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. NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage
    In the end, all NOW reveals is that talented people did a difficult thing in far-off places — and that now they have a video scrapbook.
  2. The Gambler
    The pleasures offered by The Gambler are simple, but don’t hold that against it. Wyatt, director of the 2011 surprise hit Rise of the Planet of the Apes, brings some bristly, swaggering energy to the thing, and that in turn may have loosened Wahlberg up: He’s both more intense and freer than he’s been in years.
  3. Brooklyn Lobster
    Outside of the Jordan inner circle, this family-versus-business parable comes across as slight, familiar, and in dire need of seasoning.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bulgarian Lovers
    We'd gladly give ourselves over to the literate if chatty script and the generous helpings of Bulgarian beefcake, but our interest flags the moment Biba puts his clothes back on.
  5. The Acid House
    There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Casa de los babys
    The screenplay's clutchy banter (interspersed with arias of teary confession) feels distinctly Oprah, but Sayles extracts unexpected life from his wooden setups.
  7. Starsky & Hutch
    S&H's chief pleasure is the spontaneous, sometimes quite touching rapport between the two stars.
  8. Summer of Blood
    Any 30 minutes of Summer of Blood might have me in hysterics. But the sputtering torrent of Eric's yakking proves wearying over 90: Dude's built for speed-dating.
  9. The World of Kanako
    Yakusho's breathless, riveting performance grounds The World of Kanako even as it threatens to devolve into an unbearable series of nihilistic plot twists and gory set pieces.
  10. Rainbow Time
    Lynskey is a luminous counterpoint to Phillips's energetic earthiness, but they can't lift a story with so much killjoy ballast.
  11. Beloved
    A sprawling mess of multiple romantic triangles in which all the angles are obtuse.
  12. Promised Land
    Van Sant knows how to display the common touch, but the movie is a hard sell whose ending is never in doubt.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Agora
    What's missing is a satisfying, plausible middle ground where heady ideas and metaphors coalesce into compelling drama.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lion Ark
    Finding balance between the rescue of abused circus lions and the fascinating cause and effect of a ban that led to the rescue of said lions proves too much for the creators of Lion Ark.
  15. The Man Who Saved the World
    The emotional and narrative core of the story is how much tragedy swirls through Petrov's personal life — from his parents pushing him into the military at the age of seventeen to his marriage to the unraveling of his circumstances after his heroic decision. It is heart-wrenching stuff that you might wish the filmmakers had trusted more.
  16. Jack of the Red Hearts
    It's rare that a drama shows such specificity with respect to the experience of coping with autism, and that sensitivity goes a long way.
  17. Walk with Me
    Walk With Me (save for a few patronizing shots of nuns and monks with toys or in an amusement park) becomes a moving examination of mortality and life choices.
  18. I Heart Huckabees
    There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.
  19. Rendition
    Unlike Hood's far more persuasive gangster picture "Tsotsi," Rendition feels generic and lackluster.
  20. Trolls
    Trolls is a pretty standard piece of subpar DreamWorks product: loud and shiny, more than a tad frantic despite a generic set of characters.
  21. Perfect Sense
    Perfect Sense beautifully captures the ache and counterintuitive thrill of "the days as we know them, the world as we imagine the world" fading away by degrees.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ice Princess
    The surprisingly twisty plot skates along with zero friction, giving new meaning to "Disney on Ice."
  23. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pocket Money
    There's an ease, a simplicity to the thing which often reminds me of Raoul Walsh's stories of simple-minded adventurers venturing into the unknown wilderness. But the carefully-constructed and well-acted buddy-buddy relationship between Newman and Marvin never coalesces into a plot. [08 Jun 1972, p.71]
    • Village Voice
  25. Bra Boys
    Rudimentarily made as documentaries go--and more than a touch self-glorifying at times--Bra Boys is nevertheless intriguing for its insider's perspective of an outsider culture steeped in tradition, male-bonding rituals, and intense localism.
  26. Hobo with a Shotgun
    Pick a reason to balk at this spot-on, garishly threadbare paean to '80s no-budget sleaze.
  27. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    Fun and frothy, a fan's mash note.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Love and Other Drugs
    Buried somewhere in Zwick's film might be a topical modern romance, maybe even a health care satire, but you'd need to dig past layers of creative desperation to find it.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    London to Brighton
    LTB offers a fresh (if grimy) contribution to kitchen-sink realism, but little to the tiresome persistence of vicious British gangster chic.
  30. Without the King
    A cut above the average Quad-bound video agit-prop doc, Michael Skolnik's Without the King succeeds mostly through negative virtues.
  31. Take the Lead
    It's no surprise to anyone who's seen his Robert Rodriguez films that Banderas works well with kids. But it may surprise those who saw "Evita" that he can make a music-and-dance movie that doesn't suck.
  32. Young Goethe in Love
    And yet for all of its obtuse choices, there's still something commendable, if daffy, about trying to turn the high holy father of German literature into a rock star.
  33. Clandestine Childhood
    A charming, involving first feature, Clandestine Childhood muscles its familiar coming-of-age material into something more vibrant and urgent than the usual.
  34. Sky
    Fabienne Berthaud's Sky is a road movie that never quite makes the right turns.
  35. Zoom
    Director Pedro Morelli's neon-and-grime aesthetic and a solid cast of mostly Canadian character actors (including a campy, animated Don McKellar and a creepy Michael Eklund) are the grounding factors.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sukiyaki Western Django
    This delirious spaghetti eastern could only have come from the boiling brain of Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese auteur whose spectacularly uneven films account for the lion's share of the past decade's most utterly batshit movie moments.
  37. When You're Strange
    DiCillo overburdens When You're Strange, which is narrated by Johnny Depp, with a cliché barrage of achronological news events, including an unconscionable use of Robert Kennedy's death agony, but the archival Doors footage he has assembled is anything but banal.
  38. The Girl Is in Trouble
    Sampled old newsreel and security-camera footage flesh out the narrative, and the film's visually arresting, but it's the performances that hold it all together.
  39. Bride & Prejudice
    Money can't buy happiness, but as Bride and Prejudice teaches us, it can get patience in bulk from a smart young woman of a practical mind-set.
  40. Little Pink House
    Like Erin Brockovich for eminent domain, Little Pink House does well to explain the thorny legal issue at its center without getting bogged down in minutiae. Although Susette’s story unfolds in small-town Connecticut, Balaker hammers the point home: This could happen anywhere.
  41. Agnes Browne
    Soft-boiled blarney so sluttish with Hollywood clichés it could've been made in Burbank.
  42. 'R Xmas
    Like any self-respecting Ferrara film, 'R Xmas has its intimations of hellfire, yet it's a weirdly benign Christmas fable -- something like "Miracle on 134th Street."
  43. Forsaken
    Amid Kiefer's narrow-eyed glowering, Donald's exhausted-sage routine, and Moore's approximation of rural homeliness, only Wincott seems to fit in, exuding a poised, laconic cold-bloodedness that stands in stark contrast to the film's inert phoniness.
  44. Bitch
    While it’s refreshing to see a portrait of a woman’s unraveling that doesn’t romanticize mental illness, and that’s actually directed by a woman, it’s easy to wish Bitch probed a bit deeper into the protagonist’s pre-dog life.
  45. Barefoot in the Park
    Gene Saks directs his first film so clumsily that he even muffs Mike Nichol’s exploitation of the climbing the stairs gag that kept Neil Simon’s feeble farce running for 79 years on Broadway.
  46. King of the Corner
    An average film starring an average character actor, but maybe that's the point. This is a story about the benefits of just showing up. Even at its most sentimental, Riegert's pet project possesses a lived-in integrity that nearly offsets the staleness of the material.
  47. The Conspirator
    The film is a burdensome two hours.
  48. Dallas 362
    As a director (Caan) occasionally falls prey to the rookie mistake of excessive crosscutting, fragmenting the dramatic momentum created by his fine cast.
  49. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    Hicks's shtick is so good and his life so ordinary that it's hard to escape the feeling that we might've been better off just watching a compilation of the groundbreaking funnyman's work.
