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. Vivere
    I like writer-director Angela Maccarone's ambition, but her technical ingenuity exceeds her grasp of potentially complex emotions, which get stuck in a groove of mawkish self-pity.
  2. Bonneville
    This rarity in cinema--a graying cast in a female-bonding adventure--couldn't be more dull-humored or predictably maudlin without just calling itself "The Bucket List 2."
  3. Chicago 10
    However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied.
  4. Penelope
    Ricci is appealingly human, and some acknowledgement of the importance of female friendship, in addition to romance, is faintly touching.
  5. Semi-Pro
    What at least distinguishes Semi-Pro from its predecessors (not only those starring Ferrell, but also such lesser lights as "Dodgeball" and "Balls of Fury") is that it's a slightly darker movie--one made for grown-ups, hence the R rating.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Unforeseen
    Making her first feature, Austin filmmaker Dunn no doubt included some unnecessary detours for star power's sake (like the inessential footage of Redford and Nelson). But it's ultimately the movie's glacial pace and willingness to let its mind and eye wander that produces its spiritual and intellectual heft--not to mention its atypical visual splendor.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jar City
    Here, the movie's urgency lies mostly in its convincing cast, its varied urban-to-pastoral locations (in light that ranges from harsh to bilious), and its cold-pro handling of familiar genre machinery, made fresh by unusual detail--such as the investigator's fast-food predilection for sheep heads.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chop Shop
    Authentic as all this feels (and smells, and tastes), Chop Shop gives off a heightened sense of reality, a faintly idealized atmosphere akin to the Lower East Side milieu of "Raising Victor Vargas," a close relative in the New York branch of neo-neorealism.
  9. Charlie Bartlett
    Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Signal
    This uneven but impressive shot-on-digital shocker earns a marker in the mausoleum of apocalyptic horror--a genre that's proving (un)surprisingly durable in the new century.
  11. Cover
    This is a weirdly schizophrenic movie, one that's light on the murder mystery and heavy on the sermonizing.
  12. Be Kind Rewind
    Although frequently funny, Be Kind doesn't have the same pathos as "The Science of Sleep." (Nothing approaches the loneliness projected by Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)
  13. The Counterfeiters
    At its best--and queasiest--The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies.
  14. Vantage Point
    Produced by Paul Greengrass, and conceived as something of a companion film to his own "Bloody Sunday," there wasn't a moment in "Omagh" that rang false. There's not a single one in Vantage Point that rings true.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Duchess of Langeais
    Rivette is teasing his way, thinking afresh, playing a game but tweaking its rules, telling a story, but only sort of--making, in short, not simply a movie, but that ineffable magic called cinema.
  16. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    As a visceral experience, it’s entrancing, especially during Shinji’s fight sequences, when his anxieties are cruelly exacerbated by having his body and mind symbiotically bonded to his father’s combat toy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diary of the Dead
    Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible "Redacted," nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of "Cloverfield," but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    This warmly engaging film benefits from its understated approach (it suggests rather than spells out the political turmoil), and its light, comedic tone never mitigates the drama of the central story.
  19. Definitely, Maybe
    A surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy.
  20. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    The movie's richly autumnal look is by swift turns cozily naturalistic and terrifyingly baroque, and director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) sustains the balance between real and surreal with mischievous brio.
  21. Ezra
    Unsparing, pedagogic, and genuinely compelling.
  22. Fool's Gold
    Fool's Gold is the sort of movie that makes you look more kindly upon the WGA strike. It isn't merely bad--it's so desperate that the actors can scarcely conceal their contempt for the material.
    • 7 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Hottie & the Nottie
    Crass, shrill, disingenuous, tawdry, mean-spirited, vulgar, idiotic, boring, slapdash, half-assed, and very, very unfunny.
  24. In Bruges
    Bruges may be the movie's rather too-long-running joke, but Farrell's shaggy brow is easily the most entertaining thing in Irish playwright Martin McDonagh's first foray into the crime caper.
  25. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    The doc provides plenty of backstory (meeting the comics' families offers generous context to material heard earlier in the film). But in the end, it's the bits involving Vaughn and his celeb guests that linger.
  26. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    Although the big comic setups in Lee's script feel a bit forced--the director continually sets up moments of rapid-fire, barb-filled interplay among his accomplished cast.
    • 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.
  28. A Walk to Beautiful
    Aside from a few casual digs at the loutishness of the rural Ethiopian male, documentarians Mary Olive Smith and Amy Bucher feel no need to overlay this health-care calamity with pious outrage; any editorial is implied in the immutable facts from overworked gynecologists and the camera's testament.
  29. How to Rob a Bank
    So objectively awful it ceases even to be a reflection of writer- director Andrews Jenkins's non-talent, How to Rob a Bank calls into question the distribution filtration process that should protect delicate consumer eyes from things like this.
  30. Caramel
    Beauty-parlor romantic comedy has been done to death and beyond, but what Caramel lacks in originality is redeemed by its exuberant sensuality and astute commentary on the way Lebanese women sit uncomfortably in the crosshairs of their country’s clash between patriarchal tradition and Westernized modernity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Praying with Lior
    Trachtman’s movie is not technically accomplished--the camerawork is run-of-the-mill, the structure is rambling--but it’s redeemed by the deliciously complex, practically Balzac-ian family at its center.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witnesses
    The Witnesses forms a magnificent trilogy with "Son Frère" (2003), Patrice Chéreau's devastating account of fraternal devotion in the face of death, and the amazing, acerbic "Before I Forget," a brooding and bitter tale of survival coming soon from Jacques Nolot, here lending an iconic cameo as the proprietor of Manu's hooker hotel.
  33. The Silence Before Bach
    Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.
  34. Rambo
    A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How She Move
    Especially good are Wesley, whose expressions are a study in shifting thought, and Tre Armstrong as her street-hardened but good-hearted rival, a stock role that Armstrong fills with unmediated feeling.
  36. Meet the Spartans
    Witless, tasteless, formless spoof.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Untraceable
    Directed by Gregory Hoblit from a screenplay by a trio (a trio!) of whomevers, Untraceable hasn't the brains of a class-act psychothriller like "The Silence of the Lambs" (though it does reprise that film's titillating homophobia); worse yet, it lacks the balls to juice up the trashy verve of the "Saw" series.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
    I'm sure the pot-laced antics of these trashy dudes are, like, totally hilarious on Canadian TV, but they don't translate well to America or the big screen.
  39. The Air I Breathe
    The destiny-versus- responsibility hand-wringing is Philosophy 101, the camera angles straight out of film school, and the pacing strictly music-video. Plus, the ta-da! twist ending is foreshadowed roughly 20 minutes into the action, for those still interested.
  40. Lost in Beijing
    The prevalent shooting style is monotonous naturalism, as the camera buzzes between contentious actors and trolls after anything on the move. No performance registers quite so much as the capital city itself.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alice's House
    Alice's House is an utterly average foreign art-house film, with all the strengths and flaws that label implies.
  42. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    U2 3D
    The performances, culled from seven shows on the “Vertigo” tour from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, burn with the old unforgettable fire.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Summer Palace
    The director is at his best portraying the dingy dorms and vivid idealism of college life; his film stalls when it meanders away from these particulars toward a sweeping but empty attempt at the epic.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Teeth
    Veteran actor Lichtenstein, the son of Pop artist Roy, rarely finds a workable tone, muffling the splattery mayhem with sluggish pacing and a tendency toward camp. Still, even if the movie's little more than a curio, I love the thought of Lichtenstein at the pitch meeting: "It's Jaws meets The Vagina Monologues!"
  46. Cassandra's Dream
    Feels like one of Allen's laziest pieces of writing and direction, leaden with heavy metaphor and characters who rarely make it beyond the archetype--marionettes in a miserablist puppet theater.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cloverfield
    Cloverfield never stops to identify the why, whence, or whereto of its rampaging meanie—this relentless thriller stops for nothing—but as for what to call it, behold . . . al-Qaedzilla!
