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. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Crewdson and others (including Russell Banks and Laurie Simmons) speak eloquently about his project, but it's the on-set agonies - to achieve the fleeting expression here, dark kiss of light there, and the peculiar relief they bring our maestro - that fascinate.
  2. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    With horror altogether absent and a plot drowning in insipid convolutions, it's a film whose early warning to Heather should be heeded: "Don't go to Silent Hill."
  3. The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling - Ireland 1965
    Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.
  4. Dust Up
    Billy Jack meets Rob Zombie meets John Waters in this trippy, gory, not-as-fun-as-it-should-be genre mash-up from writer-director Ward Roberts.
  5. Deep Dark Canyon
    The film depletes itself with inter-location crosscutting, presumably intended to stoke suspense, and it all approximates the feel of an early Billy Bob Thornton script but lacks the full investment. Still, Levine commands every scene he's in with great support from a subtle and soulful Martin Starr as his conflicted deputy.
  6. The American Scream
    Though not must-see cinema, it is entertaining and affecting.
  7. The Black Tulip
    There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.
  8. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Too bad this section of the movie is but a temporary reprieve from the obnoxious sentimentality.
  9. Cloud Atlas
    Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe.
  10. Sleep Tight
    Director Jaume Balagueró's film is nothing if not a well-executed bit of escalating craziness.
  11. Pusher (2012)
    Pusher faithfully mimics Nicolas Winding Refn's 1996 Danish crime saga while missing its nasty, grungy spirit.
  12. The Other Son
    Ham-fisted dialogue and clichéd characterizations trump genuine chemistry in The Other Son, a contrived Franco-Israeli drama about two 18-year-olds, an Israeli and a Palestinian, accidentally switched at birth.
  13. Orchestra of Exiles
    Although the movie is overreliant on chintzy-looking and rather corny historical reenactments, these are counterbalanced by anecdote-rich interviews, including descendants of Huberman's first orchestra, human testament to the family tree of Israeli musicianship that he planted.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fun Size
    The fundamental Schwartz touch applies: In the guise of a narrowly targeted tween flick, he has delivered a smart and emotionally satisfying slice of wish fulfillment, tracing how a threatened family finds harmony.
  15. Dinotasia
    If they're never fully convincing as photo-realistic figures, they're certainly as much good gory fun to watch as any old-school monster kids had to stick with dreary first acts to see.
  16. Paranormal Activity 4
    Screenwriter Christopher Landon, along with co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, make a truly lame attempt at establishing a supernatural mythology to explain all this, but their real energies go to amping up the jarring sound cues, darting shadows, and last-shot shocker (so goofily weird this time that you'll laugh out loud) that make this franchise a perennial crowd-pleaser.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alex Cross
    There's not a moment in Alex Cross that doesn't function splendidly as comedy. Which means that for all his cool-cat preening and heroic soul-searching, Tyler Perry must have felt right at home.
  18. Bad 25
    Spike Lee has given the world the first tribute that fully measures up to Jackson the artist. Come on get your sham on.
  19. Yogawoman
    Yogawoman clearly is a fan of yoga and of women. And as it gently reminds us, these two special interests have not always been compatible.
  20. Unmasked Judeophobia
    Greenfield works against her own interests with absurdly selective arguments and sloppy filmmaking.
  21. Sheer
    This modest crime drama is infused with the joy and expectation that only comes from young filmmakers instinctively awed by their urban surroundings.
  22. Sassy Pants
    With its positive gay images, and even a perfectly executed two-step line dance, Sassy Pants is a feel-good movie for girls of both sexes.
  23. Chicks
    A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.
  24. Tai Chi Zero
    Give some points to a genre flick whose style mash-up reflects uneasy relations between Asia and the West just as its fracas-intensive plot tries to dramatize them.
  25. My Worst Nightmare
    Whether this is an argument for or against marriage probably depends on the viewer's own experience.
  26. Brooklyn Castle
    We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.
  27. Question One
    Curiously, the most sympathetic figure in Question One might be the co-chairman of the "Yes on 1" campaign. He knows he's on the wrong side of history and is miserable about being ordered by his diocese to fight this horrible fight, but he lacks the courage to say no to them.
