Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Speed Sisters
    Although Speed Sisters is not comprehensive, it's vital.
  2. Lucky Them
    Strangely Bechdel Test-failing and as far removed from real life as Middle Earth, Lucky Them nonetheless hits familiar beats in welcome and unexpected ways, and does it by the book.
  3. The TV Set
    The TV Set is wry and true about the messy tangle of art, commerce, and family, as talented creative types try to stay true to themselves and put food on the table. The movie is also a treasure trove of inspired comic personalities.
  4. Roar
    Roar is a thrilling bore, an inanity with actual peril in every scene.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff's glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.
  6. Circumstance
    Keshavarz's earnest, well-intentioned first feature on women's oppression in Iran has trouble resisting its own heavy hand.
  7. Maryam
    Serry perfectly captures the peculiar climate, creating uncanny echoes with today's situation. Persian stars Shaun Toub and Shohreh Aghdashloo are extremely convincing as Maryam's parents.
  8. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Less a movie than a seething psychological bonanza.
  9. Journey from Zanskar
    Although the film might be forced to rely rather heavily on Richard Gere's narration simply to situate the Western viewer, the actor does unify a bumptious collection of material that, taken together, relates what has to be admitted is a remarkable story.
  10. My Brooklyn
    As a paean to the sort of vibrant, quickly disappearing community that Brooklyn represents less now than it did in the past, her film works well; as a genuine study, it sometimes falls short.
  11. A Tale of Two Sisters
    Either way, Kim's rather clumsily acted film remains monstrously effective ookiness, with crepuscular cinematography (by the Hollywood-destined Kim Byeong-il) that suggests a nightmare endured from inside a suffocating velvet pillowcase.
  12. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    This is potentially wonderful, if not exactly new stuff, but Gilliam and McKeown's willful refusal of coherent narrative and determination to pack every idea about art they ever had into one scenario, make this fiendishly gorgeous movie more exhausting than exhilarating to watch.
  13. 6ixtynin9
    Though overlong at two hours, 6ixtynin9—only the director's second outing (after 1997's spoofy" Fun Bar Karaoke')—is impressive for the tonal control Ratanaruang applies to his swerving scenario.
  14. Arlington Road
    The mode is hysteric-Hitchcockian, the result mostly devoid of suspense.
  15. The Salt of Life
    Di Gregorio's performance sets the tone of dim hope and quiet forbearance, telling the story through reactions: an ever-accommodating smile that shades into a wince; sparkling, heavy-lidded eyes betrayed by vexed brows.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Drama/Mex
    "Amores Perros" is a yappy whelp compared to this striking degrees-of-separation drama by Mexican writer-director Gerardo Naranjo.
  17. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    It's an absorbing document of an extraordinary act of generosity.
  18. Unexpected
    Unexpected isn't about, but rather a product of, class-based condescension in America.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paternal Instinct
    As intimate as a home movie, Instinct has only one flaw: its length.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Runaways
    In The Runaways' first hour, there's a guttural pleasure to be had in riding waves of rock-movie cliché spiked with socio-sexual commentary. The movie is at its best when working through the contradictions of teen sex-for-sale, when it's both turn-on and creep-out.
  21. Pawn Sacrifice
    Pawn Sacrifice clicks along with crisp efficiency. Zwick, the director behind movies like Glory and Blood Diamond, is old-school in his attention to craftsmanship, alive to telling details.
  22. Patrik Age 1.5
    One is never bored, thanks to the innate charms of Skarsgård and young Ljungman.
  23. White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
    A formal hodgepodge, Congo suffers from abrasive voice-over narration, stilted re-enactments, and an awkward courtroom conceit, but gets by on its shocking material.
  24. Bye Bye Germany
    The story digs deep enough that the cheese Garbarski lays on at the end feels well-earned. It’s a charmingly made film.
