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 7.5 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. The Green Wave
    That Ahadi and his team were able to safely compile, let alone edit together, this much ground-level footage is a feat in and of itself; that it comes together in such a compelling manner makes it almost vital.
  2. Meet the Fokkens
    Directors Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas capture some un-pretty details of spankings, HJs, and dominance scenarios, but the film is about two old ladies, still cackling despite the sadness that trailed in the wake of the lives into which they were forced.
  3. Goats
    Incapable of energizing Mark Poirier's leaden script (based on his own novel), Christopher Neil directs with a mechanical blandness made more tedious still by a score of gentle guitar strumming so aggravatingly benign it might inspire you to partake in one of Wendy's climactic, cathartic primal screams.
  4. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy, of course, finds her father charming because he is her father, misses her mother for the same reason, and treasures her neuroses because they are her own. What viewers miss is anything inviting us to feel the same way.
  5. Red Hook Summer
    An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.
  6. The Bourne Legacy
    Now, we have Jeremy Renner as another Treadstone mega man (there were nine, apparently), and though he is a likable enough pug-nosed action figure, the Damonlessness is sorely felt.
  7. Hope Springs
    Jones and Streep give likable enough performances as a humane monster and a human victim. But their characters never become more than that.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Campaign
    Like past-his-peak Perot, The Campaign is basically a footnote, a goof on our broken political system that's good for a certain novelty, but as a challenge to the dominant order? It's ultimately impotent.
  9. Soldiers of Fortune
    Christian "Direct-to-Video" Slater lends not a shred of credibility to the role of Craig MacKenzie.
  10. Total Recall (2012)
    Where Paul Verhoeven's original was testosterone-stupid and, therefore, fun, Wiseman's film is just boring-stupid.
  11. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    It's the latest installment in what now forms a lightly likable trilogy of films based on Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid books.
  12. Craigslist Joe
    Directed by Garner, Craigslist Joe is sweet, moving, and frustrating.
  13. 360
    There are fleeting moments, but Morgan's narrative promiscuity leaves 360 feeling only spread out and empty.
  14. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
    Chodorov follows the first-person tradition accordingly, entering the subject through his own early immersion in these films via his father, television presenter Stephen Chodorov.
  15. Dreams of a Life
    Left with barely any there there, Morley compensates with long reenactments starring look-alike Zawe Ashton that are never quite convincing but instead suck more air out of the haunting vacuum left behind in Vincent's wake.
  16. Assassin's Bullet
    Fans of incessant flashbacks and endless whooshing zooms into close-ups will find much to love about Assassin's Bullet; less satisfied, alas, will be those with a fondness for lucid plotting, compelling intrigue, and credible performances.
  17. Mosquita y Mari
    Despite occasional lapses into showy expressionistic slo-mo, Guerrero's direction demonstrates a patience and attention to emotional detail that allows the two young leads' performances to develop naturally.
  18. Sushi: The Global Catch
    This kaleidoscopic meticulousness proves comprehensive without ever feeling tedious, an especially impressive feat considering how quickly it becomes message-oriented.
  19. The Babymakers
    The zippy screwball energy - and fantastic roster of cameos - that mitigated the fratty humor of Broken Lizard's last movie, the restaurant send-up "The Slammin' Salmon," is missing here, resulting in generic, feeble laffs and an ending as sticky as the pilfered substance.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    Throughout, stereotypes are trotted out so that the movie can wink that it's too smart for them.
  21. You've Been Trumped
    Donald Trump is the face of America here, representing all of us and demonstrating our values abroad. Hopefully this sharp rendering, or something very much like it, is the legacy for which he and his family will be remembered.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burning Man
    The high-sheen Australian drama Burning Man leans heavily on a scrambled chronology, and likewise feels tonally mixed up, but it certainly does keep you guessing.
  23. Falling Overnight
    While a movie such as last year's "Like Crazy" let its early promise gradually give way to sun-kissed montages and tedious melodrama, Jackson's mini-indie not only stays the course but also gets better throughout.
  24. Abendland
    There's material from a phone-in psychoanalysis center, the dumping grounds of London's surveillance-camera feed, and the detox tent at some massive biergarten - like much of the film, mordantly funny in a kind of pursed-lips, arched-eyebrows way.
  25. Nuit #1
    First-time feature director Anne Émond's Nuit #1 lingers on the combination of hunger and awkwardness that attends the best one-nighters, showing the unsexy details that most movies elide.
  26. Sacrifice
    Chen's attention to character over spectacle pays minimal dividends and is compounded by the fact that his battles - full of standard-issue slow motion and hacked-off limbs - are as dull as an overused blade.
  27. Klown
    Raunchy dude comedy is hardly the sole province of American cinema, as Klown all too dispiritingly reconfirms.
  28. Searching for Sugar Man
    Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man such a gift.
  29. Planet of Snail
    An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun's documentary Planet of Snail celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple.
  30. Killer Joe
    A hideously funny tabloid noir.
  31. Ruby Sparks
    She (Kazan) also wrote the screenplay, which begs interpretation as a frustrated actress's commentary on the way that even ostensibly serious writers write women - that is, for maximum convenience. Still, the direction, from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), is never more than workmanlike.
  32. The Well Digger's Daughter
    Stirrings of dignified outrage via the eponymous well-digger eventually go a long way toward energizing the film, which improves markedly once it shifts its focus from the World War I–era milieu toward how quickly a naive young girl can turn into a fallen woman and the ways in which that fallout affects her father, her family, and apparently most importantly, her name.
  33. Wagner's Dream
    It remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which - by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition - Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Murphy has never been a typical rock star, and Shut Up is by no means a conventional rock documentary.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Queen of Versailles
    I've seen The Queen of Versailles twice, and both times the audience laughed frequently at the Siegel family's sheer tackiness.
  36. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like "13 Assassins" -it may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology.
  37. 30 Beats
    It is absolutely terrible.
  38. The Dark Knight Rises
    The Dark Knight Rises is a shallow repository of ideas, but as a work of sheer sensation, it has something to recommend.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trishna
    In the hands of Winterbottom, who has frequently shown a knack for infusing red flag sex with dread without sapping it of sexiness, the master-slave dialectic is made grossly, appropriately literal. The dialectic itself is never discussed.
  40. Ponies
    Nick Sandow's Ponies can claim the not negligible achievement of bringing one of the more irritatingly objectionable characters in recent cinema to the screen.
  41. Family Portrait in Black and White
    The film's emotional and psychological textures suffer for those losses, but Family is still riveting viewing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    An unexpectedly gripping portrait of how MLB's sausage gets made.
  43. Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    Calling the movie simply Buddhist, in form as well as context, might be just another way of saying it's awesome, as in it inspires legitimate awe.
  44. Alps
    It's quibbling to draw up columns denoting what Lanthimos, a difficult but undeniable talent, does right and does wrong. He's seemingly working intuitively here, and whatever missteps he makes while feeling his way forward, he manages to pass quite near to one of the essential conundrums of being human.
  45. Red Lights
    Much as I want to believe in Cortés, who is clearly talented and ambitious, there is just too much in Red Lights that encourages agnosticism.
  46. Farewell, My Queen
    The pleasure of Jacquot's film is in watching various strains of discreet, heated, and deluded passionate attachment performed.
  47. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Deconstructing Dad might be a messy biography, but it is a fascinating primer on Scott's work.
  48. Grassroots
    By ultimately softening its stance toward McIver, Grassroots disingenuously has it both ways, reducing politics first to a David-versus-Goliath adventure, and then to an everyone-is-cool bowl of mush.
  49. The Imposter
    Thick with reenactments and cute cutaways, the movie evolves into a cultural inquisition, following this stranger through the strange land of bad-news America, where the truth is still waiting to be exhumed.
  50. Easy Money
    A hit in its native Sweden as "Snabba Cash," the English title is a piece of cheap irony; this is a crime thriller where no one gets away clean, and every action has its irrevocable reaction.
  51. Daisies (1966)
    A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.
  52. Starry Starry Night
    Lin fills in the gaps with some handsome CG-fantasy sequences and a rather obvious central metaphor involving a missing puzzle piece, but he can't make up for the fact that the film wants to say more about the fragility of childhood than it's capable of communicating through its characters and their delicate, perpetually uncertain situations.
  53. 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.
  54. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.
  55. Collaborator
    On one level, it's a dark, funny tragedy, but it's also Donovan's thesis on his own craft.
  56. The Pact
    A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.
  57. The Magic of Belle Isle
    With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled power of imagination while displaying absolutely none of its own.
  58. China Heavyweight
    In the end, once we realize the title doesn't refer to these bantams' weight class but to their strength of heart, or something, the film feels blandly respectful and, oddly enough, apolitical.
  59. 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.
  60. Last Ride
    Newcomer Russell, at once tough and vulnerable, canny and damaged, delivers a performance of nuanced naturalism that starkly conveys the sorrow and sacrifice that sometimes come with learning to achieve self-sufficiency.
  61. Crazy Eyes
    The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Her savvy for self-presentation, though admirable from a business standpoint, makes for a more boring movie. You never get the sense that the camera was ever allowed to see anything that Perry didn't want it to see.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Savages
    Soul is something Savages has in short supply, not least because Kitsch and Johnson register as blanks on-screen. In contrast, Hayek and del Toro, both sporting apparently intentionally terrible wigs, give big, scenery-chewing performances and earn our interest and empathy even while committing heinous acts.
  64. Neil Young Journeys
    Teaming with the Canadian legend again, Demme and five other camera operators expertly capture an intense, pared-down 2011 solo show at Toronto's Massey Hall in the absorbing new Neil Young Journeys.
  65. The Amazing Spider-Man
    The film is also faithful to the smartassery of the Spider-Man of the comics, and Garfield's spindly physicality evokes the Marvel illustrations of the 1960s.
  66. Madea's Witness Protection
    An agent of spiritual regeneration and showman, Perry's dramaturgy is as subtle as a Bible-thump, but until a logy last act that has Levy disguised as a faux-Frenchman, his instincts are on-target here.
  67. Busong
    Splendid vistas and sun scapes add mythic punctuation to the proceedings, but director Auraeus Solito (Tuli) generates too little of the magic that holds a story as tenuous as this one together.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unforgivable
    It's some kind of monster of romanticized antiromanticism, filleting and exalting its characters, cheating and rewarding its breathless audience. The closest the film gets to a thesis is this shoulder-shrug torpedo: "People do things like that without knowing why."
  69. A Burning Hot Summer
    Although Angèle's religious faith and Frédéric's belief in luck seem like strained attempts at adding heft to the material, the film nevertheless works up a potent dramatic restlessness, derived from the push-pull between an entitled, obsessive Frédéric and Bellucci's quietly chaotic Angèle.
  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. Take This Waltz
    There are enough unexpected delights, such as repurposing "Video Killed the Radio Star" during a critical moment between Margot and Daniel, to keep us interested in their drawn-out, teasing, tantalizing courtship.
  72. People Like Us
    Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.
  73. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality.
  74. Ted
    It's dispiriting enough to witness Kunis still waiting for a comic lead role worthy of her. But the usually nimble Wahlberg - who at least has one great moment rattling off "white-trash girls' names" - suffers the most, playing second fiddle to a knee-high Gund knockoff.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magic Mike
    The highly calculated Magic Mike is pure Hollywood self-mythology - a neo-Depression musical, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for shitty times, an origin-of-the-star story, and a projection of that star's hoped-for future.
  76. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Possible resulting "fun" is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.
  77. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Ordinary Miracles offers a breezy and informative overview of the legendary photographic collective known as the Photo League.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stella Days
    Thanks to its understated elegance and surpassing central performance, this modest, too-eagerly schematic period drama is more engrossing than it has a right to be.
  79. Men on the Bridge
    Raw yet respectful and tenderly observed.
  80. Nate & Margaret
    Narrative conflicts are introduced and swatted away in favor of an amiable sentimentality, two nice people being nice to each other.
  81. The Last Ride
    It portrays Williams in a generally sympathetic light without whitewashing his vice-loving, belligerent ways or mythologizing them in a bid for postmortem psychoanalysis.
  82. Kumaré
    Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary.
  83. To Rome with Love
    This Rome is luminous, and Allen, as in "Manhattan," is great at imbuing his film with a strong sense of location.
  84. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    By turns bizarrely affectless and then prattlingly manic, much like its dual protagonists.
  85. Brave
    The animation studio's first film with a female protagonist, a defiant lass who acts as a much-welcome corrective to retrograde Disney heroines of the past and the company's unstoppable pink-princess merchandising.
  86. The Invisible War
    The Invisible War, though revelatory, is perhaps the most straightforward film yet from a director who likes to broach the fault lines of sex and society.
  87. The Girl from the Naked Eye
    There are dozens of better, riskier, more interesting films that go unreleased every year - why this militantly dull effort is taking their place is its only worthwhile mystery.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Master Qi and the Monkey King
    Quietly admiring of its subjects' skill and dedication, Govenar's straightforward documentary does a capable job of extending that mission.
  89. Ikland
    Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.
  90. The Woman in the Fifth
    You're not sure what this is till it's over, but certainly Hawke's performance is his nerviest and most sincere in a decade.
  91. Americano
    Americano, which Demy also wrote and stars in, is an ambivalent, occasionally touching work of homage to his parents, yet one whose clumsiness only underscores the superiority of their directly quoted films.
  92. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    She's trying to access a shared humanity, to foster an unusual intimacy with viewers - to strip herself, often literally, to a naked and undeniable truth.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tortured
    Lean, nasty, and patently absurd, The Tortured plays like one long scream of agony.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Extraterrestrial
    Extraterrestrial is a comedy dropped agreeably into an alien invasion - well, maybe not invasion. The spaceship just sits there.
  95. Kite
    Less Bollywood than Generic Asian Family Drama Lite, when it's not a flat-out sunset-choked infomercial for Ahmedabad and its annual rooftop kite-flying festival.
  96. El Velador
    El Velador still sharply conveys what life is like in a traumatized nation.
  97. Your Sister's Sister
    As Alex Ross Perry's "The Color Wheel" - another micro-budgeted sibling story - shows, a film about relentlessly repellent characters is much more fascinating, if not courageous, than one that tries to explain, redeem, or forgive them so easily.
  98. Rock of Ages
    A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded.
  99. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    The variations are many, but the theme is as consistent as the crowd that grows and strengthens throughout Savona's inside, traditional, vérité portrait of the uprising.
  100. The Harder They Come
    The definitive postcolonial cult-movie musical.
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