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. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    Dante's masterstroke is to make the movie as visually and narratively unhinged as its source material.
  2. Vengo
    Gatlif's latest celebration of gypsy soul, sets a modest sliver of narrative in a fabulous widescreen landscape and surrounds it with a permanent party.
  3. Blood Work
    A bracingly no-nonsense, highly professional policier—as proudly old-fashioned as its curmudgeon hero.
  4. Tales of Halloween
    There's much to like here, and ample scares for your brains.
  5. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    Holdridge's film oscillates wildly between low-key romantic comedy and antic slapstick and doesn't always hit the mark, but it has charm to burn.
  6. Lymelife
    Given how steeped it is in symbolic portent, Lymelife proves surprisingly watchable from moment to moment, thanks to the uniformly fine playing (particularly of the Culkin frères), evocative production design (by Kelly McGehee), and handsome widescreen photography (by Frank Godwin).
  7. Cupcakes
    This musical comedy is sugary and sincere.
  8. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    If Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna's exhilarating documentary, Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, were merely a testament to McQueen's stubbornness and irascibility, it would still be a damned entertaining portrait.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shortbus
    There's something refreshingly frisky and celebratory about Shortbus that offsets its flaws. It's a triple-X midnight movie with a heart of squarest gold.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Grey
    There's too much Jack London, and, as they systematically pick off the stragglers, too many CGI wolves go unpunched.
  11. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    Okazaki gets close to, but never sheds enough light on, Mifune's elusive personality.
  12. Fast Food Nation
    A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    District 13: Ultimatum
    Works only when at full sprint.
  14. Michael
    Not everything that is human is naturally interesting, and Schleinzer approaches his subject not as an investigator, but as though covering up a crime scene and scrubbing it of anything that might provide insight or empathy or psychological traction.
  15. The Salvation
    Emphasizing action over the spoken word, The Salvation doesn't break new ground, yet its murderous twists of fate are consistently compelling.
  16. Film Socialisme
    Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.
  17. Tokyo!
    Mutants abound as each episode trips the light fantastic.
  18. Woman Is the Future of Man
    We're accustomed to an omniscient understanding of what movie characters, particularly in dramas about love and loss, are thinking, but Hong distributes information with a saline drip. Often, of course, his two lonely fools don't quite know what they're thinking, either--Woman can sometimes come off like an introverted "Carnal Knowledge" with two Jack Nicholsons.
  19. Dancer in the Dark
    This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.
  20. Seoul Searching
    Every character gets to learn a lesson, and while the humor is nothing new, the situations are.
  21. 16 Blocks
    It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.
  22. Caterina va in città
    Pitch-perfect performances and a light-handed but razor-sharp script keep this satire brisk and biting.
  23. Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
    Schneebaum is a great subject; the film doesn't quite make the most of him.
  24. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    This is a tender and engaging portrait of a marvelously elusive personality, whose style remains timeless.
  25. One True Thing
    Quindlen's book is wry and deeply sad in its prose, but watching actors run this very simple maze is significantly less entertaining, or convincing.
  26. Songcatcher
    The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.
  27. Sex Is Comedy
    Enjoyable if light, until it becomes apparent that Breillat is not simply waxing narcissistic but fashioning a simultaneous critique, explication, and demystification of the lengthy, near-single-take defloration that is Fat Girl's centerpiece.
  28. Unfaithful
    Casual familiarity with Lyne's oeuvre is all you need to predict the major plot contortion.
  29. The Summer of Sangaile
    Lesbian coming-of-age tales can be sensationalistic and leering, but this film (directed by a woman, Alanté Kavaïté) casts a sensitive eye on the understated story of Sangaile (Julija Steponaityté), a shy, troubled girl who begins a relationship with the more ebullient Auste (Aisté Dirziuté).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Monsters
    Director Gareth Edwards, a CGI artist by trade, has created a dystopian landscape that's so naturalistic, it's uncanny.
  31. Good Kill
    It's immediate and vital, and it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve got all the right answers.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babies
    Is Babies a good movie? Of course not. But that's missing the point--like asking if a porn video is a good movie. Babies gets the job done.
  33. Design Is One
    Good design rests at the intersection of function and beauty. Design Is One, alas, has far too little of the latter.
  34. Return
    Firmly in the unassuming indie vein, Return treads lightly and leaves little imprint.
  35. Lbs.
    When a heart attack causes Neil to isolate himself in the wild and get his eating under control, Lbs. acquires a more distinct, insightful texture, emerging--along with its star, who actually lost 170 pounds over the course of a two-year shoot--as a creature with sharper angles than it first appeared.
  36. Flowers
    Pulled in too many directions, the film's subtle mood-building starts to feel intentionally oblique, the force of its characters and symbols lessened by a frustrating circuitousness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dai si gin
    Well executed but ultimately unsatisfying, Breaking News centers its cops-and-robbers plot around a clever meta-media twist that nevertheless fails to transcend gimmickry.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bad Posture
    Bad Posture, the first narrative feature from director Malcolm Murray, is sure to unsettle those who prefer films to pass clear judgment on not-so-upstanding types, but it's hard not to admire such a drolly off-kilter pass at the domestic regionalist indie.
  39. Splinters
    The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).
  40. The Hand That Feeds
    López is a singularly tender, compelling, and articulate campaigner in this high-stakes struggle for justice, filmed with the urgency and suspense of a Hitchcock thriller.
  41. Deliver Us
    The filmmakers observe rather than interview or investigate, and much of the film is footage of actual church-sanctioned exorcisms.
  42. Waydowntown
    With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.
  43. Wendigo
    Grounded in Fessenden's handheld camera, stuttering montage rhythms, and time-lapse photography, the engagingly primitive animated special effects contribute to a mood that's sustained through the surprisingly somber conclusion.
  44. Out of Time
    In apparent atonement for whatever wayward thinking led him down the Freeman-Judd path, Franklin has transformed Out of Time into a highly felicitous comedy of infidelities and busted-up romances.
  45. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Baggy and overbroad, He Loves Me is notable only as a corrective to cinema's promiscuity with fabulous destinies.
  46. Secretary
    The unnecessarily emphatic ending suggests that Secretary's makers are a bit anxious to demonstrate they've whipped a potentially grotesque, spanks-for-the-memories scenario into the season's most romantic love story -- which is, in fact, what they've done.
  47. Drumline
    An exhilarating serving of movie fluff.
  48. Chaos
    Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)
  49. The Patriot
    A movie of cornball sentiment, humorously anachronistic dialogue, and expensive Colonial Williamsburg sets.
  50. Children of Love
    Chillingly naturalistic.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Perfect Getaway
    A Perfect Getaway is never great, but Twohy isn't aspiring for greatness--he's after gritty and lively and weird. And that's good enough.
  52. Love Crime
    Even KST is left floundering as the misconceived, underwritten totem of today's amoral, power-mad executive, wearing flowing trousers and medallion necklaces not seen since Faye Dunaway demanded a meeting in "Network."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    This burlesque of biopic clichés flounders from one setup to the next without the engine that drives the genre: a strong central character.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    Lee pays little attention to the roots of breakdancing or how it helped to spread hip-hop worldwide, choosing instead to obsess over the mad skillz of his international subjects.
  55. Reel Injun
    Combining a road trip from his native Arctic reservation to Los Angeles with an archival cinematic survey, Diamond's treatment of each is perfunctory to the point of inutility.
  56. My Cousin Rachel
    Tense and at times downright frightening.
  57. Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    Ultimately less an arty provocation than a secular invocation, Outside Satan seems almost helplessly exploratory, an honest account of groping for grace.
  58. The Lincoln Lawyer
    Undercut by uninspired direction, car-commercial art direction, and a lack of grit that makes the hidebound nature of the genre stand out like an episode of "Matlock" on HBO.
  59. Young & Beautiful
    Young & Beautiful is more interesting once Isabelle's secret is out, when it's more about the way other people react to this prematurely jaded girl who seems to have stepped out of a Lorde song.
  60. Wild Style
    The folks who made Wild Style probably didn’t realize it, but their fiction film was essentially a documentary of history in the early making.
  61. The Merchant of Venice
    Pacino simply wipes the cobblestones with the rest of the cast: His beautifully calibrated performance is lucid, commanding, and genuinely tragic.
  62. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    Habicht has made a lovely film that’s partly about Pulp and partly about Sheffield: It’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins.
  63. Kingdom of Heaven
    The movie does what any self-respecting politician would do: sidestep the issues, soft-pedal mortal costs, talk a fat game, and divert your attention away from history with exercises in spectacle and power.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Common Thread
    Sequins hinges on its performances and newcomer Naymark is a marvel of quiet intelligence, endowing Claire with a complex mix of virginal purity and hormonal rage.
  65. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bombón: El Perro
    Sorin's spare style belies a rich wisdom, as well as impressive performances from a cast of debuting nonpros.
  67. Invisible
    Earnest and blessed with immediate visual textures, Aviad's film is nevertheless much more a matter of feelings - shared or suppressed and then shared - than of story.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chronicles
    Leguizamo finds the right mute for his trumpet, modulating his expenditure of emotion to the requirements of the scenario rather than overengaging his capable Mambo Mouth.
