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. The House of Tomorrow
    The House of Tomorrow sticks to a time-tested coming-of-age template that’s as common in the indie world as the superhero origin story is in the studio world. But there’s good news, too: When it’s not busy hitting the usual notes, Peter Livolsi’s film, which is based on a novel by Peter Bognanni, manages to be a touching exploration of what “tomorrow” actually means.
  2. Hollow in the Land
    The stench of needlessly convoluted derivativeness lingers throughout this flick.
  3. Duck Butter
    I’m still hopeful about Shawkat’s screenwriting career — especially since her performance always feels so genuine, adding substance to an otherwise deflated story. But other than the script’s daring premise, the material doesn’t rise up to the potential she hints at here: a comedy of ingenuity that takes advantage of Shawkat’s fearless frankness.
  4. Shrek Forever After
    It takes the film a deadly long time to kick in, and when it does, it largely retreads formula: ironic use of pop standards, musical numbers with contemporary choreography played for maximum laughs, risque one-liners.
  5. Turbo
    Content to be merely cheerfully clichéd, it's an assembly-line kids' film that, unlike its daring protagonist, risks little, and thus reaps only modest rewards.
  6. Beloved
    Dutiful as it is, Jonathan Demme's Beloved doesn't succeed so much as it abides…it moves in leisurely fits and--unencumbered by style or narrative complexity--never loses its forward momentum.
  7. Sisters
    Once the bash really gets going, I was swept up in the chaos and happily clicked off my brain. Screenwriter Paula Pell classes up the dumb stuff with a touch of depth.
  8. Unleashed
    Cloying dreck.
  9. 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dictator
    Even in its manufactured boundary-pushing - a flash of full-frontal Baron Cohen, another scene set partially inside a birth canal - The Dictator never really risks anything.
  11. Quantum of Solace
    A spastic, indecipherable, unholy, and altogether unwatchable mess.
  12. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    The drama is mostly interior, and Washington’s quiet performance tends to reveal the jittery surface rather than the tortured soul. Neither it nor the script is incisive enough to make Israel’s abandonment of his principles fascinating.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blossoms of Fire
    Backed by folk songs and swirling shots of fiestas and markets, Blossoms is feel-good tourism but by its own bounds only woolly anthropology.
  14. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.
  15. I Declare War
    Exciting and thoughtful, scraped free of the empty provocations of the wicked-pixie Hit-Girl scenes in Kick-Ass, I Declare War offers movie thrills—smartly plotted betrayals and escapes—as well as its share of disappointments.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    This would-be comedy about a thirtysomething family man (Attal) and his foray into infidelity is probably the worst in the putrid bushel of recent Gallic imports.
  17. Danny Collins
    This movie is a narrow character piece that shows Pacino wrestling to reveal layers in a man who's worried he might actually be hollow. He and Fogelman string together dozens of small, perfect moments.
  18. Tragedy Girls
    If Scream and Heathers shacked up and had murderous, millennial offspring, it might look a lot like Tragedy Girls.
  19. Rise of the Guardians
    At times, it approaches some of Pixar's best.
  20. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    Binoche's hushed histrionics, though, are of a piece with the fruity portentousness of L'Attesa.
  21. Pioneer
    The tension never lets up.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El carro
    Part fluff, part social farce, and all foregone conclusion.
  23. Easy Virtue
    Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.
  24. K-19: The Widowmaker
    As square-shouldered as you'd expect of a National Geographic co-production. But Bigelow hits all her marks and more within the narrow parameters.
  25. The Grey Zone
    "No poetry after Auschwitz," Theodor Adorno proclaimed. One sometimes wishes he'd added, "And no big-name cinema either."
  26. Solomon & Gaenor
    Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.
  27. Virgil Bliss
    Jordan and Kirsten Russell, as the deadbeat-hooker love interest, bring the film to intermittent life, suggesting several more dimensions than the stale, futile scenario ever allows them.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Already a top-selling DVD thanks to PR support from moveon.org, numerous media outlets, political blogs, and even Doonesbury, Outfoxed argues that Fox News's pro-Republican bias is top-down.
  29. Small Voices
    Despite its affinity for whimsy over realism, Small Voices effectively captures the embittered desperation and ragged dedication of its exploited teachers.
  30. Days of Grace
    Most of this frantic moviemaking is more disorienting than riveting.
  31. Frontera
    Berry isn't afraid to use melodrama as a tool to highlight injustice. It's his very un-flashiness that makes Frontera effective.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fuck
    Aside from the historically worthy identification of General George S. Patton as a pioneering potty mouth, the film contains little or nothing in the way of surprise.
  33. The Prey
    If the thrills it yields are expected ones, the pleasure in the formula remains.
  34. Just a Sigh
    Just a Sigh's day-long liaison sustains interest largely for the appeal of Devos and Byrne, its accomplished leads — they share what is known in the rom-com lexicon as "chemistry," and this quality invigorates their time together, in bed and out.
  35. Creative Control
    This toothless, silken-looking satire takes aim at easy targets: white Williamsburg ennui, technology, yoga.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Closing Escrow
    Closing Escrow can't even execute the bare-bones requirements of mediocre mockumentaries, as its unbelievably quirky characters' not-funny behavior is punctuated with awkward silences and L.A. clichés.
  37. The Express
    Like all formulaic biopics, The Express sacrifices the details for the Big Picture--hagiography without the humanity.
  38. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    The script is only lightly didactic and well-paced, and it nods toward the adults in the audience mainly by not insulting their intelligence.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    Eclipse is the least laughable installment yet in the series, and director David Slade efficiently delivers the fan service that Twihards require.
  40. Lights Out
    When Sandberg isn’t spinning his wheels in the why, he’s capable of doling out a steady diet of scares.
    • 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.
  42. The Woman
    Even with a nauseous climax, The Woman never gets under the skin, and its artsy-languid pacing and incessant lite-metal commentary tunes finally seem like part of an effort to disguise what it really is: torture porn for people who'd never admit to liking torture porn.
  43. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
    Palast slices through all the B.S., and while he may be over-the-top in his presentation, keep in mind, he’s got just the facts, ma’am.
  44. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it.
  45. Splinter
    Buoyed by solid ensemble work, some yuckily effective special effects, and a script that subverts genre convention by having its characters do smart things instead of stupid ones (mostly), Splinter earns our respect while delivering 82 minutes of lean, mean fun.
  46. (Untitled)
    A film only Hilton Kramer could love, (Untitled) aims wide and misses.
  47. The Trench
    The acting, by a large cast of little-known young Brits chewing on South London accents like dog bones, is uniformly splendiferous.
  48. The Safety of Objects
    Though agile edits keep things moving, in braiding several tales into one tight suburban tangle, character development takes more shortcuts than "Short Cuts."
  49. Session 9
    The script for Session 9 is so underwritten that even such lively character actors as David Caruso, Peter Mullan, and Brendan Sexton III are left stranded.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Shanghai Knights
    The adventure-book pace and topsy-turvy English setting evoke the feel of Stephen Sommers's "Mummy" films.
  51. Gozu
    Splendidly entertaining.
  52. Man on the Moon
    The filmmakers don't even attempt to give Kaufman an inner life.
  53. Butterfly
    He (Wolens) captures Crayola-vivid images of both the unspoiled forest canopy and denuded expanses of slash-and-burned landscape -- a bleak summation, perhaps, of the area's past and future.
  54. Leaves of Grass
    His (Nelson) timing is off and his bullshit detector nonexistent. I don't much care for the Coens, but the sad truth is that their cynical nihilism is a lot less spurious than Nelson's earnest sentimentality.
  55. Populaire
    Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature-length debut is visually sharp, with period design that's eye-catching without being fussy or fetishistic. Too bad there's not much going on beneath the surface.
  56. Men in Black III
    Despite such ubiquitous timidity, one can pluck out a few pleasing distractions here.
  57. Big Fish
    An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.
  58. Wrong
    The film's heady buzz is invigorating, and there are substantial pleasures—and laughs—to be found in all its real-life-just-gone-sour strangeness.
  59. Snowden
    Stone seems genuinely interested in the slow and steady process by which Edward Snowden came to distrust the government that he worked for, and the director has made a slow and steady movie to go with it.
  60. Hello Lonesome
    The same laxity given to the performers extends, unfortunately, to the film's structuring, a lazy Susan rotation between storylines and monotonous settings.
  61. Lawless
    The narrative often seems at odds with the director's pictorialism, trudging when it should be striding toward the climax, isolating the performers on their marks when everything depends on taut blood-ties interconnection.
  62. Raging Dove
    Raging Dove can't avoid the biodoc pitfall of fixating on its subject's personal saga to the virtual exclusion of all else; by the end it's essentially blaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Abu Lashin's professional demise.
  63. Jobriath A.D.
    Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. is an exceptional example of this subgenre, a cubist portrait of an unknowable man and a dramatic whodunit about an artist-victim who died by a thousand cuts.
  64. Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
    Here, as Berry warns, the imagination is limited by the camera. In a world in which I couldn’t buy Berry’s New Collected Poems, I might make an effort to see this again someday, with my eyes shut.
  65. Brothers
    Sheridan, repeatedly drawn to family sagas, including his own (2002's In America), aims for Greek tragedy but ends up with a PTSD melodrama, with Maguire able to produce slobber almost as effortlessly as Portman can summon up tears--essentially all her role calls for.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    20 Centimeters
    The musical numbers are dreadful and the jokes barely register, but more disappointing is how rote the exploration of the transgender dilemma is.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Chapel
    The Red Chapel becomes an infectiously funny, gonzo glimpse into the sausage-making process of propaganda.
  68. A Hologram for the King
    Tykwer sublimates what Eggers made explicit: the joblessness, the debt, the isolation. He knows the power of an image, a gesture, a brief exchange, so he captures those social themes in flashes, which ironically gives them new power.
  69. Stepmom
    Loathsome though Stepmom is, the eternally coltish Roberts is always a pleasure to watch and Sarandon's mordant wit occasionally comes to the fore.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Police Beat
    Dreamlike in style, Police Beat is also a real-world vision of what American indies could be if they dared to recognize the drama in our own neighborhoods.
  71. Vanishing Waves
    For those who found Inception too plotty and sexless, Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte's sleek sci-fi reverie is hereby advised.
  72. Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating
    Lighthearted foray into the world of competitive eating.
  73. Penance
    While it doesn't cohere into anything more substantial than a collection of self-loathing anxieties, Japanese teledrama Penance is effectively unnerving on a scene-for-scene basis thanks to writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's preference for ambience over character-driven drama.
  74. The Moving Creatures
    A puzzling film that despite being saturated with feeling leaves only a vague impression.
  75. Prime
    Not quite a romance by numbers, Prime is nevertheless a movie we need like a hole in the head.
  76. Jimmy P.
    Amalric's impish dexterity and Del Toro's mild catatonia make for a memorable mismatch, but Jimmy P.'s profound slow burn might be too clinical for some to consider dramatic.
  77. Rising from Ashes
    Rising from Ashes is not just about a cycling team; it's a testament to what happens when human beings care for one another.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Tortilla Soup
    Tortilla Soup feels instantly dated, distinguishable from EDMW only by some attractive close-ups of avocado.
  79. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    Marvelously grizzled and tender, Josef Bierbichler's Brecht wheezes and grumbles through it all.
  80. ZigZag
    Kid-pulp screenwriter Goyer (Dark City, Blade I and II) manages some mature textures but his movie never surmounts its manipulative ideas.
  81. Francis Ford Coppola Presents: The Legend of Suriyothai
    Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol's movie is lovely, large, and tedious, subscribing blindly to storybook stereotypes (this warrior is brave, this prince is noble, this consort is evil) and acted, for the most part, in a passionless monotone.
  82. The Legend of 1900
    Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.
  83. Risk/Reward
    Holder and Parker tread lightly on issues of sexism, and sex in general, and leave us wishing more questions were asked.
  84. I Am Chris Farley
    Shrewder documentarians than directors Brent Hodge and Derik Murray would have balanced out the sentiment with grit. The movie is saccharine.
  85. Ask the Dust
    Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.
  86. Lost in Beijing
    The prevalent shooting style is monotonous naturalism, as the camera buzzes between contentious actors and trolls after anything on the move. No performance registers quite so much as the capital city itself.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Snow
    First-time director Fergus's film is more a moody, tedious anti-thriller about ineluctable fate.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Somebody Up There Likes Me
    The whole thing comes off as a fairy tale bordering on hallucination, perhaps the vision of life that passes before the eyes at death.
  89. Ramen Heads
    As demonstrated by this exquisite documentary, the preparation of Japan’s national dish is an arduous affair, with the most celebrated chefs — variously referred to here as “ramen gods” and “ramen demons” — toiling fanatically to retain the color, richness, and viscosity of their dishes.
  90. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    At any speed, the movie only springs to full life late in the day, during the first meeting of Bilbo and the tragic creature who will come to be known as Gollum (once again played by the sublime Andy Serkis).
  91. Southbound
    Just as most of them can't outrun their pasts, neither can they escape familiar plot contrivances that try too hard and achieve too little.
  92. Shrek the Third
    Blinded by avarice and all out of ideas, once again, Hollywood can't tell when enough is way more than enough.
  93. The Finest Hours
    Just as Pine's Bernie Webber grits his teeth and pilots his 36-foot Coast Guard boat into seas that rise up like angry gods, Gillespie steers head-on into clichés, powering through. They never quite capsize his film, but it does take on some water.
  94. Somm
    The film maintains a sluggish calm, like its mellow jazz soundtrack, and suffers from following four players with similar stories.
  95. Aurora Borealis
    Aurora Borealisulth -- yes, that title eventually comes home to roost -- doesn't offend in any way, but it's so self-consciously quaint, so unwaveringly "nice," that you nearly wish it did.
  96. The Trust
    In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film quickly loses focus and forgets the quirky characters that make the city — and the story — special.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    Politically, psychologically, and aesthetically schizophrenic.
  98. The Tree
    In her second film, writer-director Julie Bertuccelli, adapting Judy Pascoe's 2002 novel, "Our Father Who Art in the Tree," is sometimes partial to clumsy dialogue and scattershot pacing.
  99. The Seagull
    Onstage, we get to choose which face to regard, to watch each hard truth or unexamined lie crash against each character’s carefully maintained set of illusions. Here, we mostly see one face at a time. Those faces are grand enough that this Seagull still has much to recommend.
  100. The Night Before
    At first the laughs are Hangover III–spare and the picture is too shambling to lunge for them. But these leftovers warm up eventually. The usual setups at last develop variations, and you might be reminded of why audiences first responded to Rogen back in Knocked Up.
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