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. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Allen has crafted a wry and thoughtful film about the peculiar stirrings of the heart that is certainly his most accomplished piece of work since 2005's "Match Point" and arguably his funniest in the eight years since "Small Time Crooks."
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fly Me to the Moon 3D
    This sketchily conceived and executed space yarn is one missed opportunity after another.
    • 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.
  4. The Girl Cut in Two
    A Girl Cut in Two is a spry piece of work. Chabrol uses this sinister clown show as a means to puncture the media world's hot-air balloons--as well as to highlight the hypocrisies of his favorite target, the haute bourgeoisie.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
    A good deal livelier than the usual music-doc embalming.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bachna Ae Haseeno
    Two and a half hours of this will try anyone's patience.
  7. Tropic Thunder
    That's the thing about satire: It doesn't play past its expiration date. And everything about Tropic Thunder already feels antiquated.
  8. Elegy
    Spanish director Isabel Coixet's hushed and understated Elegy is a flat, joyless affair.
  9. 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.
  10. Hell Ride
    Bishop's jumbled, wholly unexciting throwback has very little on its mind beyond mythologizing its maker as a bad-ass biker named Pistolero.
  11. Red
    The movie's escalating series of tit-for-tat revenge ploys becomes a bit tedious even at 95 minutes, but Cox and a rich (if not always well-served) supporting cast that includes Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, and Robert Englund keep it more than watchable throughout.
  12. What We Do Is Secret
    The worst kind of bastard adaptation, Secret subtracts without adding.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Stop for Paul
    Crisply shot on a lightweight camcorder, Last Stop for Paul leaves the prevailing impression of an amiable, homespun travelogue done in the style of Bruce Brown's "Endless Summer."
  14. Pineapple Express
    A savvy nod to 1980s action comedies, down to the Huey Lewis original that plays over the end credits. But its greatest achievements lie in the tossed-off non sequiturs, the pop-culture (and Scott Baio) allusions, and the unexpected respites in the midst of all the bang-bang-boom.
  15. Bottle Shock
    The movie should have been more like Rickman: sparkling and light, with just a hint of acid. Instead, it's a huge gulp of vinegar.
  16. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    Blandly engaging sequel.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    109 mostly black-and-white minutes of punk's wet nurse floating through the modern world while endlessly ruminating on mortality, art, and the occasional bodily function. Problem is, there's nary a hint of context, even with biographic essentials.
  18. Frozen River
    If there's one thing this movie gets dead right, it's the desperation of impoverished single mothers trying to fend for their children.
  19. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    Strange how dreary it all is, and how tired Fraser seems.
  20. Sixty Six
    You don't have to be Jewish to appreciate its genuine fondness for the claustrophobic warmth of family life among working-class people apprehensively inching their way toward upward mobility.
  21. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    Holdridge's film oscillates wildly between low-key romantic comedy and antic slapstick and doesn't always hit the mark, but it has charm to burn.
  22. America the Beautiful
    The scattershot America the Beautiful recapitulates vintage "Beauty Myth" trumpery.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Man on Wire
    While largely lighthearted, Petit's walk and Marsh's film take on new meaning post-9/11. Man on Wire never mentions the events of that day, but the Trade Center's collapse continues to weigh on Petit, as if its destruction was every bit as tragic as the human lives lost that day.
  24. Step Brothers
    Not to wax too serious here (since this is, after all, a movie in which two nearly middle-aged men beat each other over the heads with blunt instruments on their front lawn), but ticking away just beneath Step Brothers' freely associative surface is a fairly astute commentary on how we define such abstract concepts as "growing up" and "making something of yourself."
  25. Baghead
    It's an indie about indies--meta, right?
  26. Brideshead Revisited
    Though I can imagine Waugh rolling his eyes at the very idea of Brideshead Revisited as "a heartbreaking romantic epic," this remake is, often inadvertently, closer to the novel's spirit than the sepulchral television series, albeit still not half as waggishly Waugh-ish as "Bright Young Things," Stephen Fry's delightfully naughty interpretation of "Vile Bodies."
  27. Bustin' Down the Door
    Engaging, elegantly made surf documentary.
  28. 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.
  29. The Order of Myths
    Quietly shocking, The Order of Myths is a deft, engrossing cross-section of Mobile life, heavy on local color and insight.
  30. American Teen
    Even when it's ripping off "Juno" and "The Hills," American Teen is fascinating in the way of every good documentary--the more time you spend with anyone, the more they surprise you.
  31. Canary
    Writer-director Akihiko Shiota's dramatic strategies are limited to the point of monotony.
  32. CSNY/Déjà Vu
    The film's mishmash of news footage and concert reviews threatens to devolve into a CSNY wank-fest.
  33. Boy A
    The film's both smart and devastating as it unthreads interwoven questions about redemption, justice, and the pivotal role of history in shaping an individual and his actions.
  34. The Dark Knight
    The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread.
  35. Mamma Mia!
    It's little more than droopy ditties draped around a threadbare plot.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Felon
    Harold Perrineau gives unintentionally comic expression in Felon to the delineation between his character's public and private scruples.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Berlin
    A concert film by technicality, a cinematic trance in practicality.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Take
    Take has the audacity to excuse its bad cinematic habits as figments of both Saul and Ana's imaginations.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transsiberian
    Just as nasty as the titular mode of transport is the script's wanton declaration of theme and a cynical and fashionable belief in moral grayness that may complement the frosty setting but nonetheless feels easy.
  41. Before I Forget
    Exquisitely sad, idiosyncratic film à clef about an aging gay gigolo grasping at the embers of memory before they--and he--turn to ash.
  42. The Doorman
    Not until the goofy closing credits does the film hit its tonal stride and nail what could have been its saving, salient theme: the absurd lines that fancy people draw (and obey) to make themselves feel special on a Saturday night.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mad Detective
    Apart from its inventive depiction of the weaknesses that tough guys try to hide, Mad Detective is a slight work from the wildly prolific To.
  44. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Despite the rosary beads Red wraps around his wrist, Hellboy II doesn't have much on its mind, but few will care since del Toro and his stellar "Pan's Labyrinth" team, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, stage one virtuoso set-piece after another.
  45. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    If the 3D here is better than average, SLIGHTLY, the rest of the movie brings it way, way down--not quite to the center of the earth, but at least a good six feet under.
  46. A Man Named Pearl
    Feature-length elaborations on quirky, inspiring human-interest stories are generally to be avoided, but I'll make an exception for A Man Named Pearl.
  47. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    Lively, exasperating documentary.
  48. August
    August seems to be missing something essential--a prologue? Or maybe it's not what's missing that's the problem, but what's here.
  49. Das wilde Leben
    Stoned on the story's '60s-sex-bomb potential, Bornhak piles on the sex and forgets the bomb; the result is unaffecting filmmaking, as slack-jawed and superficial as its subject.
  50. Garden Party
    Trivial, commercially calculated ensemble drama (porn! pot! rock music!), which plays like a non-musical "Rent," or a faux-edgy "Shortbus" for kids raised on "American Pie."
  51. Giorni e nuvole
    Without grounding in specific causes-and-effects, the film is just another dreary wallow in self-pity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Stone Angel
    Despite its cutesy comic-relief digressions and overdone solemnity, The Stone Angel finds its way past tonal inconsistencies to a moving conclusion that doesn't romanticize death.
  53. Harold
    The question of who might find Harold even mildly entertaining looms large.
  54. 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    While the evidence of his spotty post-1970s work is hard to refute, Gonzo proves what a vapid, overvalued commodity edginess is, championing Thompson's best work for brass-tacks insight more than brass-balled outrage.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Holding Trevor
    There's nothing to fill up the 88 minutes of the film except for the idle bitchery spewed by nearly every character.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kabluey
    Catches the nation's mood of economic anxiety and workplace exploitation more pungently than anything else in theaters.
  58. Diminished Capacity
    It's the kind of lite movie you go and see with your mom, and she'll say she liked it--but then a year later, you're both trying to remember what it was even about. Two and a half shrugs.
  59. The Wackness
    All the drug-slinging material's counterfeit, but the script is refreshingly straight-faced in looking at the strange relationship between white boys and rap.
    • Village Voice
  60. Tell No One
    Among the movie's many delights are the fluctuating rhythms of its pacing, an atmospheric volatility that sets off the doctor's blooming paranoia against his sunlit, leafy surroundings, and a terrific cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas.
  61. Hancock
    It doesn't take itself as seriously as it should, and undercuts a final act that should have and so could have packed a mighty emotional wallop.
  62. Finding Amanda
    By keeping the tone light, the players human (Steve Coogan has a nice turn as a greasy casino host), and never, ever romanticizing the addict, Finding Amanda comes by its heartbreak honestly.
  63. WALL-E
    A film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wanted
    In the end, Wanted may be most notable for cementing the connection between superhero movies and the cinematic craze they have temporarily supplanted, torture porn--both genres that, like "Fight Club," address our ambiguous fascination with being powerless and invulnerable at the same time.
  65. 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.
  66. Trumbo
    The actors--most unshaven, wrinkled, so goddamned serious--steal the writer's movie, as they wring from his epistles every last drop of blood and sweat spilled by a man punished for believing his country was better than its behavior.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Elsa y Fred
    The problem isn't the acting; both actors are superb. It's Elsa's character that is so difficult to take. Only the hopelessly romantic will be able to tolerate her.
  68. The Last Mistress
    A highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's mid-19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse.
  69. Red Roses and Petrol
    Tamar Simon Hoffs's bland-as-boiled-cabbage adaptation of Joseph O'Connor's play finally hobbles into theaters.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Full Grown Men
    For better and for worse (at least for a story about a man struggling to behave like an adult), Full Grown Men feels and thinks with the heart and mind of a child.
  71. Get Smart
    This redux is a rare device: a TV remake for the big screen that works on its own terms.
  72. The Love Guru
    Now and again some pungent writing leaks through to poke fun at the excruciating banality of guru wisdom. But mostly it’s dreary dick jokes and elephant poop, slack directing by Marco Schnabel, and, of all fatal errors, Mike Myers, shooting for cuddly.
  73. Brick Lane
    Absorbing enough, moving enough, and visually attractive enough to provide a perfectly acceptable night out at the movies.
  74. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    Based on several American Girl stories about a 1930s cub reporter in Cincinnati, this dull theatrical debut especially disappoints because I'm usually fond of square, sepia-toned, period-costumed kids' movies (like Fly Away Home) that go nowhere at the box office.
  75. Medicine for Melancholy
    Tender, smart, soulful.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Expired
    Expired pretends to be a valentine to society's outcasts, but it's just one more indie comedy that mocks its characters while sucking up to its knowing audience, assuring all of us hip urbanites that the romantic insecurities of "weirdos" don't deserve our sympathy.
  77. The Happening
    What a bunch of nonsense--effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
  78. The Incredible Hulk
    Cheers to lower expectations, then, because The Incredible Hulk is The Pretty Good Hulk. All things considered, of course.
  79. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    With his elegant cadence, crisp comedic timing, and witty flipping of homophobic stereotypes--in his very choice and use of language--Bachardy is that story come to life: the student who eventually mirrored his teacher, the molded who became a duplicate of the mold.
  80. My Winnipeg
    In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.
    • 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.
  82. To the Limit
    Daring enough to appeal to more than just the usual extreme-sports junkies.
  83. Encounters at the End of the World
    Perhaps because Herzog is approaching old-master status, Encounters at the End of the World skews toward the observational. As in "Grizzly Man," his 2005 portrait of a deranged bear lover, Herzog seems at least as fascinated with other people's obsessions as his own.
  84. Kung Fu Panda
    Perfectly pleasant, very good-looking, modestly funny, dispiritingly unoriginal variant on the nerd-with-a-dream recipe that's been clobbered to death in animated films for at least a decade now.
  85. 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.
  86. The Go-Getter
    Modestly rewards with gorgeous sun-spotted cinematography, tender digressions in rather brave quantities, and believably charming dialogue that doesn't all sound like it came from the same brain (listen up, Diablo Cody).
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    Last year's Academy Award nominee from Kazakhstan for Best Foreign Film, Mongol is purportedly the first in a multi-film saga on the wrath of Khan; as such, it's probably the last thing you'd expect--great fun.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mother of Tears
    A once-great director's near-worst work passes through its funhouse plumbing and emerges from the crapper as intentional mischief: self-sabotage explained away as mad genius.
  89. The Promotion
    As to whether a smart comedy about work and family can itself succeed in a marketplace overrun by idiot farces about reluctant bridesmaids (male and female), shotgun Vegas weddings, and finding or losing Mr./Ms. Right . . . this remains to be seen.
  90. Take Out
    This is as exceptional as microbudget cinema gets.
  91. 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.
  92. Operation Filmmaker
    A fable for our reality-TV reality, Nina Davenport's Operation Filmmaker is as much virus as video documentary. This essentially comic tale maps a contagion of mutual exploitation that seems to have burnished the careers of everyone involved.
  93. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable.
  94. The Foot Fist Way
    Truthfully, The Foot Fist Way is no different from an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm": This is irritainment, something you snicker at while covering your eyes, praying that this guy never gets loose in the real world, when, in fact, he's your next-door neighbor. Or you.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Savage Grace
    A tawdry nighttime soap that marvels without insight at its characters' despicable behavior: It squanders a major performance by Moore.
  96. Sex and the City
    Though Sex and the City is every bit as busy as its HBO progenitor was, it's virtually plotless, not to mention pointless.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Strangers
    Bertino teases with the unknown until he's left no pimple ungoosed. Sometimes avoiding the synapse-raping bad habits of splat packers Eli Roth and Alexandre Aja is its own reward; doing so without also submitting to Michael Haneke–style hand-slapping is nearly monumental.
  98. The Unknown Woman
    Repellent piece of garbage.
  99. Stuck
    Stuck is both darkly comic and disgusting; the name alone reduces the crime to a sick joke.
  100. The Children of Huang Shi
    A tale as ploddingly familiar as it is good-looking and worth telling.
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