Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Contraband
    No one, however, could mistake Contraband for anything but what it is: a shift-job genre movie - not a bad day's work, content to match the blocky trudge of its star rather than attempt panache.
  2. Joyful Noise
    Speaking of camp, the diva battle teased in the trailer for Joyful Noise between its two stars, Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton, flatlines, as do most of the movie's jokes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It's About You
    The result is an amateurish travelogue that feels like a botched assignment, halfheartedly self-regarding and resentfully remote from the object of our fascination.
  4. The Hunter
    Filmed during the months leading up to the 2009 presidential election in Iran, The Hunter still seethes with fury - and anticipates the blood that would spill after the vote.
  5. 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.
  6. Roadie
    Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.
  7. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.
  8. Norwegian Wood
    Despite Hung's obvious gifts as a filmmaker, he has ditched this raw immediacy in favor of a drifty, overstuffed, ultimately dull melodrama.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Beneath the Darkness
    Unfortunately for Quaid, director Martin Guigui's pathetic thriller doesn't even have the pulse-pounding excitement of a second-tier Scooby-Doo mystery.
  10. Angels Crest
    Luxuriantly-lashed Dekker leads the most attractive cast of small-towners this side of "Twin Peaks" but, though the setting is nearly as artificial as Lynch's, the melodrama is played quite straightforwardly here, even as the dialogue frequently borders on parody.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Iron Lady
    Despite the story's conceit of placing the viewer inside Thatcher's head, she never feels like a real person - but this is more the fault of Morgan's script than Streep's typically studied performance, much of it buried under prosthetics.
  12. Pariah
    The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces.
  13. A Separation
    What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.
  14. El Sicario: Room 164
    Our subject retains a noticeable streak of pride in his expertise, though falters when discussing the killing of women. Hoping for his own salvation, the converted killer now claims the scales have fallen from his eyes, but his executioner's hood remains in place to the end - as does the mephitic air of timeless evil that hangs over El Sicario.
  15. Pina
    Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.
  16. Miss Minoes
    Conveying, with a light touch, important lessons for kids on the necessity of civic engagement, the perils of edit-ad conflicts, and the need to honor difference, Miss Minoes is also an ailurophile's dream, featuring a fantastic array of tabbies, calicos, and Birmans that always hit their marks.
  17. Albert Nobbs
    Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    In the Land of Blood and Honey
    The denouement that sorts it all out moves from predictable tragedy to ludicrous redemption; closing titles confirm that the motivating intent in making In the Land of Blood and Honey was activist rather than artistic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Flowers of War
    With The Flowers of War, Zhang mostly just proves that there's no tragedy too terrible that it can't be turned into an operatic pageant - human suffering reduced to visual showmanship.
  20. We Bought a Zoo
    The cynics will scoff and dismiss it all as manipulative, the heartstring-tugging machine on hyperdrive. But this movie isn't for them; did you not see the PG? It's a sweet, sincere, utterly affable kids' movie about how parents are all kinds of screwed up and unable to tell their kids what they want or show them how they feel.
  21. The Adventures of Tintin
    Adventures is an awesome movie mechanism, but awe comes at a cost. The Tintin character is something like a blank spot at the movie's center, most vivid (unfortunately) as a plucky, priggish motivational speaker when he coaches Haddock out of a drinking problem.
  22. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Such an abundance of "epiphanies," one after another, amount to a tactical assault on viewer sentiments. The deluge of tears is Daldry's idea of pathos, but to these eyes, it's Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch.
  23. War Horse
    Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.
  24. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The remake is an altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.
  25. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.
  26. Sleepless Nights Stories
    More often, Mekas's focus on "names" comes off as a cloistered insensitivity to the wider world.
  27. The Pill
    What makes Khoury's film work - at least until its cop-out ending - is the consistency of Fred's loathsomeness.
  28. Deep End (1970)
    Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
  29. Cook County
    Rather than viewing moral chaos from the eye of a storm, director David Pomes watches his movie blow off into the storm itself.
  30. Addiction Incorporated
    With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.
  31. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Lackluster screenwriting and the absence of actorly communion are breezed past with monotonous banter, as is the fleetingly visible plot.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Carnage
    In the final stage of the film's programmatic chaos, Alan announces that he believes in the god of carnage and cops to the pleasure he gets from watching people deviate from social convention and tear one another apart. You'd have to agree with him in order to embrace this film - there's nothing else to see here.
  33. Knuckle
    Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.
  34. Fanny, Annie & Danny
    Mostly the movie just gets off on how awful and/or pathetic its characters are, calling on the viewer to judge or pity rather than sympathize with its gallery of grotesques.
  35. Red Hook Black
    Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seducing Charlie Barker
    In adapting her recent play The Scene, Theresa Rebeck can't find a consistent tone for her material or players.
  37. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.
  38. London River
    Director Rachid Bouchareb brings a measured hand to this intimate, occasionally overdetermined sketch of the aloneness at the center of our global confluence.
