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. Goya in Bordeaux
    What can a movie tell us about the painter that the paintings do not? The effort has done no favors for Picasso or Rivera or Bacon.
  2. Taking Sides
    Flawed but fascinating.
  3. One
    Even more than the subtlety of the writing and acting, it's this sophisticated and emotionally potent visual strategy that suggests Barbieri's promise as a filmmaker and lifts One above the low-budget indie heap.
  4. Magic Mike XXL
    He's selling nonsense fantasy in a movie that's nonsense fantasy, but boy is Tatum the real deal.
  5. The Observers
    There are moments when the tedium loosens you to melt into the landscape, and you swear you can hear the moss on the rocks start talking.
  6. The Hornet's Nest
    An important film despite some baffling presentational choices.
  7. Red Knot
    Scott Cohen's Red Knot exhibits such spot-on, heartbreaking honesty about behaviors that tear many couples apart — passive-aggressiveness, career obsession, seeking validation to soothe one's inadequacies — that it's easy to forgive Cohen his metaphorical excesses.
  8. Fear X
    Perhaps a radical re-editing of Fear X-like Lynch did on “Mulholland Drive”-could rescue the film's workaday unease from the dread taboo of derivative weirdness. It's half a movie, but a half that hums.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Pit
    In the Pit's empathy feels strictly skin-deep, its insight even shallower.
  10. The Soloist
    Foxx and Downey's disciplined duet come close to redeeming The Soloist from its visual excesses, but Wright leaves us with a parting shot of the dancing homeless that shamelessly exploits the very people he means to champion.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ladies in Lavender.
    So tastefully subdued it makes Merchant Ivory look like Gaspar Noé. And while they never look bored, Smith and Dench are clearly slumming, having played these roles in other costume pics.
  12. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    Funniest movie of '08? Close enough, for those who don't mind monkeying around.
  13. Documented
    Vargas lingers for long stretches over his personal story and his complicated relationship with his mother, still in the Philippines -- a place he dare not visit for fear of being unable to return. But his story is a vivid illustration of the pickle we're in.
  14. Paradise: Faith
    Though we're never allowed a close-up, Hofstätter's performance comes off as an unselfconscious tour de force, painfully real and culturally lost.
  15. Last Hijack
    The filmmakers have gotten extraordinary access to Mohamed and ravaged Somalia... But it's disappointing that they did not capture more scenes of Mohamed's wife and her family, who in the end are the ones who make the most momentous decision.
  16. Ocean's 8
    Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast.
  17. 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.
  18. Hideaway (Le refuge)
    Though the psychological layering and thematic ambition of the screenplay do not quite result in the depth intended, Hideaway's unsentimental performances will hook you.
  19. The Weather Man
    The most supremely odd American film of the year.
  20. Blackthorn
    This modest oater should tickle western fans.
  21. Traitor
    The movie's first hour is well-done, but realism and insight go out the window as soon as Samir crosses the U.S. border.
  22. Jabberwocky (re-release)
    The film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
  23. Bugs!
    As with the more glamorously photographed "MicroCosmos," the climbing, scurrying, and munching eventually grows tiresome, but the film is not without its highlights.
  24. The Dream Catcher
    A highly talented filmmaker, Radtke draws intense, focused performances from these two inexperienced young actors.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Backyard
    Though filled with violent smackdowns, slackjawed interviews, and bizarre characters, Hough's doc never rises above the level of first-year student project, hobbled by scattershot editing, badly written intertitles, and useless directorial voice-over.
  26. Laurel Canyon
    The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Welcome to Collinwood
    An anti-"Rififi" in which nearly everybody loses their cool, not after the big score goes down but repeatedly and neurotically throughout.
  28. Blue Gate Crossing
    Set largely in empty public spaces late at night, Blue Gate Crossing supplements its slender narrative with disarming performances and plangent atmosphere.
  29. Blue Crush
    Director John Stockwell keeps the proceedings casual, and the film is admirably at ease with its dutifully trite plot and porn-worthy dialogue (most of which vanishes under the crash of a wave or the roar of a jet-ski anyway).
  30. Beijing Bicycle
    Wang mistakes affectless storytelling and character conception for rigor, and as a result huge portions of Beijing Bicycle are dull and repetitive.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rumble in the Bronx
    This cross-cultural circulation of proto-gangster fantasies is ultimately Rumble in the Bronx's lasting irony and perhaps even the source of its outsized hilarity. Better to laugh than to dwell on the fact that not only has Jackie Chan made a lame "American" movie, but he's plagiarized Michael Jackson's "Bad" video to boot. [27 Feb 1996]
    • Village Voice
  32. Sunlight Jr.
    Collyer has a keen eye for underrepresented populations, but she'd be better served in the future to scale back on the overstatement.
  33. Capitalism: A Love Story
    Scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.
  34. Day Night Day Night
    Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie.
