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. Broken City
    Broken City slogs through such fatigued plot "twists" as having one character confess to another without realizing he's being recorded. The actors look generally unhappy to be here, most of all Crowe, who seems even more miserable than he did in "Les Misérables."
  2. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film's biggest surprise is that, after Wonderstone loses everything, we're expected to feel something besides impatience as he learns to become a better person—and gapes like a child at the wonder of magic.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Other F Word
    Flea almost cries. Twice. There's your four-word summation of The Other F Word, a half-poignant, half-absurd documentary on punk-rocker dads.
  4. The Look
    Women of a certain age will kvell, but the point might be better made for the rest of us by rewatching the autumnal Rampling in Ozon's "Under the Sand."
  5. RED 2
    Red 2, disappointing in so many ways, isn't torture to watch, in part because Mirren has even more to do than she did in the first installment.
  6. Dog Sweat
    It might be sufficient that Dog Sweat exists at all - but only if you believe intention trumps execution.
  7. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    His lightning-fast fingers can't fail to impress even those unschooled in the classical idiom, but when not center stage, Heifetz proves a far more elusive figure, firmly out of the grasp of Rosen's film.
  8. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    "I think their marriage was a mystery to everyone," an Eames worker notes - an observation true of every couple that you'll wish the filmmakers had explored more deeply.
  9. In Darkness
    Another break in the tension is the inescapable fact that every Holocaust movie, however hair-raising, essentially thrums the same self-sacrifice-versus-self-preservation chord. It's not fair, but there it is: We've been here before.
  10. Angels Crest
    Luxuriantly-lashed Dekker leads the most attractive cast of small-towners this side of "Twin Peaks" but, though the setting is nearly as artificial as Lynch's, the melodrama is played quite straightforwardly here, even as the dialogue frequently borders on parody.
  11. Lawless
    The narrative often seems at odds with the director's pictorialism, trudging when it should be striding toward the climax, isolating the performers on their marks when everything depends on taut blood-ties interconnection.
    • 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.
  13. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    It is suggested that Trungpa was in possession of yeshe chölwa-the title's "crazy wisdom" - and, as a sort of holy fool, his apparent misbehavior could be read as a manifestation of higher spiritual truths. If you're determined to see something, it's easy to find it - so those inclined to interest in Tibetan Buddhism will discover something here.
  14. Sparkle
    The forebear's underwritten melodrama has been supplanted by Tyler Perry–like soap operatics and much jawing about the Lord, riots in the Motor City, marriage proposals, and maternal heartbreak and disapproval.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seducing Charlie Barker
    In adapting her recent play The Scene, Theresa Rebeck can't find a consistent tone for her material or players.
  16. Fanny, Annie & Danny
    Mostly the movie just gets off on how awful and/or pathetic its characters are, calling on the viewer to judge or pity rather than sympathize with its gallery of grotesques.
  17. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Wages of Fear rides for a cheap fall. Clouzot has copped out with cheap irony. [25 May 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jul 1, 2020
  18. Sleepless Nights Stories
    More often, Mekas's focus on "names" comes off as a cloistered insensitivity to the wider world.
  19. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Dori Berinstein's desultory, fawning profile of the nonagenarian performer devotes many of its padded 88 minutes to Channing's greatest success, playing the title yenta in "Hello, Dolly!"
  20. Albatross
    By the time a disillusioned, grimly deflowered Beth leaves for school wearing her ex-friend's "I Put Out" T-shirt, tonal whiplash has eaten up the pleasures of this otherwise well-cast, evocatively shot small-town trifle.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It's About You
    The result is an amateurish travelogue that feels like a botched assignment, halfheartedly self-regarding and resentfully remote from the object of our fascination.
  22. Turn Me On, Dammit!
    Like its title, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a jokey pseudo-provocation.
  23. Black Butterflies
    Art, politics, and craziness conspire to form a rather mechanical melodrama in Black Butterflies.
