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. Postal
    Manages to be as toothless as he (Boll) is tasteless. Poorly framed, tone-deaf, and nonsensical (yet still Boll's best!).
  2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    It's hard to tell whether Spielberg and Lucas are trying too hard or trying at all--the thing's such a mess, such an unmitigated disaster, that damned is the scholar stuck with the unfortunate task of deciphering this cynical, clinical gibberish in decades to come.
  3. The Edge of Heaven
    It's not brilliant, but it wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships as the former Ottomans clean house for E.U. membership, and the demographic earthquake of 70 million Muslims waits at Europe's door.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Jihad for Love
    Muslims, Jews, and Christians may have their, oh, occasional differences, but as an Islamic scholar observes early in Parvez Sharma's documentary, there is one point on which the world's divine religions agree: Homosexuality is a crime.
  5. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Prince Caspian is fairly good fun, and I'm trying to decide whether it was the capable swordplay or Ben Barnes's bedroom eyes that prompted a significant shift in brand loyalty.
  6. Reprise
    Reprise--a masculine story whose women come off best--is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic, and strangely beautiful riff on growing up in a broken world.
  7. Sangre De Mi Sangre
    The result is contrived, but compelling--as is the movie's high-powered humanism.
  8. Speed Racer
    Gaudier than a Hindu-temple roof, louder than the Las Vegas night, Speed Racer is a cathedral of glitz.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Babysitters
    Ultimately, the film's view of female self-loathing and girl-on-girl exploitation is woefully reductive and painful.
  10. The Fall
    If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera, and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle.
  11. Noise
    Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy.
  12. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    A frequently uproarious send-up of Jean Bruce's long-running series of spy novels.
  13. Surfwise
    Whether you call this a Rousseau-ian paradise or "Capturing the Friedmans" by the Sea will depend on where you stand on hippie living--up to a point.
  14. Turn the River
    Turn the River can't weather the ante-upping into pathos when Kailey desperately reasserts her privilege of motherhood--but the sense of storytelling intelligence is undeniable.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Before the Rains
    Saddled with a predictable lushness--even a streak of blood on a dirty window is aestheticized until it looks like stained glass--and the sensuality here can crowd out the sense. Still, director Santosh Sivan imparts a vastness and a sense of wonder to the film, qualities reminiscent of a Thomas Cole painting.
  16. The Tracey Fragments
    Beyond its overarching aesthetic, The Tracey Fragments co-stars Toronto rockabilly punk Slim Twig as a Tim Burton caricature of Pretty in Pink’s Duckie and boasts a score by Broken Social Scene; it would all swagger dangerously close into hipster-trash territory if not for Page's pathos and wit, honest to blog.
  17. Unsettled
    Adam Hootnick's burningly smart documentary, delves into this national crisis, which was a relative blip on the international media's radar.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Battle for Haditha
    An engaging Iraqudrama that straddles the line between blistering exposé and Spielbergian heart-tugger.
  19. Iron Man
    Iron Man, too, is something that people will see regardless of the reviews, but here is the point: Where Michael Bay (Transformers) has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller who engages the audience's imagination rather than crushing it in a tsunami of digital noise.
  20. Fugitive Pieces
    Fugitive Pieces is a cerebral excavation into history, written in lush cadences meant to be read or recited. It may be unfilmable, and in pursuit of sensitivity, Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa hollows out the novel's urgency in favor of a vaguely spiritual morbidity.
  21. Made of Honor
    Director Paul Weiland and the three (!) screenwriters it took to boil down thousands of bad movies into 101 minutes haven't provided this one with a single original thought; it should only entertain those still getting adjusted to the idea of talkies.
    • 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.
  23. Redbelt
    With his 10th feature--an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts--Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Son of Rambow
    At its most likable, Son of Rambow evokes the rush of discovery that turns budding cinephiles into lifers--that delight in finding a film that seems to express or coalesce some inchoate yearning, including a yen to share.
