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. 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.
  2. Life in a Day
    The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).
  3. Attack the Block
    The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June's "Trollhunter," Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it's neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy.
  4. The Future
    Sophie's (or is it July's?) coy narcissism becomes a criticism of itself, and her "sadness" turns into something truly sad. In short, I have seen The Future and it's heartbreaking.
  5. The Interrupters
    The Interrupters reminds us of the powers and pleasures of well-crafted, immersive nonfiction filmmaking.
  6. Cowboys & Aliens
    Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding - a Western-sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit - is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre.
  7. Friends with Benefits
    What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.
  8. A Little Help
    The film is as average and forgettable.
  9. Autoerotic
    Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard's latest exploration of amorous urban collisions, is only sporadically a good sex comedy, in part because the flat affect favored by its young Chicago cast of hipsters looks an awful lot like, well, seriousness.
  10. Fire in Babylon
    Riley shrewdly maintains focus on how the players co-opted the merciless tactics of their invective-hurling adversaries for their own, and the region's, self-actualization.
  11. Psychohydrography
    A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Myth of the American Sleepover
    The constant presence of music - think "Dazed and Confused," with the Magnetic Fields swapped in for Foghat - nails both the teenage fantasy of living life to a personal soundtrack, and a high-schooler's heightened hunger to experience everything all at once.
  13. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    Geier, who died in 2010, speaks on all subjects - from her son's mortal injury to the nature of her various collaborations - with the contemplative, courtly intelligence of her favorite novels.
  14. Sarah's Key
    Dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Another Earth
    Unable to organically incorporate their Big Ideas into the narrative, the filmmakers lazily lay them on top, leaving the exposition of Another Earth's structuring fantasy to a blanket of background voiceover.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Captain America: The First Avenger
    (A) hokey, hacky, two-hour-plus exercise in franchise transition/price gouging, complete with utterly unnecessary post-converted 3-D.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Undefeated
    Less a documentary than a glowing two-hour infomercial for Sarah Palin, Presidential Candidate To-Be.
  18. Hood to Coast
    Because the runners' standings in the race are never really established, and are largely beside the point, the film keeps cutting back to these increasingly sentimentalized accounts of hardship overcome.
  19. Impolex
    Can only be appreciated if you don't let guileless amateurishness, or chronic mumbling, ruin your evening.
  20. Lucky
    Graynor is a muddle of kooky indie girlfriend and materialistic fortune hunter; Hanks has neither threat nor pathos at his command.
  21. Life, Above All
    Life, Above All suggests that ignorance and stigmatization are a problem only in the village, not in the highest office of government.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    As the parallel friendships evolve over time, both push and pull between platonic and erotic; it's to the film's credit that it never definitively suggests that love can only be one or the other.
  23. The Chameleon
    Screenwriters, take note: Unless your story is a whodunit, it's an unforgivable flaw to telegraph early and often that, sometime during the final act, we should anticipate the proverbial rug to be pulled.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Girlfriend
    Implausibilities mount, and by the last act Lerner appears to have lost any compunction he might have had about using his protagonist to tug the audience's heartstrings.
  25. Salvation Boulevard
    Salvation Boulevard isn't groundbreaking or even consistently funny, but it is mildly inventive and the absurdities of its characters are tender and recognizably human. Best of all, we're encouraged to laugh with them rather than at them.
  26. The Tree
    In her second film, writer-director Julie Bertuccelli, adapting Judy Pascoe's 2002 novel, "Our Father Who Art in the Tree," is sometimes partial to clumsy dialogue and scattershot pacing.
  27. Daylight
    Punctuating views of the bucolic countryside and sky attest to nature or God's indifference to human suffering, but such formalist touches don't overwhelm the responsive ensemble work in this resourceful, taboo-prodding sickie.
  28. Winnie the Pooh
    At barely over an hour, the film still overflows with musical charm, nostalgic wonder, and visual wit (characters literally interact with the words on Milne's pages). This one will make you feel eight years old again.
  29. Tabloid
    Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.
  30. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Annenberg's attitudinous Shakespeare riff is a unique blend of psychodrama, ethnographic experimentation, and high-concept hustle.
  31. Zookeeper
    A comedy whose cliché-embracing stupidity borders on the surrealistic.
  32. The Sleeping Beauty
    Though The Sleeping Beauty ends ambiguously, it remains consistent with the logic that Breillat has laid out: A girl's childhood and adolescence are often culturally sanctioned confinements. But the prisoners aren't always victims; the jails can be escaped through the courage to "go alone into the world."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flying Fish
    Pushpakumara's debut feature portrays the recent Sri Lankan civil war as a gauntlet of private humiliations, endured by largely nameless, barely individuated villagers - making this would-be multi-strand narrative more of an impenetrable tangle.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Farmageddon
    A lesser effort in the burgeoning canon, it's still effective in its goals: illuminating how denigrated and dangerous our food supply is.
  35. The Ledge
    Even if The Ledge couldn't be written off as a hollow polemic, there's also the lifeless drama, laughable dialogue, chintzy sets, and poor lighting to grapple with.
  36. Fading of the Cries
    No one expects perfect coherence - or competent acting - from a low-budget horror picture, but this convoluted mess sets new lows in underimagined, overplotted narrative - not to mention grade-Z thesping and dimly portentous dialogue.
  37. Ironclad
    While Ironclad captures the casual cruelty and flesh-and-bone violence of the 13th century, it fails to do the same in the more intimate material set in the downtime between assaults.
  38. Rapt
    The growing disgust of both his family and business associates, all hazily drawn, may knock the magnate down, but it's a limp substitute for the public fury that still burns after the fall of 2008.
  39. Septien
    Never the same movie for five minutes straight, Septien can't sit still.
  40. The Ward
    Carpenter does what he's always done well here: individualizing shorthand personalities in a group under siege. This is Carpenter's first all-female ensemble, and the inmates are uniformly well-played.
  41. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Despite the passive-aggressive bickering, Beats, Rhymes & Life is not, thankfully, hip-hop's "Some Kind of Monster."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Project Nim
    Marsh's film remains a deeply haunting portrait of the unbridgeable gap between kindred species.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Horrible Bosses
    This is middling TV material, almost comforting in its bland predictability - the kind of stuff you want on the seat-back screen when there's turbulence on a plane - but rarely actually laugh-out-loud funny, and never truly dark or daring.
  45. Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema
    There's minor amusement in the suggestion that entrepreneurial criminality begins with a preference for Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal" over the Bible.
  46. Welcome
    Heavy ironies like that drop regularly, undermining both the film's intentions and the drama.
  47. Small Town Murder Songs
    Boldly succinct yet confident enough to take its time.
  48. Polytechnique
    Polytechnique smartly exposes the spectrum of misogyny without overplaying the connection between the two incidents. Which makes the concluding flash-forward scene all the more disappointing: Designed to give hope, it comes off as an emotional sop instead.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Etc.
    As cutely contrived as any scripted Hollywood romance.
  50. Delhi Belly
    Delhi Belly's rare singing-and-dancing production numbers play classical Bollywood glitz for pure kitsch, the Ram Sampath–composed soundtrack otherwise tending toward up-tempo sing-along rock, including a hit song ("DK Bose") with a subliminally dirty chorus.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crime After Crime
    Potash's first feature-length documentary otherwise does justice to its subject's wrenching story.
  52. Aurora
    Call it a mental workout that (although considerably less arduous than reading Sartre) some might find exhausting and others exhilarating. Aurora is not a movie to make you glad that you exist; it's a movie that makes you aware that you do.
  53. The Perfect Host
    First-timer Nick Tomnay has expanded his movie from a short, and the point where he ran out of ideas looms like a cliff edge.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Larry Crowne
    With its eager-to-please congeniality, it almost works, but with a pacing that is at once comfortably assured and frustratingly slack, like holding exactly to the speed limit on a stretch of open road, Larry Crowne never quite comes to life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terri
    Humanistic without being moralistic, and very funny, Terri is a measured, observational examination of the stratification of teenage loser-dom.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    Amid the windy speeches, fiery explosions, exposition dumps, and product placements, there are a few treats to help the intelligent moviegoer - drawn to Dark of the Moon by peer pressure or kitsch factor or an insatiable desire for overstimulation - through the ordeal.