  69. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Studiously harmless, Disney's long-in-development film rendition pasteurizes the book's renegade verve with typical means.
  70. A Cat in Paris
    Unoriginal and mired in bad jokes.
  71. Denial
    The movie is fascinating in its approach to legal arguments, forensic evidence, and the uses and abuses of history — but, like the courtroom at its center, it doesn't have much feel for the feels.
  72. 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.
  73. Dandelion
    Atmosphere trumps plot throughout, enabling the movie to survive an unfortunate, if inevitable, final-act turn.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dark Hours
    Devine's giddy sex offender nearly rivals William Hurt's preposterous gangster in "A History of Violence" for absurdly enjoyable line readings.
  75. Gaza Strip
    A documentary to make the stones weep -- as shameful as it is scary.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dahmer
    Jacobson has achieved the unthinkable: He humanizes a notoriously brutal psychopath and, in the process, leaves the audience with an unwelcome sense of complicity.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Presumed Guilty: Tales of the Public Defenders
    As in most court TV (the film is produced by KQED), the action is faster paced than in reality, and the graphics are cheesy. But the lawyers are far more compelling than David E. Kelley's.
  78. The Blonds
    Unpretentiously poetic and casually stylish, yet perversely precise. Reconstructing the past, Carri seems to suggest, is akin to grabbing the water in a flowing stream.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Youth
    Though director Ratnam keeps this actioner running MTV-smoothly, his global pop style is both complemented and bested by composer A.R. Rahman (Lagaan, Bombay Dreams), whose electronic soundtrack grafts chunky post-hip-hop beats onto the quickly evolving sonic norms of subcontinental cinema.
  80. Ticket to Jerusalem
    Largely sidesteps sentiment in favor of a tentative hopefulness.
  81. Out of the Furnace
    Cooper may have gone overboard in delineating the hardships of blue-collar life in Out of the Furnace. But he has a gift for getting actors to put some muscle into their work, and enough finesse to make sure the sweat doesn't show.
  82. Cheap Thrills
    Katz stages the contests with infectious energy... Too bad the last half hour feels like Katz is rubbing our face in the several turds he shows us, reminding us that people are awful. Of course they are. What else do you have to tell us?
  83. Buster's Mal Heart
    It’s science fiction that’s complex, thoughtful and funny, like 12 Monkeys or Primer run through a Fargo filter.
  84. Pitch Perfect 2
    The story is stuffed with subplots and gags that are sometimes fun by themselves but don’t quite cohere into a whole — the picture has a melismatic waywardness, as if it’s singing as fast as it can yet is never quite sure where it’s going.
  85. 100 Bloody Acres
    Playing like a Down Under Elmore Leonard novel, 100 Bloody Acres features lucky breaks and quick reverses; a persistent soundtrack of Aussie oldies helps keep the mood cheery, despite a literal vatful of blood.
  86. Zombie Honeymoon
    If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.
  87. Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story
    Among the alleged virtues of the game cited by the doc's subjects are its ability to bring people together, its usefulness as a tool to indoctrinate (er, teach) children, and its building of a global culture.
  88. 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.
  89. Symphony of the Soil
    Despite director Deborah Koons Garcia's mighty effort to create a stimulating and visually engaging product, Symphony plays mostly like a taped lecture.
  90. Because I Was a Painter
    Cognet's work is more devoted to thought about aesthetics than aesthetics themselves. His modest film represents a break from the rigorous historical work typically associated with documentaries about the Holocaust, and its open-ended nature is a fitting analogue to ongoing questions about testimony and healing.
  91. Path of Blood
    Documentary is an inherently tricky field, requiring objectivity, but Path of Blood leans so far into it that any sense of narrative or purpose dissolves.
  92. A Coffee In Berlin
    Gerster and Schilling are more successful when they allow Niko's behavior to be their main subject.
  93. Dear Frankie
    Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Jerusalem
    The film strains under the influence of too many philosophy texts.
  95. Violeta Went to Heaven
    By inexpertly filtering her art through her travails, Wood and Altunaga reimagine Parra's suicide as an explicable conclusion to her turbulent life.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    A State of Mind
    One leaves the film with the Twilight Zone sense that the place isn't quite the hellhole prior reports have suggested.
  97. Atomic Blonde
    The most coherent moments of the simultaneously byzantine and dumb Atomic Blonde are its nimbly choreographed fight scenes, episodes that best show off the aloof appeal of Theron.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vitus
    Charming Swiss import.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cachorro
    Much smarter than the average comedy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How She Move
    Especially good are Wesley, whose expressions are a study in shifting thought, and Tre Armstrong as her street-hardened but good-hearted rival, a stock role that Armstrong fills with unmediated feeling.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »