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
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wanted
    In the end, Wanted may be most notable for cementing the connection between superhero movies and the cinematic craze they have temporarily supplanted, torture porn--both genres that, like "Fight Club," address our ambiguous fascination with being powerless and invulnerable at the same time.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am Taraneh, I Am Fifteen Years Old
    Can nobly stand behind its more celebrated forebears.
  3. Fighting for Life
    Director Terry Sanders's goal of comprehensiveness and some bad sequencing prevents the film from achieving the ringing purity of John Huston's postwar doc "Let There Be Light."
  4. Adoration
    The end result is a movie considerably more absorbing to talk, write, and think about afterward than it is to actually watch.
  5. The King's Choice
    The film is handsomely mounted, traditional in its scenecraft, superbly acted, and much less ham-handed than you might expect from a historical drama about a great man’s great moment.
  6. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    What makes the film — which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name — so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.
  7. JCVD
    What exactly is JCVD? Comedy? Confession? Confusion? No one will ever mistake these backstage shenanigans for "Irma Vep." But as a self-regarding expression of masculine angst, it's a Damme sight more fun than "Synecdoche."
  8. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue.
  9. Dolphin Tale
    By the end of the movie, Winter has become a mascot for human disability, especially for children, and Dolphin Tale has enough depth and sensitivity to tap into emotion without feeling manipulative.
  10. A Better Life
    Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason are unable to commit fully even to this sudsy vision, tacking on a coda that completely undermines their already timid message.
  11. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page.
  12. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    There's nothing earth-shattering going on here, but it's a film you'll want to befriend.
  13. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    The fact that you can sense Westwood’s disillusionment with the documentary project while watching it creates some interesting tension, but director Lorna Tucker doesn’t fully exploit it or turn it into meta commentary.
  14. The Innkeepers
    It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness - until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That Man: Peter Berlin
    Tushinski must spin Berlin's self-portrait photography and well-documented peacocking as more than predictable narcissism.
  16. Sister Helen
    Perhaps if Sister Helen had been released when filming was completed in 2000, its tough-loving Irish nun, who gives hell to male drug addicts in a Mott Haven "safe house," might have passed for endearing.
  17. Northfork
    Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.
  18. One Hour Photo
    Romanek's movie is a bit too pat and pleased with its undeniable ambitions, but the setup resonates with quiet desperation. There's not a single vicarious glorch.
  19. Father and Son
    Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.
  20. Dark Touch
    Dark Touch, like much of the best horror, works the fears that connect to real life.
  21. Quartet
    Sentimental and pandering.
  22. Prometheus
    With this overreaching Prometheus, Scott seems a bit like David carefully arranging his hair in imitation of O'Toole's Lawrence. He can still mimic the appearance of an epic, noble, important movie - but the appearance is all.
  23. Orgasm Inc.
    Too scattered in its arguments and piecemeal in its sources to weave together a convincing institutional condemnation.
  24. Northern Soul
    This debut feature by Elaine Constantine has no shortage of style, but ultimately relies a lot on cliché.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
    It's a stunning sight inside this notorious jail compound, which is better known for violence and corruption.
  26. Goon
    When considering the moral implications of such gladiatorial violence, the film comes out squarely in favor, asking what's crueler: enjoying the spectacle of blood on ice or taking away a livelihood from those who can't do anything else?
  27. Slash
    It's both funny and enlightening, a nuanced yet strikingly bold look at how teens see themselves, not how adults would like to see them. Parents: Take note. Teens: Relax, you'll figure it out.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Princesas
    De Aranoa never condescends to his subjects, and Caye's mixture of aggression and tenderness is appealingly authentic.
  29. Teenage
    The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.
  30. The Patience Stone
    The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.
  31. Jean Gentil
    Although it's steeped in tragedies both personal and cultural, this contemplative, gorgeously shot documentary-fiction hybrid from husband-and-wife auteurs Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán nevertheless keeps an unsentimental distance from its titular saint-savant and the existential crisis he endures.
  32. Soft in the Head
    Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grateful Dawg
    It's like an 80-minute flip through the Grisman family photo album -- complete with live, unreleased soundtrack.
  35. Big Bad Wolves
    Even though Papushado and Keshales raise some ticklish questions, it's hard to know exactly what they're going for, beyond some mischievous, grisly thrills. At least they're skillful at delivering those.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    The Red Tent manages not to collapse and is on the whole a likable movie. It reminded me of the typical '50s epics - lavishly produced, lushly scored, requiring relatively little thought, and perfect for two hours escape. [26 Aug 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  37. The Pursuit of Happyness
    Too emotionally slick to work, too visually glib to have an impact, made by people who think grit is something that's brought in by the prop department.
  38. In Praise of Love
    A sustained immersion in gorgeously austere street photography and casual portraiture, the images punctuated by bits of black leader and gnomic intertitles, the action propelled by sweetly pulverized music and an effortlessly layered soundtrack of enigmatic conversations. Poetry is really the only word for it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eight Below
    A gorgeous art film full of snowy silences and spare, gestural performances threatens to break loose (the most inspired acting comes courtesy of the canines), though the plot's slavish schmaltz proves as oppressive as the harsh winter that descends upon the dogs.