  57. The Names of Love
    The pathetic attempts at outré, taboo-busting humor as sociopolitical commentary can't disguise what this film really is: a mawkish, MOR comedy of manners that even its straw man Nicolas Sarkozy would find suitable for date night.
  58. Late Autumn
    In remaking the 1966 South Korean film "Full Autumn" and setting it in America, writer-director Kim Tae-Yong uses the melancholic, gray backdrop of Seattle as both character and metaphor, crafting a film that's visually beautiful and incredibly moving.
  59. The Best and the Brightest
    Drearily shot with cheesy skyline pans, oppressively scored with Hallmark cutesiness, and oddly filled with filthy one-liners.
  60. Leap Year
    There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.
  61. A Love Affair of Sorts
    It is part of the film's premise that the movies are only a pretext to serve personal needs. Given how little the murky finished product offers an outside audience, this comes across all too convincingly.
  62. Raw Faith
    Shining an intimate light on an individual in order to reveal greater truths about life and the world, Raw Faith focuses on progressive-minded Portland, Oregon, Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.
  63. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    Turtle still has cinematographer Rory McGuinness's remarkable visuals in its favor, though, and reveals how even innocuous human activites curtail the loggerheads' centuries-in-the-making migration with refreshing subtlty.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    General Orders No. 9
    Much of this commentary, equally in awe of progress and suspicious of it, is strikingly sincere.
  65. A Better Life
    Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason are unable to commit fully even to this sudsy vision, tacking on a coda that completely undermines their already timid message.
  66. Passione
    Works best when its director tamps down his impulse to enhance the performances with florid narratives, focusing on just the singer and the song.
  67. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    Takes us through reams of fascinating drama, from the first heroic forest-saving protests to the reactive police violence and resulting dead-of-night firebombs to the core group's implosion after the FBI tightens the net.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    As fly-on-the-wall as it gets-meaning the camerawork is often sloppy-Flender's film presents O'Brien in full-on Tortured Star mode, alternately overexerting himself and complaining that he's being overworked, courting attention and sulking alone. The portrayal is at times startlingly negative.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bad Teacher
    In a role hardly larger than a cameo despite the fact that he's ostensibly the male romantic lead, Segel never tries to hide that he's only here to pay his mortgage - which makes him the most likeable presence on-screen
  70. Cars 2
    Notwithstanding John Turturro's amusingly smug Italian F1 speedster and a few lighthearted jabs at Japanese TV and technology, Cars 2 generally remains stuck in neutral.
  71. The High Life
    This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.
  72. Angel of Evil
    In many ways reminiscent of "Mesrine" but suffers greatly in comparison. It hits many of the same marks -- but the scenes unfold almost elliptically, never really building or illuminating character, and never sparking narrative momentum.
  73. Jig
    Bourne's lengthy chronicle of the World Championship is severely under-contextualized, leaving us in the dark about the competition's structure and frustrating our efforts to take a rooting interest in the proceedings.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Battle for Brooklyn
    Battle for Brooklyn provides a useful primer on the opposition to Atlantic Yards, but figures who might have made more compelling documentary subjects than the always on-message Goldstein crowd the sidelines.
  75. R
    Following "Prophet" director Jacques Audiard's lead, Lindholm and Noer attempt to make up in raw emotion what their film lacks in context, an approach good for a surprising amount of mileage, until the project finally chokes on its own inevitable nihilism.
  76. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Opens with a montage of the press in full operational mode, spewing out newspapers all but automatically for a fleet of waiting delivery trucks. It's a system at once efficient and cumbersome, ultra-modern yet quaint, that suggests nothing so much as a herd of dinosaurs, oblivious to the threat of impending extinction.
  77. Buck
    Meehl finds the real story in Brannaman's fractured past as a child celebrity trick-roper who, along with his older brother, Smokie, was systematically abused by his alcoholic father.
  78. The Art of Getting By
    Crafted not to give the slightest offense, The Art of Getting By makes the great - and even the mediocre - teen movies of 30 years ago, like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "Fame," and "Foxes," look even more radical in comparison, with their depiction of obnoxious, horny, property-destroying teens.
  79. Kidnapped
    The long takes and lack of theatrical affect are presumably meant to heighten the realism by dispensing with film - fiction artifice, but in the process, everything that might lure a viewer - the seduction of style and plot or an engagement with characters - is forgotten.
  80. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    The only faint upside to this excruciating dud is that, in its movie clips of Charlie Chaplin - who the mesmerized birds view as a kindred waddling spirit - the film might hopefully function for some kids as a gateway to superior comedy cinema.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Green Lantern
    The film never rewards the viewer for even trying to keep track of what is going on. So you give up, and instead try to grab on to the small pleasures, which momentarily distract from the fact that the narrative is nonsensical, the characters so boilerplate that their every action seem preordained from the earliest frames, even as the action on-screen is often incoherent.
  82. Viva Riva!
    The first from the Democratic Republic of Congo to be distributed in the U.S. That in itself is worthy of some kind of celebration, even if Viva Riva! too lazily indulges in shapeless genre excess.
  83. Bride Flight
    The flashbacks dominate, playing like wet-inked storyboards: pioneer women forced into patriarch games; a baby born in secrecy and raised in deceit; Jewish legacy lost and found. When the men are all dead, the women speak freely, wrapping up two florid hours with a pickled sentence or two.
  84. Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland
    Mostly pathetic but on occasion grimly funny.
  85. 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."
  86. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    True to form, Queen of the Sun presents inspiring and direct solutions from the likes of journalist Michael Pollan, activist Vandana Shiva, and biodynamic farmer and author Gunther Hauk, but it also glosses over the question of how migratory beekeepers, among others, would make a living if those fixes were enacted.
  87. Just Like Us
    The film is largely effective as a breezy travelogue. Still, Ahmed plays the "Muslims, they're just like us" bit a little too hard, pointedly ignoring the obvious parallels between the "freedom" provided by imported stand-up and the endless McDonald's signs that flicker throughout the region.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lips
    With a minimum of dialogue and backstory, the lead actresses (winners of a single special prize at Cannes 2010) movingly portray the depth of these colleagues' compassion, and their struggle to maintain a front of data-gathering objectivity. Unfolding in a remarkably organic fashion, The Lips pays plaintive tribute to the work.
  89. Road to Nowhere
    The screenplay is by Variety editor Steven Gaydos, and it combines a working knowledge of on-set dynamics with corny cinephile in-joking, frequently elevated by the fresh evidence of Hellman's craft in the tranquil, largely nocturnal atmosphere, until the closing-credits song ruins everything.
  90. Le Rayon Vert (1986)
    Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as "The Green Ray"), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy.
  91. The Trip
    The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.
  92. Reversion
    Like many similarly twisty tales, Reversion's narrative logic is undermined by its characters' irrational behavior.
  93. Agrarian Utopia
    Raksasad manages to keep the film afloat on the real drama of his nation's political and social issues, bringing an added measure of poignancy to the quiet desperation of his characters.
  94. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    The incessant tumult drowns out any real message for the kids - or pleasure for their parents. It's a film so obnoxiously frantic that its most restrained element is a banjo-strumming elementary school teacher played by none other than '90s tween-mugging icon Jaleel "Urkel" White.
  95. One Lucky Elephant
    Admirably, and gently, raises questions about the folly and hubris of a relationship that may only ever be one-sided.
  96. Super 8
    A big-bang demolition derby, J.J. Abrams's much-anticipated, greatly enjoyable Super 8 seems bound for box-office glory.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    X-Men: First Class
    A cameo from an old-school X-Man only serves to remind how stylish and witty the first installment was a decade ago. Lacking a single memorable joke or striking image, First Class is as perfunctory and passionless as would-be franchise resurrections get.
  98. !Women Art Revolution
    Moves briskly, unfolding as one lively sit-down after another with artists, scholars, and curators who established themselves at the height of second-wave feminism.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Nice
    Though told here with appealing drollness, Marks's story makes an odd vessel for the filmmakers' casually advanced legalization arguments, what with its mischief making on the grandest scale possible.
  100. Film Socialisme
    Film Socialisme deflects interpretation but, so long as one subscribes to the William Carlos Williams injunction "No ideas but in things," it's filled with sensuous pleasures.
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