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. Rashevski's Tango
    The Rashevski Tango begins and ends with a burial, but the movie teems with cranky life, then heals all rifts with a dance that sets a seal of comically erotic approval on that undying genre, the domestic melodrama.
  2. Tickling Leo
    Davidson weaves deeper questions of who a Jew is into this powerful tale of a clan shredded by the rage and hatred passed down through three generations.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Casino
    This authoritative, far-reaching documentary by veteran investigative journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn comes off as curiously bloodless.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Unmade Beds
    Unmade Beds revels in its art-pop sensibility, bursting with the spirit of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-wai.
  5. The September Issue
    Wintour's arctic imperiousness has a way of creating the most masochistic deference, a dynamic that R.J Cutler superficially explores--and becomes prone to--in his documentary The September Issue.
  6. We Live in Public
    Timoner takes Harris's erratic pulse--and diagnoses society.
  7. St. Trinian's
    Can be enjoyed in all its endearing awfulness, as a loony "High School Musical" with posher accents and a lot more going on upstairs.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    At the Edge of the World
    By turns stupendously beautiful and grimly terrifying, and best appreciated in a movie theater.
  9. Big Fan
    It takes considerable effort to make Darren Aronofsky seem like a model of restraint, but Robert Siegel pulls it off in Big Fan.
  10. Wolke Neun
    Besides the frank, blithe sex scenes, a melodramatic ending aims to banish any last hope of gemütlichkeit, but the film comes to feel curiously incomplete, like one long fretful afternoon.
  11. Play the Game
    This Lifetime-ready comedy is hardly provocative--let alone perceptive, funny, or fresh
  12. Taking Woodstock
    Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.
  13. Inglourious Basterds
    Energetic, inventive, swaggering fun, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is a consummate Hollywood entertainment--rich in fantasy and blithely amoral.
  14. World's Greatest Dad
    The particular stew of midlife and pubescent despair that clogs a single-father male-child household has rarely been achieved so well.
  15. Post Grad
    In 2009. Vicky Jenson's live-action debut is as cartoonish as her work on "Shrek," and that's OK for the comic bits. The rest seems like a remarkably cynical cross-breed—for all demographics, but, ultimately, for none.
  16. Shorts
    A cute and mildly clever fantasy.
  17. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.
  18. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    The unfitting flashiness and clunky segues between thriller and melodrama kill any real sense of tension, making this a poor man's "Donnie Brasco"--that is, if its self-congratulation and failure to contextualize the values on both sides of the ethno-political struggle didn't already make it the poor man's "Hunger."
  19. Five Minutes of Heaven
    The production design is spot-on, but Hirschbiegel tries way too hard to create tension, making every occurrence--a record needle dropping, a car door slamming--an unsubtle potential bomb, fraying your nerves like a cheap horror movie.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    X Games 3D: The Movie
    Steve Lawrence's glitzy infotainment raises the question, "How much awesomeness can an audience take?"
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Art & Copy
    Yet however stirring these vintage campaigns and their graying creators may be for ad junkies and nostalgists, Pray fails at analysis: His film is simply a tribute.
  22. My One and Only
    Occasionally diverting but ultimately forgettable, My One and Only will become unforgivable if it inspires other former competitors from "Dancing With the Stars" to go in search of lost time.
  23. Passing Strange
    Passing Strange conjures a rare kind of theatrical magic with its emotionally raw, frequently euphoric portrait of the artist as a young man.
  24. Sikandar
    Despite the cliché-riddled translation and super-corny sound design, writer-director Piyush Jha presents an affecting account of the Kashmir conflict through the struggles of its children.
  25. Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
    There's a temptation to "give" this to Van Peebles, but any scene in which actors get to interact is deathly awkward, and 100 minutes should never feel this long.
  26. Casi divas
    A none-too-clever but hustling-to-please Mexican comedy.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Still Walking
    Koreeda imbues the story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem.
  28. The Headless Woman
    As dense and fluid as Martel's movie is, the viewer--like the protagonist--is compelled to live in the moment. And a rich moment it is.
  29. District 9
    District 9 whizzes by with a resourcefulness and mordant wit nearly worthy of its obvious influences: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Dawn of the Dead," and "Starship Troopers."
  30. Ponyo
    It's a movie for anyone who, like Miyazaki himself, can still happily commune with his inner five-year-old.
  31. The Time Traveler's Wife
    Will disappoint anyone looking for transport from a movie--being a time traveler's wife, it turns out, is mostly a drag.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bandslam
    Todd Graff's film is written with a desperate cleverness that clamors for attention over the brainless against-the-odds music-competition plot.
  33. Earth Days
    There's great archival footage.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Grace
    A muddled, logic-starved provocation, Grace avoids smugness by refusing to play its body horror for sh**s and giggles, but its resonance is purely atmospheric.
  35. It Might Get Loud
    It's Page, a joyful instructor and natural storyteller, who steals the spotlight (Robert who? More, please.) Only real complaint: The movie's not loud enough. They should have turned that f***er up to 11.
  36. Spread
    Spread becomes a sloggy, tepid comeuppance tale.
  37. The Way We Get By
    It's the stuff of a fine short on what any "Bowling Alone" reader knows is the last generation of civic-minded civilians, but Gaudet has a hard time extending his material to feature length.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Perfect Getaway
    A Perfect Getaway is never great, but Twohy isn't aspiring for greatness--he's after gritty and lively and weird. And that's good enough.
  39. 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cold Souls
    It may be only in the film's last ambiguous, evocative image that Barthes and Parekh finally transcend the material and arrive at something beautiful and ineffable.
  41. Beeswax
    Beeswax exemplifies post-mumble maturity. The movie is not only semi-documentary, but also casually thoughtful (or at least self-reflexive)--working with friends is what Bujalski does in creating his own particular Storyville.
  42. Bliss
    Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose.
  43. I Sell the Dead
    The storytelling frame allows a genial, ain't-it-cool pile-up of occasionally antic episodes.
  44. Paper Heart
    A documentary except when it's a mockumentary, this is all kinds of adorable and heartbreaking--the doc part, at least.
  45. Funny People
    There's so much that's so disarmingly good and sharp about Funny People that you wish the whole movie weren't so much of a shambles.
  46. The Cove
    The Cove is properly enchanting, horrifying, and rousing, but it comes dangerously close to making the narcissistic case that dolphins deserve to be saved because they're cute and breathe air like we do.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thirst
    The most intriguing aspect of Thirst is the steady erosion of Sang-hyeon's ethics, slackened from "do not" to "do not kill" to "do not kill the undeserving" by the lure of those O+ cocktails.
  48. Lorna's Silence
    The Dardennes retain a company of returning players: Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, and Olivier Gourmet. Such loyalty is rare and touching.
  49. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    The rise of video and the death of the drive-ins would eventually bring the curtain down on the Aussie schlock industry, but for two glorious hours, Not Quite Hollywood returns us to a time when the price of admission was cheap and the thrills even cheaper.
  50. Flame and Citron
    Flame & Citron is the film that the horribly overrated "Black Book" could have been, had Paul Verhoeven not indulged in the puerile reversals of sensitive Nazis and treacherous partisans.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gotta Dance
    Would be just another disposable, albeit touching, distraction if its subtext didn't hint that growing old in this ageist society is a bitch.
  52. Adam
    Other than Rose Byrne's on-screen radiance and a soothingly warm palette lit by cinematographer Seamus Tierney, there's not much to get passionate about in this amiable chamberpiece from theater director Max Mayer.
  53. You, the Living
    You, the Living flips through 50-some single-panel vignettes, many very funny.
  54. In the Loop
    Not to detract from the pleasure of watching the consistently excellent actors, who enhance the dialogue's bite with their body language, but the script of In the Loop is so rich that it could work as a radio play.
  55. Orphan
    Silly, overlong, and bloody as hell, Orphan is likely to turn a sweet profit, money that Leo (DiCaprio), the renowned do-gooder, should spend with shame.
  56. The Answer Man
    Hindman is a stand-up comedian with many Turgenev-size issues on his mind--inadequate fathers and troubled sons, overprotective mothers, the search for belief--whose weight this slight picture can hardly bear. But the laid-back charm of Daniels and Graham's bumpy courtship gives the movie a much-needed edge of idiosyncrasy.
  57. Deadgirl
    Has more fantastically blunt, clunky, and downright laughable teen-sex dialogue per minute than anything this side of Larry Clark.
  58. Shrink
    Pate's eye isn't bad, but Thomas Moffett's screenplay is self-serious piffle.
  59. (500) Days of Summer
    It's more like a love story in a blender. What is unexpected is the sincerity beneath the modest conceit that, yup, love hurts.
  60. A Woman in Berlin
    One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945.
  61. Death in Love
    Someday, a wise and potent film will be made about the Holocaust's legacy on succeeding generations. Posing as a study in evil, Death in Love is claptrap that confuses bile with art.
  62. Homecoming
    Glued together with shards from much better movies, the humorless plot offers no mystery about who's doing what to whom, or why.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Off Jackson Avenue
    Despite this tri-part farcical thriller's plot construction, some hackneyed dialogue and actorial mugging--the finest exception being Aya Cash's airily acerbic Slavic hooker--you can't help but eagerly anticipate the finale, when Montias brings his intersecting storylines together. Apparently, amusingly improbable coincidences can satisfy.
  64. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    Generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering along on auto-broomstick.
  65. Somers Town
    Without ever trivializing his characters' meager circumstances or resorting to the rags-to-riches fantasy of "Slumdog Millionaire," Meadows has made a lovely film about the ability of the imagination to offset the harshness of reality.
  66. Bruno
    Funny as it is, Brüno could not be as shockingly uproarious as "Borat." No matter how well retold, a joke necessarily loses explosive force the second time around. But a great gag is a thing of beauty forever--so, too, a comic performance.
  67. Humpday
    Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Lynn Shelton's third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy," also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in Seattle.
  68. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Unexciting, incoherent, lamely acted, and carelessly written.
  69. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Joyless, offensively stupid end-of-high-school farce.
  70. Soul Power
    Takes too long to get to the meat of its matter, but captivates once it does.
  71. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    Celebratory but clear-eyed portrait of Gertrude Berg.
  72. Lake Tahoe
    Eimbcke's droll rhythms are reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki--here stylistically appropriate for a film about social and emotional inertia.
  73. I Hate Valentine's Day
    Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.
  74. The Girl from Monaco
    The modest pleasure of the film issues chiefly from the performances.
  75. Tony Manero
    Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain's alarming Tony Manero--named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever"--is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.
  76. The Beaches of Agnès
    In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.
  77. Public Enemies
    Mann's exhilarating movie exists in a state of perpetual forward motion.
  78. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    There's no breathing life into a formula that ought to have bowed out gracefully while the going was good.
  79. The Hurt Locker
    A full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot.
  80. 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.
  81. Afghan Star
    Marking follows the finalists around on the last leg of their PR campaigns and captures something sweetly goofy, with an edge of creepy, about their aping of smarmy American self-promotion (kissing babies, etc).
  82. Chéri
    Frears and Hampton's missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs.
  83. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    This is basically self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more "politically conscious" when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough. Right now, you're better off just watching the news.
  84. Surveillance
    Surveillance is the work of a director who has made significant strides in both storytelling and control of the medium, deftly interweaving a grisly thriller, a sicko "Rashômon," a switcheroo, a psychotic love story, an imaginative paean to children, and an inspired resurrection of Julia Ormond.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    New York
    Quite apart from the fact that none of these performers is capable of smoldering with conviction, there's no terror or sensuality in director Khan's images.
  86. Quiet Chaos
    Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.
  87. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that might resemble "a point," save the obvious one to move more Hasbro action figures and animated-series DVD boxed sets. In a word: distasteful.
  88. Whatever Works
    Blown opportunity.
  89. The Proposal
    You know every tinny beat and false note by heart, from the implausible setup to the sprint-to-the-airport finish.
  90. Dead Snow
    For more than half of this 90-minute film, director Tommy Wirkola plays things pretty straight--a mistake, perhaps, since the first half is pretty boring--but once the Nazi zombies start arriving en masse, he abruptly shifts to an "Evil Dead"–style zaniness, including the sight of a potential victim hanging off the side of a mountain while using a zombie's entrails as rope.
  91. The End of the Line
    A free-form splash of jaw-dropping graphs, impressively accredited talking heads, and sumptuously shot portraits of natural beauty and decay, overdramatically scored to symphonic and other intense musical attacks.
  92. 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Food, Inc.
    Expertly crafted documentary.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Scott's redo comes up short in almost every regard against the '74 model--against David Shire's knuckled-brass score, against its mugs' gallery of '70s New York character actors, against Peter Stone's serrated script, and certainly against its wordless punchline.
  95. Imagine That
    Imagine That does manage to get a crowd tearing up on cue for its emotional climax; as much as it works, it's through the personal charm of Murphy and Shahidi.
  96. Sex Positive
    It helps that Wein's subject is such a fascinating, garrulous paradox.
  97. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    For all the singer's sincere intentions to build secular-religious bridges, a straight-up concert film might have been a better approach, especially given viewer fatigue with those musicians and their causes.
  98. Tetro
    For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hangover
    Phillips can't bring himself to push the material into truly outré territory, or to characterize his growth-impaired guys as degenerate creeps rather than lovable scamps.
  100. Séraphine
    Séraphine's dependence on her patron--a cultivated but emotionally detached homosexual, who knew a fellow outsider when he saw one but came and went in her life without warning--is almost as unbearably moving as her inevitable unraveling--when money and fame cut the artist off from her creative wellsprings and drove her over the edge.
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