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. Stuck Between Stations
    There's an overapplication of split-screen and woozy soundtrack cues to this end, but Lister Jones and Rosen do an appealing back-and-forth with lively dialogue, not dulled in the interest of realism.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Other F Word
    Flea almost cries. Twice. There's your four-word summation of The Other F Word, a half-poignant, half-absurd documentary on punk-rocker dads.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dragonslayer
    Nothing like a traditional social-issue doc, Patterson's one-of-a-kind hybrid captures a socio-historical moment with the kind of charged authenticity that only comes from a willingness to embrace contradictions: It's discursive and hypnotic, laconic and urgent.
  4. Tower Heist
    More than the marquee names, the second bananas keep the movie bobbing along: Broderick's pharmaceutically vague hangdog act is perfect ("If you need me, I'll be living in this box"), while Peña turns out to be a fine comedian, an enthusiastically yipping dumb puppy here.
  5. In Time
    A pleasing, often rousing movie for the 99 percent, In Time is not without flaws.
  6. Silver Bullets
    Silver Bullets is the most affecting "horror" movie I've seen in a while, as Swanberg ignores tired supernatural scare-flick trappings and locates terror in the shadowy, passive-aggressive process of making, and watching, movies.
  7. 13
    Lumbers, stumbles, and blows all its secrets at the outset.
  8. My Reincarnation
    Fox's briskness leaves certain questions gaping open. As in, how cynical and derisive is she deliberately being of Rinpoche's teachings, since all we get are trite homilies and vague advice?
  9. The Double
    The Double, Michael Brandt's post–Cold War spy film, is grade-B hokum, but it's not without its occasional generic thrills.
  10. Janie Jones
    Nivola and Breslin sing and perform the original numbers, welcome interludes that provide respite from Rosenthal's lousy script.
  11. Sidewalls
    A shrewd, intellectually playful rom-com that delivers the gooey goods.
  12. Like Crazy
    The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance - this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction.
  13. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary could use a shot of the mania that fueled Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." As deadpan as he is, Depp could use a crazed Benicio Del Toro to complement his cool.
  14. Anonymous
    Emmerich's movie is sporadically enjoyable trash with better performances than it has any right to: Hogg's verminous villain leaves a trail of cold, oozing hisses.
  15. Melancholia
    Plenty of moments in Melancholia are painfully funny. Some moments are even painful to watch, but there was never a moment when I thought about the time or my next movie or did not care about the characters or had anything less than complete interest in what was happening on the screen.
  16. Paranormal Activity 3
    The further this series drifts into corporate-franchise territory and away from Peli's inventively cheap, slyly psychosexual conception, the more reasons there are to just stay away.
  17. Le Havre
    Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.
  18. Margin Call
    Unlike "The Company Men," which successfully explored the moral conscience and despair of its corporate titans and middle managers, Margin Call's bids for sympathy for its most conflicted character, Spacey's Sam, fail.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You All Are Captains
    When onscreen Laxe loses control of the film-within-the-film, off-screen Laxe's voice is subsumed into dreamily beautiful footage following a "script" laid out earlier by the kids. Or so it seems - by that point, we've seen enough of Laxe's brilliantly constructed deconstruction of "truth" versus "fiction" to know to question the authorship of every frame.
  20. Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    As bluntly humanist and free-ranging as its subject, this brisk take on the life of poet, sociologist, educator, psychologist, and general pain-in-the-ass gadfly Paul Goodman is as much endangered-species doc as biography.
  21. Oranges and Sunshine
    At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.
  22. Klitschko
    Fight fans will still find much of interest, including some surreptitious footage of Don King unsuccessfully wooing the young brothers by "playing" Mozart on a player piano.
  23. Revenge of the Electric Car
    Sleekly designed (Tim Robbins narrates) with excellent mileage, Revenge is a balm for beaten-down times. In lieu of a business case for ethics, it tells the story of that rare moment when the bottom line finally dovetails with the greater good.
