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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    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Are Wizards
    Ignore the scattershot approach, however, and there's considerable pleasure to be had in spending time with these bizarre enthusiasts and watching the creative ways they find to express their obsessions.
  2. The Dukes
    How, though, to resent a work of such deliberate inconsequence?
  3. How About You ...
    The only crowds this stodgy little movie is likely to please tend to be home on a Saturday night, watching PBS.
  4. Slumdog Millionaire
    An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.
  5. Role Models
    Wain, Marino, and Rudd pull it off because theirs is a funnier, brainier, bawdier brand of feel-good.
  6. JCVD
    What exactly is JCVD? Comedy? Confession? Confusion? No one will ever mistake these backstage shenanigans for "Irma Vep." But as a self-regarding expression of masculine angst, it's a Damme sight more fun than "Synecdoche."
  7. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gardens of the Night
    Pitched at the risible level of Marco Kreuzpaintner's Trade, the film never quite recovers from writer-director Damian Harris's dithering way of shooting things.
  9. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
    Funniest movie of '08? Close enough, for those who don't mind monkeying around.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Reticker offers perhaps a too-narrow focus on this historical moment, but Pray the Devil remembers the golden rule of moviemaking--rather than tell, it shows, and what it shows is quietly affecting.
  11. Repo! The Genetic Opera
    The grim finality of the ensuing pietà suggests the last act of Hamlet or, rather, Hamlet 2--so embarrassing that, for the first time, I wanted to avert my eyes from the screen, although that might have also been because Repo! appears to have been shot with a cell phone.
  12. Soul Men
    Mac and Jackson carry the show--particularly Mac, who's at his crackly, cranky best here. As swan songs go, Soul Men is pretty sweet.
  13. House
    The central problem here is one common to faith-based films: The heroes (Reynaldo Rosales and Heidi Dippold) are both overly bland and poorly cast.
  14. Otto; or, Up with Dead People
    Campy but not comical, reactionary but not very clever, LaBruce's film is best saved for those tickled by the sight of homo-zombie orgies or the hardcore penetration of an open wound.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    Kuenne lovingly assembles home-movie footage and new interviews, while deftly borrowing a narrative trick from fiction--the plot twist--to create a true-crime story so gripping, devastating, and ultimately unforgettable that it easily trumps any thriller Hollywood has to offer this year.
  16. Splinter
    Buoyed by solid ensemble work, some yuckily effective special effects, and a script that subverts genre convention by having its characters do smart things instead of stupid ones (mostly), Splinter earns our respect while delivering 82 minutes of lean, mean fun.
  17. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The biggest titters at a recent preview screening came during a scene in which Mewes shows off his dick--as though, at last! Still, how Jason Segal of him. Does Apatow always get there first?
  18. My Name Is Bruce
    The only things missing from this unfunny Campbell love fest are a passable script, Sam Raimi's inventiveness, and a level of sophistication beyond nose-picking and ass grabs.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Matador
    The Matador reserves judgment while raising the core issue concerning this traditional ritual: deep, poetic cultural expression or glorified animal cruelty?
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Other End of the Line
    At a time when our global standing is sinking like a stone, it's comforting to know that, at least on the big screen, we can still land the babes no matter how obnoxious we are.
  21. The First Basket
    The First Basket is more than a triumphalist screw-you to those who think Jews don't play sports.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let the Right One In
    A coolly balanced and utterly compelling examination of alienation and love.
  23. Synecdoche, New York
    Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.
  24. Changeling
    Burdened by a convoluted script and an ensemble-proof leading lady, the director fails to illuminate a particular corrupt system.
  25. I've Loved You So Long
    A modestly satisfying tale of sisterly love weighed down by a history of family betrayal and mendacity.
  26. Pride and Glory
    How ironic that a movie filled with police officers should end up feeling like a hostage situation.
  27. Johnny Got His Gun
    Filmed theater is an inherently dubious genre, and Johnny Got His Gun is little more than a good performance of dated material.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Universe of Keith Haring
    Equally a portrait of the artist and a portrait of a decade.
  29. Fear(s) of the Dark
    Though multi-director projects are patchy by definition, Fear(s) of the Dark hits with an all-star batting average.
