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. 3
    More willing suspension of disbelief - or suppression of giggles - is required.
  2. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    Granito becomes both a humanitarian legal thriller and a quest to find justice through cinema.
  3. The Mill and the Cross
    An extraordinary example of both art-historical interpretation and CGI as passport to unknown lands, The Mill and the Cross, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, is a moving-image tribute to the still image, with its ability to "wrestle the senseless moment to the ground."
  4. Silent Souls
    Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.
  5. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Still, the tapes are great. More than just a flophouse Punch and Judy show, the Raymond vs. Peter dustups elevate cruel bickering to a ritual through which we live life's pain.
  6. I Don't Know How She Does It
    She is also played by Sarah Jessica Parker, a performer so aggressively determined to make us like her that no work-life conflicts in the film ever gain any traction; we're too distracted by the actress's manic tics (the head tilts, the popping of the wounded-deer eyes) to notice any real adversity.
  7. Drive
    Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.
  8. One Fall
    The cast is engaging, and there are a few light-chuckle moments, but the script needed another rewrite, and the film itself needed to be guided by a thornier sensibility than Fuller's.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Position Among the Stars
    Leonard Retel Helmrich's third documentary about the same Indonesian family is a dazzler in at least a couple ways.
  10. The High Cost of Living
    Deborah Chow's ridiculously implausible yet still predictable tale of guilt and redemption is so bipolar in tone that when it's not a more linear rip-off of Guillermo Arriaga's grim and gritty melodramas (21 Grams, Babel), it's the kind of quirky indie romance that made Braff's name.
  11. Brother's Justice
    Like an overlong episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with none of the wit and twice the irritation, co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard's impotent, largely unscripted showbiz satire is yet another goof on clueless filmmakers who don't know how to make a film.
  12. Grave Encounters
    True terror needs at least some authenticity. That's perhaps too much to ask of a faked movie about a faked reality show that still can't scare up a fresh idea.
  13. Tanner Hall
    From hairstyles and clothes to autumnal-hued cinematography and a raft of clichéd incidents involving pills, suicide, sneaking out, and blackmail, everything feels dainty to the point of stale.
  14. Burke and Hare
    By swinging between broad laughs and cheap pathos - Pegg's specialties as an actor, apparently - while avoiding the more fertile ground between, Landis renders his Burke and Hare sociopolitically toothless and bizarrely insensitive.
  15. Shaolin
    This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.
  16. Beware the Gonzo
    Too cute by half, Beware the Gonzo will appeal to the 20 people left on earth who insist on broadsheets over iPad apps and/or those bewitched by star Ezra Miller's pretty cheekbones.
  17. Where Soldiers Come From
    Much of what's presented is familiar territory, but it's the moments that fracture prejudices and expectations that stick with you.
  18. Echotone
    Too vital for elegy, Echotone tells an old story whose beginning - the inception of a vibrant creative hub - remains mysterious, although the end is easy to predict.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Inside Out
    This WWE-produced thriller is the best kind of bait-and-switch, auguring cranium-crushing action but instead delivering a meandering, eccentric, downright adorable existential crime yarn.
  20. We Were Here
    A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.
  21. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    The sorry spectacle of the ranting codger never effaces the image of the boy concentrating his entire being over a chessboard. You have to love that kid and pity him.
  22. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary - a standout in last spring's New Directors/New Films - assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Contagion
    If Contagion truly is the first leg of Soderbergh's retirement victory lap, this harrowing film is a potent reminder of what we stand to lose.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    Thankfully, the kids' complicated impulses resist such packaging, whether they're catcalling head-scarved co-eds outside the local gas station or channeling racial resentments into extra hard hits.
  25. The Inheritors
    Unadulterated labor is the focus of this blistering, beautifully modulated documentary from Mexican auteur Eugenio Polgovsky.
  26. Warrior
    Old line-gargler Nolte remains an effortlessly moving presence, while Hardy and Edgerton embody their archetypes and handle the physical demands.
  27. Shark Night 3D
    Aspires to nothing more or less than carrying along an audience through a string of unremarkable kills, often involving high-jumping fish.
  28. Apollo 18
    His (Gonzalo López-Gallego) this-is-authentic conceit is by now a tediously corny device, and his story delivers no scares during the interminably long, uneventful build-up to its deflating climax.
  29. Bodyguard
    The overweight, gays and little people are cheerfully mocked while writer/director Siddique ratchets up his story's disparate comedy-romance-action elements to an insanely over-the-top degree.
  30. Red Desert (1964)
    Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.
  31. That Girl in Yellow Boots
    Koechlin, a striking woman with a slim frame, horse mouth, and big turbulent eyes, has screen presence enough to kick along the frequently-stalling psychodrama up to an ending that seems like a tossing up of hands.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    Resurrect Dead works splendidly as a threadbare urban mystery, teasing out details and complications without withholding too much information.
  33. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Magnificent and cheesy, the latest and most proudly absurd of Chinese historical spectaculars, Detective Dee is a cinematic comic book for people who are sick of the mode.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seven Days in Utopia
    For a time, the film shoulders its hokum rather well, with Black strutting convincingly and Duvall's mouthy mugging mostly in check. But all those shots of heavenly shafts of light eventually climax in unabashed Christian conversion.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    Despite Whitaker's best attempts, Rebirth never persuasively builds to catharsis, and that's entirely for the best. Forget transcendence: The quintet's return to normal, quotidian lives is the most inspiring development of all.
  36. Love Crime
    Even KST is left floundering as the misconceived, underwritten totem of today's amoral, power-mad executive, wearing flowing trousers and medallion necklaces not seen since Faye Dunaway demanded a meeting in "Network."
  37. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    Scenes showing the tricky process of acclimatizing a child to new surroundings, and the patchwork of experiences that make up an education - both Asia's and Tairo's - are grounded by entirely affectless performances, not least that of little Asia Crippa.
  38. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    Despite the clumsy script and a shaky acting partner, Cattani, at least, is fascinating to watch, never demanding audience sympathy.
  39. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.
  40. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Is the world of the film ruled by its high concept, its low comedy, its demographic credibility, or its romantic screwball realism? Ultimately, Orgy's refusal to be any one thing - including good or bad - forms a kind of epochal statement.
  41. The Debt
    Predictably, the holes in the narrative set us up for a twist or three, but, in balance, it's a pleasure to be back in the wet alleys and spy-patrolled streets of the GDR, however vague they seem without '60s black-and-white cinematography.
  42. Colombiana
    Possibly worth seeing if you are 13, as the hot Rihanna-looking chick shows sideboob.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stripped Down
    It's a thriller, it's a strip-club soap opera, it's an inner-child reclamation inspirational - it's really unpleasant to look at.
  44. Special Treatment
    That's why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep as hers.
  45. The Family Tree
    Thin as it is, Family Tree is no slog - the droll, attentive performances by Davis and Mulroney are endearing, and the extraneous guest-star bits (including Christina Hendricks as a secretary, no less) and rambling B stories aren't overly distracting.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Proper Violence
    Scrappy college-age filmmakers Chris Faulisi and Matt Robinson do a commendable job of establishing tone and tension in their debut feature, but things fall apart when words and feelings start to flow.
  47. Circumstance
    Keshavarz's earnest, well-intentioned first feature on women's oppression in Iran has trouble resisting its own heavy hand.
  48. Chasing Madoff
    Too bad Prosserman can't trust his material: Overloading the screen with aesthetic dross, the director offers up tiresome symbolic imagery of blood-soaked hands, burning money, and out-of-focus documents. Rather than amping up the intensity, these fast-cut sequences prove disastrously distracting.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brighton Rock
    The leads are compelling and the chase and fight scenes - scored to a propulsive bass-drum beat - are kinetic, but as Brighton Rock attempts to zero in on Rose and Pinkie's dangerous relationship, it loses momentum.
  50. Iron Crows
    Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Our Idiot Brother
    Its roundelay of shallow types (played by beautiful movie stars) treating one another badly, and having whiny conversations about said treatment, is such a whisper-soft version of social critique that it makes the autobiographical films of Nicole Holofcener (Please Give, Friends With Money) look as cutting as the films of Jean Eustache.
  52. Higher Ground
    Even with her beatific face (the actress looks like one of Parmigianino's Madonnas), Farmiga is never wholly believable as a woman shaken by a crisis of belief.