  28. Sexy Baby
    There might be something new to say about sex after all, and it's said in Sexy Baby, a snazzily edited documentary by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus.
  29. The First Time
    Something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet spots.
  30. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    Former "Frontline" producer Brian Knappenberger's fascinating, incisive social history of the online network known as Anonymous.
  31. All Together
    Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.
  32. The Sessions
    Hawkes and Hunt nobly tackle the physical demands their roles require.
  33. Nobody Walks
    Ultimately, the director and her cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt (Meek's Cutoff), prove to be more interested in capturing the perfection of L.A.'s perpetual sunshine and the ways in which the people beneath it seem subtly oppressed, as if the light is expecting more of them than they can possibly deliver.
  34. Two Years at Sea
    The imagery has all the solemn ravishment of Béla Tarr's similarly darkening "The Turin Horse" with none of the epochal portentousness, while Rivers's work owes more to Billy Bitzer than most gallery art contemporaries.
  35. Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike
    Seriously, if this is the best promotion of itself that the free market can manage, it really would benefit from the help of a Ministry of Culture or something.
  36. Bestiaire
    Bestiaire is, most profoundly, about the dynamics of looking, an exercise in studying gazes that are either unidirectional or, superficially, at least, reciprocated.
  37. Holy Motors
    Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.
  38. The Loneliest Planet
    Julia Loktev's marvelous, slow-burning follow-up to her minimalist thriller "Day Night Day Night" somehow manages to be both audacious and subtle.
  39. Excuse Me for Living
    No strand of Excuse Me for Living's frantic, unfunny, and pseudo-thoughtful narrative is well conceived.
  40. Here Comes the Boom
    Boom was produced under the auspices of pal Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, which has a tendency toward broad-comic morality tales and multiplex populism that often shades into remedial-level pandering.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Argo
    A "gritty" historical drama overwhelmed by its love of Hollywood as an inventor of imaginary narratives with real consequences, a great generator of American bedtime stories whose magic works on suburban kids and foreign enemies alike.
  42. Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    In an overlong sequence shot to resemble an actual play, the acting feels so forced, the staging so wooden, that it's impossible to be fully engaged in what's actually going on. The actual story is, if not quite rote, certainly nothing new.
  43. Least Among Saints
    There's nothing but skin-deep warmth to Least Among Saints, a film in which any authority figure who can't magically sober up and play surrogate daddy for a spell is treated as either a meddler or a well-meaning, do-nothing skeptic.
  44. Madrid, 1987
    Miguel uses her beauty and placid demeanor as a screen against which to project his memories of past adventures and the ghost of his libido.
  45. A Whisper to a Roar
    An expertly drawn primer on the soft dictatorships that constrained five different countries and the peaceful revolutions that sought to expunge them.
  46. An Affair of the Heart
    An Affair of the Heart's focus is so vaguely sketched out that it ultimately could be about any grateful artist who enjoys a modicum of celebrity years after his initial success.
  47. The Flat
    In families, this fascinating film suggests, acknowledging or denying the darker truths of one's legacy is a choice that must be made again and again, each and every day.
  48. Bitter Seeds
    Although temperamentally dissimilar, Peled's film complements Anusha Rizvi's 2010 feature debut, Peepli (Live), which responded to the same crisis with a flawed but nervy satire. Bitter Seeds doesn't fool around, not while the enormity persists.
  49. Simon & the Oaks
    Lisa Ohlin's Simon and the Oaks has all the superficial elements of compelling drama but none of the interiority; it looks like a good movie without ever actually feeling like one.
  50. Hotel Noir
    Gutierrez bathes in moodiness while remaining unconcerned with anything so pedestrian as dramatic cohesion.
  51. The Thieves
    Easier to like than it is to follow, Choi Dong-hoon's glossy caper boasts all the pomp and cajolery of the true international blockbuster.
  52. The Big Picture
    For most of the film, Lartigau creates the tension of a Hitchcockian thriller solely through Paul's interior struggle.
  53. Gayby
    Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year - after Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends With Kids" - in Gayby, a comedy that, much like the perfunctory p-in-the-v it depicts, gives about 30 seconds of pleasure before going limp.
  54. War of the Buttons
    Of course, everyone in the film - aside from one or two conspicuous villains - turns out to be a resistant, making an otherwise harmlessly corny movie something slightly more bothersome: a revisionist fantasy of French heroism.
  55. Special Forces
    For a while Degan's serious charisma also kind of makes Islamic extremist fundamentalism look cool and badass, which could have been hilariously subversive if director Stéphane Rybojad had pushed it further.
  56. Smiley
    Tell a die-hard horror-movie fan that the latest scary movie is the worst thing ever, and that fan will nod respectfully but still make plans to go see it. Horror fans must always see for themselves. All of which makes it a bit pointless to declare Smiley the year's dullest scare flick (thus far).
  57. Smashed
    Movies about drugs and alcohol might be a dime (bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt's Smashed is so beautifully shot and well acted as to transcend the genre.
  58. Photographic Memory
    Alternating between time periods and geographic locations, all of it connected by McElwee's narrated thoughts, the film proves a bracing and sometimes uncomfortable peek into private fears and regrets about mortality and missed opportunities. It's also, in its portrait of wayward Adrian, further proof that there's nothing more difficult, frustrating, messy, and insufferable than teenagerdom.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Middle of Nowhere
    A slow-motion-enhanced kiss scene, with Corinealdi in top I-don't-give-a-f--- strut, is a startling example of DuVernay's ability to conjure drama that at once takes place in a character's head and in a recognizable real world. It's beautifully nuanced and confidently ambiguous - and so is the movie.
  60. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, 3, 2, 1 . . . Frankie Go Boom nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless to ever achieve true absurdity.
  61. Sinister
    Hawke's taut performance - lightly parodying his own career doldrums while playing an egotistical hack who's a close cousin of John Cassavetes's self-loathing actor in Rosemary's Baby - is totally credible.
  62. Seven Psychopaths
    Remember the shitty crime comedies every Hollywood brat tried to make after "Pulp Fiction"? It took an Irish playwright to get it right. See it with an audience.
  63. Fat Kid Rules the World
    The film succeeds thanks to Lillard's clear affection for the material and on the strength of its performances, especially Billy Campbell as Troy's conflicted father.
  64. Butter
    Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.
  65. Taken 2
    Taken 2 rarely embodies the values of concision and focus that it extols, and any breathing room from the hurtling narrative illogic only allows the audience opportunity to notice slips in Mills's father-knows-best infallibility.
  66. The Prosecution of an American President
    So unabashedly one-sided that the documentary is problematic even when the facts and figures check out.
  67. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    These 2-D characters might as well be wearing T-shirts that say things like "Predatory College Professor" and "Self-Obsessed Father" on them.
  68. My Father and The Man In Black
    As Cash might say, it has the heart, and it has the blood, and by the time childhood chatter is played back again, feeling is soaked through it like the sweat in Cash's guitar strap.
  69. 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.
  70. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Escape Fire winds up feeling like only one half of a larger argument.
  71. Sister
    Writer/director Ursula Meier uses a stripped-down, naturalistic aesthetic full of well-organized compositions that pay close attention to shifts in character mood, comportment, and behavior.
  72. Trade of Innocents
    Not for the first time in films, noble intent is at odds with aesthetics.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Avé
    Outside of a final shot that's more poetically convenient than emotionally convincing, Avé follows a progression that feels intimate even as it mimics things iconic. They, we, move and are moved.
  74. The Paperboy
    When not contriving to get Efron out of his clothes, The Paperboy gropes for familiar movie language of its period setting: Soul music swells up excitedly over a jumble of jerky zooms, befuddling cuts, and spatial vagueness. But sometimes hot messiness has its charms.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    V/H/S
    In too many of the shorts, bad acting quickly undermines the "authenticity" the aesthetics labor to achieve.
  76. The House I Live In
    What's riveting and attention grabbing in Jarecki's recapitulations of failed policy are some of the talking heads he has assembled, including "The Wire" creator David Simon and historian Richard Lawrence Miller.
  77. Wuthering Heights
    Heathcliff does not get the revenge he wants because he wants to escape the specific traumas of his adolescent past, shown in the film's first half. And because Arnold traps her viewers with Heathcliff's murky version of events. There's no room for enriching subtext in this version of Wuthering Heights because all the information we need is inscribed on the film's glassy surface.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    A road movie using undeveloped land as a blank screen on which to project a dark deconstruction of masculinity and manifest destiny.