  25. XXY
    It takes a controlling hand to chisel something more contoured than monotony out of this dense angst, and director Lucía Puenzo doesn't have it, though Inés Efron, as Alex, gives a committed centerpiece performance with a nice, slightly lupine grin.
  26. The Favor
    As an unconscious parody of everything that's wrong with Indiewood, Eva Aridjis's The Favor is brilliant. Otherwise, it's an unwatchable nightmare that brought back bad memories of NYU screenwriting classes.
  27. Viva
    About half an hour of this was enough for me—long before the orgy, LSD drugging, and hallucination animation, I'd gotten the joke—though Biller's re-creation is not only right-on but rigorous.
  28. 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.
  29. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    A largely mind-numbing experience.
  30. Roman de gare
    This goofy tale of self-emancipation, a love story made by a mature man wise to the possibilities of the improbable, is also a thriller with an unexpectedly dark edge.
  31. Standard Operating Procedure
    Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.
  32. Then She Found Me
    In short, it's the kind of film that only a mother, which is to say my mother, would love.
  33. Up the Yangtze
    By journey's end, Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground.
  34. 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.
  35. Stuff and Dough
    Puiu seems content to embrace the dynamism of youth and possibility; if "Lazarescu" was a movie of dead ends, Stuff and Dough is one, quite literally, of open roads.
  36. 88 Minutes
    We may have to sit through worse films to come this year, but with any luck, there'll be none as guilelessly, idiotically misogynist as this one.
  37. The Forbidden Kingdom
    Taken as a whole, though, it's an amiable lost-and-found of epic-adventure tropes. As I still illogically treasure "Willow," many a 10-year-old who sees Forbidden Kingdom will remember it fondly in spite of its flaws.
  38. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Without Segel bravely channeling "his own anxieties and obsessions into his clowning," as Pauline Kael wrote about Woody Allen 24 years ago, Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been easily forgettable and, one might even say, limp.
  39. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather.
  40. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    An affable action hero in search of the planet's arch supervillain, Spurlock is less irritating than his obvious model, Michael Moore, but also less politically astute; assuming the role of a faux-naïf stranger in a strange land, he's more benign and not nearly as funny as unacknowledged analogue Sacha Baron Cohen.
  41. Zombie Strippers!
    Director Jay Lee (The Slaughter) delivers absolutely everything you could possibly hope for in a film called Zombie Strippers, with a consistently hilarious, brutal, and titillating mash-up of "Return of the Living Dead" and "Showgirls" that actually beats out Mark Pirro's "Nudist Colony of the Dead" for the unofficial title of best naked zombie movie ever.
  42. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    Bizarre and hysterical.
  43. Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    Glass is a stupefyingly dull portrait of a man who doesn't seem to be lying when he says, "I have so few secrets."
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anamorph
    Any resemblance between these and the real-world practice known as murder--committed for trifling old human motivations like blind anger and money--is strictly coincidental.
  45. The First Saturday in May
    First Saturday isn't exactly a winner, but it places.
  46. Dark Matter
    First-time filmmaker Shi-Zheng Chen shows little aptitude for accurately transcribing the textures of human interaction; there's not a single credible performance here, not excluding Meryl Streep as a faculty Sinophile, doing that thing where she grinds every line through a gauntlet of tremulous inflections.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Street Kings
    Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense that an infinitely more complex drama exists within the film's grasp, but no one bothered to stop guzzling the testosterone long enough to find it.
  48. The Visitor
    McCarthy unquestionably means well, but he's made one of those incredibly naïve movies that gives liberals a bad name, and which does more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it.
  49. Chaos Theory
    Reynolds, called to 180 from anal nebbish to feral beast, is beautifully committed, but he gets no help on the other side of the camera.
  50. The Take
    Furman draws superb performances from Leguizamo and Perez, two actors whose hyperactive energy has often been a distraction. Here, they're centered and completely believable as a hardworking couple whose life has been turned inside out.
  51. 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.