  50. The Fundamentals of Caring
    As in Ant-Man, there's lots of shopworn redemption-plotting to get through here, and a sense that the filmmakers find the kind of jobs actually available to Americans a little beneath someone as twinkly-cute as Paul Rudd. But — also like in Ant-Man — the pleasures of Rudd overpower the programmatic elements.
  51. The First Time
    Something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet spots.
  52. MirrorMask
    The film galumphs along in static panels, prioritizing flash over thought, hyperextending a story that would barely sustain a children's picture book.
  53. The Astronaut Farmer
    This movie works precisely because it's bereft of modern cinema's cynicism.
  54. Tusk
    Tusk is kind of terrible, annoying and self-congratulatory in all the ways we’ve come to expect from Smith (without even, say, any of the silly sweetness of the 2008 Zack and Miri Make a Porno). But Tusk is at least trying to be about something.
  55. Harry Brown
    Director Daniel Barber's lame handwringing about the root causes of youthful alienation forms a thin veneer over the real purpose of this self-important piece of rubbish--to hold us hostage to the director's bottomless appetite for spurious depravity.
  56. Invincible
    What's more disappointing is how filthy Invincible is with missed opportunities for Herzog to be Herzog.
  57. All the Pretty Horses
    The film is too eager to please and falls short of the novel's tragic dimension.
  58. Evelyn
    Every other line is a coy Oirishism, and Brosnan, despite being Irish, isn't any more convincing than twinkly-eyed barmaid Julianna Margulies.
  59. Fever Pitch
    The entire matter of totemistic home-team dementia is roasted on a spit and then embraced for all its sorry pointlessness.
  60. Hearts in Atlantis
    The heartfelt use of extrasensory events as metaphors for a child's grasp of adult mysteries has a poetry to it, and the unblinking sympathy for kids struggling with evil and with the strange frequencies of prepubescent passion can, if your defenses are down, lay you out.
  61. Facing Windows
    Blends past and present to draw some utterly stupefying parallels.
  62. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    Cirque du Soleil's campy, crackbrained, and in no way unenjoyable 3-D IMAX pageant Journey of Man might be the oddest movie offering of the year so far.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Feels part reality show, part mockumentary, part Jakes promo video.
  64. Snatch.
    For those who care, Madonna has found her match in Guy Ritchie, whose absence of talent when it comes to the film medium is equal to her own.
  65. Secret Things
    Neil LaBute on his worst day couldn't devise a scenario so primitive in its psychology and predictable in its sense of sin.
  66. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    Claims to sort the bad guys from the good, which is its essential problem.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Room 314
    Writer-director Michael Knowles is interested in what happens when you shove people into the anonymous space of a hotel room, but these mostly unconnected short cuts are neither unusual nor substantial.
  68. Plastic Planet
    When Boote gets out of the way, the film is illuminating and infuriating.
  69. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    Even its most interesting human subjects can't compare to the beauty and enigma of the wild horses who, after a life of running free, find themselves forced to two-step and bow to bizarre commands.
  70. The Decent One
    Most of the documents that Lapa quotes from are, as presented, unrevealing — even offensive.
  71. The Midnight Swim
    Less is often more when it comes to depicting such rituals onscreen, and Smith is highly attuned to the simple power of, say, characters cryptically chanting under their breath.
  72. A Ballerina's Tale
    In A Ballerina's Tale, director Nelson George paints a moving portrait of Copeland that underscores her triumphs over bodily and historical limitations.
  73. Hard Labor
    The film's brittle and quiet, on occasion touched with the techniques of horror, especially as Helena stalks her store after hours. It's also trenchant, stinging, and acted with great frumping subtlety.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreamland
    Schwartzman's film is bawdy in its exploration of sexual fantasies, some of them extravagant. But it's a safer movie than its slick, retro look and subject matter would have you believe.
  75. The Osiris Child
    Such is the case of The Osiris Child, a series of scenes that cut away from interesting developments to flashbacks with a vengeance, as though “interesting developments” killed director Shane Abbess’s dog.
  76. Godard Mon Amour
    Although writer-director Hazanavicius based the biopic on Wiazemsky’s memoir, Un An Après (One Year Later), Wiazemsky gets portrayed as a passive observer, a minor character in her own story.
  77. The Missing
    However bogged down by predictable story rhythms, banally assembled shoot-outs, and climactic mano a mano, The Missing has an acidic period tone, a respect for the reality of violence, and a refreshing dearth of superhuman heroics and easy triumph. For that much, we should be grateful.
  78. Romance & Cigarettes
    The bleakly bizarre, uneven aesthetic and direction that is fluid but not quite limber succeed and fail from montage to montage, with the principals doing a sort of karaoke tribute to the likes of Joplin and Springsteen.
  79. Liberal Arts
    Still, in the central relationship, the writer-director shows an understanding of human interaction that marks his second feature as a quantum leap beyond his stilted debut, "Happythankyoumoreplease."
  80. Hours
    The film stirs richer, truer feelings once it becomes a one-man show. This is due both to Heisserer's and Walker's skill — the tension is strong, the scenario elemental, and Walker's harried, urgent hero is compelling — but also the fact that the movies are really good at dudes doing things, especially when those things are scrappy, desperate, and heroic.
  81. Everyday
    Michael Winterbottom's wise and involving Everyday specializes in unscripted-feeling moments that ache of life.
  82. The Last Samurai
    The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately.
  83. Baby Mama
    Ultimately, that's all this shrugging disappointment is: a "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched a good hour past its breaking point of no return.
  84. Hostel
    Falling somewhere between fratboy porno wish fulfillment and Europhobic sex-tourism scare flick, Eli Roth's taut, wily, but ultimately pointless shocker Hostel is neither as transgressive nor as grueling as it aims to be.
  85. The Duelist
    What's most arresting is the way Mizgirev's vision of 1860s Russia shines through in the perspiration on Champagne goblets, the flicker of candlelight on faces, and the sheen of polished-steel dueling pistols.
  86. 5 Flights Up
    What starts as a somewhat charming — if prosaic — story of love in the time of gentrification inexplicably spends most of its third act mired in the finer points of apartment hunting, like a tastefully lit HGTV show.
  87. Anesthesia
    Anesthesia doesn't cast judgment. Instead, Nelson slowly reveals awful things about his characters after we've decided to like them. I admire the film's vigor, even if at times it feels like a cruel, clumsy trick.
  88. Song to Song
    Connect with the kineticism of Song to Song, and it might just leave you breathless.
  89. Noise
    Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy.
  90. The Mind's Eye
    The Mind's Eye ought to hit the sweet spot for fans of early David Cronenberg, the more violent X-Men comics, and the kinds of indie horror movies Larry Fessenden always cameos in, as he does again here.
  91. Pride
    If nothing else, Pride has the best sports-film soundtrack ever--Philly funk and soul, '70s style. And hell, that'll get ya wet.
  92. The Institute
    Complaints that there's too little here about how the Jejune Institute was hatched or what it all may have meant matter little in the face of the one great thing The Institute does offer: a record of the mad invention of the game's masterminds.
  93. The D Train
    The D Train has one great idea, a couple strong jokes, and a void at its center — a man who is only believable when he briefly becomes specific.
  94. Old Goats
    [An] eager-to-please but creaky and shambling movie.
  95. Milk and Honey
    In the end, Milk and Honey's contrived connections blossom into a disarmingly effective reckoning with loss and regret.
  96. CyberWorld
    A techno-happy bumrush screaming the joy of never thinking twice about repeating things ad nauseam, and as loud as possible.
  97. Baby Boy
    Pretty much a mess, but it also has a couple of long stretches that are extremely daring in that they reveal black family dynamics we've never seen on screen before.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
    A real snooze.
  99. Road Trip
    Gets a lurching spring in its step whenever Tom Green shows up to, say, cram a live mouse in his mouth.
  100. Tigerland
    In his first major role, the Irish actor Farrell deflects the script's more dubious aspects through sheer magnetic presence.
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