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. Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer
    In its didactic narration and constant on-screen introductions, the film loses a good deal of the very silence and mystery it venerates.
  2. The Elephant in the Living Room
    The film ultimately serves as an edifying (who knew Ohio's Amish were big into exotic-animal auctions?) and unsensational (excepting one horrifying scene involving Brumfield's beloved male lion) look into a peculiar corner of American acquisitiveness.
  3. They're Out of the Business
    The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.
  4. Meeting Spencer
    Though it's a big thrill that the world's finest character actor has his very own lead role, one wishes there were more meat on the elegant bones of Meeting Spencer to justify his cheerfully offhand wit.
  5. Kati with an I
    Greene may intend Kati's story as a quiet tragedy, but the native feeling of that's-just-the-way-it-is lethargy ("Only in Alabama can you be a home-school drop-out") is rather convincing.
  6. To Die Like a Man
    A mysterious, fabulously sad fable.
  7. Blank City
    Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular "Please Kill Me" model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine grudging that made that tome so entertaining.
  8. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    Hicks's shtick is so good and his life so ordinary that it's hard to escape the feeling that we might've been better off just watching a compilation of the groundbreaking funnyman's work.
  9. Ceremony
    Ceremony is a callow movie: Winkler exhibits no comprehension of the class anxieties he addresses, and extends precocity into adulthood. That callowness is Ceremony's subject scarcely makes it funnier.
  10. Meet Monica Velour
    The result is unbalanced by cartoonish flourishes-Ingram's performance being the chief offender-that overpower Cattrall's subtler character work.
  11. Henry's Crime
    Caan and Farmiga give more to the material than it can return, but it sure is fun to watch them tangle.
  12. Born to Be Wild
    If not for its outsize IMAX presentation, this handsome nonfiction film would be little more than an uplifting episode of PBS's "Nature."
  13. Soul Surfer
    Soul Surfer offers a ghastlier sight than your wildest "127 Hours"–meets-"Jaws" nightmare: barefaced Christian pandering that pretends it isn't.
  14. Your Highness
    Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hanna
    Despite its handsome presentation and cinematic ingenuity, the film never really goes beyond superficial pleasures.
  16. Meek's Cutoff
    Cinematic as it is, Meek's Cutoff has an uncanny theatricality. The scenes alternating between windswept emptiness and the dark void could be played on a barren stage. For all its detailed authenticity, this minimalist "Wagon Train" is less naturalistic than existential.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wretches & Jabberers
    More info packet than a story, the film is carefully designed for unambiguous impact.
  18. An Affirmative Act
    The film veers into the narrow channels of the bare-bulb courtroom melodrama and then the rapids of the lurid conspiracy thriller before washing ashore in pieces.
  19. Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead
    Virtually every documentary cliché from the past decade finds its way into this account of director Joe Cross's weight-loss odyssey, a retread-reversal of "Super Size Me" right down to the cheesy animation.
  20. Cat Run
    Janet McTeer, at least, delights as MI6's cruelly capable answer to Mary Poppins. She's a whiz at testicular vivisection, yet she still cannot save this film.
  21. Circo
    Circo is filled with beautiful images and haunting moments, especially in the third act, when the family unravels as the film culminates in a final triumphant, haunting image.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Super
    Gunn successfully shifts between celebrating violence and mourning it, but his handling of emotional evolution is clumsier; he seems particularly out of his depth in the film's mawkish ending. But Page is a revelation: There isn't another gorgeous twentysomething actress working today who could more convincingly reveal sexual bravado to be simultaneously silly and creepy.
  23. Two Gates of Sleep
    As a work of narrative fiction, the film is too little invested in character to make the occasional intrusions of plot meaningful, while its editing is overly elliptical and its actions too perfunctorily observed to make it work as a documentary study of human activity.
  24. Wrecked
    Because it's so carefully parceled out and so evocatively framed (in widescreen), Wrecked is an absorbing ordeal, perhaps less for its survival narrative than its metaphoric heft.