  25. Memphis
    Sutton's Memphis framed in fascinating layers -- leaves and tree limbs, wig shops and overgrown gravel roads. It's a movie of a place and a character rather than about them.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Week with Marilyn
    You never forget that you're watching a talented living actress laboring to mimic a long-gone movie star who - on-screen, at least - never seemed to be acting at all.
  27. Kingdom of Shadows
    Though at times too splintered by its various points of interest, Bernardo Ruiz's up-close-and-personal documentary is nonetheless harrowing in its details.
  28. Kill Your Darlings
    Kill Your Darlings is an undernourished and over-emphatic film.
  29. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    It's hard to tell whether Spielberg and Lucas are trying too hard or trying at all--the thing's such a mess, such an unmitigated disaster, that damned is the scholar stuck with the unfortunate task of deciphering this cynical, clinical gibberish in decades to come.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scott Walker: 30 Century Man
    From the increasingly experimental solo records that followed, and Walker's subsequent reputation as a reclusive genius and cult figure, you'd expect the subject of Stephen Kijak's documentary to be a forbidding, pretentious artiste--and the pleasant surprise of Kijak's film is that he's anything but.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Battle for Haditha
    An engaging Iraqudrama that straddles the line between blistering exposé and Spielbergian heart-tugger.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Salt
    From the start, this character plays to the star's strengths, merging subject and object, warrior and victim, ass-kicker and damsel-in-distress. And hero and villain.
  33. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    Most astonishingly, with the franchise's powerful climax, Lawrence has managed to align her parallel Hollywood lives and reinvent the prestigious popcorn flick, a crowd-pleaser with intelligent class.
  34. I Love You Phillip Morris
    Nothing tops ILYPM's Jim Carrey ... in the most gloriously raunchy, unrepentant moment in the an(n)als of Hollywood A-listers doing gay-for-pay.
  35. Venus and Serena
    What Venus and Serena does extraordinarily well is capture the work ethic and undersung smarts of the sisters while taking viewers deep into their enviably close relationship.
  36. Pecker
    If scandal, sleaze, and celebrity worship are our national religion, then John Waters is an American prophet.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Tucker & Dale piquantly tweaks every '80s ax-murderer flick you've ever seen, though it provides the same satisfaction of watching bratty undergrads perish one by one. Admittedly, the spoof loses steam in its last reel (i.e., when it runs out of frat kids to kill), but the film strikes an enjoyable tone of congenial gore.
  38. Everything Must Go
    Everything Must Go, which is ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to broken-heartland movies like "Up in the Air" and "Cedar Rapids," although this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.
  39. The French Minister
    Mannered and often very funny.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exit: The Right to Die
    Filmed and edited with near anesthetic calm, Fernand Melgar's documentary meditation on the work of Swiss euthanasia outfit Exit ADMD doesn't so much argue for the legalization of assisted suicide as recline comfortably in the knowledge that this firm's devoted "escorts" are here to direct terminal patients toward that shining light down the hall.
  41. A Skin So Soft
    Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté holds up a shallow mirror to the world of bodybuilding in the underwhelming experimental documentary A Skin So Soft.
  42. Amazing Grace
    Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake.
  43. A Room for Romeo Brass
    So low-key it could be mistaken for a throwaway. But Meadows's understanding of childhood fears and fantasies and the yearning, heartfelt performances he draws from his two young actors should not be underestimated.
  44. One Last Kiss
    The director knows how to apply textural gloss, but his portrait of sex-as-war is strictly sitcom.
  45. Last Night
    A witty, trenchant script, lots of complicated characters, and a few actors who turn human frailty into something nearly sublime.
  46. Francine
    Reveals itself to be a project of few interesting ideas.
  47. Naz & Maalik
    It's no news that a filmmaker's debut is mostly 90 minutes of a couple kids gabbing on the streets of Brooklyn. But writer/director Jay Dockendorf's buoyant, tragic, richly textured walking-and-talking job Naz & Maalik exhibits none of the shambling narcissism that so often characterizes such projects.
