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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    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deja Vu
    Déjà Vu isn't as sleek a genre pleasure as "Enemy of the State," but it does have a freaky little trick up its sleeve.
  2. Change of Plans (Le code a changé)
    A comedy of manners in need of Ritalin.
  3. Cocaine Cowboys
    The story is fascinating, if a little overlong.
  4. The Playroom
    The Playroom jettisons all things cute, but still takes flight by portraying the characters, adult and juvenile, under direct lighting, and asking you if you care about them.
  5. Heartbreaker
    There's trouble in Paradis-and in a script that prizes frenzy over any actual feeling.
  6. Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    Chernick's film traces the creation of Barney's "narrative sculpture" with open curiosity and an alert, amiable eye.
  7. We Own the Night
    The closest thing Gray's done to a commercial actioner, the film also applies his genius for tone (aided by superlative sound work) to set pieces that throb with trauma: a tinnitus-soundtracked shoot-out and a rain-slick car chase set to the tempo of windshield wipers.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ice Age: The Meltdown
    A romantic subplot about a possum-raised mammoth (Queen Latifah!) tries to put the warm in global warming, but the unappealing character designs, incessant celebrity-voice chatter, and slickly inexpressive 3-D animation thwart any emotional pull.
  9. Lakeboat
    Forster not only makes this unlikely story emotionally believable, he moves you to tears. Lakeboat isn't much of a film, but for Forster fans, it's indispensable.
  10. Langrishe Go Down
    Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.
  11. Intact
    It's a shame that, somewhere in his mystagogical handstanding, Fresnadillo forgot the real world.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (re-release)
    Slowly devolves to the inept "warm bodies shine together in the darkness."
  13. Nico and Dani
    The movie avoids grand conclusions, and its restraint heightens the clarity of the perspective shifts that constitute a rite of passage; Nico and Dani is a modest chronicle of a summer during which everything had to change so that everything could stay the same.
  14. Signs
    Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.
  15. The Front Line
    Tightly directed and well acted (even though many characters are cut-outs from every war movie you've ever seen), The Front Line shoehorns little known history into a familiar format, and it works.
  16. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash, but nothing in Hur Jin-ho's tony new version approaches the dizzying depths of Sarah Michelle Gellar spelling out the conditions of her sex bet with Ryan Phillippe ("You can put it anywhere . . .") in 1999's "Cruel Intentions."
  17. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    The film is playful throughout... Unfortunately, the shoddy treatment of the film's sole LGBT character and a tendency to use people in wheelchairs as punchlines mar this otherwise delightful gruesome confection.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Simon
    Eddy Terstall's film is bipolar and ultimately wrenching, but it works if you let it.
  19. Bridget Jones's Baby
    As much as this latest installment draws on affection for the snappy first film, it's the differences that make Bridget Jones's Baby the warmest and most satisfying of the series.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Very British Gangster
    MacIntyre's control over his material is assured at times, particularly when he focuses on Dom's young son, Bugsy, and the other troubled boys who float around the periphery of the Noonan gang.
  21. Suntan
    Structurally, there’s little that’s new in Suntan. The tale of a middle-aged man delusionally pursuing youth and beauty reaches back to Thomas Mann and beyond. But Papadimitropoulos has a feel for the physicality of this world, for contrasting postures and gestures.
  22. Elvis & Nixon
    Outside of Shannon's performance, Elvis & Nixon is enough to make you long for the nuance of Kissin' Cousins.
  23. Legally Blonde
    A junk-food movie striving to be nutritious -- it's one of your racier Be Yourself after-school specials crossed with 'Who Moved My Cheese?" for Cosmo girls.
  24. The Final Girls
    The heart of this mostly bloodless picture is Max's relationship with her mother's film character, and there are some genuinely touching moments about grieving and the acceptance of loss.
  25. Cars 3
    The thoughtful, thrilling finale retroactively complicates and improves much of the film that it caps, and it left me thinking something else impossible: I’d kind of like to see what happens in Cars 4.
  26. Moonlight Mile
    All the shell-shocked wryness, irredeemable remorse, and unaccountable will to survive that the movie attempts to embody are realized in Gyllenhaal, and the actor makes it possible to root for Moonlight Mile despite its flaws.
