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. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy, of course, finds her father charming because he is her father, misses her mother for the same reason, and treasures her neuroses because they are her own. What viewers miss is anything inviting us to feel the same way.
  2. Harmontown
    Berkeley includes some of the writer's unpleasant moments on the tour. But what Harmon wants, as any Community fan knows, is real connection with other human beings.
  3. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    The early scenes whir and buzz along to create quite a pleasing clamor.
  4. Stop-Loss
    In the end, Stop-Loss's evening-news topicality proves both an asset and a liability--an irresolvable structural conundrum. Simply put, the film so effectively reconstitutes those Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them.
  5. Trollhunter
    As de-mythologizings go, Trollhunter has neither the wit, nor art, nor social insight to honor the legacy of George A. Romero's "Martin."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Days of Santiago
    Méndez contrasts his protagonist's highly subjective journey with a neorealistic visual style. If the movie lacks narrative originality, it leaves a singularly raw impression of having spent time inside someone's sweaty, ill-fitting skin.
  7. The Good Shepherd
    The Good Shepherd needed to be either considerably longer -- more like 1979's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" miniseries -- or considerably shorter (word has it De Niro cut 30 minutes). Right now, it's stuck in the deadly dull middle in which everything happens but nothing matters since the filmmakers can't stick with one event or idea long enough for it to, well, stick.
  8. Bustin' Down the Door
    Engaging, elegantly made surf documentary.
  9. Crazy/Beautiful
    Overproduced as a Super Bowl soft-drink commercial, so much so that even its potentially insightful moments seem like movie fakery.
  10. Runaway Jury
    Not nearly enough time is spent in court--that is, on the movie's ostensible subject. (Besides, the down-to-the-wire deliberation scene is risibly unconvincing and abbreviated.)
  11. September 11
    It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.
  12. Stolen
    Despite the soft-spoken Smith, a type-A British liaison self-named the Turbocharger, and the apparent involvement of the IRA, the doc prioritizes flash over facts, leaving you pining for the New Yorker exposé it could've been.
  13. L'ennemi intime
    With its sententious air of historical reckoning, Enemies is an impressive monument, but not a moving one.
  14. Valhalla Rising
    Frequently dull and stupidly obvious, you nonetheless have to applaud the misguided ambition of Refn's career turn. If nothing else, as the metal guitars get louder and louder, the synergy between Viking imagery and the pagan-obsessed metal freaks it spawned has never been clearer.
  15. 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.
  16. Wrecked
    Because it's so carefully parceled out and so evocatively framed (in widescreen), Wrecked is an absorbing ordeal, perhaps less for its survival narrative than its metaphoric heft.
  17. 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.
  18. Le Pont du Nord
    Playful and tense, loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy...It seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers—Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry—and expanded our sense of the possible.
  19. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    While it doesn't quite encompass everything, the film's still a bit too busy for its own good.
  20. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Paley's segment proves that The Prophet is more of a missed opportunity than an ambitious folly.
  21. Yarn
    The film offers fascinating insight into what yarn can do in the talented hands of those determined to elevate mere craft to high art.
  22. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    Anonymous haters on YouTube can say Gigi is fake, but her enthusiasm here, and the enthusiasm her teen girl fans have in meeting her, is totally genuine.
  23. Braven
    Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.
  24. This Is Our Land
    At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.
  25. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Margaret
    It's less successful as a human drama than as a near-Brechtian exercise in what human drama looks and sounds like - a distanced but often car-crash compelling portrait of a teen as an unfinished being.
  27. Grand Piano
    Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.
  28. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    Tillman is clumsy in his handling of a few scenes, and considering what these kids are up against—junkie moms, drug-dealing pimp neighbors—the ending might be a little too implausibly upbeat. But Tillman seems to know that we need to go home feeling hope for Mister and Pete, who, it turns out, aren't so easily defeated.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Bush's stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism. Not incidentally, the film also offers a compact primer in the ways of dharma. A tonic for Buddhists, no doubt, it offers many pleasures to atheists as well.
  30. Ice Age
    Has only its stylized designs to recommend it.
  31. The Boxtrolls
    The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower, and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film.
  32. Roadie
    Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.
  33. Stuck
    Stuck is both darkly comic and disgusting; the name alone reduces the crime to a sick joke.
  34. Nina's Tragedies
    With improbable charm, Gabizon knits it all together, his characters' sexual obsessions and earthiness tempered by a soulful melancholy.
  35. Sunshine Cleaning
    More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams–Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it feels almost like an afterthought.
  36. Private
    Private never reconciles its conflicting impulses, and consequently, the human impact of the struggle--so powerfully explored in "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride" --never acquires the emotional weight it should. The semi-absurdist closer amounts to little more than a knee-jerk declaration of hopelessness.
  37. Headshot
    With Uwais choreographing the insane fights and Indonesian genre vets the Mo Brothers catching every bloody, manic minute, both fists and bullets get dished out with equal, frenetic fury — and the movie offers plenty of "Oh shit!" moments.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wondrous Oblivion
    If writer-director Paul Morrison's film traces a predictable arc from racial unease to acceptance, it's often winning--and sometimes tough-minded--in the details.
