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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    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Valentine's Day
    Shoddy enough within its primary genre, Valentine's Day becomes deadly in its attempt to be a Los Angeles Ensemble Movie.
  2. Videocracy
    Videocracy is hopelessly infected with the very prurience it means to expose--again and again, Gandini returns to images of pretty women grinding away for the camera in hopes of scoring their 15 minutes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    October Country
    Best understood as a work of creative nonfiction. The directors employ art-film techniques to aestheticize a swamp of big issues--the military, poverty, madness, family planning, spousal and child abuse--and give a family's (and America's) angst a clear voice and seductive form without leveling judgment.
  4. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    American Radical shows--albeit with great reluctance--how a formidable intellect partnered with an absolutist disposition can get you absolutely nowhere.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    3 Idiots
    In writer-director Rajkumar Hirani's tuneful, enjoyable college comedy, 3 Idiots, Khan plays "Rancho," an engineering student so brilliant that he barely has to break a sweat to place first in his class.
  6. Tano da morire
    Manically entertaining, Tano may have been a popular hit, but its caricatured world of papier-mâché bad taste fulfills at least one Underground criteria: Save for a big showstopper in the Vucciria market, it all could've been shot in someone's basement.
  7. From Paris with Love
    He (Morel) brings in lobotomized entertainment at 90-odd minutes. During the February doldrums, this cannot be underestimated.
  8. Dear John
    The biggest surprise here is Tatum, whose butch reticence has never been put to better use: His saddest farewell isn’t to his lady, but to a man even more uncommunicative than he is.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    District 13: Ultimatum
    Works only when at full sprint.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shinjuku Incident
    Despite its Hong Kong pedigree (veteran Derek Yee directs), Shinjuku Incident forgoes flashy action scenes in favor of old-fashioned moralism. Warner Bros. could have made it in the 1930s, and that's a compliment.
  11. Frozen
    Green also can't maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary as we watch three charmlessly written characters bicker and attempt inane ideas. It's one thing to be scared with them, and quite another to feel trapped with them.
  12. Terribly Happy
    Cedergren is a little too bland, but that works with Hansen's air of haplessness and sets him apart from the colorful locals. His self-inflicted reckoning is a horizon visible throughout the movie, and the bog outside of town is a thudding but effective metaphor of willful repression.
  13. Eyes Wide Open
    Mostly, though, it wins with excellent performances: Strauss never overplays his character's internal tension, nor does Danker camp up his youthful virility.
  14. Promised Lands
    Promised Lands is the only western documentary made about the war, but today, the movie seems more remarkable as a Sontag artifact than as political filmmaking.
  15. Ajami
    To the extent that its sympathies lie with the occupied and with those who must do the work of enforcing occupation, Ajami brings a warmly generous spirit to its subjects, almost all of whom become gangsters by default. No one is demonized or sanctified. The movie's sensibilities are humanistic.
  16. Edge of Darkness
    Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, Gibson can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.
  17. 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.
  18. Saint John of Las Vegas
    Mostly, Saint John traps good comic performers--including Malco and Peter Dinklage as John's boss--in airless editing and an unproductive, unresolved, sludgy tone.
  19. For My Father
    While films like “The Band's Visit,” “Jellyfish,” and “Waltz With Bashir” suggest a subtler, more psychologically directed path for Israeli film, Dror Zahavi's For My Father is old-school social melodrama (plus bombs), all the way.
  20. Off and Running
    A tactful but probing and richly satisfying study of an entire family thrown into self-doubt by a teenager venturing into risky territory as she struggles to find her way.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    North Face
    Director Philipp Stölzl makes the movie a tad more political (i.e., anti-Nazi) than it needs to be, but Fürmann's stoic performance reduces the story to its harsh, true fundamentals.
  22. Falling Awake
    The film hints at progressive themes...soon disregard both in the service of a hokey gangsta plot.
  23. Word Is Out
    Extraordinary, groundbreaking documentary.
  24. Still Bill
    Withers gets a sleepily even-keel portrait that could use more on musical technique, though it is nice to see him get happy with singer-songwriter Raul Midón.
  25. Legion
    This wan rebooting of the Christ tale has decent acting, serviceable if familiar visual effects, a few jump-in-your-seat moments, and the always crowd-pleasing gimmick of a senior citizen cussing up a storm. But the down time between action scenes is deadly dull and the film's hoary cinematic shorthand (i.e., a young Black man enters the film to the sound of hip-hop and fights with his baby mama) is more terrifying than anything else served up.
  26. 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.
  27. The Girl on the Train
    For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into a tone poem.
  28. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    More often than not, these musical interludes are more like distractions aimed only to entice younger audiences (not a terrible thing).
  29. To Save a Life
    To Save a Life wants to rescue kids from the Satanic messages of "Gossip Girl"--a benign, even worthy enough objective, but must alternatives to empty, materialistic adolescence require baptism in the Pacific?
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tooth Fairy
    Johnson seems perfectly happy coasting through bland mediocrities. It used to be that his former career as a wrestler was his biggest obstacle to becoming a Hollywood star--now, it appears to be laziness.
  31. The Paranoids
    Maybe it's appropriate that Argentinean writer-director Gabriel Medina's chokingly offbeat debut is as aimless and confused as its prototypical slacker-comedy hero, who seems to have wandered into a glum dramedy with a hazy noirish aesthetic.
  32. Room and a Half
    In this ecstatically fanciful film, Russian filmmaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky brings the acclaimed Nobel Laureate back home via his sonorous verse and a montage of archival footage, wickedly doctored photos, re-enactments, and puckish animation featuring two crows and a very large cat.
  33. Pop Star on Ice
    Pop Star offers zero that enthusiasts didn't know already and nothing for the rest of us.
  34. The Book of Eli
    The Book of Eli's plastic parable isn't much more advanced than "Insane Clown Posse" theology.
  35. Fish Tank
    Jarvis gives a ferociously persuasive performance in an otherwise routine tale of domestic disaster.
  36. The Spy Next Door
    Immediately forgettable family entertainment, suitable for release only in the dung-heap month of January.
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Leap Year
    Leap Year belongs to the Prada backlash subgenre of women's pictures--epitomized by "The Proposal"--in which smart, stylish women must be muddied, abased, ridiculed, and degraded in order to get their man.
  40. Waiting for Armageddon
    Line up this terrific documentary about end-times evangelical Christians against Bill Maher's sneering "Religulous," and you'll see an excellent argument for restraint and a fair fight.
  41. Wonderful World
    It's heartbreaking to see Lathan, an underemployed actress whose talents were last put to good use in 2006's "Something Else," in such a ridiculous, impossible role.
  42. Garbage Dreams
    With new problems come new opportunities, and Garbage Dreams smartly focuses on a younger generation of teenage workers who stand to benefit from the Zaballeen's new focus on education and updated techniques.
  43. The White Ribbon
    Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator.
  44. The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond
    If Markell's instincts for script exhumation are questionable, she's the victim of even worse timing: Who thought releasing her film 10 days after Liv Ullmann and Cate Blanchett's praised-to-the-high-heavens "A Streetcar Named Desire" closed was a good idea?
  45. The Chaser
    A late-act tragedy drenched in bloodlust slow-mo epitomizes the film's poseur bleakness, with its treatise on individual and institutional amorality sabotaged by broad-stroke characterizations and a knotty narrative too reliant on twin modern-day horror tropes: preposterous decision-making and lousy cell phone service.
  46. 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.
  47. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    This is potentially wonderful, if not exactly new stuff, but Gilliam and McKeown's willful refusal of coherent narrative and determination to pack every idea about art they ever had into one scenario, make this fiendishly gorgeous movie more exhausting than exhilarating to watch.
  48. 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.
  49. Sita Sings the Blues
    Paley's beguiling, consistently inventive visuals and sly yet melancholy tone are about as warm and winning as heartbreak-fueled empowerment gets.
  50. 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.
  51. Police, Adjective
    Police, Adjective is a deadly serious as well as dryly humorous analysis of bureaucratic procedure and, particularly, the tyranny of language. Images may record reality, but words define it.
  52. Avatar
    Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is "Dances With Wolves."
  53. Nine
    Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity. It's the only point at which Nine seems more than a total zero.
  54. The Young Victoria
    Man, British heritage cinema can be dull when assembly-lined for the export market.
  55. Crazy Heart
    It's merely a well-done, adult American movie--that is to say, a rarity.
  56. 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."
  57. Ricky
    Ozon's fractured-working-class-family magical realism, liberally adapted from Rose Tremain's short story, "Moth," works best in specific moments.
  58. Invictus
    Like every Eastwood production, Invictus is stately, handsomely mounted, attentive to detail right down to the Marmite adorning the team's breakfast buffet, and relentlessly conventional. As a portrait of a hero, the movie effortlessly brings a lump to the throat (Freeman gives a subtly crafted performance that blends Mandela's physical frailty with his easy charm and cerebral wit); as history, it is borderline daft and selective to the point of distortion.
  59. The Lovely Bones
    In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," part Fritz Lang's "M," the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous.
  60. 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
  61. The Slammin' Salmon
    Likably stoopid, the latest from comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) mines plenty of jokes from eating out and being served.
  62. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
    Everything about this berserk, essentially static procedural is just crazy enough to be true. In any case, Herzog has gone beyond Good and Evil to reinvent himself as a candidate for the wiggiest director of comedy in America today.
  63. 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. The Last Station
    Tolstoy fought a love-hate war with his bipolar wife, Sonya, and thank God for that, since it allows Helen Mirren, basically playing a cross between Ibsen drama queen Hedda Gabler and the little squirrel from "A Doll's House," to waltz away with the movie.
  65. Brothers
    Sheridan, repeatedly drawn to family sagas, including his own (2002's In America), aims for Greek tragedy but ends up with a PTSD melodrama, with Maguire able to produce slobber almost as effortlessly as Portman can summon up tears--essentially all her role calls for.
  66. Everybody's Fine
    Robert De Niro's only good at playing a dad in movies starring Ben Stiller? It's all so much raging bull.
  67. Giant
    With potentially lethargic materials, Biniez has made a quiet, intent, involving film, a moony-innocent urban alienation fairy tale of bashful ogre and village beauty--and it never quite crests.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Breaking Point
    Breaking Point is so dry you may wish it had the good sense to be a campy hoot.
  69. Serious Moonlight
    Serious Moonlight has a backstory much more intriguingly dramatic than what's onscreen.
  70. Big River Man
    The real drama lies in the sweetly twisted symbiosis between this likable, infuriating wreck of a man and his devoted son and publicist, Borut.
  71. Loot
    The bleakness and resignation running through the film can be gut-wrenching.
  72. The Strip
    Could Dave Foley prostitute his talent to amuse any further without actually becoming a prostitute? In a plunging step down from emceeing celebrity poker, Foley provides a recognizable face to Jameel Khan's picked-over Goodwill bin of workplace comedy, The Strip.
  73. Until the Light Takes Us
    One artist favorably compares the homemade metal scene to state-supported "mediocre cultural activity"--as good a designation as any for Until the Light Takes Us.
  74. Le jour avant le lendemain
    But if the movie's documentary function tends to trump its narrative one, the directors nevertheless manage to locate great reserves of sadness in the material, tapping a particularly rich vein in the wrinkled look of resignation on actress/co-director Ivalu's face.
  75. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
    In this densely populated ensemble piece, Reeves stands out as the only actor whose damaged character evokes sympathy and avoids cliché. Pippa, played by Wright Penn in near-permanent Stepford Wife mode, isn't much more than a vehicle for false epiphanies and forced rapprochements.
  76. Home
    Ursula Meier's confident, appealingly bizarre theatrical debut.
  77. The Road
    Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.
  78. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ninja Assassin
    A triple-cross plot with Harris's superiors doesn't help the movie's clarity--neither does the clattering sound design. Shouldn't throwing stars be silent? If they're gonna sound like gunshots, why not just use guns?
  80. Me and Orson Welles
    Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.
  81. The Blind Side
    Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.
  82. 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broken Embraces
    Indeed, three decades into his career as a name-brand fashioner of zesty soapers, Spanish cinema's most beloved export could direct un film de Almodóvar with his eyes shut and still get a rise out of his fans. So who could blame the matador for letting the bull run the show this time?
  84. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Chaste, oddly bloodless, and nearly plotless saga.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Planet 51
    Like "E.T." in reverse, this pleasantly mediocre CG animation tale lands an astronaut on a distant planet.
  86. Defamation
    Like most good documentaries, Defamation poses more questions than it purports to answer, before arriving at the mildly reductive postulation that what's past is past.
  87. The Sun
    Though he successfully humanizes Hirohito, who is shown happily shedding his divinity, Sokurov doesn't entirely exonerate him. He contrives a shock ending that, as measured as everything else in this engrossing, supremely assured movie, acknowledges one last blood sacrifice on the emperor's altar.
  88. Mammoth
    Grossly exaggerating his characters' either/or constructions, Moodysson forgoes any real ideas about the world's vast inequities, content to pummel his audience with portentous global guilt-tripping.
  89. The Missing Person
    The film has been gesturing toward a profundity that isn't there.
  90. The War on Kids
    Cevin Soling's lively documentary lays out in hair-raising detail the authoritarian underpinnings of America's child-centered culture.
  91. Red Cliff
    Red Cliff exudes a physical grandiosity that few movies of the past 20 years have attempted--no matter that Woo, even at his best, is still more at ease with down-and-dirty action than epic pageantry.
  92. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold--with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere.
  93. 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.
  94. The Messenger
    What really resonates is the complex tale of camaraderie between two men whose only hope of avoiding self-destruction is to let down their guard--which is, of course, against protocol.
  95. 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.
  96. Dare
    Zach Gilford's game performance is still no match for the film's catalog of easy ironies, awkward framings, and advice on how to play Blanche DuBois.
  97. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
    What makes the film fascinating is the anguished dance around hagiography performed by two of his daughters, who wrote, directed, and narrated the movie.
  98. Oh My God
    The drubbing score leaves one nearly insensate to the fact that Rodgers has nothing original or even interesting to say about his subject, flattening fine points of scripture to recommend interfaith group hugs.
  99. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    A glorified informercial, complete with enough blandly upbeat guitar-cues to power all 22 seasons of "Real World" intros.
  100. Uncertainty
    The result is some nice atmospherics tethered to a cripplingly half-baked existentialism.
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