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. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    If nothing else--and there isn't much else--You Don't Mess With the Zohan pronounces the Middle East fair game for absurdist comedy.
  2. The Happening
    What a bunch of nonsense--effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
  3. Dreams with Sharp Teeth
    Documentarian Erik Nelson, overcautious of his subject, is content to let Ellison luxuriate in his legacy of infamy--as a lothario, and a litigious and pugilistic combatant.
    • 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.
  5. Mamma Mia!
    It's little more than droopy ditties draped around a threadbare plot.
  6. Full Battle Rattle
    Set off by sprightly graphics and shimmering with over-bright colors, Full Battle Rattle has a fake transparency. The movie arouses, without gratifying, a desire to see the camera.
  7. Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
    As each player's run through the same routine--hometown meet-and-greet, biographical sketch, hasty interview--the burden of the formulaic structure starts to wear.
  8. Tropic Thunder
    That's the thing about satire: It doesn't play past its expiration date. And everything about Tropic Thunder already feels antiquated.
  9. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    Lively, exasperating documentary.
  10. Giorni e nuvole
    Without grounding in specific causes-and-effects, the film is just another dreary wallow in self-pity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Very British Gangster
    MacIntyre's control over his material is assured at times, particularly when he focuses on Dom's young son, Bugsy, and the other troubled boys who float around the periphery of the Noonan gang.
  12. No Regret
    A tiny, specific film admirable in its focus, competent digital cinematography, and lack of sentimentality. Too bad it turns into Extreme Korean Romance.
  13. Beautiful Losers
    Regardless of Rose's intentions, his underachieving airiness is both entertaining and perfectly fitting for the slacker ennui of his clique's rising years.
  14. Religulous
    Bill Maher's one-man stand-up attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more bark than bite--a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding of the hypocrites, amusingly annotated with sarcastic subtitles and clips from cheesy biblical spectacles.
  15. Hamlet 2
    Not nearly as uproarious as it should be.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henry Poole Is Here
    A film that could have used some of the genuine intrigue of Pellington's thrillers to help offset the increasingly doe-eyed narrative.
  17. Traitor
    The movie's first hour is well-done, but realism and insight go out the window as soon as Samir crosses the U.S. border.
  18. Ping Pong Playa
    Frantically paced, littered with cute kids, and overstuffed with split screens and a rap score, Ping Pong Playa angles a little too hard for tween attention, but there's no resisting the movie's antic affability or its irreverence.
  19. Battle in Seattle
    Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria.
  20. The Duchess
    As a tale of mature self-sacrifice, the movie would be almost unbearably moving were it not for Knightley's insubstantial performance, which allows her to be fatally upstaged by Ralph Fiennes.
  21. Hounddog
    In the wake of the inadvertent betrayal that leads to her now-notorious rape (a sequence that, ironically, seems to have lost the horrific impact it needs), the film turns listless.
  22. Lakeview Terrace
    Like a lot of better genre fare, Lakeview Terrace uses its predictable premise to mount a stealth attack on the audience's sensibilities.
  23. Forever Strong
    Though director Ryan Little puts together a clean, professional package, at bottom this is a nearly-two-hour scrum of therapeutic direct encounters.
  24. The Elephant King
    Equivalent to a crummy band with a monster of a drummer who convinces you to stay for the whole show anyways.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Morning Light
    Two unnerving phenomena--the popularity of reality-TV competitions and the Walt Disney Company's ability to churn out entertainment starring the most squeaky-clean humans on earth--come together in Morning Light, a nightmarishly upbeat documentary.
  26. The Secret Life of Bees
    Only near the end does this likable but saccharine movie fleetingly complicate the "Gone With the Wind"–fed delusion that the love of poor, black nannies for their white charges was undiluted by bitterness.
  27. Changeling
    Burdened by a convoluted script and an ensemble-proof leading lady, the director fails to illuminate a particular corrupt system.
  28. Special
    All that's left then is a miserablist analogue to M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable," a sad portrait of paranoid delusion with wipe-out stunts played for the comic wincing of "Jackass."
  29. Punisher: War Zone
    The script isn't what matters here: This is a slasher movie with guns, and, uh, huh-huh, that's pretty cool.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Timecrimes
    Modestly diverting.
  31. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    The problem here is that there are no big ideas.
  32. Doubt
    Doubt is only marginally, and tendentiously, about moral uncertainty--it's more about the sins of a nosy old biddy who pulls out all the stops when going through the official channels of a male-dominated Catholic Church would get her nowhere.
  33. Nothing Like the Holidays
    The cast is appealing enough, though, and those looking for seasonal warm fuzzies can find them, as predictably touching as a muddled-through "Auld Lang Syne."
  34. The Reader
    Like many narrative filmmakers who walk on their tippy-toes when dealing with the Holocaust, neither Daldry nor Hare seems eager to make the material his own.
  35. Moscow, Belgium
    We're not talking the Dardennes brothers here, but fellow Belgian Christophe Van Rompaey gives this light May-to-December pair-up an agreeably mussed, pedestrian milieu.
  36. Yes Man
    Yes Man is nothing more than warmed-over holiday seconds, a repackaged best-of for those who already own the hits.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bedtime Stories
    While no one was expecting the live-wire daring of "Punch-Drunk Love" or even "You Don't Mess With the Zohan," the Adam Sandler who shows up in Bedtime Stories is that most unnecessary of movie-star guises: the benign family-comedy guy.
  38. 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.
  39. Valkyrie
    Valkyrie feels like another installment in the never-ending franchise -- not just the action-movie one, but the Tom Cruise one. Like the operation itself, it's a good idea -- just not well-executed.
  40. The Unborn
    For as long as it forges ahead without explanations, The Unborn works, in its way, as a series of snap-cut gotchas introducing each new contestant in its pageant of cold-sweat set pieces.
  41. Yonkers Joe
    Lahti burns through a thinly written role with a surprising level of warmth and humanity.
  42. Just Another Love Story
    Danish director Ole Bornedal (Nightwatch) continues a career of laying the groundwork for remakes that will be middling in more familiar, English-language ways.
  43. Cherry Blossoms
    The best I can say for Cherry Blossoms is that it's made with love; the worst, that it's been a big hit in Germany. Yearning for Ozu, Dörrie stops off at cute, and parks.
  44. Notorious
    Notorious, despite its bigger-than-life subject and habit of dripping sex sweat at the most unexpected moments, is rather square.
  45. Of Time and the City
    Terence Davies revisits his youth to decidedly mixed effect.
  46. Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
    An ungainly hybrid of straight-up documentary and ingenuous reenactment.
  47. He's Just Not That Into You
    If all you ask for is a few gay jokes, a perky score, pretty shots of Baltimore, and some clever but callow observations of sexual mores in the city, He's Just Not That Into You is an amiable enough night out.
  48. Everlasting Moments
    The movie satisfies for an hour, but never quite persuades that its subject is worth two.
  49. Fados
    Saura is formally ambitious--a troupe travels through the film, articulating lyrics in dance--but the movie missteps when departing wholly from the intrinsic nostalgia of its subject, as the seventysomething director imposes his idea of contemporary cool.
  50. The Great Buck Howard
    Malkovich swallows up the screen, and when he's out of frame, the movie feels slack and slow.
  51. American Swing
    The film tries--and fails--to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.
  52. American Violet
    A docudrama with a good heart but a heavy hand.
  53. Lemon Tree
    Promising parallels abound (not least between the two women's burdens), but the direction is stubbornly flat-footed.
  54. The Soloist
    Foxx and Downey's disciplined duet come close to redeeming The Soloist from its visual excesses, but Wright leaves us with a parting shot of the dancing homeless that shamelessly exploits the very people he means to champion.
  55. Three Monkeys
    The heavy mood of indolence and rage, calibrated with ellipses in action, is stifling--everyone seems to move in a queasy haze.
  56. 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.
  57. Little Ashes
    A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.
    • 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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New World Order
    Neither a call to alarm nor a laugh-at-the-loonies yukfest, the doc charts a temperate middle course through its subjects' heated rhetoric.
  60. 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.
  61. The Girl from Monaco
    The modest pleasure of the film issues chiefly from the performances.
  62. 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.
  63. 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.
  64. Bliss
    Though calling out the abominable oppression of women, even in a vehicle as didactic as Bliss, serves at least some redeemable purpose.
  65. Paper Heart
    A documentary except when it's a mockumentary, this is all kinds of adorable and heartbreaking--the doc part, at least.
  66. 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?"
  68. We Live in Public
    Timoner takes Harris's erratic pulse--and diagnoses society.
  69. 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?
  70. Paris
    At a 124-minute runtime, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it with.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. 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.
  74. 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.
  75. Fame
    The sanitized moppets in the new Fame sing the body generic.
  76. 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.
  77. As Seen Through These Eyes
    Distractingly tortured metaphors are given a distractingly affected narration by Maya Angelou.
  78. Eating Out: All You Can Eat
    Seems comprised in equal measure of foul-mouthed humor and good-natured coupling.
  79. 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.
  80. The Wedding Song
    Though lovely to look at, The Wedding Song is a little overwhelmed by its relentlessly hyper-poetic imagery.
  81. A Christmas Carol
    A Christmas Carol is a whiz-bang 3-D thrill-ride with all the emotional satisfaction squeezed out of it.
  82. 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.
  83. 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.
  84. The Karate Kid
    There is the impression, deadly to the sense of fun, that the talent here actually thought they were remaking a classic.
  85. Red Riding Trilogy
    The fact that the films hang together at the brink of incoherence is a credit to the assembled acting talent. Rebecca Hall and Maxine Peake deserve note, oases in this nasty, masculine world.
  86. Chloe
    Thanks to Egoyan's trademark mix of detachment and prurience, the fun is more cheesy than queasy.
  87. How to Train Your Dragon
    Adequate but unremarkable animated tale.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That's the Way I Like It
    Writer- director Glen Goei, a London stage actor, ably guides his likable cast through this by-the-numbers story, but he is hobbled by the film's lifeless soundtrack.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    They
    Efficient, suitably anonymous chiller.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hard Word
    Convoluted yet simple-minded, the movie frequently equates verbosity with wit.
  91. All the Pretty Horses
    The film is too eager to please and falls short of the novel's tragic dimension.
  92. The Château
    The raw art of the malapropism has rarely been so extensively honored, but the increasingly strident, slapstick-smacked movie runs out of steam once the culture shock wears off.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
    As full of flickering warmth as it is bereft of larger insight.
  94. Hell House
    Lookin' for sin, American-style? Try Hell House, which documents the cautionary Christian spook-a-rama of the same name.
  95. Tully
    The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.
  96. Biandan, guniang
    The elliptical, even fragmented editing style clashes with the reiterative voice-over, which could indicate a stylistic choice or cutting under duress.
  97. Just Looking
    Marshall Karp's script is clever and funny, though studded with anachronisms.
  98. American Desi
    Clubfooted but earnest, Pandya's movie never forgets about its second-gen issues, but never quite plumbs them, either.
  99. The Wolves of Kromer
    Largely inept and weirdly endearing.
  100. Once in the Life
    While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.
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