  48. Mad Money
    While it's all so breezy and zippy and girl-power peppy, it's Keaton who makes Mad Money worth a few bucks.
  49. 27 Dresses
    A forgettable, formulaic comedy so predictable that seeing it and skipping it are the exact same thing.
  50. Taxi to the Dark Side
    Taxi is an impressively blueprinted work. Still images--from autopsy tables, makeshift holding cells, the Oval Office--are selected and deployed to maximum effect.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Day Zero
    With ludicrous gravity and a narrow-minded view of courage and conviction, the film's what-if scenario is presented as a reality check to every ostensibly unimaginative male who's come of age in the draftless years since Vietnam.
  52. Still Life
    As usual, Jia's people tend toward the opaque--one of the movie's most enthusiastic conversations is conducted with ringtones. But his compositions have their own eloquence. Everything's despoiled and yet--as rendered in cinematographer Yu Lik-wai's rich, impossibly crisp HD images--everything is beautiful.
  53. First Sunday
    At first, the movie is over-anxious--trying too hard to squeeze out the laughs, pump up the soundtrack, ingratiate itself with the audience--and the straining is abrasive. But once Talbert gets distracted by keeping the plot clunking along, the comedy eases into relaxed sideline banter.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    Humorless, incoherent, and ugly as sin, this Christian-friendly production is as tragic as the candle wax that resembles a glob of man jam and opens Pa Grape's eyes to the meaning of his adventure.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Business of Being Born
    Epstein and Lake have crafted an absorbing, thought-provoking inquiry into what modern birth has become and how to make it better.
  56. Woman on the Beach
    Albeit not as textured as Hong's past few films, Woman on the Beach is no less engrossing--a rueful tale of karmic irony, self-deceived desire, squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment.
  57. The Killing of John Lennon
    Director Andrew Piddington's fastidiously researched, dubiously suspenseful character portrait is unable to salvage a lick of hindsight from the tragedy beyond "Murderous narcissists are people, too." (He's a victim of our celebrity-fixated culture? Oh, shut up.)
  58. There Will Be Blood
    This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution.
  59. Persepolis
    Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation--though it moves fluidly enough, and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-'toon juggernauts--but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, "adult" comic story into moving pictures.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bucket List
    Turns out The Bucket List is a meta-film, mostly about how these two legendary actors interact and what it means to be an actor in your own life.
  61. The Great Debaters
    The film avoids potentially interesting frictions by always letting the team debate (and win) on the "correct" side of every issue--that which aligns with generally accepted modern liberal sympathies. The kids follow their party line all the way to the big game, a ridiculous, fallacy-riddled face-off against Harvard.
  62. P.S. I Love You
    Hilary Swank, who was not put in this world to simper, does little else as a young wife whose twinkly leprechaun of an Irish husband (Gerard Butler, who's Scottish, but never mind) has died.
  63. Charlie Wilson's War
    Dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden.
  64. Steep
    Blandly beautiful, inarticulate extreme-skiing documentary.
  65. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    No Greek tragedy, this Hollywood Sweeney is a FUN creepy-crawly. If nothing else, Burton has learned that the successfully gruesome is its own reward.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    This burlesque of biopic clichés flounders from one setup to the next without the engine that drives the genre: a strong central character.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flakes
    Despite a few good one-liners, the dialogue is overwritten, and director Michael Lehmann (Heathers, The Truth About Cats & Dogs) is in thrall with the hipness he tries to chronicle.
  68. I Am Legend
    In what has been a pretty remarkable career up to now, it's this performance that fully affirms Smith as one of the great leading men of his generation.
  69. The Kite Runner
    A drama as bland and beige as its tasteful palette.
  70. Look
    Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording.
  71. Youth Without Youth
    For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.
  72. Half Moon
    Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi's picturesque road trip is less about preserving a musical heritage than accepting one's fate, a mythic trek that's both heartrending and boisterous--often as hauntingly absurdist as a Kusturica carnival.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Perfect Holiday
    The actors distinguish themselves mainly by their ability to make the material, directed and co-written by Lance Rivera, seem even more painfully awkward and unfunny than it already is--which is very.
