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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    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breaking the Frame
    Director Marielle Nitoslawska's faith in the power of imagery over pedantic exposition rewards the audience with a heady catalogue of Schneemann's luscious paintings, expressionistic collages, hand-illustrated journals, visceral photographs, and excerpts from her corporeal films.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    To watch the 158-minute 1991 theatrical cut of Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’s globetrotting, apocalyptic, pop-rock-saturated sci-fi odyssey, is to zone in and out of a meandering, wistful dream.
  3. The Adventures of Felix
    A wafer-thin, sweetly sentimental picaresque with semiserious overtones.
  4. Kiss Me, Stupid (re-release)
    A grimly suggestive and unexpectedly tender bedroom farce, Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid is a true film maudit.
  5. Suddenly
    A humane, unassumingly quirky rumination on chance and caprice.
  6. I Capture the Castle
    Sweet and sleepy, I Capture the Castle might feel most comfortable in a Sunday-afternoon slot on the BBC.
  7. Bombay Eunuch
    A happy ending of sorts arrives out of nowhere -- against unfathomable odds, the string of awful ironies ends, for now, with sweet justice.
  8. Echotone
    Too vital for elegy, Echotone tells an old story whose beginning - the inception of a vibrant creative hub - remains mysterious, although the end is easy to predict.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life
    An uneven but extremely funny throwback.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    L'amour fou
    It plays like an extended auction catalog with commentary. Thematically recalling Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours"-another film dealing with objects in a French art collection as receptacles for memory and personal biography-it sorely lacks that drama's tension between insular nostalgia and the wider, rapidly evolving outside world.
  11. The Great Yokai War
    The film makes no more or less sense than Ridley Scott's Legend or Jim Henson's Labyrinth, and in fact has a creaky, blue-gel '80s-ness to it, but for many, keeping up with Miike's cranked output is an end in itself.
  12. The Upside of Anger
    The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.
  13. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers is bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up "Little Buddha" or "Stealing Beauty," it's not exactly boring.
  14. Rank
    Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.
  15. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    Based on several American Girl stories about a 1930s cub reporter in Cincinnati, this dull theatrical debut especially disappoints because I'm usually fond of square, sepia-toned, period-costumed kids' movies (like Fly Away Home) that go nowhere at the box office.
  16. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    [Goldthwait] handles it beautifully, crafting from such rough stuff something astoundingly sweet and sharply funny about forgiveness, unconditional love, tenderness, and the things we hide just to get ourselves from one day to the next.
  17. This Christmas
    The cast has spirit, but the dialogue and situations are phonier than the Yule log on TV.
  18. Laggies
    Even though Laggies is clearly well-intentioned — and the anxieties it tussles with are completely believable — the film is awkward in ways that are sometimes charming and sometimes off-putting.
  19. Free Fire
    10 minutes early to the Free Fire press screening, I grew restless as “Annie’s Song” played on a continuous loop in the theater; the gimmick filled up my senses with the quickly confirmed fear that Wheatley’s film would rarely rise above the dopey and obvious.
  20. Keanu
    Key and Peele have a special kind of magic they’ve brought to their first feature, but it’s also a crazy-simple formula: Keep saving that damn cat.
  21. Zero Charisma
    The comic scenes arc into bleakness, and the bleak ones often collapse back into comedy.
  22. Megamind
    If nothing else, I found my son's Kryptonite: boring superhero rip-offs voiced by check-cashing actors. At least Steve Carell used an accent.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Signal
    This uneven but impressive shot-on-digital shocker earns a marker in the mausoleum of apocalyptic horror--a genre that's proving (un)surprisingly durable in the new century.
  24. Burn After Reading
    The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.
  25. Invincible
    Invincible joins "Rocky" or "Hoosiers" or "Breaking Away" as one of the few satisfying sports movies in which the foundation built upon a heap of clichés holds strong.
  26. Shutter Island
    Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Allegro
    Unmotivated jitters and flash-zooms abound, needlessly complicating a flagrantly elaborate premise.
    • 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.
  29. Boiler Room
    Takes us inside the consciousness and the coded masculine world of a single character.
  30. Petits frères
    Doillon's ease with young performers is again seamlessly evident.
  31. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    It's all slight enough to blow away, and rare enough to warrant seeing it before it does.
  32. The Parking Lot Movie
    Their sense of superiority toward the petty SUV drivers and rude midlife-crisisers who frequent the lot is matched by introspective considerations of traditional social contracts.
  33. Amigo
    John Sayles's Amigo aspires more to educate than entertain, but it's no less engrossing for that.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wretches & Jabberers
    More info packet than a story, the film is carefully designed for unambiguous impact.
  35. The Nine Muses
    The result is not without beauty, though at a certain point, one begins to notice that each new muse rather resembles the previous, a uniformity that restrains the film from true symphonic swell.
  36. Under Control
    Once that point is made, this push-pull settles into a certain lulling monotony, wandering a wilderness of wires, cooling towers, and a thousand other inscrutable devices, but it is a monotony with an undertone of menace.
