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. Women in Trouble
    Awkwardly mixes blue material with sob stories.
  2. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop.
  3. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    Despite a backbeat of perky music and the sarcastic voiceover meant to lubricate the action, The Men Who Stare at Goats lacks pizzazz. The movie isn't funny enough to work as farce, but it's far too dippy to take seriously.
  4. The Box
    The new Richard Kelly movie is basically a sock of coal for Christmas.
  5. The Fourth Kind
    A couple of modestly effective shocks lie in store.
  6. A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it.
  7. Storm
    The writing by director Hans-Christian Schmid (Requiem) and Bernd Lange is more stilted and righteous than even the U.N. environs, with its humanity-embracing procedural-speak, calls for.
  8. Collapse
    Smith lets Ruppert's plainspoken autodidactic skepticism get gradually shriller until his arguments dissolve into tears of grief and frustration. There's an element of Errol Morris in the film, which implicitly psychologizes its subject and watches as he talks himself deeper and deeper into the hole.
  9. Endgame
    The principals, especially Ejiofor, rise above the starchiness that often hampers portrayals of recent, monumental history.
  10. Splinterheads
    Touching in its dorkiness.
  11. That Evening Sun
    More than once, the director inserts a gooey flashback to a tender moment between the farmer and his late wife (Dixie Carter) that not only extends an already overlong movie, but also fatally undercuts the artful rigor of its leading man.
  12. The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    John Woo outgrew stylizing movies like this in the '90s, but Duffy is still chasing his perfect slide-and-shoot, except now with more self-satisfied posturing, awkward pop-culture referencing, casual homophobia and racism, and the most vulgar co-opting of religious iconography this side of Dan Brown.
  13. Gentlemen Broncos
    Hess deserves credit, I suppose, for so effectively channeling his inner seven-year-old. Personally, I preferred spending two hours in the company of Spike Jonze's.
  14. The House of the Devil
    Pumping the audience with inhale-exhale zooms and out-of-the-way close-ups, director Ti West's ratcheting of suspense in this alone-in-an-empty-house tale is proficient, if not psychologically piercing, in the best "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" fashion.
  15. How to Seduce Difficult Women
    It is, perhaps, best not to expect too much from the directorial debut of Grace Kelly's ex-hairdresser; still, How to Seduce Difficult Women is woefully incompetent and ugly.
  16. Labor Day
    A well-intentioned but dull, video-ugly documentary if it weren't partly financed by its subject, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); that just makes it a crappy infomercial.
  17. Looking for Palladin
    Requiring cuts, some sense of direction, and dialogue that doesn't either declare or dither, the film looks like it was fun to make.
  18. Skin
    This workmanlike, but enormously moving, movie makes the case that apartheid really does control her life, even her decision to rebel and get involved with a black man.
  19. Antichrist
    Antichrist, which, above all, wants to make pain visceral, is less successful at projecting authentic experience--the shock tactics are ultimately numbing.
  20. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie), the movie suffers from the same tonal schizophrenia of that other recent goth wannabe, "Jennifer's Body": Is it meant to be scary or funny? Oops, it's neither.
  21. (Untitled)
    A film only Hilton Kramer could love, (Untitled) aims wide and misses.
  22. Motherhood
    Dieckmann nails the look of a certain niche of urban neo-middle-class living, but the film's hyper-earnest tone and reliance on "day-from-hell" New York clichés overwhelm those details.
  23. Ong Bak 2
    While Jaa clearly hasn't lost any of his stamina in the six years since starring as a different underdog in the original, his first outing as a director is confusing, with distractingly muddy storytelling and wildly varying styles from scene to scene.
  24. The Wedding Song
    Though lovely to look at, The Wedding Song is a little overwhelmed by its relentlessly hyper-poetic imagery.
  25. Bam gua nat
    Some of it is hilarious, some sad, all filtered through Hong's inimitably wry take on the unbearable lightness of being . . . himself.
  26. Eulogy for a Vampire
    This is one gay vampire film that's surprisingly anemic.
  27. Killing Kasztner
    Ross is very good at teasing out the politics behind Kasztner's shifting fortunes, not to mention his murky ambitions. But closure is the last thing that's needed here.
  28. Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!
    The filmmaker uncovers a foul, lurid, corrupt, and perversely compelling conspiracy--which is to say, he successfully turns The Night Watch into a Peter Greenaway film.
  29. Where the Wild Things Are
    Wild Things isn't overlong, but it is underwhelming.
  30. Law Abiding Citizen
    If the filmmakers meant a word of it, they'd quit making films and do something more useful. "Saw" with a conscience is not what the world needs.
  31. New York, I Love You
    As with its predecessor, "Paris je t'aime," there are hits and misses.
  32. Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
    Jean-Paul Jaud's indignant doc is equally worthless for preaching the merits of organic chow via an emotionally reactive argument instead of an investigative one.
  33. The Little Traitor
    Terminally mild, ill-structured adaptation of Amos Oz's novel "Panther in the Basement."
  34. The Maid
    In a remarkable performance that won her a special award from the world cinema jury at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Chilean television vet Saavedra goes through one of the most uncanny psychophysical transformations I've ever seen in a movie without the benefit of obvious makeup or other prosthetics.
  35. Adela
    With its art-perfect snapshot of a community-in-flux, Adela calls to mind Pedro Costa's similarly rigorous slum-life portrait "Colossal Youth."
  36. An Education
    Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
  37. The Damned United
    A movie about soccer that doesn't spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that is enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby's team owner.
  38. Bronson
    Bronson is essentially a faux-operatic, music hall turn--a larky, lumpen version of "Lola Montès."
  39. Good Hair
    Breezy, superficial documentary.
  40. Trucker
    It's a smooth ride thanks to Monaghan, and an impressive ensemble.
  41. Visual Acoustics
    Enjoyable as it is, Bricker's giddy hagiography could have used a little pushback, especially in the matter of Shulman's airy dismissal of the postmodernism that, he claimed, forced him into "retirement."
  42. Eating Out: All You Can Eat
    Seems comprised in equal measure of foul-mouthed humor and good-natured coupling.
  43. Adventures of Power
    The film--despite some successful goofs and a defiantly dorky Phil Collins tribute--can't quite win for trying.
  44. Peter and Vandy
    Ritter and Weixler do share an easy-at-being-uneasy chemistry, mostly because his performance is downright distinguished compared to her blandness, but DiPietro's screenplay is emotionally myopic.
  45. The Heretics
    For a movement that was "fundamentally leaderless," Braderman's film gives its participants an opportunity to rightfully claim: "We thought we could change things--and, in fact, we did."
  46. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Mainly, Fix the World is about the beauty of the riff. The Yes Men are funniest when addressing a straight audience, making outlandish claims in favor of the free market and the benefits of unregulated catastrophe--the Black Plague gave us capitalism!
  47. Araya
    Another stunningly photographed document of a singular culture.
  48. After the Storm
    The class and cultural tension that exists between the well-intentioned city slickers and underprivileged kids is unavoidable, and director Hilla Medalia lets it settle evenly, refusing to judge.
  49. 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."
  50. 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.
  51. Zombieland
    Fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer.
  52. The Invention of Lying
    Lying brushes more big ideas than commonplace comedies, but hasn't taken those ideas through enough drafts to work out their implications or--harder still--make them killingly funny.
  53. More Than a Game
    Good game footage, a few clear looks at the kids behind it, but mostly as processed as "Space Jam."
  54. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Distractingly tortured metaphors are given a distractingly affected narration by Maya Angelou.
  55. A Beautiful Life
    Misery pile-up.
  56. Afterschool
    Afterschool, the almost frighteningly accomplished first feature made by Antonio Campos when he was 24, is high school as horror show.
  57. Chelsea on the Rocks
    Chelsea rambles--and in a way that makes you want to move down the bar.
  58. Do Knot Disturb
    Contemporary B'wood movies are not for all tastes, and rarely do they show potential to appeal to mainstream American sensibilities, but Do Knot Disturb is so boorish and shrill that it's easy to mourn all of the great, unfinished films that could be made for just the cost of its item-number budget.
  59. L'ennemi intime
    With its sententious air of historical reckoning, Enemies is an impressive monument, but not a moving one.
  60. Where Is Where?
    Ultimately, the film attempts to confront its vague ideas with a self-contained bit of narrative, whose neat rendering clashes with, but fails to make sense of, the messiness of what came before.
  61. The Horse Boy
    The Horse Boy may excuse itself as a "raising awareness" tract on autism, but the exotic travelogue isn't a practicable care option for most cases, and it certainly isn't worthy cinema.
  62. Surrogates
    Willis is fine, both as his blond action figure (Zack Morris hair) and actual self, in trusty bruised palooka mode. Mostow does good meat-and-potatoes genre work, coherent even when reckless.
  63. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    Visually incompetent to a painful extreme and almost never funny, but, worst of all, it doesn't have the courage of Max's unadulterated convictions. If you're going to offend the easily offended, at least go big.
  64. 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.
  66. Fame
    The sanitized moppets in the new Fame sing the body generic.
  67. Blind Date
    Stagey pacing and unnecessary magic-realist voiceover aside, the film's ultimate failure as moving melodrama is that we experience these two acting as a dance partner, a reporter--even a blind man--but we never get who they really are, beyond grieving parents.
  68. The Blue Tooth Virgin
    In case we don't get that this is pretentious bullshit, David mentions how much he likes Bergman's "Persona." Later, to hammer it home, he admits that he's been trying to be a cooler person by succumbing to peer pressure by seeing "art films" and listening "to certain bands that actually suck."
  69. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    As a film, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is a disaster.
  70. The Providence Effect
    The film never completely shakes the feel of being more an advertisement than a documentary, but once it settles into a concrete illustration of Adams's philosophy ("You've got to believe and expect that the children can achieve"), it becomes riveting.
  71. Paradise
    Steadily maintaining momentum and a meditative mood without narration or editorialization is itself a feat, but more vitally, Paradise appreciates and shares the curious mysteries in the seemingly banal.
  72. Capitalism: A Love Story
    Scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.
  73. In Search of Beethoven
    The film's real resource is its impressive array of talking heads, their intimate familiarity with the music, and their ability to impart graspable insight.
  74. The Informant!
    Unlike the director's usual organic efforts--in which great style never results in overstylized--The Informant! feels overamped from start to shrugging finish.
  75. Jennifer's Body
    This is the sophomore production from "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, similarly told through ultra-stylized slangy teen dialogue, which is cool, in theory, in the way it respects the verbal resourcefulness of idle flyover kids, but is excruciating to listen to in actual fact.
  76. Paris
    At a 124-minute runtime, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it with.
  77. The Burning Plain
    The writer's most successful works--"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and "Amores Perros"--were bolstered by directors who brought genuine emotion to the screen, but The Burning Plain marks Arriaga's behind-the-camera debut, and his obviousness is staggering.
  78. Disgrace
    The austere economy of Coetzee's writing, crisply adapted for the screen by Anna Maria Monticelli, plays out the melodrama with quietly brooding menace.
  79. Fatal Promises
    Outlines a culture of cross-border corruption that preys on poverty and has become so widespread that it can now be mentioned in the same breath as the drug trade. The film also critiques the willful ignorance of law-making bodies that turn a blind eye to these atrocities.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Fuel
    Those outside the bio-church aren't likely to drive--even on regular and currently cheap gasoline--to see Fuel at their local theater.
  81. If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
    A shoot with Fassbinder actress Irm Hermann signifies Tillmans's desire--and the desire of every high-profile German-speaking artist (hello, Fatih Akin)--to huff the fading smell of RWF's genius. Like the rest of the film, though, it does little to convince the unconverted of Tillmans's own.
  82. Harmony and Me
    Slight, indifferently shot, and entirely lacking in ballast, Harmony and Me's sole justification for being is that it's consistently very funny.
  83. Bright Star
    It's more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic--but no less touching for that.
  84. 35 Shots of Rum
    35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.
  85. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    Makes a few distracting embellishments--re-enactments (some shabbily animated), melodramatic cloak-and-dagger scoring--but in the main, it's a professional job, standing above the crowd of politico documentaries that proliferate like kudzu over arthouse screens.
  86. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
    Lang's film, the last he made in the U.S., exposed the immorality of the death penalty; Hyams's retread offers only more plot and longer, louder car chases.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Not Forgotten
    If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly--what's the proper cinematic terminology?--batshit-crazy finale.
  88. No Impact Man: The Documentary
    We could all do better, definitely, but how much can we possibly glean from a guy whose idealism can be measured with a calendar?
  89. Donne-moi la main
    The movie is most compelling when demonstrating the gorgeousness of the South of France—a truth that is always worth emphasizing, but was never really in dispute.
  90. The Other Man
    It hurts to see a terrific cast (including the lovely and intelligent young Irish actress Romola Garai as the couple's quietly seething daughter) squandered on such dreary filmmaking.
  91. Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    An exhilarating document.
  92. The Painter Sam Francis
    For aficionados, the evidently rare footage of Francis squatting on hairy thighs, scampering ahead to stay intuitive before intellectual, will justify the film.
  93. Skiptracers
    The primary source of comedy is tiresome pottymouthing.
  94. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
    The resulting experience could very easily be described as off-putting -- which well suits the uneasiness of the subject.
  95. 9
    The result is never as gripping in narrative terms--a well-worn litany of dystopian-future chestnuts--as it is visually.
  96. Crude
    Remarkable documentary.
  97. Walt & El Grupo
    Both a gargantuan, multi-family home movie and a slight, if entertaining, curio that'll be of most interest to hardcore Disney aficionados.
  98. 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."
  99. Extract
    The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.
  100. Amreeka
    There's nothing bitter or cynical about Amreeka, which is directed with impish wit, an observant visual competence, and an open, conciliatory spirit.
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