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. Treasure Planet
    Despite more betrayal and loyalty than a Chris Carabba box set, there's no real good or evil here.
  2. Price of Gold
    The men's faces often vanish as they go underground, threatened with permanent disappearance: the risk of dynamite bursting early, or of rope breaking and leaving them trapped. The filmmakers find those faces again in private interviews above ground, each miner sitting away from the others to discuss how he feels about the job.
  3. Middle Men
    But for all that predictability, Middle Men is smart and tense, with each scene drenched in dread.
  4. Life of Crime
    The comedy's too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story about anxious waiting.
  5. Thin Ice
    Working the long con and damn near getting away with it, this kissing cousin to "Fargo," "Cedar Rapids," and "Win Win" makes for a surprisingly entertaining and nonderivative February time-passer.
  6. Lonely Hearts
    Todd Robinson, grandson of the real-life Elmer, never fully commits to the heartlessness of the genre as Arthur Penn did in "Bonnie and Clyde."
  7. Hateship Loveship
    Johnson doesn't seem to trust her star to unclench and act... In contrast, the rest of the cast, down to the gossipy local bank teller (Christine Lahti), feels electrically human.
  8. This Changes Everything
    This Changes Everything isn't a game-changer, but it is jarring enough to be scary.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    Throughout, stereotypes are trotted out so that the movie can wink that it's too smart for them.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Captive
    This intriguing debut by Argentinean writer-director Gaston Biraben sets up a lot of tough choices before finally taking the easy way out.
  11. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    The duo's travels never gain a traction of their own, and the film's destination feels overdetermined despite its sweetness.
  12. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Thorny issues regarding patient-caregiver relationships, cost-vs.-care tensions, and morality-vs.-rules dynamics are handled with a minimum of didacticism by Lilti, whose handheld camerawork provides a measure of immediacy without calling undue attention to itself.
  13. Standing Tall
    Paradot exposes every last nerve and manages to be appropriately sensitive and confused between outbursts of rage. He benefits, too, from direction (by On My Way's Emmanuelle Bercot) that's unafraid to make Malony look terrible.
  14. Killing Ground
    What the film doesn’t do, much to its credit, is make the killers into charismatically “cool” villains, à la Wolf Creek‘s Mick Taylor.
  15. Anthropoid
    It's all sickeningly accomplished, with incidents so tense and audacious that you might not have the headspace to wonder until afterwards, "Hey, wait, what was the point in grinding us through so many terrifying minutes of that?"
  16. The Red Orchestra
    Worth sticking around for: the triumphant end credit sequence of each Red Orchestra mug shot morphing into the next one.
  17. Nobody's Perfect
    Too bad von Glasow dissipates the effect with a tentative last-minute Michael Moore-lite gesture, the final mark of a slack, scattershot approach that ill serves the director's intermittently audacious film.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Audrey the Trainwreck
    Frank V. Ross makes no-budget, impeccably acted, dryly funny, and unpretentiously melancholic movies about the tiny gray area between happiness and misery, and the frustrations of the suburban working-class. In his latest, Audrey the Trainwreck, there is no character named Audrey, and nothing as histrionic as a trainwreck.
  19. 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ways to Live Forever
    A cute kid dying of cancer is usually a surefire way for filmmakers to get the tears flowing, but despite a few powerful moments, this children's-book-turned-movie isn't designed to make its audience cry.
  21. Beyond the Edge
    With the facts so poignant, there's little that needs dramatizing.
  22. Heli
    A dead-eyed, lyrical art film that kicks you in the throat.
  23. She's Lost Control
    Marquardt works many threads... but, while individually interesting, they're never woven into a truly compelling whole.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ping Pong
    The film vividly portrays the obsessive landscape of Japanese table tennis, but the endless ping . . . pong of that teeny ball bouncing over that teeny net gets tiresome, especially in slo-mo.
  25. Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
    As each player's run through the same routine--hometown meet-and-greet, biographical sketch, hasty interview--the burden of the formulaic structure starts to wear.
  26. Fantasia 2000
    Arriving just after the best year for animated film in recent memory, Fantasia 2000 doesn't play like a celebration. In its sentimental yearning for a golden age when another one's upon us, it feels a little like a rebuke.
  27. 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.
  28. Big Eden
    Stupefyingly benign.
  29. The Rundown
    To call this action gambit formulaic is to sell it short: The Rundown runs down more formulas than a month's worth of complimentary premium cable service.
  30. The Perfect Storm
    Rains on its own parade.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Attitude
    Nilsson's handheld lensing is a blend of smooth home-movie closeness and expressive formal compositions.
  32. Voyeur
    An article, a book, and now a film, Talese’s fascination with Foos’s voyeurism still hasn’t resulted in anything like rigorous journalism. The movie, though, at least lets us be the witnesses to something unsettling rather than just asking us to take some dude’s word for it. That means these cameramen are journalists.
  33. The Humbling
    Levinson and Pacino's willingness to explore the creakier end of life isn't a drawback; it's what gives The Humbling its bittersweet vitality.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Mimzy
    Mimzy, whose charmingly retro FX date to around 1985, won't post Peter Jackson figures at the box office, but you can't say that Shaye doesn't have the magic touch.
