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 Ninth Day
    Plays best as a dry exercise in historical doublespeak and rationalization.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lynch
    Much of this is tedious--no more or less exciting than surveillance-cam footage of a regional sales manager, even if this one's desk offers a glimpse at one point of a legless baby doll.
  3. An Affair of Love
    This sweet, pensive gabfest is neither conventionally romantic nor pornographic.
  4. The Flower of Evil
    Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.
  5. Open Range
    The scenario recalls everything from "High Noon" to "Unforgiven," but Costner is less interested in grappling with the grim ambiguities underlying those films than in codifying them. There's still much to like, including the warm, thoughtful performances and cinematographer James Muro's fearless use of natural light.
  6. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Worse, the film never challenges the traditional Zionist narrative of the kibbutzim developing an untamed land, paying only lip service to the fact that it was already inhabited before the Jewish settlers got there.
  7. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Ordinary Miracles offers a breezy and informative overview of the legendary photographic collective known as the Photo League.
  8. The Last Christeros
    A war film consumed with waiting.
  9. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    Because the battle for legalization is still being fought in most other states, the lack of an up-to-date perspective is frustrating.
  10. The Homestretch
    The Homestretch is ultimately a humane accomplishment.
  11. Homme Less
    The film is an adventure, a reason to despair, a chance to hang out with a great talker, and an often beautiful portrait of this city's promise and cruelty.
  12. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
    [A] lighthearted and immensely entertaining doc.
  13. Better Watch Out
    It’s only October, but Christmas has come early for horror fans.
  14. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Ostensibly a conventional tale of triad loyalty, As Tears Go By announced the presence of a genuine Hong Kong new wave—as well as an ambitious cineaste.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Ides of March
    Compelling enough as a methodic moral inquiry, a step-by-step account of how lines in the sand move, Ides is less successful when attempting to capture the feeling of the times.
  16. Guinevere
    Except for Polley and Rea, the performances are heavy-handed.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    Whatever the first-time filmmaker lacks in subtlety and finesse--not even the snow-white Sundance Screenwriters Lab could bleach Montiel's script of its corner-deli grit--he recoups by other, more playfully attitudinal means.
  18. Enemy of the State
    Enemy of the State isn't really a smart film, but it makes a concerted stab at pretending to be one.
  19. Watermarks
    Though Zilberman's affection for the women leads to some indulgent digression, the doc's low-key tone (and lack of the stock, timpani-backed Nazi iconography) throws certain anecdotes into powerful relief.
  20. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    Given its boundless sarcasm, running-jumping- standing-still ambience and hyperbolic Guignol violence, Lock, Stock aspires to be something like the Beatles meet the "Wild Bunch." Too bad it doesn't have even a rubber soul.
  21. Flow: For Love of Water
    One of those charming little documentaries that make you question whether the human race is really worth preserving.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    Chbosky plays this CW serial stuff for maximum earnestness, stressing the teenage tendency to assume that every new thing they're feeling is unprecedented in human history, keeping the tone just-moist-eyed throughout.
  23. The History of Future Folk
    Even as an apocalyptic plot-pushing rescue mission unfolds, slapstick police chases keep the level of diverting quirk high, and the husband-wife/father-daughter dynamics remain central.
  24. Tom at the Farm
    That the most vicious homophobes are often closet cases is not news, but Dolan seems less concerned with that self-evident fact and more about creating a mood of unease.
  25. The Circle
    This is a fascinating and often tumultuous story, which Haupt chronicles through a mixture of interviews with the real Ostertag and Rapp (now married, they appear as a pair) alongside dramatized vignettes that, as the film wears on, feel like annoying interruptions.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jesus, You Know
    Complex and deeply moving documentary.
  27. 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.
  28. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    The perfect storm of homophobia, racism, and moral panic that sent the San Antonio four to prison is almost too much to cover in a ninety-minute documentary, but Esquenazi paints a tragic and humane portrait of the women who ended up in its center.
