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. Winter Sleepers
    Unfolds in a shroud of nonspecific suggestiveness but never emerges from under it.
  2. Life is Strange
    Hertz hasn't framed his subjects' stories into a singular, compelling narrative.
  3. Ruby Sparks
    She (Kazan) also wrote the screenplay, which begs interpretation as a frustrated actress's commentary on the way that even ostensibly serious writers write women - that is, for maximum convenience. Still, the direction, from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), is never more than workmanlike.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Campaign
    Like past-his-peak Perot, The Campaign is basically a footnote, a goof on our broken political system that's good for a certain novelty, but as a challenge to the dominant order? It's ultimately impotent.
  5. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    Far from terrible, Leconte's latest movie suggests the work of a slightly hip preacher.
  6. Save the Last Dance
    The disjointed plotting and afterschool-special dialogue offer scant opportunity for the charismatic leading duo to work up much chemistry.
    • 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.
  8. Son of the Bride
    In its details, though, Juan José Campanella's movie works beautifully: The actors are all superb when the florid demands of the story allow them elbowroom.
  9. The Tavern
    Though rife with incidental plot holes, Foote's movie feels right even when nothing important is happening...which is much of the time.
  10. Come What May
    Come What May stirs little suspense or unease as it cuts between these stories.
  11. Hope Springs
    Jones and Streep give likable enough performances as a humane monster and a human victim. But their characters never become more than that.
  12. Conversations with God
    It's an agreeable enough tale right up until God butts in and starts talking; even if you can swallow the premise, it isn't particularly cinematic to watch a guy endlessly scribbling on legal pads.
  13. Life Is Beautiful
    Life Is Beautiful is funny (kinda) and even tasteful (sorta). But in its fantasy of divine grace, it is also nonsense.
  14. Rails & Ties
    Alison Eastwood's debut feature is slow, deliberate, assured, and shot with a graceful feel for place--none of which is enough to overcome the creaky themes that tie this hackneyed domestic drama together with fearsome symmetry.
  15. Conviction
    In all fairness, Swank's unsubtle performance is often an extension of the bluntly dumb lines she and other cast members must deliver.
  16. Kalamity
    Though Hausler's sincerity is palpable, his efforts at world-weary ennui seem premature, and his wisdom about what motivates random violence in the youth of today proves too callow for a satisfying climax.
  17. The First Monday in May
    Rossi provides an attractive overview of the exhibition for those who did not attend it, but we are left feeling something like Wong, seeing a lot of pretty things surrounded by vapidity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Casino
    This authoritative, far-reaching documentary by veteran investigative journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn comes off as curiously bloodless.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dictator
    Even in its manufactured boundary-pushing - a flash of full-frontal Baron Cohen, another scene set partially inside a birth canal - The Dictator never really risks anything.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds
    As before, the fun is somewhat capped by absurdly stilted acting and daytime-soap-quality DV, but the nonstop sub-Araki glibbage is plenty peppy and so is Rebekah Kochan's ding-a-ling Tiffani, a dead ringer for 90210's Tori Spelling.
  21. The Great Invisible
    Unfortunately, given both its content and the media's collective failure to fully report the (ongoing) story, the film only intermittently has a pulse.
  22. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    Richet proves maddeningly loath to edit his material, and his charismatic star, Vincent Cassel, does not delve deep into the character.
  23. Sympathy for Delicious
    Ruffalo has assembled an exceptional cast-to surround writer and star Christopher Thornton, but a script that favors incident over story and direction that crowds scenes instead of letting them breathe make for curiously rough going.
  24. Amnesia
    Under Schroeder’s direction, Keller and Riemelt deliver wistful, earnest performances that almost make up for the script’s shortcomings.
  25. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    This reboot smartly doesn't try to escalate the material to bigger and better status, keeping things small and scrappy and relying on the fighters to be the best special effects.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    Paul Wendkos, a director with a cult-following is responsible, and he makes you appreciate Polanski's extraordinary discretion in the handling of similar material. [15 Apr 1971, p.69]
    • Village Voice
  27. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Frustratingly little here grapples with the day-to-day realities of life in Chechnya and the surrounding areas.
  28. The High Life
    This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.
  29. The Heat
    The movie -- too much of it -- is spent testing the boundaries of how loud and obnoxious McCarthy can be. Feig doesn't hand this able comic actress the gift of freedom; he simply gives her enough rope, which isn't nearly the same thing.
  30. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    Claims to sort the bad guys from the good, which is its essential problem.
  31. Claire in Motion
    Howell and Robinson go all-in on Claire’s measured mourning, and while it may be realistic, that detachment — along with a relentlessly clinical gray-tinged color palette — ultimately bogs down whatever momentum Claire in Motion might be working up to.