  53. Tales from the Golden Age
    Sardonic as it may be, Tales From the Golden Age is basically affirmative - its true subject is resilience. Romania suffered under a regime of dangerous stupidity. Drawing on popular memory, Mungiu has orchestrated a contribution to local folklore, a suite of stories in which those rendered witless by oppression were compelled by circumstance to live off their wits.
  54. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    If the grand finale isn't as resonantly scary as the original's, maybe that's just because, try though we might, we're no longer impressionable kids.
  55. 5 Days of War
    Taking the vantage point of civilians rather than combatants allows 5 Days of War to show the toll of the terror and of the relentless, exhausting pursuit of war with unexpected force. Had it rejected the genre's romantic trappings and false heroics more consistently, the movie might've been worth the ride.
  56. Programming the Nation?
    The results are irritating, occasionally educational, and frustratingly insight-free.
  57. Conan the Barbarian
    Squeamish types may balk, but the gory cruelty on display here is faithful to the source material and deeply thrilling.
  58. Mozart's Sister
    These subplots hint at what could have been, nudging the film toward biting rather than obvious commentary on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and creativity, and the costs of thwarting expression of any of them. But Féret barely explores this, and the film suffers for it.
  59. Griff the Invisible
    An Australian misfits-in-love story manufactured from whole quirk, Griff the Invisible is more mannerism than movie.
  60. Atrocious
    A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy pre-emptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death.
  61. Flypaper
    Slick, manic, excruciatingly hollow entry in the exhausted subgenre of misfit bank-heist comedies.
  62. The Hedgehog
    Watching Balasko, a veteran actor-writer-director in thick-browed, frumped-up drag, sitting at her kitchen table reading Tolstoy and nibbling on dark chocolate with a cat in her lap, is one of The Hedgehog's purest delights. At the very least, it provides relief from the prating of that junior wisenheimer.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Journals of Musan
    Group scenes, meanwhile, often suffer from a peculiar handheld drift, as if in troubling over which insult to add to which injury, the filmmakers neglected to attend to rudimentary blocking.
  64. The Last Circus
    Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast) is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes "Pan's Labyrinth" look like "Sesame Street."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    Bowen in particular stands out, impressively describing Garrick's hairpin turns from comforting his victims to instinctively throttling them, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett exhibit less facility with the big picture.
  66. Iconoclast: Boyd Rice
    The most genial professed social Darwinist you could ever meet, Rice has never stopped to explain how much of his persona is a goof. Likewise, Larry Wessel's documentary portrait Iconoclast doesn't bother to synopsize its subject for the novice before setting off on its four-hour journey.
  67. Amigo
    John Sayles's Amigo aspires more to educate than entertain, but it's no less engrossing for that.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Day
    For an entry in a genre of films that frequently work as guilty pleasures even at their most formulaic, One Day doesn't offer much pleasure.
  69. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    An Egyptian feminist tale told with both affecting compassion and made-for-TV corniness.
  70. Damn!
    The director ultimately treads too fine a line between exposé and cash-in, in part because he belabors his thesis. Sure, McMillan is at least half charlatan, but 20 minutes into Damn! it's clear that he's also a sad, possibly disturbed man who needs a compassionate caseworker more than the attention of a fickle public or ambitious documentarian.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bad Posture
    Bad Posture, the first narrative feature from director Malcolm Murray, is sure to unsettle those who prefer films to pass clear judgment on not-so-upstanding types, but it's hard not to admire such a drolly off-kilter pass at the domestic regionalist indie.
  72. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    In equal parts mesmerizing and disorienting, Over Your Cities (the title comes from the biblical story of Lilith) plunges viewers into the earth, wind, and fire of Kiefer's massive-scale projects.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summer Pasture
    Summer Pasture is remarkable not merely for documenting the disappearing way of life, but for registering the depth of Yama and Locho's uncertainty about moving on from it.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Littlerock
    Atsuko the character doesn't speak English; Atsuko the actress, speaking mostly un-subtitled Japanese when she speaks at all, gives a performance that's a marvel of nonverbal reaction.
  75. Senna
    The aura of a life lived in extremis, undergirded by faith, clings to the film. Even nonbelievers in Senna's sport and church will find it difficult to visit Kapadia's cinematic shrine without emotion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    30 Minutes or Less
    A comedy that knows it has to move with all due dispatch to keep from disappointing the customer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Help
    We get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes.