  29. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    In this unhurried full version, Benson allows grief to transform his characters, with few guarantees and plenty of regrets.
  30. A Master Builder
    Demme, following in the footsteps of the late Louis Malle, takes a spare, direct approach to the material -- his economy pays off in quiet eloquence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music from the Inside Out
    A revealing portrait of painfully withdrawn artists navigating the tug between the divine harmony of an orchestral synthesis and the sweaty glow of individual experimentation.
    • 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.
  33. The Sapphires
    First-time director Wayne Blair and screenwriters Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs, adapting Briggs’ stage play, don’t shy away from the era’s social complexities, but they keep their eye on the ball, which in this case is the sweet pull of soul tune harmony.
  34. Fastpitch
    Spear's portrait of unpaid, passionate fastpitchers could give filmmakers of all budgets a notion of how real Americans speak.
  35. Ivansxtc
    Boldly engineering a collision between tawdry B-movie flamboyance and grandiose spiritual anomie, Rose's film, true to its source material, provides a tenacious demonstration of death as the great equalizer.
  36. Veer-Zaara
    With just the right balance of epic grandeur and break-into-song goofiness, this Bollywood love legend does double duty as a women's-rights manifesto and a plea for amity between India and Pakistan.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Garden State
    Braff's naive romanticism is also lovely proof of the film's innocent heart.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sia, the Dream of the Python
    Sia becomes a bloodbath of Shakespearean proportions as even the good guys kill one another in an effort to preserve illusions.
  39. The Green Prince
    Despite being an aesthetic bore, The Green Prince sets itself apart from the nonfiction pack via a recent story of two unlikely comrades’ heroic sacrifice, moral courage, and cross-cultural dedication to peace that’s not only gripping, but all too timely.
  40. Saint of 9/11
    Mychal Judge, the popular gay FDNY chaplain who perished in the fallen towers and was the day's first official casualty, has been so designated by this treacly, worshipful doc, something he would surely have deemed ridiculous.
  41. Proteus
    Broad and pleasantly idealistic, and the evident ardor for 150-year-old graphics (especially Dore's Ancient Mariner masterstrokes) is hard to argue with. But is it a movie or the best-designed episode of "Nova" ever?
    • 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.
  43. More Than the Rainbow
    On treks through the city, camera in hand, Weber's expertise, tenderness, and taste for the absurd become clear. Wechsler runs with it, interspersing decades of Weber's often gritty photographs with expert cinematography.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    This warmly engaging film benefits from its understated approach (it suggests rather than spells out the political turmoil), and its light, comedic tone never mitigates the drama of the central story.
  45. Water Lilies
    French director Céline Sciamma doesn't quite have the stun of discovery--mortified adolescent sexuality is something of a national specialty, after all--but she inexhaustibly endeavors after the indelible image.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unforgivable
    It's some kind of monster of romanticized antiromanticism, filleting and exalting its characters, cheating and rewarding its breathless audience. The closest the film gets to a thesis is this shoulder-shrug torpedo: "People do things like that without knowing why."
  47. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    The film is often beautiful and appealingly light. Every clear-eyed insight into why pushy people insist on pushing is matched by loose ensemble humor and lyric reveries.
  48. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Ends up an intricate, becalmed take on a soul adrift.
  49. Visual Acoustics
    Enjoyable as it is, Bricker's giddy hagiography could have used a little pushback, especially in the matter of Shulman's airy dismissal of the postmodernism that, he claimed, forced him into "retirement."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alice's House
    Alice's House is an utterly average foreign art-house film, with all the strengths and flaws that label implies.
  51. Furious 7
    For all the full-throttle dazzle of Furious 7, the best scenes are the quietest ones, in which these characters make observations about love, life, and family that would seem overcooked in any other movie.
  52. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    Scotty offers more than just salaciousness.