  37. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    The played-out scenarios in Olnek's first feature, such as Jane's sessions with her therapist, are soon outnumbered by inspired silliness, like tears shed over a revolving dessert tray in a diner.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Keyhole
    The film is infectiously somnambulant, so convincingly and unrelentingly dreamlike that its sudden end mimics the sensation of snapping awake from deep sleep.
  39. Player Hating: A Love Story
    A young boy's nonchalant attitude toward having a friend stick a loaded gun in his mouth as well as a man's numerous knife scars courtesy of his beloved wife definitely cut through the clichés about "thug life" to capture how violence is an integral, corrosive part of inner-city life.
  40. You Are Here
    Overlapping story threads, voices, and imagery result in an atmosphere of disquieting psychological confusion.
  41. State 194
    The best part of State 194 is its domesticity, its low-key approach to a conflict that has been widely sensationalized in the media.
  42. Student
    Psychological violence is constantly present and reflected in the film's physical violence, which is typically suggested rather than seen.
  43. Peaches Does Herself
    While it helps to already be a fan, it's imaginative and energetic enough to be entertaining for the uninitiated.
  44. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band
    While his obsessiveness seems neurotic, and watching this film is not always comfortable, it also seems to be all part of the process.
  45. K2: Siren of the Himalayas
    Its considered use of ice and snow-covered vistas against the expanse of blue sky offers great beauty while capturing something of what pulls the adventurous to try to reach the world's second highest peak.
  46. Kung Fu Elliot
    Documentary character study Kung Fu Elliot starts off as a cringe-humor portrait of a delusional would-be action star, but gradually transforms into a thoughtful examination of its title character's naïveté.
  47. Farewell to Hollywood
    [A] bizarre and wonderful doc that's pitched like a home movie but crafted with fine, poignant sensibilities.
  48. Brand: A Second Coming
    Though it includes parts of a live comedy performance, the film is a documentary with an attention span about as long as its subject's.
  49. Love at First Fight
    Rejuvenating the romantic comedy through its unusual premise — in which training for an elite army unit releases a flood of pheromones — Cailley's film is also buoyed by its enormously appealing leads, Kévin Azaïs and Adèle Haenel.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Station to Station
    Director Doug Aitken's trick of turning 62 one-minute clips into a single feature turns out to be less a shattering of narrative than a segmentation.
  51. Karski & the Lords of Humanity
    In their abstraction, a number of striking animated sequences prove more effective in conveying these horrors than the talking-head segments that contextualize them.
  52. A Good American
    The movie is slow, quiet, and infuriating, as Binney and his small group are undermined by Gen. Michael Hayden's NSA and inept private contractors.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Padmaavat
    The finished work itself is actually a stellar achievement, its raucous meta-narrative more than worthy of a spot in Bhansali’s visually splendid canon.
  54. Bubble
    The three stars are all perfectly naturalistic, but their roles are too bloodless and their patter too dry.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ATL
    It's entertainment with ambition, but I can't front though; the soundtrack is pretty fly too.
  56. Youth in Revolt
    Winded and weary from its long journey to a bigger screen, the three-books-in-one has been squeezed into a 90-minute Cliff's Notes version starring Michael Cera as Every Role Michael Cera's Ever Had.
  57. Mayhem
    I’m sure the movie was made for Yeun (who also serves as executive producer) to finally have a chance to prove he has leading-man chops — and Hollywood should start giving him movie-star, action-hero gigs, like, yesterday.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Art & Copy
    Yet however stirring these vintage campaigns and their graying creators may be for ad junkies and nostalgists, Pray fails at analysis: His film is simply a tribute.
  59. Stander
    Kind of a bore.
  60. Stinking Heaven
    Never a banal depiction of dysfunctional group dynamics, Stinking Heaven, which was shaped, as in Silver's previous work, largely through improvisation, remains consistently absorbing.
  61. Julia
    Tilda Swinton doesn't merely act the title role in French director Erick Zonca's Julia--she devours it, spits it back up, dances giddily upon it, twirls it in the air.
  62. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    The resulting portrait is a cautionary rejoinder to typical sports-movie uplift, elucidating how athletics remain a dangerously precarious foundation upon which to construct lasting peace.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Farmageddon
    A lesser effort in the burgeoning canon, it's still effective in its goals: illuminating how denigrated and dangerous our food supply is.
  64. 11/8/16
    This minute-by-minute rundown is priceless history, alive with the anxious textures of American life right then, a film that in twenty years will reward attentive viewing. It’s also, for many of us alive in the now, probably too much too soon, the tearing open of wounds that only are just starting to scab over.
  65. Severance
    When Smith's Grand Guignol tableaux are strung together, they lack any forward momentum. Some take inspired comic flight. The rest crash to the ground and, like so much else in Severance, go splat.