  25. Queen to Play
    The supporting cast is uniformly fine, but the film rests on the delicate shoulders of Bonnaire, who carries it with a soulful, magnetic presence.
  26. 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rubber
    An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlock - one infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a post–"Easy Rider" road movie - Rubber is some kind of miracle.
  28. In a Better World
    Slick moralizing grows exponentially as the plot, wrapped in travelogue photography, transparently expository dialogue, and cheap thrills, drives home spurious parallels between the first and third worlds.
  29. Insidious
    We need visionaries-but also solid craftsmen who seem to enjoy their work. Insidious is the product of the latter. It doesn't build a better haunted house but, when on its game, reminds us of the genre's pleasures.
  30. Source Code
    A propulsive ride worth your popcorn dollar, not for its preposterous genre tinkering but for its refreshingly humanist take on a high-concept gimmick.
  31. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries-or almost-documentaries-ever made.
  32. Hop
    Despite its scattered frenzy, Hop-thanks to its fondness for smushing together seemingly incongruous elements and Marsden's goofy, bug-eyed mugging-is just demented enough to deliver a fleeting sugar rush.
  33. Sucker Punch
    His (Snyder) mash-up set pieces ("Call of Duty" meets "Castlevania," etc.) blend into so-awesome-they're-awful slo-mo monotony, and the awful sisterhood stuff in between makes you anticipate the action as though waiting for the bus.
  34. Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    Chugs along inoffensively enough.
  35. My Perestroika
    The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.
  36. One Hundred Mornings
    Part morality play, part comment on our excessive energy consumption, One Hundred Mornings is often most affecting when it considers the most mundane points.
  37. Mia and the Migoo
    Regrettably, both the condemnation of capitalist avarice and violence and the sanctification of nature and youthful innocence are dramatized only in simplistic black-and-white terms.
  38. Drawing with Chalk
    Slight and sweet with a bit of a paunch in the middle, Drawing With Chalk resembles the aging would-be rock stars at its center.
  39. Illegal
    Blunt, loud, and showboaty, Illegal suffers even more when compared with another recent Liège-set film about the horrors faced by paperless immigrants: the Dardennes' "Lorna's Silence."
  40. I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You
    Road movies don't get any purer.
  41. Tyrannosaur
    Colman's performance comes as a revelation.
  42. Curling
    In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Attenberg
    While Tsangari may have borrowed Attenborough's "British phlegmatic tenderness," as she calls it, Attenberg is worlds away from a nature documentary.
  44. 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.
  45. White Irish Drinkers
    Even though Gray is no raw-boned rookie-he has made TV movies for decades, plus, back in the day, a single Steven Seagal floater-his movie is rather inexcusably obvious, going for "troot," but recycling dese-dose-dem clichés already pressed into plastic lumber 25 years ago.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Peep World
    Thick with stale "We're Jewish!" and inconvenient-boner jokes, the film's a post-"Office," shaky-cam sitcom pilot stretched to feature length.
  47. Bal
    Though this graceful film is a minor addition to the canon of Middle Eastern cinema in which nothing and everything happens, Bal is still a beauty.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Potiche
    Like its heroine, Potiche is deceptively lightweight, its camp screwball fizziness giving way to a surprisingly cogent feminist parable, in which the personal proves again and again to be the most volatile variable in the political.
  49. Miral
    Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gift to Stalin
    Alternating between impressive and pedestrian shot-making, professional and amateurish acting, the film aims for gravitas and entertainment but only occasionally achieves either.
  51. 0s & 1s
    During his quest to track down his missing laptop, James's unrelenting douchiness and his friends' essential emptiness grow tiresome, but that's precisely the point. As digital media becomes more vivid, people tend to hollow out.
  52. Motherland
    Despite its ambitious combination of murder mystery and cautionary immigration tale, Motherland doesn't quite hold together, lacking both the fuel to reach a rolling, procedural boil and the intimacy to simmer with emotion.
  53. Bereavement
    Bereavement-miraculously as dull as its title-is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.
  54. Lord of the Dance in 3D
    It never morphs into the amazing Christopher Guest jam it first suggests. Strike two is the fact that, not counting one superb, David Lee Roth scissor-kick in slo-mo, director Marcus Viner does little to marry Flatley's métier to the form.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am
    Embellished with a lot of CG, supporting clips, and lovely stock footage, I Am's basic tenets are hardly ridiculous: What's so funny about empathy, compassion, and love? Shadyac, looking like the lost triplet of Kenny G. and Al Yankovic, cheerfully indicts his own overconsumption first.
    • 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.
  57. Winter in Wartime
    An efficient, absorbing example of the form framed in a boy's coming-of-age story set in a snowbound rural Holland in 1945.
  58. The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman
    The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.
  59. Desert Flower
    Luckily, her cast makes up for the lapses, and Kebede is especially effective at showing how triumph over culturally sanctioned brutality remains a tentative prospect at best.
  60. Cracks
    Alas, the hopelessly miscast Green is too darn French, lacking the voraciously loony brio it takes to play Miss G.
  61. Nostalgia for the Light
    Often stark and ravishing, Nostalgia for the Light is most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker's stubborn righteousness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Win Win
    A "quirky" dramedy in the "Juno"/"Little Miss Sunshine" mode, but lacking the latter's vibrant ensemble and the former's snappy patter, Win Win is indie with the edges sanded down completely.
  63. Limitless
    Without a complex thought about narcissism, merit, or addiction, Limitless is content to be an empty, one-note, satire-free fairy tale of avarice and corporate-political ambition.
  64. Paul
    This is the smart-ass stoner's "E.T.," the movie the fanboy parent won't be able to hand down like some tattered, squeaky-clean memento to their action-figure-collecting kids. It's just not quite right without Wright, who could have helped Frost and Pegg stuff Mel Brooks back into their Han Solo Underoos.
  65. Bill Cunningham New York
    No passion for fashion is required to enjoy this absorbing portrait of legendary New York Times "On the Street" photographer Bill Cunningham, but a sense of history and tragedy might help.
  66. The Lincoln Lawyer
    Undercut by uninspired direction, car-commercial art direction, and a lack of grit that makes the hidebound nature of the genre stand out like an episode of "Matlock" on HBO.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Red Riding Hood
    RRH veers between monotonous, soapy seriousness and camp.
  68. Battle: Los Angeles
    Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive courtesy of a cornball motivational speech by Eckhart's hero.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dear Lemon Lima
    Still, Lima's "Be yourself, and you'll eventually find your tribe" moral is so well-meaning that we might as well be generous and grade on a curve-it's more appealing than anything Hollywood has recently offered the eight- to 13-year-old female demographic.
  70. I Will Follow
    Its elegantly simple structure filled in with startling, understated force, I Will Follow is a modestly framed portrait of grief in its first season.
  71. Foreign Parts
    Foreign Parts engages in sociological inquiry without narration or contextual handholding, utilizing incisive, striking aesthetics (a panorama of hanging side mirrors, worn shoes trudging through grimy puddles) to elicit potent subcultural immersion.
  72. The Soft Skin (1969)
    The Soft Skin is a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an extramarital affair. Truffaut treats it like a crime film-low-key yet tense, filled with carefully planted potential "clues" and an undercurrent of anxiety.
  73. Black Death
    Screenwriter Dario Poloni and director Christopher Smith provide enough sword-and-sorcery hoo-ha to please the "Lord of the Rings" demographic, but the movie's real coup is in how it repeatedly shifts our allegiance from Christians to pagans.
  74. Making the Boys
    Crayton Robey's documentary on this queer cultural touchstone admirably presents both sides of the divide.
  75. Monogamy
    The film's final plot twist is easy to spot well before it arrives, but that doesn't detract from its crafty, heartfelt, and surprisingly sound affirmation of getting hitched.
