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 Night Eats the World
    Unfortunately, the best and worst thing about director Dominique Rocher and his two co-writers’ scenario is its familiarity.
  2. Nate & Margaret
    Narrative conflicts are introduced and swatted away in favor of an amiable sentimentality, two nice people being nice to each other.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where's the Party Yaar?
    This breezy comedy deconstructs the struggles of assimilation, satirizing the stereotypical "culture clash" Indian-American identity narrative.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shit Year
    Barkin is often fascinating in playing a character who, in both her heroic bitchery and hysterical sadness, is more of a concept than a person, in a film that ultimately seems to be "about" nothing more or less than the actress' magnetic face.
  5. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    [Nicholson's] clear affection for the sights and personalities that make Coney Island what it is gets in the way of a hard-hitting investigation of why it hasn't maintained its luster.
  6. Autumn Blood
    The structure of Autumn Blood and its metaphors are obvious, but what makes it engaging, even haunting, are the messy flesh-and-blood characters.
  7. All the Money in the World
    It’s easy to appreciate the director’s eye even while being left mostly cold by everything else. It’s almost as if, in trying to make a film about the gilded prison of wealth, Ridley Scott has made one about the gilded prison of empty, beautiful images.
  8. Rush Hour 3
    Chan is still the Gene Kelly of martial arts.
  9. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    Disney's big-screen expansion of their hit TV show is nirvana for the pubescent crowd.
  10. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    There’s little in Paul, Apostle of Christ that’s not predictable, but the film engages honestly enough with its ideas that at times it feels like a small…well, let’s not use the word miracle in this case. It doesn’t shy away from complexity, and for that we can all be grateful — believers and heathens alike.
  11. Gambit
    Ronald Neame's civilized anemia is appropriate enough for the direction of material that is going in no direction in particular. [23 Feb 1967, p.23]
    • Village Voice
  12. In Good Company
    The scenario is stale but the actors are faultless.
  13. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    Fun and frothy, a fan's mash note.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    Affecting, straightforward presentation of tightly knit, contrapuntal interviews and crosscut rally footage--Hamzeh's film eschews voice-over to allow the more despicable characters to embarrass themselves with their ludicrously foolish invective.
  15. The Purge: Election Year
    If The Purge: Election Year is ultimately still engaging, it’s largely because of the irresistibility of the basic concept itself. But this new movie also makes a pretty good case for why the series should end here: Things have not only come to their logical conclusion, but you get the curious sense that the filmmakers have run out of ideas.
  16. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Modelworks
    Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.
  17. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    This gripping movie is essential viewing for any Irish history buffs who found In the Name of the Father a tad corny.
  18. Private Peaceful
    O'Connor tries mightily to contextualize the suffering of the Peaceful brothers at home and abroad, making a better case for the British class system's demise than for their survival.
  19. I'm So Excited
    I'm So Excited! is characterized by a distinct brand of unsuccessful yet ambitious storytelling, the kind often found in minor works by major masters.
  20. Thirteen Days
    A tense and engrossing political thriller.
  21. Dinosaur 13
    Unfortunately, Dinosaur 13 never manages to display the story's many complex parts in a way that enables viewers to grasp the whole beast.
  22. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    There are pages missing from this fable: Meadows reports that his financiers asked him to cut one-quarter of his original script just before production began, and his fondness for long takes sits uneasily beside the apparent gaps in the narrative.
  23. Zootopia
    Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident, it manages a lively clip and the odd fresh joke.
  24. Jabberwocky (re-release)
    The film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
  25. Buffalo Soldiers
    In its post-Vietnam cynicism, Buffalo Soldiers feels almost avant-garde.
  26. Harvest of Empire
    Harvest of Empire is never quite wrong, but it's effectiveness is inversely proportional to how hard it's trying.
  27. Truth
    Truth is hammier than Easter brunch, but its depictions of rejection transfiguring into violence are always affecting and distressing.
  28. Tomb Raider
    I admire the seriousness with which everyone involved treats these characters, and the smart ways that the script (from Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons) on several occasions dashes expectations to the rocks. I have hopes for a sequel.
  29. Swimming Upstream
    Rush and Davis perform strikingly against type, suffusing an otherwise average genre pic with quiet dignity.
  30. The Matador
    Taking the medium slopes and never venturing into extremities, Shepard gets all of his laughs if not the ironic heart-tugs, and his cast is perfectly in tune. (Davis in comedic-observant mode is funnier than most American actresses in fifth gear.)
  31. Skinwalker Ranch
    Fixed cameras lend themselves well to dimly lit effects and shrewd obfuscation, and McGinn proves a fine hand at stock-horror misdirection.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fidel
    The tone is doting, but not cloying.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shelter
    As far as coming-out dramas go, Shelter is a puppy dog, well-acted but rife with cliché received wisdom and at least one ingeniously arbitrary bit of mid-scene dialogue: "That's why you never tell a woman how to cook a chicken."
  34. Omar
    The movie is so brisk, even-handed, and realpolitik you're never quite sure if it has anything to say.
  35. Making the Boys
    Crayton Robey's documentary on this queer cultural touchstone admirably presents both sides of the divide.
  36. Your Sister's Sister
    As Alex Ross Perry's "The Color Wheel" - another micro-budgeted sibling story - shows, a film about relentlessly repellent characters is much more fascinating, if not courageous, than one that tries to explain, redeem, or forgive them so easily.
  37. That Sugar Film
    That Sugar Film suffers from some of the usual stunt-doc laziness.... But Gameau builds his case well.
  38. The Dying Gaul
    Entertaining if cornball, lacking the cold-eyed nastiness of something like Mike Nichols's "Closer," The Dying Gaul is tricked out with strident montage sequences and tremulous Steve Reich music. It's already drowning in an icky sea of language when Lucas makes a stretch for Greek tragedy and sends the whole Malibu playhouse abruptly crashing down.
  39. Life After Beth
    It's not quite as crazy as it needs to be: There's something listless about Life After Beth — it starts out as a reflection on the potentially morbid nature of grief and then doesn't seem to know where to go.
  40. There Was Once...
    The neo-Nazi sentiment in Hungary today is touched on most acutely when it mars the memorial that finally brings the survivors home.
  41. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Adept and generally enjoyable.
  43. Woodpeckers
    An uncharacteristically melodramatic final act...betrays how grounded (and true to real life) the rest of the movie is.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Limelight
    Given all this interesting raw material, it's mildly disappointing that the filmmakers tie it together with such cheesy connective tissue.
  45. Tiger Lily Road
    While not as kinky, dark, or schizoid as debuting director/screenwriter Michael Medeiros intends, Tiger Lily Road succeeds on its own small, claustrophobic level.
  46. McFarland USA
    It works, kind of, despite its broadness, its obviousness, and its howlingly awful opening.
  47. 100 Bloody Acres
    Playing like a Down Under Elmore Leonard novel, 100 Bloody Acres features lucky breaks and quick reverses; a persistent soundtrack of Aussie oldies helps keep the mood cheery, despite a literal vatful of blood.
  48. Cocaine Cowboys
    The story is fascinating, if a little overlong.
  49. The Children of the Century
    It does best when it leaves behind hothouse literary discussions and closes in on these two legendary behemoths, battling for sexual supremacy.
  50. Timecode
    I suspect that Time Code was a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.
  51. Diving Normal
    For most of its running time, Diving Normal doesn't work, and then it does, which makes it both maddening and memorable.
  52. The Same River Twice
    It's a generous document of cultural passage, and not incidentally, the sexiest naturally nudist American movie since Murnau's "Tabu." Moss, however, keeps himself out of the picture and neglects massive amounts of context that might've made Same River a stunner.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Off Jackson Avenue
    Despite this tri-part farcical thriller's plot construction, some hackneyed dialogue and actorial mugging--the finest exception being Aya Cash's airily acerbic Slavic hooker--you can't help but eagerly anticipate the finale, when Montias brings his intersecting storylines together. Apparently, amusingly improbable coincidences can satisfy.
  54. The End of the Tour
    [The] conversation peters out as the film grinds on, the men getting competitive and the camera nosing into their faces. Everyone involved sifts the material a little too hard for clues to Wallace's eventual suicide.
  55. Chutney Popcorn
    The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.
    • 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.
  57. Sex Is Comedy
    Enjoyable if light, until it becomes apparent that Breillat is not simply waxing narcissistic but fashioning a simultaneous critique, explication, and demystification of the lengthy, near-single-take defloration that is Fat Girl's centerpiece.
  58. Peeples
    While she doesn't quite achieve the screwball zaniness she strives for, Chism deserves commendation for crafting a farcical work that feels like it concerns real characters.
  59. Gypsy
    You might call it an old story with higher stakes, but a keen sensitivity to its moral difficulties and enlivening details sets Gypsy urgently apart.
  60. Twelve and Holding
    To call Twelve and Holding cartoonish is to put it mildly. Marked by reckless tonal shifts, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay traffics in sensationalism and sentimentality.
  61. Bad Santa 2
    God bless Kathy Bates, because she scalds with the darkest, mindfuckiest burns as the ultimate Mommy Dearest. And this script is in dire need of her.
  62. The Wackness
    All the drug-slinging material's counterfeit, but the script is refreshingly straight-faced in looking at the strange relationship between white boys and rap.
    • Village Voice
  63. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Neither disposable nor a long-lost masterpiece, she might not be loved by all the boys, but she's still worth a Friday night date.
  64. Murder of a Cat
    Murder of a Cat has an off-kilter charm, with Greene prizing humor over menace, and Clinton's maturity over plot resolution
  65. I.O.U.S.A.
    Both a handy election primer and a bowel-rattling cry of fiscal doom.
  66. Queen and Country
    A pleasant old man's movie, in the end, but not one for which Boorman will be remembered.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    People Say I'm Crazy
    His story is sad but not humorless.
  68. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    The doc is also fat with film clips from before and after the 1979 revolution, but innocent of sensationalism as they are, Iranian films aren't terribly quotable—except when used to illustrate how filmmakers must choreograph their action so that men and women never touch on-screen.
  69. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    The art direction is impeccable, but this is a pop-up book that I was impatient to slam.
  70. Nearing Grace
    This '70s-era teen romance from the director of "Halloween II" and the screenwriter of "Mean Creek" is a quietly effective number, a little like an '80s John Hughes movie without the laughs (not an insult in this case).
  71. Wedding Palace
    Yoo's broadly drawn characters are less ha-ha funny than endearingly over-the-top, their exaggerated mannerisms rooted in fondness as much as mockery.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guy Thing
    In her role as Becky the half-assed tiki girl, Stiles's left-footedness can finally be named, only one of the many pleasures tugging this girl-snatches-guy-from-altar comedy a notch above standard.
  73. Grazia's Island
    It's Filippo Pucillo who gives the youngest son such mellifluous southern sass that you wish the camera would abandon the whole woman-as-sadness retread and scooter off in his direction.
  74. Two Men Went to War
    Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.
  75. Home of the Brave
    Doubles as a narrative of the nascent women's movement.
  76. Friends with Money
    As its title jokingly implies, this is a more grown-up version of Aniston's long- running TV vehicle--complete with the star herself as eternal ingenue.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    Whatever the first-time filmmaker lacks in subtlety and finesse--not even the snow-white Sundance Screenwriters Lab could bleach Montiel's script of its corner-deli grit--he recoups by other, more playfully attitudinal means.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The General's Daughter
    Plotwise, Daughter is an "aha!"-intensive but thoroughly random mystery.
  79. Reykjavík
    Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).
  80. Little Accidents
    All the secrets, lies, and consequences feel as authentic as the Appalachian milieu, but the film lacks the memorable idiosyncrasy of a River's Edge, or more fittingly, the myth-making lyricism of Matewan.
  81. Nabbeun namja
    Bad Guy, one of the seven films in Kim's fascinating back catalog, is another kind of cocktail--simple, bitter, served straight and in an unwashed glass.
  82. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    There's a palpable avoidance of risk as this new mythology is wheeled gingerly into the marketplace and carefully positioned to zap your pre-sold brain...Solid but uninspired, Harry lacks brio. It's respectable and a bit dull.
  83. Explicit Ills
    A tender ensemble slice of inner-city Philly life.
  84. After the Dark
    After the Dark is a shaggy dog story but an intriguing and frequently beautiful one.
  85. A Will for the Woods
    While the film also captures many private, sometimes heartbreaking scenes, it takes a lot of time to make its simple point.
  86. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    Thompson assembles his footage with an expert's touch, but what his film lacks is its own perspective on these atrocities.
  87. Mostly Martha
    Handsomely shot, German filmmaker Sandra Nettelbeck's third feature suffers from a certain romantic predictability.
  88. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wretches & Jabberers
    More info packet than a story, the film is carefully designed for unambiguous impact.
  90. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    There was so much joy in their remake, but Raiders! is often dispiritingly preoccupied with adult issues of financing. But when they talk about their alienated childhoods, broken families, and absent fathers, it's pretty clear why their cinematic role model was so meaningful.
  91. Blood Ties
    Though it takes a long while for the many moving parts to click into place, the final minutes redeem not only a few characters but also Blood Ties itself -- not enough to make up for prior transgressions, perhaps, but enough to leave a favorable last impression.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grateful Dawg
    It's like an 80-minute flip through the Grisman family photo album -- complete with live, unreleased soundtrack.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    They gloss over concerns that mainstream Busch isn't as funny or as daring as cult Busch. Still, I'd kill for more footage of his less famous plays, like the intriguingly titled "Pardon My Inquisition," or "Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets."
  94. Novitiate
    There’s a lot of great filmmaking in Novitiate, but there’s also quite a bit still missing.
  95. Wild Side
    Lifshitz successfully maneuvers his trio of outcasts toward a state of grace: His vision of misfit utopianism, in its own quiet way, is as defiant as anything in Fassbinder.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Endurance
    Still enigmatic is the figure of Shackleton himself. The film conveys his remarkable leadership without explaining (beyond a because-it's-there romanticism) what would compel such a journey in the first place.
  97. Raaz 3: The Third Dimension
    To Western audiences, the most interesting part of director Vikram Bhatt's Raaz 3 will be the Bollywood-narrative conventions--overamplified melodrama, romantic montages, elaborately choreographed dance numbers. But as a horror film, it's about as ambitious as R.L. Stine.
  98. Best in Show
    Best in Show succeeds only insofar as you're willing to laugh at a bunch of sad freaks.
  99. In the Heart of the Sea
    Howard is great at capturing the timbre of the ship, the creaks and snaps and the whir of the hemp lines, and the sonar clicks of the whales strategizing below. All his sound and fury has a befuddling purpose. His emotional climax is about, well, disaster insurance.
  100. The Lullaby
    The filmmakers do an effective job at making a clever horror show out of postpartum depression. So it’s a shame the movie goes off the deep end in the final act, as the story literally comes to a bloody, tragic finish.
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