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. Away We Go
    The road-trippers of Away We Go harbor no discernible ambitions whatsoever, which may make them true to Gen-Y life, but also renders them fatally uninteresting. For all the ground they cover geographically, dramatically their velocity remains zero. Mendes, too, seems to have trouble getting on board with the underachieving set.
  2. My Life in Ruins
    A strangely self-loathing affair that paints Vardalos's tour group as a uniformly ill-mannered, culturally illiterate bunch, while rendering Greece itself as a badly plumbed third-world hellhole run by lazy, Zorba-dancing louts.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Downloading Nancy
    The jump cuts and nonlinear narrative are gratuitously stylish, and when you peel away this film's complex performances, at the core of its drawn-out suicide spectacle is pain so extreme, so alienating, and, in the end, so pointless.
  4. 24 City
    Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.
  5. Herb & Dorothy
    Watching the Vogels mull over art that they don't need to understand only makes their delight more infectious.
  6. Unmistaken Child
    The movie is a drama of faith, a Tibetan monk's search for the reincarnation of his beloved master Lama Konchog.
  7. Up
    The first 10 minutes of Up are flawless; the final 80 minutes, close enough. (Though, note this: Do not see Up in 3-D. It's inessential to the tale and altogether distracting.)
  8. Drag Me to Hell
    If the booga-booga shocks are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its audience right in its last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by crack editor Bob Murawski through a burlesque exorcism.
  9. Departures
    Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue.
  10. Pontypool
    For a film about the perils of too much talk, there's quite a lot of babbling presented as profundity. The political statements in Pontypool, much like those in another recent Canadian offering, Atom Egoyan's trite terrorism hand-wringer "Adoration," seem all the less provocative for appearing several years too late--McDonald's film might have had more punch if it were released when Bluetooth first rolled out.
  11. What Goes Up
    This is rock bottom: I've seen a lot of terrible movies in the line of duty, but What Goes Up might be the only genuinely unreleasable one.
  12. Offshore
    Cheklich's insipid, cheapjack dramedy--about a flagging company's decision to outsource--isn't potent enough to even be called a lukewarm-button movie.
  13. Pressure Cooker
    The intersection of food and identity is briefly explored, and the prep/exam sequences have a tension and charm that keeps the film moving toward its literally rewarding climax.
  14. The Girlfriend Experience
    Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.
  15. O'Horten
    The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly.
  16. Easy Virtue
    Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.
    • 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.
  18. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    Though it's a little slow to start and some of the humor clunks, the film features a wholesome charm, some truly dazzling effects (the Lincoln Memorial alone is worth it), and enough mild, parent-nip in-jokes to keep all but the stone-hearted happy.
  19. The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
    Boys is first-rate cinema archaeology. What pushes it beyond that is the brutal honesty with which the sibling rivalry between the elder Shermans is depicted; theirs is a palpable mixture of love and disdain that led to the men not socializing with each other for more than 40 years.
  20. Terminator Salvation
    Among the many things junked in McG's chop-shop is the notion of pleasure.
  21. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    There was no happy ending, but if Burma VJ's account of the efficacy of dictatorship threatens to crush you, the sight of a sturdy young back disappearing into the mountains, returning from a Thailand hideout for another round of bearing witness, should make your heart burst.
  22. Summer Hours
    Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.
  23. 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.
  24. Angels & Demons
    Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for whacked-out male conspiracy theorists.
  25. Big Man Japan
    I hurt myself laughing at this amazingly inventive mockumentary, and because it's so good, I refuse to give away much more than an insistent recommendation.
  26. The Big Shot-Caller
    An overaffected, preachy drama.
  27. Jerichow
    Jerichow forgoes the prolonged double-crosses of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," its simpler ending made all the more powerful--and a little heartbreaking.
  28. Adoration
    The end result is a movie considerably more absorbing to talk, write, and think about afterward than it is to actually watch.
  29. Julia
    Tilda Swinton doesn't merely act the title role in French director Erick Zonca's Julia--she devours it, spits it back up, dances giddily upon it, twirls it in the air.
  30. 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.
  31. Outrage
    Moment by moment, Outrage proves duly provocative, well sourced, and almost certain to go more viral than swine flu.
  32. Powder Blue
    In a movie full of egregiously overdramatic stupidities, the ultimate insult is to Patrick Swayze, who plays Biel's manager as an especially-poorly-preserved Bret Michaels.
  33. Rudo y Cursi
    Rudo y Cursi is as fatalistic as any film noir, but it's played for cartoonish screwball comedy. At once smooth and frantic, filled with cozy clutter and vulgar jive, the movie subsumes its moralizing in frat-house entertainment.
  34. Star Trek
    Not only does this Star Trek proffer smart thrills and slick kicks, but it builds upon the original's history–from its very first pilot episode to Robert Wise's 1979 "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and beyond–while creating an entirely new future.
  35. The Limits of Control
    Like everything Jarmusch, The Limits of Control is calibrated for cool.
  36. Revanche
    Revanche gets its hooks into you early and leaves them there.
  37. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The X-Men franchise takes a giant leap backward and off a cliff with its fourth offering.
  38. A Wink and a Smile
    The tension between wanting to root for these women and ultimately being faced with what you're rooting for (a pair of pinwheeling boobies) goes completely unresolved.
  39. Battle for Terra
    Terra, to be fair, looks fairly clean, and the 3-D is totally passable, but watching it will be no fun for either kids or adults.
  40. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    Above all, it will make you long for a day when studio movies about relationships feel like they are by and for adults who have actually been in one.
  41. The Merry Gentleman
    Keaton, who took over directing duties from ill-stricken screenwriter Ron Lazzeretti before shooting started, inherited a stock-still story of two lonely souls and never develops their rapport.
  42. Three Monkeys
    The heavy mood of indolence and rage, calibrated with ellipses in action, is stifling--everyone seems to move in a queasy haze.
  43. Home
    Using cinema as self-therapy might be a selfish way to treat audiences, but Harden and Scheel's chemistry makes the mother-daughter dynamic universal.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Skeptic
    Though a few scary skeletons (and one doll) rattle in and out of the film's closet, Bardwell is a slave to television lexicon, allowing Bryan and his lawyer buddy (Tom Arnold) to brave the banter of shrill detective comedies, and framing his images with all the brio of your average "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" episode.
  45. The Informers
    A tale of absolute self-absorption and unconscious revelation.
  46. Fighting
    The movie never works up a pulpy head of steam. It's like an exploitation movie that thinks it's an art movie, only there's no art to be found.
  47. Il Divo
    Il Divo plays like an elegantly ritualized black comedy.
  48. 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.
  49. Tyson
    Tyson is more like a particularly riveting therapy session, with Tyson as both analyst and patient.
  50. Empty Nest
    Dark and light invariably go hand in hand in Burman's work, but this tender, goofily circular portrait of how we fill up the cavernous space once occupied by children begins and ends, beautifully, with an image of a man and a woman floating head to head on water--hapless, helpless, happy.
  51. Mutant Chronicles
    A film this monotonous will make you zone out.
  52. Treeless Mountain
    Treeless Mountain is skillfully unsentimental--because of, but also despite, the presence of two irresistible, unself-conscious performers in virtually every scene.
  53. State of Play
    An effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer.
  54. 17 Again
    If this is one small step for the actor (Efron) toward becoming a leading man, it is, for Hollywood movies, one more giant leap into infantilism.
  55. American Violet
    A docudrama with a good heart but a heavy hand.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Every Little Step
    For Chorus Line fans, though, the documentary--is a singular sensation.
  57. Is Anybody There?
    Even Crowley, who seems to have a knack with overloaded material, can't quite bring the thing in for a safe landing in all the slush.
  58. Lemon Tree
    Promising parallels abound (not least between the two women's burdens), but the direction is stubbornly flat-footed.
  59. Sleep Dealer
    Science fiction easily lends itself to allegory, but while the dystopian near-future of co-writer/director Alex Rivera's feature debut focuses, admirably, on how globalization affects the third world, his ideas are as subtle as a light saber to the face.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Phenomenal rockumentary.
  61. Dragonball: Evolution
    Far more entertaining than it deserves to be, unless you're a 10-year-old boy, in which case it's only the greatest movie ever made.
  62. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
    Mena Suvari, as Art's vindictive ex-fuckbuddy, gives sole signs of life--Miller is so void of presence that one can forget she's in the movie from scene to scene.
  63. Observe and Report
    Broad but thin and more bleak than uproarious--a humorously downsized homage to foundational '70s classics like "Dirty Harry" and, especially, "Taxi Driver."
  64. Lymelife
    Given how steeped it is in symbolic portent, Lymelife proves surprisingly watchable from moment to moment, thanks to the uniformly fine playing (particularly of the Culkin frères), evocative production design (by Kelly McGehee), and handsome widescreen photography (by Frank Godwin).
  65. Adventureland
    I've seen Mottola's movie twice, and both times, it has inspired feelings of joy, sadness, and a profound yearning for the unrecoverable past.
  66. Sugar
    Without a trace of didacticism, Boden and Fleck portray the insidious details of exploitation and hollow American maxims.
  67. Alien Trespass
    The pleasures of genre depend on invention within margins, not just prop department scavenger hunting.
  68. Bart Got a Room
    With 19 producers, one wonders how many rich Floridians invested in what might be the year's most unambitious comedy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Escapist
    A taut thriller that ends on a note of unexpected grace.
  70. Fast & Furious
    Fast & Furious reconfirms that car-chase movies--good, bad, or mediocre--all assume the future employment of the quaint old fast-forward button.
  71. Gigantic
    I don't remember ever wanting to just haul out and punch a movie before Gigantic.
  72. Paris 36
    Like Amélie's scrubbed-up "City of Lights," Paris 36 is an antiseptic arthouse trifle, so eager to soothe that it only numbs.
  73. The Song of Sparrows
    The film is pleasingly meandering, till the more typically Majidian soulful and teary-eyed climax.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Forbidden Lie$
    This entertaining, provocative film raises pointed issues about con artists and their sometimes-culpable "victims," and also speaks to the elusive pursuit of documentary truth.
  75. Lifelines
    The film's befuddling direction and tone, queasy HD interiors, and tin-eared, often preposterous, screenplay prove disastrous.
  76. Tulpan
    In every respect, this unclassifiable movie is an amazing accomplishment.
  77. Goodbye Solo
    Bahrani possesses a disciplined sense of composition and form, a vision of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of his own navel, and the understanding that it is possible to make films about class and race in this country without pandering to the audience.
  78. Monsters vs Aliens
    The grandeur of the effects--the honest-to-God spectacle of the thing--elevates Monsters vs. Aliens to something approaching art. It's not a masterpiece, but it's most certainly a milestone.
  79. Spinning Into Butter
    Approaches its ideas of reverse racism and the hypocrisies of tolerance with a heavy hand and odious moralizing.
  80. The Education of Charlie Banks
    Durst and Elkoff deliver a nuanced scenario of class assimilation and resentment, then flub the ending.
  81. American Swing
    The film tries--and fails--to swing both ways, nostalgically glorifying its subject only to smugly revel in Levenson's ignominious demise.
  82. The Haunting in Connecticut
    In the realm of domestic horror, The Haunting in Connecticut is about as scary as a shower that suddenly changes temperature when someone flushes the toilet.
  83. Guest of Cindy Sherman
    A highly entertaining evisceration and celebration of the milieu. It's also a fascinating, probably one-sided view of the artist herself.
  84. Shall We Kiss?
    Bogs down in the philosophical shallow end and never quite recovers from what's clearly meant to be a deceptively light tone.
  85. Sin Nombre
    Lushly photographed and meticulously sound-designed, Sin Nombre is visceral without being vital, researched without ever seeming lived-in.
  86. I Love You, Man
    The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the meet-cute, love-at-first-sight, break-up-and-make-up, racing-to-the-altar slapstick weepy that's been a staple of cinema since the invention of cinema.
  87. Duplicity
    Comedy seems to have liberated Gilroy, who directs Duplicity with the high gloss and fleet-footed hustle of a golden-age Hollywood craftsman.
  88. Bob Funk
    With all due respect to Leo Tolstoy, all unhappy film families in which someone ascends those "12 steps" are exactly alike.
  89. The Great Buck Howard
    Malkovich swallows up the screen, and when he's out of frame, the movie feels slack and slow.
  90. Skills Like This
    Skills thinks it's far more magically whimsical than it really is.
  91. Valentino: The Last Emperor
    Dedicated follower of fashion Matt Tyrnauer crafts the slick, superficial portrait that you might expect from a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
  92. Sunshine Cleaning
    More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams–Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it feels almost like an afterthought.
  93. The Last House on the Left
    This new House tries to sustain a grave, heavy sense of threat. It fails, through its villainy.
  94. The Cake Eaters
    There's no kind of wonderful in Mary Stuart Masterson's directorial debut, yet however slight her ensemble drama--about two distressed families in the Rockwellian framings of time-forgotten rural America--maybe, it's at least convincing in its genuine sweetness.
  95. Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
    The spectacle of two dudes mucking about in the primal forest becomes tedious.
  96. Tokyo Sonata
    Kurosawa's abiding concern has always been the alienation of modern living, which he here merely transplants into a more recognizable domestic milieu, where subtle fissures in society's apparent order threaten to short-circuit people instead of their beloved technology.
  97. Brothers at War
    I can, however, object to the bathetic, misty score and the endless close-ups of American babies to remind us "what we're fighting for"--and to the filmmaker's belief that support for our troops and support for their mission are one in the same. Just because Rademacher believes his film to be "non-partisan" does not make it so.
  98. Watchmen
    Watchmen is neither desecratory disaster nor total triumph. In filming David Hayter and Alex Tse's adaptation of the most ambitious superhero comic book ever written, director Zack Snyder has managed to address the cult while pandering to the masses.
  99. Phoebe in Wonderland
    Writer-director Daniel Barnz's film is profoundly stirring, if also occasionally maddening.
  100. Everlasting Moments
    The movie satisfies for an hour, but never quite persuades that its subject is worth two.
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