  74. Nanking
    While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today.
  75. Atonement
    Wright wouldn't recognize unobtrusive if it tapped him on the nose--he's cross- pollinated the first half of Atonement into an Oscar-buzzy brew of Masterpiece Theatre and "Upstairs, Downstairs," with the wild English countryside tamed into an artfully lit fairy glade, and into just enough of a bodice-ripper to reel in the youth market. And not a bad one at that.
  76. The Golden Compass
    In drawing and quartering much of the novel's intent, Weitz ends up with a film that feels not just unfinished but undone.
  77. Looking for Cheyenne
    A beguiling comedy from a Marxist-inflected thesis that is filled with characters who rage against the machine with pessimism, optimism, and naïveté--sometimes in rotation.
  78. Grace Is Gone
    The music--a gently jazzy piano-and-strings theme--is just fine, and a good deal less cloying than what was there before. One can only regret that Eastwood didn't offer to reshoot the whole movie while he was at it.
  79. Revolver
    It's no return to rock, this, but rather Ritchie's soporific, proggy-conceptual Film of Ideas, with Vivaldi interludes, fussbudget set design, recurrent references to chess, and a hit man inexplicably got up as Tati's Mr. Hulot.
  80. The Walker
    This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal.
  81. 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
    What kept Paris from the top? The answers provided rarely qualify as revelation, but this affectionate portrait distinguishes itself from the ongoing epidemic of musician docs by mere virtue of staking out ground that hasn't already been thoroughly tilled.
  82. Man in the Chair
    Walsh and Plummer are obviously pros, and they hustle to put across some patently ridiculous business, but, well, it's true about the polishing thing.
  83. Juno
    Once it works its way through the first-timer's lookatme! snark, Juno evolves into a thing of beauty and grace. By the end, it's unexpectedly moving without ever once trolling for crocodile tears. It's a sneak attack.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy the Kid
    I have seen more than 25 documentaries this year, and after a while they all start to run together, both structurally and thematically. Billy the Kid is utterly original in both respects.
  85. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Far too often, though, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby--who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end--would have despised.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oswald's Ghost
    Riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying documentary.
  87. Maurice Richard
    As Richard, Roy Dupuis's tight-clutched performance easily holds down the screen, when he's not hooked by an inelegant script that leaks mythologizing flatus.
  88. Protagonist
    Yu's rousing, difficult-to-classify exercise in parallel storytelling is surprisingly accessible, and all the more insightful for it.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tony N' Tina's Wedding
    The not-exactly-long-awaited movie version is here, trading in stereotypes just as ineptly as the original.
  90. Badland
    Writer-director Francesco Lucente's overconfident, emotionally forced 160-minute opus offers trite antiwar platitudes--at best--in chronicling the anguished existence of a soldier who can't shake the horrors he experienced in Fallujah.
  91. The Savages
    The movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo's liberation.
  92. Starting Out in the Evening
    This wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché in the book.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Everything's Cool
    Gratingly condescending toward its audience and sorely lacking in any substantive information about the problem or the solution.
  94. Midnight Eagle
    Convoluted action saga.
  95. August Rush
    Acclimate yourself to the frenzied vibe, and you'll feel the movie grow into itself as an urban fairy tale whose rapturous finale stakes a wishful claim on the redemptive power of love and art.
  96. Enchanted
    Somewhere between conception and execution, what could have been so much smart, sharp fun turned decidedly pedestrian.
  97. I'm Not There.
    I'm Not There is the movie of the year.
  98. The Mist
    A lumbering and depressing movie.
  99. This Christmas
    The cast has spirit, but the dialogue and situations are phonier than the Yule log on TV.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nina's Heavenly Delights
    "A difficult choice, between perfection and heavenly delight," crows the announcer at an Indian-cooking contest during this movie's climax. Sadly, Pratibha Parmar's Nina's Heavenly Delights offers neither.
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