  24. Elevate
    Four years, two continents, and a whole lot of culture shock in the making, Anne Buford's endearing and vibrantly photographed hoop-dreams doc follows a quartet of gifted West African teens from the SEEDS Academy (Sports for Education and Economic Development in Senegal) as they head to the U.S. on basketball scholarships.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Transit Cities
    At 71 minutes, the film too schematically ratchets up the inhospitality, but its portrait of Amman - Hushki offsets the increasingly claustrophobic domestic scenes with views of the metropolis, which Laila also now finds too Westernized - is welcome.
  26. The Mighty Macs
    Appears to have been made on a budget equivalent to the cost of a WNBA fleece hoodie. But even at that price, the first feature by Tim Chambers is profligate with sports-movie clichés.
  27. The Reunion
    The resultant smorgasbord is a misshapen mess, short on humor, tension, or chemistry among its bickering protagonists.
  28. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Constance Marks's documentary on Kevin Clash, the kind, gentle man who created the Muppet beloved by every single child in the world, rushes through the intriguing points its interviewees bring up to devote more time to banalities.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Norman
    Although Norman, shot on location in Spokane and scored by singer-songwriter Andrew Bird, succeeds in fleshing out its troubled main character, the actions of his peers are consistently harder to accept.
  30. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    A deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories of hippie cult crazies.
  31. The Catechism Cataclysm
    Taking the notion of toilet humor literally but incapable of delivering its promised religious satire, The Catechism Cataclysm is more muddled than its tongue-twister title.
  32. Cargo
    With the certainty of bad melodrama, Cargo moves gradually into superficial moral complexity, an inevitable display of heroics, and the perfunctory title card ensuring us that sex slavery is indeed a real-life problem.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Thing
    As written by Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5), the new Thing lacks much wit or self-awareness. It's more of a "final girl" formula film, but on ice. Still, why did it take 29 years to create this solid double-feature? And will they unfreeze Russell for a trilogy?
  34. Oka!
    Oka!, a loose-limbed tapestry of cultural nuances, atmosphere, and song, is a tuneful tribute to the Bayakan spirit.
  35. Father of Invention
    The rather unappealing character of Axel is indulged with every opportunity for redemption, as Spacey is indulged with every opportunity to showboat.
  36. Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology
    Like Shlain's hand-written diagram in which lines twist and knot while linking various subjects, the film resembles not a coherent thesis but a tangle of semi-related ideas.
  37. The Dead
    The Dead, with its vast, pitiless landscapes and moral seriousness, is "Night of the Living Dead" reimagined as a Sergio Leone western. It's a knockout.
  38. The Woman
    Even with a nauseous climax, The Woman never gets under the skin, and its artsy-languid pacing and incessant lite-metal commentary tunes finally seem like part of an effort to disguise what it really is: torture porn for people who'd never admit to liking torture porn.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    However uplifting, To Be Heard, shot over the course of several years, takes a surprisingly unflinching look at the home lives of the three high schoolers.
  40. Happy Life
    The most spot-on scenes show passive-aggressive hipster clerks snorting at Keith's flyers for a comeback fundraiser rave and a city suffocating on its own cool.
  41. Trespass
    A home-invasion movie as instantly forgettable as its title, Trespass is not without disturbing images: namely, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman as spouses.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Skin I Live In
    The film deflates in its final third, with crude matter-of-fact set pieces, dumb explanatory psychology, and bursts of intentional camp overwhelming and canceling out the unmoored creepiness.
  43. Fireflies in the Garden
    Despite an A-list roster, the performances are universally one-note, a fact largely attributable to a script overflowing with blunt dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism.
  44. Chalet Girl
    Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Footloose
    Nothing in Footloose comes close, in this respect, to the best moments of Brewer's previous, vibrant if uneven films "Hustle & Flow" and "Black Snake Moan," but this heartfelt retread of a notably thin popcorn property does come alive during an illicit dance-off.
  46. Texas Killing Fields
    The plot is a chaos of underdeveloped relationships and frayed loose ends, but every so often, Mann does something so right that it makes this seem less a matter of narrative disorganization than a commentary on the anarchy intrinsic to any investigation.
  47. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.
  48. The Nine Muses
    The result is not without beauty, though at a certain point, one begins to notice that each new muse rather resembles the previous, a uniformity that restrains the film from true symphonic swell.
  49. 1911
    If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here.
  50. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    All the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the stiffness of the bourgeoisie.
  51. Dirty Girl
    For a film that's supposed to be rooted in such a specific time and place, Sylvia isn't really concerned with details: Costumes, hair, and décor appear to be the work of "That '70s Show" interns; William H. Macy, as Danielle's Mormon soon-to-be stepdad, continuously muffs a Sooner State drawl.
  52. The Way
    As a director, Estevez exhibits a bland visual sense, but he does manage to convey some of his scenic locations' multifaceted textures. Mostly, though, his dramatically inert, spiritually generic The Way seems like it was far more fun to shoot than it is to endure.
  53. Blackthorn
    This modest oater should tickle western fans.
  54. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    A love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, it solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever - furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    It's perhaps the sequel we deserve. But that doesn't mean this dumb, blunt follow-up - both more unspeakably grotesque and less scary than the first film - is worth sitting through. Once Six's conceptual project becomes clear, his escalating audience-mocking torture is increasingly pointless.
  56. Real Steel
    Based very loosely on a short story by "I Am Legend" author Richard Matheson, Real Steel in fact comes closer to road-bonding movies featuring children and hesitant papas: "Paper Moon" or "Over the Top," say.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Ides of March
    Compelling enough as a methodic moral inquiry, a step-by-step account of how lines in the sand move, Ides is less successful when attempting to capture the feeling of the times.
  58. Courageous
    Borderline creepy, Courageous endlessly expounds on the importance of God in men's lives but fails to answer the more pressing question of why religious sagas such as this treat subtlety as a sin.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Even if the speechifying is cringingly trite, and even though it's evident from Colin's first frame onscreen that 21 will be Ally's lucky number, at least her roundelay through exes allows for a few scant moments of inspired lunacy, led by Faris's cartoon-perfect vocal talents.
  60. Dream House
    Dream House also manages to commit a cardinal thriller sin: casting well-known actors in ostensibly inconsequential roles, which in this case reveals the real culprit before the mystery proper has even begun.
  61. American Teacher
    What's made powerfully clear is that we've reached a dire point of crisis that, while largely rooted in economics, is about so much more than dollars and cents.
  62. Surrogate Valentine
    A rambling valentine to San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura, Surrogate Valentine is a stylish pseudo-portrait that refracts Nakamura's gently impassive persona and lilting indie pop ballads through several lenses.
  63. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    You Don't Like the Truth focuses on the pathetic manipulations of Canadian intelligence officers as they interrogate Toronto-born Omar Khadr, the youngest prisoner held in Guantánamo Bay.
  64. Take Shelter
    Despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder - a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as "something that's not right."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    50/50
    Although it veers maudlin in its final act - 50/50 mostly succeeds as a movie about a young man fighting cancer that doesn't give in to sap or sentiment.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Sarah Palin: You Betcha!
    For all the legitimate reasons to jeer Palin, should her rightful wariness of Broomfield's camera be one of them?
  67. My Joy
    My Joy is a maddening vision and one of the year's must-see provocations.
    • 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.
  69. Bunraku
    Insular and indulgent as it is, though, the movie is never less than a visual treat.
  70. Benda Bilili!
    But real-life hard-knock plot twists, as well as some tweaking of form (there's no narrator or voiceover of any kind; the film's subjects outline their grim realities largely through their rhythmically upbeat songs) make the film absolutely riveting, as does the fiercely rousing music.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Tucker & Dale piquantly tweaks every '80s ax-murderer flick you've ever seen, though it provides the same satisfaction of watching bratty undergrads perish one by one. Admittedly, the spoof loses steam in its last reel (i.e., when it runs out of frat kids to kill), but the film strikes an enjoyable tone of congenial gore.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Abduction
    A blockhead espionage thriller from director-for-hire John Singleton.
  73. Journey from Zanskar
    Although the film might be forced to rely rather heavily on Richard Gere's narration simply to situate the Western viewer, the actor does unify a bumptious collection of material that, taken together, relates what has to be admitted is a remarkable story.
