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. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    Mostly sacrifices the political satire and epistolary structure of Paul Torday's source novel in favor of cute, if strained, rom-com shenanigans.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Footnote
    Something between a comedy of everyday absurdity and a family tragedy pushed into the realm of the hyper-real, Footnote uses its characters' differing relationships to authenticity as the basis for an enigmatic riff on representation.
  3. Silent House
    Silent House does superficially spiff up the haunted-house movie, but it's not built to last.
  4. Friends with Kids
    Just as Friends With Kids compares unfavorably to Westfeldt's earlier effort, her cast members' previous projects further highlight this film's shortcomings.
  5. The Decoy Bride
    Pernicious tripe suitable only for masochists and the intellectually disabled.
  6. Project X
    "There's a midget in the oven!" is about as inspired as the dialogue and set pieces get in this queasy-making entertainment.
  7. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    Par for the course in blowout CGI adaptations, a great deal of detail and bustle is gained at the expense of charm - for all the miracles these armies of animators can achieve, they have yet to successfully reproduce a humble artist's line.
  8. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.
  9. Black Butterflies
    Art, politics, and craziness conspire to form a rather mechanical melodrama in Black Butterflies.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriocracy
    Malone reveals himself to have a stunningly low opinion of his audience's powers of bullshit detection.
  11. Boy
    The abundant charm of first-time actor James Rolleston, playing the 11-year-old of the title in Boy, doesn't quite save the aimless, nostalgia-woozy second feature from Taika Waititi (2007's Eagle vs. Shark).
  12. The Woods
    A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.
  13. Let the Bullets Fly
    Comedy and shifting-allegiances intrigue more than compensate for the dearth of rousing action in this 1920s-set film.
  14. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In every swelling musical cue, Billion Dollar Movie displays open contempt for friendship, family, love, sex, heroism, and everything lofty and beautiful that multiplex movies have reduced to cant.
  15. The Salt of Life
    Di Gregorio's performance sets the tone of dim hope and quiet forbearance, telling the story through reactions: an ever-accommodating smile that shades into a wince; sparkling, heavy-lidded eyes betrayed by vexed brows.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Snowtown Murders
    This slog adds up to nothing other than the shocking truism that average people will do horrible things primarily because someone tells them to.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where Are You Taking Me?
    Takesue doesn't presume to tell anyone's story for him or her, but rather lets the activity on-screen speak for itself.
  18. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Even non-fans will appreciate what a tough act Reatard is to follow, though, and anybody with a shred of respect left for rock 'n' roll will feel loss and anger at his passing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Being Flynn
    What the actors are unable to get across emotionally (which is a lot - Dano and De Niro, both of them all big actorly tics, often seem like they were filmed in different rooms), Weitz hammers home via near-constant music.
  20. Last Days Here
    An affectionate look at a self-destructing maniac and his supporters that bluntly reveals Liebling's total abjection without mocking him.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Not a Film
    It's a political statement, an act of defiance, a master class in one auteur's body of work and process, and a document of a life unseen. But above all, it's a gripping entertainment.
  22. Wanderlust
    Though Wanderlust finally laughs off the real discomforting conclusion that it's edging toward, it's gut-busting funny when mocking their hopeless options.
  23. How to Start a Revolution
    How to Start a Revolution plays like a Nobel Prize–campaign film and never once demonstrates an understanding of the distinction between encomium and inquiry.
  24. The Fairy
    While every scene is art-directed with zest and innovatively staged, The Fairy rarely inspires outright laughter. At least it respects its influences more than does "The Artist."
  25. Act of Valor
    The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover.
  26. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Marston nails the claustrophobia of small-town life and the turbulent emotionalism of teenagers, but what pushes the film toward sublimity is the way he delicately captures all of the characters' inner lives as their world slowly crumbles.
  27. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    Cage-ophiles will find some delectable freakouts in Blaze's transformation - or near transformation - scenes. Otherwise, the committee-penned script combines yokel-friendly haw-haw irreverence (non-sequitur cutaways to the Rider pissing in a flamethrower pattern) and sweaty monologues about "controlling the Rider" (the character is basically a mean drunk's superhero).
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jess and Moss
    Achingly sad and surpassingly lovely.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Ice
    On the Ice is a marvel of concentrated, classical storytelling. The flat, snowy landscape strips away all but the essentials from its tale.
  30. Cirkus Columbia
    "No Man's Land" director Danis Tanovic, adapting a novel by Ivica Djikic, also returns to his roots with this decidedly old-fashioned, quasi-satirical drama that is a bit on the nose with its indictments of post-communist animosities and opportunism.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Though Masha's courage is considerable, her change of heart finally feels too nuanced for Pedersen's streamlined political-drama treatment, complete with persistent intrigue music and scenes of Masha restating her dilemma to friends that seem rather canned.
  32. 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.
  33. Bullhead
    The sentiment, just like the repeated shots of Jacky lying in the fetal position in a tub, shadowboxing, and erupting into a bestial 'roid rage, typifies the film's habit of flattening an idea rather than developing it.
  34. The Forgotten Space
    Epic in scope, intellectual agility, and the potential to induce panic and despair, this documentary exploration of global trade as an emblem of economic apocalypse avoids (just barely) doom-mongering by virtue of its compassion and visual grandeur.
  35. Undefeated
    Honestly, Courtney and his crew all seem like nice people, but if there's an unironic audience for this kind of romantic jock-cup fondling, I'm not interested in knowing it.
  36. Thin Ice
    Working the long con and damn near getting away with it, this kissing cousin to "Fargo," "Cedar Rapids," and "Win Win" makes for a surprisingly entertaining and nonderivative February time-passer.
  37. The Secret World of Arrietty
    It's pure magic.
  38. This Means War
    The cocky presumption of charm that isn't actually there is precisely the problem with action-comedy This Means War.
  39. Hell and Back Again
    Working alone with a camera and his ingenuity, Dennis captured the surreality of firefights with an invisible enemy and the frustration of displaced civilians.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bombay Beach
    That it documents rural poverty in the American West without exploiting or sanctifying its subjects would be cause enough for praise. But this doesn't begin to approach what Alma Har'el pulls off with her hybrid documentary knockout Bombay Beach.
  41. Mammuth
    Too limp and scattershot to warrant anything stronger than indifference.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Swell Season
    To viewers without a preexisting emotional relationship to the couple and their saga, that everyday angst is just banal.
  43. Buried Prayers
    With the survivors' physical presence amongst Nazi slaughterhouses as its own powerful statement, Buried Prayers is a nonfiction work that confronts Holocaust atrocities from a piercing ground-level view.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements
    With so many voices, Color Me becomes a rock version of "Rashomon," and what the film lacks in music and live footage, it more than makes up for with obsessive detail and heated debate. Who's right? Everyone.
  45. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    The movie's argument only occasionally transcends its oozy nonspecificity and feel-good bleeding-heart vibe.
  46. Kinyarwanda
    Cast with both professional and novice actors (which results in uneven performances), the beautifully shot film is filled with exquisite moments.
  47. Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
    Fascinating and often devastating.
  48. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    She might not be our kin, but filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour's anecdotal, warm-humored tribute to his grandmother - and, to a limited extent, to her cultural heritage - taps into the universal desire to hang onto loved ones in their waning years.
  49. Chronicle
    Chronicle, with its found-footage storytelling and superpowered teens, at least playfully transcends its "Cloverfield meets Heroes" pitch.
  50. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    It should be mentioned that Garriott's father, Owen, was himself a Skylab astronaut, a fact of which much is made - but that only more obviously shows Man on a Mission for what it is: a puffed-up home movie.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Safe House
    [A] scattered but not totally disagreeable CIA conspiracy thriller.
  52. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    What gives the film its human dimension are the conflicting memories of former residents.
  53. Private Romeo
    The hunky ensemble shares a fine chemistry, but Brown's stylistic choices lie somewhere between perverse and nonsensical.
  54. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    Ideal only for the junior-high classroom, Holly Mosher's dull-as-dishwater documentary fudges the line between socially progressive message-spreading and suspicious hagiography in its celebration of Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dish & the Spoon
    For once, an American indie's muted modesty at least makes emotional sense, suiting a bittersweet romance that, by nature, has neither a name nor a future.
  56. Chico & Rita
    The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés's story - though real-life figures including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and a Cuban songstress who bears some resemblance to Rita Montaner are featured as characters - but it's a dazzling thing to behold.
  57. In Darkness
    Another break in the tension is the inescapable fact that every Holocaust movie, however hair-raising, essentially thrums the same self-sacrifice-versus-self-preservation chord. It's not fair, but there it is: We've been here before.
  58. Return
    Firmly in the unassuming indie vein, Return treads lightly and leaves little imprint.
  59. The Miners' Hymns
    It speaks eloquently about the disappearance of most any indigenous working-class culture.
  60. The Turin Horse
    An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve.
  61. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    The film is endurable owing solely to Johnson, a veteran of bad kids' movies whose sense of when to dial up the charm in such a generic, soulless entertainment remains impeccable.
  62. Crazy Horse
    Every shot and edit in Wiseman's film also suggests without over-explaining, allowing a viewer to lose herself in pleasure.
  63. 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.
  64. Splinters
    The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).
  65. The Story of Film: An Odyssey
    More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.
  66. Pretty Poison (1968)
    Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    W.E.
    Certainly, W.E. is the work of a woman who apparently hasn't spent time with normal human beings in a while. But Madonna's anachronistic use of music is the least of her movie's problems. It's basic storytelling that stymies her.
  68. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Dori Berinstein's desultory, fawning profile of the nonagenarian performer devotes many of its padded 88 minutes to Channing's greatest success, playing the title yenta in "Hello, Dolly!"
  69. Bad Fever
    If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.