  32. Unknown
    As with its protagonist, Unknown boasts tantalizing issues buried deep beneath its frantic exterior, but little idea how to unlock or address them.
  33. The Bling Ring
    Even though Coppola is one of our most compassionate storytellers, she can't bring herself to like these kids much. She's not cynical enough to turn this story into satire.
  34. Formula 17
    It might be, empirically speaking, the gayest movie ever released.
  35. Man in Red Bandana
    The short-subject treatment serves as a challenge that, in eighty minutes, writer-director Matthew Weiss doesn’t meet.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Noriko's Dinner Table
    There's not nearly enough blood to keep fans of "Suicide Club," or the rest of us, happy.
  37. Moon
    Impressively pulled together on a modest budget, Moon has a strong lead and a valid philosophical premise but, despite Bell's fissured psyche, the drama is inert.
  38. Fever Pitch
    But the ickiest thing about Fever Pitch is its reverential Field of Dreams music.
  39. Calling All Earthlings
    There isn’t much marijuana use in Jonathan Berman’s documentary Calling All Earthlings, but its elliptical, ramshackle structure could make one question the merits of legalization.
  40. The Girl Next Door
    Occasionally smirky.
  41. The Libertine
    The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.
  42. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
    In the absence of any greater cultural context, the ritual reiteration of Greenberg's greatness grows wearisome.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mad Cowgirl
    It's safe to say there will not be another movie this year like Mad Cowgirl. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your tolerance for copious bloodletting, hardcore pornography, and C-SPAN.
  44. White Girl
    This is one of those films that merits a long cold shower afterwards. That might actually be a compliment — Wood wants to provoke.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Help
    We get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes.
  46. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It's dispiriting that a film about a humor magazine that broke and rebuilt the forms of both humor and magazines is itself so staid — and so lacking in sociologic sweep.
  47. Assassination Tango
    Dramatically lopsided, Assassination Tango is a spontaneous life-slice in which John J. (standing in for Duvall) fumbles like a besotted granddad toward empathic connections. That it doesn't "work" is a measure of its sincerity.
  48. Tales of the Night
    The stories are quick, tiny surveys of a given culture's conventions told as monomythic, Joseph Campbell–ish pastiches and animated with fluidity and deliberateness that nearly excuses the film's slightness.
  49. I Am Ali
    It’s unfortunate that, even with this wealth of uncovered materials, I Am Ali still plays as a greatest-hits version of its subject’s life, offering little depth or insight into any one element of it.
  50. Charlie's Angels
    The cheesy disco action scenes are topped only by the movie's ripe double entendres and continual cheesecake.
  51. Shattered Glass
    The Sarsgaard slow burn is only marginally more compelling than the Christensen simper; like its subject, the movie is self-important yet insipid.
  52. Twilight
    In the 17-million-copy land of "Twilight," the calling card isn't blood and fangs, but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love. By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon.
  53. Dancing Across Borders
    We get white folks ruminating lyrically on the peasant Asian's role as a kind of grand jeté bridge between East and West, and long performance sequences that are dazzling to behold but quite troubling to contemplate.
  54. A Silent Love
    The movie can't resist putting its key points in italics, but it maintains a refreshingly unsentimental trajectory.
  55. The Fencer
    The Fencer is ultimately too staid: It’s at its best when Nelis shows the art of fencing to his students and the elegant yet dangerous swords are wielded.
  56. Red Hook Summer
    An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.
  57. The Nine Muses
    The result is not without beauty, though at a certain point, one begins to notice that each new muse rather resembles the previous, a uniformity that restrains the film from true symphonic swell.
  58. Rendition
    Unlike Hood's far more persuasive gangster picture "Tsotsi," Rendition feels generic and lackluster.
  59. 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.
    • 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.
  61. Obit
    Obit rarely strays from the anodyne tone of the advertorial.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sheriff
    There's so little meat to his likable subject that the endeavor proves less "Cops" and more "The Andy Griffith Show."
  63. Operation Finale
    Rather than the cagey, caged mastermind who later would play dumb at trial, this Eichmann is just another movie bad guy — and Operation Finale is just another movie.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Loving but frank, Brown, by refusing to judge her film's subject, never falls into this trap. Too frequently, however, the side-of-the-road montages that are meant to mesmerize offer only blurry filler instead.
  65. A Midsummer Night's Dream
    The early scenes whir and buzz along to create quite a pleasing clamor.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conventioneers
    Unlike in "Medium Cool," the most telling and dramatic events aren't shown.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gator
    Structurally, Gator is a bit of a mess, largely because of the civilizing and romantic influence Reynolds has brought to the randy domain of the redneck action film.
  68. The Great Buck Howard
    Malkovich swallows up the screen, and when he's out of frame, the movie feels slack and slow.
