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 7.6 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
view
per page
  1. The Transfiguration
    The Transfiguration gradually reveals itself to be a coming-of-age tale, one whose central figure reaches a point at which he’s forced to reckon with the evil lurking within himself.
  2. Clerks II
    Clerks II can't bear the strain of its amateur-hour theatrics, no matter how big its heart or how many crocodile tears it manages to squirt. The dramatic moments become melodramatic; the bawdy moments turn icky. The fans will eat it up.
  3. Tetro
    For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.
  4. Unknown White Male
    To call this story unbelievable is to say the very least. If it's a hoax, Bruce is a fantastic actor (but then, the movie suggests, so are we all). If not, you may wonder less about Bruce's personality than his condition.
  5. Coco Before Chanel
    The Coco of Fontaine's project--which she co-wrote with her sister, Camille, freely adapting Edmonde Charles-Roux's book L'Irrégulière: ou, Mon itinéraire Chanel--can be described as courtesan before couturiere.
  6. Find Me Guilty
    Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.
  7. Washington Heights
    One-upping Latino immigrant movies like "Luminarias" and "Tortilla Soup," Washington Heights zeroes in on go-getters (mostly of Dominican lineage) whose ambitions are transformed by familial demands.
  8. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    It's like an odd storybook you'd find in the attic and have trouble putting down — the more quixotic Lian's journey becomes, the more you want her to see it through to the bitter end.
  9. Telling Lies in America
    Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]
    • Village Voice
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    A movie of splendid bits and pieces disappointingly strung together. [25 July 1974, p.70]
    • Village Voice
  11. In the Fade
    Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Swell Season
    To viewers without a preexisting emotional relationship to the couple and their saga, that everyday angst is just banal.
  13. We Are Still Here
    Early scenes overplay the shock of these phantasms, but just as you expect Geoghegan to crank up the effects, the film mixes in some subtler scares.
  14. A Letter to Momo
    The bickering goblins make a boffo comedy team, and while there's a recurring fart joke, it borders on classy. That's the power of good anime.
  15. Walk on Water
    The complex questions Walk on Water raises receive only confused answers.
  16. Tyrannosaur
    Colman's performance comes as a revelation.
  17. We Are Mari Pepa
    We Are Mari Pepa is a sweaty, urgent, beautifully honest bliss out.
  18. Grazia's Island
    It's Filippo Pucillo who gives the youngest son such mellifluous southern sass that you wish the camera would abandon the whole woman-as-sadness retread and scooter off in his direction.
  19. Daughters of the Sun
    The filmmaker achieves the desired sense of remoteness and claustrophobic doom, and though the story could be told more economically, her slow approach conveys the distended chronology that attends an indentured servitude resembling slavery.
  20. Sex and Lucia
    An adept mood maker, Medem strains madly for cosmic alliances, fairy-tale imagery, and fated coincidences, but he triumphs only with two hot bodies, a cluttered apartment, and a Shower Massage.
  21. Sleepy Hollow
    There isn't a bankable Hollywood director with a flintier sense of aesthetic integrity.
  22. Dim the Fluorescents
    The film’s examination of the artistic grind is promising, but Dim the Fluorescents clocks in at over two hours, proving tiresome at times. Luckily, Skwarna and Armstrong’s quirky chemistry keeps the lights on in this overlong debut.
  23. A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Society
    This musical remake of The Philadelphia Story has some pretty good moments but will probably outrage those of you who remember Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart in the original version. [17 Oct 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  25. Oliver Twist
    Accomplished if lacking in urgency, this Oliver Twist (scripted by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote "The Pianist") showcases Polanski's proven gift for Dickensian caricature.
  26. Life 2.0
    At once a disturbing vision of escape, a cautious portrait of liberation, and an exploration of authenticity and artificiality.
  27. Scalene
    Although Scalene slows to a drip in places, strong performances and a Hitchcock-trained eye build unnerving tension into its depiction of the intimate stress of caring for an invalid and the ways people might or might not crack under it.
  28. Hostiles
    Cooper has yet to elevate his sensibility beyond a choked, self-inhibiting intensity.
  29. Coherence
    The Rod Serling tension Byrkit is angling for never quite arrives, nor does any real Borgesian frisson. But thanks to its social setting, it does offer a vivid and perhaps intentional satirical portrait of L.A. culture.
  30. Do I Sound Gay?
    Thorpe offers charming, intimate glimpses of his life, including memorable chats with friends and experts, and he's adept at drawing winning quotes from interview subjects — one of the most moving moments comes from George Takei.
  31. The We and the I
    At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Generation P
    Generation P is long and incredibly dense, but it's never boring - it's too wild and unhinged. The more you know about the past 20 years of Russian history, the more you stand to "get" from its coded references, though as with the not-totally-dissimilar "Holy Motors," deciphering every frame might be beside the point.
  33. The Unknown Girl
    As we watch Haenel — whose piercing gaze is only one aspect of her luminosity — stride through these overdetermined scenes, clutching a medical bag to her side, we are reminded that even the most timeworn of conventions can be made electric and alive.
  34. The Hallow
    The Hallow offers plenty of scares and is unnerving from wire to wire, wrapping up the second act with a bang and red-lining the tension until the end.
  35. The Overnight
    Though an accomplished farce, The Overnight is most interesting when confronting its genuine emotional stakes.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hanna
    Despite its handsome presentation and cinematic ingenuity, the film never really goes beyond superficial pleasures.
  37. Pacific Rim
    Pacific Rim is big and dumb in a smart way.
  38. Night Catches Us
    Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's striking debut is the rare recent American-independent film that goes beyond the private dramas of its protagonists, imagining them as players in broader historical moments.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Warrior
    Visual grandiloquence more than makes up for the bare-bones dialogue. But while high on mysticism and vast in scale, The Warrior seems more poised than poetic, and ultimately landscape proves to be the film's real grabber.
  40. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Cédric Klapisch has been compared to Truffaut, but the new-waver's weakness for glib sentimentalism seems to have left the biggest impression on L'Auberge Espagnole.
  41. We Were Soldiers
    Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unraveled
    It's a fascinating fishbowl in concept, yet Simon's storytelling is unevenly textured and oddly listless - fatal for a film about a banal document - pushing felon clock-watching to a known outcome.
  43. 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.
  44. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    Without the serious acting talent of its leads, this color-saturated gross-out horror could have devolved into a mess, but The Autopsy of Jane Doe proves imperfect fun even when it starts to play like CSI: Salem.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    The best bits of Deathly Hallows are the moments that play with the tensions of late adolescence.
  46. In My Mother's Arms
    Husham's efforts might be a drop in the bucket, but that only makes them more worthy of documenting, perhaps even celebrating.
  47. The Aggressives
    Thankfully, Peddle's film is much more illuminating than a grad school seminar.
  48. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Investigates the events leading up to the coup d'état; that it was the second for Aristide (overthrown in 1991, mere months after becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president) darkens the film's triumphalist-sounding title.
  49. The Lovers and the Despot
    The film is brisk and fascinating, ultimately moving, but also less rich than it might have been.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ondine
    Ciphers aside, Ondine effectively sustains a mood of a hazy melancholy most affecting when nothing much is happening.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Down in the Valley
    Like "Don't Come Knocking," this contrived lament for the lonesome cowboy means to measure what remains of the old western in the absence of the Old West, eventually plopping its displaced ranch hand protagonist onto the fake Main Street of an old western movie set just to make sure we don't miss any of the cine-mythic connotations.
  52. Monsieur N.
    As modest conspiracy-mongering, the movie is perfectly robust, earning its dramatic impact from its classical sense of intrigue and Philippe Torreton's testy performance in the title role.
  53. In a Better World
    Slick moralizing grows exponentially as the plot, wrapped in travelogue photography, transparently expository dialogue, and cheap thrills, drives home spurious parallels between the first and third worlds.
  54. We Are What We Are
    This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year's New York Film Festival.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bonsái
    Bonsái seems like a veritable thicket of illuminating references and correspondences. A kind of poetry sprouts up even in some of the inevitable sad-twee flourishes.
  56. Point and Shoot
    Matthew VanDyke, Point and Shoot's hero/subject, can't forget the mediated, imitative nature of his adventures even when he has dedicated himself to a grand cause.
  57. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    A deceptively modest fable of innocence abroad that resonates with the situation within Israel and without.
  58. Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands
    Thomsen culls wisely from Fassbinder's filmography to illustrate the kino-giant's abiding themes, patricide and masochism among them.
  59. Close to Home
    Though it clearly means to call into question the legitimacy of their work, the movie is formlessly episodic as it meanders from one day to the next, finally losing itself in a forest of coming-of-age clichés.
  60. Outrage
    Moment by moment, Outrage proves duly provocative, well sourced, and almost certain to go more viral than swine flu.
  61. The Pillow Book
    The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]
    • Village Voice
  62. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    A tender, thoughtful paean to geek community.
  63. The Way
    As a director, Estevez exhibits a bland visual sense, but he does manage to convey some of his scenic locations' multifaceted textures. Mostly, though, his dramatically inert, spiritually generic The Way seems like it was far more fun to shoot than it is to endure.
  64. The Rover
    The Rover might not be about anything at all, but the dust it stirs up sticks to you after you leave the theater.
  65. Marie Antoinette
    A graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection -- at least for its first hour.
  66. Dr T and the Women
    A flabby farce in which everyone seems to be making it up as they go along.
  67. About Adam
    Hudson is ebullient, never cutesy, and her accent stays in tune.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.
  69. Napoleon Dynamite
    Thrusts us into a high school senior year like no other.
  70. From the Other Side
    Akerman's characteristically patient, pensive approach elegantly accommodates her reportorial responsibilities.
  71. Cold Weather
    Steadily building in intensity from sluggish interest to mild excitement, Cold Weather is a slight movie with a long, circuitous fuse-and that's the point.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interview
    The result, though anchored mostly to a single set cleverly sectioned by hammocks, curtains, and a kitchen bar, is the least concrete and most artificial of Buscemi's films.
  73. Cavite
    Cavite is such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ever Since the World Ended
    Like Emmanuel Lubezki's phantasmagoric images for "Children of Men," the performances in the film are so remarkable it's easy to ignore the implausibilities that surface. But even as its self-aware approximation of the doc format startles, Ever Since the World Ended lacks vigor.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunflower
    As father and son argue and reunite every few minutes, accompanied by veeery slow violin music, Sunflower plays less like the epic it aspires to be than an episode of "Full House: Beijing."
  76. Rachel
    Bitton, best known for her 2004 nonfiction film "Wall," about the barrier Israel is building along its border with the occupied territories of the West Bank, questions her interviewees calmly and dispassionately (though her voice is heard, she is never seen). It's a strategy that yields damning revelations.
  77. 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.
  78. Zarafa
    Beautifully animated and often moving.
  79. Assassination
    Assassination is a blast whenever the director doesn't take his melodramatic plot too seriously.
  80. Sweet Micky for President
    The energy never falters as the film jumps from talking-head testimonies to on-the-streets footage of rallies and riots.
  81. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    Well-written and inoffensively directed by Jeff Grace, the film suffers from an overall brown color.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sunshine
    Ideas scintillate over the surface of Sunshine without ever quite igniting, but at least the movie sparkles. What it doesn't do is cohere. Action flick, sci-fi thriller, metaphysical adventure, incoherent allegory, ethical hypothesis, and horror film all at once, this mad multitasker has the agenda of a dozen movies. Problem is, we know which ones.
  83. Mean Dreams
    For better or for worse, Paxton's performance will be the focus of viewers’ attention, so it is decidedly to the good that he doesn't just deliver. He gives a sort of master class on why we've loved him: Paxton was amazing in the role of regular guys, and equally compelling as the subversion of same.
  84. The Prince of Egypt
    As entertainment goes, however, this desert spectacle is no "Aladdin"-- despite the impressively strong graphics of the vast urban spaces.
  85. Runoff
    Kimberly Levin's Runoff deals with an old-as-time moral quandary — how far will you go to protect your family? — but the movie achieves an understated resonance through Levin's emotionally sensitive compositions and her clued-in portrayal of life in a middle-American farming community.
  86. Mother and Child
    The force of the acting alone almost compensates for some of the more difficult (and realistic) questions about not giving birth that García willfully sidesteps.
  87. Examined Life
    Ideas beam out from Astra Taylor's engaging new philoso-doc Examined Life; the viewer basks in the intelligence on-screen and, occasionally, soaks up the rays.
  88. There Was Once...
    The neo-Nazi sentiment in Hungary today is touched on most acutely when it mars the memorial that finally brings the survivors home.
  89. Disconnect
    Disconnect might play better a decade from now, when it's more clearly a compendium of contemporary fears rather than some dire expression of them.
  90. The Tic Code
    A sympathetic but conventional disease-of-the-week movie.
  91. Frailty
    It's a small, unassuming movie grasping at whole-hog homo psychopathicus, with its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement.
  92. 8 Women
    For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.
  93. Joe the King
    The film belongs to Fleiss, and he makes Joe's inner life so transparent that it's heartbreaking to watch the boy dig himself into a hole.
  94. One Swallow Brought Spring
    The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    In the rare moments when a rifle, grenade, howitzer, bayonet, dagger, fist, land mine, or flamethrower isn't being deployed, the film pushes its melodramatic plotline with soap operatic shamelessness.
  96. The Shine of Day
    The Shine of Day shows strangers rockily building a family together.
  97. Dementia
    As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.
  98. Sleeping with Other People
    Headland's film might have been more engaging if it were about its supporting characters.
  99. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    More often than not, these musical interludes are more like distractions aimed only to entice younger audiences (not a terrible thing).
  100. Dreams with Sharp Teeth
    Documentarian Erik Nelson, overcautious of his subject, is content to let Ellison luxuriate in his legacy of infamy--as a lothario, and a litigious and pugilistic combatant.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »