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. Hotel Artemis
    Whether it’s the too-harried pacing or too many central people vying for attention, the film’s heart never quite coalesces. Seizing it is like trying to grab a cloud. Pearce seems to want this movie to be both a neon pulp plot-heavy piece and a character-driven drama, and there’s just not enough time in a single film for all of it to work.
  2. Undisputed
    The movie is typical Hill-pulp: modestly scaled and efficiently cheesy.
  3. Kiss of the Dragon
    A veteran of commercials and music videos, director Chris Nahon crowds out too much of the sprawling combat gymnastics, but his film doesn't lack for luxuriously seedy ambience --his Paris is a retro-futurist sewer.
  4. American Pie
    Returns the teen movie to the uncomplicated glory days of "Porky's" and "Losin' It."
  5. May
    The flavor is textbook '90s indie -- self-regarding quirk with an occasional spasm of Solondzian incorrectness.
  6. Ocean's Twelve
    Funnier and sprightlier than Eleven, which exhibited a genial self-consciousness but never thought to challenge the genre textbook, Twelve is committed to not taking itself seriously.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    As predictable as a segment of "MTV Spring Break," which at least doesn't try to hide its voyeurism, Burning looks more like a travel-agency video targeted at people who like to ride bikes topless and roll in the mud than a worthwhile glimpse of independent-community guiding lights.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Grainy video and gimmicky editing give this documentary an amateurish feel, but Samir's charming, rueful interlocutors shine through.
  9. Our Man in Tehran
    Informative but tedious talking-head doc Our Man in Tehran is for anyone who watched Argo and then wished to hear a ditzy, history-obsessed uncle ramble about the real-life political stakes of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freakonomics
    A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary.
  11. Away We Go
    The road-trippers of Away We Go harbor no discernible ambitions whatsoever, which may make them true to Gen-Y life, but also renders them fatally uninteresting. For all the ground they cover geographically, dramatically their velocity remains zero. Mendes, too, seems to have trouble getting on board with the underachieving set.
  12. Heartless
    With erratic success, Heartless tries a number of different veins-urban fairy tale with "There was no magic, it was you all along" twist, supernatural family drama-but it's on firmest footing as a macabre comedy.
  13. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is a breeze, enjoyable both for its sweetness and its unapologetic silliness.
  14. Escape from Tomorrow
    While Escape is filled with inspired touches... Moore lacks the off-kilter psychological nuances of Lynch, as well as the go-for-broke storytelling skills and visual élan. It doesn't help that the cast is largely competent at best.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory Road
    As Coach Haskins would have put it, "It's activity without accomplishment."
  16. Gemma Bovery
    Fontaine handles the assignations with sympathetic shorthand — we see what Martin sees, but we see more, too, enough to understand that Gemma's dalliances are vital to her but not overwhelming. She has a handle on them.
  17. We Bought a Zoo
    The cynics will scoff and dismiss it all as manipulative, the heartstring-tugging machine on hyperdrive. But this movie isn't for them; did you not see the PG? It's a sweet, sincere, utterly affable kids' movie about how parents are all kinds of screwed up and unable to tell their kids what they want or show them how they feel.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    The stats relayed at the movie's end...almost have more impact than the narrative.
  19. Papillon
    Shaffner has really made an exhilarating movie out of the most dangerously depressing material. [10 Jan 1974, p.56]
    • Village Voice
  20. Low Down
    There are too many notes that, while not false, are neither satisfactorily resolved nor left interestingly unresolved.
  21. A Royal Night Out
    The film relies heavily on the coltish charms of its young leads, and Powley's effervescent, well-timed performance as the younger princess (she calls herself "P2") is skillful enough to bring out the screwball latencies in an otherwise bland screenplay.
  22. Les Coquillettes
    Letourneur captures film fests' buzz of self-congratulatory promiscuity but never makes the many parties and mishaps compelling.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    If for nothing else, Jessica is worth seeing for the presence of Zohra Lampert, and intelligent actress whose talent has somehow never been sufficiently appreciated. [14 Oct 1971, p.75]
    • Village Voice
  24. Everything Is Illuminated
    Foer's ironic ideas have a lovely roundness to them, and somehow the film achieves Holocaust-fiction balance without much ado or melodrama. It may be substantially less ambitious than its source material, but that may be what saves it from implosion.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Emile
    Odd beginning permits viewers to leave after five minutes and know what happens. Those remaining are left with the full tome, its 92-minute length hiding an experience as draining as "Heaven's Gate."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Felon
    Harold Perrineau gives unintentionally comic expression in Felon to the delineation between his character's public and private scruples.
  27. The Invention of Lying
    Lying brushes more big ideas than commonplace comedies, but hasn't taken those ideas through enough drafts to work out their implications or--harder still--make them killingly funny.
  28. Storm
    The writing by director Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem) and Bernd Lange is more stilted and righteous than even the U.N. environs, with its humanity-embracing procedural-speak, calls for.
  29. The Yards
    Gray's brand of film-buffery manifests itself, simply and irresistibly, as ardent, uncynical movie love.
  30. The Holy Land
    This broadly acted first feature is exceedingly direct, appropriately sordid, and at times, almost delicate.
  31. Free Radicals
    An intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise in ensemble acting and associative montage, enlivened with some terrific visual and dramatic ideas.
  32. The Lords of Salem
    The movie is eerily photographed (by Brandon Trost), but never suspenseful or scary, and eventually, events descend into goat-sacrificing silliness.
  33. Renaissance
    For a little while, the film is dazzling. Then it's dizzying. Then it's just kind of . . . wearying. That's not because it's in black-and-white; so was "Sin City". There's just something terribly, tragically dull about Renaissance.
  34. 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.
  35. One More Time
    The characters are overburdened by backstories that constrict rather than inform their behavior.
  36. Special
    All that's left then is a miserablist analogue to M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," a sad portrait of paranoid delusion with wipe-out stunts played for the comic wincing of "Jackass."
  37. Summer of 84
    If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.
  38. It's a Disaster
    The story's outline may be familiar, but its emphasis and quality are not.
  39. The Patsy
    Considerably weaker than The Nutty Professor. [10 Sep 1964, p.17]
    • Village Voice
  40. Chelsea on the Rocks
    Chelsea rambles--and in a way that makes you want to move down the bar.
  41. Flawless
    Flawless is the sort of movie that tends to get called "enjoyably old-fashioned," except that there's nothing enjoyable about it. The pacing is torpid, the plotting slack, and the performances utterly joyless--chiefly Moore, who walks through every scene with her face stretched into an expressionless mask, her lips pressed into a permanent pout.
  42. Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    While secret handshakes are amusingly depicted as the key to building trust and friendship, it's Stephen McHattie's greedy agent...that truly hammers home the film's depiction of the art world as fueled by rapacious, kill-or-be-killed bloodlust.
  43. Terraferma
    It's all very predictable, very Hollywood. Storytelling cliché, it would seem, knows no borders.
  44. Daybreakers
    Wearisome "Ain't it cool?" video-game splatter-violence is all that's memorable of the action, while a (mixed) metaphorical subtext of conservationism can't save a text that squanders its actors.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trishna
    In the hands of Winterbottom, who has frequently shown a knack for infusing red flag sex with dread without sapping it of sexiness, the master-slave dialectic is made grossly, appropriately literal. The dialectic itself is never discussed.
  46. Lila Says
    A misguided tale of sentimental education.
  47. The Cured
    Even though The Cured doesn’t quite excel at being both terrifying and thought-provoking, at least it gave Juno the opportunity to become a horror hero.
  48. Severe Clear
    A potent reminder of how thankless a soldier's job is.
    • 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.
  50. R100
    You'd expect more yucks from the country that bequeathed tentacle porn unto the world.
  51. Paul
    This is the smart-ass stoner's "E.T.," the movie the fanboy parent won't be able to hand down like some tattered, squeaky-clean memento to their action-figure-collecting kids. It's just not quite right without Wright, who could have helped Frost and Pegg stuff Mel Brooks back into their Han Solo Underoos.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Color Me Kubrick
    I find it hard to believe that Conway bamboozled half of London simply by announcing his name, and it's regrettable that the filmmakers premise their picture on such improbable gullibility. The real Conway was assuredly slier than his bio-pic incarnation; he ought to have been played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
  53. Bart Got a Room
    With 19 producers, one wonders how many rich Floridians invested in what might be the year's most unambitious comedy.
  54. My Wife Is an Actress
    Gainsbourg is virtually incidental to her mate's screeching navel-serenade, which maintains a stranglehold on the declarative first-person mode of its title.
  55. Holy Smoke
    Filled with flashy sight gags, overwrought performances, and madly overlapping dialogue.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Sea Is Watching
    Though The Sea (and the sea) wants to capture some elemental, unruly truths, it's ultimately an over-lacquered jidai-geki curio, something for the appendix of the next book on Kurosawa.
  57. The Ring
    Requiring an enormous amount of suspended disbelief, the original Rings may be a culture-specific phenom; despite strenuous efforts to Americanize Nakata's field of bad dreams, the preview audience did a lot of cackling.
  58. Osmosis Jones
    Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How to Grow a Band
    How to Grow a Band might be a bit too low-key for the non-fan, but that's not to say the tour doc lacks substance: It doubles nicely as a fly-on-the-wall case study in the demands of making music for a living.
  60. My Father and The Man In Black
    As Cash might say, it has the heart, and it has the blood, and by the time childhood chatter is played back again, feeling is soaked through it like the sweat in Cash's guitar strap.
  61. The Zookeeper's Wife
    True to form, Caro seems unbound by her audience’s expectations of a WWII picture; she delivers a singular, thrilling portrait, filled with surprises and moving performances.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    A fine, sharp movie nonetheless, "The Laughing Policeman" is the raunchiest--and no doubt the best--floor show in town. [31 Jan 1974, p.79]
    • Village Voice
  63. White Wash
    Even at 78 minutes, White Wash pads its material through repetition but remains a proficient portrait of how increased social, economic, and geographic opportunity fosters diversity - in life and out on the waves.
  64. Ip Man 3
    Stone-faced martial-arts star Donnie Yen does a lot with a little in wuxia weepy Ip Man 3, the rare kung fu film whose sentimental dialogue scenes are just as good as its stripped-down action sequences.
  65. The Woman in the Fifth
    You're not sure what this is till it's over, but certainly Hawke's performance is his nerviest and most sincere in a decade.
  66. The World Is Not Enough
    Makes the strongest case for retirement since late-period Roger Moore.
  67. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Just because a film holds back the truth doesn't make the truth suspenseful. It merely shortchanges the filmmaker and the audience from exploring what that truth means.
  68. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    Those with a higher tolerance for bumptious jestering-from a yipping and mincing Xiao, or Cheng Ye as a bucktoothed jelly-belly-may, however, cry Masterpiece. They are instructed to seek out the longer Chinese cut, which apparently packs in more such interminable shtick, broad as the Yangtze.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    Thankfully, the kids' complicated impulses resist such packaging, whether they're catcalling head-scarved co-eds outside the local gas station or channeling racial resentments into extra hard hits.
  70. Lace Crater
    Slight though it may be, Lace Crater's mix of Andrew Bujalski–style naturalism and Roman Polanski–style body horror is at least off-kilter enough to keep one absorbed throughout.
  71. Vamps
    Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.
  72. Master of the Flying Guillotine (re-release)
    Snags the viewer's attention by lacing its martial-arts high jinks with a compelling weirdness.
  73. Mifune's Last Song
    Grows increasingly slack and silly.
  74. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    Comes down to two sorely limited and rapidly tiresome characters.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    SK3D, alas, banks it all on a dead-end VR aesthetic, albeit one emitting a certain black-hole fascination.
  76. Life Partners
    Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz's script captures the girls' relationship in fine detail.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thor
    An astonishingly awkward marriage of ancient Norse mythology and 21st-century nonsense, Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh, works too hard at simply functioning to assert why it, or we, should bother.
  78. Me and You
    Bertolucci, despite his obvious affection for Lorenzo, can't help but seem out of touch, and his hero looks and sounds less like a modern-day teen than an old man's wistful idea of one.
  79. Body of Lies
    Its generic attributes (and title) notwithstanding, Scott's film may be the sharpest of all the post-9/11 thrillers--and also the most purely entertaining--in the way it maps the vectors and currents of the modern intelligence-gathering game without losing us in its dense narrative thicket.
  80. Towelhead
    Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.
  81. The Notebook
    Szász's harrowing film roots that coming-of-age process in suffering, depicting it with a grim solemnity that, by never wavering, ultimately leads to a tempered measure of unexpected hopefulness.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Teeth
    Veteran actor Lichtenstein, the son of Pop artist Roy, rarely finds a workable tone, muffling the splattery mayhem with sluggish pacing and a tendency toward camp. Still, even if the movie's little more than a curio, I love the thought of Lichtenstein at the pitch meeting: "It's Jaws meets The Vagina Monologues!"
  83. The Grand Seduction
    The endearing nature of the characters, especially Gleeson's Murray, provides some pleasure.
  84. The Groomsmen
    Fatally conventional in nearly every respect, the movie would be easy to dismiss were it not for Burns's frustrating knack for inserting unexpectedly truthful moments amid all the dross.
  85. 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.
  86. 16 Years of Alcohol
    16 Years' greatest asset may be its star: Trainspotting's McKidd, coiled and queasy, transcends the dubious romanticism and hard-man clichés of his role -- he exudes a commanding air of constancy in a film that teeters between the rapturous and the ridiculous.
  87. Happy Endings
    Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.
  88. Filly Brown
    Youssef Delara and Michael D. Olmos's variation on the too-familiar subgenre (the rising inner-city superstar here is a Latina tomboy) is more heartfelt, humanistic, and entertaining than such a clichéd showbiz cautionary tale has any right to be.
  89. The Missing Person
    The film has been gesturing toward a profundity that isn't there.
  90. Cesar's Last Fast
    Equally lionizing but richer in detail than the recent Michael Peña-led biopic César Chávez, this occasionally stirring doc portrait of the late Latino labor organizer and civil rights icon frames his legacy around a single act of protest.
  91. Break Point
    Karas showcases the actors' surprisingly good tennis skills, like the continuous volley they do while reciting the lyrics to "Bust a Move" and the deft way Sisto spins his racquet. But rather than develop these two as characters, Break Point tries to score too many points.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cowboy del Amor
    A 60-year-old eccentric with a knack for self-promotion, Thompson makes an engaging documentary subject. But his plainspoken charm and cornpone shtick can't dispel the film's lingering aftertaste of exploitative condescension.
  93. Kodachrome
    Netflix’s Kodachrome is good fall-asleep-with-the-TV-on fare, and I mean you should snooze out immediately unless you want to be subjected to a criminally mediocre family drama.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Boys Are Back
    Carr's original anecdotes don't supply much storyline, so Hicks spans the gaps with golden-lit montages set to Sigur Rós. They're a great advertisement for Australian vacations. And vasectomies.
  95. The Red Violin
    It sustains its purplish, epic sweep by thrusting broadly etched characters into extravagantly hokey situations, and registers mainly as a flamboyant joke.
  96. Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?
    On a dark set, between strums and archival clips, this master raconteur exudes his own brand of obnoxious charm, the kind that can only be possessed, never imitated.
  97. Mr 3000
    The real news is that Mac has finally found a movie that taps into the dark side displayed in his best stand-up work. A hilarious elementary-school scene plays off the comedian's ambivalence toward kids.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    13 Going on 30
    Anyway, the thirtysomething in me was all, gag me with a spoon, but the kid in me was like, this movie's rad to the max.
  99. Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain
    Despite its candy-hued costumes, hyperbolic acting, sudden lapses into song, and mystical context (all Bollywood staples), it lacks "Lagaan's" sweep, humor, and colorful characters.
    • 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.
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