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 7.5 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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Smash His Camera
    Gast's documentary portrait has a freewheeling charm that perfectly matches its subject.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What's the Matter with Kansas?
    Paradoxically, the movie feels dated in the sense that it pre-dates both the recession and Obama's campaign, yet prescient in illuminating a crisis that plagues us today.
  3. Who Killed Nancy?
    An unnecessary retelling of rock's dingiest "legend"--ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Salt
    From the start, this character plays to the star's strengths, merging subject and object, warrior and victim, ass-kicker and damsel-in-distress. And hero and villain.
  5. Ramona and Beezus
    Wholesome to the point of being dull.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Audrey the Trainwreck
    Frank V. Ross makes no-budget, impeccably acted, dryly funny, and unpretentiously melancholic movies about the tiny gray area between happiness and misery, and the frustrations of the suburban working-class. In his latest, Audrey the Trainwreck, there is no character named Audrey, and nothing as histrionic as a trainwreck.
  7. Countdown to Zero
    This is another well-intentioned but preaching-to-the-choir doc, and boring as well.
  8. Farewell
    A homely bit of international Cold War cloak-and-dagger, starring badly dressed bureaucrats instead of chic spies, Farewell is based on a vital early-'80s espionage break involving the KGB, DST French intelligence, and the CIA.
  9. Life During Wartime
    Todd Solondz is back. Life During Wartime shows the misanthropic moralizer as confounding and trigger-happy as ever, his big clown thumb poised over a garish assortment of hot buttons--race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, Israel, and, his old favorite, pedophilia.
  10. Mugabe and the White African
    As their extraordinarily brave black female attorney points out, at stake are not merely the rights of this family or indeed of all white farmers, but the future of race relations and human rights in Africa.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spoken Word
    Though crudely constructed (the lighting and framing are strictly soap opera), unevenly acted (Becker is a bundle of distracting tics), and bluntly scripted, the film does have an honest integrity--at least whenever Blades is onscreen.
  12. Slingshot
    Though one misses cinematographer Oydssey Flores's camerawork that played such an important role on the three subsequent films--at once more chaotic and more expressive than the digital shooting here--Mendoza's look at the illicit activity of a group of marginal Filipinos is no less feverishly absorbing.
  13. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    Her (Davis) homage--tender, never hagiographic--also contains some biting analysis of the racism, both overt and insidious, that the artist was up against.
  14. Inception
    It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.
  15. Kisses
    The movie's ending may be less satisfying than that of "Slumdog Millionaire"--a film you can love for its infectiously wishful exuberance, but never fully believe in--but Kisses is truer to the tragedy of a generation of children whom we have utterly failed. If they're anything like Kylie and Dylan, they'll be back to let us know.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Contenders
    A mystery with nothing to reveal, a drama without consequence, an elegy of dispassion. Lacking wisdom or even earnest intent, the film's flaws of execution become more apparent.
  17. Alamar (To the Sea)
    Alamar provides a nearly hypnotic immersion in the brilliantly aqua, impossibly tranquil Caribbean--a Paradise Regained not just for Natan, but for everyone
  18. To Age or Not to Age
    Too bad Pappas limits any critical perspective on this project to brief, superficial discussions with a handful of wealthy "artists" at their Hamptons homes whose connection to the filmmaker or the documentary's subject remains unspecified.
  19. Valhalla Rising
    Frequently dull and stupidly obvious, you nonetheless have to applaud the misguided ambition of Refn's career turn. If nothing else, as the metal guitars get louder and louder, the synergy between Viking imagery and the pagan-obsessed metal freaks it spawned has never been clearer.
  20. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    Cage will likely not earn a second Oscar here, but he and director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) make leftovers into fine PG malarkey with their hokey naïveté and prankish hocus-pocus.
  21. The Kids Are All Right
    Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist.
  22. Despicable Me
    So, yes, kiddies--it's funny. Silly. Slight. Though, grown-ups, be warned: I had more fun watching the kid giggle through the screening than I did watching the movie itself. It's no "Toy Story 3."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Stripped of Larsson's social/political minutiae and slimmed down to its thriller chassis, certain clichés become more glaring: Lisbeth's superhuman hacking skills, overfamiliar from a zillion TV procedurals; an exploitative lesbian sex scene that mightn't have pleased the feminist Larsson; the secondary villain, a blond giant incapable of feeling pain--gah!; and the too-comfy manner in which the twin narratives finally interlace.