  24. Won't Back Down
    In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle
  25. Sing Your Song
    Produced by his youngest daughter, Gina, this profile of Harry Belafonte, foregrounding the 84-year-old actor and singer's political activism, is a moving if occasionally wearying hagiography.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    By the time this fawning documentary gets to Foster's CG-animated rendering for a $15 billion planned city in Abu Dhabi (a movie within the movie), you realize it's essentially an infomercial for the company he unsuccessfully tried to sell before the 2008 crash.
  27. ATM
    After memorably sealing Ryan Reynolds in a coffin in "Buried," screenwriter Chris Sparling's attempts to make a two-ATM vestibule equally claustrophobic are less inspired.
  28. We Have a Pope
    Until the potent concluding scene, the humor and shallow profundities of We Have a Pope pivot on the cuteness of geriatrics, especially when they're spiking a volleyball in slo-mo.
  29. The Hunter
    The Hunter is too many films in one.
  30. First Position
    The result is a film that eschews in-depth insight in favor of easily digestible who's-going-to-win suspense, a tack that's aided by Kargman's rather poignant (and visually graceful) evocation of pre-performance anxiety but ultimately leaves the material feeling deflated once the winners emerge.
  31. Return
    Firmly in the unassuming indie vein, Return treads lightly and leaves little imprint.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Swell Season
    To viewers without a preexisting emotional relationship to the couple and their saga, that everyday angst is just banal.
  33. The Wolverine
    The Wolverine—despite being an improvement on Gavin Hood’s muddled 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine—isn’t worthy of Jackman’s gifts. It’s a reasonably engaging summer diversion, a semi-rousing adventure that doesn’t make you feel robbed of two hours of your life.
  34. The Magic of Belle Isle
    With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled power of imagination while displaying absolutely none of its own.
  35. Bullhead
    The sentiment, just like the repeated shots of Jacky lying in the fetal position in a tub, shadowboxing, and erupting into a bestial 'roid rage, typifies the film's habit of flattening an idea rather than developing it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Putin's Kiss
    Though Masha's courage is considerable, her change of heart finally feels too nuanced for Pedersen's streamlined political-drama treatment, complete with persistent intrigue music and scenes of Masha restating her dilemma to friends that seem rather canned.
  37. Cirkus Columbia
    "No Man's Land" director Danis Tanovic, adapting a novel by Ivica Djikic, also returns to his roots with this decidedly old-fashioned, quasi-satirical drama that is a bit on the nose with its indictments of post-communist animosities and opportunism.
  38. How to Start a Revolution
    How to Start a Revolution plays like a Nobel Prize–campaign film and never once demonstrates an understanding of the distinction between encomium and inquiry.
  39. Sound of Noise
    More an intriguing premise than a successful film, the Malmö-set Sound of Noise, about a group of "musical terrorists," quickly loses its novelty and becomes about as bold as a Swedish production of "Stomp."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Free Men
    Free Men never feels like a movie about a developing conscience, due largely to the shallowness of the protagonist as written and, by extension, Rahim's portrayal.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blue Like Jazz
    One only has so much patience, though, for watching Communion-wafer-thin characters caught in a liberal-arts cartoon.
  42. Payback
    Cinematic globe-trotting doesn't necessarily trump reading a good book, it turns out; then again, more movies should be burdened with the flaw of being too intellectually curious.
  43. God Bless America
    The interplay between Murray and Barr is closely and carefully handled, but when the monotonous squib-popping subsides, the movie is often static and talky, lapsing into criticism-hedging qualifications and anti-everything speechifying.
  44. Downtown Express
    Whether to let go and follow your own path is a stock dilemma, and an implausibly hopeful conclusion winds up undercutting the realism of this immigrant song.
  45. 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.
  46. 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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four Lovers
    Cordier remains sensitive to the subtle shifts in the foursome's dynamics, but do we really need another handwringer about the perils of polyamory?
  48. Womb
    The glacial pace is only quickened for seconds at a time with evocative ideas and hints of satire.
  49. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
    There are so many complicated political, religious, and cultural issues swirling around Yoni's story, and Follow Me keeps them on the sidelines. It is pure hagiography.
