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. That's My Face
    The movie might test your tolerance for the mystical, but its whispery vagueness is of a piece with the luxuriantly grainy atmospherics.
  2. U-571
    It's a simple pleasure watching an American movie that respects genre, knows its limitations, and genuflects at the memory of Don Siegel in the age of Spielberg.
  3. The Golden Bowl
    Though it often wallows in louche baroque textures, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the most visually accomplished of the Ivory soaps.
  4. Saved!
    An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.
  5. Farmingville
    Authentic ethical dialogue is conspicuous for its absence, as is the potentially disturbing view of a normal, working-class corner of American society going not-so-quietly cuckoo.
  6. Goodbye to All That
    The title indicates a major transition, but despite assertions that the dissolution of a marriage is a life-altering event, divorce doesn't change Otto as much as rouse him from stupefaction, and Schneider deftly balances bewilderment with resolve.
  7. Stolen Childhoods
    So well-intentioned it almost renders critical examination frivolous.
  8. My Scientology Movie
    The film's a little choppy as Theroux takes side trips to interview other former Scientologists, but it comes together as a chilling look at America's most famous 20th-century homegrown religion.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sky High
    Clunky and shamelessly transparent, but it's also charmingly earnest, and well designed for kids.
  10. Wakefield
    Swicord turns what could be a dark or one-note premise into a sometimes charming, sometimes heartbreaking meditation on a man’s loss of self after having set out to conquer the job, wife, house, and kids he thought would make him happy.
  11. Yakuza Apocalypse
    If you can get on its wacko wavelength, it's a uniquely crazed, compelling midnight-movie whatsit.
  12. Ten Thousand Saints
    The movie has a lilting, generous spirit: Springer Berman and Pulcini, the filmmaking team behind the 2003 American Splendor, have a feel for human eccentricities and weaknesses, and they know how to draw the best from their casts.
  13. Major Dundee (re-release)
    What rescues Major Dundee in the end from its many conflicts and unresolved passions is Heston.
  14. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    It's part caper comedy, part revenge tale, and part glorious whopper.
  15. 5x2
    Deceptively placid and subtly unpredictable drama.
  16. The Five-Year Engagement
    There is exactly one unexpected moment in the otherwise drearily predictable The Five-Year Engagement that, though little more than a throwaway line, at least adds a bit of political reality to puncture Nicholas Stoller's limp, hermetic comedy of deferred nuptials.
  17. About Last Night
    Far from a film about sharks sharking and love not working out, this About Last Night revels in friendship, fidelity, and something too rarely seen in the movies today: the idea that being young and black in Los Angeles can be glorious.
  18. Red Hill
    It's clear that Hughes knows his Midnight Oil, but he's ignorant of the craft of economic action filmmaking. However arguably noble his film's intent to redress historical grievance, a poorly filmed shoot-out is never more than exactly that.
  19. Let the Corpses Tan
    More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful.
  20. I Sell the Dead
    The storytelling frame allows a genial, ain't-it-cool pile-up of occasionally antic episodes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Micmacs
    Micmacs is more fantasia than violent revenge tale. And its pleasing curlicues--like a bouquet of spoons--linger long after the predictable outcome.
  22. Una
    There’s nothing wrong with stylization and opening things up (usually, these are good things), and Andrews has impressive command of his frame. But here, the extra-cinematic adornments seem somewhat unnecessary, as Una’s chief power lies in its two striking lead performances.
  23. Match
    Writer-director Stephen Belber's inspiriting, generous Match is so good that it's like some kind of trick.
  24. Supporting Characters
    Frequently funny, Schechter's movie is also shrewd in its handling of the tensions between longtime friends and co-workers as professional opportunities dwindle and off-the-job romantic drama trickles into the cutting room.
  25. Xenia
    Xenia has a winning streak of oddness.
  26. Incident at Loch Ness
    The film slowly sheds its convincing identity as nonfiction and becomes a cruel parody of making-of docs, studio-movie pandering, and showbiz egomania.
  27. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    Diliberto has managed to make a political comedy that seems at once tremendously funny and intensely serious — a provocative, and perhaps even important, combination.
  28. Labyrinth of Lies
    It's to the film's credit that truth-telling here looks as hard as it does noble, and that the Holocaust is not treated just as a suspense story's macguffin.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    A Man of No Importance
    The film has that made-for-UK-TV-but-theatriucally-released-inthe-US look, The shots are claustrophobic and grainy for no reason. [27 Dec 1994]
    • Village Voice
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Centurion
    Up to now, writer-director Neil Marshall has specialized in horror movies (Dog Soldiers, The Descent), but here, he imagines and communicates a remote world with terrific energy and a passion for detail.
  31. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    Scenes showing the tricky process of acclimatizing a child to new surroundings, and the patchwork of experiences that make up an education - both Asia's and Tairo's - are grounded by entirely affectless performances, not least that of little Asia Crippa.
  32. Chicks
    A film that puts too much faith in the appeal of its garrulous, aimless leads.
  33. Deli Man
    Chinese and Italian cuisines in America recall the traditions of homelands to which their practitioners can return. Not so with the Jewish traditions of Eastern Europe that inform delicatessens; those communities were destroyed in the Holocaust. This is one of the themes of Deli Man.
