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. Breastmilk
    Ben-Ari elegantly conveys the crippling social pressures that arise when a woman suggests that she might be allowed agency over her own body and that of her child, without adding any words of her own.
  2. Here Alone
    Although writer David Ebeltoft's post-apocalyptic story feels familiar at times (reminiscent of parts of Stephen King's The Stand), the scenery and Blackhurst's direction make Here Alone a verdant, suspenseful treat.
  3. Sharkwater
    No matter how much "Jaws"-hugging zeal he brings to the deck, Stewart has made a vain polemic that never addresses the finning industry's deep-seated cultural significance in Asia (where, rightly or wrongly, shark soup is a symbol of economic prestige), nor elaborates on how the disrupted ecosystem affects us humans.
  4. American Swing
    The film tries--and fails--to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.
  5. This Is 40
    Much like marriage, This Is 40 is somewhat formless, and it almost never hurries up. But life is improved by having the option.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nanny McPhee
    If you have someone under 10 to take to the movies, this one is charming and painless.
  7. Onegin
    Unable to capture either its wit, psychological acuity, or formal rigor, the movie essentially reduces the schematic, seesaw narrative to doomy clichés.
  8. Come te nessuno mai
    For a quality horny-Italian-teen frolic, you need look no further.
  9. Wimbledon
    The appealing leads have strong chemistry, but it's the wrong kind: an affectionate big-brother/little-sister rapport that leaves a discomfiting taint on their more amorous clinches.
  10. The Ant Bully
    It's a kids' movie for kids, and Davis approaches it as though he and his cast are merely storytellers trying to reach kids rather than show-offs trying to impress their parents.
  11. The First Saturday in May
    First Saturday isn't exactly a winner, but it places.
  12. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    Mostly sacrifices the political satire and epistolary structure of Paul Torday's source novel in favor of cute, if strained, rom-com shenanigans.
  13. The Look
    Women of a certain age will kvell, but the point might be better made for the rest of us by rewatching the autumnal Rampling in Ozon's "Under the Sand."
  14. New World
    Park's direction is sleek and assured, but lacking the dynamism that might help energize a film that—its title notwithstanding—comes off as dully old-school.
  15. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    Deepsea Challenge has too little interest in anything that's not Cameron's personal experience.
  16. Viva
    About half an hour of this was enough for me—long before the orgy, LSD drugging, and hallucination animation, I'd gotten the joke—though Biller's re-creation is not only right-on but rigorous.
  17. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
    There are so many complicated political, religious, and cultural issues swirling around Yoni's story, and Follow Me keeps them on the sidelines. It is pure hagiography.
  18. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."
  19. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    The look of the reference-heavy film, mostly shot on location in Brazil, is impeccably cheesy, but the Nazi humor and awkward sexist and racist eruptions smell a little stale. And yet, given time, the film develops an energy all its own.
  20. Trapped by the Mormons
    While positioned firmly as camp, the new Trapped by the Mormons is a surprisingly faithful rendering--at least until the flesh-eating zombies show up.
  21. Where Soldiers Come From
    Much of what's presented is familiar territory, but it's the moments that fracture prejudices and expectations that stick with you.
  22. A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer)
    Although smoothly directed, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea has little visual personality or dramatic urgency. What might have been a tough and adult take on a bond full of hope but thwarted by war plays more like an after-school special.
  23. Complete Unknown
    While [Rachel Weisz] is a compelling performer, the film is ultimately a Hitchcock-inspired thriller without too many real thrills.
  24. Back to Burgundy
    There doesn’t seem to be a romantic-comedy cliché missing from the bland French domestic Back to Burgundy, a wholly contrived post-adolescent coming-of-age yarn.
  25. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    Demme's documentary portrait, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, has no surfeit of good intentions. In fact, running over two hours, they're nearly suffocating.
  26. The Voices
    The Voices is a perfect film that's hard to watch.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Free Men
    Free Men never feels like a movie about a developing conscience, due largely to the shallowness of the protagonist as written and, by extension, Rahim's portrayal.
  28. The Triumph of Love
    It's a giddy farce worthy of Lucy and Ethel, and Peploe plays up the buffoonery.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pipe Dream
    The dialogue, by Walsh and Cynthia Kaplan, is sharp and nimble.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    The film's flashy you-are-there qualities only underscore the bittersweet gulf between NASCAR's seemingly self-actualized, life-risking gladiators and their softly padded, toddler-toting, ticket-buying fans.
  31. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The material is often weak, but the stars earn their paychecks.
  32. Beuys
    Veiel’s refreshingly open-ended approach invites you to find your own answers.
  33. God Help the Girl
    Browning captures Eve's weariness and enthusiasm, and her lovely voice and crisp delivery gives Murdoch's labored lyrics a vulnerable immediacy.
  34. Wildling
    The attention paid to images does not translate to character development, story, or dialogue, leaving little emotional resonance, while making me seriously wonder if the men telling these stories understand much at all about female sexuality.
  35. The Fast and the Furious
    (You) might be charmed by the film's blend of kineticism, car-culture rituals, and hilariously flat-footed dialogue.
  36. Amira & Sam
    Writer-director Sean Mullin gives us some of the usual beats, but he and his performers invest them with rare persuasive power.
  37. Norwegian Wood
    Despite Hung's obvious gifts as a filmmaker, he has ditched this raw immediacy in favor of a drifty, overstuffed, ultimately dull melodrama.
  38. Baskin
    On the evidence of the first half of Baskin alone, Evrenol seems to be a filmmaker who understands character, tension, and terror. Now all he needs is some follow-through.
  39. To the Wonder
    For all the absurdity, there's also something strangely touching about it, maybe because for once Malick has allowed himself to be unsure. To the Wonder is an irresolute piece of work, a sketchbook of a movie, one made by a human being rather than an august master.
  40. Lady Sings the Blues
    By any formal standards, it is a mess, but, surprisingly often, a moving mess. [23 Nov 1972, p.77]
    • Village Voice
  41. Steep
    Blandly beautiful, inarticulate extreme-skiing documentary.
  42. A Kid Like Jake
    Howard, who is trans himself, approaches the film with sensitivity, but it ends up feeling like a conversation to be continued, not resolved. At least there’s some classic Claire Danes crying.
  43. Hitch
    While far from perfect, Hitch is a rare studio product that earns the goodwill it smugly demands.
  44. 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.
  45. Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings
    The equally thrilling and exhausting Hong Kong martial arts fantasy Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings boasts more inventive weapons, monsters, and plot twists than most Western audiences will know what to do with.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ffolkes
    Floating somewhere between thriller and comedy, ffolkes reunites McLaglen with a very game Moore.
  47. Sunday in New York
    A triumph of bounce over banality. [19 Mar 1964, p.12]
    • Village Voice
  48. Operation Finale
    Rather than the cagey, caged mastermind who later would play dumb at trial, this Eichmann is just another movie bad guy — and Operation Finale is just another movie.
  49. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Shameless Eisenhower-era corn.
  50. Before I Fall
    Russo-Young gives this teen parable the thriller treatment to ward off any cheese, and watching Deutch learn her lesson with that expressive face of hers is a singular, moving experience.
  51. Life in a Day
    The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).
  52. Dolphin Tale 2
    Dolphin Tale 2 is a singularly honest animal film: It never insists that Winter wouldn't prefer to be elsewhere . . . or that what she feels for them has anything to do with what we think of as love.
  53. August: Osage County
    August: Osage County, however, bitterly funny in some places and numbingly earnest in others, is just too much Streep. But all is not lost. Some of her fellow actors are resourceful enough to reconstruct themselves after being obliterated.
  54. American Anarchist
    Powell can be evasive and embarrassed at times — who wouldn’t be, faced with the worst of your own youthful mind? But Siskel seems to think this film is exposing a monster in the now rather than witnessing a man wrestle with his past selves.
  55. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Inoffensively glib and innocuously arty.
  56. Hats Off
    Weddell isn't really representative of an older generation of actors; she's one of a kind. But this visually indifferent documentary never explains why that matters.
  57. Troubadours
    The film is entertaining but hardly penetrating.
  58. Tokyo Tribe
    Tokyo Tribe is Sono cackling hysterically while smashing a keytar. Sure, there are a few sour notes, but he's made a great blast of noise.
  59. The Mist
    A lumbering and depressing movie.
  60. Jug Face
    Kinkle shows a deft hand at pacing and the gore is kept to a minimum.
  61. X-Men: The Last Stand
    If little else, the third and supposedly final entry in the X-Men mega-franchise suggests that some movies -- or at any rate some formulas -- are not just critic-proof, they might even be director-proof.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Adam Resurrected
    One cannot recommend this film strongly enough.
  63. Lads & Jockeys
    Director Benjamin Marquet mingles black-and-white footage of students past with that of his current focus - three 14-year-olds in their first year of a jockey apprenticeship - to build a sense of specificity and continuum into a timeless passage.
  64. Jarhead
    One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cosmopolis
    To the extent that Cosmopolis functions as a super-literal conceptual exercise, it's simultaneously irritating and fascinating.
  66. Acts of Worship
    The opposition of Christian spirituality and the bad religion of drugs is enough to send you down to the feel-good bodega just on principle.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Footloose
    Nothing in Footloose comes close, in this respect, to the best moments of Brewer's previous, vibrant if uneven films "Hustle & Flow" and "Black Snake Moan," but this heartfelt retread of a notably thin popcorn property does come alive during an illicit dance-off.
  68. Jason Bourne
    Even when it comes to life, Jason Bourne offers very little that could stand on its own; its best scenes remind you of even better ones in the earlier films. There's a greatest-hits quality to the movie, only the band is tired and its heart isn't in it.
  69. Love Liza
    What should have been an idiosyncratic 20-minute short is distended by repetition and loads of standard indie-film time-killers.
  70. Swimming Upstream
    Rush and Davis perform strikingly against type, suffusing an otherwise average genre pic with quiet dignity.
  71. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    The 100-Year-Old Man's equal-opportunity irreverence doesn't often translate to cleverness.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-screen
    Ulmer emerges as the bigger-than-life symbol he probably desired to project: the brooding Old World artist, eternally frustrated with American market pressures, preferring to rule in Hell than serve in Hollywood.
  73. Luck by Chance
    Remains a fluffy fantasy as trivial as an episode of Entourage.
  74. Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    An exhilarating document.
  75. Heneral Luna
    At a minimum, the film might inspire some people to hit up Google for a crash course on this historical narrative.
  76. La scorta (re-release)
    Tognazzi's use of public spaces, streets, and offices is three-dimensional and exciting in a Michael Mann–ish way, and Ennio Morricone's all-bass-register piano score keeps things nervous. But La Scorta suffers from an anemic plot pulse-you could say the judge's bodyguards did their job too well, because nothing much happens-and the anticlimax is as dull as it is pessimistic.
  77. Help!
    Help does not indicate that Lester has depleted his bag of tricks, but rather that he is too addicted to fragmentation for its own sake. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]
    • Village Voice
  78. No Stone Unturned
    Gibney may encourage viewers to condemn the police, but his self-righteous editorializing doesn’t make up for the lack of convincing evidence.
  79. Wolf Totem
    Wolf Totem itself becomes a pitched battle for supremacy between the breathtaking glories of nature and the grinding banality of man. Here, as ever, nature loses.
  80. Pirate Radio
    Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K., and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore with most of its better bits excised.
  81. The Reader
    Like many narrative filmmakers who walk on their tippy-toes when dealing with the Holocaust, neither Daldry nor Hare seems eager to make the material his own.
  82. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    Florida-born folksinger Jim White serves as guide on this musical tour of the rural South, conceptualized less as a state of mind than as an atmosphere.
  83. The Swan
    Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.
  84. Life Is Beautiful
    Life Is Beautiful is funny (kinda) and even tasteful (sorta). But in its fantasy of divine grace, it is also nonsense.
  85. Defamation
    Like most good documentaries, Defamation poses more questions than it purports to answer, before arriving at the mildly reductive postulation that what's past is past.
  86. Stoker
    Park's methodical but tonally uneven direction too often eschews luridness; it's as if he can't decide exactly how far to push his material into the loopy. Still, his assured and evocative camerawork intimates that peril lurks everywhere, and there's an alien quality to its performances and dialogue that suggests a world slightly unhinged.
  87. The King
    The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.
  88. Love & Air Sex
    What's remarkable is that despite the sweaty overdetermination of the film's dude-bro interactions and the whole prefabricated concept of performance air sex, the love story has actual depth and sadness.
  89. Trouble with the Curve
    Here is the irony: Trouble With the Curve embodies all of the values it espouses - it is an old-fashioned, proficient, amiable, and decent movie - but it has no instinct.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hard Candy
    A film that forges identification with its victimized heroine like none I've seen in decades. (The Nova Scotia–born Page, a Molly Ringwald type who was only 15 when the movie was made, leaves little doubt as to whether a kid can play a grown-up's icky game and win.)
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Go Further
    Go Further meanders--narratively as well as geographically--all over the map.
  92. Defiance
    There are subtitles and vaguely East European accents; there is romance and rebirth, tears and regular pauses for gallows humor (at which we Jews are known to be very good, on account of our long history of persecution).
  93. Nerve
    The city and the plot points wheel right by, the leads fetchingly entranced with each other. If one patch of dares disappoints, there's another coming right up, and the directors stage and shoot them with swooning neon kinecticism.
  94. The Keeping Room
    The film's frustrating, fascinating, at times too eager to shock. But it's also daring and eccentric.
  95. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    The complexity of feminism for young girls today is displayed with rare hilarity and insight.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bridge
    Ghoulish documentary.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Brown Sugar
    Draws a belabored association between romance and hip-hop, and it's hard not to wish the parallel lines would hurry up and converge.
  98. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    Against the prevailing cheerlessness, these intensively choreographed fights, many shot in audacious, roving single takes, are like glimpses into a dream world.
  99. Gayby
    Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year - after Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends With Kids" - in Gayby, a comedy that, much like the perfunctory p-in-the-v it depicts, gives about 30 seconds of pleasure before going limp.
  100. Orchestra of Exiles
    Although the movie is overreliant on chintzy-looking and rather corny historical reenactments, these are counterbalanced by anecdote-rich interviews, including descendants of Huberman's first orchestra, human testament to the family tree of Israeli musicianship that he planted.
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