  40. Belle
    There's a great story here, but Asante — who has made one previous feature, the 2004 drama A Way of Life — can't quite harness its power.
  41. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Would that Harris had simply let the images and their historical context speak for themselves. His narration is simplistic and narcissistic... and the textual ideas he and his interviewees present about the intersection between race and imagery are hardly fresh.
  42. Avenue Montaigne
    Not that Thompson's films lack for romance. She shoots Paris like Woody Allen shoots New York--ritzy, golden, and packed with chance meetings between highly strung arty types.
  43. 1408
    The horror wouldn't work without Cusack, who makes what could have been a rote acting exercise--Be tough! Now angry! Now defensively funny!--a cathartic ritual instead.
  44. The Low Down
    Captures the latent anxieties of a hazy, ambling existence with pinpoint accuracy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    John and John, it cannot be denied, are charming, witty, adorable, and quite capable of rocking.
  46. Mondays in the Sun
    It's forgivable, and even appropriate, that Mondays itself suffers from a certain lack of definition -- a drifting, repetitive dead-endedness that, at the inconclusive finale, shows no signs of abating.
  47. Blackboards
    Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.
  48. Enigma
    Doesn't coddle the audience. But neither does it play fair. The narrative takes several fast turns and stops short with the sudden introduction of new material; the exposition is hurried and lazily predicated on characters' thinking aloud.
  49. Unlikely Heroes
    It's also frustrating-we long to learn more about each individual. Still, the sheer fascination and profoundly moving power of these stories transcend the film's more conventional limitations.
  50. The Sixth Sense
    Complain all you want about Willis's posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child's traumatic stress.
  51. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    Winds up a sweetly nonchalant and excellently unwhiny allegory of seeking and gaining entry to the Caucasian fortress that is present-day America, or at least nocturnal New Jersey.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chain
    A dreamlike travelogue that transforms a mundane world into something strange and new.
  53. Between Us
    Illingworth aims to capture a vital relationship at a crucial turning point, but Between Us fails because Dianne is half-formed. She's just another projection of male desire and fear, easily led and passive-aggressive, everything but a woman who knows her own mind.
  54. Bettie Page Reveals All
    Mori — director of the 1991 documentary Building Bombs — assembles the information here with clarity and sensitivity.
  55. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    The film doesn’t use enough of Houston’s music.
  56. Domain
    Dalle, with a mouth that could devour the world, unravels inexorably but with decadent dignity, and Chiha's singular film never relies on cliché in its examination of illness, disappointment, and abandonment.
  57. Medora
    This stellar, incisive slice-of-life doc centers on the kind of crowd-pleasing competition story that lures in audiences and then lays bare heartsick truths about small-town America today.
  58. XX
    I’d rather see these shorts included in a co-ed anthology, which would allow each director’s piece to gain resonance via proximity to works of shared themes. Still, if it takes segregating the sexes to climb up to gender parity, I can overlook a slightly mismatched directing combo.
  59. Che
    Every Bolivian sequence has its Cuban parallel, which is why Che's two parts are best seen together. Guerrilla may be the more realized of the two--and could certainly stand on its own--but it is only comprehensible in the light of The Argentine. Elevating Guerrilla to tragedy, The Argentine puts some hope in hopelessness--and even in history.
  60. Wolke Neun
    Besides the frank, blithe sex scenes, a melodramatic ending aims to banish any last hope of gemütlichkeit, but the film comes to feel curiously incomplete, like one long fretful afternoon.
  61. Youth
    Sorrentino, as always, invests his scenarios with a feeling and beauty that transcends the dreary specifics
  62. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    Crucially, all four men, plus the ancillary characters who appear throughout the film, prove to be excellent company, holding forth on literature, Europe's future, inner-ear ailments, and side triceps.
  63. Look Both Ways
    An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.
  64. Canopy
    Despite Wilson’s early control and aesthetic confidence, there isn’t a single scripted idea of weight or emotionality that pays off.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Whale
    If your children love animals, by all means, take them to see The Whale. If you appreciate gorgeous scenery, the movie doubles as a picture postcard for the region. If you simply want to indulge in warm-and-fuzzy scenes of whale petting, this movie is also for you. What it is not, however, is remotely new.
  66. Nasty Baby
    Nasty Baby isn't satisfying. But on Silva's terms, it makes sense.
  67. Born to be Blue
    Budreau's variation on the theme of Chet Baker doesn't play out as an inspired improvisation, settling instead into the familiar grooves of a redemptive melodrama
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Come Early Morning
    Judd's typically lived-in performance and the authentic Arkansas locations -- cramped bars, dusty roads -- help vaguely distinguish a movie that comes on like a minor-key reprise of Judd's breakthrough "Ruby in Paradise" and every other rural indie melodrama to grace Sundance since.
  69. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    Demme has crafted yet another superb document of musicians at work, one as much about creation—and the sources of inspiration—as it is about performance. A wonderful film, as in, it's full of wonders.
  70. Gypsy
    You might call it an old story with higher stakes, but a keen sensitivity to its moral difficulties and enlivening details sets Gypsy urgently apart.
  71. Holy Hell
    Will Allen's sunny gut-punch cult exposé Holy Hell plays like a thriller, all right, with a darkness edging slowly over its swimsuit revelry, but Allen never cheats in the interest of suspense.
  72. Pick of the Litter
    What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?
  73. Kaboom
    Kaboom does have an excellent punchline, although even at 86 minutes it feels too long-mainly because Araki can't help letting his camera linger over his performers. Hard to blame him-he's assembled the best-looking cast in town and it's largely his gaga appreciation that makes the movie so much fun.
  74. Mongolian Ping Pong
    Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.
  75. Hell House
    Lookin' for sin, American-style? Try Hell House, which documents the cautionary Christian spook-a-rama of the same name.
  76. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Thanks to some brilliant casting, Venus Beauty Institute provokes ideas about women, movies, sexuality, and age that extend beyond its frothy fiction.
  77. American Psycho
    Lacking any equivalent to the Sadean excess of Ellis's prose, it is also further evacuated of purpose.
  78. Identity
    The ultimate cliché of plot-twist implausibility, the crucial revelation is so outlandishly fatuous it might have given Donald Kaufman pause.
  79. Intermission
    Like a loud and intermittently charismatic drunk at a dreary dive bar, Intermission grabs your attention, but in no time you're looking for the nearest exit.
  80. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    The storyline sometimes veers into melodrama; a subplot concerning Alex's involvement in the white-slave trade is particularly lurid. But the director retains a light touch in the character of Aurelie, whose combination of innocence and knowing is magical.
  81. Team America: World Police
    Team America is at once grandiose and tacky, elaborate and deflationary.
  82. Chinese Puzzle
    With each of these movies, Klapisch reiterates a core sentiment behind all the romantic comedy: that lives are continuously pieced together, broken, and rearranged in different settings. All that screwing and screwing up in between? Totally necessary.
  83. Glass Chin
    Writer-director Noah Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man.
  84. You Kill Me
    The past decade has been less kind to Dahl, and though his latest, called You Kill Me, has the outward appearance of a return to form, it may in fact be the worst thing he's ever done--an inert, tone-deaf mélange of "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Living Out Loud
    Richard LaGravenese peppers his directorial debut with the narrative trickery (fantasy sequences, flashbacks) that often tangles his sceenplays ("The Fisher King," "Beloved").
    • 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.
  87. Downsizing
    The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.
  88. Brideshead Revisited
    Though I can imagine Waugh rolling his eyes at the very idea of Brideshead Revisited as "a heartbreaking romantic epic," this remake is, often inadvertently, closer to the novel's spirit than the sepulchral television series, albeit still not half as waggishly Waugh-ish as "Bright Young Things," Stephen Fry's delightfully naughty interpretation of "Vile Bodies."
  89. Fifty-Fifty
    A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Comedy of Power
    An enjoyable but curiously weightless trifle that lowers rather than raises the temperature of the affair. Comedy of Power has to be the most polite, untroubled conspiracy film since the genre first tapped a phone.
  91. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    It's all fascinating, but must Kalatozov's careening angel of cinema be laid bare?
  92. Where Is Where?
    Ultimately, the film attempts to confront its vague ideas with a self-contained bit of narrative, whose neat rendering clashes with, but fails to make sense of, the messiness of what came before.
  93. Slingshot
    Though one misses cinematographer Oydssey Flores's camerawork that played such an important role on the three subsequent films--at once more chaotic and more expressive than the digital shooting here--Mendoza's look at the illicit activity of a group of marginal Filipinos is no less feverishly absorbing.
  94. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Much of what happens in Infinitely Polar Bear could be unbearably painful, but Forbes sees the cracked humor in everything
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cloverfield
    Cloverfield never stops to identify the why, whence, or whereto of its rampaging meanie—this relentless thriller stops for nothing—but as for what to call it, behold . . . al-Qaedzilla!
  96. Miles Ahead
    Cheadle's tender eyes and scraped-raw whisper prove reason enough for Davis fans to give Miles Ahead a go: Just often enough, I thought, "Holy shit, this is what a day with Miles might feel like."
  97. Fury
    This is an ugly part of an ugly war, and Ayer wallows in it. Instead of flags and patriotism, Fury is about filth.
  98. Tamara Drewe
    Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.
  99. To the Bone
    Though To the Bone isn’t quite enjoyable to watch, it’s acted well and is, in its depiction of this all-too-pervasive disorder, essential.
  100. The Reception
    A fresh and uncompromising account of emotional self-immolation and romantic flux. And it has a happy ending to boot.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »