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. 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.
  2. Middle Men
    But for all that predictability, Middle Men is smart and tense, with each scene drenched in dread.
  3. American Fable
    The film beguiles more than it thrills, its plotting never quite measuring up to its atmosphere or its suggestions of deeper meanings.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Serendipity
    The most romantic New York movie since August's "Happy Accidents."
  5. G.B.F.
    Here's to hoping lax multiplex security allows teenagers to sneak in to this very funny and thoughtful take on how straights often objectify queers — and how increased visibility in the media can result in an expectation to conform to stereotypes.
  6. The Five Obstructions
    An unclassifiable film-school exercise--one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto--The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Garden State
    Braff's naive romanticism is also lovely proof of the film's innocent heart.
  8. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    Tying it all together is Hahn's transparent love for the art of animation and for Disney--its history and once geek-heavy in-house culture. Hahn balances that love with a critical eye that allows him to sing the praises of unsung heroes while letting the a--holes hang themselves.
  9. Get Low
    Despite that maddening third-act stumble, Get Low is a pleasure to watch.
  10. Rubble Kings
    Rubble Kings, an impassioned examination of New York's gang culture of the late 1970s, isn't just a fascinating piece of urban history. It's also a challenge to common assumptions about that culture, and a testament to the power of organization within a community.
  11. War Photographer
    The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.
  12. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    Sarah Silverman's cartoon bunny rabbit smile could make her the poster child for orthodontia, but it's her timing that's the real thing of beauty.
  13. Alice et Martin
    Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.
  14. Amélie
    The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.
  15. In the Family
    With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don't feel stretched out so much as given room to breathe, In the Family proves that smart direction and an innate feeling for one's material trumps potentially precious subject matter.
  16. Approved for Adoption
    Watching the animated memoir Approved for Adoption can stir a serenity like skipping stones on water for a delightfully long time.
  17. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    It all remains cohesive, even poetic, and puts what had to have been formidable reporting to excellent use.
  18. The Extra Man
    Going below the surface, the filmmakers and the cast (including a marvelous performance by Marian Seldes as an osteoporotic doyenne) successfully create the hardest characters to pull off: exotic yet recognizable New Yorkers.
  19. Reset
    Reset often seems like Demaizière and Teurlai's attempt to indoctrinate a new generation. Their glorious recruitment film espouses individual expression and athletic grace, while also pinpointing the limits of star power.
  20. Outrage
    Like one of its yakuza bigs, Outrage commands respect but no affection.
  21. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.
  22. My Scientology Movie
    The film's a little choppy as Theroux takes side trips to interview other former Scientologists, but it comes together as a chilling look at America's most famous 20th-century homegrown religion.
  23. Soul Men
    Mac and Jackson carry the show--particularly Mac, who's at his crackly, cranky best here. As swan songs go, Soul Men is pretty sweet.
  24. The War Zone
    We may not want another film about incest, but there's a necessity about this one that won't be denied.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Calle 54
    A dazzling, long-overdue tribute to the true stars of Latin music.
  26. The Big Risk
    Shot on city streets but unfolds in the world of the movies--in a Godardian touch that anticipates Godard, the Ventura character is identified by the cops as "an old pal of Pierrot le Fou." The new titles are flavorsome, and the restoration is up to Rialto's previous high standards.
  27. Ass Backwards
    The episodic story and minimal budget result in a small canvas over which these two huge characters dominate.
  28. Atonement
    Wright wouldn't recognize unobtrusive if it tapped him on the nose--he's cross- pollinated the first half of Atonement into an Oscar-buzzy brew of Masterpiece Theatre and "Upstairs, Downstairs," with the wild English countryside tamed into an artfully lit fairy glade, and into just enough of a bodice-ripper to reel in the youth market. And not a bad one at that.
  29. Big Eyes
    Fortunately for Burton, Big Eyes is actually good. Not great, but good enough -- the perfect middlebrow portrait of the ultimate middlebrow artist.
  30. Tiny Furniture
    A comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York's bourgeois bohemia.
  31. The Dry Land
    The Dry Land does slip inside the inescapable, closed-circle logic of despair, and O'Nan's shy, precarious performance keeps you with him to the edge of the abyss.
  32. Cocote
    Getting one’s bearings isn’t impossible; it’s like divining the trick of a Sunday crossword. But Cocote isn’t purely academic. It’s alternately clinical and sensual.
  33. Pig Death Machine
    Too madcap or not self-serious enough to be called transgressive, Moritsugu's degenerate romp splits the tonal difference between Nick Zedd and John Waters.
  34. Daughter from Danang
    Operation Babylift itself was an attempt to provide some semblance of an American happy ending to the Vietnam debacle. But as Daughter From Danang demonstrates, the war's scars may take another generation to heal.
  35. Bunraku
    Insular and indulgent as it is, though, the movie is never less than a visual treat.
  36. Evolution
    Clinical in the extreme, Evolution aims for open-endedness, but the film, unlike its pint-size protagonists, remains impenetrable.
  37. Joshua
    A nifty psychological thriller--part "Bad Seed," part "Rosemary's Baby"--that deals in a manner both comic and creepy with the parental anxieties of a Manhattan haute yuppie family.
  38. Youth Without Youth
    For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.
  39. The Gambler
    The pleasures offered by The Gambler are simple, but don’t hold that against it. Wyatt, director of the 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brings some bristly, swaggering energy to the thing, and that in turn may have loosened Wahlberg up: He’s both more intense and freer than he’s been in years.
  40. David
    Thankfully, as David's ostentatious subplot-hopping becomes routine, Nambiar's stylistic experiment coalesces into a moving set of faith-based confrontations. It's thrilling to watch Nambiar futz around with tone and style for the sake of establishing a thematic progression.
  41. Gimme Shelter
    Though the arc of the film is as saccharine as a Precious Moments figurine — and it'll play that way for audiences who can't be bothered to look closer — Hudgens is too honest to believe in simple, happy endings.
  42. Mars
    Using a combination of hand-drawn, 3-D, and rotoscope animation to tell his story of an unlikely trio's voyage to Mars in 2015, Marslett struck upon a unique look and tone, spacey, soothing, and strange.
  43. Queen to Play
    The supporting cast is uniformly fine, but the film rests on the delicate shoulders of Bonnaire, who carries it with a soulful, magnetic presence.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shinjuku Incident
    Despite its Hong Kong pedigree (veteran Derek Yee directs), Shinjuku Incident forgoes flashy action scenes in favor of old-fashioned moralism. Warner Bros. could have made it in the 1930s, and that's a compliment.
  45. Lights Out
    When Sandberg isn’t spinning his wheels in the why, he’s capable of doling out a steady diet of scares.
  46. No Date, No Signature
    No Date, No Signature presents a story of flawed but generally decent people trying to put right what went so horribly wrong.
  47. The Conquest
    Aided by an excellent ensemble cast, director Xavier Durringer and his co-scripter, Patrick Rotman, don't refrain from showing this truly repellent side of Sarko during his rise from minister of justice in 2002 to the highest elected office.
  48. Winged Migration
    Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is merely about birds, and though you learn less about the various species Perrin circled the globe to document than you might from an afternoon with Animal Planet, you become intensely chummy with the process and labor of flying.
  49. Port of Memory
    Quietly and atmospherically touches on the Kiarostamian Uncertainty Principle, with Aljafari liberally corrupting his demi-documentary with scripted dialogue, rehearsals, and even digital effects.
  50. The Woman in the Septic Tank
    The novel and wickedly funny topic is mined for only a portion of its potential, but a little ironic astringency is certainly more unsettling than by-the-book slum drama.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Following Sean
    Arlyck's compulsion is to our great fortune. Patient and elegant, his film is a quietly devastating meditation on family, work, and the unrelenting passage of time.
  52. Much Ado About Something
    It's a pleasingly Hollywood notion that plays well with Rubbo's interpolated quotes from "Shakespeare in Love."
  53. Tragedy Girls
    If Scream and Heathers shacked up and had murderous, millennial offspring, it might look a lot like Tragedy Girls.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Margaret
    It's less successful as a human drama than as a near-Brechtian exercise in what human drama looks and sounds like - a distanced but often car-crash compelling portrait of a teen as an unfinished being.
  55. That's My Face
    The movie might test your tolerance for the mystical, but its whispery vagueness is of a piece with the luxuriantly grainy atmospherics.
  56. 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.
  57. The Black Balloon
    Within its resolutely mainstream parameters, The Black Balloon courses with a firsthand feel for languorous Aussie summers, the shifting scales of love and hate in sibling relationships, and the earned wit that helps families cope with difficult situations.
  58. Cars 3
    The thoughtful, thrilling finale retroactively complicates and improves much of the film that it caps, and it left me thinking something else impossible: I’d kind of like to see what happens in Cars 4.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goon: Last of the Enforcers
    In some ways Goon: Last of the Enforcers actually manages to improve upon its forebear, connecting on jabs at a rate roughly equal to that of the earlier film but this time — if you’ll pardon yet more in the way of this figurative pugilism — mixing in some gut-punches, too.
  60. Brokeback Mountain
    The most straightforward love story--and in some ways the straightest--to come out of Hollywood, at least since "Titanic."
  61. For a Good Time, Call...
    Lauren and Katie aren't defined by their attitudes toward men; they're defined by being fu--ing funny and awesome.
  62. No
    No uses the actual commercial material the opposition created for its anti-Pinochet campaign and—re-creating the behind-the-scenes filming—deftly appropriates mediated history for fiction.
  63. Beeswax
    Beeswax exemplifies post-mumble maturity. The movie is not only semi-documentary, but also casually thoughtful (or at least self-reflexive)--working with friends is what Bujalski does in creating his own particular Storyville.
  64. Head-On
    Head-On loses its merry mojo once events turn irrevocable and the action switches from Hamburg to Istanbul.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What's the Matter with Kansas?
    Paradoxically, the movie feels dated in the sense that it pre-dates both the recession and Obama's campaign, yet prescient in illuminating a crisis that plagues us today.