  79. The Oranges
    The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of the suburbs written by the people who designed the menu at Olive Garden: It's inoffensive, forgettable, and you don't actually have to chew anything.
  80. Now, Forager
    A slow-food procedural, commendably devoted yet still underdone.
  81. Frankenweenie
    Frankenweenie, scripted by John August, and based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps from Burton's original story, is tight and brief, hitting all the marks you'd expect from an animated kid's film, and enlivened by Burton's visual style. The man should make more small movies like this one.
  82. Decoding Deepak
    Following the celebrity guru into Thailand for his ordainment as a Buddhist monk, the film is at its best when Gotham can't help but see through his father, who seems entirely restless without an audience and a smartphone through which to be reminded of their adoration of him.
  83. Bel Borba Aqui
    Now he's famous, and the production of the documentary Bel Borba Aqui, practically a montage of color, music, and Borba's constant laughter, coincides with his local acclaim.
  84. The Double Steps
    In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.
  85. Dear Mandela
    Triumph follows tragedy as the case unfolds and history is caught repeating, but the larger, more complicated story underlying this brief but bracing missive still feels untold.
  86. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    On every level this production - from Robinson's callow performance to Vila's hackneyed handheld camerawork, punching beats in the stead of the actors - remains firmly on the level of the obvious.
  87. Six Million and One
    All the while, Fisher and his kin's incessant, contentious bickering exposes the ongoing difficulty of reconciling with inherited trauma, though such squabbling's protracted prominence also, ultimately, suggests the need for a bit more editorial trimming.
  88. Won't Back Down
    In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    West of Thunder
    West of Thunder is not a tedious watch at all. In fact, it is oddly absorbing, just not the way writer and star Dan Davies probably meant it to be.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
    Atwill and other scholars maintain that the Romans were ingenious in pulling off the pacifist hoax, so useful to the ruthless men who administered the Roman empire. They were able to "create a type of Judaism that was benign," says one commentator.
  91. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    The film is funny, weepy, and hairy all the way to the barrel-chested-and utterly predictable-end.
  92. The Iran Job
    Although it presents itself as merely the story of a professional basketball player named Kevin Sheppard, who, never quite making it to the NBA, has spent his career playing in lesser leagues overseas, The Iran Job ends up being quite a bit more: an underdog sports story, a fish-out-of-water tale, and an outsider's perspective on Iran's almost-revolution of early 2009.
  93. Raaz 3: The Third Dimension
    To Western audiences, the most interesting part of director Vikram Bhatt's Raaz 3 will be the Bollywood-narrative conventions--overamplified melodrama, romantic montages, elaborately choreographed dance numbers. But as a horror film, it's about as ambitious as R.L. Stine.
  94. Electoral Dysfunction
    The result being a film that, devoid of both laugh-out-loud humor and the righteous indignation that characterizes most agitprop efforts, winds up being just a voting-for-dummies primer.
  95. Harvest of Empire
    Harvest of Empire is never quite wrong, but it's effectiveness is inversely proportional to how hard it's trying.
  96. Vulgaria
    The broadness of the film's comedy might be largely attributable to the conventions of Hong Kong cinema, but to American audiences, the film has an exaggerated notion of its own raunchiness.
  97. The Waiting Room
    What makes The Waiting Room worth visiting is how well it does without the usual narcotizing documentary tactics.
  98. The Other Dream Team
    Watching Sabonis and company deliver comeuppance to their former rulers on the hardwood, I fully expect The Other Dream Team to join "Do You Believe in Miracles?" and "Undefeated" in your inspirational-sports-doc rotation.
  99. Bringing Up Bobby
    The movie permanently downshifts to moralizing melodrama and retrograde Stella Dallas–like maternal sacrifice when Bobby has an accidental run-in with real estate magnate Kent (Bill Pullman).
  100. Tales of the Night
    The stories are quick, tiny surveys of a given culture's conventions told as monomythic, Joseph Campbell–ish pastiches and animated with fluidity and deliberateness that nearly excuses the film's slightness.
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