  48. Saving Mr. Banks
    Saving Mr. Banks, a fictionalized account of two weeks Travers spent on the lot in Burbank, is proof that Walt has thawed and secretly reclaimed Disney's reins.
  49. The Warriors
    If the movie is not as dangerous as its detractors claim, neither is it as glorious and memorable as some of its less discriminating admirers would have it. I find the spectacle fading from my memory in a jumble of dislocated colors and motions. In retrospect, it seems too studiously unreal.
  50. Made in Dagenham
    Though nothing here is as rousing as "The Pajama Game's" raise-baiting "Seven and a Half Cents," the always-welcome Miranda Richardson steals the film in a small role as Barbara Castle, Labour P.M.
  51. Beauty and the Beast
    The clock, Cogsworth, serves as a perfect metaphor for the production itself: The movie’s just as poky and lumbering as he is while huffing up the staircase to escort Belle to her bedroom.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Wheel of Time
    Patient and fascinated, but never succumbing to abstraction, Wheel of Time can be seen as the middle installment of a trilogy against nature.
  53. Ivory Tower
    What the film does accomplish is making you think, especially about how universities are spending their ever-increasing tuition on top-notch campus amenities and their own disastrous loans, and how state governments and federal agencies are similarly passing off their education cuts onto the young people who they expect to one day run the economy and society.
  54. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Deconstructing Dad might be a messy biography, but it is a fascinating primer on Scott's work.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    X-Men: First Class
    A cameo from an old-school X-Man only serves to remind how stylish and witty the first installment was a decade ago. Lacking a single memorable joke or striking image, First Class is as perfunctory and passionless as would-be franchise resurrections get.
  56. The Confirmation
    The movie's not just good but moving, funny and true to the way people actually live in hard-times America.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tekkonkinkreet
    It's both too cute and too rambling.
  58. Honeymoon
    While its ending descends into standard horror tropes that fail to completely satisfy its promise, the film nevertheless achieves emotional resonance due to how effectively it joins its source of horror with the stuff of everyday human anxieties.
  59. Deathgasm
    Cawthorne's performance underpins the resulting power fantasy with genuine emotion.
  60. 1001 Grams
    This portrait of an introverted soul brought out of her shell is not without its charms.
  61. Alien: Covenant
    If in the end it doesn’t quite work — if its many fascinating pieces and ideas and odds and ends don’t ever cohere into a whole — lament not what might have been. Instead, be grateful that Ridley Scott has lost none of his ability to provoke, captivate and infuriate.
  62. Monsters University
    Monsters University feels not like the work of artists eager to express something but like that of likable pros whose existence depends on getting a rise out the kids. It's like the scares Sully and Mike spring on those sleeping tykes: technically impressive but a job un-anchored to anything more meaningful.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Story of an African Farm
    A modest tale intermittently well told.
  64. The American Side
    While The American Side may not quite achieve the classic thriller tone to which it aspires, it does create an enjoyably hard-boiled world.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Scream of Fear
    No thrill, no suspense, no direction, bad in every way. [31 Aug 1961, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  66. Deadpool
    Deadpool might even stand as one of the strongest and most inventive films of the high-early-late superhero baroque — if we could just turn off its built-in commentary track.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies.
  68. The Matador
    Taking the medium slopes and never venturing into extremities, Shepard gets all of his laughs if not the ironic heart-tugs, and his cast is perfectly in tune. (Davis in comedic-observant mode is funnier than most American actresses in fifth gear.)
  69. Maudie
    Maudie is hit-or-miss, but you’ll probably bawl anyway.
  70. The Town Is Quiet
    The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.
  71. Dick
    Most conveniently synopsized as Romy and Michelle's Watergate Adventure.
  72. Pola X
    This moody, rapturous adaptation of Pierre, Herman Melville's gothic follow-up to "Moby Dick," is never less than seriously romantic.
  73. Panic Room
    Like the shelter for which it is named, Panic Room is an efficiently tooled construction (albeit one whose success is overly predicated on its villains' single-minded idiocy). But unlike the eponymous treasure trove, there's nothing inside.
  74. Ae Fond Kiss...
    Despite the agreeable lead performances, it's one of Loach's more forgettable films.
  75. Beyond Hatred
    It's easy to find fault with the film's maudlin score, overlong static shots devoid of the abstract poetry they infer, and a second half that pursues legal rather than personal ramifications at a trial where cameras aren't allowed. But, following the family's path to closure, we'll forgive.
  76. Punching Henry
    Well observed and sometimes hilarious, Punching Henry stands as a better film than The Comedian, but many fewer people will see it. That might be its truest punch line.
  77. Love in the Buff
    Buff gels into a surprisingly moving look at the machinations of the heart.
  78. Bad News Bears
    Hardly the kids'-sports movie we need, but maybe it's as much as we can handle.
  79. High-Rise
    Ben Wheatley's muddled adaptation of the dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise — one of many Ballard books that examine the pathologizing effects of modern technology and convenience — suffers from being both too literal and too obtuse in its alterations.
  80. Timecode
    I suspect that Time Code was a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.
  81. Paradise: Love
    It might be the most lonesome film about a tropical vacation we've seen, and the greatest film ever made about the weird socioeconomics of tourism.
  82. The Boys in the Band
    Mart Crowley's brilliantly bitchy lines are worth standing on line for, and the original off-Broadway cast stands up well on the screen. [28 May 1970, p.53]
    • Village Voice
  83. The Robber
    Against interpretation, Heisenberg (who is, after all, the grandson of the physicist who gave us the uncertainty principle) has nonetheless created a nimble, dynamic character study of a fiercely guarded loner on the run.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Through the Fire
    It's slickly shot and structured like a Bruckheimer sports weepie, but director Jonathan Hock also shows the image-production of Telfair as star.
  85. Hockney
    Hockney is a little work of art of its own, even if it's so very nice and happy about everything.
  86. Wild Grass
    An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.
  87. Entertainment
    Entertainment is a painful, poetic watch.
  88. Dan in Real Life
    Dan in Real Life steals from that line in "Virgin" about Carell kinda looking like Luke Wilson, since here Carell is, after all, playing the Luke Wilson role from "The Family Stone."
  89. Get Him to the Greek
    Get Him to the Greek, is a mess, but an amiable and occasionally uproarious one due mostly to Russell Brand’s reprising of his role as Aldous Snow.
  90. The Powerpuff Girls
    The rapid-fire satirical sophistication (scatology notwithstanding) and lovingly rendered pulp surrealism of this sequence should delight adults, while kids will get a charge out of the heroines' grown-up-defying chutzpah.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Saving Face
    Despite a fairly explicit lesbian boobfest (projected attendance just went up!), the film is more good-natured than provocative.
  92. Cadillac Records
    With everything so wrong, how can there be anything right about Cadillac Records?
  93. Ali
    Filled with vivid cameos and set to an infectious soul beat that effectively covers the underlying hum of calculated precision.
  94. Twelve and Holding
    To call Twelve and Holding cartoonish is to put it mildly. Marked by reckless tonal shifts, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay traffics in sensationalism and sentimentality.
  95. Family Affair
    While Colvard's film is always queasily watchable, as with other voyeuristic entertainments that insist on making the private public, there's the sense that such matters may be better dealt with in-house-or in a courtroom-than writ large on a movie screen.
  96. Knuckle
    Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.
  97. We Women Warriors
    The director's DV cinematography can be rough and ungainly, but it provides sterling glimpses of both family intimacy and its larger social context.
  98. Samsara
    The film's imagery is epic and trance-inducing. It's the "guided" part where Samsara stumbles.
  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. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    The film is most illuminating on the prehistory of Land Art.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »