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. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    Score may be little more than a superficial primer on a dizzyingly expansive subject, but Schrader offers just enough to satisfy both film-music novices and dyed-in-the-wool fanatics.
  2. Trust
    Trust never seems dated and, as a youth film, it may even be usefully pedagogic. [30 July 1991]
    • Village Voice
  3. Nancy
    I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.
  4. Fight Club
    This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.
  5. Outrage
    Like one of its yakuza bigs, Outrage commands respect but no affection.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kawasaki's Rose
    Performed and directed with assured elegance, Kawasaki's Rose is a film that recognizes life as a tumultuous mess of both noble and base intensions and actions, as well as one that understands the thorny tragedies such chaos often leaves in its wake.
  7. R
    Following "Prophet" director Jacques Audiard's lead, Lindholm and Noer attempt to make up in raw emotion what their film lacks in context, an approach good for a surprising amount of mileage, until the project finally chokes on its own inevitable nihilism.
  8. The Final Year
    The filmmakers offer us glimpses of the diplomatic life but too little telling detail.
  9. Price Check
    Mabius is understated and sympathetic as a guy who makes some dickish choices, and Susan, played by anyone else, might be a completely unrelatable force of nature. Although Posey renders Susan's instability and dominance with gusto, the character's vulnerability and pain are manifest.
  10. Wild Canaries
    The story Levine spins out of this premise has a rambunctious, woolly quality, though in the end there may be too many stringy loose ends for him to weave in properly. Still, Wild Canaries has its quiet charms.
  11. Seasons
    The movie starts in an ice age, as I've said, so you can guess where it's all heading, but what you'll remember from it is the vision of a plump ol' bear snoozing in a tree in the rain.
  12. Be with Me
    Sometimes clumsy and dry, always sympathetic, and wryly interested in the impact food has on social intercourse, Be With Me is eventually affecting once its elliptical shape becomes clear.
  13. The Way We Get By
    It's the stuff of a fine short on what any "Bowling Alone" reader knows is the last generation of civic-minded civilians, but Gaudet has a hard time extending his material to feature length.
  14. SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
    The talking heads (lower case) are fine, but the dream-drama music-video theater piece of Rock on a gurney while nurses and doctors consult around him takes too much time away from the reason people want to see this: what Rock saw.
  15. Somewhere
    Those who groan that the writer-director has made another indulgent film about the obscenely privileged have overlooked Coppola's redoubtable gifts at capturing milieu, languor, and exacting details.
  16. The Well
    Still most easily defined by its unavoidable parallels to any number of lesbian-overtone psychodramas.
  17. Home Movie
    The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.
  18. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    The film is flecked with moments of interest, though this decidedly minor and not particularly cinematographic affair is clearly best suited to television.
  19. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    The film too often relies on rote sermonizing when tackling the city's scourge of shootings, a grave topic that The Next Cut is simply too feeble to examine with any real depth or meaning.
  20. The Book of Life
    The film's rote right-makes-might fantasy wouldn't be so obnoxious if pandering to the lowest common denominator wasn't its default mode.
  21. The Wrecking Crew
    The crew's recollections and occasional demonstrations, on their instruments, are revealing and delightful, but the film itself could use more of their professionalism and chops; the editing's haphazard, and it's not always clear why one segment follows another.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Page Turner
    Anyone who remembers "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie's kitchen, and Dercourt's overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke–esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flanders
    Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his.
  24. The Final Member
    the shock factor was to be expected from the get-go, and so it's not all that shocking. What is compelling, however, is the weird way this film demonstrates the supreme emotional effectiveness of a simple quest narrative.
  25. The Workers Cup
    Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.
  26. The Future
    Sophie's (or is it July's?) coy narcissism becomes a criticism of itself, and her "sadness" turns into something truly sad. In short, I have seen The Future and it's heartbreaking.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    North Face
    Director Philipp Stölzl makes the movie a tad more political (i.e., anti-Nazi) than it needs to be, but Fürmann's stoic performance reduces the story to its harsh, true fundamentals.
  28. Workingman's Death
    Michael Glawogger's rather majestic Workingman's Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    3 Idiots
    In writer-director Rajkumar Hirani's tuneful, enjoyable college comedy, 3 Idiots, Khan plays "Rancho," an engineering student so brilliant that he barely has to break a sweat to place first in his class.
  30. Cinderella
    Like all of Branagh's films, even some of the bad ones, Cinderella is practically Wagnerian in its ambitions — it's so swaggering in its confidence that at times it almost commands us to like it. But it's also unexpectedly delicate in all the right ways, and uncompromisingly beautiful to look at.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos
    This intermittently fascinating documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the Cosmos --which is also the rise and fall of U.S. soccer.
  32. Mr. Holmes
    Condon, like this Holmes, can't quite keep everything in his story straight and clear, but he and his film come close just often enough.
  33. A Whisper to a Roar
    An expertly drawn primer on the soft dictatorships that constrained five different countries and the peaceful revolutions that sought to expunge them.
  34. Web Junkie
    The slow (albeit unevenly paced) unveiling of the boys' stories is persuasive and chilling.
  35. They Will Have to Kill Us First
    As a look at geopolitics, the film is limited, but as a musical doc it's strong — and it's best as the movie to recommend old white Americans go see as a reminder that people everywhere remain people.
  36. Ruby Sparks
    She (Kazan) also wrote the screenplay, which begs interpretation as a frustrated actress's commentary on the way that even ostensibly serious writers write women - that is, for maximum convenience. Still, the direction, from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), is never more than workmanlike.
  37. Rock School
    Don Argott's lively documentary, ostensibly a paean to alternative pedagogy, extends its subject a long leash, and he in turn does his damnedest to sabotage the project. Rock School ends up being a movie about just how little fun rock 'n' roll can be.
    • 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.
  39. Demonlover
    However glitzy, clever, and luridly philosophical, Demonlover is still mainly an old-fashioned thriller.
  40. Time to Leave
    Time to Leave amounts simply to a semi-thoughtful disease-of-the-week weepie, admirable in its restraint but shying from the terror of the situation.
  41. I Saw the Devil
    Never good with nuance, Kim is a beast with disarming imagery but has few resonating ideas, leaving the domino-tumble of brutality to become its own tiresome spectacle.
  42. The Eclipse
    The Eclipse is a curious Irish ghost story that fiddles with the recipe just enough to produce interesting results.
  43. Kill List
    Brutal and bloody and utterly unnerving, thanks in no small measure to Jim Williams's brilliant score, which is filled with strings so taut, they sound like screams you might hear in the distance and decide (quite sensibly) to ignore.
  44. Whisky
    The film is a model of precision and economy, from the scrupulous framing and editing to the dryly note-perfect performances.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
    The charm of Tim Irwin's documentary, which charts via archival footage and talking-head reminiscences the arc of the band bassist Watt shared with guitarist D. Boon and drummer George Hurley in the early '80s, is that emphasis on the personal.
  46. Tupac: Resurrection
    Though the edits can be too living-room smooth, the passion and pathology on display transcend the Tabitha Soren overload.
  47. Kung Fu Panda 3
    The movie undercuts its own undercutting.
  48. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
    The film risks self-importance, but when Peralta admits through tears just how much he loves his skater charges, it imparts what every parent knows: that even better than achieving one's own success is shepherding the success of others.
  49. Himizu
    Intermittently refreshing yet thoroughly unpleasant.
  50. The Apostate
    Ogalla makes it happen: Bedroom-eyed and shaggy, looking every inch like a reincarnation of dead-too-soon ‘70s French star Patrick Dewaere but without the haywire intensity, he's an amiable spectacle.
  51. World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
  52. Wonder
    It tempers its fairly blunt narrative approach by constantly shifting its perspective. It starts off as the portrait of a troubled child, but expands to become a film about community.
  53. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Whatever its flaws may be — and there are many — John Ridley's Jimi: All Is By My Side is compelling for one specific reason: It's more attuned to the women in Hendrix's life than it is to Hendrix himself.
  54. To Be Takei
    To Be Takei is never less than joyful — much like the man himself.
  55. Al otro lado
    A competent, earnest ethnographic video doc that never quite rises above its own best intentions.
  56. LA 92
    LA 92 is about what this all looked like on TV, a sort of Los Angeles Burns Itself.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Take
    Combining the common-sense lucidity of Klein's "No Logo" with an undertone of melancholy doggedness, The Take follows its characters through a national election that feels like an antipodean doppelgänger of our own.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Stripped of Larsson's social/political minutiae and slimmed down to its thriller chassis, certain clichés become more glaring: Lisbeth's superhuman hacking skills, overfamiliar from a zillion TV procedurals; an exploitative lesbian sex scene that mightn't have pleased the feminist Larsson; the secondary villain, a blond giant incapable of feeling pain--gah!; and the too-comfy manner in which the twin narratives finally interlace.
  59. Darfur Now
    If you evaluate Darfur Now against the goals it sets for itself--as a stirring call to action--it must be considered lacking.
  60. Everything Else (Todo Lo Demás)
    Almada deserves credit for creating a portrait of a character so often passed over onscreen: Doña is a woman in her sixties with a decidedly unglamorous life. But the relentless darkness here (both figuratively and literally — some of the shots of Doña in her home are shrouded in blackness) often proves more alienating than illuminating.
  61. The Trip to Spain
    It is at once a desperate echo of long-gone glories and a glory itself.
  62. Borgman
    Van Warmerdam keeps such a calm, firm hold on the material that he practically hypnotizes you into following along to the end. The craftsmanship is precise; the result is enigmatic.
  63. The Candidate
    But why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like “The Candidate?” Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Zelary
    Zelary strands its protagonists in a hermetically sealed world where time runs in place. It's a feeling that viewers of this two-and-a-half-hour epic will come to know all too well.