  70. Perfect Sense
    Perfect Sense beautifully captures the ache and counterintuitive thrill of "the days as we know them, the world as we imagine the world" fading away by degrees.
  71. Kill List
    Brutal and bloody and utterly unnerving, thanks in no small measure to Jim Williams's brilliant score, which is filled with strings so taut, they sound like screams you might hear in the distance and decide (quite sensibly) to ignore.
  72. 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.
  73. Big Miracle
    While rooting for the marine mammals (and wishing for more footage of them - and even of their animatronic incarnations), your heart will also go out to the cast, stuck even more pitiably in syrupy manufactured crises.
  74. One for the Money
    Making even more appearances than the rodent is the Big Gulp; the lady bounty hunter is constantly consuming junk - though at least when Heigl is snacking, she isn't talking.
  75. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.
  76. Five Time Champion
    Rule of thumb: If a movie about how life is messy features someone lecturing about how messy life is, that movie is not nearly messy enough to do justice to life.
  77. All's Well Ends Well
    Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."
  78. After Fall, Winter
    Schaeffer can't be trusted or believed as a broken man - he's got no humility.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    By the time this fawning documentary gets to Foster's CG-animated rendering for a $15 billion planned city in Abu Dhabi (a movie within the movie), you realize it's essentially an infomercial for the company he unsuccessfully tried to sell before the 2008 crash.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Declaration of War
    Shot in the actual hospital where Donzelli and Elkaïm's actual son was treated for cancer, Declaration of War turns autobiography into thrilling expressionist art.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Man on a Ledge
    Worthington wouldn't know how to behave if the film were a comedy; and poor Banks, after a promising, "Young Adult"–style introduction, isn't allowed to goose the script or push beyond the glass ceiling of her character.
  83. Underworld: Awakening
    The entire production is single-mindedly, earnestly devoted to serving up feats of BADASS, and it succeeds in this devotion to the exclusion of everything else. Allegedly in 3-D, though I didn't notice at the time.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    It's silly and excessive, but Fullmetal Alchemist occasionally strikes a note of adolescent truth, as when Ed wishes for "some way to get our bodies back."
  85. Scalene
    Although Scalene slows to a drip in places, strong performances and a Hitchcock-trained eye build unnerving tension into its depiction of the intimate stress of caring for an invalid and the ways people might or might not crack under it.
  86. The Front Line
    Tightly directed and well acted (even though many characters are cut-outs from every war movie you've ever seen), The Front Line shoehorns little known history into a familiar format, and it works.
  87. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    Nearly every scene is clunky, and the film's commentary about TV as the unifying glue of American culture is embellished through lame incidents of sex and violence that eventually validate the Chinese tourists' anti-U.S. critiques.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    There's a good film to be made about Halston, the dashing man who went from Iowa-born milliner to revered fashion designer to self-popularizing entrepreneur to AIDS-era casualty, but dear Lord, Ultrasuede is not it.
  89. The Viral Factor
    It's an overloaded, overwrought, profligate production inclined to hysteria and, in cumulative effect, something like being pelted with scenes until buried alive - but it helps keep it from being boring.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miss Bala
    The character is intentionally lightly drawn: Laura's suffering is symbolic, a surrogate for the suffering of a society helplessly caught in the crossfire.
  91. Haywire
    Where faux-empowering "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" confines sexual power play to the old rape-revenge matrix, Haywire is a real war-of-the-sexes tournament, briskly paced with a tickling sense of black humor.
  92. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
    The new film is more informational than resonant. But you can still sense a vacuum, a rat pit of stories waiting to be unearthed. The dark something that triggered the whole ordeal in West Memphis is still out there.
  93. Sing Your Song
    Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer's political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography.
  94. Albatross
    By the time a disillusioned, grimly deflowered Beth leaves for school wearing her ex-friend's "I Put Out" T-shirt, tonal whiplash has eaten up the pleasures of this otherwise well-cast, evocatively shot small-town trifle.
  95. Don't Go in the Woods
    The forced horseplay is entirely without ensemble chemistry, probably because the leads were hired principally as singers/musicians, as this, the directorial debut of former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D'Onofrio, is that rarest of mongrel movies: a slasher/musical.
  96. Loosies
    Michael Corrente's film is a mush of poses. The director's saga revels in cornball romance, imitation tough-guy attitude, and awkward flashbacks.
  97. Lula, the Son of Brazil
    Forget "Son of Brazil": This syrupy origin story/biopic on the nation's beloved reformist president, whose second term ended in 2010, should be titled Mama's Boy.
  98. Domain
    Dalle, with a mouth that could devour the world, unravels inexorably but with decadent dignity, and Chiha's singular film never relies on cliché in its examination of illness, disappointment, and abandonment.
  99. The Divide
    Neither intellectually nor viscerally engaging, what The Divide finally offers audiences is the not-terribly-edifying, stagnant experience of being locked in a basement with a pack of assholes.
  100. Robinson in Ruins
    A rigorous, agile, scathingly funny reckoning with a city and society in the last stages of decline.
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