  39. My Piece of the Pie
    A feeble stab at topicality from that master of overripe Gallic melodrama, Cédric Klapisch.
  40. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    The latest Tinker Tailor is, in some ways, more explicit regarding various characters' sexual proclivities than was the miniseries. It's also more concise, but what's lost is George's pathos.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Need to Talk About Kevin
    By treating Kevin's evil as a mystery to be solved, Ramsay only succeeds in making what was once allusive banal.
  42. Young Adult
    Young Adult might be brushed off as curdled rom-com were it not for two things. The first is the depth of Theron's performance...The second, less predictable aspect is the utter absence of the corny rehabilitation found in "Juno" and Reitman's glib, downsizing dramedy "Up in the Air."
  43. I Melt with You
    Stylish cinematography and an awesome punk-and-new-wave soundtrack make the early, music-video-like montages of debauchery at least trashy entertainment, but the film's second half couldn't be more contemptible.
  44. New Year's Eve
    A movie so excruciating that it makes its predecessor, "Valentine's Day," seem like "Nashville" in comparison.
  45. An African Election
    Even those who closely follow African (or global) politics will likely be bowled over by the real-life plot twists unfolding before Merz's camera. What makes the film especially resonate now is the frustration with the status quo that is consistently voiced by the people on the street.
  46. The Yellow Sea
    If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.
  47. A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps
    Great achievements don't guarantee great documentary - or, as A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps proves, they don't even secure a mediocre one.
  48. Lads & Jockeys
    Director Benjamin Marquet mingles black-and-white footage of students past with that of his current focus - three 14-year-olds in their first year of a jockey apprenticeship - to build a sense of specificity and continuum into a timeless passage.
  49. 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coriolanus
    In the case of Ralph Fiennes's adaptation of Coriolanus - the transposition to present day is confusing and counterproductive, dulling the impact of an otherwise fierce, often unbearably immediate production.
  51. Answers to Nothing
    The most embarrassing project on co-star Barbara Hershey's resume.
  52. Outrage
    Like one of its yakuza bigs, Outrage commands respect but no affection.
  53. The Big Fix
    The film's scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP's origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran.
  54. Sleeping Beauty
    Sharp and precise as its tableaux might be, though, Sleeping Beauty never burrows into the brain, and its tenuous provocations fizzle out quickly.
  55. Shame
    Another creature of need, if the temperamental opposite of self-contained Brandon, Sissy is equally prepared to push her way into his life or push herself in front of a subway. She's also a performer - and Mulligan's blowsy desperation makes for the movie's best turn.
  56. Khodorkovsky
    Though the PR bit is right on, Khodorkovsky goes some way toward questioning the guilt.
  57. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    It is suggested that Trungpa was in possession of yeshe chölwa-the title's "crazy wisdom" - and, as a sort of holy fool, his apparent misbehavior could be read as a manifestation of higher spiritual truths. If you're determined to see something, it's easy to find it - so those inclined to interest in Tibetan Buddhism will discover something here.
  58. Romantics Anonymous
    Améris's recipe here calls for everything in moderation, resulting in a movie that never threatens to offend nor, particularly, to delight, though it does offer a good view on a modestly charming actors' duet.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rampart
    Here the director pulls off the formidable task of marrying two unwieldy performances: Harrelson's, a volatile and vulnerable feat of showboating, and Ellroy's, whose writing voice is unmistakably the voice of the movie.
  60. The Artist
    The Artist is movie love at its most anodyne; where Guy Maddin has used the conventions of silent film to express his loony psychosexual fantasias for more than a decade, Hazanavicius sweetly asks that we not be afraid of the past.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Week with Marilyn
    You never forget that you're watching a talented living actress laboring to mimic a long-gone movie star who - on-screen, at least - never seemed to be acting at all.
  62. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur was made, in co-production with Sony, by Aardman Animations, the U.K. company best known for Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, and the character animation has some of the same homely charm.
  63. The Muppets
    Terrified of alienating those who were raised on the originals, The Muppets panders to them instead, constantly blasting or restaging Top 40 hits from the past three-plus decades, continuing the cheap strategy that worked well on YouTube two years ago with the Muppets' cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hugo
    Perfunctorily mounted as a children's adventure, Hugo is weirdly staid in its pacing, and the screenplay, by Scorsese's "Aviator" collaborator John Logan, is full of groaners. The movie is far more successful as a barely veiled issue flick.
  65. House of Pleasures
    The filmmaker gives full vent to his romanticism by staging an End of the Epoch party, with tearful sex workers dancing to "Nights in White Satin," then steps on the mood with yet another farewell fête, commemorating Bastille Day. The prisoners are free - to walk the streets. Ironic, no?
  66. A Dangerous Method
    Cronenberg's film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a compelling narrative, and a splendidly acted love story.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Condon delivers the most authoritatively directed Twilight film so far, which only brings into sharp relief how tonally incoherent its story is.