  74. In Search of God
    Purportedly about a quest for spiritual enlightenment and the question of what binds global religions, In Search of God is instead defined by simplistic philosophizing and rampant narcissism.
  75. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    Respectful, loving, but never lionizing, Carl's thorough investigation transcends his personal catharsis to become an enduring treatise on how character flaws affect policy.
  76. Dolphin Tale
    By the end of the movie, Winter has become a mascot for human disability, especially for children, and Dolphin Tale has enough depth and sensitivity to tap into emotion without feeling manipulative.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Whale
    If your children love animals, by all means, take them to see The Whale. If you appreciate gorgeous scenery, the movie doubles as a picture postcard for the region. If you simply want to indulge in warm-and-fuzzy scenes of whale petting, this movie is also for you. What it is not, however, is remotely new.
  78. A Bird of the Air
    The cast detracts, too: Fiona, a flighty loner in the book, is a grating twit in Nichols's hands, and Hurst, while likeable, is flat and too hunky. The bird's got more charisma, which in a better movie would've been the point.
  79. Toast
    Slater's book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.
  80. White Wash
    Even at 78 minutes, White Wash pads its material through repetition but remains a proficient portrait of how increased social, economic, and geographic opportunity fosters diversity - in life and out on the waves.
  81. Puncture
    Puncture is proudly "Based on a True Story." As is so often the case, this means an indifference to "true" human relationships in favor of crusading self-righteousness.
  82. Machine Gun Preacher
    Machine Gun Preacher is the umpteenth onscreen iteration of a white savior aiding the most desperate in Africa.
  83. Art History
    Swanberg has discovered lighting and mood-to occasionally stunning effect. Perhaps in some future memo from the front lines of indie-sploitation, he will unite them with story and more than a superficial nod to character.
  84. Thunder Soul
    Sometimes you just can't fight the funk; as much as you might resist the film's more maudlin scenes, not succumbing to the band's signature tune, "Head Wiggle," is impossible.
  85. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl, and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Limelight
    Given all this interesting raw material, it's mildly disappointing that the filmmakers tie it together with such cheesy connective tissue.
  87. There Was Once...
    The neo-Nazi sentiment in Hungary today is touched on most acutely when it mars the memorial that finally brings the survivors home.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pearl Jam Twenty
    Perhaps Pearl Jam's arc too closely resembles Crowe's own, and he can't see what's so uniquely poignant about dimmed but enduring stars.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weekend
    Naturalistic without being ineloquent, heartfelt yet unsentimental, Weekend is the rarest of birds: a movie romance that rings true.
  90. Moneyball
    It really happened, it's really corny, and it's really great.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shit Year
    Barkin is often fascinating in playing a character who, in both her heroic bitchery and hysterical sadness, is more of a concept than a person, in a film that ultimately seems to be "about" nothing more or less than the actress' magnetic face.
  92. Straw Dogs
    There's no matching the sinister village faces in Peckinpah's cast or the psychological acuity of his scene-making, but Lurie shows himself man enough for the material.
  93. Prince of Swine
    A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.
  94. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    That so many of the colossal yokel's mental states are literalized, as when the screen fills with thousands of rats while Margueritte reads Camus's "The Plague" aloud to her new pal, typifies the movie's antipathy to nuance.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy, Happy
    The questionable black-historical shorthand detracts from what is otherwise a well-performed and fitfully amusing film.
  96. Sound It Out
    Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    Although its subject is never less than captivating, Jonathan Furmanski's film is frustratingly unfocused, a scattershot collection of candid footage and biographical information. Thankfully, Blowfly's world is weird as promised.
  98. Restless
    Gus Van Sant's latest - a middle-class hetero teen romance, no less - walks the line between mainstream sentimentality and dark art-house humor so effectively that it seems noncommittal.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jane's Journey
    Spectacularly photographed and journalistically lame, Jane's Journey blows a 105-minute kiss to Dr. Jane Goodall.
  100. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    Human characters emerge from photo ops and heroes from the shadows.
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