  78. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    As tight as the parallel homo sapiens storylines are lax, Caesar's prison conversion to charismatic pan-ape revolutionist is near-silent filmmaking, with simple and precise images illustrating Caesar's General-like divining of personalities and his organization of a group from chaos to order. All of this is shown in absorbing, propulsive style, as Caesar broodingly bides his time like a king in disguise awaiting restoration.
  79. The Mouth of the Wolf
    A collection of "small great stories," in the words of its unobtrusive narrator, Pietro Marcello's singular doc/fiction hybrid salutes the crumbling grandeur of the northern Italian seaport Genoa.
  80. The Smurfs
    Gosnell directs as if every scene must be either a nauseating roller-coaster ride or a syrupy melodrama, resulting in a seesawing tone that's not stabilized by the presence of Neil Patrick Harris.
  81. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    The phoniness of their cross-country saga is compounded by a gaggle of cipher sidekicks.
  82. Habermann
    A World War II melodrama with a hook - affluent Germans as sympathetic victims - Habermann does a credible job of personalizing a period of the war largely unknown outside the Czech Republic.
  83. Gun Hill Road
    Though two late plot developments are borderline-contrived, Green's direction is marked by mature dramatic and aesthetic understatement.
  84. Protektor
    Najbrt gets the look and feel of noir fatalism down, but storytelling that alternates between roughshod and lethargic means the film doesn't hold together as much more than pretty fragments.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    Geographic diffusion aside, Kondracki's fact-based thriller remains somewhat focused on its grim subject, though its principled bid to allure and enlighten the VOD-surfing masses results in a surplus of Hollywood-style eye candy and narrative formula.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cold Fish
    Cold Fish is wild, head-turning, stomach-churning stuff, and it makes a bracing addition to the overstuffed canon of serial-killer cinema.
  87. Magic Trip
    What it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, is a sense of the cosmic Now; the movie recovers, without exactly illuminating, a "long, strange trip" that seems all the stranger as it recedes into the past.
  88. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Change-Up
    The film's final dialogue exchange reveals The Change-Up to be one long setup to a bromantic joke that, in a roundabout way, maybe comes closer than any previous film to fulfilling that woebegone subgenre's implicit homoerotic endgame.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bellflower
    In the end, Glodell's bona fide B-movie is monumentally dumb but damn near undeniable - although perhaps only a midnight drive-in screening in rural Texas, beat-up Chevys dripping muffler fluid and steam hissing from hot gravel, could do it proper.
  91. Good Neighbors
    A murder close to home freaks Louise out, but it's a pointed cat poisoning that sends her, and Good Neighbors, over the edge. Tierney offers what preparations he can for the offbeat darkness to come - faint organ chords and a focus on his character's idiosyncrasies build a sense of dread - but at least one part of the perfect, triple-crossing crime that plays out is so black you may want to wear shades.
  92. House of Boys
    And yet, for all its hanging on the details of the boys' heavily eroticized performances and its graphing of the relationships between the young performers, the film is at once too drawn out and underdeveloped.
  93. Golf in the Kingdom
    From the outset, Streitfeld hopscotches back and forth over her tale's 24 hours with a self-conscious aesthetic affectation (overlapping imagery, shifting camera speeds, elliptical edits) that demolishes any intelligible character or plot development, resulting in a story comprised of pretentious meditative fragments.
  94. All She Can
    The film proves that closely sketched specificity can trump pedestrian plotting. At least, that is, until steroids rears its ugly and inevitable head and the film veers into morality play and, finally, inspirational uplift.
  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.
    • 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.
  97. The Guard
    One senses that The Guard is McDonagh's eulogy for the brusque, warts-and-all character of a passing generation of tough, working-class Irishmen, much as Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" was for vintage Americanism.
  98. The Devil's Double
    Ignoring all but the most obvious tensions in the Uday-Latif symbiosis, Devil's Double is static drama, with Michael Thomas's script establishing relationships as if perfunctorily pressing buttons marked "Father-Son Dynamic" and "Forbidden Love Affair," failing to dignify these themes with individuality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy, Stupid, Love
    Shooting on grainy, high-speed film stock with an often handheld camera, working with a suite of actors who are game to both play light and silly and dig deep, Ficarra and Requa lend a naturalism to highly contrived, patently absurd situations.
  100. Point Blank
    No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.
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