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. Empire of Silver
    It's decent, exoticized pulp with a porcelain veneer, and should be consumed idly.
  2. Submarine
    Though Submarine isn't a dull head-movie, amid the bells and whistles, Roberts seems less its star than its cameraman.
  3. Rejoice and Shout
    The best bits - the powerful instrument called Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, for example - more than speak for themselves.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Turkey Bowl
    The director and his actors successfully sell the notion that these are real people whose lives and relationships will continue off the field - and that's more than enough.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    YellowBrickRoad
    The film is caught in the fatal demographic desert between the "Scream" and "Baghead" crowds - neither funny nor quirky enough to sustain interest during its long march.
  6. Love, Wedding, Marriage
    As if written by a robot whose frame of reference wasn't human reality but merely fairy-tale romantic comedies, Love, Wedding, Marriage strips genre tropes down to their scrawny, brittle bones.
  7. The Last Mountain
    This environmental exposé confirms every awful suspicion ever raised about the coal industry. Trouble is, the news is so bad and so plentiful that The Last Mountain may have you looking for the nearest exit.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beginners
    So Beginners might sound insufferable, but it isn't - or at least not completely. Mills's second feature (after Thumbsucker) has way too many quirks for its own good, although it also flaunts a rare freedom to jump back and forth in time.
  9. Beautiful Boy
    While Beautiful Boy is potent and even admirable, it ultimately mistakes prim, emotional monotony for gravity.
  10. We Are the Night
    Director/co-writer Dennis Gansel compensates for the story's lack of emotional heft with rousing chase scenes and impressive, near-poetic CGI set pieces, and works in a sly suggestion that vampirism is the ultimate expression of consumerist indulgence.
  11. Spork
    Writer-director J.B. Ghuman Jr. shoehorns the character into a witlessly stitched homage to other films - notably "Heathers."
  12. Dirty Old Town
    Directors Jenner Furst and Daniel Levin go for montaged ambience, and Levin's lyrical camerawork limns a beguiling, modestly Wong Kar-wai–ish rhapsody out of very little. When Levin's lens is focused on Shirtcliff's unwashed hair and spectral eyes, the film grabs hold of something sweet and sad.
  13. The Abduction of Zack Butterfield
    The script is often ludicrous (gratuitous digs at feminism; muddled commentary on war and the military), the sets look like sets, and the acting-aside from Helsham and Plunkett-doesn't even rise to the level of student films.
  14. Puzzle
    The self-esteem booster shot provided by the sudden discovery of a prodigious talent is conveyed in a shy, self-surprised amusement by Onetto, accompanied by the slightest loosening of the joints.
  15. Hello Lonesome
    The same laxity given to the performers extends, unfortunately, to the film's structuring, a lazy Susan rotation between storylines and monotonous settings.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Hangover Part II
    It's hard to imagine a more calculating, creatively bankrupt piece of real estate than The Hangover Part II.
  17. Tied to a Chair
    Loren's performance is as tonally off as the rest of Bergmann's jokey lark, which strings together characters and twists with amateurishly chaotic abandon.
  18. Tuesday, After Christmas
    Unrelentingly mundane, as if made with the sole purpose of draining the topic of adultery of any prurient interest.
  19. United Red Army
    At the heart of the movie are the prolonged, increasingly violent, self-criticism sessions - an escalating, claustrophobic, paranoid reign of terror, staged in near-darkness and shown in close-up.
  20. The Tree of Life
    Better than a masterpiece - whatever that is - The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.
  21. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Jennifer Yuh Nelson's sequel delivers a bevy of superpowered set pieces that are dexterous and delirious, as well as tonally confident.
  22. Life 2.0
    At once a disturbing vision of escape, a cautious portrait of liberation, and an exploration of authenticity and artificiality.
  23. Lost Bohemia
    Lost Bohemia's real power, though, is in the impromptu interviews Astor conducted with his neighbors.
  24. The Big Uneasy
    Shearer builds an airtight case to prove his thesis, and one of his most chilling arguments is a roll call of brave souls whose lives and careers have been systematically wrecked in pursuit of the truth.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight in Paris
    The latest in a long line of actors playing a "Woody Allen type" in a Woody Allen film, Wilson bends his own recognizably nasal Texan drawl into an exaggerated pattern of staccatos and glissandos that's obviously modeled on the writer/director's near-musical verbal cadences.
  26. Cost of a Soul
    Kirkpatrick's color-deficient visual scheme is sturdy, but it can't compensate for a mechanical, unsubtle script.
  27. Louder Than a Bomb
    The movie floats to another realm entirely when the cameras go into the home of Nova Venerable, a smart, eloquent, gorgeous girl whose love for her special-needs younger brother and their hardworking single mom is expressed in terms that sidestep the formulaic verbal and physical bombast of so many of her peers.
  28. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    As the seductive and conniving Angelica, Cruz is luminous, albeit not enough to compensate for Marshall shrouding virtually every major set piece in nighttime fogginess.
  29. Make Believe
    The drama is merely serviceable until the last moment, when the winner makes the competition disappear.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vacation!
    The narrative doesn't arc so much as slope down at a 45-degree angle-from the high of innocent fun to the depths of absolute moral vacuity-with a break in the dead center for a visually stunning, perfectly weird acid-trip scene, something like an excerpt from "Inland Empire's" would-be nautically themed sequel.
  31. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    The beloved Kiwi duo, who frequently perform as a rotating cast of corny alter egos, can charm even the crankiest viewers, thanks to their soaring, clarion harmonies and cuddly-butch personas.
  32. True Legend
    In countless over-the-top set pieces, Yuen delivers striking combat clarity without sacrificing the visceral editing and crazy digital effects of modern bloodbaths.
  33. Skateland
    If Skateland is the sort of work Ritchie's future holds, it's proof that some talents are better off staying home.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    L'amour fou
    It plays like an extended auction catalog with commentary. Thematically recalling Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours"-another film dealing with objects in a French art collection as receptacles for memory and personal biography-it sorely lacks that drama's tension between insular nostalgia and the wider, rapidly evolving outside world.
  35. How to Live Forever
    Suffice it to say, life's too short for such self-indulgent glibness.
  36. Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
    The overall effect is flattering but shallow, making Murphy's movie the last thing Mockingbird needs-another toothless encomium. No wonder Lee dodges the limelight.
  37. Hesher
    Still, Hesher finds uncommon sympathy for people at loose ends, and although Hesher himself is sentimentalized and backhandedly inspiring, he never softens into an actual role model.
  38. The First Grader
    Chadwick veers frequently into flashbacks to Maruge's past as a Mau Mau resistance fighter-mostly prolonged scenes of torture and violence that do little to inform or propel the present-day story. Poorly defined tribal lines flare up, and Jane's life is threatened, the point at which the script's Hollywood contrivances open up and swallow this often charming film whole.
  39. Everything Must Go
    Everything Must Go, which is ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to broken-heartland movies like "Up in the Air" and "Cedar Rapids," although this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.
  40. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?
  41. The Big Bang
    Though the setup is pure Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, specifically), the film's bleary, neon glamour and penchant for the bizarre suggests an attempted-and wayward-homage to David Lynch.
  42. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bridesmaids
    Many of the chaotic set pieces cataloging Annie's self-destruction have a kind of dumb crassness that works against Bridesmaids' often smart, highly class-conscious deconstruction of female friendship and competition.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thor
    An astonishingly awkward marriage of ancient Norse mythology and 21st-century nonsense, Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh, works too hard at simply functioning to assert why it, or we, should bother.
  45. Vito Bonafacci
    Factor in the consistently subpar acting and Vito Bonafaccistands as one project better suited to Sunday schools than movie theaters.
  46. Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story
    Among the alleged virtues of the game cited by the doc's subjects are its ability to bring people together, its usefulness as a tool to indoctrinate (er, teach) children, and its building of a global culture.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People vs. George Lucas
    It's an exhausting airing of nerd grievances, the monolithic arguments leavened only slightly by counterpoints seemingly inserted for comic relief.
