Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Emperor's New Clothes
    It can be hard to take someone so pleased with himself seriously, but amid his grandstanding, Brand does offer some solutions to problems many of us rightfully feel are intractable.
  2. Love Songs
    That Honoré knows a lot about movies is beyond question--but from first frame to last, Love Songs stays as icy to the touch as Julie's premature corpse.
  3. Samson and Delilah
    A deglamorized couple-on-the-run story, Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah doubles as a portrait of a tiny Australian aboriginal community.
  4. Family Affair
    While Colvard's film is always queasily watchable, as with other voyeuristic entertainments that insist on making the private public, there's the sense that such matters may be better dealt with in-house-or in a courtroom-than writ large on a movie screen.
  5. Viva
    Despite its gorgeous views and a pair of strong turns from veteran Cuban actors Perugorría and García, the film doesn't connect to the heart of its central character.
  6. Southside with You
    Both actors occasionally hit stumbling blocks with the wordy script and Tanne's direction, neither of which allows quite enough room for the characters to think and feel onscreen.
  7. Out of the Dark
    Stylishly filmed and often scary, Out of the Dark unspools a conclusion as conventional and button-down as a wide tie knot and a pair of wingtips.
  8. Viktoria
    Bulgarian filmmaker Maya Vitkova's feature debut, Viktoria, is an impressive display of stylistic control and directorial vision, even if it doesn't always hold together.
  9. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself.
  10. Denial
    The movie is fascinating in its approach to legal arguments, forensic evidence, and the uses and abuses of history — but, like the courtroom at its center, it doesn't have much feel for the feels.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stagedoor
    Shiva has a sensitive eye for rarefied outcasts.
  12. A Very Long Engagement
    Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.
  13. Be Cool
    Rock is brave, fully invested in his character, and with a wide-open face and foolish grin, outrageously funny. It's a singular performance achieved without condescension or camp. Who'd a-thunk it?
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Master Qi and the Monkey King
    Quietly admiring of its subjects' skill and dedication, Govenar's straightforward documentary does a capable job of extending that mission.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Naked in Ashes
    Naked reads, in places, like a street fair on the Santa Monica Pier. But it's utterly sincere about the practices it depicts.
  16. Punks
    Thanks to an uninhibited screenplay and the easy, unforced chemistry of its ensemble cast, Punks is mostly good, snappy fun.
  17. Hello I Must Be Going
    With a digital sheen exacerbating the aura of slightness, Hello vamps along in its low indie-rom-com key toward a climactic mother-daughter moment not nearly as harrowing as the one in Lynskey's 1994 debut, but moving nonetheless.
  18. The Debut
    Has a sweet low-budget quality that sometimes slips into TV-movie schmaltz.
  19. Valley of Tears
    Most of the best moments in Hart Perry's latest documentary can be found in its opening half-hour, a vivid record of a 1979 strike by Mexican American migrant farmworkers in the onion fields of Raymondville, Texas.
  20. Croupier
    Polished and adroit ado about next to nothing, Hodges's film owes everything to Owen, who nails the vaguely unsavory, unreadable, half-lidded hunks that inhabit every profitable entertainment-industry outpost.
  21. Princess Cyd
    While the chemistry between Pinnick and Spence is sweet and familial, I couldn’t help but think so much of this film is just…nice. It’s that pretty feather you found in the grass. And maybe you’ll take it home, but will likely forget you did.
  22. Alone with Her
    This first feature is shot "first person" and is first and foremost a concept -- at least as interesting to think about as to actually watch.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Last Dance is riveting when it focuses on the challenges of crossing a generational divide --The movie loses steam toward the end.
  24. Summer in Berlin
    German director Andreas Dresen has made an oddly buoyant little film about loneliness: Part Sex in der City, part Dogme doldrums, Summer in Berlin is most affecting as a character study of two women in their late thirties.
  25. Pleasantville
    Funny for about half an hour, Pleasantville thereafter becomes an increasingly lugubrious, ultimately exasperating mix of technological wonder and ideological idiocy.
  26. 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.
  27. Missionary
    The tension in Missionary is surprisingly effective, especially given how easy it should be to put out an APB on a guy on a freaking bicycle, and there are enough scares to remind you to keep the chain latched when those polite young men in the slacks and neckties drop by.
  28. Frantz
    The savage derangements of grief so guttingly explored by Ozon in Under the Sand (2000), a career-revitalizing project for Charlotte Rampling, are decorously treated in Frantz.
  29. The Last Ride
    It portrays Williams in a generally sympathetic light without whitewashing his vice-loving, belligerent ways or mythologizing them in a bid for postmortem psychoanalysis.
  30. 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.
  31. Abendland
    There's material from a phone-in psychoanalysis center, the dumping grounds of London's surveillance-camera feed, and the detox tent at some massive biergarten - like much of the film, mordantly funny in a kind of pursed-lips, arched-eyebrows way.
  32. Criminal Activities
    The script veers from comic, narrated episodes to surprising violence, planting early narrative seeds that yield some effective surprises later, a dynamic range that's pretty comfortable to old hands Travolta and Travolta's Chili Palmer wig after all these years.
  33. Orgazmo
    A ridiculous soft-core kung-fu porn film about a ridiculous hard-core one, Orgazmo is the kind of movie that improves according to the lateness of the hour.
  34. Northfork
    Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bulgarian Lovers
    We'd gladly give ourselves over to the literate if chatty script and the generous helpings of Bulgarian beefcake, but our interest flags the moment Biba puts his clothes back on.
  36. Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    Viewers may find the narrative aimlessness here frustrating.
  37. Love Is All You Need
    Formulaic despite its trespasses, Love Is All You Need leaves the lingering sensation that more fun could have been had if the film cut loose and lived a little.
  38. The Midnight Swim
    Less is often more when it comes to depicting such rituals onscreen, and Smith is highly attuned to the simple power of, say, characters cryptically chanting under their breath.
  39. Lord of War
    Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.
  40. Flightplan
    Becomes more satisfying than the stock thriller–star vehicle it begins and ends as.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You All Are Captains
    When onscreen Laxe loses control of the film-within-the-film, off-screen Laxe's voice is subsumed into dreamily beautiful footage following a "script" laid out earlier by the kids. Or so it seems - by that point, we've seen enough of Laxe's brilliantly constructed deconstruction of "truth" versus "fiction" to know to question the authorship of every frame.
  42. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    Hribar's film is not remarkable or ingenious in its creation of ethnic gusto and peripheral naturalism, but it's adept enough for a pass on M:i:III.
  43. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Britishly, the movie has a knack for inflating little sap bubbles as if mostly for the joy of popping them.
  44. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Investigates the events leading up to the coup d'état; that it was the second for Aristide (overthrown in 1991, mere months after becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president) darkens the film's triumphalist-sounding title.
  45. Woodshock
    Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.
  46. Charlie Bartlett
    Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough.
  47. Risk/Reward
    Holder and Parker tread lightly on issues of sexism, and sex in general, and leave us wishing more questions were asked.
  48. The Acid House
    There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.
  49. Ben-Hur
    In paring down and streamlining its source material, this new version also saps its heft.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultimate X: The Movie
    Nausea-inducing street luge provides the requisite kinesthetic thrill of this mega-cinematic genre.
  51. Preservation
    Christopher Denham's Preservation is a violent yet agreeably goofy throwback to the survival-in-the-woods genre.
  52. Viceroy's House
    Using the trappings of old-fashioned romanticism, Chadha envisions the cataclysmic upheaval of millions in the traumatic lives of a few.
  53. 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.
  54. The Beautiful City
    At times resembling an Iranian "Dead Man Walking," Beautiful City goes out of its way to give each character a fair shake-a few patriarchal rages notwithstanding, even the vengeful father is treated sympathetically. But the script, overly laden with red herrings, forces its characters into some improbable dilemmas.
  55. Gaza Strip
    A documentary to make the stones weep -- as shameful as it is scary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Fuller Life
    Two things are clear in this documentary. The first is that Samuel Fuller was brilliant, optimistic, talented -- an auteur in every right -- and well deserving of all the praise and admiration he inspired. The second is that this is a product of a first-time director, not quite experienced enough to take full advantage of the medium or know how to bring every element together.
  57. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Less persuasive is Forbes's perfunctory, psychologically thin rummage through Atwater's childhood for a traumatic event that would explain his utter ruthlessness.
  58. Tag
    No matter how much they remind us that this is all based on a true story, at heart Tag is still a dumb, goofy Hollywood comedy with big stars running around making glorious asses of themselves. It’d be a pretty good one, too, were it not so afraid to embrace its essence.
  59. Winter Brothers
    Pálmason can occasionally get bogged down in his ambiguous leanings.... But many moments attest to the high ceiling of Pálmason’s abilities.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Though the film never transcends its own neo-boho quirk, it concludes in a marvelous final shot: a long take set to Gang of Four, grungy and materialist in the Jacobs tradition.
  61. F.I.S.T.
    I found myself reasonably absorbed in this grown-up though not sufficiently lived-in and thought-through entertainment. [01 May 1978, p.45]
    • Village Voice
  62. The Law in These Parts
    Dialectical and precise to the point of exhaustion, The Law in These Parts applies a cold anger to one of the geopolitical world's most passionate discords.
  63. High Tech, Low Life
    Whatever their orientation, both men are intrepid in pursuing the truth, the consequences of which are made clear in a series of terrifying late-film crackdowns.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    800 Bullets
    Though the high-noon climax drags somewhat, Álex de la Iglesia's charming comedy celebrates the resilient power of dreams, memories, and the movies.
  65. The Sting
    The plot has many twists, few surprises, and one gaping hole, which becomes apparent only after you walk out of the theater and have a chance to think. But pure popcorn like this is hardly worthy of serious analysis...Fortunately, the stars have not lost their charm and authority.
  66. Hilary and Jackie
    Hilary and Jackie tries far too hard to dictate emotional involvement right out of the gate, and you're left counting off the doom-laden cues for things that are sure to return full circle.
  67. A.C.O.D.
    A.C.O.D. ultimately suffers from a rare affliction: an overkill of editing. Whole scenes—especially the farcical finale—peter out just at the simmering point.
  68. Night Train to Lisbon
    Gentle has its charms, and August's vision of the world, archaic though it may willingly be, is appealingly urbane .
  69. Slack Bay
    Slack Bay is nothing if not anti-authoritarian, and while its anarchic energy is appealing in small doses, it becomes tiresome when it turns toward cruelty.
  70. Code 46
    Late in the day, Code 46 bursts its chemical chains to become a convincingly irrational love story.
  71. Hover
    Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.
  72. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    There’s no self-reflexive media criticism in Nobody Speak, only the simple plea for Americans to resolutely support journalism, in both principle and practice.
  73. What Keeps You Alive
    Minihan’s ambitions are towering, so it’s only right to note that he doesn’t quite get there. The ideas, even the emotions, don’t develop and grow.
  74. Butterfly Tongues
    It's boilerplate Miramax: a sentimental import with lovingly photographed Euro locale.
  75. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    The doc is gorgeously filmed, well edited, and works in close-up, but the result is more voyeuristic than revealing, except to show that desolation is among those things that cannot be seen or touched.
  76. Brand Upon the Brain!
    Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but . . . the gimmick's the prize. Without all the hoopla, there simply isn't enough variation to this stylized fever-dream to justify its fatiguing running time, nor to call it anything less than predictably Maddin–esque.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blindsight
    Blindsight works best when it casts off the constraints of the adventure tale it wasn't meant to be and settles into a deft and humanistic treatment of blindness in Tibet.
  78. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Philosophical ambitions notwithstanding, Hiding and Seeking is basically a personal essay, and the undeniably moving family saga takes over completely in the film's second half.
  79. How I Killed a Saint
    Throughout, first-time director Teona Strugar Mitevska (the sibling of the lead actress) demonstrates a keen eye for off-center compositions, a striking visual depiction of a world out of balance.
  80. Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer?
    Director/producer Eve Marson doesn't characterize Hurwitz as devious or nefarious. Instead, she presents him as a naïve, way-too-trusting schnook — an even more troubling diagnosis.
  81. Occupy Love
    The photography is beautiful, the scenes of crowds and their signs arresting, and the interviews with individual protesters...are often inspiring.
  82. Unscrewed
    Even if actorliness sometimes invades the tired faux-doc form, Unscrewed is, in the end, a likable, wrinkly taint of a movie.
  83. Chicken with Plums
    The evocation of passionate love is palpable, what with Amalric's sad longing and Farahani's Nobel Prize–winning face and everything, and the honest undercurrent of melancholy keeps the whole thing from becoming unmoored.
  84. The Italian
    Lured, perhaps, by the promise of international markets, Kravchuk instead opts for routine uplift, and once the heroic journey is set in motion, the rest is ballast.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Before the Rains
    Saddled with a predictable lushness--even a streak of blood on a dirty window is aestheticized until it looks like stained glass--and the sensuality here can crowd out the sense. Still, director Santosh Sivan imparts a vastness and a sense of wonder to the film, qualities reminiscent of a Thomas Cole painting.
  86. Blackhat
    There’s visual thinking everywhere you look in Blackhat, which is great until you realize that it’s bled into a kind of overthinking — the movie is too much of a good thing, an exercise that flattens any potential exhilaration or excitement into the sensation of grading a term paper.
  87. Kitchen Stories
    Slight but sardonic, Norwegian director Bent Hamer's deadpan Kitchen Stories makes a taciturn comedy of nothingness out of color-coordinated '50s coziness and Scandinavian social planning.
  88. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    Gibney, a prolific and skilled documentarian, marshals and organizes a raft of information as deftly as anyone could wish. But his conclusions are murkier than they might be.
  89. Electric Shadows
    Electric Shadows is committed to movies-as-escape swoonery, but the script's late disasters are also predicated on cinema and filmgoing, suggesting an ambivalence the rest of the film seems oblivious to.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Young Unknowns
    Numbing but effective debut.
  91. White Bird in a Blizzard
    If the results are occasionally broad and schematic, the actors (Woodley especially) are anything but, and Araki has an absolute field day adorning his kitschy, 1950s-ish view of suburban Los Angeles with a string of showoffy colors.
  92. Contraband
    No one, however, could mistake Contraband for anything but what it is: a shift-job genre movie - not a bad day's work, content to match the blocky trudge of its star rather than attempt panache.
  93. The China Hustle
    Rothstein’s film, for the most part, is more well-reported exposé than it is cliché-driven agitprop, a film that blows the whistle on ongoing financial crimes.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    Overreaching in many of its laudatory appraisals, the film is mostly GOP-boosting rhetoric in the guise of a dull History Channel special.
  95. Voices of Iraq
    It's certainly important for American leftists to consider that many Iraqis have benefited from the war that we oppose, but the omission of historical context here misrepresents the checkered history of American involvement in the region.
  96. Adult Beginners
    Married-in-real-life screenwriters Liz Flahive (Nurse Jackie) and Jeff Cox (Blades of Glory) can do poignant (not tossing family memorabilia) and clever (connecting Skype, hairspray, and stepparents), though the humor is intermittent.
  97. Machuca
    Machuca is still a half-measure. Wood is fastidious about period set design, but not much else; rather than burning with experience, the film feels opportunistic.
  98. Be with Me
    Sometimes clumsy and dry, always sympathetic, and wryly interested in the impact food has on social intercourse, Be With Me is eventually affecting once its elliptical shape becomes clear.
  99. Loves Her Gun
    Has a lived-in, almost documentary-like realism to it, but as drama it's occasionally inert.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Iceman
    Ultimately The Iceman is a blend of Mafia-film cliché and the jarring reality of lives undone by crime.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »