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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    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Return to the Land of Wonders
    As she revisits the formative people and places of her childhood, Pachachi achieves vérité lyricism, illuminating a host of lives shattered by both a ruthless dictator and the Western hegemon that replaced him.
  2. Men on the Bridge
    Raw yet respectful and tenderly observed.
  3. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain forces its way through numerous illogicalities and several plot lapses to a violently abrupt ending.
  4. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden's documentary Ne Me Quitte Pas is a grimly funny deep dive into sustained alcoholism with a classical three-act structure.
  5. Notorious
    Notorious, despite its bigger-than-life subject and habit of dripping sex sweat at the most unexpected moments, is rather square.
  6. Great Expectations
    Newell's film doesn't supplant Lean's, of course. The yearning is more vague, the gloom less consummate. But it's the best since, rich in feeling and dark beauty, alive with the superior scenecraft, chatter, and imagination of the most beloved of novelists.
  7. Warm Bodies
    The film's intentions are way too good for its own good, producing bloodless romance and more shamefully bloodless carnage.
  8. Keeping the Faith
    Its exploration of faith and love is skin deep.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    With All Deliberate Speed
    While the filmmaker avoids a conventional episodic format driven by central characters in conflict, he hasn't created one that could keep a complex story clear.
  10. Handsome Devil
    As the flick teeters between feel-good message movie and a burlesque of gay panic, the director scratches the surface in order to show how people rarely look beyond the surface of others.
  11. McFarland USA
    It works, kind of, despite its broadness, its obviousness, and its howlingly awful opening.
  12. 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.
  13. Gloomy Sunday
    Dissolving four characters' lives into the dank smoke of the bitterest of torch songs, Gloomy Sunday fashions an apocryphal, pretty, and somewhat pat biography of the title ballad.
  14. Magical Universe
    This story is about tenderness and empathy, including Carbee's for his plastic proxies.
  15. A Perfect Day
    A Perfect Day is a wry salute to the hard-drinking, eye-rolling aid workers of the world, men and women whose high ideals get crushed by global bureaucracy and local recalcitrance.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guys and Balls
    Both totally predictable and unerringly charming, with all of the quirky players, training montages, and father-son drama you'd expect.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Paris
    Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris is both a floppy, joyful tribute to the French New Wave and an inspired retelling of "Franny and Zooey."
  19. Christopher Robin
    Christopher Robin preaches a return to childhood exuberance and frivolity, but its quiet, focused restraint often feels like it’s coming from a very different impulse — an old-world professionalism and humility. It’s a grown-up sensibility applied to a child’s tale, which makes for an occasionally endearing mixture. In today’s world, I’ll take it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rooms for Tourists
    The scenario is absurd enough to play as satire, but no, the film warns us, "If you think that we are just a bunch of mental cases you didn't understand anything." Clearly, I didn't understand anything.
  21. The Concert
    Beyond fans of Mélanie Laurent--who furiously fingers a fiddle and wears flashback wigs--The Concert may appeal to those who delight in stereotypes.
  22. Battle in Heaven
    Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat.
  23. Body of War
    Neither the most cinematic nor the most elegantly crafted of recent Iraq War documentaries, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most deeply affecting. Where Spiro and Donahue triumph is in putting a human face on the war.
  24. The Heat
    The movie -- too much of it -- is spent testing the boundaries of how loud and obnoxious McCarthy can be. Feig doesn't hand this able comic actress the gift of freedom; he simply gives her enough rope, which isn't nearly the same thing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red Doors
    Everything you'd expect from a frosh-indie effort: stilted dialogue, oversimplified relationships, sitcommy goofiness, and cringe-inducing romances. And yet Red Doors is so well-meaning, with such obvious affection for its characters, that it pleases nonetheless.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Machete
    Because there's no real character drama or consistent critique grounding the spoof, when Machete isn't laugh-out-loud funny, it's deadly boring.
  27. In Her Shoes
    The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.
  28. The Visit
    The last scenes contain so many moral and spiritual turnarounds that Alex (Harper) -- and the film -- are all but buried in the uplift. Harper, in a fierce, nuanced performance, deserves better.
  29. Under solen
    The kind of quotidian pastoral -- about a simple, honest peasant who finds the greatest love of all -- that the Academy invariably finds irresistible.
  30. All I Wanna Do
    A smart, sweet, and altogether smashing evocation of teenage girlhood.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Illuminata
    For all its ambitions, Illuminata sheds only murky light on what separates theater from life.
  32. The Governess
    The Governess is too dirty-minded to fit the Merchant Ivory mold but not salacious enough to qualify as bodice-ripping laff riot. [04 Aug 1998]
    • Village Voice
  33. Tomorrowland
    Bird layers on plenty of dazzle... But his heart is what keeps the story motoring and the ending is perfectly engineered, including a coda that encourages all of us to try harder.
  34. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    There’s no hint of irony in this film (I don’t think it would work if there were); in fact, Jeannette succeeds in its earnestness, adapting its words from Charles Peguy’s works, but countering it with the pure, joyous silliness of its presentation.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Would Jesus Buy?
    Much like Spurlock's hit "Super Size Me," this production is slick, well-paced, and tremendously entertaining.
  36. Tumbledown
    Neither comedy nor melodrama (though bearing traces of both), Tumbledown ends up a modest study of two fairly unremarkable, prickly characters.
  37. Love Is All You Need
    Formulaic despite its trespasses, Love Is All You Need leaves the lingering sensation that more fun could have been had if the film cut loose and lived a little.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    L'iceberg
    The result packs all the hilarity of a museum installation on The Semiotics of Silent Comedy.
  39. On My Way
    Its realism is patient and inclusive.
  40. Darling
    There are distinctive touches to give this passing interest.
  41. Protocols of Zion
    This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.
  42. Dark Night
    Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.
  43. At Middleton
    Farmiga and Garcia give it their all, and their chemistry keeps certain scenes afloat.
  44. The Last Sentence
    This attention to the personal crises of Segerstedt comes at the expense of a broader and more elusive subject, namely, the war. We know what Segerstedt did, and Troell tries to ask why. What he ignores are the implications.
  45. Anything
    Early absorbs Freda’s pain into his own, and McNeil builds a delicate idyll from their defiant embrace of unexpected second chances.
  46. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    "Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.
  47. Brothers at War
    I can, however, object to the bathetic, misty score and the endless close-ups of American babies to remind us "what we're fighting for"--and to the filmmaker's belief that support for our troops and support for their mission are one in the same. Just because Rademacher believes his film to be "non-partisan" does not make it so.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fred Won't Move Out
    Mostly, it captures how old age decimates even the people who don't suffer from it.
  49. The Other Half
    Maslany and Cullen's characters seem intended to be psychologically realistic, but they're only as complex as The Other Half's surface-deep style.
  50. RED
    Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest.
  51. Goosebumps
    Especially in its superior first hour, Goosebumps has a loose comic rhythm at odds with what we see in effects-heavy would-be blockbuster junk like Pan.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Train Man
    Adapted from a Japanese bestseller that's apparently based on true events, Train Man: Densha Otoko is a lot like its protagonist: sweet, weird, and likable despite some irritating quirks.
  53. Interview with the Assassin
    Pitched somewhere between Oliver Stone's "JFK" and the Seinfeld parody thereof, Neil Burger's debut never quite transcends jokester status -- it's a veritable menagerie of shaggy dogs, red herrings, and wild geese -- and the punchline doesn't live up to Barry's dead-eyed, perfectly chilled delivery.
  54. Otomo
    The film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.
  55. Spartan
    David Mamet takes on the digi-tech, hard-Clancy-core intel thriller most often inflated by Tony Scott and like-minded plodders, and typically he elevates it, botches it, and exploits it for searing political comment.
  56. The Debut
    Has a sweet low-budget quality that sometimes slips into TV-movie schmaltz.
  57. Gangster No. 1
    The actors all function as best they can as glowering clichés, though the narrative's temporal jump presents difficulties.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Happy Accidents
    The leads smooth over the plot holes endemic to all 4D fables, making the movie more than mere déjà vu.
  59. Cellular
    Basinger takes her shuddery Stanwyckness very seriously, but everyone else has a ball.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never Been Kissed
    A lively tribute to the awkwardness and power of adolescent girlhood.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conventioneers
    Unlike in "Medium Cool," the most telling and dramatic events aren't shown.
  62. Behind the Burly Q
    Leslie Zemeckis's slightly ramshackle but utterly entertaining Behind the Burly Q is a painstakingly researched love letter to the women and men who once made up the community of burlesque performers.
  63. Max Manus
    An epic by Scandinavian standards, Manus's period re-creation is lavish-but the too-polished rental décor doesn't create a living past.
  64. Korkoro
    The plotting is two-dimensional, but in the tormented visage of Taloche (James Thiérrée)-a clichéd holy simpleton enlivened by irrepressible physicality-the film seethes with full-bodied fury and anguish.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy, Happy
    The questionable black-historical shorthand detracts from what is otherwise a well-performed and fitfully amusing film.
  66. Sidewalls
    A shrewd, intellectually playful rom-com that delivers the gooey goods.
    • 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.
  68. Brahmin Bulls
    Brahmin Bulls focuses on the individual choices made by Ashok and Sid, but just as Gingger Shankar subtly weaves traditional Indian instrumentation throughout her lovely score, Pailoor touches upon how cultural expectations inform their relationship.
  69. Mateo
    Incisively intimate, it's a small but stirring snapshot of a gifted, hopelessly lonely soul.
  70. Maineland
    That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.
  71. Cat Ballou
    Pleasantly inoffensive. [29 Jul 1965, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  72. Rolling Papers
    Without coming across as a soapbox for narcs or unserious stoners, Rolling Papers gives a clearheaded account of things as they stand and where they might be headed.
  73. Analyze This
    Enjoyable but slight— an intermittently funny, one-joke vaudeville.
  74. Mrs. Hyde
    The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.
  75. Kumaré
    Prepare to have your assumptions pitched out the window by this tense, surprisingly probing satirical documentary.
  76. They Came Together
    They Came Together is one joke repeated until you're broken down by the giggles. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and wouldn't if it weren't perfectly cast with America's Comedy Sweethearts.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Music Never Stopped
    In a rare leading role, character actor Simmons is saddled with the entirety of the film's diagrammatic emotional arc, briskly (and tediously) about-facing on matters of fatherhood, activism, and guitar rock, while a too-boyish Pucci is fatally unconvincing as a former band leader.
  78. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Salomé would be better served by a story that focuses more explicitly on her intellectual life rather than on her personal one, but considering how stodgy biopics can be, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free offers a mostly engaging portrait of a charismatic and brilliant figure.
  79. Red Dragon
    Red Dragon's formula is so risible and rote by now that the natural reaction to scenes of peril, torture, and suffering is flippant laughter.
  80. The Beaver
    Perhaps that's the problem. Mel's character isn't on Prozac, but the movie is-a succession of bland camera setups, cued to a highly conventional score. Would that the direction were half as nutty as the script or as wacked-out as its star!
  81. Time and Tide
    Jagged and jokey, filled with glam young people, lyrical Canto-Pop, and narrative non sequiturs, Time and Tide is Tsui's version of neo-new wave.
  82. Manic
    Often the script (co-written by Michael Bacall, who plays sardonic bipolar rich kid Chad) rings clear with mouths-of-babes declamations that all pained kids spew before downing adulthood's suck-it-up Kool-Aid.
  83. Calendar Girls
    Remains a genial lesson in how to both honor and subvert womanly expectations.
    • 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.
  85. Soul Boys of the Western World
    In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Iceman
    Ultimately The Iceman is a blend of Mafia-film cliché and the jarring reality of lives undone by crime.
  87. Len and Company
    You think you can guess what happens next, but the beauty of Tim Godsall's film, adapted from a play by Carly Mensch, is that it eschews the obvious arcs and come-to-Jesus moments of your typical Bad Dad pics.
  88. Trust
    "Afterschool Special" stuff, but the ensemble rings quite true in their coping processes, as director David Schwimmer proves adept at tracking rogue emotions that no closing "Ordinary People" clench can satisfactorily resolve.
  89. Under the Silver Lake
    Mitchell has interesting ideas, and his actors seem to be having fun, but that’s not enough when the film itself lacks atmosphere, or tension, or emotional engagement.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy Here and Now
    When Amelia takes the full multimedia plunge in the movie's final moments, Happy becomes something inexplicably (and metaphysically) beautiful.
  91. Tap World
    It's rare to find a film that portrays dancers of all shapes, colors, ages, and sizes as beautiful, which they are.
  92. The Fencer
    The Fencer is ultimately too staid: It’s at its best when Nelis shows the art of fencing to his students and the elegant yet dangerous swords are wielded.
  93. The Sisterhood of Night
    It's a sweet, sympathetic film, based on wise and memorable material and featuring inspired performances from its teen cast, but it simply collapses.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    Like a big-screen Big Gulp, this third installment of the billion-dollar animated franchise contains as much cinematic confection as an 85-minute movie can bear.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unveiled
    An Iranian version of "Boys Don't Cry," Unveiled overflows with sociopolitical outrage even if its portrayal of a gender-confused heroine is ultimately indecisive and laconic.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electrick Children
    Electrick Children juggles heavy things, with humor and sobriety in their proper, Book of Ecclesiastes turn. Best of all, Thomas has an aversion to the easy resolution—she knows precisely which mysteries to keep dangling.
  97. Go for Zucker
    Mildly tasteless (natürlich), if not exactly uproarious.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Following Chong to the clink by way of a few well-timed stand-up gigs, this genial doc sprinkles Reagan and Nixon soundbites over its vintage stash of C&C clips for a suitably fuzzy squint at America from '69 to the buzzkill present.
  99. Lone Survivor
    Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film: the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods.
  100. Bandits
    Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.
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