  48. Octubre
    There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.
  49. The Makioka Sisters (1983)
    The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.
  50. Lord Byron
    Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.
  51. Harvest
    This is largely a non-narrative piece, the director employing a slice-of-life-in-crisis approach that only works if the characters or the situations are sharply drawn. Neither are.
  52. The Colors of the Mountain
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
  53. An Invisible Sign
    Jessica Alba gets plain-Jane crazy for An Invisible Sign, a syrupy "A Beautiful Mind" redux in which the starlet sports big brown bangs and Pippi Longstocking pigtails.
  54. Forks Over Knives
    Some of the data is less convincing than Fulkerson would have us believe, but nothing trumps the clear eyes and shiny coats of a trio of newly minted vegans.
  55. Daydream Nation
    Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.
  56. There Be Dragons
    Its appeal for the rest of us is buoyed by cinematographer Gabriel Beristain's attentiveness to the ravishing Argentinian locations, but the geriatric pacing, flat-footed Old Hollywood pastiche, and Joffé's inexplicable penchant for tear-jerking Catholic mysticism make Dragons more punishing than a hundred Hail Marys.
  57. Hobo with a Shotgun
    Pick a reason to balk at this spot-on, garishly threadbare paean to '80s no-budget sleaze.
  58. Jumping the Broom
    A late-act crisis precipitated by scandalous maternity news is straight out of the Tyler Perry Academy of Plotting, and all the beseeching of the Lord sounds like little more than product placement.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Night
    First-time director Massy Tadjedin conjures some essence of constrained desire, but mostly from the architecture.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caterpillar
    It's cinema that risks blunt silliness to achieve emotional and experiential seriousness.
  61. 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!
  62. Something Borrowed
    It's clear that Something Borrowed finds it easier to tell us about relationships than to show us them under way.
  63. Red White & Blue
    The pacing and performances are more organic than in most horror.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fast Five
    Five's few driving set pieces, all economically cut for spectacle over continuity, are pumped to near-Crank levels of absurdity, with Lin transforming his ragtag bunch of fugitives' superhuman knack for escaping certain death into a running joke.
  65. We Go Way Back
    For all of the film's preciousness, the pungent notion of having your young-teen self gazing in horrified disappointment at the adult you've failed to become is as fresh a thematic undertow as it is disquieting.
  66. Lebanon, Pa.
    Lebanon, Pa. begins as a tale about male, middle-aged self-discovery, but soon becomes something quite different: a clear-eyed if crassly manipulative take on the culture wars.
  67. Sympathy for Delicious
    Ruffalo has assembled an exceptional cast-to surround writer and star Christopher Thornton, but a script that favors incident over story and direction that crowds scenes instead of letting them breathe make for curiously rough going.
  68. That's What I Am
    The writing hits the weeds on occasion, but Pavone evokes with feeling adolescence as a series of outlandish physical punishments and sweetly remembered firsts.
  69. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    One of the more depressing, desensitizing experiences I've had in a theater, Hoodwinked Too! Hood Vs. Evil feels as computer-generated as its creepy, talking-ceramic-toy style of animation.
  70. The Robber
    Against interpretation, Heisenberg (who is, after all, the grandson of the physicist who gave us the uncertainty principle) has nonetheless created a nimble, dynamic character study of a fiercely guarded loner on the run.
  71. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.
  72. Earthwork
    Like Herd, the movie-which resists peeking above the horizon until its final, poignant skyline shot-strives for a connection with land and labor typically missing from depictions of urban life, and provides a timely model for finding value in lean circumstances and humble company.
  73. Exporting Raymond
    Like its namesake, Exporting Raymond captures a few satisfyingly human moments.
  74. The Arbor
    Barnard makes the psychological mayhem Dunbar endured and inflicted tangible.
  75. Prom
    Katie Wech's script is a carousel of reassuringly familiar plot lines, kept smoothly revolving.
  76. 13 Assassins
    Perhaps something important was spirited away with the 20 minutes of footage shorn for this U.S. release, but the combatants are scarcely distinguishable here even before disappearing under layers of mud and guts.
  77. St. Nick
    Like a child bluffing at knowing a secret, St. Nick teases and frustrates.
  78. 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.
  79. When Harry Tries to Marry
    A substandard romantic comedy gussied up in Indian drag.
  80. Children of Hiroshima
    This is a movie of blunt juxtapositions-death accompanied by the sound of raucous street musicians-as well as awkward flashbacks. Still, the strategy works.
  81. Beautiful Darling
    Denied the opportunity to see Candy at her best, simultaneously mocking and paying homage to golden-age glamour, viewers instead get too much of Jeremiah Newton, a close friend of the actress's and guardian of her papers, personal effects, and ashes (and one of Beautiful Darling's producers).
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dumbstruck
    All are compelling subjects, especially the disarmingly gifted and emotionally relatable Horn. But Goffman's either unwilling or incapable of getting them to move their lips to reveal enough of themselves, or of their artistry, to make the already overly familiar endeavor worth anyone's time.
  83. African Cats
    That visual beauty helps compensate for a script that wastes no opportunity for heartstring tugging, often in the form of adorable tykes playing with each other and cuddling with their elders in close-up.
  84. Incendies
    Nawal's travails are more in the vein of a Latin American soap opera than Greek tragedy, and Jeanne and Simon's climactic, genuinely god-awful discovery plays like artistic sleight-of-hand rather than the profoundly tautological revelation it aspires to be.
  85. The Bang Bang Club
    Silver treads around and too heavily on the moral ambiguities involved in documenting atrocities, moving between frantic, poorly explained scenes of African conflict and the equally familiar, benumbing aesthetic of boys making a macho game of war.
  86. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen
    Anyone who's seen a martial-arts picture expects a certain amount of thumb-twiddling between the big numbers, but director Andrew Lau's handling of exposition is markedly poor, distended with rubbish plotlines, flashy sadism, and overwrought jingo.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stake Land
    It's thick with a distinct mood-the sadness and exhilaration of having nothing left to lose-and the characters, in their desperation and drive, feel real.
  88. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    As agreeable as it is insidious, Morgan Spurlock's latest exposé of corporate control via immersive humiliation is his best, most formally inventive project yet.
  89. Phillip the Fossil
    Donovan's idiosyncratic approach to character develops a compelling rhythm, but the film falters when a dramatic double climax pushes it past its low-key limits.
  90. 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.
  91. Footprints
    Rife with classic-cinema shoutouts, the film is a cutesy, toothless variation on "Mulholland Drive," one whose attempts to pay tribute to movie magic are ultimately undercut by stagey aesthetics and narrative theatricality.
  92. The First Beautiful Thing
    Virzì's delicate touch and the cast's uniformly captivating performances make that reckoning a lovely, charmingly melancholy thing to watch.
  93. The Double Hour
    The Double Hour sustains a minimum of attention thanks to the naturally beguiling presence of long-stemmed Rappoport-but what might've a less cautious director done with the material?
  94. A Screaming Man
    The characterizations never comfortably accommodate Haroun's pat metaphor, though his stoic visual storytelling has an oblique gravity.
  95. Rio
    Too timid to be either inspired or outrageously inept, Rio is merely a bird of a familiar feather.
  96. Armadillo
    While much of Armadillo echoes last year's "Restrepo," the unprecedented access of director Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree reveals the alternating waves of frontline tedium and terror with fresh immediacy.
  97. The Princess of Montpensier
    The finest Western you'll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation.
  98. The Conspirator
    The film is a burdensome two hours.
  99. Scream 4
    The enjoyable moments are limited to Alison Brie, funny as Sidney's publicist, and the final recasting of the movie as a backstage diva drama. As ever, the self-reflexive horror stuff is superficial, loveless, and constant-a ladled-on sauce to disguise what you're eating.
  100. The Family Jams
    Only a true fanatical follower of the "freak folk" musical scene with a high tolerance for artless verité camerawork will find much merit in Kevin Barker's extended home video.
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