  34. Rise of the Legend
    Too artfully made for camp status but populated by characters too one-dimensional to stand alongside the likes of Once Upon a Time in China, Chow Hin Yeung's martial-arts epic, set in the late nineteenth century, is marked by blue-gray hues and some genuinely striking camerawork.
  35. Murder on the Orient Express
    Murder on the Orient Express falls down so badly as escapist entertainment that it is as if it were designed to prove the proposition that movies and mysteries don't mix.
  36. Gambit
    Ronald Neame's civilized anemia is appropriate enough for the direction of material that is going in no direction in particular. [23 Feb 1967, p.23]
    • Village Voice
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Help
    We get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes.
  38. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
    What makes the film fascinating is the anguished dance around hagiography performed by two of his daughters, who wrote, directed, and narrated the movie.
  39. Girls Rock!
    While the camp is all about liberation, the film hews to a predictable doc template and comes off as a drag.
  40. Lu Over the Wall
    Even by anime standards, Lu Over the Wall is best enjoyed by disconnecting your logic circuits and just enjoying the pretty colors and sounds.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ira & Abby
    The overall effect is that of an aging vaudevillian making a good-hearted but embarrassing attempt to entertain us with stock characters and stock jokes and stock shtick.
  42. Stuck on You
    Damon and Kinnear are both pitch-perfect, inhabiting their ingenuous, codependent little universe together with the commitment of eight-year-old best friends. True to form, the Farrellys toss sophomoric spitballs at us, but nothing stems the rise of big-hearted generosity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rolling Family
    The repeated sight of cute roadside animals and kissing cousins doesn't much enliven the long trip, and while Graciana Chironi lends humanity to the role of the white-shawl-wearing, high-blood-pressure-battling Gramma, the movie rarely if ever crosses the border between familiarity and surprise.
  44. The Names of Love
    The pathetic attempts at outré, taboo-busting humor as sociopolitical commentary can't disguise what this film really is: a mawkish, MOR comedy of manners that even its straw man Nicolas Sarkozy would find suitable for date night.
  45. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    The film is fascinating, even if you're resistant to this dark star's gravity.
  46. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    Leitman's interviews are lax and inconclusive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bug
    Genuinely freaky-deaky, not to mention more inventively unsettling than anything Friedkin has mustered in the quarter-century since twisting little Linda Blair into a satanic spewer of pea soup and F-bombs.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oswald's Ghost
    Riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying documentary.
  49. The First Beautiful Thing
    Virzì's delicate touch and the cast's uniformly captivating performances make that reckoning a lovely, charmingly melancholy thing to watch.
  50. Joshy
    Joshy could easily be a film about loss, but it instead ends up as a prickly exploration of forced fun.
  51. Lan Yu
    For all of its careful realism, Lan Yu is constructed around clichés, plummeting toward a modestly heroic sacrifice and a tearjerking act of fate. But Kwan is a master of shadow, quietude, and room noise, and Lan Yu is a disarmingly lived-in movie.
  52. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    Vardalos's parodies of Greek family values are loving and witheringly hilarious.
  53. Mumford
    Mumford is good for a few chuckles and not nearly as egregious or cloying as it might have been.
  54. Train of Life
    It's entertainment that never lets us off the hook.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mudge Boy
    Despite its chic pedigree, the film projects a shy modesty, a virtue largely attributable to Emile Hirsch's unflashy performance.
  56. Unbreakable
    Soggy mysticism, nagging inconsistencies, and coarse horror-playbook jolts.
  57. A Silent Love
    The movie can't resist putting its key points in italics, but it maintains a refreshingly unsentimental trajectory.
  58. Ararat
    If the movie feels cumbersome and overstuffed, it's because Egoyan's characters, so often aphasic, are this time driven by a compulsion to speak -- though the noisy tumble of words mostly underscores their failure to communicate.
  59. The Last Mountain
    This environmental exposé confirms every awful suspicion ever raised about the coal industry. Trouble is, the news is so bad and so plentiful that The Last Mountain may have you looking for the nearest exit.
  60. Dragon
    The roaring popular success of Peter Chan's Wu xia in China - renamed Dragon for export - is no mystery: It's an adept genre exercise with rare primal depths.
  61. Sleight
    The director builds to one big, beautiful revelation. But the story he tells in the lead-up doesn’t distract so much as it politely asks you to stand up so that it can place the trick card under your ass.
  62. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Murray is always pleasurable company, and his barely suppressed soulfulness might've supported this dawdling big-fish story if its insistent larkiness had abated and let a little reality in, as had "Rushmore."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am a Sex Addict
    Caveh Zahedi's one-of-a-kind movie--a funny, inventive, ground-shifting hybrid of essay film, mea culpa, and pathological real-life romantic farce--aims for truth by wrecking its own verisimilitude.
  64. The Ice Harvest
    From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit."
  65. On Chesil Beach
    A movie can and should stand on its own, of course, but it still needs to find a way to give weight and scope to this intimate miniature. And while Dominic Cooke’s film succeeds at much of what it attempts, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a dimension missing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Year Without Love
    Anahí Berneri's promising feature debut (based on Pablo Pérez's autobiographical novel) is at once unsentimental and sympathetic; she evinces rare insight into a gay man's life and sexuality without cringing, passing judgment, or wallowing in pity.
  67. Longing
    Magnificent and moving chamber drama.
  68. Breakfast with Curtis
    A small gem of a film, Breakfast is a lovely tapestry of subtlety, full of sly, smart humor and unforced insights into human nature.
  69. All the Light in the Sky
    [A] tediously naturalistic and fairly pointless no-budget indie about the compromises of middle-aged femininity.
  70. Bitter Honey
    Lemelson's interviews can be repetitive in their direct staging, but there's inspiration in his conceit of using a shadow-puppet performance set to gamelan music as interludes.
  71. The Front Page
    It is refreshing to find a director who is still making talkies instead of gawkies, and who thus still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression. [23 Dec 1974, p.83]
    • Village Voice
  72. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    It's not clear what Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale values more - endless preaching about ancestral spirits or gruesome CG decapitations.
  73. Big Man Japan
    I hurt myself laughing at this amazingly inventive mockumentary, and because it's so good, I refuse to give away much more than an insistent recommendation.
  74. The Interpreter
    The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.
  75. Wish You Were Here
    Stories built around a mystery can have a difficult time creating a satisfying answer, and this picture is no exception.
  76. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The plot twists are about as venerable as the cast and predictably affecting when performed with such old-hand proficiency.
  77. The Bad Batch
    No matter how confounding the story gets, details and humor ground the narrative, and a simple guiding premise about the importance of human connection and artistic expression fills in the blanks.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mission to Lars
    But the biggest frustration is that the film's abrupt ending fails to show whether Kate and William really did rebuild their relationship with Tom on the Ulrich quest, and, either way, what that outcome means for the rest of us.
  79. Bad Milo!
    Bad Milo! meets your expectations right where you left them.
  80. The Great Water
    Despite the choppy script and cartoonishly bad villains, what emerges is a compelling tale of the moral compromises a corrupt system demands of even its most unwilling participants.
  81. Zebraman
    The creator of such wicked bloodbaths as "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer" had it in him to craft a nearly family-friendly flick. No doubt, this kitschy CGI-action spoof is still deliciously insane.
  82. Never Goin' Back
    Writer-director Augustine Frizzell, making her feature directorial debut, is attuned to the giddy intimacies of female friendship, and Mitchell and Morrone are a charismatic pair.
  83. Restaurant
    Director Eric Bross has a smooth nonstyle that serves him well until the screenplay turns melodramatic at the end.
  84. Rubble Kings
    Rubble Kings, an impassioned examination of New York's gang culture of the late 1970s, isn't just a fascinating piece of urban history. It's also a challenge to common assumptions about that culture, and a testament to the power of organization within a community.
  85. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    It would benefit from more focus on the music, but the work stands as an effective (if overly long) portrait of addiction.
  86. On the Map
    The film mounts a competent offense as it shows how the Israeli squad overcame superior foes on the court and prejudice off of it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Without a Face
    Furiously intent on celebrating male love, Gibson and company try to refuse the erotics of friendship and miserably, wonderously fail. [[31 Aug 1993]
    • Village Voice
  88. I Touched All Your Stuff
    Bühler and Mariani make their process part of the narrative, deconstructing the documentary form while delving into Kirk's copious digital life.
  89. Lucy
    There's enough mumbo jumbo about space and time and cellular division to allow Lucy to feign depth, but what lingers is Besson's regressive belief that even the most intelligent woman on earth can't figure out how to get her way without a miniskirt and a gun.
  90. Rock Rubber 45s
    Bobbito’s storytelling is infectious, and the scenes of community outreach are heartwarming. May all such vanity projects have such a friendly beat.
  91. The Devil Wears Prada
    A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.
  92. Hello I Must Be Going
    With a digital sheen exacerbating the aura of slightness, Hello vamps along in its low indie-rom-com key toward a climactic mother-daughter moment not nearly as harrowing as the one in Lynskey's 1994 debut, but moving nonetheless.
  93. Touched With Fire
    With high spirits and great tenderness, Dalio and his actors stir up what might be the greatest of youthful feelings: that as you get to know someone new, someone whose thinking rhymes with yours, you're also becoming ever more yourself.
  94. We Are the Flesh
    Filmgoers who brave We Are the Flesh may regret seeing it. Forgetting it is another matter entirely.
  95. Butterfly Kiss
    This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]
    • Village Voice
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The American
    Despite its director's disinterest in letting people in, there is nevertheless something exciting about a movie this uncompromised, in which the big change from the book to the screen actually toughens up the story instead of watering it down.
  97. African Cats
    That visual beauty helps compensate for a script that wastes no opportunity for heartstring tugging, often in the form of adorable tykes playing with each other and cuddling with their elders in close-up.
  98. 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.
  99. The Anderson Tapes
    I thought there were about 11 good minutes in it, and the rest confused and uncertain. [22 Jul 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  100. Zoolander
    The result is a freakishly potent farce.
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