  68. Dzi Croquettes
    It's the mind-blowing performance footage (and there's lots of it) that makes this a must-see film.
  69. Happy Feet Two
    Really, the movie has absolutely everything except the light touch required for unaffected charm - the mugging is savage - a single piece of memorable original music, or a production number that's celebratory rather than trampling.
  70. Rid of Me
    Rid of Me is a bad movie, but at least it's a flailing, innocent badness.
  71. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    The film is flecked with moments of interest, though this decidedly minor and not particularly cinematographic affair is clearly best suited to television.
  72. Another Happy Day
    Hoping to distract us from the zero ideas found in his film, Levinson demands that his cast act loudly and unbearably, a task for which Demi Moore, as the second wife of Ellen's first husband, is perfectly suited.
  73. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    It's impossible to imagine how anything this convoluted could have already earned a sequel, but it has.
  74. The Lie
    Weixler is an alert, mobile comedienne who deserves better than this awkward pause, nervous stammer, social-anxiety comedy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Garbo: The Spy
    Some of this footage feels like filler, but Roch's concept is strong: He's creating a dialogue between the fictions Pujol created to help win the war and the fictions Hollywood created to memorialize that victory.
  76. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    "I think their marriage was a mystery to everyone," an Eames worker notes - an observation true of every couple that you'll wish the filmmakers had explored more deeply.
  77. Tomboy
    Tomboy astutely explores the freedom, however brief, of being untethered to the highly rule-bound world of gender codes.
  78. The Descendants
    It left me cold. The pathos is as unearned as the protagonist's privilege.
  79. Immortals
    Given something as simple as Theseus's rousing prebattle speech, maximalist Singh is helpless, but when he gets whole armies in on the act, you've got something to behold.
  80. Jack and Jill
    It's a dull drag-show routine headed nowhere until Pacino (playing a self-important version of himself) begins stalking Jill.
  81. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    His lightning-fast fingers can't fail to impress even those unschooled in the classical idiom, but when not center stage, Heifetz proves a far more elusive figure, firmly out of the grasp of Rosen's film.
  82. A Novel Romance
    Cohabitation "commandments" and talk of "chick flicks" further send the material into a cutesy tailspin, with the script's low point an egregious scene featuring Nate sneaking a peek at a silhouette of Jenny undressing behind a curtain.
  83. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    This is intended as one of those kid's comeuppance stories, in which a new maturity is won through contact with salt-of-the-earth types and honest labor but is done with an almost total lack of charm.
  84. Dog Sweat
    It might be sufficient that Dog Sweat exists at all - but only if you believe intention trumps execution.
  85. London Boulevard
    Monahan's debut has verve and charisma, but, in the end, the tension of a late-night pub shrug.
  86. Letters from the Big Man
    Its quiet plea for reconnection with the non-human world is persuasive, and the engaged, agile meditation on the limits of communication at its center aligns it with Munch's earlier work. Oregon's million-dollar scenery, a sweet cameo by Karen Black, and Rabe's tough/tender performance sweeten the pot.
  87. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Will test the ideological mettle of law-and-order conservatives and lefty peaceniks alike.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Barbershop Punk
    Dovetails with the current Occupy message but still feels rather stale.
  89. 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.
  90. Into the Abyss
    An egalitarian study of crime and punishment in a small Southern town, Into the Abyss is also an unmistakably Herzogian inquiry into the lawlessness of the human soul.
  91. J. Edgar
    Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pianomania
    Directors Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis fail to plumb their subject's frustrations or any other insightful biographical details.
  93. 5 Star Day
    Gigandet fills every close-up with flirtatious face wrinkles, embarrassed smiles, and anything else he can think of, to the point where Jake seems downright spastic; although not terribly good at acting, Gigandet seeks to compensate for this fact by doing a lot of it.
  94. Cherkess
    In addition to the droll baby talk, any emotional resonance is undercut by the lead actress's rather unfortunate Snooki-esque hair and makeup.
  95. Young Goethe in Love
    And yet for all of its obtuse choices, there's still something commendable, if daffy, about trying to turn the high holy father of German literature into a rock star.
  96. Killing Bono
    The migraine of a story arc needed sharp comedy reflexes or, at least, a live-wire/slummy star turn and got neither.
  97. The Last Rites of Joe May
    Farina is un-self-conscious and true enough to alchemize cliché.
  98. In the Family
    With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don't feel stretched out so much as given room to breathe, In the Family proves that smart direction and an innate feeling for one's material trumps potentially precious subject matter.
  99. The Son of No One
    Tatum is touching as the stressed, decent provider trying to make something bad from his past not destroy his future. Yet the real surprise is Tracy Morgan, in a small but transformative role as the heavily medicated adult incarnation of Jonathan's childhood friend.
  100. The Look
    Women of a certain age will kvell, but the point might be better made for the rest of us by rewatching the autumnal Rampling in Ozon's "Under the Sand."
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »