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. Consuming Spirits
    Consuming Spirits is overlong. A dystopian T.S. Eliot once said, "Humankind cannot bear too much reality," maybe even in a cartoon.
  2. Let Fury Have the Hour
    The film joyfully surveys the evolution of a politically informed artistic movement, set to a soundtrack that includes MC5, Rage Against the Machine, DJ Spooky, and others.
  3. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    Expertly measured, emotional look at the life of a guitar prodigy cut down by ALS.
  4. Yelling to the Sky
    Little more than a résumé film for all involved, it certainly feels more Park City than Bushwick.
  5. Save the Date
    Unremarkable, thinly sketched characters, many adorned with creative careers or hobbies, populate the romantic dramedy Save the Date, yet another unfocused movie about generic relationship quandaries.
  6. Tchoupitoulas
    Bill and Turner Ross - the directors, producers, camera operators, and troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas - could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in–New Orleans documentary for each of the world's great cities.
  7. Sahkanaga
    What Summerour doesn't capture as well are the panic and emotional upheaval that Paul's poems and tentative interactions with Lyla only hint at - one of the reasons the film feels flimsy rather than delicate, lacking strong performances or psychological nuance.
  8. Playing for Keeps
    Yet it's not entirely forgettable. I'll long be haunted by Dennis Quaid's manic performance as a palm-greasing dad who seems to be under the influence of bath salts-tweaked-out acting that matches the camera movements.
  9. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Burns's job as director is differentiating and spotlighting everyone in this large ensemble, a storytelling challenge to which he responds with a brisk pace and an eye for revealing moments. The film recalls his 1995 debut, "The Brothers McMullen," grounded in Irish family traditions and comedic chemistry among performers.
  10. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    At any speed, the movie only springs to full life late in the day, during the first meeting of Bilbo and the tragic creature who will come to be known as Gollum (once again played by the sublime Andy Serkis).
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Rabbi's Cat
    An absorbing, nuanced, and vividly animated tale of adventure, ambivalent morality, colonial injustice, talking animals, and the vagaries of religious zeal and colonialism.
  12. Waiting for Lightning
    Unfortunately, as the extensive footage of kick flips, fakies, and grinders goes from thrilling to routine, we're left waiting - and wanting - for Rosenberg to offer something more substantial than another "big air."
  13. Wagner & Me
    Most of the time, though, Fry is an unabashed appreciator. He paws at costumes, thrills to touch Wagner's own piano, and looks right at the camera to apologize for being so excited. It's the light, charming touch absent in Wagner - and proof that both of the famous men referred to in the title benefit from each other's association.
  14. The Sheik and I
    The Sheik and I is funny and visually inventive, which leavens its often bleak vision of the state of freedom in the some parts of the world.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only the Young
    Only the Young captures the lyricism of late childhood and the bewilderment of the road ahead. As for the skate footage, it's shot for pure glory and for all the world, like Wild China or Blue Planet, beautiful beings struggling in exotic habitats: abandoned houses, red-gold bluffs, and run-down mini-golf courses.
  16. Off-White Lies
    An intermittently engaging tale of father-and-daughter bonding (and non-bonding) set against the backdrop of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War.
  17. The Loving Story
    Well-timed and well crafted in equal measures, The Loving Story is a thoughtful, terrifically intimate account of the case that dismantled this country's anti-miscegenation laws 100 years after the abolition of slavery.
  18. In Our Nature
    By the time Savelson has hit all the obligatory checkpoints (unplanned pregnancy, dying parents, bear home invasion), the reconciliation we all saw coming has been achieved.
  19. Honor Flight
    Greatest-generation stoicism meets gushing contemporary sentiment in Honor Flight.
  20. Heleno
    You're stuck daydreaming about a far, far better movie.
  21. Happy New Year
    So trite that it's unwittingly insensitive.
  22. Delhi Safari
    Although its message is never subtle, Delhi Safari is fun enough to earn the right to preach.
  23. The Collection
    The Collection doesn't have much to recommend it beyond a first-reel bloodbath rivaling "Blade" and "Death Ship."
  24. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    The costumes are gorgeous, and the settings are plush, but the acting is merely serviceable, and the film lacks either the wit or the energy of its predecessors. Long before it ends, you find yourself indifferent to the fate of the mismatched lovebirds or anyone else in the tale.
