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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    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Renoir
    Wisely, director Gilles Bourdos keeps the pace slow, what with all the tensions beneath the surface: Oedipal conflict, career choices, even class struggle.
  2. Blancanieves
    The new film from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is a silent, black-and-white film so witty, riveting, and drop-dead gorgeous that moviegoers may forget to notice that they can't hear the dialogue.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Somebody Up There Likes Me
    The whole thing comes off as a fairy tale bordering on hallucination, perhaps the vision of life that passes before the eyes at death.
  4. Family Weekend
    Quirky indie hell, thy name is Family Weekend. Benjamin Epps's film is the very definition of affected cutie-pie whimsy and weirdness.
  5. Welcome to the Punch
    When bullets aren't flying, the movie offers yesterday's goods in shiny new packaging.
  6. Violeta Went to Heaven
    By inexpertly filtering her art through her travails, Wood and Altunaga reimagine Parra's suicide as an explicable conclusion to her turbulent life.
  7. Rescue in the Philippines
    A well-crafted if structurally generic documentary.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Murph: The Protector
    Such an uncomplicated portrait may be faithful to Murphy...Yet, no matter its veracity, that veneration is the only point conveyed throughout, and in cinematic terms, it renders Murph: The Protector a one-note hagiography, no matter how convincing and affecting its portrait of unimpeachable courage.
  9. 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.
  10. Gimme the Loot
    Leon’s grungy resume indie is a conscientiously modest deal in the end, with a sweet, mumblecoresque ending, but it glows with unmistakable star power.
  11. Eden
    A few moments harp on the sentimental, but overall, this is a powerful addition to the small collection of films dedicated to spreading awareness of this horrific crime.
  12. Everybody Has a Plan
    An identity crisis is at the heart of Everybody Has a Plan—but it's the film's. Even Viggo Mortensen's movingly enigmatic performance as identical twins can't help first-time Argentinean director Ana Piterbarg decide whether she is making an existential tone poem or a brutish thriller.
  13. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    Govenar's slow pace doesn't quite do the story justice. With tighter editing, the film's beats might be just as infectious as those from Conde's drum.
  14. Starbuck
    The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.
  15. Silver Circle
    The charms of what might charitably be called Silver Circle's homemade look and feel are limited.
  16. New World
    Park's direction is sleek and assured, but lacking the dynamism that might help energize a film that—its title notwithstanding—comes off as dully old-school.
  17. My Brother the Devil
    Despite its moral seriousness, the film's a crowd-pleaser, boasting tense set pieces, a raucous polyglot of voices and accents, beauty-in-poverty streetscapes, and two warm, brawling, big-hearted leads.
  18. Love and Honor
    Between the cast's modern hairstyles and attitude, and the paint-by-numbers set design and period costumes...the action comes across as a prolonged, dreary game of dress-up. That director Danny Mooney shoots his material like a TV show doesn't help.
  19. Mindless Behavior: All Around the World
    Throughout the film, Mindless Behavior's four interchangeable members only project youthful enthusiasm and PR-friendly love for their fans.
  20. Le Pont du Nord
    Playful and tense, loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy...It seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers—Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry—and expanded our sense of the possible.
  21. Hunky Dory
    Hunky Dory isn't blazing any trails, but if you're not wholly burned out by the genre and/or look back fondly on the Glam era, you'll find musicals haven't yet completely gone to the (diamond) dogs.
  22. Olympus Has Fallen
    A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.
  23. Dorfman in Love
    Even as Deb comes to embrace the vibrancy of urban life, she's still prey to a blinkered suburban viewpoint which becomes inscribed in the film itself.
  24. Come Out and Play
    Even by the standards of the genre, the characters behave with astonishing stupidity, while Makinov tries repeatedly to mine suspense from slowly creeping up on his actors with the camera.
  25. Leonie
    Well-shot and sometimes briefly affecting, especially when Mortimer is given a scene that lasts longer then thirty seconds, the film moves too quickly for its many incidents to have much impact, and what limited power it builds is dissipated by mortifying narration.
  26. The Call
    The middle third of the film comprises the phone call, a tight 40 minutes.
  27. Admission
    Weitz, an openhearted director if not always a precise one, can't bring himself to whet the knives. Only Fey drills to the center of what Admission might have been—her performance has more layers of emotion than the picture does.
  28. Stars in Shorts
    Sequencing is crucial to any anthology, and Stars in Shorts wisely opens with two of the strongest films.
  29. The Revolutionary Optimists
    Change may be elusive, Optimists confirms, but the will to make it blazes.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mariachi Gringo
    Amid this malarkey Gustafson is smart enough to let the camera linger on musical performances that reveal mariachi to be dynamic and complex as opera.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Kill Hole
    Serious-minded to a fault, this debut feature from writer-director Mischa Webley is a bit of a mess, but committed work from a talented cast gives it unexpected power.
  32. Crazy and Thief
    The film's engagement rests on the viewer's interest in observing—and while the kids are wildly charming at first, like a tired babysitter, one may find their antics growing repetitive and trying. Clocking in at just 51 minutes, Crazy and Thief nevertheless could have been a great deal shorter.
  33. Better Mus' Come
    Uneven acting by the cast and a script that could have used at least one more overhaul to synthesize its elements (the love story is so flimsily mapped out as to be unbelievable) cripple Saulter's ambitions, but the energy of the film pulls you in and holds you through its tragic ending.
  34. My Amityville Horror
    Whether it was all a haunting or a hoax is left unanswered, but the film leaves little doubt that Amityville's greatest source of evil was, fundamentally, parental in nature.
  35. Ginger & Rosa
    In its closing minutes Potter restores the calmer observational tone and mood that distinguish much of Ginger & Rosa, providing a lovely summation of its main character's age-appropriate contradictions.
  36. K-11
    More like an on-the-nose parody of Lee Daniels directing an episode of Oz, K-11 is a pulpy, tone-deaf mess of confused directorial intent—exploitation laughs one minute, somber tragedy the next.
  37. Upside Down
    Solanas comes up with arresting images; it's in telling the story that he stumbles, getting so tripped up in the allegorical details of his invented universe that his characters suffer.
  38. Reality
    Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loath to remember years from now—if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."
  39. Clip
    Milos's film pulses with f#*!-it-all abandon and chintzy eastern-Euro club beats.
  40. If I Were You
    If I Were You is a screwball comedy for Canadians—not LOL funny, but as crazy as you might expect Toronto to get.
  41. From Up on Poppy Hill
    This film's gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one's suspension of disbelief.
  42. Reincarnated
    The film is as lightweight as the ganja-puffing is plentiful, little more than a vanity project that allows its subject to wax philosophical on his past triumphs, tragedies, and spiritual development (aided by Louis Farrakhan) from gangland pimp to nonviolent family man.
  43. Vanishing Waves
    For those who found Inception too plotty and sexless, Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte's sleek sci-fi reverie is hereby advised.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Costa's grainy footage looks amateurish at times—at one point, she runs out of battery and the screen goes dark—but her rule-breaking is bold.
  45. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film's biggest surprise is that, after Wonderstone loses everything, we're expected to feel something besides impatience as he learns to become a better person—and gapes like a child at the wonder of magic.
  46. Spring Breakers
    Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.
  47. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    The directors plant a camera in front of Roth and get him talking. To smooth over edits, they show us book covers and old photos—Roth was dashing, charming, a little dangerous, one of his college friends tells us, but she doesn't need to say it. It's manifest, and it's still true. The film is especially recommended to anyone who thinks they hate him.
  48. Downeast
    Redmon and Sabin carefully tease apart the insidious process of American deindustrialization, and by the end of the film the threads they unravel reveal how the free market can choke like a noose.
  49. Thinly Veiled
    This ludicrous, overlong, pathetically conceived, instant festival rejection might just be sincere enough to rank among laughable drunk-crowd curios like Troll 2, Birdemic and, ye Gods, The Room.
  50. The Other Side of the Ice
    Too much of the movie is just people being crabby (or, later, dumb!) in fascinating places, which is less enthralling than the places themselves.
  51. Dead Man Down
    It's all so much turgid brooding, dialogue underlined with import, and leaden symbolism involving Rapace's white and red dresses, none of which is salvaged by a typically understated Farrell performance.
  52. Girl Rising
    The stories, shaped by anecdotal brevity, are often charmingly modest. Only an insistence on blandly inspirational rhetoric and a series of didactic interludes threaten to reduce the film to a PSA about the plight of young women in developing countries.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electrick Children
    Electrick Children juggles heavy things, with humor and sobriety in their proper, Book of Ecclesiastes turn. Best of all, Thomas has an aversion to the easy resolution—she knows precisely which mysteries to keep dangling.
  54. Citizen Hearst
    Sometimes Citizen Hearst feels as breezy and electric as the newsreels Hearst pioneered; other times it feels like the video they'll make you watch during orientation on your first day at 300 West 57th.
  55. The Last Exorcism Part II
    When the creators of The Last Exorcism Part II swapped pseudo-verité realism for psychological realism, they made it a lot harder to take their franchise seriously.
  56. The Attacks of 26/11
    Attacks doesn't establish the severity of a real-life tragedy, it only crassly devalues the loss of human life.
  57. The Silence
    Making his feature debut, Swiss-born writer/director Baran bo Odar has turned Jan Costin Wagner’s 2007 novel The Silence into a taut, beautifully acted thriller.
  58. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.
    • 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.
  60. Le Petit Soldat (re-release)
    It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.
  61. Language of a Broken Heart
    Full of familiar tropes, exhausted rhythms, self-conscious references to genre forebears...Language of a Broken Heart, directed by Rocky Powell from a screenplay by Juddy Talt, is pure product.
  62. Gut Renovation
    What a shame it is that Friedrich, so impassioned by her subject matter, couldn’t get enough objectivity to make a film that’s more than just a complaint.
  63. Greedy Lying Bastards
    It’s too bad that Rosebraugh himself can be so off-putting. The data presented is horrifying enough without sarcastic narration, or his Roger & Me–style pursuit of an interview with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
  64. Emperor
    Given its true-life basis, the story is already devoid of suspense regarding Hirohito’s ultimate fate, and Fellers’s inquiry is made more sluggish by dramatically inert conversations with Japanese officials.
  65. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    It’s a moving tale made more so because even after he’s “won,” Pineda maintains a clear-eyed pragmatism about what living a fairy tale costs.
  66. Beyond the Hills
    The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.
  67. The We and the I
    At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments
  68. Welcome to Pine Hill
    At times the improvised dialogue seems too schematic and superfluous, especially in view of such exploratory and observant handheld camera work. Otherwise, though, this is wonderful stuff.
  69. The Lost Medallion
    The first in a projected series of four values-encouraging family films, The Lost Medallion is so corny that even the most conservative parent might beat a hasty retreat.
  70. The Sweeney
    The Sweeney—a new British police drama—feels a lot like an American-made cop movie circa 1990.
  71. 21 and Over
    The movie rambles in a way that dilutes any possibility of edgy discomfort. Lucas and Moore have good control over the timing within the gags; it's the spaces between them that stretch out awkwardly. You can't hate 21 & Over, and you can't laugh at it. The most you can do is just pity it for not being as outrageous as it thinks it is.
  72. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.
  73. Future Weather
    The film is most successful as a character study of a stubborn, prickly girl whose intelligence far outweighs her immediate prospects.
  74. The Condemned
    Writer-director Roberto Busó-Garcia's Spanish-language movie is so tame and so completely boring that to advertise it as a horror film is to insult the genre.
  75. The Unspeakable Act
    Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.
  76. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    Patronizing from toe to chin, the film opts continually for self-congratulation and cheesy aphorism, and could've-should've been comfortable slotted into a half hour of airtime on TJC.
  77. White T
    When choosing to unleash seemingly any desperate comedian they could find willing to work for scale, the creators of White T ensured that almost nothing about White T would make sense.
  78. War Witch
    Nguyen's matter-of-fact storytelling proves to be the right match for a life of extraordinary suffering. In art, lives like Komona's are all too often given an alien sheen. Here, they feel unnervingly plausible.
  79. Stoker
    Park's methodical but tonally uneven direction too often eschews luridness; it's as if he can't decide exactly how far to push his material into the loopy. Still, his assured and evocative camerawork intimates that peril lurks everywhere, and there's an alien quality to its performances and dialogue that suggests a world slightly unhinged.
  80. A Place at the Table
    A Place at the Table attempts to document its subject with the progressive angle and emotional effect of such docs as "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman."
  81. Phantom
    The ensuing suspense story is a pastiche of familiar tropes—effectively paced, but without originality. And what is up with combinations of Ed Harris, water, and unbelievably hokey endings?
  82. Jack the Giant Slayer
    By the standards of today's bombastic "event" movies, this is a refreshingly modest endeavor—one in which the main event is the skillful holding of our attention, all the way from "Once upon a time" to "Happily ever after."
  83. Genius on Hold
    One marvel of the film is how it conveys so much information so quickly, and with such accessibility.
  84. A Fierce Green Fire
    There's no consistent narrative thread to carry the film from start to finish, and A Fierce Green Fire fails to open any singular intellectual or psychological point of investigation.
  85. Leviathan
    Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.
  86. The End of Love
    It's the kind of indie in which shrugging naturalism means nobody has a distinctive personality or energy, and the claustrophobic sense of young Industry workers collarbone-deep into their own navels is hard to shake.
  87. Doctor Bello
    The worst thing about Doctor Bello's tacky, pseudo-spiritual proceedings isn't how bad the soap opera melodramatics are (Tyler Perry would blush!), but rather how lazily sketched out its story of one man's road to self-actualization is.
  88. Bless Me, Ultima
    Volumes are said about class, assimilation, and the ways the assimilated sometimes shame and scar those who haven't shorn themselves of ethnic or racial signifiers. There is pungency in this shorthand, in these sketches that are richly evocative without saying too much or giving too little. You can't help but wish the movie had more of it.
  89. The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek
    Despite Civil War homages—hazy vistas, silhouetted cannons, and even the famous Ken Burns pan over still photos—the imaginary heroes never spring to life.
  90. Escape from Planet Earth
    Escape From Planet Earth makes a compelling case for our disposable culture to finally get wiped out by malevolent aliens.
  91. Snitch
    Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation's sentencing laws for first-time drug offenders is quickly subsumed by a jacked-up narrative of a father going to extremes to save his son.
  92. Rubberneck
    Karpovsky is unsettlingly good as Paul, and Newman's Danielle is sexy and layered.
  93. Red Flag
    Some genuinely tender moments—especially the final scene, which at this admittedly early point in 2013 qualifies as one of the best of the year—offset the occasional dramatic misfire.
  94. One Life
    Beautiful slo-mo, up-close-and-personal cinematography abounds, as does an aggravating desire to turn its many subjects (and their plights to survive) into reflections of mankind.
  95. Northeast
    A bland aimlesssness characterizes both Northeast's lead character and the film itself.
  96. Kai po che!
    The dramatic stakes are so puny that every obstacle can be overcome with a simple work-it-out montage.
  97. Inescapable
    Inescapable isn't a terrible movie, but absent its ripped-from-the-headlines setting it's unremarkable.
  98. The ABCs of Death
    What's unexpected is how thoroughly The ABCs of Death's ample duds overshadow its treasures, and how uninspired it feels as a whole.
  99. Special 26
    The film is superficially tense throughout, but director Pandey doesn't know what to emphasize when.
  100. Safe Haven
    Hough emits all the charisma of a personal assistant.
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