  27. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    The art of physical comedy is alive and well with Saunders and Lumley, who precisely calculate each well-timed tumble.
  28. The Dead Lands
    The film is undeniably elevated by its exotic milieu. It's a shame, then, that it's stuck with such a familiar coming-of-age call to adventure.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pearl Jam Twenty
    Perhaps Pearl Jam's arc too closely resembles Crowe's own, and he can't see what's so uniquely poignant about dimmed but enduring stars.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Savages
    Soul is something Savages has in short supply, not least because Kitsch and Johnson register as blanks on-screen. In contrast, Hayek and del Toro, both sporting apparently intentionally terrible wigs, give big, scenery-chewing performances and earn our interest and empathy even while committing heinous acts.
  31. Salvo
    Viewers looking for a shoot-em-up will be disappointed, but those hankering for an old-school Italian broodfest will find plenty to soak in.
  32. Roll Bounce
    Bow Wow isn't bad. But he and the dudes who fill out X's crew never quite nail the desired What's Happening!! vibe.
  33. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's modern-day retelling of a Korean fairy tale is an experiment in space, narrative and physical.
  34. For a Woman
    Visually, Kurys offers a mostly conventional, period-handsome widescreen style, which suits her capable actors just fine. The real drawback, though, is the spoon-feeding frame narrative, which takes away from the urgency.
  35. Shot Caller
    Shot Caller is Coster-Waldau’s show, and he’s up to the task.
  36. Molière
    Tirard unwinds the action slow and steady, which makes for a slackly paced first hour that all but destroys the movie. Hang in and you'll see the method in this seemingly perverse strategy, as the young blade grows a passion for the highly strung, cultivated lady of the house, beautifully played by Europe's reigning queen of barely suppressed hysteria, Laura Morante.
  37. The Lie
    Weixler is an alert, mobile comedienne who deserves better than this awkward pause, nervous stammer, social-anxiety comedy.
  38. The Sticky Fingers of Time
    Psychologically resonant despite the intermittently clunky performances...one of the only Amerindies in recent years to match intellectual with formal ambitions.
  39. Sliding Doors
    Unduly smug about its flashy conceit and otherwise utterly empty, the film plays like lobotomized Kieslowski, less Blind Chance than dumb luck.
  40. Confidence
    Cynically accumulates plot twists while showing little regard for suspense or audience sophistication.
  41. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    A bit naive and formless.
  42. American Pimp
    Alternately mind-expanding and brain-numbing.
  43. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    Gets by on infectious geniality.
  44. Dawn of the Dead
    It is, like most, an unnecessary remake, but the new, digitally boosted Dawn of the Dead brings it on with a 10-minute overture that might be the most upsetting tin-can apocalypse modern movies have ever seen.
  45. Mendy
    Inspired by a 1997 "Voice" article on ex-members of the Satmar sect, Mendy is cast largely with Orthodox or former Orthodox actors, who are utterly credible with dialogue that necessarily teeters between the candid and the offensive.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Noriko's Dinner Table
    There's not nearly enough blood to keep fans of "Suicide Club," or the rest of us, happy.
  47. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    For all the singer's sincere intentions to build secular-religious bridges, a straight-up concert film might have been a better approach, especially given viewer fatigue with those musicians and their causes.
  48. Two in the Wave
    Director Emmanuel Laurent extends de Baecque's essay with clips from Truffaut-Godard films (diminished in HD) and, rather than new interviews with contemporaries, footage of an attractive actress (Isild Le Besco) flipping through old photos and looking pensively at the entrance of the old Cinémathèque Française.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ip Man
    Like his narrative, Yip's aesthetics are more muted and traditional than those of well-known florid imports "Hero" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Yet such modesty is in tune with his soft-spoken protagonist, and also provides clean, sharp views of Yen's awe-inspiring skills, which, in choreographer Sammo Hung's thrilling one-against-many skirmishes, make literal the term "fists of fury."
  50. Surviving Progress
    The film trots out a who's who of great thinkers - Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking, Margaret Atwood, assorted scientists and historians - who are riveting as they walk us through the question of whether we will or can survive progress. The anticapitalism prognosis is grim, and the hope offered is slim indeed.
  51. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Insult upon injury didn't stop the central figure of Mary Liz Thomson's tough and intriguingly well-told account of the fight between environmentalists and corporate raiders (perhaps abetted, we learn, by the government) from taking the battle to her deathbed.
  52. The Most Unknown
    Much of the film is beautiful — hot springs, the ocean’s depths, and deep space are photogenic — although Cheney preserves a few too many mundane “hello, how do you do”s, and the science isn’t deeply explained.
  53. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    Patronizing from toe to chin, the film opts continually for self-congratulation and cheesy aphorism, and could've-should've been comfortable slotted into a half hour of airtime on TJC.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    A revenge tragedy as brutal and Byzantine as "Titus Andronicus," Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance accomplishes a miraculous feat by being harrowing and humane in equal measure.
  55. Moonlight
    Not only is the candid (but never prurient) treatment of early-teen sexuality and drug use too hot to handle, but the narrative blend of fairy-tale wonder and nightmare logic feels sui generis.
  56. 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.
  57. Running from Crazy
    The possible hereditary nature of suicide in general and of the seven known Hemingway suicides in particular is lazily poked at; decades of research go unmentioned and unexplored.
  58. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World is pretty good fun. Especially for a here-today, gone-tomorrow summer blockbuster, the picture is better-crafted than it needs to be: If you ignore some extraneous plot threads, and the stop-the-presses revelation that, in the end, “what really matters is family,” Jurassic World hangs together surprisingly well.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Ice
    On the Ice is a marvel of concentrated, classical storytelling. The flat, snowy landscape strips away all but the essentials from its tale.
  60. Realive
    Realive’s greatest strength is that it takes its premise so seriously, engaging with its moral and spiritual questions.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Day Watch
    The worst thing Bekmambetov has picked up from his American models is the tendency of megasequels to aggrandize material grown enervated, to compensate for thinness by spreading out.
    • 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.
  63. The Dead
    The Dead, with its vast, pitiless landscapes and moral seriousness, is "Night of the Living Dead" reimagined as a Sergio Leone western. It's a knockout.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Are Wizards
    Ignore the scattershot approach, however, and there's considerable pleasure to be had in spending time with these bizarre enthusiasts and watching the creative ways they find to express their obsessions.
  65. Strike a Pose
    The six surviving members of the original seven are always excellent company, though Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan's film at times seems frustratingly under-researched.
  66. Naqoyqatsi
    Despite some rocking bombast by Philip Glass and reliably wicked cello saws from Yo-Yo Ma, the whole thing plays like a tired Tyco ad.
  67. Madame Satã
    It can feel a bit slight and, given the epic sweep of its subject's life, somewhat underplotted. But there's no denying the incendiary power of Ramos's performance -- he's present in nearly every scene. The movie is as much the story of his transformation into Madame Satã as it is João Francisco's.
  68. The Children of the Century
    It does best when it leaves behind hothouse literary discussions and closes in on these two legendary behemoths, battling for sexual supremacy.
  69. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Cube is still adorable, but the potentially poppin' battle between the shop and big-box competitor Nappy Cuts gets obscured by sloppy chronology and flat, cartoonish politicos.
  70. The Shape of Things
    In its costumes, line readings, and structure, the movie faithfully preserves the stage production -- a provocative, if meretricious, evening of theater that ends in a paroxysm of LaButality with a bear swipe to the spectator's head. It is, however, more difficult to rattle a movie audience -- at least with words -- and, despite its streamlined presentation, The Shape of Things is not nearly as effective on-screen.
  71. I, Robot
    If you see it, the sequel will be your fault.
  72. Valley of Love
    Isabelle and Gérard's regrets and laments about their parenting skills betray no bone-deep rue or shame but are delivered with all the conviction of two luminaries merely running their lines.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mack
    It is almost perfect as escapist entertainment -- as a carefully schematized synthesis of fantasies for black audiences. [03 May 1973, p.81]
    • Village Voice
  74. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    "We're all mixed bags" is the conclusion of unwieldy mixed bag Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.
  75. Detroit Unleaded
    Director Rola Nashef's visuals can be clunky, and her script's conversational dialogue is occasionally stilted. Nonetheless, she draws her characters in sharp lines, so that the gaggle of customers who frequent Sami's workplace...feel not like types but, rather, like diverse individuals.