  39. Word Wars
    Even the fast-motion effects and flashy graphics can't make this a spectator sport.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Polar Express
    When it comes to the "humans," the atmosphere collapses. Unnervingly smooth, mouths moving in strange, even frightening formations, the Polar people are the least convincing things on-screen, glaring impostors amid the otherwise painstakingly rendered scenery.
  41. Edmond
    As the full-length sorta-satire it has become, Edmond is all sizzle and little meat, a veritable tangent act dropped from "Glengarry Glen Ross" because it was several marks too silly.
  42. Two Lovers and a Bear
    Reckless love, life and death and a talking polar bear (voiced by Gordon Pinsent) are all given equal time but not a trajectory we can follow.
  43. Worlds Apart
    Neophyte writer/director Christopher Papakaliatis eventually shows an affinity for filming two people in love, but his actors often lack the chemistry to make us believe that their bond transcends all socioeconomic boundaries.
  44. The Incomparable Rose Hartman
    The Incomparable Rose Hartman is a gorgeously shot, sharply edited portrait of photographer Hartman.
  45. The Wackness
    All the drug-slinging material's counterfeit, but the script is refreshingly straight-faced in looking at the strange relationship between white boys and rap.
    • Village Voice
  46. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    By focusing on his subject's unwavering moral certainty, Kraume denies his ethical complexity and diminishes the difficulties of his challenging stance to educate the society that wanted him dead.
  47. Enemy
    Denis Villeneuve's shared dream of a film takes the simple premise of a man glimpsing his doppelganger while watching a movie and mines every bit of tension and oddity from it — there's hardly a scene that doesn't exude menace.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Drawing Restraint 9
    Those who fear that the mainstream of contemporary art has become little more than an extension of fashion will find no comfort in Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney's latest big-budget ejaculation of ritual self-involvement and superficial foofery.
  49. Sólo con tu pareja
    The film is more stale than crisp, with dialogue that is at least 50 percent old aphorisms, homilies, and clichés.
  50. The Isle
    Kim's movie rocks -- I saw it cold a year ago, and I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's "Iron Man."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Iluminados por el fuego
    Tristán Bauer's new war movie has an even more bitterly ironic title in Spanish: "Iluminados por El Fuego" or "Enlightened by Fire."
  52. Conviction
    In all fairness, Swank's unsubtle performance is often an extension of the bluntly dumb lines she and other cast members must deliver.
  53. Madrid, 1987
    Miguel uses her beauty and placid demeanor as a screen against which to project his memories of past adventures and the ghost of his libido.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Kids Grow Up
    Seemingly modest but stealthily ambitious, Block's feature-length home movies have a way of spiraling outward just as he's drilling inward, of becoming profoundly universal when most nakedly personal. And despite their candor, the Blocks are less exhibitionistic than welcoming. They make for very dear company.
  55. Brick Lane
    Absorbing enough, moving enough, and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies.
  56. 10 Years
    10 Years is an uncommonly magnanimous project, kind not only to its stumbling characters but also to audiences tired of films pruned of unruly emotions.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mail Order Wife
    Less a film, more a series of ragtag gags.
  58. Willard
    In a culture clogged with appropriated effluvia and remake cop-outs, Willard is wittier and nastier than we deserve.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Faculty
    Since the codes of science fiction are different from horror's cant, the patented Williamson method doesn't make a perfect fit with the material; Faculty's fun, but less fun than it could be.
  60. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The week's guilty pleasure is The Count of Monte Cristo, a gorgeously photographed, sumptuously designed adaptation of the Dumas swashbuckler boasting the most ludicrous dialogue since director Kevin Reynolds's "Waterworld."
  61. Reign Over Me
    If Binder has a considerably heavier hand when it comes to metaphor, his movie nevertheless remains buoyant because the feelings in it are immutable, and because Sandler has never before held the screen with greater intensity.
  62. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    Thompson assembles his footage with an expert's touch, but what his film lacks is its own perspective on these atrocities.
  63. The Secret Life of Pets
    The Secret Life of Pets is an ADD-addled mess of a movie — and that, amazingly, is its charm.
  64. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    The good news is that Anchorman 2 is pretty funny. It's also more rambling and hit-or-miss than its predecessor, which means, thankfully, that it's less likely to become what we euphemistically call iconic: In other words, fewer annoying guys will be inspired to quote it.
  65. The Motel Life
    The Motel Life too often revisits the same emotions and sentiments, leaving us with a portrait that feels frustratingly simple.
  66. After the Storm
    The class and cultural tension that exists between the well-intentioned city slickers and underprivileged kids is unavoidable, and director Hilla Medalia lets it settle evenly, refusing to judge.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    Cooking in Progress is, in fact, all magic and no path: This is extreme fly-on-the-wall vérité, with only the barest context provided (no helpful TV-style titles here - when it comes to identifying ingredients and techniques, viewers are usually left to their own devices) as the culinary impossible is realized one painstaking step at a time.
