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. Crash
    Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.
  2. Broken
    Jung Jae-young gives a physical, full-bodied performance in the main role.
  3. Penelope
    Ricci is appealingly human, and some acknowledgement of the importance of female friendship, in addition to romance, is faintly touching.
  4. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    Skeleton may be 100 percent cult-in-a-can, but aficionados should feel sated. All others are advised to bring copious amounts of controlled substances.
  5. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    Govenar's slow pace doesn't quite do the story justice. With tighter editing, the film's beats might be just as infectious as those from Conde's drum.
  6. The New Radical
    It’s hard to know whether it’s intentional that The New Radical, Adam Bhala Lough’s slick documentary about “techno-anarchist” Cody Wilson, famous for developing a 3-D-printable plastic gun, presents its subject as a shallow pseudo-intellectual man-child.
  7. 9
    The result is never as gripping in narrative terms--a well-worn litany of dystopian-future chestnuts--as it is visually.
  8. Junk
    The film is frequently amusing but indulges too often in flights of fancy.
  9. The Greatest
    First-time writer-director Shana Feste has made an uneven but often affecting film that requires its gifted cast to push hard against the script's schematic plotting to find moments of real emotion.
  10. Dom Hemingway
    If only Shepard's movie lived up to his leading man. It's merely a frame for a character portrait, with Shepard's camera screwing our eyes to Law's performance and pasting in supporting actors and situations for no larger purpose than to see his reaction to them.
  11. The Gift
    A creepily effective button-pusher that owes a bit to the original "Cape Fear" both in Sam Raimi's ruthless direction and Keanu Reeves's unexpectedly robust performance as the most violent redneck peckerwood in a steamy Georgia town.
  12. The East
    For all its empathy and equilibrium, The East has nowhere to go after the script backs itself into a corner.
  13. Generation Wealth
    By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.
  14. Patagonia Rising
    Elicits the combination of rage and helplessness (and guilty wanderlust) unique to the genre with admirable thoroughness and balance.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mule Skinner Blues
    Earnhart's auteurs are better adjusted, integrating their art into the daily routine of their (equally fucked-up) lives.
  16. Elsa & Fred
    This occasionally charming November-December romance has elements of a Douglas Sirk woman's weepie... but the movie eventually goes into Woody Allen territory in the best way possible.
  17. Enchanted
    Somewhere between conception and execution, what could have been so much smart, sharp fun turned decidedly pedestrian.
  18. Australia
    The result is mostly a woodenly derivative melding of '40s maternal melodramas, oaters, and World War II actioners.
  19. Frequencies
    Fisher never subordinates his big ideas to the usual chase scenes or manufactured love conflicts less confident filmmakers use to candy up such material. That's great — too bad that, in the final third, the movie also doesn't subordinate those ideas to its own story, or to its earlier elegance of construction.
  20. Monsters University
    Monsters University feels not like the work of artists eager to express something but like that of likable pros whose existence depends on getting a rise out the kids. It's like the scares Sully and Mike spring on those sleeping tykes: technically impressive but a job un-anchored to anything more meaningful.
  21. Jason and Shirley
    Jason and Shirley is imprecise, even maddening history, but it's hair-raising as historicity: Exposed here is the longstanding and somewhat vampiric process of white artists extracting for their work minority perspectives and experiences.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mad Detective
    Apart from its inventive depiction of the weaknesses that tough guys try to hide, Mad Detective is a slight work from the wildly prolific To.
  23. Square Grouper
    Square Grouper's admirably backhanded inquiry into the social and economic costs of weed criminalization extends far beyond the wake-and-bake crowd.
  24. Prom
    Katie Wech's script is a carousel of reassuringly familiar plot lines, kept smoothly revolving.
  25. Home Movie
    The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.
  26. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.
  27. Down with Love
    Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume.
  28. The Unknown Known
    Rumsfeld's impenetrability makes him fascinating, but only to a point.
  29. Blood Glacier
    It's all rather familiar, but the key image of a glacier glazed over with something like gore proves majestic, and tension throbs throughout a scene of a scientist following his dog into a blood-veined tunnel inside that glacier.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stealing the Fire
    Placing blame sorta misses the point in a world of matrixed self-interest where all is equally just and unjust.
  31. The Walker
    This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal.
  32. Roxanne Roxanne
    The film may not end on a tragic note, but in attempting a gritty portrayal of Shanté’s little-known private life, Roxanne Roxanne forgets her genius, as so many other people did back in the day.
  33. Greedy Lying Bastards
    It’s too bad that Rosebraugh himself can be so off-putting. The data presented is horrifying enough without sarcastic narration, or his Roger & Me–style pursuit of an interview with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
  34. Upstream Color
    To be bewildered by Upstream Color is to be human; the story is obtuse by design, though the filmmaking is X-Acto precise. But it's a bloodless movie, and its ideas aren't as tricky or complex as Carruth's arch, mannered approach might suggest.
  35. Grass
    Grass's relentless hard sell ultimately grows wearisome. Although only 80 minutes, it ends, and not a moment too soon, with a pot legalization rally that might well be reproduced outside the theater.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heartbeats
    If Dolan is able to derive a certain comic tension from the simple threat of what could happen with these three in close quarters, he and his co-actors often spoil the mystery of the unsaid with the tells on their faces.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gift to Stalin
    Alternating between impressive and pedestrian shot-making, professional and amateurish acting, the film aims for gravitas and entertainment but only occasionally achieves either.
  38. Surrogates
    Willis is fine, both as his blond action figure (Zack Morris hair) and actual self, in trusty bruised palooka mode. Mostow does good meat-and-potatoes genre work, coherent even when reckless.
  39. P.S.
    The question of whether this is a movie about reincarnation or fate or middle-aged delusion remains unaddressed far beyond our capacity to care. Many of the admirably long conversational scenes are pointless; some, like Harden and Linney's climactic bitch-fest in a hotel room, are flat-out absurd.
  40. Hearts Beat Loud
    The real reason to see this film is Kiersey Clemons’s Sam and her romance with aspiring artist Rose (Sasha Lane).
  41. An Open Secret
    Berg might have proven that there's a circle of powerful creeps, but not that the blame for this goes straight to the top.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Avé
    Outside of a final shot that's more poetically convenient than emotionally convincing, Avé follows a progression that feels intimate even as it mimics things iconic. They, we, move and are moved.
  44. 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.
  45. Citizen Hearst
    Sometimes Citizen Hearst feels as breezy and electric as the newsreels Hearst pioneered; other times it feels like the video they'll make you watch during orientation on your first day at 300 West 57th.
  46. True Adolescents
    Johnson establishes an understated, agreeable tone throughout that makes up for the movie's notable lack of hilarity, and in the outdoors sequences nicely captures how seemingly benign nature can turn nasty in an instant.
  47. Only the Strong Survive
    I'd have welcomed more archival footage (Pennebaker did, after all, document Otis Redding's epochal performance at the Monterey Pop Festival), but that would be asking for another movie.
  48. Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    The most fascinating moments in Hieronymous Bosch come from art historians once they’ve turned to the work of history: creating meaning and context, wrestling with these questions. The film renders this conversation beautifully, and in moments begins to feel urgent in spite of itself.
  49. I Origins
    The story proceeds with all the flighty unreality of a film unconcerned with real-world scientific rigor... but Cahill manufactures enough conspiracies, coincidences, and extraordinary turns of plot to keep his thinking audience too busy to care.
  50. Dark House
    Dark House is one nutty horror movie, but what's crazier still is how well it works — until it doesn't.
  51. Particles of Truth
    In the central romantic push-pull, Elster and Harold achieve a rare, edgily hopeful chemistry amid emotional ruins.
  52. What on Earth?
    Framed in a series of casual chats, Taylor's subjects make interesting suppositions (invoking particle physics, higher consciousness, and the laws of geometry), but their credibility is sometimes undermined by editorial drift and a beseeching New Age soundtrack.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Milan Hlavsa a Plastic People of the Universe
    For the non-Czech audience, the overview may be patchy. Viewers who know heroes aren't saints deserve more information about the band's internal rifts, the main thing that kept them nonfunctional after 1988. With history this juicy, the music gets upstaged -- it's a limitation of the medium.
  54. 'R Xmas
    Like any self-respecting Ferrara film, 'R Xmas has its intimations of hellfire, yet it's a weirdly benign Christmas fable -- something like "Miracle on 134th Street."
  55. Take Me to the River
    Take Me to the River takes a while to find its groove and capture what Charlie Musselwhite calls "that secret, Southern, Memphis ingredient."
  56. Godspeed: The Story of Page Jones
    While his story is moving, Godspeed would perhaps have been more powerful if Barry spent more time balancing Jones's relative good fortune with the monumental hurdles faced by the less fortunate with similar injuries, instead of touching upon the issue in the film's final minutes.
  57. Sex Ed
    Mildly funny and about 15 minutes too long, Sex Ed has a funny cast, particularly a kid played by Isaac White, who gets some hilariously rude dialogue.
  58. Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
    HGBP too often relies on caricature.... Yet Cone, who is bighearted toward but not uncritical of his Bible-thumping characters, has a keen sense of seemingly incongruous details.
  59. Unclaimed
    The man who might be Robertson is both the point and the best part of the film. He comes across as sincere, his childlike vulnerability and the depiction of his life in Vietnam demanding sympathy.
  60. Or
    The scoreless Or (My Treasure) consists solely of stationary shots that, while sometimes awkwardly composed, build in organic momentum and bracing detail.
  61. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chronicles
    Leguizamo finds the right mute for his trumpet, modulating his expenditure of emotion to the requirements of the scenario rather than overengaging his capable Mambo Mouth.
  63. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    Because the battle for legalization is still being fought in most other states, the lack of an up-to-date perspective is frustrating.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Princesa
    Unsettling in spots, Princesa ultimately glosses over the futility of Fernanda's plight, her misery rapidly erased.
  65. The Holiday
    Meyers can write a good zinger, and she has a knack for casting actors who not only look good in bed, but are talented enough to rise above the material and, in some cases, nearly transform it (save Diaz). But make no mistake: We're a long way here from Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges.
  66. Nixon
    Satisfying as it is to at last have Nixon as a Disney character, Hopkins's overheated, self-consciously self-conscious performance doesn't get the overall nuttiness of Nixon's unctuous rage, his iron-butt single-mindedness. [26 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
  67. Minority Report
    Miscast, misguided, and often nonsensical, Minority Report is nevertheless the most entertaining, least pretentious genre movie Steven Spielberg has made in the decade since "Jurassic Park."
  68. 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.
  69. RoboCop
    Every bit of it is more advanced: The actors are better, the plot is tighter, the special effects sleeker, the messages more heartfelt. Yet it lacks Verhoeven's bloody, biting scream.
  70. Wish I Was Here
    Wish I Was Here is at least stretching toward something, and even if its reach exceeds its grasp, Braff's earnest determination as a filmmaker and performer helps smooth out some of the awkward bumps.
  71. Dead Before Dawn 3D
    Dead Before Dawn's best jokes are grounded in the warm, believable camaraderie between Casper and his friends, but Mullen is less confident with crowds. The zemon-horde attack scenes are a visual jumble.
  72. The Most Hated Woman in America
    The Most Hated Woman in America suffers from tonal whiplash.
  73. California Split
    California Split never comes to a very fine point in the psychological development of its characters. California Split is thus more about moment-to-moment living than momentous life. [03 Oct 1974, p.81]
    • Village Voice
  74. Girl Rising
    The stories, shaped by anecdotal brevity, are often charmingly modest. Only an insistence on blandly inspirational rhetoric and a series of didactic interludes threaten to reduce the film to a PSA about the plight of young women in developing countries.
  75. Monsters: Dark Continent
    Green seems to be asking: In the face of beasts whose scale and life cycles we can't begin to grasp, how can we allow our fellow human beings to be so unknowable?
  76. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    Picasso and Braque's primary merit is its archive-raiding evocation of the period discussed through vintage nitrate images.
  77. The Fault in Our Stars
    The Fault in Our Stars doesn't quite capture the discreetly twisted humor, or the muted anger, of Green's book, and its problems can be attributed to a constellation of little annoyances rather than any one serious, North Star–size flaw.
  78. We the People: The Market Basket Effect
    In his rousing — if at times syrupy — documentary, director Tommy Reid captures this stranger-than-fiction feel-good tale and bottles it in rosy glass.
  79. Henry's Crime
    Caan and Farmiga give more to the material than it can return, but it sure is fun to watch them tangle.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Too Deep
    The film does have a canny appreciation for how ghetto realness is acted out.
  81. The Magic Gloves
    Martin Rejtman's 1999 "Silvia Prieto" fashioned a deadpan farce from the aimless circulation of objects and identities around its unsmiling title character. The Magic Gloves, the Argentine writer-director's 2003 follow-up, is a similarly absurdist smart-com featuring another depressed protag navigating a yuppie Buenos Aires milieu.
  82. Seraphim Falls
    Seraphim Falls has decent pep in its step till the final 30 minutes, when it's finally revealed why Neeson's bounty hunter is after Brosnan's surly mountain man. The flashback finale and all that comes after (and keeps on comin') drags on so long even the leads look exhausted. Till then, it's yet another replay of "The Most Dangerous Game," and Brosnan and Neeson are game for it.
  83. 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The City of Lost Children
    City of Lost Children is so extravagantly cluttered, so packed to the portholes, it's hard to sort out, or even see, what's there. Under the overload, however, it has some perfectly lovely elements. [19 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
  85. Moonlight Mile
    All the shell-shocked wryness, irredeemable remorse, and unaccountable will to survive that the movie attempts to embody are realized in Gyllenhaal, and the actor makes it possible to root for Moonlight Mile despite its flaws.
  86. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Rigorous and outrageous, Greenaway's defiant approach to narrative only offers insight into his character, not Eisenstein's.
  87. St. Trinian's
    Can be enjoyed in all its endearing awfulness, as a loony "High School Musical" with posher accents and a lot more going on upstairs.
  88. 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.
  89. Maniac
    Khalfoun makes the audience privy to Frank's memories, migraines, and jarring hallucinations of his mother's recalled abuses.
  90. When the Sea Rises
    If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.
  91. Redacted
    The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.
  92. Burden
    [A] densely packed but occasionally facile documentary.
  93. The Riot Club
    Director Lone Scherfig’s stagings of these suspenseful set pieces are masterful, but the rest of the thriller is a fairly predictable manifesto against Britain’s de facto oligarchy.
  94. Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    Deconstructing Dad might be a messy biography, but it is a fascinating primer on Scott's work.
  95. Sleep Furiously
    A lingering, mildly lyrical look at village life, Sleep Furiously does for the mobile librarians of Wales what "Sweetgrass" did for the shepherds of Montana.
  96. The Circle
    This is a fascinating and often tumultuous story, which Haupt chronicles through a mixture of interviews with the real Ostertag and Rapp (now married, they appear as a pair) alongside dramatized vignettes that, as the film wears on, feel like annoying interruptions.
  97. The First Saturday in May
    First Saturday isn't exactly a winner, but it places.
  98. Where God Left His Shoes
    Leguizamo, working at a scramble, gets more on-screen traction than in recent memory.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Living Out Loud
    Richard LaGravenese peppers his directorial debut with the narrative trickery (fantasy sequences, flashbacks) that often tangles his sceenplays ("The Fisher King," "Beloved").
  100. Dig!
    These flashes push Dig! beyond recording-industry kvetch, causing it to stay with you longer than either band's ephemeral music.
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