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. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    Lively talking heads lay out the reasons for the decay of Yiddish culture...What's missing from this gentle homage...is a sense of the joyful heyday of Yiddish theater, and the richness it brought to the artistic life of Manhattan.
  2. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Easily the worst adaptation of a major novel by a Nobel Prize–winning author. Easily.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Margot at the Wedding
    Hard as it may be to imagine a comedy that inflicts all the psychic torment of "Cries and Whispers," Baumbach has pulled off a more psychologically acute--and funnier--version of the Bergman pastiches that Woody Allen attempted 30 years ago, with a jumpy, nerve-rattling rhythm all his own.
  4. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    Helm's pacing is as pallid as his palette is vivid, and for a movie that celebrates wonder and strangeness, the whole enterprise feels coy and half-baked.
  5. Redacted
    The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    On the plus side, 100 percent sober when I watched it, I can say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997's "Nowhere," and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Would Jesus Buy?
    Much like Spurlock's hit "Super Size Me," this production is slick, well-paced, and tremendously entertaining.
  8. Southland Tales
    In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.
  9. No Country for Old Men
    The most measured, classical film of their (Coen Brothers) 23-year career, and maybe the best.
  10. Fred Claus
    The exceptional cast--Vaughn, Giamatti, Kathy Bates, Kevin Spacey, Rachel Weisz--is an embarrassment of riches for a script this thin and this beholden to family-fare protocol, with its mushy-minded moral and slick sentimentality.
  11. Lions for Lambs
    The movie is awful--and also oddly touching, even adorable in its dogged sense of responsibility, its stubborn refusal of style.
  12. P2
    If it weren't for two excessively violent deaths, P2 could be termed a refreshingly old-fashioned thriller, one dependent on hairbreadth escapes and the pluck of its heroine.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saawariya
    See this movie if you need to get some sleep.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    War Dance
    The movie comes across as desperately, even irritatingly contrived, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it overcame my naturally complacent instincts--which would be to watch something (anything) else, to not get haunted by that closing litany of websites for global action.
  15. Holly
    Though the storytelling is haphazard, artistry often transcends mere good intentions. Director Guy Moshe scavenges color from the torn fringes of Phnom Penh, and the composer Tôn-Thât Tiêt provides a spare score, laying bleary sadness over the art-house muckracking.
  16. Steal a Pencil for Me
    At once tender and tough-minded, Steal a Pencil for Me offers a useful corrective to the sentimental prevailing notion that the Shoah only happened to saints.
  17. My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Kasper Collin's melancholy, beautiful feature debut does more than just chronicle this undervalued musician; it brings Ayler and his message of spiritual unity back to life.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fat Girls
    This film goes to some lengths not to be another high-school movie, which means prom stinks and no one can sing. Given Fat Girls' honesty, and its delicately drawn examples of social hopelessness, the sudden, sugary, puzzling finale feels out of character. It's as though the film forgot how to talk to us.
  19. American Gangster
    As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott's would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson article on Lucas that inspired the movie, a real-life Superfly.
  20. Darfur Now
    If you evaluate Darfur Now against the goals it sets for itself--as a stirring call to action--it must be considered lacking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    Temple's engrossing portrait of the Clash's late frontman uses endlessly suggestive montage to show how he kept punk's precepts alive, even after he left the music and eventually the earth itself.
  22. Martian Child
    Martian Child certainly isn't much fun, unless you were desperately awaiting K-PAX with a kid instead of Kevin Spacey.
  23. Sharkwater
    No matter how much "Jaws"-hugging zeal he brings to the deck, Stewart has made a vain polemic that never addresses the finning industry's deep-seated cultural significance in Asia (where, rightly or wrongly, shark soup is a symbol of economic prestige), nor elaborates on how the disrupted ecosystem affects us humans.
  24. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bella
    Manages to be utterly predictable without making any sense at all.
  26. Dan in Real Life
    Dan in Real Life steals from that line in "Virgin" about Carell kinda looking like Luke Wilson, since here Carell is, after all, playing the Luke Wilson role from "The Family Stone."
  27. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    Demme's documentary portrait, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains, has no surfeit of good intentions. In fact, running over two hours, they're nearly suffocating.
  28. Music Within
    Sheen, like the movie itself, is trying too hard to inspire when the story doesn't need the help.
  29. 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.
  30. Slipstream
    Hopkins claims it's a comedy, and perhaps John Turturro's live-action cartoon of a mogul producer suggests so, but what does it all mean? That art can be just as shallow as Hollywood?
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lynch
    Much of this is tedious--no more or less exciting than surveillance-cam footage of a regional sales manager, even if this one's desk offers a glimpse at one point of a legless baby doll.
  32. Mr. Untouchable
    A fascinating first-person account of drug kingpin and ruthless gangster Nicky Barnes, whose outrageous story of rise, rule, rage, and revenge requires no such stylistic filler.
  33. 30 Days of Night
    Director David Slade's stab at the story is actually rather ordinary.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone Baby Gone
    In his strikingly downbeat directorial debut, Affleck has created something of a blue-moon rarity: an American movie of genuine moral complexity.
  35. Out of the Blue
    There's some nifty soft-focus cinematography and fine performances, but otherwise, not much to resonate on this side of the pond.
  36. Rendition
    Unlike Hood's far more persuasive gangster picture "Tsotsi," Rendition feels generic and lackluster.
  37. Reservation Road
    Reservation Road itself may twist and turn into the New England night, but emotionally and dramatically, the movie that bears its name is a dead end.
  38. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    A well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They've got attitude.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Meeting Resistance
    Ultimately, Meeting Resistance is just one more doc about the monumental screw-up that is the U.S. campaign in Iraq.
  40. O Jerusalem
    Imagine watching Otto Preminger's equally silly 1960 "Exodus" now and you'll have O Jerusalem, minus Paul Newman's blue-eyed wink.
  41. Canvas
    Greco's sincerity is so palpable that the frequent uplift feels deserved, but with just-passable filmmaking and the demeaning score, Canvas falls somewhere between powerful indie and made-for-TV diversion.
  42. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Kapur and his screenwriter have little interest here in maintaining even a dollop of historical accuracy.
  43. Lars and the Real Girl
    Lars and the Real Girl wobbles in a slow, toneless no-man's-land between mawkish and schmaltzy while trafficking shamelessly in heartland stereotypy.
  44. Sleuth
    Whatever pleasure can be wrung from Sleuth lies in the black comedy of Caine and Law's sinuous symbiosis.
  45. Terror's Advocate
    Terror's Advocate is largely a mix of talking heads and archival footage, but as Vergés's connections to Swiss neo-Nazis and Congo secessionists are explored, the movie becomes a fantastic international thriller.
  46. We Own the Night
    The closest thing Gray's done to a commercial actioner, the film also applies his genius for tone (aided by superlative sound work) to set pieces that throb with trauma: a tinnitus-soundtracked shoot-out and a rain-slick car chase set to the tempo of windshield wipers.
  47. King Corn
    King Corn will put you off corn for a long, long time, but this is as much a thoughtful meditation on the plight of the American farmer as it is a rant against our expanding waistlines.
  48. Khadak
    Khadak recedes deeper and deeper into esoterica as it progresses.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Control
    Despite excellent performances from Samantha Morton, Craig Parkinson, and the radiant Toby Kebbell, along with a noble effort from pretty newcomer Sam Riley as Curtis himself, Control is like a wake where the guests forgot to bring the booze and, for the most part, have nothing very nice or even particularly interesting to say about the deceased.
  50. Golda's Balcony
    Jeremy Kagan's excellent adaptation of William Gibson's stage play.
  51. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    By setting the film in a deliberately distanced '70s, writer-director Justin Lin gets the benefit of looking-back-in-superiority.
  52. For the Bible Tells Me So
    Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.
  53. The Good Night
    Director Jake Paltrow's feature debut has all the hallmarks of an earnest young man's feature debut, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I can only imagine that it fit Sundance like a fingerless glove when it had its premiere there earlier this year.
  54. Michael Clayton
    Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Kid Could Paint That
    What began as a human-interest story for filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev led down stranger paths than the Duchampian conundrums of modern art.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Culture
    Slipping in and out of character, variously embodying, studying, and commenting on their counterparts, the actors manage both dramatic reenactment and its deconstruction with aplomb.
  57. The Girl Next Door
    Any resonance from that real-life atrocity gets smothered by a script that interlaces clichéd dialogue so tightly as to block out any glint of recognizable human behavior.
  58. Lake of Fire
    At once monumental and ghostly.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kurt Cobain About a Son
    About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Darjeeling Limited
    I was moved by Darjeeling, flaws and all, but if my job is to explain why, I find it difficult for reasons that are none of my business. From the minute Wilson walks onscreen, face covered in scars, eyes full of trouble, Darjeeling is warped by the gravitas of his recent suicide attempt.
  61. Trade
    It's pure exploitation--the kind of movie after which you need a long, hot shower. German director Marco Kreuzpaintner's movie looks like "Traffic" and "Syriana"--clearly his role models--but is little more than our generation's version of 1979's "Hardcore."
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Feast of Love
    For a film that purports to be an epic consideration of Love in Our Time, Feast is strikingly unthoughtful and uninterested in any but the most obvious kind of romantic love.
  63. The Kingdom
    A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.
  64. Lust, Caution
    Ang Lee's latest foray into forbidden love is as monotonous and disaffecting as "Brokeback Mountain" was gripping and immediate.
  65. The Price of Sugar
    Out of this sorry tale of human trafficking emerges a fascinating portrait of this handsome, pugnacious, one-man NGO, who left a cushy life with his patrician Anglo-Spanish family to work with Mother Theresa and devote himself to the oppressed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    Outsourced has all the charm and color of its made-in-India locations, yet it's crafted--well crafted--according to familiar Hollywood convention.
  67. Into the Wild
    To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Last Winter
    It's the imaginative background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action, that counts--and unnerves--in this most chilling of global-warming movies.
  69. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western "Dead Man," Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks.
  70. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Perfectly pleasant, perfectly undistinguished adaptation of a market-driven novel about six Sacramento lovelies trying to mend their stalled or broken lives while massaging each other's feet.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Man of My Life
    The film's arresting beauty--shots of a curtain blowing into a shadowed stairwell, or a meadow of sunflowers, or a head resting on a shoulder--is nearly enough.
  72. Beauty Remains
    The film plays like the work of a fifth-generation Chinese hack faking a lavish Hollywood saga on an indie budget: It's all soft focuses, sax flourishes, and silky slo-mos.
  73. Across the Universe
    Across the Universe, which filters the cultural revolt through a blizzard of early Beatles songs, ends up both reductive and smugly condescending to a presumptively know-nothing audience.
  74. December Boys
    If Daniel Radcliffe is hoping for an acting life after Harry Potter, he might want to be choosier than this cloying little Australian number.
  75. Eastern Promises
    A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steve Knight, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to "A History of Violence."
  76. In the Valley of Elah
    Elah comes packaged as a feverish murder mystery groaning beneath too many subplots and the added weight of a strained David and Goliath allegory.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ira & Abby
    The overall effect is that of an aging vaudevillian making a good-hearted but embarrassing attempt to entertain us with stock characters and stock jokes and stock shtick.
  78. King of California
    Hard to tell what’s more annoying in this empty character study of eccentrics and the suckers who love them: the braying, blurting soundtrack or Douglas himself, who can’t find his way into a man tortured by dull demons.
  79. Mr. Woodcock
    Amy Poehler ekes out a smirk or two as a boozy broad publicist trying to keep her paycheck in check, but even the best gags feel like leftovers, again.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Silk
    Silk isn’t just bad. It’s utterly mad. It stutters and hiccups from scene to scene, from country to country, but never once does it make narrative or emotional sense.
  81. The Brave One
    Taken literally, almost everything that follows in The Brave One so seriously strains credibility (even by the standards of the genre) as to enter the realm of the absurd. Taken on the level of a menacing urban fairy tale, however--something akin to what Jane Campion was aiming for with "In the Cut"--it's strangely fascinating.
  82. The Rape of Europa
    Impressive in scope if unremarkable in style, The Rape of Europa provides a chronology of World War II as it was experienced by "David," "Mona Lisa," and other artistic treasures the Nazis plundered.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    Shallow, very officially sanctioned, and overly compressed, The Power of Song plays like a PBS infomercial for the inevitable DVD box set, which will surely include even more archival footage.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Great World of Sound
    A fitting 21st-century addition to the genre. The film's meager plotting and casual melancholy peg it as a modest indie, but these ingredients dovetail nicely with Zobel's bigger theme about the futility of the modern world.
  85. 3:10 to Yuma
    The movie's best performance belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel.
  86. Fierce People
    Whereas most of the injustices suffered by "Nanny's" nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In the Shadow of the Moon
    In the Shadow of the Moon recalls the wondrous moment when America had the entire world looking up, up, and not away.
  88. Romance & Cigarettes
    The bleakly bizarre, uneven aesthetic and direction that is fluid but not quite limber succeed and fail from montage to montage, with the principals doing a sort of karaoke tribute to the likes of Joplin and Springsteen.
  89. Shoot 'Em Up
    Extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller.
  90. The Bubble
    Given the upbeat, tender rhythms of the movie's love story, the climax--a cry of bottomless despair--comes as a profound shock. It's meant to, and though the ending is touched by the goofy absurdities of melodrama, Fox's mix-and-match sampling of apparently incompatible genres nails the nervous blend of vitality and desperation that is Israel today.
  91. The Hunting Party
    Like many of the best movies about war and its lingering echo, The Hunting Party is full of dark humor. Writer-director Richard Shepard, maker of 2005's "The Matador," is becoming a master at finding the right tone, balancing the seriousness of his characters' purpose with the madness of their intentions.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Inner Life of Martin Frost
    What starts out as a clever exploration of consciousness quickly descends into underplotted folly.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Unknown Soldier
    The film eventually becomes one long therapy session for the German nation as it struggles to understand how its brave and good soldiers could have done such bad, bad things. We, the viewers, are forced to take on the uncomfortable role of therapist.
  94. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    May be one of the wisest studies of urban loneliness since Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty."
  95. The Nines
    It's hardly a novel idea, but at least when Kaufman, David Lynch, or Michel Gondry invites us on a tour of his chaotic subconscious, it's a fascinating place to visit. Plunging into August's gray matter is more like a season in vacation hell.
  96. Exiled
    By Hong Kong standards, To's policiers have been fairly down-to-earth, but Exiled--which begins with a tribute to Sergio Leone and ends by acknowledging Sam Peckinpah--exists solely in the world of the movies.
  97. Self Medicated
    Self-Medicated reveals itself as a narcissistic fantasy about the misunderstood kid with a heart of gold who finally figures out how to get his shit together: "Good Will Hunting" with a side of Capracorn.
  98. The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
    Unlike far too many human-interest docs today, director Pernille Rose Grønkjær's fantastic little character portrait doesn't rest on the strength of its personality, with prudent attention paid to aesthetic nuances and the growing quasi-love that the titular bickerers have for one another.
  99. Dedication
    "Inland Empire's" Justin Theroux pops his directorial cherry with this obnoxious Sundance throwaway, a by-the-numbers romantic comedy that mistakenly believes it's either too quirky or too irreverent to be a by-the-numbers romantic comedy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deep Water
    Co-directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell have done a commendable job of making Deep Water . . . well, not boring.
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