  69. Little Ashes
    A typically bombastic lives-of-the-artists production made even more stilted by having all the actors (including the Spanish ones) speak accented English.
  70. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
    Mad Songs saves its most memorable image for its hard-earned climax, which molds the ambiguous, hallucinatory spectacle of a combusting effigy into a viewer-implicating demonstration of crowd psychology and a harrowing cri de coeur.
  71. Lost Embrace
    Despite an absurdly melodramatic premise, Lost Embrace is an essentially plotless series of riffs and jokes. It's 20 minutes too long--forgivable in view of Burman's affection for his material.
  72. 2 Days in New York
    Delpy, of course, finds her father charming because he is her father, misses her mother for the same reason, and treasures her neuroses because they are her own. What viewers miss is anything inviting us to feel the same way.
  73. Let Them Chirp Awhile
    It's lively and funny, if unbalanced.
  74. The Next Three Days
    Once the second act begins with a title card announcing "The Last 3 Months"-the amount of time John spends cooking up labyrinthine plans to spring Lara-Haggis's film becomes interminably nonsensical.
  75. All In: The Poker Movie
    Instead of sustaining a significant cultural story, at almost two hours, All In feels like an energetic but overlong highlight reel.
  76. Happy End
    Haneke has delivered the Haneke film that Haneke-haters see in their heads when they think of a Haneke film: a series of disjointed, narratively oblique episodes showing people being inhumane to each other.
  77. Analyze This
    Enjoyable but slight— an intermittently funny, one-joke vaudeville.
  78. Samba
    Samba's relationship with Alice (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a volunteer at an immigration advocacy center, has moments of sweetness, but is painted in too-broad brushstrokes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El carro
    Part fluff, part social farce, and all foregone conclusion.
  80. Without Shepherds
    Without Shepherds is all sprawl, a loose mélange of talking heads and landscape b-roll.
  81. Crossing the Line
    Decaying and illiterate, with a mouthful of metal teeth, Dresnok himself belies his advertisements for the greatness of North Korea.
    • 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.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Amityville Horror
    A Xerox so tattered and faded that it's impossible to determine who's to blame for the overproduced mediocrity before our eyes.
  84. Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face
    Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face conjures the aura of Goldin's halcyon days with the ease of diaristic reminiscence, and for that it proves a valuable record. But on the subject of her cultural significance the film remains oddly quiet.
  85. Jarhead
    One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    30 Minutes or Less
    A comedy that knows it has to move with all due dispatch to keep from disappointing the customer.
  87. Imagine I'm Beautiful
    Imagine I'm Beautiful is a thematically ambitious character study trapped inside the limiting strictures of a crazy-roommate thriller.
  88. Permission
    This earnest, deadly serious character study has few moments of levity, mostly provided by an arch Gina Gershon, still as intoxicating and seductive as she was in Bound.
  89. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    For a story that's pro-poor and anti-wealth, every frame of it looks like it cost as much as human life itself — and that, more than any bludgeoned battle cries for freedom, is the pleasure of the film.
  90. My One and Only
    Occasionally diverting but ultimately forgettable, My One and Only will become unforgivable if it inspires other former competitors from "Dancing With the Stars" to go in search of lost time.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Apres Vous (After You)
    Praised be the gods that this rom-com is French. If not, we'd be haunted by visions of a Focker-ish Dustin Hoffman rescuing a suicidal Tony Shalhoub then orchestrating the TV germophobe's reunification with ex Lisa Kudrow. Vive la France!
  92. Wish You Were Here
    Stories built around a mystery can have a difficult time creating a satisfying answer, and this picture is no exception.
  93. 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.
  94. Marius
    Auteuil doesn't distance himself enough from the era to allow room for critique. As a result, the old-fashioned attitudes on display are accepted with open arms rather than reckoned with.
  95. Max
    For all its flaws, Max does propose a credible young Hitler, played by Noah Taylor as an unpleasantly opinionated, arrogantly ascetic, defensively vain autodidact with a diffident sneer and a bottomless well of grievance to draw upon.
  96. The Ritual
    The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.
  97. After The Fall
    The movie's flaws — silly plotting and unconvincing psychological groundwork — are Klein's doing.
  98. 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.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Queen of the Lot
    Queen of the Lot is sort of sweet in its earnestness, sort of frustratingly delusional, and ultimately unsubstantial-but there are moments of meta-provocation that almost justify the lopsided enterprise.
  100. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Howard stamps the material in some welcome ways: The scruffy breeziness of his early comedies (Night Shift, Splash, Gung Ho) suits the hit-and-miss script, by Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. Here’s a Star Wars that’s more appealing when its characters are chatting than when they’re pew-pewing.
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