  30. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    The film's length may well be intended to mirror the 72-day ordeal, but it's relentlessly wearing and lacking in nutritive fiber.
  31. W.
    A painful movie to endure.
  32. The Elephant King
    Equivalent to a crummy band with a monster of a drummer who convinces you to stay for the whole show anyways.
  33. Filth and Wisdom
    There's an undeniably funky charm and abiding can-do spirit to this loose-knit portrait of three London flatmates trying to make their way in the world.
    • 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.
  35. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sex Drive
    Remains faithful to a portrait of teens as they see themselves.
  37. Mary
    Tightly framed and tightly wound, Mary is a claustrophobic, incandescent, nutty 83 minutes with everyone in the cast teetering on the ledge of madness.
  38. Frontrunners
    Suh shows herself ever-happy to settle for the shallow rewards of pop documentary. Depending on your level of fatigue with The Other Campaign, this may be good enough.
  39. Body of Lies
    Its generic attributes (and title) notwithstanding, Scott's film may be the sharpest of all the post-9/11 thrillers--and also the most purely entertaining--in the way it maps the vectors and currents of the modern intelligence-gathering game without losing us in its dense narrative thicket.
  40. Breakfast with Scot
    Cavanagh, best known for the TV show "Ed," is terrific--as is young Bernett, who steals the show without hogging it.
  41. The Express
    Like all formulaic biopics, The Express sacrifices the details for the Big Picture--hagiography without the humanity.
  42. Happy-Go-Lucky
    At the very least, the spectacle of Poppy's devotion and desire, not to mention her all-around sunny disposish, left this viewer feeling unaccountably happy--at least for the moment.
  43. Dung che sai duk
    Wittily, earnestly, gorgeously sets up the paradox he has returned to throughout his career--that of romantic memory as both scourge and succor.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Choose Connor
    For all the potential of this coming-of-age/political-awakening tale, Choose Connor undoes itself with an egregiously sordid turn.
  45. Nights and Weekends
    Very often, the "rawness" here seems like an inability to distinguish the essential from the banal (or elevate the banal to the essential). A good eye might help, but Swanberg and Gerwig's filmmaking is stubbornly disheveled.
  46. RocknRolla
    Sum total of scenes that deserved to stay in the final cut: Thandie Newton doing a little shimmying frug.
  47. Rachel Getting Married
    A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.
  48. 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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blindness
    Unflinching at best and treacly at worst, the film unveils its apocalyptic scenario with visceral intensity, but lacks the emotional sophistication to rise above schadenfreude kicks.
  50. Flash of Genius
    Greg Kinnear, usually kinetic, is unusually (and unbearably) dull.
  51. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    Weide's big-screen version is sitcom-drab.
  52. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    Plays like something crafted in a lab by 54-year-old hucksters trying to sell shit to the kids under the cheerless guise of "alternative." The only thing it's an alternative to? Good.
  53. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    It's obvious that Amer and Usman labor under the burden of making humor at once insider-cool and outsider-friendly. And it's hard to finesse "offensive" from a defensive crouch.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just Buried
    The movie serves up gory killings and kinky peripheral shenanigans without any satirical thrust, blunting its death-equals-profit subtext with a snickering tone better suited to an afternoon of Clue.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ballast
    The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs.
  56. The Lucky Ones
    Its hopelessly schematic road-trip arc (bond-fight-reconcile-repeat) grows increasingly tedious.
  57. 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.
  58. Miracle at St. Anna
    You may begin to wonder if Lee really initiated this project or if it only fell into his hands after Roberto Benigni proved unavailable.
  59. Choke
    They explain and explain again the genesis of Victor's demons, to the point where the novel and movie play almost like parodies of novels and movies in which a character has to get in touch with his feelings in order to become a better man.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nights in Rodanthe
    Exhibits a certain amount of integrity in its dedication to being uncomplicated, unashamed romantic goo.
  61. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    Mildly engrossing, building to a final-act clash between First and Third worlds that is riveting and highly uncomfortable to watch.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Humboldt County
    Jeremy Strong's minimalist performance in the lead role makes for an unconvincing character arc--he seems almost as ill-at-ease and dispirited by the end of the film as he does at the beginning.
  63. Obscene
    Very fine documentary.
  64. Shoot on Sight
    As if only made for ignoramuses who get nervous around brown skin, nearly everything on-screen is condescendingly telegraphed--from its plodding dialogue jammed with black-or-white morals to its lingering reaction shots, one-dimensional racists and radicals, obvious mood music, and thriller clichés.
  65. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Less persuasive is Forbes's perfunctory, psychologically thin rummage through Atwater's childhood for a traumatic event that would explain his utter ruthlessness.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elite Squad
    This latest pounding slice-of-thug-life thriller from Brazil packs the same cinematic firepower as "City of God," only on the other side of the law.
  67. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    There's nothing earth-shattering going on here, but it's a film you'll want to befriend.
  68. Appaloosa
    Harris and his collaborators are playing it straight with a timeless male fantasy--horse, hat, six-shooter--a traditional approach that will please moviegoers like my dad and yours.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. Ghost Town
    If it sounds all so pale and predictable, it is.
  74. All of Us
    Brooklyn filmmaker Emily Abt's well-meaning, pro-feminist doc offers little new insight in seeking to raise awareness that black women are disproportionately at high risk for HIV infection.
  75. Fraulein
    Stylized with a recurring misty focus, the film's economically captured detail shots (gestures, expressions, caught moments) convey genuine sensitivity without the expected weepiness.
  76. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    An elegantly constructed if misleadingly titled class lecture.
  77. Burn After Reading
    The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.
  78. Christmas on Mars
    As a Lips completist, it's at least worth enduring for its homegrown resourcefulness, all General Electric stoves and found industrial objects, but that's the thing about experimentation: Sometimes it's destined to fail.
  79. Flow: For Love of Water
    One of those charming little documentaries that make you question whether the human race is really worth preserving.
  80. Towelhead
    Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.
  81. The Women
    Isn't so much incompetent as it is hopelessly tame and muddled.
  82. Forgiveness
    David's trauma, madness, and recovery (including a relationship with a Palestinian woman) is arranged as a puzzle of dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, and strikingly choreographed numbers that, while occasionally dazzling, remains in pieces at film's end.
  83. Everybody Wants to Be Italian
    Less a movie than a charm offensive beamed at those who thought "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a masterpiece.
  84. Mister Foe
    The whole thing's poised uneasily somewhere between urban fairy tale and actual human psychodrama, never really landing in one place or the other.
  85. 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.
  86. Save Me
    Though Save Me never quite surmounts its schematic scenario, scene by scene, beat by beat, it's pretty damn good.
  87. A Secret
    Deepened by its complex back-and-forth chronology, deft shifts in perspective, and a significantly counterintuitive color-coding of past and present, A Secret suggests that it's not illicit passion, but rather the crime of denial, that has screwed up this family down the generations.
  88. August Evening
    Perhaps Eska didn't have to write all of his characters into overlapping crossroads of crisis, but he's more nuanced than overt, and his cast (especially Loren and the nonprofessional Castaneda) sells it.
  89. The Pool
    This heightened consciousness of objects and obligations ballasts the drama-light, class-conscious fable with tactile life.
  90. I Served the King of England
    A mischievously hedonistic, Chaplinesque farce, the film buoyantly but seriously traverses the horrors of World War II with a subtlety and sophistication that most American comedies cannot grasp.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Mexican Shivah
    Kvetches its way through an insipid vision of cross-cultural conflict.
  93. Year of the Fish
    Year of the Fish is the kind of really bad movie it takes a lot of misplaced conviction to make.
  94. 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.
  95. The Longshots
    The Longshots strains so hard to inspire, every moment underlined with a by-the-numbers score, that it ends up totally innocuous.
  96. Hamlet 2
    Not nearly as uproarious as it should be.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble the Water
    The resilience of the movie's subjects--survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV--irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine.
  98. I.O.U.S.A.
    Both a handy election primer and a bowel-rattling cry of fiscal doom.
  99. Momma's Man
    One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.
  100. The Rocker
    This is sugary-sweet stuff--pop instead of rock.
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