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. Sacrifice
    Chen's attention to character over spectacle pays minimal dividends and is compounded by the fact that his battles - full of standard-issue slow motion and hacked-off limbs - are as dull as an overused blade.
  2. The Big Fix
    The film's scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP's origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran.
  3. Bright Days Ahead
    Ultimately, this is all about Caroline, and it's refreshing to see an optimistic story about an older woman who is funny, smart, and desirable, even if her happy life doesn't leave much room for conflict.
  4. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting abbreviations, namely AYFKMWTS and GTFOOH. In the end, though, it's an armed-forces acronym dating back to World War II that best describes this dismal project: FUBAR.
  5. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    The unfitting flashiness and clunky segues between thriller and melodrama kill any real sense of tension, making this a poor man's "Donnie Brasco"--that is, if its self-congratulation and failure to contextualize the values on both sides of the ethno-political struggle didn't already make it the poor man's "Hunger."
  6. How I Live Now
    Tender, humane, and searing, How I Live Now stands as something all too rare: a movie about young people that young people may love — but not one that lies to them, and not one built for them alone.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kinky Boots
    Boots is unforgivably tame; only foot fetishists (or possibly Imelda Marcos) could get off on such desexualized, PG-13-rated fare.
  8. Sushi: The Global Catch
    This kaleidoscopic meticulousness proves comprehensive without ever feeling tedious, an especially impressive feat considering how quickly it becomes message-oriented.
  9. How to Live Forever
    Suffice it to say, life's too short for such self-indulgent glibness.
  10. Smart People
    It's like the entire season of a sitcom whittled down to a single episode. There's no time for characterization, no room for emotion, no interest in anything other than moving the story forward. It's all action, no reaction. One minute they're miserable; 90 minutes later, aww better.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    200 Motels
    With all the mumbo jumbo of necromancy and visual pyrotechnics, there is little real magic, and in the absence of any central organizing presence, the film needs more of Zappa's punctuating wit. [25 Nov 1971, p.79]
    • Village Voice
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Candy
    Any drug movie's effectiveness can be measured by the strength of its detox, and Candy doesn't sweeten the cold turkey. Still, it's a downward spiral from there in more ways than one. Never mind the neo-psychedelic-pop soundtrack and occasional double-vision cinematography: Dope just can't account for the film's fried brain cells.
  13. Bad Words
    Bateman, as both director and star, digs his heels in too hard to make the movie's points, using lots of ho-hum close-ups and wriggly camera work along the way.
  14. Natural Selection
    Natural Selection mixes elements of "Transamerica" and the recent "Higher Ground" to tell the story of how a God-fearing fortysomething woman found the greatest love of all.
  15. Bernard and Huey
    As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Her savvy for self-presentation, though admirable from a business standpoint, makes for a more boring movie. You never get the sense that the camera was ever allowed to see anything that Perry didn't want it to see.
  17. The Look of Love
    Coogan's portrayal is heartfelt, but The Look of Love rarely exploits its star's comedic dexterity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Grand
    It has a lot of affection for its screwy characters, and it has a cast worth watching even when the plot's held captive by a bunch of boring cards.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I, Olga Hepnarová
    A top performance for this year so far, Olszanksa's Olga is standoffish, frequently smoldering, rarely smiling, and she toes the line between intelligence and insanity.
  20. The Forbidden Kingdom
    Taken as a whole, though, it's an amiable lost-and-found of epic-adventure tropes. As I still illogically treasure "Willow," many a 10-year-old who sees Forbidden Kingdom will remember it fondly in spite of its flaws.
  21. Albert Nobbs
    Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.
  22. What's Cooking?
    Trades in sitcom stereotypes and crosscuts predictably from family to family as if under the misapprehension that equal time is a dramatic principle.
  23. The Human Stain
    Playing the young Coleman with the requisite intelligence and ambiguity, Wentworth Miller contributes the sole viable characterization.
  24. All Together
    Well-acted and directed, with melancholy grooved insights that will only be news to the young and narcissistic, Together is a pleasant way to while away an afternoon and see some old pros in great form.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lights in the Dusk
    Lights in the Dusk derives scant excitement from its melodramatic plot, which satisfies a dismal, ineluctable formula with stultifying efficiency. Nor is it enlivened by the airless performances.
  26. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    Mildly engrossing, building to a final-act clash between First and Third worlds that is riveting and highly uncomfortable to watch.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chimpanzee
    Throughout, narrator Tim Allen shuttles between a jokey primer on chimp society and a basic play-by-play during the more action-packed scenes - the constant stream of explanation often detracts from the heart-of-the-jungle sights and sounds on display.
  28. Southpaw
    Southpaw is an exhausting brutalist melodrama, but if nothing else, Fuqua always works with fine actors, and he's got a passel of them here.
  29. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    Bruce may succeed in making you wary of the Fed, but, unfortunately, he's also likely to make you wary of his film.
  30. The Secret Life of Bees
    Only near the end does this likable but saccharine movie fleetingly complicate the "Gone With the Wind"–fed delusion that the love of poor, black nannies for their white charges was undiluted by bitterness.
  31. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Burton scales his finale down to the size of a tourist boardwalk for an unexpectedly gripping crowd-pleaser of an action scene.
  32. Miss Potter
    By most accounts, Potter was a serious workaholic monomaniacally devoted to the purity of her vision. Undaunted, Noonan and Maltby are determined to squeeze her life into a run-of-the-mill romance in which love heals all wounds.
  33. Lovely, Still
    Call Lovely, Still life-affirming if you must, but its uplift is designed less to reassure than to honor the difficult process of how we deal when faced with the loss of those we have loved.
  34. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    Not fully understanding its own merits, Easy Money is accidentally fascinating in some moments, but purposefully formulaic in many more.
  35. The Hammer
    Former "Loveline" and "The Man Show" co-host Adam Carolla brings his self-deprecating, improvisational, regular-dude deadpan--as well as his former Golden Gloves status--to this semi-autobiographical comedy with ambitions so low that one might call it charmingly mediocre.
    • 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.
  37. The First Monday in May
    Rossi provides an attractive overview of the exhibition for those who did not attend it, but we are left feeling something like Wong, seeing a lot of pretty things surrounded by vapidity.
  38. Evil Dead
    The plotting as a whole feels fresh, as does the emphasis on women strong enough to defend themselves.
  39. Madagascar
    Madagascar's relaxed density is a relief given the DreamWorks tendency to overbear, overblast, and overcaricaturize.
  40. Mardi Gras: Made in China
    This sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.
  41. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    A largely mind-numbing experience.
  42. City of Ghosts
    Musters gobs of atmosphere and touristy menace without attending much to story or character.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Life Without Me
    What's annoying and eventually absurd is writer-director Isabel Coixet's decision to have her heroine keep the diagnosis a secret.
  44. The Grandfather
    Not only is the dialogue endless...it's like driving behind a 15 mph geezer on a one-way street.
  45. Titus
    A nonstop carnival of murder, rape, and mutilation .
  46. Saints and Sinners
    There's an enforced squareness afoot as the directors contrast the couple with Pride-float revelers, as if testifying in front of a Massachusetts court that these two are as fuddy-duddy as the wholesomest het duo.
  47. Amen.
    Costa-Gavras provides a post-war postscript to make clear that honesty is punished; cynicism survives.
  48. Hannibal
    Less monster than monstrosity—albeit, as superfluous sequels go, not on par with the memorably idiotic "Godfather III."
  49. Code 46
    Late in the day, Code 46 bursts its chemical chains to become a convincingly irrational love story.
  50. Chalk
    What gives the film extra weight is the sense that these are not just actors trying to enhance their careers but real people seizing a chance for immortality.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Catching Out
    Ultimately everything feels one-sided and sanitized.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Cloud of Unknowing
    Stilted lines alternate with ominous pauses and an annoying Pure Moods score tinkling around an oppressive sound design.
  53. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
    The result may be better suited for classroom viewing than for theatrical exhibition, but that's a tribute to the movie's instructive value.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control
    Best appreciated for Ruben Santiago-Hudson's convincing performance as a man possessed by a quartet of supernatural beings.
  55. Yat luk che
    Dishwater-dull period melodrama.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Derailroaded
    Wild Man Fischer's music is disarmingly honest and heartfelt, but even its charms can't save Derailroaded from ending up a train wreck.
  57. Light from the East
    Grappell implicitly uses the juxtaposition with the martyred Kurbas to gauge her commitment to her own art. Light From the East drinks freely from the triumphalist cup of the glasnost era.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Laura Smiles
    Stylish, low-budget indies thrive on redeeming the clichés of everyday life. But that takes smart writing and sharp humor, of which Laura Smiles has none.
  59. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    The doc is sobering, straightforward, and a bit drab, but to the participants' credit, it's also an entirely nonpartisan endeavor. Good luck telling that to the right once they hear the film is narrated by Sean Penn.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Stone Angel
    Despite its cutesy comic-relief digressions and overdone solemnity, The Stone Angel finds its way past tonal inconsistencies to a moving conclusion that doesn't romanticize death.
  61. Sixty Six
    You don't have to be Jewish to appreciate its genuine fondness for the claustrophobic warmth of family life among working-class people apprehensively inching their way toward upward mobility.
  62. The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom
    Clouds teases out the contradiction between the Lama's power as a symbol to the fiercely loyal Tibetan people, and that of his diplomatic voice, which he is using to push what they see as an impotent agenda.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here and There
    There's pleasure in watching the conceit unfold, which is sweetened by an unexpectedly poignant payoff.
  64. The Anchorage
    The Anchorage uses a narrative structure introduced to more powerful effect 35 years ago in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.
  65. Shake Hands with the Devil
    Though the film, based on Dallaire's memoir, can veer toward deification of the general, it's hugely effective.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gift to Stalin
    Alternating between impressive and pedestrian shot-making, professional and amateurish acting, the film aims for gravitas and entertainment but only occasionally achieves either.
  67. Daydream Nation
    Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Barbershop Punk
    Dovetails with the current Occupy message but still feels rather stale.
  69. Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    The whole thing can be hard to follow, but the energy (and pulchritude) of the cast make it a perfectly fine bit of popcorn escapism.
  70. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Flying Swords might not live up to the promise of Detective Dee, Hark's recent comeback, but it does deliver frequently and always when it counts most.
  71. An Affair of the Heart
    An Affair of the Heart's focus is so vaguely sketched out that it ultimately could be about any grateful artist who enjoys a modicum of celebrity years after his initial success.
  72. The Maze Runner
    The Maze Runner is so bleak that it almost convinces us to take it seriously.
  73. The Story of Luke
    The Story of Luke is a charming little film in need of a bit more grit.
  74. Wampler's Ascent
    From cinematographer Corey Rich's beautifully framed footage, Wampler's wife, Elizabeth, making her directorial debut, has assembled a stirring film that's part documentary, and part promotional tool.
  75. Geography Club
    If the characterizations are perfunctory, the performances give them unexpected weight.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    Brook offers himself as a teacher whose goal is to help his students discover brief, ephemeral moments of bliss.
  77. The Sleepwalker
    Just in time for Thanksgiving, it's your yearly "hell is family members" film. However, The Sleepwalker distinguishes itself from most entries in this angst-ridden genre by way of superb writing, smoldering performances, and hauntingly beautiful imagery from first-time director Mona Fastvold.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Fuller Life
    Two things are clear in this documentary. The first is that Samuel Fuller was brilliant, optimistic, talented -- an auteur in every right -- and well deserving of all the praise and admiration he inspired. The second is that this is a product of a first-time director, not quite experienced enough to take full advantage of the medium or know how to bring every element together.
  79. Life Inside Out
    Strong, understated performances from Baird and O'Connell bring real intimacy to their characters' sometimes-strained mother-son dynamic.
  80. The Mule
    The Mule proves a tough sit, but by the end you might be satisfied you gritted through it.
  81. The Barefoot Artist
    The Barefoot Artist, co-directed by Yeh's own son, veers too close to hagiography, and as a result makes Yeh look not so much like a well-meaning global citizen as a bona fide saint.
  82. On the Way to School
    The film quietly reveals these four small stories as epically heroic and timeless journeys.
  83. In the Courtyard
    Thoroughly nonjudgmental in its observations, Pierre Salvadori's In the Courtyard ranks as one of the funnier films about victims of depression and mental illness.
  84. Below Dreams
    As the waves of this cinematic dream break, the profundities left behind come not from character arcs, but observed states of being that feel subjectively experienced.
  85. Band of Robbers
    The directors of Band of Robbers, brothers Aaron and Adam Nee, have set out to modernize the stories of Mark Twain but end up with a cutesy caper that isn't as memorable as you might hope.
  86. Look at Us Now, Mother!
    Gayle's good-natured fight to reconcile with a person who sees nothing wrong with her own behavior proves both a fascinating character study and an intimate portrayal of a mother's love turned hostile.
  87. Lowriders
    Other than a from-nowhere burst of violence that nearly destroys the movie, Lowriders is a refreshingly muted celebration of family and forgiveness, of honoring your roots while being yourself.
  88. Strange Weather
    In a quivering, bone-deep performance, Hunter takes Darcy from a mother encased in guilt to a woman who can acknowledge her shattering loss while still recognizing her right to be alive.
  89. Finding Altamira
    Hugh Hudson's Finding Altamira is a rote but engaging historical drama about the eternal debate between truth and mythology.
  90. Klown Forever
    So long as they're only stupidly endangering themselves along the way, it's easy to watch this with a sort of libertarian detachment. It's also annoyingly predictable this time around, though the leads at first maintain their strong chemistry and essential likability.
  91. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    Making a Killing feels oddly static, like any fact-dense sermon to the choir.
  92. Big Time
    Director Kaspar Astrup Schröder’s gorgeous film is informed by that same charm and intelligence the way a sailboat is informed by 7 knots of westerly breeze.
  93. After Louie
    Its subject matter is interesting, and it’s right to remind viewers of the need for different generations of queer people to communicate, but After Louie is burdened by narrative and dialogue clichés that undermine its emotional appeal.
  94. Moss
    There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.
  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.
  96. The Muse
    As consistently funny as it is smartly tooled.
    • 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.
  98. Cars 2
    Notwithstanding John Turturro's amusingly smug Italian F1 speedster and a few lighthearted jabs at Japanese TV and technology, Cars 2 generally remains stuck in neutral.
  99. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    If the 3D here is better than average, SLIGHTLY, the rest of the movie brings it way, way down--not quite to the center of the earth, but at least a good six feet under.
  100. The Revenant
    The Revenant kind of aspires to be a horror-comedy in the vein of "Shaun of the Dead" but keeps tripping on its own misanthropy.
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