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. Killer Joe
    A hideously funny tabloid noir.
  2. Lord of War
    Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.
  3. Loving Vincent
    An engrossing exploration of the artist’s final days rendered in his signature painting style.
  4. The German Doctor
    Puenzo dramatizes her material with an overcooked sense of import that generates scant suspense.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Sheep
    The cartoonish overkill that often makes Black Sheep a hoot proves wearying over an entire movie: The broad comedy and one-note characters eventually cancel out the horror, leaving elaborate set pieces that are more frantic than funny.
  6. Medicine for Melancholy
    Tender, smart, soulful.
  7. Begin Again
    All that prickly inner conflict Ruffalo is so adept at suggesting? Cheery Begin Again wants none of it, offering instead lots of scenes of two characters we don't believe could ever exist arguing about authenticity in pop music.
  8. The Dying Gaul
    Entertaining if cornball, lacking the cold-eyed nastiness of something like Mike Nichols's "Closer," The Dying Gaul is tricked out with strident montage sequences and tremulous Steve Reich music. It's already drowning in an icky sea of language when Lucas makes a stretch for Greek tragedy and sends the whole Malibu playhouse abruptly crashing down.
  9. Shopgirl
    Unfolds as a series of slightly disjointed vignettes, padded with redundant voiceover and an oppressively histrionic score.
  10. Catch a Fire
    In the end, Catch a Fire plays like some weird hybrid on the crazy-quilt filmography of Phillip Noyce, which includes small productions made in his native Australia and the Sharon Stone sexcapade "Sliver." What it's definitely not is the standard-issue movie about apartheid; there's no white protagonist, no pale-faced hero riding in on his high horse to save the oppressed black man.
  11. Saving Grace
    Constipated English whimsy for the easily tickled.
  12. Ocean's Thirteen
    See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.
  13. Pop & Me
    The most revelatory moment is provided not by the spectacle of the Roes clinging to each other on a bungee cord, but by Julian Lennon, who pops up on the beach in Monaco to give a terse evaluation of his father.
  14. Made
    Handheld sprinting and swish-pans try to enliven the duo's shenanigans: undermotivated fisticuffs, fun with the nutty controls on their limousine (the roof slides open!), Vaughn's endless yapping.
  15. Southpaw
    Barrett's trajectory is exciting, but his tribe is hilariously, dryly Irish about the experience.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cuba feliz
    Frustratingly, Dridi tells us nothing about El Gallo other than what emerges through his music.
  17. Spiral
    With playful, compelling gore having slowed to a near trickle stateside, Uzumaki demands attention.
  18. What Alice Found
    Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.
  19. Twilight: Los Angeles
    Smith's work is a means of cauterizing wounds that have not even begun to heal...certainly not across a continent in Giuliani's New York.
  20. Newlyweeds
    Debut writer-director Shaka King dramatizes her characters' descent into disarray with disarming intimacy.
  21. The Duchess
    As a tale of mature self-sacrifice, the movie would be almost unbearably moving were it not for Knightley's insubstantial performance, which allows her to be fatally upstaged by Ralph Fiennes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fallen
    Thankfully, The Fallen is neither dour nor sentimental, but while the scope is ambitious and the tone refreshingly light on moralism, few of the innumerable characters and subplots elicit much sympathy.
  23. The Source Family
    With some focus and critical perspective, The Source Family might have documented more than a spectacle of its time.
  24. Set It Up
    While the plot is familiar, Katie Silberman’s witty script plays with expectations.
  25. Toe to Toe
    The performances are top-notch and occasionally moving, but Abt nearly smothers it all with some embarrassing coming-of-age teen-angst false notes, plus clichéd Ivy League ambitions, a cartoonishly neglectful mother, STDs, unfair expulsion, martyrdom for both the rich and poor, and a non-reciprocal lesbian crush.
  26. The Human Resources Manager
    Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis's latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion.
  27. La Última Película
    Martin and Peranson, a savvy pair, appreciate their outsider status here, and they remain uncommonly sensitive to even the subtlest ways that ignorance and entitlement may manifest themselves — both in art and in our relationship to it.
  28. Junction 48
    Junction 48 mostly sticks to uplifting formula, rarely offering anything particularly fresh or interesting.
  29. Torremolinos 73
    Its Saul Bass-y credits suggest an Almodóvarian flamboyance, but this impotent '70s-set comedy mostly skimps on discoteca stylishness.
  30. Big Eyes
    Fortunately for Burton, Big Eyes is actually good. Not great, but good enough -- the perfect middlebrow portrait of the ultimate middlebrow artist.
  31. Postmen in the Mountains
    The notion that every generation is fundamentally the same gets hammered home so relentlessly that it becomes suffocating, despite all the fresh air.
  32. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    A frequently uproarious send-up of Jean Bruce's long-running series of spy novels.
  33. The Gift
    A creepily effective button-pusher that owes a bit to the original "Cape Fear" both in Sam Raimi's ruthless direction and Keanu Reeves's unexpectedly robust performance as the most violent redneck peckerwood in a steamy Georgia town.