  35. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    Nymphomaniac is a jigsaw opus, an extended and generally exquisitely crafted riff. Story, theme, and character (despite Gainsbourg's captivations) bow to von Trier's gamesmanship, which makes his own promiscuities the film's true subject.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wah-Wah
    That the film is semi- autobiographical for caustic actor-turned-writer-director Richard E. Grant helps explain its severely, sometimes laughably bitter tone.
  37. Wall
    Disturbing and compelling.
  38. Fast & Furious 6
    Everyone involved at last seems to understand that the mode here is comic. Previous entries suffered from self-important glumness that gummed up the fun whenever the cars weren’t racing.
  39. Lilting
    Khaou creates a compelling tension between Whishaw's stricken, almost febrile performance and Cheng's stubbornly dignified one.
  40. This Must Be the Place
    Sorrentino's languorous photography, understated humor, and quiet but profound dramatic reveals coil together into something organic, whole, and achingly sweet.
  41. Muppets Most Wanted
    The story matters only in that it creates opportunities for heaps of ridiculousness, and writer-director James Bobin (who also directed The Muppets), along with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, mines them skillfully and breezily.
  42. Exposed
    Like burlesque itself, Exposed is at its best when it shows rather than tells.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    13 Tzameti
    The artiest entry in the ever growing torture-movie genre, this playfully wicked French thriller from twentysomething provocateur Gela Babluani blasts its way into your brainpan with the help of black-and-white widescreen cinematography whose striking but smooth textures better suit the upwardly mobile auteur than his poor protagonist.
  44. Extract
    The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.
  45. Role Models
    Wain, Marino, and Rudd pull it off because theirs is a funnier, brainier, bawdier brand of feel-good.
  46. Giuliani Time
    After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.
  47. Biandan, guniang
    The elliptical, even fragmented editing style clashes with the reiterative voice-over, which could indicate a stylistic choice or cutting under duress.
  48. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    If you somehow manage to stay dry-eyed through the concert numbers, the end should set you bawling.
  49. The Kite Runner
    A drama as bland and beige as its tasteful palette.
  50. Criminal
    He (Jacobs) and cinematographer Chris Menges compose the film largely in close-ups, and the effect is appropriately unnerving. Regardless, unfavorable comparisons to "Nine Queens" are inevitable.
  51. Haute Cuisine
    Writer-director Christian Vincent and co-writer Étienne Comar, aided by Frot's quiet intensity, imbue Hortense's quest to pull off culinary miracles with an urgency that's almost absurdly compelling, and all the more entertaining for it.
  52. Red
    The movie's escalating series of tit-for-tat revenge ploys becomes a bit tedious even at 95 minutes, but Cox and a rich (if not always well-served) supporting cast that includes Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, and Robert Englund keep it more than watchable throughout.
  53. The Green Mile
    Irritatingly repetitious and piled high with long-foreseen conclusions.
  54. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Perfectly pleasant, perfectly undistinguished adaptation of a market-driven novel about six Sacramento lovelies trying to mend their stalled or broken lives while massaging each other's feet.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    17 Girls
    So what does 17 Girls, the debut feature film from sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin, add to the "pregnancy pact" canon? A lot of style, but not much substance.
  56. Evil
    Is this an allegory against blind deference to fascism? It might be, but the root-for-the-Aryan-jock dramatics seem mildly fascist themselves.
  57. The Incredible Hulk
    Cheers to lower expectations, then, because The Incredible Hulk is The Pretty Good Hulk. All things considered, of course.
  58. For Ellen
    Dano, with his remarkably guileless meta-teen puss, is thoroughly convincing, which is more than can be said for the film's shameless climactic steal from "Five Easy Pieces."
  59. Tell Me Something
    Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.
  60. Hair High
    Too glib to qualify as satire, Hair High nails the high school experience.
  61. Go Go Tales
    A highly personal movie, Go Go Tales finds Ferrara in a frenzied yet pensive mode.
  62. Welcome
    Heavy ironies like that drop regularly, undermining both the film's intentions and the drama.
  63. In Search of Israeli Cuisine
    History and politics are present in this film, but over at the kids table.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    Terence Rattigan has jazzed up the screenplay with a laborious melodrama but unfortunately he has not distorted it beyond recognition. That there remain strains of the understated wit of the original dialogue is a dubious blessing--like patches of lace in a sweatsuit. [06 Nov 1969, p.52]
    • Village Voice
  65. Fighting
    The movie never works up a pulpy head of steam. It's like an exploitation movie that thinks it's an art movie, only there's no art to be found.
  66. Adult World
    Adult World captures beautifully, and with a great deal of self-deprecating humor, what it's like to feel trapped in a place you think is too small to hold you.
