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. Price of Gold
    The men's faces often vanish as they go underground, threatened with permanent disappearance: the risk of dynamite bursting early, or of rope breaking and leaving them trapped. The filmmakers find those faces again in private interviews above ground, each miner sitting away from the others to discuss how he feels about the job.
  2. Enough Said
    Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini are lovely together, though her character is the sharper-edged of the two. It's Gandolfini's Albert, soft-hearted and soft-bellied, who suffers more. Gandolfini takes the movie's small, offhand jokes and intensifies them.
  3. Rush
    It's both a perceptive dual character study and, that rarity of rarities, a large-scale action movie for grown-ups, one worth leaving the house for.
  4. Prisoners
    Torn between making sense and arguing that the world itself makes no sense, Prisoners is a captive of its own ambitions.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Family
    You can be chuckling one minute then cowering and cringing the next, which tinges the humor with apprehension and taints the brutality with absurdity. That isn't to say that the combo doesn't work at all.
  6. Wadjda
    A simple, solid, deeply affecting film.
  7. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    [Nicholson's] clear affection for the sights and personalities that make Coney Island what it is gets in the way of a hard-hitting investigation of why it hasn't maintained its luster.
  8. Things Never Said
    To be fair, the cast is largely good, given the material.
  9. TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer
    [Kosareff] backburners what's most fascinating (stories of former titans of the industry; segments discussing how shifting social mores impacted said industry, the key roles of women in the factories) and squanders a chance to discuss the larger implications.
  10. Sample This
    The music is incredible, and through interviews with Rosey Grier, Afrika Bambaataa, Questlove, and a squadron of old-school studio musicians, director Dan Forrer unearths some of the hidden history of American pop.
  11. Mother of George
    As Adenike, Gurira is wonderful: Her face is equally radiant whether she's channeling anguish or joy, and she captures the ways in which this woman, so old-country dutiful, also longs to join the modern world.
  12. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    Bruce may succeed in making you wary of the Fed, but, unfortunately, he's also likely to make you wary of his film.
  13. Informant
    Informant is riveting as it slowly assembles a damning profile of its subject. It's also timely.
  14. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    It's an absorbing document of an extraordinary act of generosity.
  15. Hawking
    Finnigan wisely seizes on the gentle strength and charisma of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. She imprints on the film as fully as her former husband.
  16. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    A film that's in perfect sync with its subject.
  17. Good Ol' Freda
    Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.
  18. GMO OMG
    A documentary that is by turns exasperating, illuminating, and intentionally infuriating.
  19. Best Kept Secret
    If Secret can leave the viewer despairing, it's also hugely inspiring, thanks to Mino. She's one of the cinematic heroines of the year.
  20. And While We Were Here
    It's a bummer that the movie settles for such an oft-mined vein of bummed-outedness—for a few minutes, Coiro really had me going.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    What is shocking is seeing the aggressive and malicious response to the movement.
  22. Blue Caprice
    The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.
  23. Mission Park
    The tense prologue of writer-director Bryan Ramirez's Mission Park...evokes a tactile, scary reality utterly betrayed by the following 90-minute string of hackneyed, basic-cable plotting and dialogue.
  24. Dead Before Dawn 3D
    Dead Before Dawn's best jokes are grounded in the warm, believable camaraderie between Casper and his friends, but Mullen is less confident with crowds. The zemon-horde attack scenes are a visual jumble.
  25. Red Obsession
    The doc affords us a look into a world rarely seen by the lumpenproletariat, though we could have done with fewer aerial/time-lapse shots and more history.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Milkshake
    The fact that Jolie isn't very likable would be less of a problem if this film were actually funny, but his selfish disregard for those around him only ends up making us feel bad for the people who care about him.
  27. Winnie Mandela
    A story that probably could have been told better as a miniseries, the film's main strength is its performances.
  28. Tio Papi
    Doesn't try to be anything more than a soft-serve pull of treacly pandering.
  29. Touchy Feely
    Worse than the goofy premise, Shelton fails to enliven the incredibly talk-heavy (but subtext-free) inaction with any sort of visual flair.
  30. A Teacher
    When Diana's fixations begin to take over, Fidell seems ill-prepared to steer the film into strictly psychological territory, resulting in a project that loses its fraught sense of control at the same moment as its embattled protagonist.
  31. Salinger
    What the movie gets hilariously, howlingly wrong is the idea that a life like Salinger's—so extraordinary, yet so willfully humdrum—could somehow be captured by the most shopworn of cinematic techniques.
  32. Populaire
    Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature-length debut is visually sharp, with period design that's eye-catching without being fussy or fetishistic. Too bad there's not much going on beneath the surface.
  33. Riddick
    The only reason to root for Riddick is that his name is on the ticket stub. But he's so dull and the hunters so weird that we're literally cheering for the movie to kill off its personality, one throat slash at a time.
  34. La Maison de la Radio
    La Maison de la Radio is the kind of film that divides its audience into two camps: those happy to observe and those impatient to be told a story.
  35. Hell Baby
    The movie is delightfully crude in places (including an instance of relay puking) and just plain silly-clever in others.
  36. Go Grandriders
    Grandriders mostly, but by no means always, avoids the more cloying or heartwarming aspects of its tale in favor of a frank account of the implications of aging in Taiwan.
  37. Il Futuro
    Scherson, adapting Roberto Bolaño's novel, incorporates surrealistic, hyper-expressive visual techniques, resulting in a film that is excitingly unclassifiable.
  38. Fire in the Blood
    While it's hardly a joy to watch, Fire in the Blood is artful in nearly every frame, perhaps so we don't avert our eyes.
  39. Bounty Killer
    Bounty Killer feels like the adaptation of a video game that doesn't exist.
  40. American Made Movie
    The film's experts and entrepreneurs have a lot to say worth listening to, but little that illuminates any clear path.
  41. Adore
    The disparity between the inherently trashy appeal of the story and the self-serious way it's presented cripples much of the potential for enjoyment. The setup screams pulp, but the film doles out stately drama.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    36 Saints
    The real problem with this film is that its voiceover at the beginning is its only real attempt at storytelling; there is no central character or quest to latch onto. There is only the senseless curse and its slow but sure fulfillment.
  43. Getaway
    The smash-and-crash chase scenes are numbingly dull.
  44. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's modern-day retelling of a Korean fairy tale is an experiment in space, narrative and physical.
  45. Gravity
    Gravity is harrowing and comforting, intimate and glorious, the kind of movie that makes you feel more connected to the world rather than less.
  46. Wampler's Ascent
    From cinematographer Corey Rich's beautifully framed footage, Wampler's wife, Elizabeth, making her directorial debut, has assembled a stirring film that's part documentary, and part promotional tool.
  47. Passion
    Passion is pretty good.
  48. Our Nixon
    In the end, though, Our Nixon is an elusive piece of work. It doesn't add much to our understanding of the man himself, though admittedly, there may not be much more that we want or need to know, anyway.
  49. The Lifeguard
    From concept to execution to tone, writer-director Liz W. Garcia's The Lifeguard is a lifeless misfire.
  50. The Last Christeros
    A war film consumed with waiting.
  51. I Declare War
    Exciting and thoughtful, scraped free of the empty provocations of the wicked-pixie Hit-Girl scenes in Kick-Ass, I Declare War offers movie thrills—smartly plotted betrayals and escapes—as well as its share of disappointments.
  52. Dark Tourist
    Cudlitz gives a haunted performance as a weathered, misogynistic, homophobic, blue-collar man roiling with demons, and Griffith can break your heart as a good woman staggering under the weight of life.
  53. Afternoon Delight
    A film whose themes are as neatly laid out as its characters' behavior is preposterous.
  54. One Direction: This Is Us
    Even calling the film a documentary feels deluded.
  55. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    Despite the poetry its subtitle promises, the fascinating crows-in-the-skyline doc Tokyo Waka is more informative than lyric, which is not at all a complaint.
  56. Closed Circuit
    To Crowley's credit, Closed Circuit is decidedly unflashy. But maybe that's a liability: There's a fine line between restrained and drab, and Closed Circuit falls just on the wrong side of it.
  57. We the Parents
    We the Parents is a must-see civics lesson, an example of the power of grassroots organizing and of having a good lawyer, and of how seemingly small ideas can make big waves.
  58. The United States of Football
    [Pamphilon] won't wow you with his skill behind the camera, but you'll likely still find yourself nodding your head in frustrated agreement.
  59. Una Noche
    The final, moving, nerve-wracking reels are all sea, sky, and desperation.
  60. Thérèse
    If the banality of life within the Bordeaux gentry is the point, then the ensuing oppressiveness is immaculately depicted through precise performances and camerawork—just don't call it emotionally engaging drama.
  61. Short Term 12
    It's a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition, and resonance. Easily one of the best films so far this year, it's a nearly perfect blend of pimple-faced naturalism, righteous moral fury, nuanced social insight, and unsentimental but devastating drama.
  62. Scenic Route
    Kevin and Michael Goetz's direction emphasizes the remoteness of the setting. The howl of the desert wind and the unflagging hammer of the sun are the backdrop for every bad decision, lending them a plausibility they wouldn't have in comfort.
  63. Savannah
    The story overflows with reverence but is drastically short on passion or suspense.
  64. Paradise: Faith
    Though we're never allowed a close-up, Hofstätter's performance comes off as an unselfconscious tour de force, painfully real and culturally lost.
  65. The Frozen Ground
    The climactic interrogation wraps up neatly and just in time, much more like a story "based on actual events" than the events themselves.
  66. Drinking Buddies
    With dexterity and care, Swanberg illuminates our muddled perceptions of our own relationships. He fixates on the minutiae of hanging out, the stuff of little loves and lies, the feints and thrusts we make in sorting matters of head and heart.
  67. The Student
    Racing handheld camerawork and a pulsing rock score energize Roque's bargaining and bribing for the sake of changing an institution's antiquated customs.
  68. The World's End
    The World's End is a big, shaggy dog of a thing, a free-spirited ramble held together by off-kilter asides, clever-dumb puns, and seemingly random bits of dialogue that could almost become catchphrases in spite of themselves.
  69. You're Next
    You're Next streamlines the gory stuff for something truly shocking: good characters. Not deep, mind you. But characters who are crayoned in bright enough that they're interesting even while alive.
  70. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    The nomenclature varies slightly, but there's little new or exciting in City of Bones. For strong female role models and unique fantasy settings, stick with The Hunger Games.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Standing Up
    The execution lacks the whimsical charm and nuance of similarly plotted Moonrise Kingdom as well as the power and clarity of 2011 documentary Bully.
  72. Paranoia
    This is a film at odds with itself, wanting to be a 99 percenter rallying cry but wallowing in and fetishizing 1 percenter accoutrement at every turn.
  73. Jobs
    Kutcher finds compassion without going for anything so cheap as an explanation for Jobs's bad behavior; it's a wily, understated performance.
  74. Abandoned Mine
    Haunted houses come in many shapes and sizes, and the title location in Abandoned Mine is the only fresh coat of paint this one gets.
  75. Pig Death Machine
    Too madcap or not self-serious enough to be called transgressive, Moritsugu's degenerate romp splits the tonal difference between Nick Zedd and John Waters.
  76. Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
    Despite its title, Drew: The Man Behind the Poster is not a documentary about movie poster artist Drew Struzan. Instead, Struzan's poster art is the film's real subject.
  77. Kick-Ass 2
    The most welcome change is the tone. Wadlow has decided he's making a straight-up comedy, and he demonstrates a knack for it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You Will Be My Son
    With a Shakespearean set of family conflicts, the film can’t help but engage, aided supremely by Arestrup, who struts his hour and 40 minutes onscreen with the magnetism of a bitter, baleful lion in winter.
  79. The United States of Autism
    The United States of Autism is an example of a well-meaning documentary that may do more harm than good.
  80. Spark: A Burning Man Story
    As an official history, Spark shines adequate light; I just wish it had spent a little more time on the shadows.
  81. This Is Martin Bonner
    This Is Martin Bonner isn't exciting, but it's also never dull.
  82. The Patience Stone
    The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Herblock: The Black & the White
    Herblock: The Black & The White falters in cheesy dramatizations of young Herblock with his father, or the off-putting and confusing scripted—based on the real Herblock's speeches and writings—interview with older Herblock (Alan Mandell), but it makes up for it by showing history through Herblock's art.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Inch'Allah
    This film has a lot to say, and it's sometimes affecting, but most of the time feels too understated to really deliver the powerful effect it seems to be going for.
  85. Implanted
    Writer-director Thomas Verrette's thriller grapples with the foundational relationship between memory and self-identity. It's a well-trod path of exploration, and Verrette-- largely competent, often pedestrian-- doesn't bring much new to the investigative process.
  86. The Happy Sad
    The cast—and Evans's deft hand with them—makes it worth checking out.
  87. Cutie and the Boxer
    With an intimacy and empathy that's all the more powerful for its modesty, the film investigates the complicated feelings of resentment and affection between wife and husband.
  88. Austenland
    The ending is a bit of an audience-pleasing cop-out, a retreat into formula after 80 minutes or so of upending it. But those upendings are memorable, the cast dishy fun, and Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale's breeze of a script (based on Hale's novel) is smart about the allure of fictional romances.
  89. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Lowery isn't a Malick and he's certainly no Kazan, but he's his own man, and a filmmaker to watch.
  90. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels is that rare contemporary filmmaker who's not afraid of melodrama. The Butler is so old-school it feels modern: Stylistically, it could have been made 30 years ago, but its time is now.
  91. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.
  92. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    The slippages and contradictions between who people are, imagine themselves to be, and present themselves as being inform the structure of Machine, a kind of loose container into which people step and out of which they extract more ideal selves.
  93. Prince Avalanche
    Prince Avalanche reconciles Green's twin modes into a whole no other director could have, deeply felt and light as laughter.
  94. Off Label
    Don't discount October Country filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's tragicomically beautiful art-doc, which sensitively favors unflinching testimonials and visually impressionistic observations over journalistic activism.
  95. Lovelace
    Lovelace, ahem, blows it. The narrative rewind gives us new facts and a whole heap of crying scenes, but no added insight into Linda's mind—she's still as empty as an inflatable toy.
  96. Jug Face
    Kinkle shows a deft hand at pacing and the gore is kept to a minimum.
  97. In a World...
    Bell captures the insularity of certain professional pockets of Hollywood, with all their petty rivalries and backstabbing. But she's sharpest in her exploration of what makes women desire success, and what prevents them from getting it.
  98. I Give It a Year
    The funny stuff outweighs the cock-ups, and supporting performances from Stephen Merchant and Minnie Driver kick the movie toward something grander.
  99. The Gardener
    The filmmaker once responsible for virtuoso, tragicomic social critiques like The Cyclist (1987) and Marriage of the Blessed (1989) now delicately works to see how beautiful the world can look when people embrace each other's differences.
  100. Blood
    Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.
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