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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  1. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    The look of the reference-heavy film, mostly shot on location in Brazil, is impeccably cheesy, but the Nazi humor and awkward sexist and racist eruptions smell a little stale. And yet, given time, the film develops an energy all its own.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babies
    Is Babies a good movie? Of course not. But that's missing the point--like asking if a porn video is a good movie. Babies gets the job done.
  3. Trash Humpers
    Trash Humpers projects a cranky resignation to the world as it is; still, it's picturesque.
  4. Furry Vengeance
    Furry Vengeance isn’t really a movie at all; it's a message provided by the good people at Participant Media.
  5. The Good Heart
    A sloppy, desultory, depressive buddy comedy the color of beer-infused pee.
  6. Harry Brown
    Director Daniel Barber's lame handwringing about the root causes of youthful alienation forms a thin veneer over the real purpose of this self-important piece of rubbish--to hold us hostage to the director's bottomless appetite for spurious depravity.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mercy
    At the risk that giving Scott Caan a bad review will cause him to fall in love with me, I must note the irony in a film that seeks to critique superficiality, only to fall back on the old "dead fiancées deepen dipshits" trick.
  8. Please Give
    It is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
    Centipede plays on the notion that the only thing more frightening than death is a state bridging life and death, in which, though one's body is no longer his own to control, the mind remains conscious.
  10. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    The Duel is the most successful literary adaptation I've seen since Pascal Ferran's 2006 "Lady Chatterley."
  11. Ghost Bird
    It's the sort of film that builds up familiar frenzy--newspaper notoriety, tourism uptick, government attention--only to dissolve in a what-just-happened daze.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Losers
    A busy, unsatisfying comic thriller, poorly acted by a grab bag of new faces and franchise movie refugees, and set to a hard-rock soundtrack.
  13. Behind the Burly Q
    Leslie Zemeckis's slightly ramshackle but utterly entertaining Behind the Burly Q is a painstakingly researched love letter to the women and men who once made up the community of burlesque performers.
  14. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    Kim's filmmaking is generally cartoonish in a bad sense, as he squanders his set pieces, flashbacks, and other attention-getting with sometimes downright wretched staging.
  15. In My Sleep
    The biggest problem with Allen Wolf's thriller is that there are so few characters that it's immediately clear what's going on; there's simply no one to suspect besides the obvious.
  16. Paper Man
    An artist-in-crisis piece run through a drab but quirk-conscious indie processor, Paper Man is everything a film like "Lost in Translation" fought not to be.
  17. Ramchand Pakistani
    In the end, however, Ramchand Pakistani sadly negates its intentions with frequent TV producer Jabbar's soapy storytelling and too-clean production values.
  18. Oceans
    Océans is a jaw-dropper as a visual travelogue--even its anthropomorphic indulgences (an ocean floor is turned into a rough neighborhood, complete with trespassers and shy weirdos) are winning.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kick-Ass
    Never as shocking as it thinks it is, as funny as it should be, or as engaged in cultural critique as it could be, Kick-Ass is half-assed.
  20. The Joneses
    What plays hard and dark for the film's first half goes squishy and blindingly bright as calamity and then outright tragedy lead to the saw-it-coming resolution writer-director Derrick Borte thinks is more sincere than it actually plays.
  21. The Cartel
    The Cartel makes up for what it lacks in style and structure with selective but stone-cold facts.
  22. The City of Your Final Destination
    Best is Linney, conquering scenes as the acrid and touching Caroline, her regal bitterness a shield against nostalgia, dressed Park Avenue posh to drink alone.
  23. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    Not just the definitive portrait of street-art counterculture, but also a hilarious exposé on the gullibility of the masses who embrace manufactured creative personas.
  24. Handsome Harry
    As in the films that precede it, the mysteries--and terrors--of desire also propel Handsome Harry, which reunites Gordon with Luminous Motion's Jamey Sheridan, here in the title role.
  25. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    Persian Cats is likeable but undistinguished filmmaking.
  26. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Campanella, who overconfidently takes his time, outfits the film with ludicrous interrogation scenes, a drunken colleague who provides comic relief and redemptive tragedy, and a climactic flood of memories that plays like a trailer.
  27. From Selma to Soweto
    A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once.
  28. Nobody's Perfect
    Too bad von Glasow dissipates the effect with a tentative last-minute Michael Moore-lite gesture, the final mark of a slack, scattershot approach that ill serves the director's intermittently audacious film.
  29. Pornography
    Ambitiously layered and almost completely incoherent, Pornography: A Thriller is a somber thesis film buried under a host of nightmarish, Lynchian conceits.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Date Night
    A jumble of genres, tones, and styles, Date Night ultimately strains to be a serious movie about marriage, with one joke: that, even when surrounded by excitement, Claire and Phil revert to being dull. But in practice, their dullness is just dull.
  31. After.Life
    Somewhere in Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's awkward debut feature is a macabre and almost quaint Gothic mystery begging to be left alone.
  32. The Black Waters of Echo's Pond
    Bloody and gory, but in a friendly way, this is a movie for old-school horror fans who understand that, sometimes, bad is good.
  33. Everyone Else
    An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable.
  34. La mission
    As subtle as a face-punch, La Mission nobly continues a necessary conversation about homophobia, but paves the way to hell with its own good intentions.
  35. The Square
    This Down Under noir confuses incoherent body pileups with "twists."
  36. When You're Strange
    DiCillo overburdens When You're Strange, which is narrated by Johnny Depp, with a cliché barrage of achronological news events, including an unconscionable use of Robert Kennedy's death agony, but the archival Doors footage he has assembled is anything but banal.
  37. Who Do You Love
    Goes from awful to insufferable.
  38. It Came from Kuchar
    Jennifer M. Kroot's film opens up the careers that followed “Naked.” It's an accessible, professional job, with onscreen testimonials from Waters--whose work owes the most to them, and who has been their most faithful proselytizer--Guy Maddin, and Buck Henry.
  39. The Misfortunates
    Often very funny, and the rolling remember-when vignettes trump the typical low-country wild-hairy-man sideshows.
  40. Don McKay
    A strange, largely inert indie thriller, Don McKay has got good bones (inspired by Blood Simple, it has a solid cast and a strong pitch) but a terrible metabolism.
  41. The Greatest
    First-time writer-director Shana Feste has made an uneven but often affecting film that requires its gifted cast to push hard against the script's schematic plotting to find moments of real emotion.
  42. Leaves of Grass
    His (Nelson) timing is off and his bullshit detector nonexistent. I don't much care for the Coens, but the sad truth is that their cynical nihilism is a lot less spurious than Nelson's earnest sentimentality.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Thorn in the Heart
    It's a shock, then, that The Thorn in the Heart, Gondry's documentary about his own family, is so unimaginative and inaccessible.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Warlords
    Chan's old-fashioned, highly watchable mega-production comes complete with God's-eye surveys of mass carnage, the moist sounds of sword-skewering, and little or no discernible CGI.
  45. Breaking Upwards
    A low-budget romantic comedy that's smart and lively and, in the end, quite affecting.
  46. Teza
    Gerima's film stands as a richly expansive portrait of a man caught between an untenable exile and the terrible consequences of his homeland's violent past.
  47. The Last Song
    I can’t recall ever squirming as much as I did during Ronnie and Will’s first kiss; shiny, buff Hemsworth looks like he’s locking lips with an Andy Hardy–era Mickey Rooney in a wig.
  48. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hot Tub Time Machine
    A fundamentally lazy comedy that will probably make you laugh like an idiot.
  50. Chloe
    Thanks to Egoyan's trademark mix of detachment and prurience, the fun is more cheesy than queasy.
  51. The Eclipse
    The Eclipse is a curious Irish ghost story that fiddles with the recipe just enough to produce interesting results.
  52. How to Train Your Dragon
    Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.
  53. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    Tying it all together is Hahn's transparent love for the art of animation and for Disney--its history and once geek-heavy in-house culture. Hahn balances that love with a critical eye that allows him to sing the praises of unsung heroes while letting the a--holes hang themselves.
  54. Blue Beard
    Psychologically rich, unobtrusively minimalist, at once admirably straightforward and slyly comic, Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard is a lucid retelling and simultaneous explanation of Charles Perrault's nastiest, most un-Disneyfiable nursery story.
  55. Dancing Across Borders
    We get white folks ruminating lyrically on the peasant Asian's role as a kind of grand jeté bridge between East and West, and long performance sequences that are dazzling to behold but quite troubling to contemplate.
  56. Godspeed
    The tone fits the material and the performances are surprisingly measured, but Saitzyk's sappy pontifications on loss, redemption, and zealotry don't register as headily as they're meant to (every character gets at least one melodramatic speech), and the spirituality invoked feels about as sincere as the Christian who only attends Christmas mass.
  57. Lbs.
    When a heart attack causes Neil to isolate himself in the wild and get his eating under control, Lbs. acquires a more distinct, insightful texture, emerging--along with its star, who actually lost 170 pounds over the course of a two-year shoot--as a creature with sharper angles than it first appeared.
  58. Repo Men
    The movie shares this premise with 2008's "Repo!: The Genetic Opera." It would be worth researching who ripped off whom if both weren't ghastly.
  59. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    Sweet and funny at either end, but in between, it sags with endless repetition of gross bodily functions.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    May be a shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own. Catch it before the inevitable U.S. remake.
  61. Greenberg
    Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Runaways
    In The Runaways' first hour, there's a guttural pleasure to be had in riding waves of rock-movie cliché spiked with socio-sexual commentary. The movie is at its best when working through the contradictions of teen sex-for-sale, when it's both turn-on and creep-out.
  63. City Island
    An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.
  64. The Killing Jar
    The film has no pulse and feels interminable, with its stilted dialogue, static staging, and usually fine actors who are horrendous here--Amber Benson is all moist-eyed empathy as the waitress while Madsen is laughably bad.
  65. Kimjongilia
    Arguably the most dysfunctional culture of the past few centuries, North Korea is a cosmically mad movie waiting to happen. But for now, Heikin's is merely insubstantial.
  66. Neil Young Trunk Show
    Removing even stage banter, the focus is entirely on performance, save for a few "candid backstage" bits--Young getting a cracked nail filed down, etc. Devotees will thrill to rarities like "Kansas" and "Mexico."
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Vincere
    Vincere, though, is the veteran director's stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema.
  68. Shutterbug
    Papas leans too heavily on expected street types (a black pimp, multi-ethnic skate punks) to populate his underworld, but he compensates with expressionistic HD photography and eerie electronic doodling to sustain an impossible mood of productive unease.
  69. Mid-August Lunch
    Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it's hard to believe writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody mafia hit "Gomorrah."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Exploding Girl
    Girl is narratively slight, but aesthetically and psychologically complex. At times, it feels more like an illustrated audio collage than a movie.
  71. Green Zone
    A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is the best action director working today, adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously.
  72. Mother
    For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.
  73. Our Family Wedding
    Might've made for a progressive film if director and co-writer Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar) hadn't pandered to the lowest common denominator with brainless screwball laughs.
  74. Remember Me
    There's an insult-to-injury quality to a plain bad movie with a "seize the day" message (Remember Me's tagline: "Live in the Moments"), which heckles you with all the other things you should or could be doing while you're marking time waiting on the credits.
  75. Severe Clear
    A potent reminder of how thankless a soldier's job is.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights
    For his part, Jack works it out onstage, in some of the most subtly shot and well-recorded concert footage ever from a band not named the Rolling Stones.
  77. Children of Invention
    The young director Tze Chun is not a flashy filmmaker, but he understands the vulnerability of immigrant workers in the sleazy sub-rosa economies of a floundering 21st-century America.
  78. Ghost Town
    I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town's mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground.
  79. Stolen
    It's uncertain whether or not Taranto and debuting helmer Anders Anderson looked at the "Law & Order: SVU" and "Cold Case" episodes that also used the crime as a plot thread; the sub-televisual incompetence of their film suggests not.
  80. Alice in Wonderland
    Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.
  81. Brooklyn's Finest
    Filled with every cop-movie convention since the invention of gunpowder and curse words, Brooklyn's Finest is three movies in one, all of which you've seen before.
  82. The Secret of Kells
    Gorgeously mounted tale of enlightenment through art and courage.
  83. Harlem Aria
    Racial tensions and bawdy humor carry the day, until, following an unfunny set piece at a fancy hotel and a street robbery, black and white (far too) easily come together to help their young charge.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess
    Stuffed with talking heads, Harlan is overlong and redundant, but its core questions are worthy.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cop Out
    Working with a full-on studio budget for the first time in his decade-and-a-half career, Smith is still making movies about guys just like him.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Prophet
    Sold to the global arthouse market as the "French Scorsese," Audiard does know his genre. A Prophet, the director has said, is the "anti-Scarface."
  87. The Yellow Handkerchief
    All three leads are solidly convincing in their candor. And Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission) shoots the hell out of the swampy South to make for a nontoxic diversion.
  88. Easier with Practice
    From the virtuoso 10-minute single shot that encompasses the initial phone call, to a long, traveling shot of Davy all but running from a humiliating sexual encounter, Alvarez trusts Geraghty's fear-and-wonder-filled eyes to tell the tale. These two need to make more movies together.
  89. The Art of the Steal
    The Art of the Steal's thorough research, bolstered by many fiery talking heads, makes it one of the most successful advocacy docs in recent years and may prompt some firsthand investigating of your own.
  90. Formosa Betrayed
    Neither the investigation nor the suspense (hobbled by editorializing) have much impact; the movie, necessarily shot in Thailand, plays like secret-history tourism, complete with archival footage haunting the screen.
  91. Prodigal Sons
    As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation.
  92. Toe to Toe
    The performances are top-notch and occasionally moving, but Abt nearly smothers it all with some embarrassing coming-of-age teen-angst false notes, plus clichéd Ivy League ambitions, a cartoonishly neglectful mother, STDs, unfair expulsion, martyrdom for both the rich and poor, and a non-reciprocal lesbian crush.
  93. Shutter Island
    Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.
  94. Happy Tears
    Continuing both his bad filmmaking and obsession with lethal orifices, Mitchell Lichtenstein follows up "Teeth," his clumsy debut about a dismembering vagina, with a voluminous explosion of poop.
  95. The Good Guy
    DePietro is no cynic, and he means well--but he also means to corner the coveted "Dear John" demographic, which, in turn, means that The Good Guy suffers from the dreary want of imagination about the specificity of twentysomething life that has sunk so many other specimens of this battered genre.
  96. Blood Done Sign My Name
    An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).
  97. The Ghost Writer
    Saved by often delightfully bitchy British dialogue.
  98. Phyllis and Harold
    What's interesting about the filmmaker's rummage through her parents' conjugal closet--another in a thriving sub-genre of domestic-turmoil docs as told by their spawn--is the abyss between the husband and wife's points of view.
  99. The Last New Yorker
    Considering how meticulously Wang location-scouted the project--documenting all the barely surviving (or since closed down) luncheonettes, Irish pubs, hosieries, and shoe repair joints of yesteryear--it's a shame he couldn't stick to his shutterbug roots and shoot a documentary instead.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lourdes
    The film delves deeper into the pain and pleasure of watching other people experience the wonderful things you dream of happening to you. In that sense, Hausner has crafted a kind of meta-riff on the masochistic lure of cinema itself.
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