  34. Black Sea
    Black Sea is so almost-terrific that it's ultimately more disappointing than a movie that's merely badly or carelessly made.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Curious George
    Misanthropic toddlers will be rolling in the aisles.
  36. Klown
    Raunchy dude comedy is hardly the sole province of American cinema, as Klown all too dispiritingly reconfirms.
  37. That Summer
    Offhandedly, in a movie that itself is offhanded to a fault, Little Edie cuts to the core of the whole Grey Gardens phenomenon during one of her moments alone with the camera. “[To] dig up the past, I think, is about the most cruel thing anybody can do.”
  38. Kong: Skull Island
    In the struggle between sober subtext and monster-movie goofiness, the goofiness mostly wins out.
  39. Hush!
    Japanese director Ryosuke Hashiguchi ("Like Grains of Sand") enriches his rendition with melancholic ambivalence, sociological specificity, and a knack for delicate epiphany.
  40. Okraina
    Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rugrats in Paris: The Movie - Rugrats II
    Nicely conveys a family trip abroad as seen from both the exhausted-parent and bewildered-infant points of view.
  42. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.
  43. Antwone Fisher
    Washington directs with proficient blandness charged only occasionally by organic acting moments.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    American History X
    A mess of a film.
  45. True Legend
    In countless over-the-top set pieces, Yuen delivers striking combat clarity without sacrificing the visceral editing and crazy digital effects of modern bloodbaths.
  46. Veronica Mars
    If you've never seen the show, it's a great excuse for binge-watching. And if you loved the show, the movie is a welcome homecoming. It has the feeling of a story that has been, against all odds, loved into existence. Probably because that's exactly what it is.
  47. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    Informative and workmanlike, Antarctic Edge is more a bad-news rundown than one of the meditative masterpieces of the genre
  48. Conversations with Other Women
    Though the movie is occasionally too clever-talky for its own good, it has the authentic ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place.
  49. Punching the Clown
    Punching the Clown mirrors Henry's act: a minor triumph whose cult following doesn't yet know it exists.
  50. Nate & Margaret
    Narrative conflicts are introduced and swatted away in favor of an amiable sentimentality, two nice people being nice to each other.
  51. Food Chains
    The film fosters a very human connection to these pickers, whose eloquence comes from their plainspoken arguments, the austerity of their situation, and the modesty of their demands.
  52. Emelie
    Emelie does create a menacing atmosphere and provide an interesting response to the "Final Girl" model that has long been the horror standard.
  53. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    The beloved Kiwi duo, who frequently perform as a rotating cast of corny alter egos, can charm even the crankiest viewers, thanks to their soaring, clarion harmonies and cuddly-butch personas.
  54. The Yellow Handkerchief
    All three leads are solidly convincing in their candor. And Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission) shoots the hell out of the swampy South to make for a nontoxic diversion.
  55. Land of Plenty
    Land of Plenty is a woozy fantasia on California dreaming, all agog at urban strife and blabby with redundant voiceover.
  56. On a Clear Day
    Gaby Dellal's cynically mushy film, like "The Full Monty" and its ilk, is best savored only by its target demo: middle-classers who see one imported film a year, the selection in question requiring working-stiff melodrama and leprechaun burrs gently and lovably mangling the English dialogue.
  57. Do You Trust this Computer?
    The doc never goes much deeper than the information and arguments on AI that can currently be found in the Sunday papers.
  58. Seraphim Falls
    Seraphim Falls has decent pep in its step till the final 30 minutes, when it's finally revealed why Neeson's bounty hunter is after Brosnan's surly mountain man. The flashback finale and all that comes after (and keeps on comin') drags on so long even the leads look exhausted. Till then, it's yet another replay of "The Most Dangerous Game," and Brosnan and Neeson are game for it.
  59. Shelley
    Director Ali Abbasi excels at atmosphere, understanding that any beautiful landscape can be made terrifying with the right sound design and that a cut to a silent interior can be as jarring as any jump scare. His script, unfortunately, is not as interesting.
  60. My One and Only
    Occasionally diverting but ultimately forgettable, My One and Only will become unforgivable if it inspires other former competitors from "Dancing With the Stars" to go in search of lost time.
  61. Puzzlehead
    By far the most independent independent-genre flick to grift screen space in Manhattan since Douglas Buck's "Family Portraits," James Bai's Puzzlehead has only its ideas and speculative frisson to sell it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
    Although technically impressive, the remake is dramatically inert, as the set becomes a motionless backdrop to theatrical line readings instead of a pulsing manifestation of diseased minds. It's Caligari embalmed.
  63. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    Hribar's film is not remarkable or ingenious in its creation of ethnic gusto and peripheral naturalism, but it's adept enough for a pass on M:i:III.
  64. Two Lives
    The film takes one entire act too long to shake its mopey fog and get crackling.
  65. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The film itself is solidly and conventionally crafted. Newsreels and stock footage alternate with fresh interviews with friends and scholars, steadfast supporters and unabashed detractors. The political life it maps out fascinates.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. The Roost
    The Roost proves that West has enough talent to do without the gimmick next time around.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Off the Black
    A disarmingly droll and insightful indie.
