easily the most entertaining thing in Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's first foray into the crime caper.
  26. Ned Rifle
    Hartley's humor and intellectual musings are, as always, fully present, but by anchoring them to a genuinely compelling story of familial retribution, he's made his best film in years.
  27. Brigsby Bear
    McCary and Mooney ground this story in sincere emotion and mostly avoid straying into easy-laugh SNL shorts territory.
  28. The Vessel
    Quintana's emphasis on Jungian dream logic gives his otherwise spartan parable a compelling mythic dimension. The Vessel may bring Malick to mind, but it also feels like a major work by an exciting new talent.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Been Rich All My Life
    The Silver Belles are bold, brash, and gorgeously awake, and their willingness to live large is thrilling.
  30. Nocturnal Animals
    Ford has given us a surprisingly candid peek into the creative process, into the strange little hurts — perceived or real, toxic or justified — that make up the soul of an artist. No, we may not like what we find in there. But I’m not sure he does, either.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Russian Dolls
    Those who loved the original Auberge will likely be eager to book rooms once again.
  32. Bolt
    Bolt carries two tales for the price of one, both handled by Disney veterans and first-time directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard with wit, grace, and the dazzling craftsmanship we've come to expect from the studio that's hitched its wagon to Pixar.
  33. The Well Digger's Daughter
    Stirrings of dignified outrage via the eponymous well-digger eventually go a long way toward energizing the film, which improves markedly once it shifts its focus from the World War I–era milieu toward how quickly a naive young girl can turn into a fallen woman and the ways in which that fallout affects her father, her family, and apparently most importantly, her name.
  34. Elevate
    Four years, two continents, and a whole lot of culture shock in the making, Anne Buford's endearing and vibrantly photographed hoop-dreams doc follows a quartet of gifted West African teens from the SEEDS Academy (Sports for Education and Economic Development in Senegal) as they head to the U.S. on basketball scholarships.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    T2 Trainspotting
    It's as if the filmmakers recognized the wanness of the material and settled on a strategy of padding it out with empty high style on the one hand and clever meta awareness on the other.
  36. This Is the End
    After going this far, both in raunchy bad-boyism and mock-apologetic love-us shamelessness, they've effectively blown up their own formula. That's not a bad thing. This is the end; now it's time to try for more.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Door in the Floor
    Eliminates much of its source's plot, focusing on the book's first third. The result is a crisply shot chamber piece for husband, wife, and boy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    The bland, jittery visual "realism" can't counteract overheated performances of tin-eared dialogue, which strain for pulp but often land at soap.
  39. 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.
  40. Steel City
    Whatever Steel City lacks in oomph or even originality, it at least breaks even with its working-class authenticity and unexpectedly well-rounded ensemble.
  41. Mondovino
    Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.
  42. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    How enlightening you find Damian Pettigrew's obsessive film depends on whether you're as adoring of Fellini as he was of himself; for the devoted, it's a gold mine.
  43. Decasia
    A fierce dance of destruction. Its flame-like, roiling black-and-white inspires trembling and gratitude.
  44. An Ideal Husband
    His film is hardly memorable, but it's amusing enough for two hours, and it never panders or cloys.
  45. Fahrenheit 9/11
    If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.
  46. Berlin Babylon
    To many eyes, Berlin was the saddest city in 20th-century Europe, divided and lost, and as city symphonies go, Siegert's is pragmatic and optimistic.
  47. Hellaware
    A broad and occasionally disjointed indictment of the New York art scene and horrorcore rap that leaves no broad side of a barn untargeted.
  48. The Wall
    For all its stellar nature photography, its low hum of suspense, and Gedeck's raw and affecting performance, the film often feels like an illustrated audiobook rather than narrative drama.
  49. The China Hustle
    Rothstein’s film, for the most part, is more well-reported exposé than it is cliché-driven agitprop, a film that blows the whistle on ongoing financial crimes.
  50. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Sturdy and rudimentary, Magician may be Welles 101, but it's dotted liberally with TV and radio clips of the famously loquacious auteur talking, talking, and doing more talking — and how could anybody with ears and a brain resist that buttery voice, spinning out clause-laden sentences that take more twists and turns than the streets of Venice but always end, somehow, in a place that's ravishingly articulate?
  51. Synecdoche, New York
    Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.
  52. Kite
    Less Bollywood than Generic Asian Family Drama Lite, when it's not a flat-out sunset-choked infomercial for Ahmedabad and its annual rooftop kite-flying festival.
  53. Charlie Wilson's War
    Dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden.
  54. Canvas
    Greco's sincerity is so palpable that the frequent uplift feels deserved, but with just-passable filmmaking and the demeaning score, Canvas falls somewhere between powerful indie and made-for-TV diversion.
  55. The Take
    Furman draws superb performances from Leguizamo and Perez, two actors whose hyperactive energy has often been a distraction. Here, they're centered and completely believable as a hardworking couple whose life has been turned inside out.
  56. Garbage Dreams
    With new problems come new opportunities, and Garbage Dreams smartly focuses on a younger generation of teenage workers who stand to benefit from the Zaballeen's new focus on education and updated techniques.
  57. Ip Man 2
    A redundant if nonetheless occasionally thrilling follow-up bolstered by star Donnie Yen's precision combat skills.
  58. 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.
  59. The Iran Job
    Although it presents itself as merely the story of a professional basketball player named Kevin Sheppard, who, never quite making it to the NBA, has spent his career playing in lesser leagues overseas, The Iran Job ends up being quite a bit more: an underdog sports story, a fish-out-of-water tale, and an outsider's perspective on Iran's almost-revolution of early 2009.
  60. Alive Inside
    Practically guaranteed to elicit tears within its first five minutes, Alive Inside... is nonetheless more than just a tearjerker.
  61. Parched
    Too bad writer-director Leena Yadav only infrequently uses innuendo-driven sex talk to break up a monotonous series of confrontations between misogynistic alpha males and their unhappy wives.
  62. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    Even simply sticking to the facts, the film is a painful watch.
  63. The Little Stranger
    Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.
  64. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Escape Fire winds up feeling like only one half of a larger argument.
  65. The Armstrong Lie
    To use a phrase from the film, The Armstrong Lie is a "myth-buster." It's wholly necessary, brilliantly executed, and a complete bummer.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ambassador
    The Ambassador's wrap-up is vague and sudden, and necessarily so: In order for the movie to work, you need to wonder if maybe, at some point, Brügger stopped acting and really became the crooked international asshole he was supposedly just pretending to be. The magic of Brügger's performance is that it earns that suspension of disbelief.
  67. Meadowland
    The filmmakers take great pains not to stack the deck or overstate the couple's self-evident trauma, but watching the movie is ultimately like being one of their friends: You understand their pain on a conceptual level but can't feel it the way they do.
  68. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Frustratingly little here grapples with the day-to-day realities of life in Chechnya and the surrounding areas.
  69. The Family Fang
    Bateman is nimble in handling a tricky mix of flashbacks and pranks, genres and tones. As you might expect from such a gifted ensemble performer, he's also an actor's director.
  70. Abendland
    There's material from a phone-in psychoanalysis center, the dumping grounds of London's surveillance-camera feed, and the detox tent at some massive biergarten - like much of the film, mordantly funny in a kind of pursed-lips, arched-eyebrows way.
  71. Rosenwald
    Kempner's film, which has an eat-your-vegetables quality, runs long and suffers from a lack of focus.... Still, it's inspiring how Rosenwald, who took full advantage of capitalism's potential, also shared, passionately and generously, his windfall.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2 Days in Paris
    Delpy shows Linklater's influence in her willingness to let actors work and walk at length, and she has an unusually playful style for an actor turned filmmaker.
  73. Juliet, Naked
    Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke.