  66. The Minus Man
    Less interesting for what it has to say about evil -- namely, that it's banal/unknowable/random/everywhere -- than for the microsurgical procedures it performs on genre conventions and expectations.
  67. 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.
  68. Short Stay
    The longer exposure to this universe opens up its cruelty and indifference.
  69. The Nazi Officer's Wife
    A powerful account of living in isolation and constant terror.
  70. Survivors Guide to Prison
    Thankfully, Cooke crams in so much persuasively appalling information — especially during a tangential aside on mentally ill patients’ high death rates — that it’s easy to forgive him for seemingly trying to push all viewers’ proverbial buttons at once.
  71. Amour Fou
    Henriette's last thought will forever be a mystery, but the grandeur of Romanticism is tartly, pleasingly demystified.
  72. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men visit rural Uganda, Canadian oil fields, Zuccotti Park, and a climate change conference in Copenhagen, but in its best moments this loopy yet informative doc becomes a buddy movie.
  73. Sylvio
    Birney and Audley have an impressive visual sense — the smart framing and thrifty, ingenious production design (by Peter Davis) at times suggest a Wes Anderson–directed installment of Between Two Ferns — and also the good sense to lean on Birney’s nuanced physical performance.
  74. The Situation
    The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation.
  75. Cinemania
    Built on a foundation of cinephilia, Cinemania is a valentine of sorts to this movie mecca (you have to love a city, and a film culture, that can sustain such bottomless appetites).
  76. Naked As We Came
    Naked plays like a gay-themed August: Osage County without all the histrionics.
  77. A Place at the Table
    A Place at the Table attempts to document its subject with the progressive angle and emotional effect of such docs as "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Waiting for Superman."
  78. Eyes Wide Open
    Mostly, though, it wins with excellent performances: Strauss never overplays his character's internal tension, nor does Danker camp up his youthful virility.
  79. Rocks in My Pockets
    With an insightfulness born from firsthand experience, Rocks in My Pockets posits depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia as conditions that, though potentially lethal, remain manageable, if only through persistent battle.
  80. Letters from the Big Man
    Its quiet plea for reconnection with the non-human world is persuasive, and the engaged, agile meditation on the limits of communication at its center aligns it with Munch's earlier work. Oregon's million-dollar scenery, a sweet cameo by Karen Black, and Rabe's tough/tender performance sweeten the pot.
  81. Right at Your Door
    Grounded hard by some terrific smoking-skyline special effects and by Cochrane and McCormack's intensity.
  82. 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.
  83. The Great Silence (1968)
    Because Silence’s might doesn’t eventually set things right for Snow Hill’s residents, The Great Silence goes out with a devastating bang.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Damsels in Distress
    The thing that Damsels and its damsels value above all else - outside of well-timed, well-phrased, slyly deployed witticisms (Stillman hasn't lost a step) - is sure to rankle mavericks on both sides of the aisle. Forget the economy - it's about conformity, stupid.
  85. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    Mitchell’s documentary style isn’t flashy or refined, but it is economical. The director does his homework and almost cross-examines the film’s subjects.
  86. Place Vendôme
    Inept as a thriller, Place Vendôme nevertheless intrigues.
  87. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Uncompromising in its way, the film's portrait of codependent compulsion is so organically conceived, you start to smell the sulfur of traumatized childhood, no exposition needed.
  88. Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story
    Manages to have its cake and eat it too -- debunking the Berlin image even while reveling in it.
  89. Centro Histórico
    A rich, artful quartet of shorts mirroring the diverse idiosyncrasies of four significant auteurs.
  90. Take My Nose... Please!
    Take My Nose…Please! rescues plastic surgery from Hollywood’s “did they or didn’t they?” gossip and reality television’s odious voyeurism with a nuanced, empathetic (and often funny) introduction to a few women, mostly comedians, who’ve had work done or are considering it.
  91. 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.
  92. The Walk
    The Walk, in its last half at least, is a dazzling piece of work, particularly in 3-D; even so, its most luminous effect is an actor.
  93. Saving Banksy
    Saving Banksy, in documenting the struggle of art consultant Brian Greif to preserve a single Banksy painting — one of the artist's trademark Che Guevara rats — inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I, Olga Hepnarová
    A top performance for this year so far, Olszanksa's Olga is standoffish, frequently smoldering, rarely smiling, and she toes the line between intelligence and insanity.
  95. Queen of Katwe
    Nair's immersive, energetic style, combined with her talented cast's ability to invest even the most obvious lines with genuine feeling, gives Queen of Katwe a powerful clarity.
  96. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Not far removed from the director’s interest in trance states, his Nosferatu posits a self-pitying creature exhausted by immortality: Sunken-eyed Kinski inverts his usual frenzy into a fatigue underlining the importance of eternal rest.
  97. A Hard Day's Night
    No previous rocksploitation film had ever done so splendid a job of selling its performers.
  98. Vanishing Waves
    For those who found Inception too plotty and sexless, Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte's sleek sci-fi reverie is hereby advised.
  99. An Ideal Husband
    His film is hardly memorable, but it's amusing enough for two hours, and it never panders or cloys.
  100. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s wilder, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus Seventies- and Eighties-style nudity.
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