  50. Fightville
    The language of ground-and-pound fighting remains untranslated for those not fluent in MMA, though ample space is given to the men's discussion of their individual warrior philosophies, illustrated with quotes from Nietzsche, P.T. Barnum, and Virgil.
  51. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    It's not clear what Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale values more - endless preaching about ancestral spirits or gruesome CG decapitations.
  52. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Tim eventually evolves out of smugness, but unfortunately, the film merely trades it for sappiness. Fischer, meanwhile, imbues Janice with a wounded soulfulness that cuts right through the clichés. The less said about a hideously wigged Topher Grace as a smarmy self-help author, the better.
  53. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Worse, the film never challenges the traditional Zionist narrative of the kibbutzim developing an untamed land, paying only lip service to the fact that it was already inhabited before the Jewish settlers got there.
  54. Red Hook Summer
    An alternately evocative and lumbering portrait of a multifaceted community.
  55. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    The costumes are gorgeous, and the settings are plush, but the acting is merely serviceable, and the film lacks either the wit or the energy of its predecessors. Long before it ends, you find yourself indifferent to the fate of the mismatched lovebirds or anyone else in the tale.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sleepwalk with Me
    [Rides] a weird tonal line, maybe aiming to split the difference between comedy and terror but coming off as afraid to really go for it on either.
  57. Liberal Arts
    Still, in the central relationship, the writer-director shows an understanding of human interaction that marks his second feature as a quantum leap beyond his stilted debut, "Happythankyoumoreplease."
  58. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    Unfortunately, its tale is so slight and simple that it also fails to say anything particularly poignant about life.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    Chbosky plays this CW serial stuff for maximum earnestness, stressing the teenage tendency to assume that every new thing they're feeling is unprecedented in human history, keeping the tone just-moist-eyed throughout.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    6 Month Rule
    As with the latest Kate Hudson comedy, it's a formula for irrelevancy pretty much as a rule.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music from the Big House
    It finally feels too cautious, as if digging a little deeper might compromise the prevailing tone of tentative uplift.
  62. One Day on Earth
    Ultimately, a collage film is only as good as its constituent parts, and, with a few exceptions, the brief snippets from this particular day on earth are far too prosaic to be illuminating.
  63. 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.
  64. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Future Past starts fast and never slows down. There's not a line of dialogue that isn't exposition... What fun there is slips in through director Bryan Singer's visuals.
  65. Dark Horse
    With Solondz's old-hat funeral deadpan and his efforts to pass off Abe's adolescent rage as elevated insight, Dark Horse is neither incisively black-comic nor particularly attuned to human behavior - proof that some directors, at least, do end up the way they started out.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cosmopolis
    To the extent that Cosmopolis functions as a super-literal conceptual exercise, it's simultaneously irritating and fascinating.
  67. Ikland
    Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.
  68. Americano
    Americano, which Demy also wrote and stars in, is an ambivalent, occasionally touching work of homage to his parents, yet one whose clumsiness only underscores the superiority of their directly quoted films.
  69. Deadfall
    There are hints of a fun, trashy film beneath the surface, but that film is always subservient to the dull one Dean and Ruzowitzky were more comfortable making.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    V/H/S
    In too many of the shorts, bad acting quickly undermines the "authenticity" the aesthetics labor to achieve.
  71. 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.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    About Cherry
    Setting out to reassure that certain decisions do not necessarily have fatal consequences for one's sexual morality, though, About Cherry only manages to seem inconsequential.
  73. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unforgivable
    It's some kind of monster of romanticized antiromanticism, filleting and exalting its characters, cheating and rewarding its breathless audience. The closest the film gets to a thesis is this shoulder-shrug torpedo: "People do things like that without knowing why."
  75. Busong
    Splendid vistas and sun scapes add mythic punctuation to the proceedings, but director Auraeus Solito (Tuli) generates too little of the magic that holds a story as tenuous as this one together.
  76. You've Been Trumped
    Donald Trump is the face of America here, representing all of us and demonstrating our values abroad. Hopefully this sharp rendering, or something very much like it, is the legacy for which he and his family will be remembered.