  52. Smart People
    It's like the entire season of a sitcom whittled down to a single episode. There's no time for characterization, no room for emotion, no interest in anything other than moving the story forward. It's all action, no reaction. One minute they're miserable; 90 minutes later, aww better.
  53. Body of War
    Neither the most cinematic nor the most elegantly crafted of recent Iraq War documentaries, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most deeply affecting. Where Spiro and Donahue triumph is in putting a human face on the war.
  54. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.
  55. Meduzot
    An Israeli movie with neither politics nor religion--and only one casual, if fraught, mention of the Holocaust--bespeaks an underlying desire for normality that's as poignant and fantastic as Keret and Geffen's modest, shabby Tel Aviv settings.
  56. Leatherheads
    For its entire two hours, Leatherheads is rarely less than very promising--and also rarely more.
  57. My Blueberry Nights
    The disappointment here doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America--he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese--but with Wong doing Wong, and not up to his own standard.
  58. Sex and Death 101
    Stupid monikers are just one symptom of a stultifying, overwritten cleverness that substitutes quirk for character.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shine a Light
    Shine a Light's only point seems to be: You try this at 60. One would hope that, after "The Last Waltz" and "No Direction Home," Scorsese might venture beyond making a glossy episode of "Ripley's Believe It or Not." Nope, and we're not supposed to question it: Like the Stones, Marty's earned the right to coast, especially in his senior years.
  60. Water Lilies
    French director Céline Sciamma doesn't quite have the stun of discovery--mortified adolescent sexuality is something of a national specialty, after all--but she inexhaustibly endeavors after the indelible image.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tuya's Marriage
    Wang's vision is preferable to the esoteric chic of "Khadak," but the Chinese director still maintains an emotional remove from his subject.
  62. Flawless
    Flawless is the sort of movie that tends to get called "enjoyably old-fashioned," except that there's nothing enjoyable about it. The pacing is torpid, the plotting slack, and the performances utterly joyless--chiefly Moore, who walks through every scene with her face stretched into an expressionless mask, her lips pressed into a permanent pout.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Run, Fatboy, Run
    Pegg has staked out a peculiar slant on genre material that ventures beyond irony toward rehabilitation--and nobody plays blithe humiliation with more style.
  64. 21
    A movie that wastes a lot of time and money and really, REALLY shoulda stayed in Vegas.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Chapter 27
    A retarded sense of meta is achieved whenever Leto's Chapman goes on about the phony theatrics of film actors, but it's Lindsay Lohan, as über–Lennon fan Jude, who breaks your heart, looking convincingly horrified that she has three undeserved Razzies while Leto has none.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cool School
    All told, and well told, this is essential history.
  67. My Brother Is an Only Child
    Tumultuously shot "rawness" is the stylistic house rule, but it's Elio Germano's Accio who vitalizes the film.
  68. Priceless
    Priceless begins as standard, unconvincing, assembly-line French farce and ends as a cop-out, feel-good rom-com. In between, it develops into something considerably more interesting.
  69. Stop-Loss
    In the end, Stop-Loss's evening-news topicality proves both an asset and a liability--an irresolvable structural conundrum. Simply put, the film so effectively reconstitutes those Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Backseat
    Bruce Van Dusen's 2005 comedy plots a meandering course due north without locating a word of truth.
  71. Hats Off
    Weddell isn't really representative of an older generation of actors; she's one of a kind. But this visually indifferent documentary never explains why that matters.
  72. Alexandra
    Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Grand
    It has a lot of affection for its screwy characters, and it has a cast worth watching even when the plot's held captive by a bunch of boring cards.
  74. The Hammer
    Former "Loveline" and "The Man Show" co-host Adam Carolla brings his self-deprecating, improvisational, regular-dude deadpan--as well as his former Golden Gloves status--to this semi-autobiographical comedy with ambitions so low that one might call it charmingly mediocre.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shelter
    As far as coming-out dramas go, Shelter is a puppy dog, well-acted but rife with cliché received wisdom and at least one ingeniously arbitrary bit of mid-scene dialogue: "That's why you never tell a woman how to cook a chicken."