  53. Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    The film is as simple, straightforward, and elegant as its title.
  54. Upgrade
    Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gotta Dance
    Would be just another disposable, albeit touching, distraction if its subtext didn't hint that growing old in this ageist society is a bitch.
  56. The Freedom to Marry
    Rosenstein makes this a suspenseful legal yarn and an essential history lesson.
  57. Brothers of the Head
    The golden-hued footage is lovingly faked by ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the straight-faced result is as improbably touching as the Farrelly brothers' underrated "Stuck on You."
  58. The Green Wave
    That Ahadi and his team were able to safely compile, let alone edit together, this much ground-level footage is a feat in and of itself; that it comes together in such a compelling manner makes it almost vital.
  59. Patti Cake$
    “The white Precious,” as one rival calls her, may be trying to master a musical genre known for ingenious metaphors and similes, but Patti Cake$ rarely rises above the literal.
  60. Death at a Funeral
    Death at a Funeral never even approaches the best of Oz's oeuvre. It's his first movie that begs for the laugh track; they'll love it on BBC America.
  61. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    Lively talking heads lay out the reasons for the decay of Yiddish culture...What's missing from this gentle homage...is a sense of the joyful heyday of Yiddish theater, and the richness it brought to the artistic life of Manhattan.
  62. Misunderstood
    Both Aria and the film as a whole are very much in their own head, which is a nice place to visit but probably not the healthiest environment to grow up in.
  63. Ma
    It's audacious enough to warrant attention.
  64. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    Vol. 2 aims to please with breathtaking set pieces that’ll convince you to delete all your old diatribes about CGI ruining the movies. But no matter how funny writer-director James Gunn wants this film to be — the one-liners move at lightspeed — too many of the punch lines are referential.
  65. Farewell, My Queen
    The pleasure of Jacquot's film is in watching various strains of discreet, heated, and deluded passionate attachment performed.
  66. The Connection
    It's a fleet, engrossing, familiar drama, a movie that's forever moving.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pianomania
    Directors Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis fail to plumb their subject's frustrations or any other insightful biographical details.
  68. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Dori Berinstein's desultory, fawning profile of the nonagenarian performer devotes many of its padded 88 minutes to Channing's greatest success, playing the title yenta in "Hello, Dolly!"
  69. Jealousy
    Vital and vigorous even when its characters feel scraped of vigor/vitality, Philippe Garrel's latest finds boho Parisians facing the ends of marriages, affairs, and the feasibility of bohemian existence itself.
  70. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    If there’s one thing that Van Sant does very well here, it’s creating a humanizing anchor at the center of the story. Despite some distracting narrative choices and sketchy character development (especially with Mara’s character, who, of course, turns into a love interest), the film does eventually find its footing.
  71. Somewhere Between
    Knowlton never delves far enough into her subjects' stories for Somewhere Between to feel more nuanced than, say, a good commercial for international child-adoption services.
  72. Rosewater
    Rosewater is an earnest picture, but it's also got some juice — there's vitality and feeling in it, the secret ingredients so often missing from even the most well-intentioned first features.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stranger Than Fiction
    Stranger Than Fiction merely layers whimsy upon whimsy. As written, Harold Crick is no more convincing a human being than he is an IRS agent; Kay Eiffel's writing, supposedly good enough to inspire the career-long devotion of a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), sounds as dully declamatory as movie-trailer narration.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cairo Time
    Happily, writer-director Ruba Nadda's emphasis on body language ultimately trumps the clumsiness of her script.
    • 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.
  76. A Wolf at the Door
    As with so much of Brazilian cinema, the framing of the plot as a social allegory instead of a psychological portrait doesn't yield the most emotionally satisfying experience. But Wolf serves as an important feminist correction -- and a compelling reminder that predators can come from anywhere.
  77. The Gospel According to André
    The Talley of before the election presents himself as a man who believes anything is possible if you swallow your anger, work hard enough, and sacrifice all — especially your chance at love — and the Talley of after seems to worry that much of that progress has proved an illusion.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nowhere Boy
    Lacking the song's raw emotive power, Taylor-Wood's debut feature is a rote coming-of-age tableau that churns through stations of anger, inspiration, reconciliation, McCartney, and Harrison.
  79. Turning
    As a whole and in conjunction with the concert snippets, they give an impressionistic glimpse of a performance and the people behind who forge it, no matter how often Atlas's glib multiple-exposure visual concoctions threaten to get in the way.
  80. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Legends of the Mountain’s narrative fuse may be long, but Hu knows exactly when to light it and when to snuff it out.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zathura: A Space Adventure
    One thing: Perhaps my studio-cynic hackles are raised imprudently, but either Favreau reimagined the boys' teenage sister to read as matinee sex bomb, Tootsie Rolling around in pink boxers for half the film, or children's books have become a lot hotter since I put down Seuss and Sendak for Encyclopedia Brown.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Darjeeling Limited
    I was moved by Darjeeling, flaws and all, but if my job is to explain why, I find it difficult for reasons that are none of my business. From the minute Wilson walks onscreen, face covered in scars, eyes full of trouble, Darjeeling is warped by the gravitas of his recent suicide attempt.
  83. The Peanuts Movie
    What's surprising — even wondrous — is how often Schulz's precisely crooked line work informs the big-budget gloss.
  84. Barney's Version
    Barney's Version misses every opportunity for raucous picaresque fun that the book throws its way, while squandering a wealth of transatlantic performing talent led by Paul Giamatti.
  85. The Swenkas
    This peculiar and sweet film--which lushly scores the silent tournaments with Henry Mancini and Tommy Dorsey--more or less leaves it at that, exploiting the poetic surreality of the overdressed Zulus in Pierre Cardin primping in the basements and barren fields of the Transvaal but resisting the urge to contextualize or explain it.
  86. Convento
    Alterman's camerawork, panning and zooming about Christiaan's ants, rabbits, birds, and other assorted mecha creatures, conveys a sense of ominous religious awe.
  87. The Creeping Garden
    Heady and rigorous, The Creeping Garden is an illuminating science documentary that tickles the imagination.
  88. Over the Hedge
    "Lady and the Tramp" all by its lonesome is worth a dozen of these meat-grinders -- crude commodities, plush toys and product placements in search of a story from which to hang their price tags.
  89. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    Yunis, as he imploringly reminds us, is the Iraqi people, but he is also steeped in Hollywood references, pulling analogies for the U.S. occupation from "Rambo" and "Dirty Harry."
  90. The Girl with All the Gifts
    The Girl with All the Gifts is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.
  91. Cinemania
    Built on a foundation of cinephilia, Cinemania is a valentine of sorts to this movie mecca (you have to love a city, and a film culture, that can sustain such bottomless appetites).
  92. Me Without You
    Essentially humorless, Me Without You manages some pleasing textures all the same.
  93. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
    Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.
  94. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Philosophical ambitions notwithstanding, Hiding and Seeking is basically a personal essay, and the undeniably moving family saga takes over completely in the film's second half.
  95. Hamlet
    An aura of dust and mothballs evidently leaves a capable cast feeling woozy.
  96. Too Much Sleep
    An understated gem.
  97. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.
  98. Solaris
    Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised.
  99. The Goebbles Experiment
    The master propagandist comes across here as a brooding, insecure megalomaniac--or at times, a bitchy member of a particularly malevolent high school clique, an effect enhanced by some of narrator Kenneth Branagh's English line readings.
  100. Rudo y Cursi
    Rudo y Cursi is as fatalistic as any film noir, but it's played for cartoonish screwball comedy. At once smooth and frantic, filled with cozy clutter and vulgar jive, the movie subsumes its moralizing in frat-house entertainment.
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