  77. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    Even its most interesting human subjects can't compare to the beauty and enigma of the wild horses who, after a life of running free, find themselves forced to two-step and bow to bizarre commands.
  78. Alps
    It's quibbling to draw up columns denoting what Lanthimos, a difficult but undeniable talent, does right and does wrong. He's seemingly working intuitively here, and whatever missteps he makes while feeling his way forward, he manages to pass quite near to one of the essential conundrums of being human.
  79. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Gunn has to juggle so many plot elements — so many booming galactic battles, so many whisker-close brushes with death — that it's little wonder he loses his grip on the thing. He inserts occasional moments of wonder but doesn't bother to smooth over the seams.
  80. The Impossible
    These horrors, and the absorbing performances of Watts and McGregor, will soon be undermined by a surfeit of sentiment.
  81. The Conjuring
    The Conjuring's problem, beyond its lack of a conjuring, is how its otherworldly hokum is stubbornly of this world.
  82. Craigslist Joe
    Directed by Garner, Craigslist Joe is sweet, moving, and frustrating.
  83. Dreams of a Life
    Left with barely any there there, Morley compensates with long reenactments starring look-alike Zawe Ashton that are never quite convincing but instead suck more air out of the haunting vacuum left behind in Vincent's wake.
  84. Nobody Walks
    Ultimately, the director and her cinematographer, Christopher Blauvelt (Meek's Cutoff), prove to be more interested in capturing the perfection of L.A.'s perpetual sunshine and the ways in which the people beneath it seem subtly oppressed, as if the light is expecting more of them than they can possibly deliver.
  85. The Lion of Judah
    It is an affecting movie - who cannot be affected by the mountains of discarded eyeglasses and shoes and children being dumped by way of slides into mass graves? - but ultimately, The Lion of Judah is no more essential than the sum of its stock footage.
  86. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    If today's youngsters grow up thinking of Christopher Lloyd as the old guy with the bongos from The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, at least they'll be thinking of Christopher Lloyd at all.
  87. Death by China
    The bulk of the film contains as much hysterical rhetoric as sober analysis.
  88. 2 Guns
    This is a here today, gone tomorrow trifle, albeit one with lots of gunplay. In midsummer, that may be enough, but it's still a shame that 2 Guns shoots so many blanks.
  89. The Revenant
    The Revenant kind of aspires to be a horror-comedy in the vein of "Shaun of the Dead" but keeps tripping on its own misanthropy.
  90. Samsara
    The film's imagery is epic and trance-inducing. It's the "guided" part where Samsara stumbles.
  91. Somewhere Between
    Knowlton never delves far enough into her subjects' stories for Somewhere Between to feel more nuanced than, say, a good commercial for international child-adoption services.
  92. For Ellen
    Dano, with his remarkably guileless meta-teen puss, is thoroughly convincing, which is more than can be said for the film's shameless climactic steal from "Five Easy Pieces."
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Café de Flore
    Café de Flore - the title comes from a song heard in both halves - is like a story constructed from the perfume ads in Vanity Fair: the emotional problems of shallow, sexy jet-setters.
  94. Vamps
    Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.
  95. A Royal Affair
    Director Arcel handles the material with a stately grace that compensates for the story's predictable trajectory, though humdrum period detail and monotonous pacing too often leave the proceedings feeling only partially aroused.
  96. The Collection
    The Collection doesn't have much to recommend it beyond a first-reel bloodbath rivaling "Blade" and "Death Ship."
  97. Amour
    Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot.
  98. Minions
    It's all perfectly OK, and even, at times, delightful.... Yet Minions doesn't add up to all that it should.
  99. The Day
    Ashley Bell stands out as a Heroic Fighter With a Dark Secret. Harbor only the expectations aroused by a production of WWE Studios and don't get too attached to any hobbits.
  100. Head Games
    While Head Games does feature a number of articulate and consistently intelligent talking-head interviews, it's ultimately not a satisfying advocacy documentary.
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