  24. Winnebago Man
    Rebney's good-natured calm and apparent indifference to his Internet notoriety initially foils the filmmaker. Hoping to re-create the original clip reel, Steinbauer is nonplussed and abashed. Was it all an act--or is this? Pay your money and find out.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    [Rec] 2
    Predictably, [REC] 2 is higher-budgeted than its barebones predecessor, which only means that the spectacular degradation of video in scenes where the zombies get in close and start chomping will test the limits of any HDTV. If only [REC] 2's rabid baddies knew how to push [STOP].
  26. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    It's all slight enough to blow away, and rare enough to warrant seeing it before it does.
  27. Great Directors
    Ten interviews with 10 "name" American and European directors--including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat--diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests.
  28. Only When I Dance
    British director Beadie Finzi follows both dancers to international competitions, where the difficult questions raised by their struggles are set aside.
    • 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.
  30. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    To have been in junior high school when rhapsodic fugues of yearning like "Spanish Harlem," "Uptown," or "Be My Baby" first poured from the radio is to have a sensibility, if not a fantasy life, in some way molded by this monster of self-absorption; to see The Agony and the Ecstasy is to be discomfitingly haunted by the specter of that long-ago innocence.
  31. Love Ranch
    Hackford's pacing throughout is continuously off, with scenes extending several beats too long, his two leads adrift and bored.
  32. Grown Ups
    While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dogtooth
    Director Giorgos Lanthimos lays out the rules largely through action rather than exposition, which allows Dogtooth to play as a richly satisfying, blackly comic mystery in spite of its delayed, horror-sourced housebreak plot.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Restrepo
    For a movie that's both a study and a product of blood, sweat, and tears, an oft-cited mid-'60s quote from film and combat vet Samuel Fuller seems to apply: "Film is a battlefield," Fuller said in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. "There's love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word: emotions."
  35. Wild Grass
    An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    South of the Border
    South of the Border's subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.
  37. Children of Tokyo
    The film retains a measure of tempered hope, born not simply from the father's command-cum-wish to his slumbering offspring ("Don't become a miserable apple-polisher like me, boys"), but also from a final act of youthful compassion that binds Ozu's intensely human characters in glass-half-full solidarity.
  38. The Law
    A movie of cartoon-like mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Knight and Day
    There's never been a particularly crisp line between intense, SUPER-AWESOME Tom Cruise and the characters he plays. In Knight and Day, his age-old cool curdles into motormouthed neediness.
  40. Cyrus
    A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.
  41. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    The flaws pale against what's illustrated, which is not just how Prop. 8 passed, but the sordid, cynical workings of our political machine.
  42. I Am Love
    When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way.
  43. Let It Rain
    Aiming to be a seriocomic movie of ideas but desperate not to offend or challenge, Let It Rain soon settles for being another smug comedy of bourgeois manners.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toy Story 3
    TS3, like its predecessors, is a clever, engrossing adventure.
  45. Wah Do Dem
    Methinks we're meant to actually feel sorry for this overprivileged twerp in neon sunglasses.
  46. 45365
    The result is a poetic documentary of quiet American surfaces and intimately eavesdropped people.
  47. Stonewall Uprising
    Tellingly, it's not the queers, but a cop--Seymour Pine, the 90-year-old retired NYPD morals inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn--who gets the last word.
  48. The Nature of Existence
    There's something a tad disingenuous about the director's quest for meaning, as if the whole arc of the project has been contrived to adhere to a scripted template rather than to document a genuine search.
  49. The Girlfriends
    Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure.
  50. The Karate Kid
    There is the impression, deadly to the sense of fun, that the talent here actually thought they were remaking a classic.
  51. The A-Team
    Convoluted, overstuffed, turned up to 11, and yet, somehow, deadly dull--in other words, white noise.
  52. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    For all the frenzied activity, Joan Rivers is less informative dish than infomercializing cliché.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    Here, Coco's cast as a femme fatale who preys on a helpless nebbish--the Audrey Tautou--starring "Coco Avant Chanel" was much more fun.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Winter's Bone
    In the end, the most interesting aspect of this quiet, sometimes frustrating, sometimes thrilling film is the way it teases out the intricate power structures that flourish even in as godforsaken (and lovely) a place as the Ozarks.
  55. Reel Injun
    Combining a road trip from his native Arctic reservation to Los Angeles with an archival cinematic survey, Diamond's treatment of each is perfunctory to the point of inutility.
  56. Nightfall
    Not only a nifty late noir but a model of economical filmmaking--well-sketched atmosphere, deft characterizations, and a 78-minute running time.
  57. The Lottery
    An electrifying community meeting finds Harlem Success president Eva Moskowitz both vilified and heralded as "our Obama" by local parents, as the unions depend on such poorly understood class and neighborhood tensions to maintain the status quo.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    12th & Delaware
    The terrific documentary 12th & Delaware gets its name from a volatile intersection in a small Florida town: On one side of the street is an abortion clinic, while on the other sits a pro-life facility that counsels pregnant women to keep their unborn children while encouraging protesters to harass the neighbor's business.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ondine
    Ciphers aside, Ondine effectively sustains a mood of a hazy melancholy most affecting when nothing much is happening.
  60. Splice
    Splice is a queerly funny movie, attuned to the absurd.
  61. Get Him to the Greek
    Get Him to the Greek, is a mess, but an amiable and occasionally uproarious one due mostly to Russell Brand’s reprising of his role as Aldous Snow.
  62. Cropsey
    Embracing what's really standard tabloid fodder of the decade with earnest engagement and doled-out suspense, Cropsey is one step from macabre comedy.
  63. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    The doctors' motivations remain somewhat enigmatic, even as the two veterans emerge as more fully drawn characters.
  64. Finding Bliss
    It is particularly painful to watch Sobieski--whose unnervingly symmetrical, Botticelli face and supernatural poise can't help but hold the screen--put through the paces of Davis's almost unbearably labored script.
  65. Whiz Kids
    This quietly absorbing film is finally more about character formation--curiosity, persistence, endurance--than about achievement as a means to some extrinsic social end.
  66. Burzynski
    Who's the bigger charlatan--Burzynski or Merola--and why is this conspiratorial rubbish being released into theaters?
  67. Visionaries
    Visionaries' heedless montage brought back the sense of crazy possibility that excited me when, as a teenage kid from Queens, I first encountered Mekas's world.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone with the Pope
    It's gloriously, hilariously offensive, including all manner of racist and sexist jokes and one sequence of WTF? grotesquerie worthy of John Waters.
  69. Convention
    The film's frustrating treatment is actually more like the local reporter who is shown struggling to stay in the loop.
  70. Mademoiselle Chambon
    Discretely drawn and elegantly photographed, Mademoiselle Chambon gives a French, working-class love triangle the "Brief Encounter" treatment.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Micmacs
    Micmacs is more fantasia than violent revenge tale. And its pleasing curlicues--like a bouquet of spoons--linger long after the predictable outcome.
  72. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Yet Newell, he of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," is ill-suited to steward such sword-and-sandals adventure, his direction--while slightly eschewing modern genre practitioners’ penchant for slicing-and-dicing skirmishes into visual incoherence--is too pedestrian and partial to clumsy slow-mo effects to truly energize the story.
  73. Survival of the Dead
    The inevitable all-you-can-eat orgy of zombies pulling stringy mouthfuls away from red, wet rib cages may satisfy gorehounds, but big set pieces showing how atrophied Romero's cutting and tactical framing have become is depressing to anyone who has valued his films for more than just splatter.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Agora
    What's missing is a satisfying, plausible middle ground where heady ideas and metaphors coalesce into compelling drama.
  75. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    Picasso and Braque's primary merit is its archive-raiding evocation of the period discussed through vintage nitrate images.
  76. Sex and the City 2
    Like its predecessor, SATC2--with a script that's basically a sack full of not very funny gag-lines wrapped in strung-together episodic mini-scenes--is not suited to be a movie.
  77. 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.
  78. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    The resulting portrait is a cautionary rejoinder to typical sports-movie uplift, elucidating how athletics remain a dangerously precarious foundation upon which to construct lasting peace.
  79. Holy Rollers
    Failing to generate either excitement as a crime story or credibility as a morality play, the film ultimately confirms the traditional values that helped push its confused lead to the brink of damnation in the first place.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    John Rabe
    It's a remarkable story, and filmmaker Florian Gallenberger does his best to shade his portrait with complications and mitigations. But for a story not often told, John Rabe feels awfully familiar.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kites
    Not even the incoherent mish-mash of plot (mostly faux Sergio Leone by way of Tarantino and Rodriguez, with periodic car-flipping chase sequences) can entirely dim the appeal of this match-up between a blue-eyed Punjabi and a blue-eyed Mexican of almost equal comeliness.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Perrier's Bounty
    Ivan Fitzgibbon’s film is so steadfastly blithe that one yearns for a flicker of pretension, some small sign that there’s a guiding principle or purpose.
  83. Racing Dreams
    No less than for the black inner-city teens of "Hoop Dreams," cash is the name of the game in Curry's fascinating doc, even as the kids' motivation remains a pure love of the sport.
  84. Solitary Man
    The film courageously shows its reprobate hero sliding further, not redeeming himself.
  85. Two in the Wave
    Director Emmanuel Laurent extends de Baecque's essay with clips from Truffaut-Godard films (diminished in HD) and, rather than new interviews with contemporaries, footage of an attractive actress (Isild Le Besco) flipping through old photos and looking pensively at the entrance of the old Cinémathèque Française.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Robin Hood
    The directorial choices are, for the most part, so lazy, the blockbuster engineering so blatant, that Robin Hood often falls into self-parody. All the more reason for Sarah Palin to love it.
  87. Daddy Longlegs
    A funny, fantastic, genuinely alarming quasi-autobiographical cheapster by twentysomething New York brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Letters to Juliet
    Gary Winick's flat direction does the material no favors: If Egan and Seyfried have any chemistry, it's framed out of their awkwardly staged climactic kisses.
  89. Just Wright
    Another movie, not as awful as this one, might one day find better use for the easygoing vibe between Queen Latifah and Common, the stars of Just Wright.
  90. The Living Wake
    From an opening newsreel biography to a climactic Viking funereal ceremony, the film's absurdity proves oppressive, its linguistic cartwheels so mirthless, and its meticulous Wes Anderson–indebted set design and visual compositions so self-conscious, that the ridiculousness feels petrified.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    There's enough wisdom in this appropriately compact film to suggest avenues of further, though likely not as wondrous, inquiry.
  92. Entre nos
    The postscript reveal that Entre Nos, which follows a newly single immigrant mother as she ekes out a living on the streets of New York, is based on the filmmaker's own story is more affecting than anything that made it to the screen.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here and There
    There's pleasure in watching the conceit unfold, which is sweetened by an unexpectedly poignant payoff.
  94. Touching Home
    Incidentally, the film has an Inspirational True Story (and tie-in book) behind it, which comes across not at all in the rather formulaic stuff that's actually onscreen.
  95. Iron Man 2
    The elements that made the first Iron Man a rather likable blockbuster have not entirely evaporated. Favreau brings together interesting American movie stars and lets them actually play through scenes.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Casino Jack and the United States of Money
    Indispensable viewing.
  97. Happiness Runs
    Loosely based on writer-director Adam Sherman's similar cult upbringing and disillusionment, the film builds on a fascinating cautionary tale, but doesn't develop its characters past whatever movie-of-the-week crisis each suffers from.
  98. Mother and Child
    The force of the acting alone almost compensates for some of the more difficult (and realistic) questions about not giving birth that García willfully sidesteps.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Multiple Sarcasms
    A vanity production by Branch, previously a studio branding consultant, it's the kind of odious, self-validating wish fulfillment that actually makes you appreciate the more generous self-absorption of Henry Jaglom films.
  100. The Oath
    Early in Laura Poitras's outstanding documentary The Oath, we learn that one of its subjects, Abu Jandal, a cabdriver living in Yemen, was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard in Afghanistan.
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