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. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    O'Nan and Weston's rapport is engagingly prickly but their "Shins meets Sesame Street" tunes have a tweeness also found in the director's music montages and lens flares. Only in its even-handed treatment of Alex's fundamentalist-Christian brother (Andrew McCarthy) does the film feel like something less than a corny cornucopia of manchildren-grow-up clichés.
  2. Explicit Ills
    A tender ensemble slice of inner-city Philly life.
  3. Some Velvet Morning
    Tucci and the English-born Eve make a riveting team, and although the film's final twist undercuts all that has come before, Some Velvet Morning is provocation of the most artful kind.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shock to the System
    Director Ron Oliver applies a thin veneer of straight-to-cable pseudo-gloss without finding a workable tone, and the cast lacks the charisma and chemistry to make the genre and gender-bending register as more than novelty.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Jandek on Corwood
    Chad Friedrichs's doc has too many rock-crit talking heads, too often saying the same thing based on scant information -- a clumsy portrait of the artist that inadvertently serves as a mirror of the critical faculty itself.
  6. Now, Forager
    A slow-food procedural, commendably devoted yet still underdone.
  7. A Girl Like Her
    A Girl Like Her focuses on the characters' emotional traumas while eschewing moral panic about how Kids These Days are so wrapped up in their phones and the internet.
  8. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    For all its frantic eager-to-please-ness, Hotel Transylvania 3 doesn’t quite achieve the blissfully reliable drumbeat of hilarious throwaway gags that the earlier films managed.
  9. The Notebook
    Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script, Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.
  10. Jet Lag
    The writerly restraint that confines them to the airport is admirable, though the fairy-tale ending in Acapulco seems like a throwaway.
  11. People I Know
    Although a marked improvement over Algrant's nightmarishly whimsical debut, "Naked in New York," People I Know is perfumed less by the sweet smell of success than the musty aroma of the Miramax vault.
  12. The Hunting of the President
    Overwrought and often hysterical, filled with distracting montages and portentous drumbeats, the documentary feels as cheesy as its subject.
  13. Human Traffic
    Sweet, ribald, and even inspired in an off-the-cuff way.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Fighting Temptations
    The camera loves Beyoncé, but her acting coach may harbor more ambivalence; if she could convert the imperious urgency of her best singing to screen presence, we might stop wishing Whitney would come back from her own private netherlands.
  15. A Single Shot
    David M. Rosenthal's sturdy, nasty rural noir, based on Matthew F. Jones's novel, is so sharp and rusted through that, after taking it in, you'll likely need a tetanus shot.
  16. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    It’s all a curious humanist experiment with anecdotal surprises and whimsy, but its motives aren’t in sharp focus like Doyle’s hotshot imagery.
  17. Shorts
    A cute and mildly clever fantasy.
  18. In Satmar Custody
    Chilling and thoroughly engrossing documentary.
  19. Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema
    There's minor amusement in the suggestion that entrepreneurial criminality begins with a preference for Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal" over the Bible.
  20. Music Within
    Sheen, like the movie itself, is trying too hard to inspire when the story doesn't need the help.
  21. Sinister
    Hawke's taut performance - lightly parodying his own career doldrums while playing an egotistical hack who's a close cousin of John Cassavetes's self-loathing actor in Rosemary's Baby - is totally credible.
  22. The Tale of Despereaux
    Clumsily wedged in like a TV commercial between deafening stunts, the emotional storytelling sinks without trace, leaving you with only one flawed character to cling to.
  23. Alice in Wonderland
    Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.
  24. A Wrinkle in Time
    I was transported by DuVernay’s adaptation to the mind-set of my girlhood — embarrassing insecurities and all. This is not a cynic’s film. It is, instead, unabashedly emotional.
  25. Book Club
    Even though it follows the map of every romcom before it, Holderman’s film still offers the too-rare chance to marvel at just how good these women are at their craft, how easily they inhabit the bodies and lives of other people.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beowulf & Grendel
    It's good, bloody fun that stirs the intellect whenever it feels like it, and as a swashbuckler, the dead-game Butler outswings just about anyone in Troy or Kingdom of Heaven or Tristan & Isolde.
  27. Alpha Dog
    If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor--his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events--he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mister Lonely
    Co-written with his brother Avi, Mister Lonely is startlingly straightforward compared to his earlier work. But, like that work, it stands or falls on each single, self-contained scene.
  29. Ha-Hesder
    Flawed but engrossing thriller. Highly atmospheric, it gets its charge by dramatizing religious millennialism in a region that is the world epicenter of irrationality.
  30. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Doyle loves bad jokes and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off.
  31. Bandits
    A confusingly edited music-video hodgepodge.
  32. Save the Last Dance
    The disjointed plotting and afterschool-special dialogue offer scant opportunity for the charismatic leading duo to work up much chemistry.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ella Enchanted
    Transpires in a somewhat chintzy fantasy kingdom lousy with more cameos than your typical Love Boat season.
  34. Chop Suey
    Time and again words fail Weber. He's a loquacious but unilluminating host.
  35. The Blind Side
    Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.
  36. Soul Surfer
    Soul Surfer offers a ghastlier sight than your wildest "127 Hours"–meets-"Jaws" nightmare: barefaced Christian pandering that pretends it isn't.
  37. Ava's Possessions
    A concurrent plot involving Ava's family doesn't land quite as well, as it travels down some more familiar paths, but the twelve-step satire had me grinning like a fiend.
  38. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    Gessner’s film may be for Foster completists only. But the intensity of her dead-eyed stare as the final credits scroll across her face reminds us of her preternatural ability, as a kid and beyond, to transform even the most negligible movie or scene into an event.
  39. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    It’s a moving tale made more so because even after he’s “won,” Pineda maintains a clear-eyed pragmatism about what living a fairy tale costs.
  40. The Book Thief
    The Book Thief is just too tidy to have much impact.
  41. Delicacy
    Tautou, playing workaholic widow Nathalie in Delicacy, gives off a sexless, cutie-pie charm - not as aggressively as she did in "Amélie," but still gratingly. The actress, therefore, is perfect for this dainty, inconsequential romantic dramedy.
  42. I Am Not a Hipster
    The film's energy is frequently low, befitting that of its main character, a stalled, self-loathing, San Diego–based indie musician named Brook (Dominic Bogart), breathing contempt for anyone asking him personal questions.
  43. Person to Person
    Person to Person is a gently comic slices-of-life drama, the kind where a variety of people’s conflicting, occasionally overlapping experience of the city comes together into a messy whole.
  44. Nancy Drew
    This tweener goddess--a virtual Batcave of handy accessories packed in her shoulder bag--may prove too annoying for general audiences, particularly as Roberts plays her comically straight.
  45. ABCs of Death 2
    Overall, it's a strong sampler, with surprising variety.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Siege
    An intramural debate masquerading as an action movie.
  47. Maya Dardel
    Is Maya Dardel serious? The regal Lena Olin plays her with frank ferocity and arrogant certainty, but so much about the grandiose poet borders on parody.
  48. Knight of Cups
    Knight of Cups might be both the most intoxicating film he's ever made—a deluge of gorgeous, kinetic images and sounds—and, in some ways, the most perplexing.
  49. 30 Days of Night
    Director David Slade's stab at the story is actually rather ordinary.
  50. The Immortalists
    Directors Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado present a study of two eccentrics without pushing too hard against their premise.
  51. Irrational Man
    It works better than most of Allen's recent films because it's a trifle without pretense, and because the director's finally smartened up — a little — right when everyone's written him off.
  52. Shaolin
    This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.
  53. 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goal! The Dream Begins
    The appealing young man's tribulations are predictable, his triumph inevitable; while he gets respect, we get another Rocky-style dose of emotional uplift, cloaked in the usual game-day clichés.
  55. The Promise
    You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Basket
    Combines the wholesomeness of "Old Yeller" with the moral and physical claustrophobia of "The Waltons."
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Short Eyes (re-release)
    Confrontational for its time yet paltry next to any episode of "Oz," Piñero's slim moral quandary is stocked with glib sermonizing and unfocused characterizations, but Robert M. Young's firmly anchored direction creates an appropriate chamber ambience.
  58. Diario di una siciliana ribelle
    The visuals can seem desperate -- Sicilian landscapes through a scrim of turning pages -- but a storytelling guitarist's running elegy gives Rita's bold actions a sadly epic scope.
  59. The Art of the Steal
    The Art of the Steal doesn't advance the nerdy intertextuality that has distinguished ironic crime films since Guy Ritchie, but writer-director Jonathan Sobol knows the ropes.
  60. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    From Oshima’s later career (after one stroke, he made 1999’s Taboo; after two strokes, it’s unclear whether he’ll direct again), most notable is this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java.
  61. Honour
    Khan’s orchestration of suspense impresses.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Apocalypse
    While short on narrative propulsion, Yasuaki Nakajima's low-budget, 72-minute After the Apocalypse turns out to be a surprisingly engaging ride.
  63. Yau doh lung fu bong
    The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story
    Nevertheless, if not as stirring as the similar "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg," it remains a reasonably comprehensive tribute to athletics as the great melting pot.
  65. Pray for Japan
    Filmed over a period of six weeks and supplemented with animated music sequences and chilling news footage of the terrifying deluge, Pray is both an elegy and a love letter.
  66. The Color Wheel
    The Color Wheel is funny, but it has a dark streak that takes it into increasingly creepy territory as the siblings face down a procession of people who are even more screwed-up than they are.
  67. $ellebrity
    Mazur miscalculates when he tries to direct viewers' outrage at stars' inability to walk down the street without getting cameras thrust in their faces. He's on far surer ground when he uses his on-screen subjects to decry the proliferation of gossip outlets, such as TMZ.
  68. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    Govenar's slow pace doesn't quite do the story justice. With tighter editing, the film's beats might be just as infectious as those from Conde's drum.
  69. Men at Lunch
    Given Men at Lunch's compelling argument that the identity of its anonymous ironworker subjects is beside the point—that mystery is a prime facet of its enduring appeal—the documentary's desire to determine who they really were comes across as unnecessary.
  70. Big Ass Spider!
    This is squirmy, hilarious fun.
  71. Revolution
    Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Getting to the Nutcracker
    As visually rich and heartwarming as the documentary is, director Serene Meshel-Dillman struggles with pace: The interviews with the young dancers sometimes drag, while the final dance performance is frenetic.
  73. My Friend Victoria
    My Friend Victoria has a specific vibrancy as delicate and understated as Lessing's social critique. It's an accumulation of small moments: telling gazes, sour notes in the dialogue, the persistent impression of a woman who's in a room but never fully present.
  74. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Almost despite itself, this is a deeply pessimistic movie.
  75. Generation Wealth
    By turns, Greenfield’s survey is alarming, hilarious, and indulgent, sometimes strained and a little dull, prone to overstatement and an abuse of synecdoche.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Being Flynn
    What the actors are unable to get across emotionally (which is a lot - Dano and De Niro, both of them all big actorly tics, often seem like they were filmed in different rooms), Weitz hammers home via near-constant music.
  77. Lucky Number Slevin
    Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.
  78. Rounders
    An unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work in which, as glumly directed from David Levien and Brian Koppelman's corny script, every scene feels like it's being played for the second time.
  79. Unmade in China
    All of this could be very funny, but while the film does deliver some strong comic turns, far too much time is spent watching an inactive Kofman whining about his lot.
  80. Unfriended: Dark Web
    For all its inventive and impressive technique, the film lacks fun; a lot of folks, myself included, need very little reminding that the Internet is a threat and that terrible men are actively out there abducting and terrorizing girls and women for lulz.
  81. Shooter
    Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  82. Killing Kasztner
    Ross is very good at teasing out the politics behind Kasztner's shifting fortunes, not to mention his murky ambitions. But closure is the last thing that's needed here.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burning Man
    The high-sheen Australian drama Burning Man leans heavily on a scrambled chronology, and likewise feels tonally mixed up, but it certainly does keep you guessing.
  84. Brother Nature
    There's nothing new in the friction between these characters, but it's fun to watch a couple of pros showboating on the field, even when the stakes aren't high.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Robin Hood
    The directorial choices are, for the most part, so lazy, the blockbuster engineering so blatant, that Robin Hood often falls into self-parody. All the more reason for Sarah Palin to love it.
  86. The Emperor's New Clothes
    It can be hard to take someone so pleased with himself seriously, but amid his grandstanding, Brand does offer some solutions to problems many of us rightfully feel are intractable.
  87. The Fluffer
    The Fluffer even heads south of the border for its finale, as if hoping that warmer climes will energize its fitful melodrama.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Group
    Though the characters are in fact sustained improvisations, the roles feel inhabited rather than acted -- a quality acutely present in scenes of excruciating awkwardness.
  89. Flightplan
    Becomes more satisfying than the stock thriller–star vehicle it begins and ends as.
  90. RocknRolla
    Sum total of scenes that deserved to stay in the final cut: Thandie Newton doing a little shimmying frug.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Too Deep
    The film does have a canny appreciation for how ghetto realness is acted out.
  92. Imaginary Heroes
    Despite Weaver's wise instincts for the thoughtful pause, we're stuck with yet another ass-kicking female actor struggling to shade in the contours of a wispy sketch.
  93. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    It should be mentioned that Garriott's father, Owen, was himself a Skylab astronaut, a fact of which much is made - but that only more obviously shows Man on a Mission for what it is: a puffed-up home movie.
  94. Broken
    Unfortunately, Broken lives up to its mawkish title, and the slice-of-life tragedies of the film's first half devolve into manipulative melodrama in the latter part. When society breaks, the spell does, too.
  95. Keeping Mum
    Obvious, simplistic, and never funny, Johnson's movie may be useful only as real estate porn--Cornwall and the Isle of Man never looked so super cute.
  96. Killing Gunther
    It’s little more than a diverting sketch, but its characters justify its ninety minutes, and Killam’s unremitting enthusiasm is occasionally contagious.
  97. Piranha 3-D
    Irredeemable, and yet, the movie, written by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, is too funny and the filmmaking too self-aware to be truly offensive.
  98. John Dies at the End
    John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old-and, oh, it is terrible.
  99. 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.
  100. Lost and Delirious
    A startling letdown after (Léa Pool's) plaintive, understated coming-of-age tale "Set Me Free."
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