  25. Deadfall
    There are hints of a fun, trashy film beneath the surface, but that film is always subservient to the dull one Dean and Ruzowitzky were more comfortable making.
  26. Lay the Favorite
    Screeches and scrambles from scene to scene with manic sitcom energy, much like the cherished pet hamster of one of its characters.
  27. Hyde Park on Hudson
    For stretches of the film, he (Murray) is enough to recommend Hyde Park on Hudson, especially as he toys with his houseguests, England's King George (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman).
  28. Certainty
    Clemens's and Lipinski's equally stiff performances are also disappointing as they staunch the humor inherent in O'Malley's dialogue.
  29. New Jerusalem
    While New Jerusalem's rigid formalism will surely be off-putting to some, there's beauty to be found in the film's sheen of placid grime.
  30. Otelo Burning
    Tiresomely simple, the film introduces a subplot involving betrayal and political informants in the eleventh hour, but by then you're either smitten by these guileless Zulu lads experiencing "freedom" on the waves or you've checked out.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Walk Away Renee
    Picking up where his 2003 "Tarnation" left off, Jonathan Caouette's new documentary is no less hermetic, autobiographical, messy, and ultimately touching.
  32. What a Man
    Mostly harmless but also irksome in its bland simplicity, the film follows your average too-nice-for-his-own-good everyman who sets about proving his masculinity after being cheated on by his caricature of a girlfriend.
  33. Parked
    Elegant, engaging meditation on displacement and the modern man.
  34. Love, Marilyn
    Fifty years after her death, the actress's corpse is still being picked over with ever-diminishing returns, as evidenced in Liz Garbus's garish, misguided documentary.
  35. Dragon
    The roaring popular success of Peter Chan's Wu xia in China - renamed Dragon for export - is no mystery: It's an adept genre exercise with rare primal depths.
  36. Ex-Girlfriends
    The callow behavior that characterizes Ex-Girlfriends' lead would be less maddening had writer/director/star Alexander Poe firmly decided how to portray the bedroom follies of youth.
  37. Beware of Mr. Baker
    In spite of Bulger's errors of tone, the movie stands as an engaging tussle with the question of what is permissible with the excuse of art. One former collaborator of Baker's, John Lydon (a/k/a Rotten), comes up with the most eloquent absolution: "I cannot question anyone with end results that perfect."
  38. California Solo
    Any transformation feels like a device, and any modest hopefulness comes across as simply the unearned wishful thinking of the filmmaker.
  39. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    Against the prevailing cheerlessness, these intensively choreographed fights, many shot in audacious, roving single takes, are like glimpses into a dream world.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Killing Them Softly
    It's a movie that shows, and then tells, tells, and tells again, its vibrant conjuring of contemporary cynicism felled by Dominik's lack of faith in his audience's ability to connect thematic dots.
  41. Saving America's Horses: A Nation Betrayed
    The sublime beauty of her subject cannot fail to move; less steady is this presentation of their plight.
  42. The Normals
    When everybody finally accepts that they've been experiencing a prolonged, semi-self-inflicted meltdown, Ciancimino and director Kevin Patrick Connors's lone gag pays off. Too bad the joke is only funny in retrospect.
  43. The Mystical Laws
    The Mystical Laws is an (un)holy mess, a religious tract masquerading as a paint-by-numbers hero's journey.
  44. The King (2012)
    Beautifully shot, the film is unapologetically a crowd-pleaser whose gentleness of tone flows from its subject.
  45. Rust and Bone
    Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.
  46. Rise of the Guardians
    At times, it approaches some of Pixar's best.
  47. Red Dawn
    Single-mindedly action-oriented to the point where Milius's film seems relatively ruminative.
  48. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    While the opera nonetheless soars with its acrobatic choreography of refugee displacement, this documentary about it suffers some dramatic slackness from the inevitable drawing board tedium of performance preparation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Central Park Five
    Because the filmmakers were unable to enlist anyone from the NYPD or the DA's office to participate, we are left with the sense that mistakes of this magnitude require those in error to hide from them.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hitchcock
    The change in title from book to film is instructive: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is about a filmmaker and the making of a film; Hitchcock is a half-ass attempt to demystify a larger-than-life man who put himself front and center while remaining enigmatic, a master at revealing a little in order to conceal a lot.