  76. In Darkness
    The first third of the story then presents her like a typical Hitchcock ingenue before branching out into a promisingly ambitious mystery. Too bad that story ultimately loses focus and its protagonist’s point of view.
  77. Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back
    Wu and Lin have great chemistry, but only because Chow was smart enough to reimagine Journey to the West as a rare character-driven big-budget action-adventure — the kind of thing Americans might love if they knew it existed.
  78. Heights
    In this study of keeping up appearances while everything falls apart, the stakes never seem as high as the title suggests.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    Geographic diffusion aside, Kondracki's fact-based thriller remains somewhat focused on its grim subject, though its principled bid to allure and enlighten the VOD-surfing masses results in a surplus of Hollywood-style eye candy and narrative formula.
  80. Miss You Already
    Toni Collette rages through Catherine Hardwicke's cancer weepie Miss You Already like a fire in a chain restaurant. The film around her is good, welcoming fare, the kind that snobs always underestimate.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Don't Trip ... He Ain't Through with Me Yet
    Despite more audience cutaways than the State of the Union Address, the movie's largely a you-had-to-be-there affair--except when the star does an uncanny imitation of a double-wide churchgoer scooting through a narrow pew.
  82. More Than a Game
    Good game footage, a few clear looks at the kids behind it, but mostly as processed as "Space Jam."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    What is shocking is seeing the aggressive and malicious response to the movement.
  84. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker
    Though some more exploration of Tucker's influence would be welcome, the documentary does make fine use of archival materials culled from Tucker's immense collection of scrapbooks from every year of her career.
  85. Learning to Drive
    The filmmakers' hearts might be in the right place, but the film's doesn't kick in until well after you might already have declared it dead.
  86. Paranormal Activity 3
    The further this series drifts into corporate-franchise territory and away from Peli's inventively cheap, slyly psychosexual conception, the more reasons there are to just stay away.
  87. If You Build It
    Creadon unveils his story in a haphazard, backwards-unfolding way.
  88. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    Everything about this berserk, essentially static procedural is just crazy enough to be true. In any case, Herzog has gone beyond Good and Evil to reinvent himself as a candidate for the wiggiest director of comedy in America today.
  89. Definitely, Maybe
    A surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy.
  90. Les amants criminels
    May be as gimmicky as Ozon's other features, but it's also more resonant and even haunting.
  91. Bang Rajan
    As hokey as "Braveheart" and yet much more apocalyptic, Thanit Jitnukul's muscular jungle bloodbath outdoes Hollywood's recent efforts at combat ultra-realism.
  92. Cinemanovels
    Equally seductive as it is inert, Terry Miles' Cinemanovels manages to cast an alluring spell, despite not amounting to much. It sticks in the memory, mostly due to the playful lead performance by Lauren Lee Smith.
  93. Magic Trip
    What it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, is a sense of the cosmic Now; the movie recovers, without exactly illuminating, a "long, strange trip" that seems all the stranger as it recedes into the past.
  94. Little Lili
    True to Chekhov's dictum, a gun does fire near the end -- by which point eye-rolling audience members may be up in arms too.
  95. Handsome Harry
    As in the films that precede it, the mysteries--and terrors--of desire also propel Handsome Harry, which reunites Gordon with Luminous Motion's Jamey Sheridan, here in the title role.
  96. What If
    In the highly imperfect world of contemporary romantic comedies, What If is as close to perfect as anything we've got, not least for the way it captures the abject hopefulness of young people who'd like to be in love but don't know how to go about it.
  97. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Adults will be restless as stabled bucks, but even children may need unusually high Ritalin doses to slog through the visual and dramatic indifference on display.
  98. Beautiful Losers
    Regardless of Rose's intentions, his underachieving airiness is both entertaining and perfectly fitting for the slacker ennui of his clique's rising years.
  99. Music and Lyrics
    Music and Lyrics suggests that it's going to be about redemption, the second act in the life of a punchline, but it feels as though it were made to fit a date on a studio's release schedule. (Happy Valentine's Day!) Oh, well, at least the songs are catchy, and the two-tone video for "Pop Goes My Heart" is inspired.
  100. Unfriended
    Director Levan Gabriadze is adept at the sinking something's not right creepiness too few horror films dig into. His techniques are certain to be copy-pasted by imitators.
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