  70. Comedian
    Seinfeld's cool professionalism is almost cruelly juxtaposed with the tortured narcissism of heel-nipping tyro Orny Adams, who illustrates the mirror-image view from below. Comedy is pain, whether you're top- or underdog.
  71. Finding Forrester
    At times you can feel Van Sant trying to loosen the movie's windpipe-folding collar, but he doesn't get far, except with Busta Rhymes, as Jamal's gone-nowhere big brother.
  72. Fever
    You can see the strenuously grand conclusion of Alex Winter's clammy psychological thriller, Fever, coming a mile off, but the director's impeccably chic expressionism and Henry Thomas's persuasive, dread-soaked performance make the wait a painless one.
  73. The Claim
    A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.
  74. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    In time, Carrey's monkeyshines, Jude Law's silhouetted reappearances as Snicket, and the inevitable descent of Beverly Hills pathos blunt the movie's fastidious dark-carnival humor.
  75. Justifiable Homicide
    Meticulously uncovers a trail of outrageous force and craven concealment.
  76. Golda's Balcony
    Jeremy Kagan's excellent adaptation of William Gibson's stage play.
  77. Aftermath
    What gives Aftermath its peculiar strain of portent is Pasikowski's consistent suggestion of the futility of bold, desperate attempts to undo a wrong.
  78. Ms. 45
    It's hard to imagine Ms. 45 with any other actress. Lund is a particularly effective avenging angel, easily making the leap from innocent mouse to worldly wise killer.
  79. Roseanne for President!
    And this is the film's buried lede: Hakeem busts her ass for the candidate while Barr conducts her entire campaign from her house via Skype.
  80. Permission
    This earnest, deadly serious character study has few moments of levity, mostly provided by an arch Gina Gershon, still as intoxicating and seductive as she was in Bound.
  81. Five Minutes of Heaven
    The production design is spot-on, but Hirschbiegel tries way too hard to create tension, making every occurrence--a record needle dropping, a car door slamming--an unsubtle potential bomb, fraying your nerves like a cheap horror movie.
  82. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    Yes, there's something terribly familiar about this historical fantasy. As we now know, and Willmott is well aware, the South actually did win the Civil War.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Expired
    Expired pretends to be a valentine to society's outcasts, but it's just one more indie comedy that mocks its characters while sucking up to its knowing audience, assuring all of us hip urbanites that the romantic insecurities of "weirdos" don't deserve our sympathy.
  84. The Void
    The twisty story and imaginative monsters are enough to overcome the relatively humdrum leads.
  85. Mister Foe
    The whole thing's poised uneasily somewhere between urban fairy tale and actual human psychodrama, never really landing in one place or the other.
  86. Despicable Me 2
    There are so many ways Despicable Me 2 could have gone wrong, and so many things it does right.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kites
    Not even the incoherent mish-mash of plot (mostly faux Sergio Leone by way of Tarantino and Rodriguez, with periodic car-flipping chase sequences) can entirely dim the appeal of this match-up between a blue-eyed Punjabi and a blue-eyed Mexican of almost equal comeliness.
  88. The Matrix Reloaded
    Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.
  89. I'm Dangerous with Love
    Negroponte's visuals are Doc 101-he simply points and shoots. But that doesn't matter; the life stories told (particularly Dimitri's) and the experiences of coming clean sell themselves.
  90. Lunch
    The appeal of Lunch might be limited to Hollywood-nostalgia buffs, but they will be enthralled not only by the stories told, but also how they're told. These guys are still some of the sharpest wits in town.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    Americanized through western showdowns, shadowy film noir, gangster shootings, sci-fi, Bruckheimer explosions, slapstick, and soaps, Bebop aims to transcend its own genre by emulating all genres, and it falls short only in the melodrama.
  92. 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.
  93. Buffalo Girls
    There's no missing Kellstein's unstated horror during the fight sequences, which traffic in queasy blood sport absurdity that overshadows "Battle Royale" and "The Hunger Games," because the cherubs are eight and because it's all too real.
  94. Bad Turn Worse
    For all its familiarity and rote nastiness, the film's sharply crafted and quite promising.
  95. Visitors
    Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.
  96. Beautiful Boy
    While Beautiful Boy is potent and even admirable, it ultimately mistakes prim, emotional monotony for gravity.
  97. Nearing Grace
    This '70s-era teen romance from the director of "Halloween II" and the screenwriter of "Mean Creek" is a quietly effective number, a little like an '80s John Hughes movie without the laughs (not an insult in this case).
  98. Baghead
    It's an indie about indies--meta, right?
  99. The Woman in Black
    If director James Watkins's second film is about as scary as the haunted house your big cousins made in the basement, Radcliffe, as widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps, at least gives a moving portrayal of grief.
  100. The Bookshop
    Though nearly nothing happens in this movie besides a woman opening a shop and beginning a standoffish friendship with a reclusive man, I still found myself drawn in, just as I was drawn to Iain’s discreet disaster of a baked Alaska (please check it out if you haven’t seen this TGBBS episode); sometimes the quiet is enticing.
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