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. Hearts Beat Loud
    The real reason to see this film is Kiersey Clemons’s Sam and her romance with aspiring artist Rose (Sasha Lane).
  2. Night Comes On
    All through the film, you pray it doesn’t go down the bleak routes that films like this usually go — and, most of the time, it does. Night Comes On is an assured first shot from Spiro but, damn, I couldn’t wait for this fucking thing to be over.
  3. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    The film is about being overwhelmed by Los Angeles, its sprawling indifference, but also about finding your place in it — and even, at times, its welcoming warmth.
  4. Roxanne Roxanne
    The film may not end on a tragic note, but in attempting a gritty portrayal of Shanté’s little-known private life, Roxanne Roxanne forgets her genius, as so many other people did back in the day.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Chasing Great
    It’s clear where all of this is going, but McCaw surprises with his mental rigor (he excelled academically) and total commitment to his sport (he plays with a stress fracture in his foot).
  8. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Workshop
    These scenes of debate (reminiscent of Cantet’s The Class from 2008) thrum with energy, thanks to the spontaneous and full-bodied performances of the nonprofessional cast, whose improvised dialogue feels casual, yet cuttingly profound.
  10. Boundaries
    Where Feste best succeeds in Boundaries isn’t in the father-daughter relationship, which finds her straining for a tight resolution, but in the mother-son one, where the two actors vibe easily and persuasively off each other.
  11. Winter Brothers
    Pálmason can occasionally get bogged down in his ambiguous leanings.... But many moments attest to the high ceiling of Pálmason’s abilities.
  12. In Darkness
    The first third of the story then presents her like a typical Hitchcock ingenue before branching out into a promisingly ambitious mystery. Too bad that story ultimately loses focus and its protagonist’s point of view.
  13. The Heart of Nuba
    If Catena has flaws, filmmaker Kenneth Carlson declines to feature them, perhaps because they’ve been friends since their Brown University days thirty years ago. Still, the doctor has earned the adulation, and a visit to a leper colony shows why.
  14. 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.
  15. Big Fish & Begonia
    Liang and Zhang’s young heroes would be far more universal if they were just credibly hormonal.
  16. This Is Our Land
    At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.
  17. That Summer
    Offhandedly, in a movie that itself is offhanded to a fault, Little Edie cuts to the core of the whole Grey Gardens phenomenon during one of her moments alone with the camera. “[To] dig up the past, I think, is about the most cruel thing anybody can do.”
  18. Little Pink House
    Like Erin Brockovich for eminent domain, Little Pink House does well to explain the thorny legal issue at its center without getting bogged down in minutiae. Although Susette’s story unfolds in small-town Connecticut, Balaker hammers the point home: This could happen anywhere.
  19. Pick of the Litter
    What are the concerns of coherent storytelling or in-depth documentation when all of these good boys and girls — yes they are! — are leaping and licking and tail-wagging and just being the best?
  20. Hover
    Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.
  21. Straight Into a Storm
    The messy but charming concert doc Straight Into a Storm works best if you treat unfocused on-camera interviews with the members of Rhode Island–based folk/grunge-rock group Deer Tick like an unintrospective but affectionate video memoir of the group’s rise to alt-rock prominence.
  22. The Most Unknown
    Much of the film is beautiful — hot springs, the ocean’s depths, and deep space are photogenic — although Cheney preserves a few too many mundane “hello, how do you do”s, and the science isn’t deeply explained.
  23. Sorry Angel
    Honoré’s scenes feel at once composed and curiously mundane, as if he’s trying to take the precision of his earlier work and mix it with a more realist impulse — or, if we’re being less charitable, as if he’s trying to will his aesthetic into something more “mature.”
  24. Love, Cecil
    Even though it paints too rosy a picture, Love, Cecil fills out history with sparkling imagery.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot to Trot
    The cameras caress landscapes, skylines, domesticity, and sequined dancers with equal fervor, but one longs for more of what a competition official calls “a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.”
  26. What Keeps You Alive
    Minihan’s ambitions are towering, so it’s only right to note that he doesn’t quite get there. The ideas, even the emotions, don’t develop and grow.
  27. Rock Rubber 45s
    Bobbito’s storytelling is infectious, and the scenes of community outreach are heartwarming. May all such vanity projects have such a friendly beat.
  28. The Night Eats the World
    Unfortunately, the best and worst thing about director Dominique Rocher and his two co-writers’ scenario is its familiarity.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Earthquake
    Halfway between a movie and a carnival huckster's gimmick, with the gimmick a great deal less interesting than the movie itself. [23 Dec 1974, p.89]
    • Village Voice
  30. F.I.S.T.
    I found myself reasonably absorbed in this grown-up though not sufficiently lived-in and thought-through entertainment. [01 May 1978, p.45]
    • Village Voice
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farewell, My Lovely
    By simply rack-focusing Mitchum in an occasional close-up, Richards evokes an entire biography, a sense of weariness and reflection. [25 Aug 1975, p.66]
    • Village Voice
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Although it's unlikely that Englishman Hough has connected with the auto culture that has made his latest film the darling of the drive-ins, Hough at the same time has connected with the perfect vehicle for his mechanized, dehumanized concerns. [01 Aug 1974, p.70]
    • Village Voice
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    A movie of splendid bits and pieces disappointingly strung together. [25 July 1974, p.70]
    • Village Voice
  34. Cat Ballou
    Pleasantly inoffensive. [29 Jul 1965, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  35. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    Gessner’s film may be for Foster completists only. But the intensity of her dead-eyed stare as the final credits scroll across her face reminds us of her preternatural ability, as a kid and beyond, to transform even the most negligible movie or scene into an event.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Terminal Man
    I'm not sure I can accept these chilling extremes of "sick" and "well," but Mike Hodges renders them with some of the same grim beauty and sense of absurdity he brought to Get Carter. [17 Jun 1974, p.82]
    • Village Voice
  37. California Split
    California Split never comes to a very fine point in the psychological development of its characters. California Split is thus more about moment-to-moment living than momentous life. [03 Oct 1974, p.81]
    • Village Voice
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Society
    This musical remake of The Philadelphia Story has some pretty good moments but will probably outrage those of you who remember Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart in the original version. [17 Oct 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  39. America America
    The director's deepest instincts are less epic than dramatic, with the result that he gets sidetracked more often than his errant hero. The picturesque is gained too often at the expense of the picaresque, and the contour of a legend is obscured time and again by the pointless intimacy of a close-up. [09 Jan 1964, p.12]
    • Village Voice
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    Mazursky's difficulty in making the transition from dramatic middle-shots to long shots, with the accompanying impulse to "universalize" his theme, indicates that he has not yet learned to trust his material, or appreciate his own sublime gift of being able to approach the secret of life through comic misunderstanding rather than cosmic understanding. [15 Aug 1974, p.63]
    • Village Voice
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Reivers
    A slight, sentimental movie that is clearly to be enjoyed rather than respected. [29 Jan 1970, p.54]
    • Village Voice
    • 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
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Night Digger
    The Night Digger is by no means an unalloyed masterpiece. It's director seems preoccupied with nuance to the detriment of narrative, and consequently much of the film looks like a triumph of mood over matter. [17 Jun 1971, p.75]
    • Village Voice
  44. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
    It’s basically the equivalent of a sensitively wrought read from the Young Adult shelf, and there’s naught wrong with that.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sterile Cuckoo
    The movie has its moments, namely in two expert performances. [13 Nov 1969, p.60]
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black God, White Devil
    The best parts of the film arise from the tension generated between the conventional use of myth and the simultaneous debunking of it. [16 Sept 1971]
  47. 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
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Together Brothers
    Working with amateur material, Director William A. Graham coaches natural performances out of the band of black teenagers who organize the manhunt. [22 Aug 1974, p.77]
    • Village Voice
  49. The War Wagon
    The War Wagon is good for a few laughs and some spectacle while John Wayne and Kirk Douglas are taking Bruce Cabot and an outlandishly armored wagon apart. [14 Sep 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
    Shallower than the level of vermouth in a Claude Rains Martini, FMBD nonetheless has a wonderful breadth of characterization, delightful thrills, and philosophical speculations to boot. [30 Apr 1970, p.60]
    • Village Voice
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It's Always Fair Weather
    Kelly, Dailey, and Michael Kidd are good as the three returning veterans, but their abilities are no match for an unbelievable script and that good old MGM realism. [02 Nov 1955, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  52. The Book of Eli
    The Book of Eli's plastic parable isn't much more advanced than "Insane Clown Posse" theology.
  53. When in Rome
    Bell, unlike Katherine Heigl and Sandra Bullock, who executive-produced their big-screen debasements of 2009, brings enough effervescence to the film that she's able to spark believable chemistry with a usual dud like Josh Duhamel.
  54. Up in the Air
    Up in the Air goes down like a sedative. This is a movie that's easy to like--and to dislike as well.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    District 13: Ultimatum
    Works only when at full sprint.
  56. Extraordinary Measures
    Fraser is open and appealing, and Ford, his acting mostly isolated in the right corner of his mouth, does well enough with a secondary part.
  57. Sherlock Holmes
    As over-emphatic as one might expect from the ham-fisted Guy Ritchie, this resurrection of the world's most famous detective is a dank, noisy affair.
  58. 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.
  59. A Single Man
    A Single Man, with one significant exception, gives us only a series of immaculate poses. The exception is Firth, who, in spite of Ford's best efforts to turn him, too, into another piece of movable scenery, manages to convey a real human soul stirring beneath George's petrified façade
  60. Youth in Revolt
    Winded and weary from its long journey to a bigger screen, the three-books-in-one has been squeezed into a 90-minute Cliff's Notes version starring Michael Cera as Every Role Michael Cera's Ever Had.
  61. Fish Tank
    Jarvis gives a ferociously persuasive performance in an otherwise routine tale of domestic disaster.
  62. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Instead of plumbing the depths of spiritual degradation, Herzog's movie is--largely due to Cage's performance--almost fun.
  63. A Serious Man
    As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry."
  64. The Princess and the Frog
    The Princess and the Frog is pleasantly, if unmemorably, drawn. But the movie as a whole never approaches the wit, cleverness, and storytelling brio of the studio's early-1990s animation renaissance (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) or pretty much anything by Pixar.
  65. 2012
    The two-hour-and-40-minute 2012 is overstuffed with special-effects, but the Curtis clan's mad dash out of town is the closest the movie gets to actually being fun.
  66. Where the Wild Things Are
    Wild Things isn't overlong, but it is underwhelming.
  67. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    Closing out a pretty great year for children's movies—Betty Thomas's dutiful animated and live-action sequel to 2007's "Alvin and the Chipmunks" brings up the rear with capable mediocrity.
  68. Moon
    Impressively pulled together on a modest budget, Moon has a strong lead and a valid philosophical premise but, despite Bell's fissured psyche, the drama is inert.
  69. Whip It
    Highlights: Andrew Wilson as the roller girls' coach (ah, so there's the Wilson brother who can act) and the roller-derby vets (played especially well by Juliette Lewis and Kristen Wiig) about whom we learn just enough to wish the movie was focused on them instead.
  70. Zombieland
    Fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer.
  71. New York, I Love You
    As with its predecessor, "Paris je t'aime," there are hits and misses.
  72. A Town Called Panic
    A Town Called Panic, which has more strident colors and less synopsizable action than a year's worth of comic-book adventures, embodies a sensibility that might be termed "extreme quirk."
  73. Watchmen
    Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse's adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering to the masses.
  74. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Far too often, though, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby--who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end--would have despised.
  75. Black Dynamite
    No matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in "Coffy"--or the loony genre experimentation in "Pootie Tang."
  76. Julie & Julia
    It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There's half of a great movie in Julie & Julia.
  77. Twilight
    In the 17-million-copy land of "Twilight," the calling card isn't blood and fangs, but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love. By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon.
  78. Terminator Salvation
    Among the many things junked in McG's chop-shop is the notion of pleasure.
  79. Life Is Beautiful
    Life Is Beautiful is funny (kinda) and even tasteful (sorta). But in its fantasy of divine grace, it is also nonsense.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blood Diamond
    De Beers can relax; the only indignation stirred up by Blood Diamond won't be among those who worry about where their jewelry came from, but with audiences incensed by facile politics and bad storytelling.
  81. The Proposal
    You know every tinny beat and false note by heart, from the implausible setup to the sprint-to-the-airport finish.
  82. Two Lovers
    Touching in its absurdity, the movie is what the French, if they didn't love Gray so much, might term agréablement ridicule.
  83. My Sister's Keeper
    You don't usually see this unblinking attention to the progress of physical decay in a PG-13 wide-release movie, and to the degree that it represents a real aspect of human experience generally curtained out of sight, it is, in the language of movie people, a brave decision. But makeup department realism alone can't redeem the dramatic fallacies surrounding it.
  84. 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.
  85. V for Vendetta
    Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.
  86. Pirate Radio
    Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K., and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore with most of its better bits excised.
  87. Sunshine Cleaning
    More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams–Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it feels almost like an afterthought.
  88. Coco Before Chanel
    The Coco of Fontaine's project--which she co-wrote with her sister, Camille, freely adapting Edmonde Charles-Roux's book L'Irrégulière: ou, Mon itinéraire Chanel--can be described as courtesan before couturiere.
    • 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.
  90. Inland Empire
    Inland Empire is Lynch's most experimental film since "Eraserhead." But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr."), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch's mental floodgates.
  91. Death at a Funeral
    Death at a Funeral never even approaches the best of Oz's oeuvre. It's his first movie that begs for the laugh track; they'll love it on BBC America.
  92. Bride & Prejudice
    Money can't buy happiness, but as Bride and Prejudice teaches us, it can get patience in bulk from a smart young woman of a practical mind-set.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Coach Carter
    Proudly wearing its self-righteousness like a letterman jacket, Coach Carter's just an exasperatingly long "The More You Know" commercial starring one first-stringer and the junior varsity.
  94. Elektra
    The pedestrian Elektra offers no surprises, and whether or not you'll appreciate its modest charms depends entirely on whether you too have been anticipating Garner's new outfit.
  95. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    A free-for-all doc that, like its subject, seems on several planes at once.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beautiful Boxer
    Those in search of a liberating treatise about empowered sexuality may find too much of the movie's erotic potential sublimated in sports metaphors, while those looking for a martial arts matinee will find its feats of physical prowess shriveled next to a fully engorged genre workout like "Ong-Bak."
  97. Lost Embrace
    Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Assisted Living
    There's a finer line between peaceable pothead jocularity and just being a dick--and sometimes it's tough to tell whether Todd is more Jon Stewart or Tucker Carlson.
  99. Because of Winn-Dixie
    The story seems awkwardly positioned between coming-of-age realism and whimsical fantasy.
  100. Constantine
    Fans of Hellblazer are bound to be disappointed.
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