  76. Meet the Browns
    Surprisingly half-decent--surprising because Perry’s not about to switch up his hardly revelatory but consistently bankable box-office signature:
  77. Shutter
    Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film--by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast--this plays more like a video copy of "The Ring" that’s been so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.
  78. Boarding Gate
    There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.
  79. Love Songs
    That Honoré knows a lot about movies is beyond question--but from first frame to last, Love Songs stays as icy to the touch as Julie's premature corpse.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    Lee pays little attention to the roots of breakdancing or how it helped to spread hip-hop worldwide, choosing instead to obsess over the mad skillz of his international subjects.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Irina Palm
    Nobody can reduce tawdry material to doddering quaintness like the British, but this staggeringly inane joint effort of U.K., Belgian, French, German, and Luxembourgian film financing represents a true coalition of the witless.
  82. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    The duo's travels never gain a traction of their own, and the film's destination feels overdetermined despite its sweetness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horton Hears a Who!
    Horton Hears a Who! has blessedly been conceived and executed in reverence to Seuss's story, padding out the original narrative with some meaningful new ideas and casting a mercifully muzzled Jim Carrey as the titular beast.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never Back Down
    A modest surprise: better acted than needed, better made than expected.
  85. Sleepwalking
    Theron and Woody Harrelson provide vitality against the film's heavy load, but they aren't around long enough to keep it from collapsing under its own portentous weight.
  86. Heartbeat Detector
    Here, knowledge and understanding raise more questions than they answer, and the film ends not in closure, but in openness. It is precisely those qualities that give Heartbeat Detector its epic sense of humanity. Take them away and you'd be left with a leaner but markedly less compelling workaday workplace thriller: "Michael Clayton" with Nazis instead of lawyers.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    City with No Mercy
    Flash Point treats its audience like dogs, making us suffer through routine, almost inscrutable plot points and inconsequential characterizations to get to these episodes, and as such reveals itself as nothing more than a dumb action picture with delusions of Johnnie To–dom.
  88. Funny Games (2008)
    Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hacia la oscuridad
    Admirably tough-minded if overstuffed, Towards Darkness delivers on its foreboding title.
  90. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    The doc is sobering, straightforward, and a bit drab, but to the participants' credit, it's also an entirely nonpartisan endeavor. Good luck telling that to the right once they hear the film is narrated by Sean Penn.
  91. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    An appropriately mellow chronicle of a Tribeca nightclub's lifespan.
  92. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain forces its way through numerous illogicalities and several plot lapses to a violently abrupt ending.
  93. Married Life
    Though the imprint of Douglas Sirk is all over Sachs's homage to old movies about restless men in bad suits and untrustworthy women in lovely frocks, his immediate reference point is clearly Haynes's "Far From Heaven."
  94. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    What makes Watson's novel a delight is its guilelessly homoerotic subtext. By downplaying that, the movie argues the case for Watson's innocent sensuality--and against its own worldly update.
  95. Paranoid Park
    The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snow Angels
    What saves this heavy, heavy material from sinking into the chill, familiar turf of the Small-Town Midwinter Tragedy is Green's practiced ear for verbal idiosyncrasy and off-kilter conversation rhythms.
  97. Fighting for Life
    Director Terry Sanders's goal of comprehensiveness and some bad sequencing prevents the film from achieving the ringing purity of John Huston's postwar doc "Let There Be Light."
  98. Girls Rock!
    While the camp is all about liberation, the film hews to a predictable doc template and comes off as a drag.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blindsight
    Blindsight works best when it casts off the constraints of the adventure tale it wasn't meant to be and settles into a deft and humanistic treatment of blindness in Tibet.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    City of Men
    Paulo Morelli directs capably, with a heavy dash of MTV-generation flair: hyper-saturated colors, close-ups of skin glittering with sweat, and a constant patter of gunfire that undergirds the soundtrack like a steady heartbeat.
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