  66. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Burns's job as director is differentiating and spotlighting everyone in this large ensemble, a storytelling challenge to which he responds with a brisk pace and an eye for revealing moments. The film recalls his 1995 debut, "The Brothers McMullen," grounded in Irish family traditions and comedic chemistry among performers.
  67. Sugar Town
    Neither as lively nor as tough as the original, and compared to the hardcore punk of "Border Radio," the score for Sugar Town sounds like Muzak.
  68. Happy, Texas
    Sputters to a dead halt right out of the gate. One labored scenario follows another.
  69. The Young Karl Marx
    There’s something dazzling in the audacity of applying the most conventional and conservative techniques to the portrayal of radical thinkers and thoughts. That frisson keeps the movie interesting without quite jolting it to life.
  70. V for Vendetta
    Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.
  71. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    The movie's richly autumnal look is by swift turns cozily naturalistic and terrifyingly baroque, and director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) sustains the balance between real and surreal with mischievous brio.
  72. Bleak Street
    Like his onetime mentor Luis Buñuel, Ripstein favors sparse, naturalistic settings populated by pathetic-yet-zany characters and eschews anything that might be considered traditionally beautiful. Instead, he unearths beauty in the mire of his characters' social conditions and in their dedication to each other.
  73. The Same River Twice
    It's a generous document of cultural passage, and not incidentally, the sexiest naturally nudist American movie since Murnau's "Tabu." Moss, however, keeps himself out of the picture and neglects massive amounts of context that might've made Same River a stunner.
  74. 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.
  75. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Prince Caspian is fairly good fun, and I'm trying to decide whether it was the capable swordplay or Ben Barnes's bedroom eyes that prompted a significant shift in brand loyalty.
  76. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.
  77. Dreams Rewired
    The filmmakers aren't arguing that mass-media tech leads to fascism, but they suggest, with some lightness, that our interconnectedness certainly facilitates it. But Dreams Rewired is no polemic, and it never mocks the past.
  78. Iron Man 3
    The big problems with Iron Man 3 are less specific to the movie itself than they are characteristic of the hypermalaise that’s infected so many current mega-blockbusters—too much plot, too much action, too many characters, too many pseudo-feelings.
  79. Hollywoodland
    Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.
  80. Backcountry
    Writer-director Adam MacDonald's direction creates an ominous sense of rural-nowhere isolation, and his script avoids contrived banter while shrewdly suggesting it's headed toward horror before unexpectedly veering into survival-story territory. Nonetheless, such misdirection can't compensate for hopelessly routine action.
  81. Dogma
    A tediously childish exhibition.
  82. Skin
    This workmanlike, but enormously moving, movie makes the case that apartheid really does control her life, even her decision to rebel and get involved with a black man.
  83. 42
    The movie sugars up Robinson's story, and like too many period pieces it summons some vague idea of a warmer, simpler past by bathing everything in thick amber light, as if each scene is one of those preserved mosquitoes that begat the monsters of Jurassic Park.
  84. Disturbia
    There's not one single bombshell dropped in Disturbia; everyone is exactly who you think they are and does exactly what you think they'll do precisely when you think they'll do it.
  85. California Solo
    Any transformation feels like a device, and any modest hopefulness comes across as simply the unearned wishful thinking of the filmmaker.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kabluey
    Catches the nation's mood of economic anxiety and workplace exploitation more pungently than anything else in theaters.
  87. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    Gaudet and Pullapilly have a background in documentaries, and there's a convincing naturalism to their storytelling.
  88. When the Sea Rises
    If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Princesa
    Unsettling in spots, Princesa ultimately glosses over the futility of Fernanda's plight, her misery rapidly erased.
  90. Outside Providence
    Cross "Rushmore" with "Cheech and Chong" and you might get Outside Providence.
  91. 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.
  92. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    Twins loses its center and therefore the nightmarish force of the earlier film. [10 Aug 1972, p.57]
    • Village Voice
  94. Godzilla
    Godzilla is one of those generic, omnipresent blockbusters that's undone by the very spectacle it strives to dazzle us with: Everything is so gargantuan, so momentous, that nothing has any weight.
  95. Love for Sale
    Once you know the title, you pretty much get the gist. Just as Hermila ought to escape her hometown, Guedes deserves to flee to a richer film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jesus Camp
    The doc these kids would make with flea market camcorders couldn't possibly be as ugly as this absurdly hypocritical critique of the far right's role in escalating the culture war. The classier indoctrination to which Gap-shopping urban Democrats subject their kids might look damn spooky, too, but it probably wouldn't sell.
  97. The Discoverers
    The dysfunction may be perfunctory, but in this gorgeous natural setting — Schwarz makes full use of the stunning woods — it feels like new territory.
  98. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    A well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They've got attitude.
  99. Cherry Blossoms
    The best I can say for Cherry Blossoms is that it's made with love; the worst, that it's been a big hit in Germany. Yearning for Ozu, Dörrie stops off at cute, and parks.
  100. Willow Creek
    The horror's a long time coming, but Goldthwait and company make the waiting worth it.
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