  74. Last Days
    The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life and Debt
    Devastating, artful, and intelligent documentary.
  76. A Decade Under the Influence
    Does attest to the once-upon-a-time existence of a Hollywood counterculture, but it's so reverentially heavy-handed in evoking the era that it can't help playing like "Forrest Gump" without Tom Hanks.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cremaster 3
    Offers little beyond the momentary joys of pretty and weightless intellectual entertainment.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Better Luck Tomorrow
    Seeing BLT has been positioned as a political act. Alas: The film in question seems hardly worth the fuss.
  79. The Business of Strangers
    The Business of Strangers goes too far in dramatizing Julie's primal, Paula-fied surge of female fury, and the script finally mistakes respectful ambiguity for vaporous drift.
  80. Young Adam
    Doesn't quite know how to take its leave; it tapers off like a curling cigarette trail, but it lingers like a ghost.
  81. Finding Neverland
    Depp and Highmore's final scene together strikes a muted blow of desolation -- bottomless but just bearable -- that Forster rather bravely lets stand as the last word on all the fanciful solace that Barrieland had to offer.
  82. Rabbit à la Berlin
    Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.
  83. United Red Army
    At the heart of the movie are the prolonged, increasingly violent, self-criticism sessions - an escalating, claustrophobic, paranoid reign of terror, staged in near-darkness and shown in close-up.
  84. 16 Acres
    It's all here, from the design contests to the farcical series of ribbon-cuttings, including a photo op cornerstone-laying, to the stupid Jeff Koons balloon that recurs as an incidental sight gag.
  85. 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.
  86. Fame High
    The dilemmas Fame High's four subjects face are real, and Kennedy gets plenty of drama from the prospect of failure and disappointment.
  87. Dislecksia: The Movie
    Dislecksia: The Movie is an exuberantly didactic documentary, and director Harvey Hubbell has done his homework.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Björk: Biophilia Live
    The visual tricks lose their potency before the halfway mark, leaving the energy of Biophilia Live to rise and fall with the music.
  89. Les Cowboys
    The strange, ever-changing result is, at times, as original as loose remakes come, with Bidegain using his hallowed source material as a springboard for something rare: a "writer's movie" that loses nothing in the jump from script to screen.
  90. Haywire
    Where faux-empowering "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" confines sexual power play to the old rape-revenge matrix, Haywire is a real war-of-the-sexes tournament, briskly paced with a tickling sense of black humor.
  91. XXY
    It takes a controlling hand to chisel something more contoured than monotony out of this dense angst, and director Lucía Puenzo doesn't have it, though Inés Efron, as Alex, gives a committed centerpiece performance with a nice, slightly lupine grin.
  92. Kink
    The doc is often terrific fun. But it is a work of observation and advocacy rather than journalism.
  93. As You Are
    Constructed as a mystery, As You Are offers glimpses into intense adolescent bonds, just enough to remind baffled onlookers that they don't have a clue.
  94. The New Radical
    It’s hard to know whether it’s intentional that The New Radical, Adam Bhala Lough’s slick documentary about “techno-anarchist” Cody Wilson, famous for developing a 3-D-printable plastic gun, presents its subject as a shallow pseudo-intellectual man-child.
  95. Meduzot
    An Israeli movie with neither politics nor religion--and only one casual, if fraught, mention of the Holocaust--bespeaks an underlying desire for normality that's as poignant and fantastic as Keret and Geffen's modest, shabby Tel Aviv settings.
  96. A Late Quartet
    It's something of a relief that little is actually resolved in A Late Quartet; Zilberman is at his best when leaving narrative threads hanging rather than trying to tie them together.
  97. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.
  98. Korengal
    The frank honesty of these accounts testifies to the trust Junger and Hetherington cultivated among the Second Platoon in 2008.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    An unstoppable good-mood generator, the resolutely 2-D SpongeBob SquarePants Movie has more yuks than "Shark Tale" and enough soul to swallow "The Polar Express" whole.
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