  68. Harvest
    This is largely a non-narrative piece, the director employing a slice-of-life-in-crisis approach that only works if the characters or the situations are sharply drawn. Neither are.
  69. Honor Flight
    Greatest-generation stoicism meets gushing contemporary sentiment in Honor Flight.
  70. Bidder 70
    Tim DeChristopher, proves a fascinating subject for Beth and George Gage's new documentary.
  71. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men visit rural Uganda, Canadian oil fields, Zuccotti Park, and a climate change conference in Copenhagen, but in its best moments this loopy yet informative doc becomes a buddy movie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    Pulse-pounding thriller.
  73. Cool It
    The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg.
  74. Oculus
    Replete with superb performances led by a paranoid Sackhoff and unhinged Cochrane, it's the rare horror film to know how to tease malevolent mysteries and deliver satisfyingly unexpected, unsettling payoffs.
  75. The Kings of Summer
    The Kings of Summer plays like an extended sitcom episode, and not a very special one at that.
  76. Broken English
    Posey remains touching as the woman with happiness in sight but bewilderingly out of reach.
  77. Barrymore
    It takes a minute for the film to move beyond a kind of gilded stasis, but once it does, it - and Plummer - are riveting.
  78. Get Bruce
    I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.
  79. Unknown Pleasures
    Unknown Pleasures suggests a coolly formalist reinvention of neorealism. The film is both distanced and immediate -- a fiction with the force of documentary.
  80. Matchstick Men
    Single-dad sitcom is not Sir Ridley's forte but, anachronistically evoking the ring-a-ding-ding ambience of "Auto Focus" and "Catch Me If You Can," his mise-en-scène is as impeccable as Roy's pad.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Oleander
    Ultimately sacrifices nuance to tidy epiphanies about personal growth.
  82. I'll Sing for You
    The reverent pacing lags a bit, but the film's meditation on the struggle to find spirituality that reconciles Islam with tribal belief systems is powerful in its understatement, and its wordless observation of France's Malian community quietly evidences daily cultural preservation amid the hard labor.
  83. Prince of Broadway
    It's not the freshest scenario, and Baker lets Lucky sputter and moan about his fate for so long that we wonder, as his sensible girlfriend does, why we're bothering with such undiluted dickness.
  84. The To Do List
    Like first sex, writer-director Maggie Carey's debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise but not quite adept at getting everyone off.
  85. The Bubble
    Given the upbeat, tender rhythms of the movie's love story, the climax--a cry of bottomless despair--comes as a profound shock. It's meant to, and though the ending is touched by the goofy absurdities of melodrama, Fox's mix-and-match sampling of apparently incompatible genres nails the nervous blend of vitality and desperation that is Israel today.
  86. Dust to Glory
    The movie is monotonous, storyless, and at under 100 minutes, interminable.
  87. Trucker
    It's a smooth ride thanks to Monaghan, and an impressive ensemble.
  88. Generation Iron
    Yudin pulls lovely philosophical grace notes from his subjects as they illuminate some universal truths from their very specific world.
  89. The Sense of an Ending
    Batra kills the mystery part of the story and instead pushes the adaptation toward that humanism, which renders a good chunk of the plot a wash. Good thing Batra’s really adept at the human portraits, though.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    La tropical
    When Turnley ventures into broader political or sociological commentary, one wishes that he'd step back and let the music, uniformly and ass-shakingly irresistible, take center stage.
  91. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    Wendy J.N. Lee's Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey powerfully connects the dots between the enormity of global warming as a phenomenon and the havoc it wreaks in ordinary lives.
  92. Thank You for Playing
    Thank You for Playing transforms a father's confession into a revealing work of art.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Freeway
    As it is, Witherspoon's sweet-as-peach-pie Southern accent only grates and writer-director Bright's incessant winking at the audience bespeaks a project that was running on empty before shooting started. [22 Oct 1996, p.88]
    • Village Voice
  94. The Island
    There are no good or bad people in The Island, just a group of hapless schmucks who become more sympathetic as they get more desperate.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    On Her Majesty's Secret Service
    With On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Peter Hunt has directed what to my mind is the most engaging and exciting James Bond film.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Iluzija
    Marko's story is far from novel, but its wicked evocation of hopelessness transcends any familiarities.
  97. Quitting
    Alternately grueling and soporific, Quitting is a movie about addiction that demands the viewer also give something up.
  98. Lucie Aubrac
    This extraordinary story still sparks controversy in France, but in Berri's hands, it never comes alive...a shadow play of historical icons, rather than a portrait of people in love.
  99. Stuart Little
    The story is little more than overdetermined trials and triumphs. Kids won't care, but they won't fall for it either; unsurprisingly, it doesn't stand a chance of providing them with the memories the book provided their parents.
  100. Frida
    Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.
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