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. 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.
  2. Mad Love
    Adroit but finally a trifle flat, Mad Love doesn't galvanize its outrage the way, say, Jane Campion might have done, but at least it possesses some.
  3. He liu
    The absurdity floods the banks of the filmmaker's intentions.
  4. America's Heart and Soul
    When ditching the mawk to follow his daredevil muse, the director delivers stunning shots of cliff dancing and stunt pilotry.
  5. Series 7: The Contenders
    Series 7 could have turned out as ugly as the second season of "Survivor," were it not for the pleasure Minahan takes in melodrama.
  6. The Terminal
    Making Viktor a Middle Eastern, a South Asian, or even a Bosnian tourist would have given this trite exercise an edge--and a measure of human pathos.
  7. Punks
    Thanks to an uninhibited screenplay and the easy, unforced chemistry of its ensemble cast, Punks is mostly good, snappy fun.
  8. Antiviral
    Papa Cronenberg must be proud, but be advised: If there's a blood test in your future, book it before seeing this movie.
  9. Spark: A Burning Man Story
    As an official history, Spark shines adequate light; I just wish it had spent a little more time on the shadows.
  10. Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago
    Driving both the filmmaker and her subjects is wonder and wanderlust. Their enthusiasm for the Camino is contagious, and it might make you drop everything and head for Spain.
  11. Stray Bullets
    If we're grading on a curve, though — and seriously, it bears repeating: Fessenden is literally sixteen years old — it's impossible not to give the film kudos for being a not-bad genre exercise that shows promise for its precocious director.
  12. Odessa... Odessa!
    A modernist travelogue, at once impressionistic and precise.
  13. Friends with Kids
    Just as Friends With Kids compares unfavorably to Westfeldt's earlier effort, her cast members' previous projects further highlight this film's shortcomings.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Extraterrestrial
    Extraterrestrial is a comedy dropped agreeably into an alien invasion - well, maybe not invasion. The spaceship just sits there.
  15. Detour
    The performance and filmmaking are invigorating.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Quid Pro Quo
    Farmiga is captivating, Stahl less so--although a bigger problem is writer/director Carlos Brooks's script, which sets up one story, then shifts gears into something more personal and psychologically specific. That's normally a plus, deepening the viewer's sense of involvement, but the transition here is bumpy and, ultimately, unconvincing.
  17. Man of Steel
    It’s a relief just to watch the actors act once in a while, and thankfully, Snyder is astute enough to punch some breathing holes in this steel-clad colossus.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    General Orders No. 9
    Much of this commentary, equally in awe of progress and suspicious of it, is strikingly sincere.
  19. My Name Is Emily
    My Name Is Emily gets lighter as it goes along, releasing tension and pretension for a pleasant, routine ride.
  20. A Bag of Marbles
    There’s a chintzy silver lining tacked onto every potentially dark cloud in the cloying French World War II drama A Bag of Marbles, a pseudo-inspiring adaptation of Jewish World War II survivor Joseph Joffo’s partly fictionalized memoir.
  21. Havana Suite
    It's all pleasant enough, but the pretty pictures, languid pacing, and endless stretches of mood music eventually combine to soporific effect.
  22. Payback
    Cinematic globe-trotting doesn't necessarily trump reading a good book, it turns out; then again, more movies should be burdened with the flaw of being too intellectually curious.
  23. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    It all remains cohesive, even poetic, and puts what had to have been formidable reporting to excellent use.
  24. Fonzy
    The comic plot of Fonzy is outrageous, but to writer-director Isabelle Doval, it's just an armature that supports its gently funny characters and its themes of emotional and filial connections.
  25. American Fable
    The film beguiles more than it thrills, its plotting never quite measuring up to its atmosphere or its suggestions of deeper meanings.
  26. For a Good Time, Call...
    Lauren and Katie aren't defined by their attitudes toward men; they're defined by being fu--ing funny and awesome.
  27. A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it.
  28. Don't Worry Baby
    Unsurprisingly, the film doesn't live up to its Beach Boys–quoting title. Things turn out all right, but there's little real emotional force.
  29. Exporting Raymond
    Like its namesake, Exporting Raymond captures a few satisfyingly human moments.
  30. Sophie and the Rising Sun
    Greenwald and cinematographer Wolfgang Held linger on the idyllic beauty of the salt marsh and trees draped with Spanish moss, using the vivid cerulean of native blue crabs to link her characters.
  31. Yes
    Potter's anachronistic rhyme schemes tumble forth with an out-damned-spot verve that rages against irrelevance.
  32. Almost Christmas
    Writer-director Talbert similarly follows formula for the overcrowded and overplotted Noel-season movie, ladling out too-generous portions of churchiness, multigenerational dance-off, and Mars vs. Venus sermonizing.
  33. Becoming Jane
    Becoming Jane turns into a presentable Harlequin romance, with hurdle after hurdle succeeded by an eleventh-hour turnaround.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Green Street Hooligans
    Hunnam, whose cockney ranges from dodgy to downright Caine-ian, mutes Gary Oldman's bestial mouth-froth (in Clarke's 1988 The Firm), becoming the prettiest, most articulate, bloodthirsty thug ever to put lip to lager.
  35. 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.
  36. One Week
    By turns whimsical and painful.
  37. The Third Miracle
    The first half has a nifty B-movie feel--it's a canny little movie with a big, big theme.
  38. A Real Young Girl
    A philosophical gross-out comedy rudely presented from the perspective of a sullen, sexually curious 14-year-old.
  39. Lost in Thailand
    Zheng errs on the side of improvisatory and lazily assembled Apatow-esque narrative episodes; many of those scenes are amiably goofy, but it all holds together based on his cast's charm and energy.
  40. The Eagle
    The Eagle is full of action and fleet of foot-it's a movie of smoky, lowering battlefields and trippy, space-bending flashbacks, pausing only for admiring location shots of Scotland's wild, craggy vistas.
  41. The Eye of the Storm
    Narrative unevenness notwithstanding, those hang-ups are given delicious life by a superb Rush, Davis, and Rampling (the latter often confined to a bed and encased in elderly makeup), who prove a regally dysfunctional trio par excellence.
  42. The Brothers Bloom
    Johnson has infused The Brothers Bloom with so much heart and beauty that one can and should easily overlook its discomfiting moments. The truth is, the film's even more profound and touching upon second viewing.
  43. Cloud Atlas
    Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe.
  44. Casi divas
    A none-too-clever but hustling-to-please Mexican comedy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hitchcock
    The change in title from book to film is instructive: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is about a filmmaker and the making of a film; Hitchcock is a half-ass attempt to demystify a larger-than-life man who put himself front and center while remaining enigmatic, a master at revealing a little in order to conceal a lot.
  46. Ordinary World
    Armstrong, who's mostly played himself in previous forays into acting, has a low-key charm suggesting that, if he desired it, he could get more onscreen gigs in between albums.
  47. Resurrecting the Champ
    This isn't great raw material, though Lurie and his screenwriters try their best to portray Erik as some guilt-ridden evildoer who's perpetrated a great fraud.
  48. Things Never Said
    To be fair, the cast is largely good, given the material.
  49. The Canal
    Piers McGrail's nuanced, moody cinematography brings out the best in writer-director Ivan Kavanagh's over-mannered but effectively creepy ghost story.
  50. I Love You, Daddy
    Ultimately, C.K., who always has found his strongest and funniest voice when he’s onstage alone with a microphone, struggles to make the movie cohere — it goes limp, the plot fizzles, and Leslie himself fades out of view, a cloudy figure who never really has to answer to anyone.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It's About You
    The result is an amateurish travelogue that feels like a botched assignment, halfheartedly self-regarding and resentfully remote from the object of our fascination.
  52. Hyde Park on Hudson
    For stretches of the film, he (Murray) is enough to recommend Hyde Park on Hudson, especially as he toys with his houseguests, England's King George (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman).
  53. I Am Eleven
    "I wanted to make something energetic, optimistic, universal, and real," Bailey announces in voiceover as the movie begins. She's certainly accomplished that, but it's too bad she didn't also aim for vital, illuminating, or consistently compelling.
  54. Turn the River
    Turn the River can't weather the ante-upping into pathos when Kailey desperately reasserts her privilege of motherhood--but the sense of storytelling intelligence is undeniable.
  55. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    Playboy "gave us some of the best literature of our time," opines noted literary critic Tony Bennett, among a cast of mostly ridiculous and redundant talking heads.
  56. Dark Shadows
    "Wood" is still by far Depp and Burton's best collaboration, exhibiting the balance of tone between kitsch parody and zealous fantasy that's missing in Dark Shadows, less a resurrection than a clumsy desecration.
  57. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    Not quite a biopic, the film presents an overview of Ip's years in Hong Kong; Anthony Wong's dignified performance begins with the grandmaster almost fully formed.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Eagle vs Shark
    You can't see the forest for the twee in writer-director Taika Waititi's thicket of cutesy conceits, from the stunted supporting characters to the precious animated interludes.
    • 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.
  60. Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
    A free-for-all doc that, like its subject, seems on several planes at once.
  61. Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda
    Lee's trickery is dazzling in flashes but also monotonously strenuous -- the derangement factor is high but there's little evidence of authentic lunacy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Porn Theater
    In its own quiet if overly studied way, Porn Theatre mourns a time when, for better or worse, we could all get off together.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Below
    Though the genre collisions (horror/WWII submarine/undersea Macbeth) are as jarring as the sound design, the cumulative effect is one of claustrophobic creepiness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Camp
    Camp is self-conscious when the teens aren't singing, but the quote marks fall away as soon as they lift their voices.
  65. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    The last scene reads like an admission of defeat.
  66. Square Grouper
    Square Grouper's admirably backhanded inquiry into the social and economic costs of weed criminalization extends far beyond the wake-and-bake crowd.
  67. Life's a Breeze
    The film's surface naturalism and visual grit simply cover up a screenplay that's as full of crap as the average recent Hollywood comedy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Street Kings
    Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense that an infinitely more complex drama exists within the film's grasp, but no one bothered to stop guzzling the testosterone long enough to find it.
  69. Money Monster
    As generic and impersonal as a new credit card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality.
  70. The Purge: Election Year
    If The Purge: Election Year is ultimately still engaging, it’s largely because of the irresistibility of the basic concept itself. But this new movie also makes a pretty good case for why the series should end here: Things have not only come to their logical conclusion, but you get the curious sense that the filmmakers have run out of ideas.
  71. The Assault
    Taut, forceful, ritualistic, and all those other flattering adjectives applied to thrillers that actually thrill, this skyjacking docudrama showcases yet another genre (in addition to shock horror) the French are kicking our asses in.
  72. Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist
    The film will come to share the video store shelf with Harlin's infinitely stupider rendition soon enough, but it's a shame they couldn't have been released theatrically head-to-head -- a death match-cum-clinical trial that might've supplied some objective stats on how much condescension the American moviegoer actually enjoys.
  73. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    Ouimet versus Vardon probably was the greatest golf game ever played, and Paxton and Frost do it justice, but I wouldn't sit through another simulated hole of it for Tiger Woods's salary.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cobra Verde
    It's easy to understand why this was Herzog's final collaboration with the actor (reportedly the director afterward claimed that Kinski had "become uncontrollable") but Kinski's performance nevertheless serves up a potent confusion of documentary and fiction that has long been an essential element of Herzog's filmmaking.
  75. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Distractingly tortured metaphors are given a distractingly affected narration by Maya Angelou.
  76. Endgame
    The principals, especially Ejiofor, rise above the starchiness that often hampers portrayals of recent, monumental history.
  77. Hellion
    Hellion offers Paul his most adult screen role so far, and he's very fine, but the movie belongs to Wiggins, a newcomer whose innate gifts are a perfect echo of Paul's.
  78. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    In adapting Irishman John Boyne's acclaimed young-adult novel, writer-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) draws beautifully modulated performances from his two child actors, who navigate a full range of emotions from wonder to betrayal to guilt.
  79. Jackie & Ryan
    The tepid Jackie & Ryan's only real strength is its supporting cast.
  80. The Truth About Charlie
    Gave me a craving for something nouvelle, not a half-hearted Hollywood co-optation.
  81. Veronica Guerin
    A pre-programmed mediocrity, a slave to its clichés.
  82. P.S.
    The question of whether this is a movie about reincarnation or fate or middle-aged delusion remains unaddressed far beyond our capacity to care. Many of the admirably long conversational scenes are pointless; some, like Harden and Linney's climactic bitch-fest in a hotel room, are flat-out absurd.
  83. Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)
    Had Rao chosen to foreground her tantalizing ideas instead of her instantly forgettable characters, Mumbai Diaries could have been more than the sum of its parts.
  84. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    The flaws pale against what's illustrated, which is not just how Prop. 8 passed, but the sordid, cynical workings of our political machine.
  85. 2 Guns
    This is a here today, gone tomorrow trifle, albeit one with lots of gunplay. In midsummer, that may be enough, but it's still a shame that 2 Guns shoots so many blanks.
  86. Legend
    Legend reminds us how easily a pretty star can get us to feel for people we'd deplore in real life — a monster's a monster, no matter how big its heart or soulful its strut.
  87. Don't Come Knocking
    It's "Broken Flowers" with bourbon and ten-gallons and meta-country soundtrack warbles.
  88. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    A tongue-in-cheek allegory on the hazards of harboring secrets in a relationship, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is most entertaining when the Smiths are hell-bent on mutual annihilation.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mao's Last Dancer
    Based on the memoirs of Li Cunxin, Mao's Last Dancer means well, but it stumbles between genres.
  90. Safe
    A preposterously enjoyable - or enjoyably preposterous - action-thriller.
  91. The Visit
    The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an eleventh feature, is its writer-director's best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it's the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what's-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan's basement-wandering simulator, with the crack scripting and meta-cinematic surprises of Shyamalan's best early films.
  92. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    Almost embarrassingly enjoyable, despite the fact that — or maybe because — it's ridiculous in a shiny, Hollywood way.
  93. Darshan: The Embrace
    Werner Herzog's "Wheel of Time" was, in a sense, the Buddhist equivalent of this film, as well as a more illuminating look at the power and transience of ritual.
  94. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Glass is a stupefyingly dull portrait of a man who doesn't seem to be lying when he says, "I have so few secrets."
  95. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Too bad this section of the movie is but a temporary reprieve from the obnoxious sentimentality.
  96. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    Tenacious D is utterly harmless and totally pointless. Black and Gass have been at this so long their dirty little joke has all the punch of a Catskills routine.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Irina Palm
    Nobody can reduce tawdry material to doddering quaintness like the British, but this staggeringly inane joint effort of U.K., Belgian, French, German, and Luxembourgian film financing represents a true coalition of the witless.
  98. Love Actually
    When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.
  99. 3
    More willing suspension of disbelief - or suppression of giggles - is required.
  100. Viktoria
    Bulgarian filmmaker Maya Vitkova's feature debut, Viktoria, is an impressive display of stylistic control and directorial vision, even if it doesn't always hold together.
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