  51. Life of Pi
    Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone.
  52. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    It's about as exciting as watching David Blaine play Stratego and makes you miss the power of the first four films all the more: the uncontainable yearning of the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.
  53. Turning
    As a whole and in conjunction with the concert snippets, they give an impressionistic glimpse of a performance and the people behind who forge it, no matter how often Atlas's glib multiple-exposure visual concoctions threaten to get in the way.
  54. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Insult upon injury didn't stop the central figure of Mary Liz Thomson's tough and intriguingly well-told account of the fight between environmentalists and corporate raiders (perhaps abetted, we learn, by the government) from taking the battle to her deathbed.
  55. Ingenious
    In truth, the film belongs more to the always superb Roberts, but it's fitting that Renner's good fortune has trickled to a movie about two guys who always expect lightning to strike twice.
  56. First Winter
    Even when things start to go awry for our group (thanks to jealousy, illness, a dwindling food stock) Dickinson's anti-dramatic methodology proves ill-suited to the task of generating narrative interest.
  57. Buffalo Girls
    There's no missing Kellstein's unstated horror during the fight sequences, which traffic in queasy blood sport absurdity that overshadows "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games," because the cherubs are eight and because it's all too real.
  58. 16 Acres
    It's all here, from the design contests to the farcical series of ribbon-cuttings, including a photo op cornerstone-laying, to the stupid Jeff Koons balloon that recurs as an incidental sight gag.
  59. 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.
  60. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    Treading on a shameful piece of French history, Bosch bizarrely intercuts scenes of Hitler, Himmler, and Hess working out the logistics of the exportations, in vignettes that smack of "Inglourious Basterds" farce, but otherwise, she's got a steady grip on the tear-jerking, if that's your awards-season cocktail.
  61. Hitler's Children
    Interweaving interviews and footage of Rainer Hess's first trip to Auschwitz, Hitler's Children is a powerful and well-judged presentation of the stories and their impossibilities.
    • 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.
  63. Barrymore
    It takes a minute for the film to move beyond a kind of gilded stasis, but once it does, it - and Plummer - are riveting.
  64. Anna Karenina
    Just as the characters created by Tolstoy the artist got the advantage of Tolstoy the polemicist - at least until the end of his life - so these confoundingly good performances gradually win the movie from Wright's puerile conceit, giving us an Anna Karenina if not for the ages, than at least for an evening.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Linings Playbook
    Manic as it might be stylistically, emotionally Silver Linings Playbook maintains too even of a keel. It's a film about the alienated that makes sure to alienate no one, a movie depicting wild mood extremes that never rises or falls above a dull hum of diversion, never exploding into riotous comedy or daring to be devastatingly sad.
  66. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    Silence might be the most perfect expression of scorn, as the saying goes, but like Edvard Munch's "The Scream," you don't have to hear it to get the horror.
  67. The Law in These Parts
    Dialectical and precise to the point of exhaustion, The Law in These Parts applies a cold anger to one of the geopolitical world's most passionate discords.
  68. Lunch
    The appeal of Lunch might be limited to Hollywood-nostalgia buffs, but they will be enthralled not only by the stories told, but also how they're told. These guys are still some of the sharpest wits in town.
  69. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash, but nothing in Hur Jin-ho's tony new version approaches the dizzying depths of Sarah Michelle Gellar spelling out the conditions of her sex bet with Ryan Phillippe ("You can put it anywhere . . .") in 1999's "Cruel Intentions."
  70. Miami Connection (1987)
    Absurd, yes, but director Richard Park and his game and guileless cast have the highest of spirits, and the nonsense bubbles like a bottle uncorked.
  71. Coming Up Roses
    After a hoot of an entrance by Bernadette Peters showboating a tune from the rafters at a church wedding, Coming Up Roses takes a nosedive into despair and stays there.
  72. Nothing But a Man (1964)
    The title almost suggests manhood as something trifling. The film, however, confirms it's a mighty hard ideal to reach.
  73. Shady Lady
    Too many Wiki-worthy info dumps and not enough character-enriching detail stops Shady Lady, a docudrama about a team of World War II Australian bombardiers, from cohering into a compelling fiction-documentary hybrid.
  74. Starlet
    Director Sean Baker, co-writing his fourth feature with Chris Bergoch, does some deft balancing of his own: His genuine admiration for these two women extends to their idiosyncrasies, yet they never become fools, whores, saints, or coots.
  75. A Royal Affair
    Director Arcel handles the material with a stately grace that compensates for the story's predictable trajectory, though humdrum period detail and monotonous pacing too often leave the proceedings feeling only partially aroused.
  76. Nature Calls
    The unmitigated disaster of the camping trip just stays disastrous, the story never really finding its way from adversity to heroic redemption.
  77. In Another Country
    The cumulative impression is of figures being lightly traced in the sand only to be inevitably washed away, intentionally ephemeral and quite charming for it.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Comedy
    There's not a false note in the film, but maybe there's a difference between accuracy and truth.
  79. Chasing Ice
    Still and live-action footage captures the ice sliding into the sea with exquisite grace, which makes it all the more wrenching. Are such images enough to convince the naysayers that something unnatural is occurring? Doubtful.
  80. Lincoln
    This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Skyfall
    As much as it's open about its paranoia of the new, Skyfall's fatal misstep is its slavish hewing to event-movie trends. Like this summer's Spider-Man, Batman, and Avengers movies, Skyfall seems to exist primarily to set up the events of subsequent films.
  82. Vamps
    Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burn
    In this lively and affecting documentary, filmmakers Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez show that Detroit is burning. Literally.
  84. 28 Hotel Rooms
    Not showing us every aspect of their lives is a fine, even novel, approach, but merely telling us about them instead feels like a fruitless middle ground.
  85. Festival of Lights
    Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.
  86. The Man with the Iron Fists
    If Iron Fists is sometimes badly made, it is refreshingly badly made. It has a homemade charm that comes from a sense of having gestated in a lifelong obsession.
  87. Here I Learned to Love
    A slight but powerful entry in the family-history-as-world-history archives.
  88. 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.
  89. High Ground
    From its low-key, guitar-based score by composer Chris Bacon to the filmmaker's refusal to sugar-coat the tough times some of the soldiers faced after completing the climb, High Ground takes its cues from the worldview of its subjects.
  90. North Sea Texas
    Director Bavo Defurne fills the frame with warm, bright color and the lovely austerity of the Belgian seaside, angling for a soulful, slightly hyperreal comedy rather than the pursuit of a political agenda or a boring awareness-raising endeavor.
  91. This Must Be the Place
    Sorrentino's languorous photography, understated humor, and quiet but profound dramatic reveals coil together into something organic, whole, and achingly sweet.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    The movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character.
  93. A Late Quartet
    It's something of a relief that little is actually resolved in A Late Quartet; Zilberman is at his best when leaving narrative threads hanging rather than trying to tie them together.
  94. Jack and Diane
    Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.
  95. The Details
    Top-shelf cast, headed by Tobey Maguire, slips into familiar grooves of adultery, lies, blackmail, and pet poisoning, it's the spectacular blow-ups and dressing-downs that make this such a nervy pleasure.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Café de Flore
    Café de Flore - the title comes from a song heard in both halves - is like a story constructed from the perfume ads in Vanity Fair: the emotional problems of shallow, sexy jet-setters.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bay
    Despite a handful of legit creepy moments, the film's concern with superficial realism prevents it from really hitting home; its fuzzy, fractured depiction of disaster never comes close to conjuring the "holy shit it could happen here don't touch that doorknob" real-world paranoia of last year's artfully Hollywood-ized disaster film, "Contagion."
  98. Wreck-It Ralph
    As with its narrative, Wreck-It Ralph's themes don't develop by branching out in wild, unpredictable ways; instead, they simply become narrower and more monotonous.
  99. Flight
    It is not surprising that Zemeckis's handling of spectacle would be undiminished, but he hasn't lost his touch with actors, either, coaching Washington into one of his rare performances that suggests much more than it shows.
  100. A Man's Story
    The result often plays more like a satire of the fashion industry than a serious look at one of the humans inside it.
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