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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    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shoah (re-release)
    It has come to serve as a solemn metaphor for remembrance, as well as for butt-numbing endurance.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie
    Perhaps the fly-on-the-wall approach of Esrick's mentor (and this film's executive producer) D.A. Pennebaker would have been more revealing. Instead, we get just a mystery man in white.
  3. Rabbit à la Berlin
    Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.
  4. Mundane History (Jao nok krajok)
    The ultimate break comes with a glorious full-screen CGI zoom into blazing heavenly bodies, a refutation of the title's modesty.
  5. Beijing Taxi
    The highlight is the crop-cut woman of the group, Wei Caixia, resoundingly vivid in her mix of ambivalence and confidence and worth her own film. Why not this one?
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    And Everything Is Going Fine
    Seen as his final monologue, the film is both an invaluable portfolio of his talent, and a tribute rendered in the style of its subject.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tangled
    The movie's real accomplishments are in its look, which was generated inside a computer but is as warm and rich as a painting.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Burlesque
    What you remember when it's over is the impact of Aguilera's voice, but not what she's singing; montages of body parts, but not the choreography; and Aguilera's face, music-video-trained to hold a close-up so emotionally exaggerated, you might even call it a burlesque.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    The best bits of Deathly Hallows are the moments that play with the tensions of late adolescence.
  10. Hemingway's Garden of Eden
    Director John Irvin, whose hapless 40-plus-year résumé runs from early Schwarzenegger to late Harold Pinter, never gets in the way, but the resulting sangria cocktail is mild, unchallenging, and kinda dull.
  11. You Won't Miss Me
    Ry Russo-Young's character study of a gal passing the worst years of her life in cool North Brooklyn, leads off with a scene that lets you know right away that you're in the good hands of a young director sensitive to the idiosyncratic details that breathe life into a movie.
  12. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    Apted seems too often to think like an old-hand action director and not enough like the 12-year-old boy who probably read Lewis's book. To enter Narnia, to really go giddy with the bright, laughing promise of a quest, a young viewer with no convenient magic portal of his own needs characters to bring him along. This is, I believe, the difference between a classic and a successful franchise reboot.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Company Men
    The Company Men is maybe best understood as a chick flick about dicks: Before its too-easy conclusion, the movie offers a multifaceted glimpse at what can happen when the connective tissue between a man and his source of income is cut, and rarely suggests that it could be anything less than excruciating to stop the bleeding.
  14. The Tempest
    The film lacks a pulse. There's sound and fury, but the result is more drizzle than tempest.
  15. The Fighter
    It plays as a "Rocky"-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up-all the way to the top of the world.
  16. Mars
    Using a combination of hand-drawn, 3-D, and rotoscope animation to tell his story of an unlikely trio's voyage to Mars in 2015, Marslett struck upon a unique look and tone, spacey, soothing, and strange.
  17. Come Undone
    This self-consciously modern movie contains classical pleasures.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Queen of the Lot
    Queen of the Lot is sort of sweet in its earnestness, sort of frustratingly delusional, and ultimately unsubstantial-but there are moments of meta-provocation that almost justify the lopsided enterprise.
  19. Night Catches Us
    Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's striking debut is the rare recent American-independent film that goes beyond the private dramas of its protagonists, imagining them as players in broader historical moments.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    It's likely the best anti-Christmas Christmas movie since "Bad Santa."
  21. Bhutto
    Contextualizing the prime minister's rise to power within a larger portrait of a nation under constant internal and external siege, Bhutto conveys a forceful sense of tectonic social and geopolitical shifts, as well as the courageous, heartbreaking personal sacrifices its subject made in service to both her homeland and ideals.
  22. All Good Things
    All Good Things patina of fictionalization has not prevented the cagey Durst Organization from threatening a lawsuit. They need not worry, though. The film succeeds only in indicting its authors.
  23. I Love You Phillip Morris
    Nothing tops ILYPM's Jim Carrey ... in the most gloriously raunchy, unrepentant moment in the an(n)als of Hollywood A-listers doing gay-for-pay.
  24. Black Swan
    A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."
  25. Willets Point
    A jarring fusion of blue-collar lament and the-more-you-know medical drama.
  26. The Legend of Pale Male
    Despite spending nearly 15 years documenting this phenomenon, Lilien proves wholly uninterested in investigating his human subjects' habit of vigorously anthropomorphizing, and projecting their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and Daddy issues onto the striking hawk.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kawasaki's Rose
    Performed and directed with assured elegance, Kawasaki's Rose is a film that recognizes life as a tumultuous mess of both noble and base intensions and actions, as well as one that understands the thorny tragedies such chaos often leaves in its wake.
  28. Undertow
    Undertow, is sublime. Set in a small, picturesque Peruvian fishing village, it's less a coming-out tale than a magic realism–infused coming-of-consciousness love story.
  29. The Nutcracker
    The wildest thing about this movie is its faith that what kids (and parents) really want for Christmas is a Nutcracker version of the Final Solution.
  30. 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.
  31. Me, Too
    The film powerfully hits the note of universalism that is its goal; haven't many of us fallen for someone that we, they, and the world deem out of our league?
  32. Today's Special
    Mandvi (who co-wrote the script with Jonathan Bines) does well as the straight man, but his journey to identity (chaperoned by a magical cabbie/world-class chef played by Naseeruddin Shah) strays too far into tacky ethnic farce.
  33. Made in Dagenham
    Though nothing here is as rousing as "The Pajama Game's" raise-baiting "Seven and a Half Cents," the always-welcome Miranda Richardson steals the film in a small role as Barbara Castle, Labour P.M.
  34. The Next Three Days
    Once the second act begins with a title card announcing "The Last 3 Months"-the amount of time John spends cooking up labyrinthine plans to spring Lara-Haggis's film becomes interminably nonsensical.
  35. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
    Leyser's collation of interviews and stock footage is polished enough to effectively perpetuate the Burroughs legend.
  36. Shake Hands with the Devil
    Though the film, based on Dallaire's memoir, can veer toward deification of the general, it's hugely effective.
  37. Eichmann
    Young's well-intentioned dramatic re-enactment of their encounters is burdened by sepia-period accessorizing, laborious flashbacks, spurious comparisons between the two men's domestic lives, and the downright bizarre casting of Franka Potente as Less's ailing wife and Stephen Fry as an Israeli pol who wants the case wrapped up in five minutes or less.
  38. Helena from the Wedding
    The group is frequently drunk, but writer-director Joseph Infantolino's handling is lucid, a necessity to keep up the sense of vague dread and walking-on-eggshell egos.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Disco and Atomic War
    If another contemporary nonfiction film makes a better case for the still-controversial tactic of blending scripted scenes into factual footage, I haven't seen it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Morning Glory
    The only love Morning Glory truly cares about is the passionate but sexless amour fou between a girl and her work.
  41. Change Nothing (Ne Change Rien)
    Call it the Passion of Jeanne: Accompanied for much of the movie by a single reverb-heavy guitar and a snare drum, Balibar demonstrates a carefully calibrated lack of affect and a voice as smoky as a carton of Gitanes.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Marine Story
    The movie becomes a lesbian amalgam of "Walking Tall" and "Billy Jack." Relentlessly clumsy and predictable, A Marine Story is set in late 2008, just as a new political breeze is blowing. But its abrupt, wishful postscript is still just a fairy tale.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story
    Nevertheless, if not as stirring as the similar "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg," it remains a reasonably comprehensive tribute to athletics as the great melting pot.
  44. Red Hill
    It's clear that Hughes knows his Midnight Oil, but he's ignorant of the craft of economic action filmmaking. However arguably noble his film's intent to redress historical grievance, a poorly filmed shoot-out is never more than exactly that.
  45. Outside the Law
    The production design is nice enough, but Bouchareb's four-country co-production isn't an epic-it's just long.
  46. Fair Game
    Penn's lachrymosity and hotheaded indignity seem cartooned against Watts's contained conviction-though more incongruous couples have certainly existed-but the film's assertion of Plame and Wilson as real people rather than characters consists mostly of draining them of anything compelling.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Four Lions
    He's (Chris Morris) breaking taboos because broken taboos can be hilarious.
  48. For Colored Girls
    The greatest frustration-not just in For Colored Girls, but in Perry's entire oeuvre-is witnessing talented (and often criminally underemployed) actresses struggle with the material they've been given.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    127 Hours
    As Boyle's film flits from the real world-the heavy reality of a man in a canyon, pinned, near death-to the world of dreams and delusions, so Franco's performance transforms, encompassing both universes.
  50. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    Spitzer, whose tireless efforts to redeem himself led to his cooperation in this doc, receives an entirely sympathetic-yet thoroughly researched-treatment from Gibney.
  51. A Small Act
    Arnold just expects her audience to accept that Mburu's doing the best he can and revere him for it.
  52. Walkaway
    Walkaway has an intimate understanding of the push-pull experienced by its gallery of twentysomethings who are comfortable with Western customs, but drawn by an ineluctable bond to a culture they can't shake.
  53. Inspector Bellamy
    It's an ostensive crime film at once symmetrical, surprising, and knowingly cinephilic.
  54. Amer
    The pleasures of this gorgeous, clever, and visceral film are almost exclusively aesthetic. Those unmoved or alienated by the porn of pain may be left flopping as nervelessly as one of the movie's severed limbs.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jolene
    Throughout, Chastain delivers a full-bodied debut performance, but she's ultimately stuck taking her wandering-soul protagonist far more seriously than it-or the film-deserves.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Wild Target
    The whole time I was watching Wild Target, I was trying to figure out just how to explain its weirdly old-fashioned comedic tone. I could talk about its absurd plot...
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Monsters
    Director Gareth Edwards, a CGI artist by trade, has created a dystopian landscape that's so naturalistic, it's uncanny.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Kids Grow Up
    Seemingly modest but stealthily ambitious, Block's feature-length home movies have a way of spiraling outward just as he's drilling inward, of becoming profoundly universal when most nakedly personal. And despite their candor, the Blocks are less exhibitionistic than welcoming. They make for very dear company.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waste Land
    A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome to the Rileys
    Try as Stewart might, she can't turn this Manic Trixie Nightmare Girl into a real person.
  61. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    Like the first two Millennium movies, this final installment feels thoughtlessly put together, its script unpruned and rushed through, all to capitalize on the staggering worldwide popularity of its dead author.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    Yet that dissonance is also what makes Strange Powers, a 10-years-in-the-making record of Merritt and his Magnetic Fields bandmates, so intriguing.
  63. Vision: From the Life of Hildegard Von Bingen
    Vision is more immediate and immersive when dealing in the jealous attachments among sisters; when circumstance and politics tear Richardis from Hildegard, Sukowa's performance rears to towering heights of abjection.
  64. Boxing Gym
    Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Inhale
    Ripped from the headlines and sensationalized for your would-be pleasure, Inhale uses the appalling phenomenon of illegal organ trafficking as the basis for an almost-as-appalling hyperventilated thriller.
  66. Kalamity
    Though Hausler's sincerity is palpable, his efforts at world-weary ennui seem premature, and his wisdom about what motivates random violence in the youth of today proves too callow for a satisfying climax.
  67. Conviction
    In all fairness, Swank's unsubtle performance is often an extension of the bluntly dumb lines she and other cast members must deliver.
  68. Hereafter
    Hereafter is not just a stretch for Eastwood, it's a contortion. The irrationality of the premise is exceeded only by the strategic irrationalities of the plot.
  69. Tamara Drewe
    Frears might have accelerated the comic pacing, but the story is a good one and events come nicely to a boil.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Modus Operandi
    A handmade, endearingly disreputable valentine to no-budget, maximum-impact cinema, Modus Operandi is seriously seedy and truly inspired.
  71. BearCity
    Only an old pro like John Waters could pull off an awkward bathtub threesome that ends in a golden shower and a head injury.
  72. Knucklehead
    A schmaltzy family comedy that won't pass the smell test for kids, parents, or even stoner second cousins, Knucklehead is too sluggish for young attention spans, and not inventive enough to keep adults engaged.
  73. Punching the Clown
    Punching the Clown mirrors Henry's act: a minor triumph whose cult following doesn't yet know it exists.
  74. The Guilty
    The Guilty beautifully demonstrates how people can act with absolute conviction even when they don’t have the full picture of a situation, and the monstrousness this can in turn lead to. And if that doesn’t speak to our time, then I don’t know what does.
  75. Mandy
    The film’s two sides — the soft, textured reverie of its first half, and the surreal, angular savagery of its second — exist in perpetual balance; one would die without the other.
  76. Madeline's Madeline
    Who’s telling this story? you might wonder, and therein lies the radical, breathtaking beauty of this film. Madeline’s Madeline is at once intoxicated by the world and deeply terrified of it.
  77. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade rejects predictable plot points and instead lives on the electric edge of awkwardness and uncertainty and doubt that represents the middle school experience; you never quite know what’s going to happen to Kayla, and that feels right.
  78. Leave No Trace
    Granik films with subtlety and quiet grace, but Leave No Trace explodes in the mind.
  79. The Tale
    It takes a remarkably assured artist to make all this work, and Fox is savvy about how she eases us into her complicated narrative.
  80. Police Story (1985)
    Chan seems to do everything he can think of to ingratiate himself with viewers.
  81. Chasing Great
    It’s clear where all of this is going, but McCaw surprises with his mental rigor (he excelled academically) and total commitment to his sport (he plays with a stress fracture in his foot).
  82. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    It’s hard not to experience Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? and not get shivers up your spine — from fear, from anger, and from the beauty of Wilkerson’s filmmaking.
  83. The Great Silence (1968)
    Because Silence’s might doesn’t eventually set things right for Snow Hill’s residents, The Great Silence goes out with a devastating bang.
  84. Trafficked
    The makers of Trafficked walk a fine line, embedding their advocacy in an action film and conveying the horror of sexual slavery without edging into exploitation.
  85. Architects of Denial
    By uniting the measured voices of human rights advocates and impassioned pleas from the Armenian diaspora, they lay out the importance of a few words in the long quest for justice.
  86. World on a Wire (1973)
    A bit of a slog at 205 minutes, World on a Wire builds up to a satisfyingly nutty finale.
  87. RED
    Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest.
  88. Down Terrace
    Down Terrace has frequently been appreciated as "The Sopranos meets Mike Leigh." But a more fruitful comparison might be to last year's stand-out British satire "In the Loop": In both films, verbal aggression makes for the biggest laughs and the surest signs of moral decay.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jackass 3-D
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but Jackass is only Jackass when all is going to shit.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carlos
    Carlos is nevertheless a movie that one can somehow remember vividly for months. Much of this power is due to the whiplash widescreen cinematography (oft-mistaken for DV), the hopped-up editing, and, not least, Ramirez's aptly arrogant, fully transfixing, Method-style turn.
  91. 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.
  92. Gerrymandering
    It gets complicated: Re-districting in Chicago gave Obama a clear advantage in his Senate election, an inconvenient truth that Reichert leaves open to debate. A clearer example of gerrymandering's mendacity is offered by Tom DeLay, who rides his black heart into yet another political documentary and fills, as ever, the role of the indisputable villain.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Two Escobars
    A stranger to this story will guess how it ends by virtue of the fact that neither Andrés nor Pablo appear in current-day footage, but nonetheless, The Two Escobars ends up being quite the nail-biter.
  94. I Spit on Your Grave
    When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's Kind of a Funny Story
    "I used to think art was just bourgeois decadence," a wiser Craig says in the end, which is funny, because that's kind of what this film is.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life as We Know It
    The feminine fantasies Berlanti seemingly seeks to stoke are undercut by a vibe that's weirdly misogynistic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nowhere Boy
    Lacking the song's raw emotive power, Taylor-Wood's debut feature is a rote coming-of-age tableau that churns through stations of anger, inspiration, reconciliation, McCartney, and Harrison.
  98. Inside Job
    There's not much sense that the system can be voted out-not least because Barack Obama, shown campaigning on the crisis and elected in part to change the game, recruited his economic advisers from those who enabled the disaster.
  99. Marwencol
    Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot.
  100. Rachel
    Bitton, best known for her 2004 nonfiction film "Wall," about the barrier Israel is building along its border with the occupied territories of the West Bank, questions her interviewees calmly and dispassionately (though her voice is heard, she is never seen). It's a strategy that yields damning revelations.
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