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. Loveless
    Despite inventive moments between the performers, the central character, true to his type, is too casually drawn to sustain our interest in whether he loves or loses.
  2. Zero Bridge
    Tapa's poetic neorealism is less a stylistic intrusion than a keeping of faith, through the film's deliberately uneven pacing, with a life devoid of rhythms to count on.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Now & Later
    Worse, all of this sex is so garishly lit and unimaginatively framed that it's not even fun to watch.
  4. Immigration Tango
    Less forgivable is the fact that this is a film in which characters are flung out of character solely for cheap laughs and rarely actually listen or talk to one another.
  5. Vanishing on 7th Street
    It is creepy enough to make you hope the theater parking lot is brightly lit.
  6. The Chaperone
    You get a bargain two high-concepts for the price of one in this amiably lame offering from Stephen Herek, who, once upon a time, cooked up an excellent Adventure for Bill and Ted, then veered off into inspirational goo with "Mr. Holland's Opus."
  7. The Last Lions
    Though floridly written and relentlessly scored, the film's dramas are more persuasively framed than many human ones, going so far as to include multiple flashbacks.
  8. Putty Hill
    Porterfield intersperses these delicately underplayed scenes with doc-style question-and-answer exchanges that, while initially jarring, achieve maximum cumulative impact.
  9. We Are What We Are
    This promising first feature is nearly as apt to use the power of suggestion as to ladle up the gore, triumphantly creepy, and just arty enough to have secured a slot in last year's New York Film Festival.
  10. Unknown
    As with its protagonist, Unknown boasts tantalizing issues buried deep beneath its frantic exterior, but little idea how to unlock or address them.
  11. Gnomeo and Juliet
    The script feels workshopped to death yet still hits only a single broad note of irony-drenched whimsy, but the voice-work sparkles and the action-heavy animation clips along fluidly. There's charm in the backyard, but it's still of a garden variety.
  12. Just Go with It
    As in many a Sandler picture, Just Go With It is a tale of both escalating lies that finally give way to truth and of childish behavior eventually corrected strung along by lowbrow jokes that hit and miss in roughly even number.
  13. Port of Memory
    Quietly and atmospherically touches on the Kiarostamian Uncertainty Principle, with Aljafari liberally corrupting his demi-documentary with scripted dialogue, rehearsals, and even digital effects.
  14. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    Director Icíar Bollaín mixes Even the Rain's various storytelling modes with an obviousness that ultimately negates enlightening intellectual or emotional discovery.
  15. The Sky Turns
    Nothing speaks more elegantly to the bewilderment of the locals than a long shot of newly built windmills lining a distant hilltop while a villager, made tiny by Álvarez's framing, looks on in the foreground, swallowed up by the forces of history.
  16. Orgasm Inc.
    Too scattered in its arguments and piecemeal in its sources to weave together a convincing institutional condemnation.
  17. Lovers of Hate
    A 2010 Sundance favorite, this inventive (and inventively thrifty) character study from Austin indie stalwart Bryan Poyser never flinches from the intractable sibling resentment at its core.
  18. Mooz-lum
    Solemn, unsubtle, and terminally self-conscious.
  19. Carbon Nation
    Director Peter Byck opted for corny graphics, a wall of statistics, a voice-of-God narrator, and a xylophonic score, but behind the infomercial presentation are solid ideas that warrant scrutiny.
  20. Vidal Sassoon: The Movie
    More accurately titled "Vidal Sassoon: The Slavering Advertorial," Craig Teper's obsequious documentary on the stylist who popularized geometric haircuts in the '60s is in desperate need of shaping and trimming itself.
  21. Certifiably Jonathan
    The big-kid-bulky Dayton-born comedian gets some welcome playtime in Jim Pasternak's patchwork tribute, but not nearly enough.
  22. Carancho
    Short on genuine suspense and long on righteous anger, the film is bolstered by a sturdy performance by Darín that brings emotional nuance to an underwritten role.
  23. Poetry
    A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.
  24. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing "At Last" while Bieber's glossy fringe sways in slow-motion.
  25. Cedar Rapids
    A mild comedy of embarrassment.
  26. The Eagle
    The Eagle is full of action and fleet of foot-it's a movie of smoky, lowering battlefields and trippy, space-bending flashbacks, pausing only for admiring location shots of Scotland's wild, craggy vistas.
  27. Troubadours
    The film is entertaining but hardly penetrating.
  28. Into Eternity
    It is meant to boggle the mind and inspire awe-and it does.
  29. How I Ended This Summer
    Playing an ignoble protagonist, Dobrygin keeps his motives always quietly evident; later, lost in a fog painted red by an emergency flare, he's an abject vision of man in a hell of his own making.
  30. Home
    While Close's testimony is sufficiently terrifying, moving toward an apocalyptic vision of climate-change catastrophe, the urgency of her tone is belied by the placidity of the film's visuals.
  31. Waiting for Forever
    Strangely unaware of its overt creepiness.
  32. Dressed
    David John Swajeski, who directed, produced, and edited this documentary on the fledgling fashionista, snags his film on clichés, poor pacing, and an unwillingness or inability to push his subject beyond talk-show pop-psych babble when the topic is interior life and wounds.
  33. The Other Woman
    Though lazily mocking hyper-vigilant parenting, the film treats the moldiest clichés - as gospel.
  34. Cold Weather
    Steadily building in intensity from sluggish interest to mild excitement, Cold Weather is a slight movie with a long, circuitous fuse-and that's the point.
  35. From Prada to Nada
    Under all the pretty faces and MTV Latino pop, there's something crassly disingenuous about the movie's blatant demographic pandering (hooray for immigration-panic jokes!) and half-assed condemnation of gluttony.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mechanic
    Jason Statham bares his six-pack before speaking his first line in this humorless, efficient remake of the 1972 Charles Bronson hitman movie.
  37. Blackmail Boys
    A wispy mix of boy-boy romance and noir-lite potboiler, the Shumanski brothers' (Wrecked) latest wastes a promising premise by loading up on tender whimsy and skimping on grit.
  38. Rage
    The structuring allegory's invocation of familial bonds and immigrant burdens grows stilted: It doesn't collapse this delicate film, but it can't quite hold it up, either.
  39. Strongman
    Levy's deeply sorrowful but wonderfully affectionate doc depicts the wistful link between humanity and celebrity.
  40. When We Leave
    Kekilli, more than an unofficial spokeswoman for rebellious Euro-Muslim youth, sells a simple and deterministic story through her sheer presence and precise reaction shots.
  41. Ip Man 2
    A redundant if nonetheless occasionally thrilling follow-up bolstered by star Donnie Yen's precision combat skills.
  42. Kaboom
    Kaboom does have an excellent punchline, although even at 86 minutes it feels too long-mainly because Araki can't help letting his camera linger over his performers. Hard to blame him-he's assembled the best-looking cast in town and it's largely his gaga appreciation that makes the movie so much fun.
  43. The Rite
    Michael's motivations remain arbitrary and inscrutable, right down to his entry into the seminary. This is brought up by a number of characters, who interpret his implausible career decision as A Sign. It is-of bad writing.
  44. Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)
    Had Rao chosen to foreground her tantalizing ideas instead of her instantly forgettable characters, Mumbai Diaries could have been more than the sum of its parts.
  45. Johnny Mad Dog
    Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.
  46. The Woodmans
    Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gabi on the Roof in July
    I know that people like this exist, but, in terms of characters on the screen, I'm never shown why they need to.
  48. The Housemaid
    Despite eccentric touches, like a handheld street-shot overture and Grand Guignol Omen references, there's little difference between this story and soap-opera intrigue.
  49. Applause
    Usually an enervating process to witness onscreen, Steen's subtle calibrations of self-hatred and raging narcissism exhilarate.
  50. The Way Back
    His (Weir) hardship drama is stolidly old-fashioned, more extreme travelogue than exercise in visceral horror.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Strings Attached
    At times, No Strings Attached feels almost shockingly attuned to the particular angst of its time and place.
  52. My Dog Tulip
    His gift-and the film's-is to transform the seemingly banal relationship between pet and owner into something singular, inimitable, sacred.
  53. The Green Hornet
    The Green Hornet provides a half-hour's worth of mildly entertaining travesty before collapsing in a clamor of bombastic action sequences and lame wisecracks.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Repo Chick
    Goofy-funny, fluffy yet sharp, for all its flaws Repo Chick is a midnight-movie blast.
  55. Plastic Planet
    When Boote gets out of the way, the film is illuminating and infuriating.
  56. A Somewhat Gentle Man
    The grungy setting and unflattering photography are only camouflage for callow, creeping sentimentality.
  57. I'm Dangerous with Love
    Negroponte's visuals are Doc 101-he simply points and shoots. But that doesn't matter; the life stories told (particularly Dimitri's) and the experiences of coming clean sell themselves.
  58. Every Day
    Levine, previously a writer for "Nip/Tuck," sets the bar low, content to work within the shopworn crises, lazy epiphanies, and eye-rolling moments of redemption that have become standard formula in Amerindie family dramedies of the past 20 years.
  59. Barney's Version
    Barney's Version misses every opportunity for raucous picaresque fun that the book throws its way, while squandering a wealth of transatlantic performing talent led by Paul Giamatti.
  60. Twelve Thirty
    A film more satisfying in occasional isolated moments than as a coherent dramatic entity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Time That Remains
    Suleiman's a more assured director than he is a comedian. But individual, Tati-worthy gags still have great power.
  62. Americatown
    The vibe rarely expands beyond dozy Comedy Central skits sprinkled with ironic cliches rather than jokes, 99 percent earnest slo-mo quirk and 1 percent funky non sequitur (the characters sport brand names, like Plymouth Ray-Ban), most of it explained rather than performed.
  63. Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    Though hewing to a too-conventional structure, Bowser's film is densely researched enough to yield insights not just into its overlooked subject, but also into his overly analyzed era.
  64. Go Go Tales
    A highly personal movie, Go Go Tales finds Ferrara in a frenzied yet pensive mode.
  65. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
    It's a measure of the movie's success that one oscillates between two despairs-noting the abject failure of the system and the utter futility of revolt.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Chapel
    The Red Chapel becomes an infectiously funny, gonzo glimpse into the sausage-making process of propaganda.
  67. Summer Wars
    It's hard to appreciate things like the character detail amid the insufferably squealy voicing and arbitrary suspense.
  68. The Strange Case of Angelica
    de Oliveira's film is a musical of a sort, its quietude occasionally lifted by work songs or chorales.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blue Valentine
    Even when transparently plumbing for depth, Cianfrance's film is frustratingly surface-bound in ways that reflect, if not out-and-out misogyny, then at least a lack of interest in imbuing his female character with the rich interior life and complicated morality he gives his male lead.
  70. Biutiful
    Though its structure may be whittled down in comparison with the earlier works, Biutiful is even more morbidly obese than "Babel" in terms of soggy ideas, elephantine with miserabilist humanism and redemption jibber-jabber.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Another Year
    I haven't seen a film this year that so openly invited me to revile each and every one of its characters-and I reviewed "The Human Centipede."
  72. The Sound of Insects
    Without additional context surrounding its subject's life, sharing the man's final excruciating moments eventually devolves into an exercise in morbidity, an experience considerably more ponderous than profound.
  73. Nénette
    Watching Nénette watch those who gape at her is an intriguing, multi-layered exercise of voyeurism, but one that wanes after our gaze is demanded for too long.
  74. Little Fockers
    Game performances and a couple of half-laughs, sure, but this is the screen comedy equivalent of the televised Yule log.
  75. Hadewijch
    With Hadewijch, he (Dumont) endorses something like the Dardenne brothers' rugged, squalid secular humanism, offering the barrier-breaking embrace as vague alternative to Despair, Church, or Capital.
  76. Secret Sunshine
    One of the year's best films.
  77. Somewhere
    Those who groan that the writer-director has made another indulgent film about the obscenely privileged have overlooked Coppola's redoubtable gifts at capturing milieu, languor, and exacting details.
  78. The Illusionist
    For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives.
  79. True Grit
    For the most part, the Coens' is a highly enjoyable yarn, stocked with pungent bushwa and a full panoply of frontier bozos.
  80. Megamind
    If nothing else, I found my son's Kryptonite: boring superhero rip-offs voiced by check-cashing actors. At least Steve Carell used an accent.
  81. I Am Secretly an Important Man
    Sillen ennobles the havoc of his life with a measure of down-and-out romance, but no moments really puncture a viewer, and the darkness is all too easily shaken off.
  82. Satan Hates You
    The film's one-note premise is only as fitfully affecting as watching caricatures hit rock bottom over and over again.
  83. Alien Girl
    Romanycheva exudes cunning carnality, yet her wiles are as rote as the rest of this B-grade genre flick, which feigns interest in post-Communist Eastern European power dynamics but favors listlessly staged shoot-outs and heists devoid of emotional, psychological, or sociopolitical substance.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Due Date
    Fast, lazy, and out of control in a manner that's basically commendable.
  85. Casino Jack
    In the grand finale, Abramoff fantasizes about using a Senate hearing to blow the whistle on the entire corrupt establishment. His rant offers a clue to how this otherwise pointlessly manic movie might have honed its political edge.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rabbit Hole
    Becca and Howie's extracurricular relationships are the saving grace of a movie that's otherwise a sledgehammer of plot and score.
  87. Yogi Bear
    Adults will be thrilled to see Anna Faris as nature documentarian Rachel. Greeting Yogi by speaking in "brown bear," the actress never fails to be seriously goofy.
  88. How Do You Know
    Not that How Do You Know doesn't have its moments of shamelessly entertaining shtick, much of it furnished by Nicholson (watch for a very funny visual gag about his proclivities for much younger women) and by Wilson as Lisa's current squeeze.
  89. TRON: Legacy
    Given the movie's graphic pizzazz, the best hippie wisdom Bridges might offer the viewer is: Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.
  90. The Tourist
    A different kind of surveillance thriller - an expensive, star-gazing Hollywood one.
  91. Cool It
    The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unstoppable
    It's like a mashup of classic commercials for Ford pickup trucks, Bud Lite, and Hooters (where, God help us, Frank's daughters are working their way through college).
  93. Saw 3D
    The film's aim to bring its convoluted saga full-circle through the reappearance of original "Saw" victim Carey Elwes merely reeks of desperation, a futile final stab at imparting significance to a creatively bankrupt franchise that need not be resuscitated.
  94. White Material
    Claire Denis's strongest movie in the decade since "Beau Travail," her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Love and Other Drugs
    Buried somewhere in Zwick's film might be a topical modern romance, maybe even a health care satire, but you'd need to dig past layers of creative desperation to find it.
  96. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Guy and Madeline is at once self-conscious and breezy, clumsy and deft, diffident and sweet, annoying and ecstatic. It's amateurish in the best sense, and it radiates cinephilia. No movie I've seen this year has given me more joy.
  97. Nothing Personal
    In her tale of a brusque, prickly young Dutch woman who inexplicably cuts herself off from the world, except for a heavily circumscribed relationship with a man whose isolation is less voluntary, writer-director Urszula Antoniak hits a lot of expected notes.
  98. Heartless
    With erratic success, Heartless tries a number of different veins-urban fairy tale with "There was no magic, it was you all along" twist, supernatural family drama-but it's on firmest footing as a macabre comedy.
  99. Tiny Furniture
    A comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York's bourgeois bohemia.
  100. The King's Speech
    A well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor.
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