  65. What Keeps You Alive
    Minihan’s ambitions are towering, so it’s only right to note that he doesn’t quite get there. The ideas, even the emotions, don’t develop and grow.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    Desperately overcompensating for the fact that most horror films are already parodies of themselves, Behind the Mask takes a bite out of the dumb "Scream" franchise before devouring its own tail, proving that you are what you eat.
  67. The Tenth Man
    In his lovely new film, Argentine director Daniel Burman mixes reality with fiction in inventive ways.
  68. Mister Universo
    His endeavor is one not of major strife but of minor flashes of magic.
  69. The Ipcress File
    The Ipcress File was reasonably entertaining while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt I'd been had... Among the tiresome directorial tricks in The Ipcress File is the repetitively off-angle anti-climax with the heavies feeding parking meters, hibernating in libraries, and plotting at band concerts. Nothing happens most of the time, and this is supposed to be funny and ironic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Son of Rambow
    At its most likable, Son of Rambow evokes the rush of discovery that turns budding cinephiles into lifers--that delight in finding a film that seems to express or coalesce some inchoate yearning, including a yen to share.
  71. In Good Company
    The scenario is stale but the actors are faultless.
  72. The Phenom
    The Phenom unfolds as a series of quiet, incisive conversations that showcase subtle, insightful performances.
  73. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over's brazen lopsidedness may diminish its credibility, but it taps into the essence of all conspiracy theories-the desperate desire to believe.
  74. Unmistaken Child
    The movie is a drama of faith, a Tibetan monk's search for the reincarnation of his beloved master Lama Konchog.
  75. Cop Car
    The film soars early as a fantasy steeped in life and crashes into a drag of a crime drama, one ripped from the movies rather than anyone's idea of small-town Colorado.
  76. On the Outs
    Most importantly, the environment feels real: the accents, the snaps, the working moms and warehouse crack nooks, every dilapidated stairwell, every bodega and lovingly appointed teenage bedroom sanctuary.
  77. La Nouvelle Ève
    Takes its shape from (Viard's) performance, which is as big as life.
  78. Chutney Popcorn
    The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.
  79. Much Ado About Something
    It's a pleasingly Hollywood notion that plays well with Rubbo's interpolated quotes from "Shakespeare in Love."
  80. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.
  81. Seaside
    Compare it to what passes for sophisticated filmmaking in this country and the movie becomes a living instrument of cinematic humanism: lovingly intent on observing, not judging; concerned with sympathy, not control; accepting the inevitable ambiguities, not denying them.
  82. Shadow Magic
    Properly picturesque but lacks subtlety and substance in blending Chinese and Western history, ideas, and cinematic conventions.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Last Dance is riveting when it focuses on the challenges of crossing a generational divide --The movie loses steam toward the end.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lost Arcade
    The film meets the open door, come-as-you-are community on its own level, freely following both new and recurring faces over its diffuse 79 minutes and avoiding the forced, interwoven three-character structure that far too many works of American nonfiction seem obliged to employ.
  85. Julie & Julia
    It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There's half of a great movie in Julie & Julia.
  86. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    [Whedon] wants to give us everything, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat. Age of Ultron is a middling film, yet it's so heavy with his sweat that it never feels like a lazy cash-in — which for a preordained summer megahit is an accomplishment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Captain America: The First Avenger
    (A) hokey, hacky, two-hour-plus exercise in franchise transition/price gouging, complete with utterly unnecessary post-converted 3-D.
  88. Glassland
    Barrett faces the daunting task of trying to contain Collette's tumultuous performance, and he struggles to make Reynor's more restrained turn work in the same space. The film trudges along in Collette's wake, fumbling for something to focus on apart from the bleeding wound just offscreen.
  89. Three... Extremes
    A black-blooded hoot.
  90. Born to Be Wild
    If not for its outsize IMAX presentation, this handsome nonfiction film would be little more than an uplifting episode of PBS's "Nature."
  91. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.
  92. An Open Secret
    Berg might have proven that there's a circle of powerful creeps, but not that the blame for this goes straight to the top.
  93. Our New President
    Our New President merely scratches the surface, and in its own weird way, comes to embody the plague of shallow spectacle it purports to fight against.
  94. City Island
    An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.
  95. Never Here
    Up through the ambiguous ending, Thoman withholds the story’s bigger puzzle pieces, which is satisfying when the focus is on Miranda’s quietly traumatic unraveling. Yet as a mystery, Never Here teases too much naturalism to get away with the haunting abstruseness Lynch does in his masterful return to Twin Peaks.
  96. Something's Gotta Give
    Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    109 mostly black-and-white minutes of punk's wet nurse floating through the modern world while endlessly ruminating on mortality, art, and the occasional bodily function. Problem is, there's nary a hint of context, even with biographic essentials.
  98. The Girlfriend Experience
    Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.
  99. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind Game
    All scrunched together into a dense marathon of optical-cranial overload, this mental puzzle-box arrives three decades too late for what would have been an inevitable midnight movie run, but undoubtedly there are American otakus popping this one into multi-region DVD players right now amid the glorbeling of bong hits.
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