  67. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    In his astute look at the artistry and business of food, de Maistre makes the case that haute cuisine serves the same function as haute couture, creating an indelible experience while encouraging new ideas to filter through the industry.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Metallica: Through the Never
    This is a movie made for people who mash themselves up against those steel crowd-control barriers at concerts and still don't think they're close enough.
  69. Arakimentari
    Admittedly compulsive in both sex and shutterbuggery, Araki has long lived on the art-porn border, though this doc aims to show him as conversant in flowers, kitties, skies, and neorealist kids' faces as he is with bondage.
  70. Waga jinsei saiaku no toki
    At heart, a work of infectious, unironic affection.
  71. Est - Ouest
    Wargnier has assembled a stellar French and Russian cast, but all that talent can't overcome his heavy-handed screenplay.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Enduring Love
    Craig keeps Joe Rose on a hair trigger, but Morton is wasted as Claire; Ifans simply looks stoned.
  73. Close, Closed, Closure
    Loevy, who made this documentary with an Israeli and Palestinian crew, supplies a self-conscious voice-over.
    • 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.
  75. Trance
    Trance packs many reveals, and the guessing game of who's who and what's what continues throughout. But with its terribly campy setup (hypnotherapy and gangsters? One's inner child and murderous showdowns?), Trance could have gotten some mileage out of comedy
  76. These Final Hours
    Hilditch's approach to this end-of-days scenario can be heavy-handed... But Hilditch gets good mileage out of his cast.
  77. Lust, Caution
    Ang Lee's latest foray into forbidden love is as monotonous and disaffecting as "Brokeback Mountain" was gripping and immediate.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transformers
    Transformers is mercilessly inhuman and completely hysterical from frame one.
  79. Where God Left His Shoes
    Leguizamo, working at a scramble, gets more on-screen traction than in recent memory.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beyond the Sea
    This is hardly the most in-depth doc on Cuban refugees (see the epic Balseros). Still, Beyond the Sea grants a quiet dignity to its subjects without sanctifying them.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox
    Although the segments featuring Bronner's son Ralph veer uncomfortably toward hagiography, first-time director Sara Lamm balances out the love-fest by exploring the dark side of being a soap-hawking prophet and the toll that ALL-ONE-FAITH took on Bronner's family.
  82. Oka!
    Oka!, a loose-limbed tapestry of cultural nuances, atmosphere, and song, is a tuneful tribute to the Bayakan spirit.
  83. Notes on an Appearance
    D’Ambrose proves uncannily adept at conjuring zero-budget paranoia through the sheer accumulation of documents.
  84. Lower City
    A bone-tired tale underneath.
  85. Tricked: The Documentary
    The film is wisely sparing of melodramatic flair, allowing the inherent drama of the situation to horrify and harrow on its own.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Dec 10, 2013
  86. The Best Man
    Everything about the film is familiar except that the twentysomethings are all African American.
  87. Dead Snow
    For more than half of this 90-minute film, director Tommy Wirkola plays things pretty straight--a mistake, perhaps, since the first half is pretty boring--but once the Nazi zombies start arriving en masse, he abruptly shifts to an "Evil Dead"–style zaniness, including the sight of a potential victim hanging off the side of a mountain while using a zombie's entrails as rope.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Notes on Marie Menken
    While it opens a rare window into an unconventional life, this portrait of an artist as an old woman is prone to strange distractions.
  89. Antarctica: Ice and Sky
    The film itself is more a record than a narrative: proof to the future that, yeah, we knew.
  90. Dogville
    For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact.
  91. At Any Price
    Quaid has a genius for broadcasting conflicting impulses. His body language twists uncomfortably away from his intentions, and his smile is built on the chassis of a cringe.
  92. The War Within
    Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.
  93. The Bourne Legacy
    Now, we have Jeremy Renner as another Treadstone mega man (there were nine, apparently), and though he is a likable enough pug-nosed action figure, the Damonlessness is sorely felt.
  94. Elysium
    Damon is as buff as ever, maybe even more so... But watching him lumber through Elysium's bramble of lofty ideals is no damn fun.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Blackout
    This passionate polemic follows Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney, of Georgia, as she campaigns to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Universe of Keith Haring
    Equally a portrait of the artist and a portrait of a decade.
  97. The Machinist
    The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.
  98. The Last Gladiators
    Blending archival footage and new interviews with Nilan, his family, journalists, and fellow combatants, Gibney celebrates hockey's fisticuff traditions while also recognizing how such brutality ultimately takes its greatest toll on those who perpetrate it.
  99. Difret
    Difret is painful but profound, skirting the pitfalls of the inspirational biopic for something more grounded and remarkable. Its authenticity extends beyond its central characters, conveying a very real sense of what is at stake.
  100. The Wolverine
    The Wolverine—despite being an improvement on Gavin Hood’s muddled 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine—isn’t worthy of Jackman’s gifts. It’s a reasonably engaging summer diversion, a semi-rousing adventure that doesn’t make you feel robbed of two hours of your life.
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