  76. 3 Backyards
    Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's "Judy Berlin" is devoted to finding descriptive correlatives to liminal emotional states through the cast's eloquent reaction shots and the camera's depiction of homely environments - with ornate, flowing visual vocabulary.
  77. Elektra Luxx
    Elektra Luxx's episodic structure and candy-apple compositions make for a good time, even if Gutierrez lacks the narrative and syntactical muscle to pull off the sex-positive Tarantino-esque farce he seems to be after.
  78. The Desert of Forbidden Art
    It's a must-see for anyone interested in art.
  79. Mars Needs Moms
    Imagination is in short supply, with rubbery heroes repeatedly plummeting (down chutes, primarily) or hopping and running in slow motion-images that (to state what has now become the obvious) are seldom enhanced by pedestrian IMAX 3-D effects.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jane Eyre
    Fukunaga has made his Jane Eyre an intimate, thoughtful epic, anchored by strong lead performances and the gorgeous, moody 100-shades-of-gray cinematography of Adriano Goldman.
  81. Certified Copy
    Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Mar 8, 2011
  82. Beastly
    Tin-eared, corny attempt at fairy-tale interpretation.
  83. The Adjustment Bureau
    The so-called Plan is derailed!
  84. Ex Drummer
    The flashy adaptation of the book by aging Belgian provocateur Herman Brusselmans is as systematically offensive and boisterously vulgar as its degenerate punk protagonists.
  85. The Human Resources Manager
    Tender irony and dark humor abound in Israeli director Eran Riklis's latest account of bureaucracy colliding with burgeoning compassion.
  86. Happythankyoumoreplease
    "Arrested Development's" Tony Hale nearly overcomes the gently worthless script, playing Annie's dork suitor, and convincingly transforming himself from toad to prince.
  87. I Saw the Devil
    Never good with nuance, Kim is a beast with disarming imagery but has few resonating ideas, leaving the domino-tumble of brutality to become its own tiresome spectacle.
  88. Take Me Home Tonight
    It's not a total wash. Faris's ample talents are squandered with a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go romantic dilemma, but there's just enough of Demetri Martin doing a prick act, and Fogler excels as a Rabelaisian dynamo.
  89. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.
  90. Rango
    For all its genre-bending cleverness and technical dexterity, Rango's overstuffed plot fails to consistently blend its brainy pretensions with its chase-and-slapstick family-film obligations. Like Dirt's H2O supply, laughs are scarce.
  91. A Good Man
    Director Safina Uberoi struck gold with her title subject, a congenital joker with an implacable will whose load-bearing personality could prop up at least three documentaries.
  92. The Over the Hill Band
    Enthoven and his screenwriters walk a fine line between celebrating the vitality of the elderly and asking us to laugh at their youthful affectations, twice embarrassing his three septuagenarians by forcing them to sing along to Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything Strange and New
    The film conveys the intimate sense of reading a diary and provides no more consolation than we feel in writing in our own.
  94. Public Speaking
    The quick-witted malcontent, a Morristown, New Jersey, refugee who arrived at Port Authority in 1969, is the best kind of New Yorker: one with a long memory who's averse to nostalgia.
  95. The Grace Card
    By refusing to even suggest that racism is a walloping social problem rather than an individual, circumstantial one with an easy fix, it does a rotten job of preaching to the choir.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heartbeats
    If Dolan is able to derive a certain comic tension from the simple threat of what could happen with these three in close quarters, he and his co-actors often spoil the mystery of the unsaid with the tells on their faces.
  97. Hall Pass
    The crazy-barista melodrama-slapstick collision seems not like a nimble twist, but tone-deaf blundering-what once came naturally now seems like trying too hard, as the Farrellys face their own mid-life crisis.
  98. Of Gods and Men
    Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.
  99. Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    John Whitesell's extraordinarily witless movie operates as a checklist for cultural and racial clichés.
  100. I Am Number Four
    Nothing but a million little pieces from prior superhero series and the "Twilight" saga.
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