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. Toast
    Slater's book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.
  2. Cirkus Columbia
    "No Man's Land" director Danis Tanovic, adapting a novel by Ivica Djikic, also returns to his roots with this decidedly old-fashioned, quasi-satirical drama that is a bit on the nose with its indictments of post-communist animosities and opportunism.
  3. Right at Your Door
    Grounded hard by some terrific smoking-skyline special effects and by Cochrane and McCormack's intensity.
  4. Generation War
    Generation War seeks the epic, creating multiple, lavishly realized worlds and moving with confidence between them. What it finds of both history and its individuals is less complete.
  5. Strangers with Candy
    Strangers With Candy regularly lampoons junkie-reparation melodramas and after-school specials, but with so little focus it's never clear what the film, or even Sedaris's vaudeville buffoon incarnation, is supposed to be parodying. That may be its fascination for some--it's a satire without a baseline, free-floating in its own self-indulgent ether.
  6. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Still, the tapes are great. More than just a flophouse Punch and Judy show, the Raymond vs. Peter dustups elevate cruel bickering to a ritual through which we live life's pain.
  7. The Wall
    Liman, for all his action acuity, struggles to make lying behind a wall exciting. He manages some tense and rousing sequences, but between them yawn scenes of the killer jabbering bullshit and the hero passing in and out of consciousness.
  8. Saudate for the Future
    Infectious city symphony.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Scorpio exists merely as a succession of stylistic flourishes without feeling, representative of the emptiest, most uninteresting kind of cinema. [24 May 1973, p.83]
    • Village Voice
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wildest Dream
    Everest looks suitably majestic in this IMAX documentary, though five different expeditions on the peak are awkwardly cobbled into one dubious narrative.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bubba Ho-tep
    Though unpainfully entertaining, its greatest dose of otherworldly mojo must have been spent warding off straight-to-video status.
  12. Snow White and the Huntsman
    For all this Snow White's visual ornamentation, there's no sense of narrative priority - the filmmakers can't see the Dark Forest for the trees.
  13. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    The film articulates this dimension of the story, regrettably, in little more than biopic platitudes and daddy-issue clichés...But it's not all bad. Badgley delivers a nuanced performance of such ferocity he almost singlehandedly makes a conventional film seem loose and improvisatory.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  16. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Poppe's closeness to the material ensures a level of passion, but he still fails to create a truly specific dynamic for Rebecca and Marcus's family, settling instead for a catch-all representation of the difficulties of maintaining a healthy home life while working in a dangerous profession.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brighton Rock
    The leads are compelling and the chase and fight scenes - scored to a propulsive bass-drum beat - are kinetic, but as Brighton Rock attempts to zero in on Rose and Pinkie's dangerous relationship, it loses momentum.
  18. The Great New Wonderful
    Ironically, Leiner's two monuments to pothead delirium seem vastly more coherent than this hazy attempt to mine the zeitgeist, a film every bit as pointed as its nounless title.
  19. The Dinner
    The beauty of a single-location thriller is how the tension escalates in containment, but Moverman fails to seize that built-in advantage.
  20. Confetti
    If nothing else, this affectionately off-the-wall confection offers exuberant confirmation of every suspicion you might ever have had that the English are charmingly eccentric. They're barking mad.
  21. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    A Walk Among the Tombstones is an uncommonly well-made thriller.
  22. Backstage
    An enjoyably overwrought meditation on the consequences of celebrity and the vicissitudes of fandom, Backstage stars Le Besco as the schoolgirl acolyte of Emmanuelle Seigner's pop diva, a singer-songwriter and high priestess of cheese.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Morning Glory
    The only love Morning Glory truly cares about is the passionate but sexless amour fou between a girl and her work.
  24. Traveller
    The movie lacks any sense of subcultural specificity, though it has a superabundant country music score. [22 Apr 1997]
    • Village Voice
  25. The Last Kiss
    The Last Kiss isn't terrible, but if you're strapped for a night out it can easily wait till DVD. Better yet, it may be time to revisit "Diner."
  26. The Tavern
    Though rife with incidental plot holes, Foote's movie feels right even when nothing important is happening...which is much of the time.
  27. Sasayaki
    This dreamy, languorous farce offers a manageable strawberry-flavored alternative, a mildly kinky Hello Kitty sadomasochism.
  28. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Manure of a relatively clover-scented variety, George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields is at primal odds with itself.
  29. Up at the Villa
    The Haases, whose previous films ("Angels and Insects," "The Music of Chance") evinced a remote, unfussy sensibility, are a poor fit for the melodramatic contortions that the story demands.
  30. Alila
    Israel's one-man new wave, Amos Gitai, surveys his nation's hardscrabble quotidian in Alila, which dallies with both Kiarostamian spirit and Altman-esque fabric, examining the intersecting lives of a dozen or so Tel Aviv residents.
  31. Memoir of War
    While clearly adoring Duras’s work, Finkiel doesn’t credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience.
  32. Today's Special
    Mandvi (who co-wrote the script with Jonathan Bines) does well as the straight man, but his journey to identity (chaperoned by a magical cabbie/world-class chef played by Naseeruddin Shah) strays too far into tacky ethnic farce.
  33. The Ritual
    The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.
  34. Last Chance Harvey
    Besides being old pros who could elevate such schmaltz in their sleep, Hoffman and Thompson -- despite the 20-plus years between them, and her graceful restraint in contrast to his creepy assertiveness -- have a genuinely sweet chemistry, which is the exact and only reason to seek this one out.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Horrible Bosses
    This is middling TV material, almost comforting in its bland predictability - the kind of stuff you want on the seat-back screen when there's turbulence on a plane - but rarely actually laugh-out-loud funny, and never truly dark or daring.
  36. First Love
    Probing the trust-based power games of a sadomasochistic dynamic, the movie is a reasonably thoughtful study of obsessive love.
  37. True Adolescents
    Johnson establishes an understated, agreeable tone throughout that makes up for the movie's notable lack of hilarity, and in the outdoors sequences nicely captures how seemingly benign nature can turn nasty in an instant.
  38. Mama
    Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise would suggest.
  39. The Company You Keep
    Far from engaged, the film practically surrenders in an arthritic faint.
  40. Everything's Gone Green
    It's not the big picture that charms here, it's the details. More than anything, though, it's Costanzo--a spindly Everydork who grows up not because he has to, but because he just kinda wants to.
  41. Forks Over Knives
    Some of the data is less convincing than Fulkerson would have us believe, but nothing trumps the clear eyes and shiny coats of a trio of newly minted vegans.
  42. Proxy
    Though Proxy shows early signs of being worthy of that vaunted company, it's brought down by some truly wooden performances and an inability to turn its interesting spark of an idea into a workable story.
  43. Red Trees
    In the end, this relentlessly scenic travelogue/valentine is Willer literally giving her old man peace of mind.
  44. Cet amour-là
    May worship heedlessly at Duras's memory, but it's a testament to Moreau alone.
  45. Dark Blue
    However misjudged and evidently cobbled together in the editing room, Dark Blue does have the nerve to drive right through the riots with Russell's saber-toothed bigot, implicitly linking the two phenomena and not being shy about the suffering on either side of the combat.
  46. Two Men Went to War
    Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.
  47. Bread and Roses
    A genuine consciousness-raiser, but it's less a social-realist narrative than a high-volume rally.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    AmnesiA
    So true to its title that I've forgotten many of the details already--and I just saw it this morning. This latecomer has been rendered completely obsolete by “Memento.”
  49. Flash of Genius
    Greg Kinnear, usually kinetic, is unusually (and unbearably) dull.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brother to Brother
    First-timer Rodney Evans's leaden script fails to live up to the poetry of its subjects and raises more themes--black-on-black homophobia, light-skin versus dark-skin prejudice, writers' envy--than it can fully develop.
  51. You've Been Trumped
    Donald Trump is the face of America here, representing all of us and demonstrating our values abroad. Hopefully this sharp rendering, or something very much like it, is the legacy for which he and his family will be remembered.
  52. It's Complicated
    Watching this garish fiasco, I found it mildly depressing to see Streep hurdling through this gauntlet of strained whimsy, her every toothy smile and throaty chortle more affected than Sophie Zawistowski's Polish accent.
  53. little man
    Guaranteed to polarize audiences. Is her insistence on taking every measure possible to save little Nicholas heroic or monumentally self-serving?
  54. Nicholas and Alexandra
    The sobriety of the entire enterprise is ill-suited to the lurid period in history it represents. [23 Dec 1971, p.61]
    • Village Voice
  55. I Origins
    The story proceeds with all the flighty unreality of a film unconcerned with real-world scientific rigor... but Cahill manufactures enough conspiracies, coincidences, and extraordinary turns of plot to keep his thinking audience too busy to care.
  56. Unfinished Song
    Shamelessly manipulative, it's a highly effective if not very good film, its success entirely due to the talents of its cast. They bring heart to a script that is unabashedly about pushing buttons.
  57. Casanova
    Ledger's deadpan baritone pumps wit into his tepid one-liners like collagen into a wilted starlet's kisser, and the clumsy staging might not grate so much if the tone weren't so self-congratulatory.
  58. War Dogs
    The film’s breezy drive and bursts of comic energy largely divert attention from the flatness of its world and characters.
  59. Rubberneck
    Karpovsky is unsettlingly good as Paul, and Newman's Danielle is sexy and layered.
  60. The Equalizer
    Fuqua steadily parades his big moments, and the movie works as unhinged spectacle. As a thriller it's less certain.
  61. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is half silliness, half swagger, but Branagh's arms-akimbo impudence as a director makes it work. He takes it all seriously, but with a wink.
  62. 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.
  63. Skins
    Good intentions or not, ineptitude and cloying sentimentality don't do anybody any favors.
  64. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    It's easily the most disarming and inventive movie made for genre geeks in years.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Art of Amália
    De Almeida's latest hagiographic effort diminishes Amália's legend by purifying it.
  66. Cecil B. DeMented
    Has the grace to send the audience out with a piece of Waters-written rap.
  67. Salvation Army
    Despite stilted camerawork often locked in the medium shot, Salvation Army is a touching ode to the freedom to finally be who we want to be — if we can ever find where we belong.
  68. The First Grader
    Chadwick veers frequently into flashbacks to Maruge's past as a Mau Mau resistance fighter-mostly prolonged scenes of torture and violence that do little to inform or propel the present-day story. Poorly defined tribal lines flare up, and Jane's life is threatened, the point at which the script's Hollywood contrivances open up and swallow this often charming film whole.
  69. Opal Dream
    Rush screaming from anything that announces itself as "a movie for children and grown-ups of all ages." Slight and shamelessly saccharine, Opal Dream is devoted to the proposition that it takes an Australian-outback village to validate the imaginary friends of a blond child who is too sensitive for this world but not, alas, for this sappy movie.
  70. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    The doc is gorgeously filmed, well edited, and works in close-up, but the result is more voyeuristic than revealing, except to show that desolation is among those things that cannot be seen or touched.
  71. Ezra
    Unsparing, pedagogic, and genuinely compelling.
  72. Collaborator
    On one level, it's a dark, funny tragedy, but it's also Donovan's thesis on his own craft.
  73. Date and Switch
    Date and Switch isn't a gay movie. It's a zippy, happy, buddy flick.
  74. The Kingdom
    A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.
  75. Good for Nothing
    Good for Nothing has a nice comic sense of the brushfire eruptions of Western violence.
  76. Uncle John
    Thanks to Ashton's brilliant, career-defining performance, we're made to see that the only thing worse than doing evil deeds is being nice enough to feel guilty about them.
  77. May in the Summer
    May in the Summer's biggest obstacle is Dabis, who isn't a strong enough actress to sell the subtle humor.
  78. 3 Hearts
    The film is so unabashed in showing the place of passion in a bourgeois world, how a missed connection can screw up a life forever, that plot implausibilities are forgiven.
  79. Save Me
    Though Save Me never quite surmounts its schematic scenario, scene by scene, beat by beat, it's pretty damn good.
  80. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    No longer silent but still the lesser talker between them, Ilya is marvelously fluent in spatial forms.
  81. Buffalo Soldiers
    In its post-Vietnam cynicism, Buffalo Soldiers feels almost avant-garde.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.
  83. The Commuter
    The director’s stylistic obsessions (harried close-ups of cell-service signal bars) and thematic integrity (witness the overworked 9-to-5 crowd banding together in solidarity) elevate the cheap-paperback plot without tipping the movie over into pomposity.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Escapist
    A taut thriller that ends on a note of unexpected grace.
  85. Non-Stop
    Exceedingly slow setup and even more tediously static sequence that effectively terminates the movie well before its official running time.
  86. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    Disney's big-screen expansion of their hit TV show is nirvana for the pubescent crowd.
  87. Hidden in Plain Sight
    John H. Smihula's compelling video documentary aims for both hearts and minds.
  88. Leaving
    In any language, the actress (Kristin Scott Thomas) does what she can to best serve her scripts, even when they're hopelessly beneath her.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Journals of Musan
    Group scenes, meanwhile, often suffer from a peculiar handheld drift, as if in troubling over which insult to add to which injury, the filmmakers neglected to attend to rudimentary blocking.
  90. G.B.F.
    Here's to hoping lax multiplex security allows teenagers to sneak in to this very funny and thoughtful take on how straights often objectify queers — and how increased visibility in the media can result in an expectation to conform to stereotypes.
  91. Pump
    [A] compelling and cogent documentary.
  92. Monk With a Camera
    Monk With a Camera hints at answers, but imposes nothing. Like a good photograph, or a wise abbot, it only presents the evidence and allows us to arrive at truth.
  93. I Am Michael
    Glatze's blog entries are read aloud by Franco, an infamous graduate-degree collector not so long ago, in a voice that suggests poetry-MFA earnestness, horrible acting, or both.
  94. Mad Tiger
    Yet another documentary paean to an unsung musical act whose fringe staying power is as remarkable as its lack of mainstream coverage.
  95. Dream Boat
    For all the outrageous cosplay and assless trunks on display, director Tristan Ferland Milewski is more interested in exploring the interior lives of gay men.
  96. ACORN and the Firestorm
    ACORN and the Firestorm fumbles with the media story, offering cable-news talking heads in montage but not digging deeply into how the story spread — or why elected Democrats believed they had to shut Acorn down. That sense of fumbling shapes the film.
  97. The Corruptor
    That in such a miserable film I could still care whether his character lived or died is, perhaps, the greatest proof that Chow Yun Fat's a movie star.
  98. Die Another Day
    Dissing a Bond movie is quite like calling a dog stupid, but when it has the temerity to run over two hours, you feel like winding up with a kick.
  99. La Maison de la Radio
    La Maison de la Radio is the kind of film that divides its audience into two camps: those happy to observe and those impatient to be told a story.
  100. 7 Chinese Brothers
    A comedy too listless to bother crafting jokes or comic incidents, a character study centered on a sweet-natured prick it's hard to believe could actually exist tumbleweeding into a job at a lube shop, 7 Chinese Brothers is a go-nowhere shrug of a movie, the kind of indie that might send you screaming for the multiplex.
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