  35. Seeds of Time
    Fowler's work is bureaucratic, institutional, Western-focused. Which shouldn't matter, because it's good work, but as a story of salvation it feels too familiar.
  36. The Wanted 18
    This movie about violence and how it comes into intimate spaces refuses to make even animals only animal. It's beautiful and important and very strange.
  37. Breakfast on Pluto
    May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.
  38. Yosemite
    Like Gia Coppola's Palo Alto (2013), a lyric and biting evocation of contemporary well-to-do teendom, Gabrielle Demeestere's Yosemite mines Franco's fiction for its most vital quality: his unsentimental depiction of youthful insecurity, this time among fifth-graders.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jan 1, 2016
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Spider-Man 3
    Given that Spider-Man 2 was twice as fun as the first, it's triply disappointing what an overwrought bore S3 turns out to be.
  40. Mission: Impossible II
    A vaguely absurd epidemiological thriller filled with elaborately superfluous setups and shamelessly stale James Bond riffs.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Disco and Atomic War
    If another contemporary nonfiction film makes a better case for the still-controversial tactic of blending scripted scenes into factual footage, I haven't seen it.
  42. Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
    Despite its title, Drew: The Man Behind the Poster is not a documentary about movie poster artist Drew Struzan. Instead, Struzan's poster art is the film's real subject.
  43. Mom and Dad
    As much of a nightmare Mom and Dad spins in turning parents into raving, homicidal lunatics, this movie also knows how hard it is for actual moms and dads to just get up every day and try to be good parents to these little muhfuckas.
  44. 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.
  45. Mojados: Through the Night
    Davis strives to keep himself out of the film, favoring a harrowing yet compassionate you-are-there aesthetic that underscores the hardship of the migrant workers' struggles.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unconscious
    The movie's message is clear: Freud's greatest contribution to society was not the idea that all little boys long to sleep with their mothers--rather, it's the concept of the unconscious, a hidden place where our secret desires yearn to be free.
  47. Unbroken
    Unbroken wants it all: the big cinematography, the close-up grit, the postcard flashbacks, and the grisly Götterdämmerung that earns directors awards. But it aches for a lighter touch -- the facts of Zamperini's life more than stand on their own.
  48. Into the Forest
    This isn’t torture-porn dystopia; it’s a singular, honest, heartfelt portrait of sisterly devotion at the end of the world
  49. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    Suffice it to say that if you've always wondered how a fish out of water and a band of resourceful yokels would behave in the Quebec hinterlands, this is your movie.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Experiment
    After the film's ultraviolent finale (set to the tacky beats of synth-pop volksmusik), one wonders whether this sharp bit of fascinating fascism provides a true analysis of television's new mean streak, or simply an engaging indulgence in same.
  51. Make Believe
    The drama is merely serviceable until the last moment, when the winner makes the competition disappear.
  52. Torn
    Made for less than $500,000, Torn is proof that a little can go a long way. In fact, the microscale perfectly lends itself to the story's quiet revelations.
  53. 24 Days
    This retelling is more concerned with black-and-white morality, which drains it of suspense.
  54. Boesman and Lena
    Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.
  55. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    A superbly crafted science-fiction fairy tale that's both Grimm and grim.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L'ennui
    The plump, Rubenesque Guillemin steals the show. Her understated simplicity is her strength -- this is one of the major movie debuts of recent years.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Home at the End of the World
    Cunningham's Cliff's Notes adaptation shrinks the character to a monosyllabic man-child with a puppy-dog stare.
  58. The Best Man Holiday
    Lee seems less interested in capturing how people of color talk than in capturing how people talk. He coaxes us to step in and listen, and the very casualness of his invitation is the key to the joyousness of The Best Man Holiday, flaws be damned.
  59. Copying Beethoven
    Screenwriters Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, best known for the two ponderous biopics "Ali" and "Nixon," deliver a film awkwardly composed.
  60. Restless City
    Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery.
  61. Shakespeare High
    If Shakespeare High lacks the tightness and emotional tension a competition doc needs to take off, we get to know enough of these preternaturally self-assured kids to care about what happens to them beyond the finals.
  62. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    A documentary saga of heartbreaking concentration-camp horrors, Inside Hana's Suitcase attempts to preserve Holocaust memories through frustratingly fractured means.
  63. Outside the Law
    The production design is nice enough, but Bouchareb's four-country co-production isn't an epic-it's just long.
  64. Nights and Weekends
    Very often, the "rawness" here seems like an inability to distinguish the essential from the banal (or elevate the banal to the essential). A good eye might help, but Swanberg and Gerwig's filmmaking is stubbornly disheveled.
  65. Advantageous
    Challenging viewers this way — denying clean resolutions, chucking out the urgent drama of the first hour of movie — is bound to alienate some audiences. But from its arresting first scenes, Phang's film is as much about why? as it is what next?
  66. Lemon
    A grating protagonist alone does not a bad film make, but the episodic, unsatisfying Lemon revels in purposeful nails-on-a-chalkboard unlikability.
  67. I Smile Back
    Silverman has taken serious, or at least semi-serious, roles before, but she's never had a part that demanded so much of her. She has been open about her own battles with depression, but what makes her turn here work is that it isn't nakedly expressive.
  68. Tower Heist
    More than the marquee names, the second bananas keep the movie bobbing along: Broderick's pharmaceutically vague hangdog act is perfect ("If you need me, I'll be living in this box"), while Peña turns out to be a fine comedian, an enthusiastically yipping dumb puppy here.
  69. Sarah's Key
    Dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality.
  70. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    The longer versions of all Jackson's Middle-earth films have played better (and made more sense) than their theatrical cuts, but this time he's trimmed out something absolutely vital, the one element that, besides his mad gore-minded grandiloquence, has kept everything together five films running: an attention to the emotional lives of his hobbits.
  71. Don't Move
    A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.
  72. Winter Solstice
    What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.
  73. Sleep Dealer
    Science fiction easily lends itself to allegory, but while the dystopian near-future of co-writer/director Alex Rivera's feature debut focuses, admirably, on how globalization affects the third world, his ideas are as subtle as a light saber to the face.
  74. Happenstance
    Being French, the film at least has indelible details -- something a Hollywood remake would fix but good.
  75. The Child I Never Was
    Kai S. Pieck's debut feature finds a plaintive, compelling route to the pathology of 1960s German child-killer Jürgen Bartsch.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
    With only a few letters and family photos, director Heidi Specogna never brings her subject to life.
  77. Only When I Dance
    British director Beadie Finzi follows both dancers to international competitions, where the difficult questions raised by their struggles are set aside.
  78. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    That so many of the colossal yokel's mental states are literalized, as when the screen fills with thousands of rats while Margueritte reads Camus's "The Plague" aloud to her new pal, typifies the movie's antipathy to nuance.
  79. This Is Where We Live
    Often threatening sentimentality yet never quite sinking into it, Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca's This Is Where We Live benefits from the good taste of the filmmakers, whose appetite for understatement ensures that the picture maintains dramatic effectiveness and only rarely lurches into histrionics.
  80. Champs
    There's nothing especially new or vital to these familiar scenes; ditto a late excursion into the realm of concussions — undoubtedly an epidemic for athletes of all stripes, but one that further muddles an already unfocused film.
  81. 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.
  82. Amnesia
    Under Schroeder’s direction, Keller and Riemelt deliver wistful, earnest performances that almost make up for the script’s shortcomings.
  83. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    The Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs franchise takes its comic cues from The Muppets and Pee Wee's Playhouse, kids' shows that ripen as their audience matures.
  84. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    A plea for equality of opportunity, a worthy objective somewhat obscured by non-disabled actors occupying the lead roles. In any case, one imagines Rory himself would prefer a Farrelly disability blooper reel.
  85. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Day-Lewis is as rooted as an oak in his character and milieu, yet easefully disengaged from the film's pensive histrionics.
  86. Go for Sisters
    It's not bad, but it feels rote, as if the film's events are just an excuse for us to hang with the film's people.
  87. Cape of Good Hope
    Only Nthati Moshesh, as a single black mother working as a housekeeper wooed by a displaced Congolese (Eriq Ebouaney), makes a dent in white-American-expatriate Mark Bamford's toothless scenario.
  88. The Day Silence Died
    Agazzi's movie rather provincially hints at sexiness, humor, and satire without actually manifesting them.
  89. The Contender
    Graceless writing and shameless plot contrivance.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Blade
    Yuki's streamlined revenge story (the furious, elegant choreography is by HK maestro Donnie Yen) has in its modest dimensions a surprising grace.
  91. Fade to Black
    The film has a feel similar to his songs--airtight, forthright, never spat till they're set.
  92. The Man Who Bought Mustique
    Tennant had hoped the documentary would serve as an "instrument of revenge" on Mustique's new owners. It's the filmmakers who end up exacting revenge on Tennant, gleefully recording his every splenetic outburst and infantile hissy fit.
  93. The Boy Downstairs
    The writer-director’s first feature is warmly affectionate and maddeningly vague, with half-formed characters, limp plotting, and performances of captivating delicacy, especially from Zosia Mamet as a novelist guided by uncertainty.
  94. Silver Bullets
    Silver Bullets is the most affecting "horror" movie I've seen in a while, as Swanberg ignores tired supernatural scare-flick trappings and locates terror in the shadowy, passive-aggressive process of making, and watching, movies.
  95. J. Edgar
    Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."
  96. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The whole thing has an amiable, gag-to-gag vibe for most of the first hour.
  97. The Cartel
    The Cartel makes up for what it lacks in style and structure with selective but stone-cold facts.
  98. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    By turns bizarrely affectless and then prattlingly manic, much like its dual protagonists.
  99. The Railway Man
    It's heartening to have a tony war film about PTSD and forgiveness; it would be grander still to have one that dedicated itself more fully to examining the courage it would take to offer that forgiveness, rather than dash its energies upon the dreary cowardice of the crime itself.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    Such informality leads to numerous lulls, but when the photographer perks up the results are delightful.
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