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. You're Gonna Miss Me
    Director Keven McAlester's film is entertaining. But with battered archival footage and celebrity worship, McAlester skimps on perspective and complexity.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Miriam
    So bad it doesn't ever approach being good, doesn't even go from bad to good and back to bad again--just bad bad bad, all the way through.
  3. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.
  4. Knocked Up
    Ultimately, what makes Knocked Up a terrific film--one of the year's best, easily--is its relaxed, shaggy vibe; if it feels improvised in places, that's because Apatow trusts his actors enough to let them make it up as they go, like the people they're playing.
  5. Gracie
    Firing on all formulaic cylinders, Gracie is heavy with tidy meaning and mealy morality; the most dubious idea here is that if you don't let a girl play soccer, she just may turn to cigarettes, halter tops, and sex with the starting forward
  6. Mr. Brooks
    Bloody disappointing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crazy Love
    However sick this tabloid star may be, Crazy Love is a celebrity doc by definition, with all its attendant trade-offs, and even the director admits that his access wasn't free.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Day Watch
    The worst thing Bekmambetov has picked up from his American models is the tendency of megasequels to aggrandize material grown enervated, to compensate for thinness by spreading out.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I'm Reed Fish
    Short of pulling a Zach Braff, there's one sure way to get known as a screenwriter: Put your actual name in the title of the script.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mala Noche
    Based on an autobiographical novella by Portland "street poet" Walt Curtis, Mala Noche (1985) was the 33-year-old Van Sant's debut feature. Shot on 16mm for $25,000, it was the first of his bittersweet odes to tender outcasts and remains the simplest and least burdened.
  11. Ten Canoes
    To watch this movie (shot in breathtaking widescreen by cinematographer Ian Jones) is to enter into a whole new language of symbols and meaning, the likes of which I have rarely encountered in cinema outside of the African tribal films of Ousmane Sembene.
  12. Radiant City
    Enlightening and disturbingly funny.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bug
    Genuinely freaky-deaky, not to mention more inventively unsettling than anything Friedkin has mustered in the quarter-century since twisting little Linda Blair into a satanic spewer of pea soup and F-bombs.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    Long before the third, fourth, or fifth climax in this endless, obligatory summer diversion, I slunk into my seat in a passive, inattentive stupor, fully submitting to the fact that I hadn't the slightest idea what the hell was going on.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Angel-A
    Amiably inconsequential fairy tale.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Golden Door
    With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paprika
    Paprika, based on a serialized novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, isn't a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced--or maybe dreamed.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amu
    Too bad first-time writer-director Shonali Bose's juxtaposition of the personal and the political often feels forced, and like many didactic history lessons, this one's about 20 minutes too long.
  19. Steel City
    Whatever Steel City lacks in oomph or even originality, it at least breaks even with its working-class authenticity and unexpectedly well-rounded ensemble.
  20. 9 Star Hotel
    Like all good political documentaries, 9 Star Hotel is more anthropology than agitprop, a portrait of life among the young, poorly educated men who are caught between Israeli exploitation and Palestinian Authority corruption.
  21. The Boss of It All
    Colors and angles and sound levels don't match from one cut to the next. The movie is ugly as sin to look at. But it's all intentional on the part of von Trier.
  22. Orange Winter
    Andrei Zagdansky's tedious time capsule of the event makes peculiar assumptions about audience familiarity with Ukrainian politics beyond what trickled into the headlines, blowing past potentially fascinating footnotes and story threads for 72 minutes of pure B-roll.
  23. Shrek the Third
    Blinded by avarice and all out of ideas, once again, Hollywood can't tell when enough is way more than enough.
  24. Brooklyn Rules
    As a longtime writer on "The Sopranos," Terence Winter has steered clear of most of the hoary organized-crime clichés. Instead, he's poured them all into director Michael Corrente's anemic urban drama.
  25. Even Money
    The problem with ensemble films, and this one in particular, is that they often flit instead of float between story arcs. With deep lags in momentum, it is this lack of cohesion that nearly cancels out what can be great about ensemble films: the performances.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Flanders
    Flanders is, dontcha know, a state of mind, and Dumont is plain out of his.
  27. The Last Time
    Beyond his technical clumsiness, Caleo seems convinced that real men exert power by being A-type jerks and all women are sluts. If nothing else, this film serves as a troubling psychological profile of a filmmaker who feels scornfully cynical toward nothing in particular.
  28. Severance
    When Smith's Grand Guignol tableaux are strung together, they lack any forward momentum. Some take inspired comic flight. The rest crash to the ground and, like so much else in Severance, go splat.
  29. Fay Grim
    As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.
  30. The Wendell Baker Story
    A sweet, dumb pup of a movie, not unlike its eponymous hero, The Wendell Baker Story frisks along sniffing the sidewalk.
  31. Hollywood Dreams
    The movie buzzes with the quirky rhythms of Jaglom's patented improvisational shooting style, and those of Frederick herself, whose go-for-broke zaniness recalls that of a former Jaglom ingenue, Karen Black.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memories of Tomorrow
    Of course, it's no surprise that a melodrama would be melodramatic. But that doesn't mean it has to be graceless--as "Away From Her" shows--and grace, that virtue most characteristic of Japanese film, is what Memories of Tomorrow completely lacks.
  33. Once
    Yet the magic of the movie is how utterly wrenching it renders these songs, which thrive alongside the film's simple, eloquent, dusky narrative.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Changeling
    Stern's direction is reticent where it should be nervy, and the chemistry-free cast of mostly New York stage actors appears to have been chosen for its discomfort with dialogue such as "Come hither!" and "Get thee from me!" Ye have been warned.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    28 Weeks Later
    The sequel trumps its predecessor for sustained doomsday gloom and suggests this might be the man to adapt Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road.
  36. Georgia Rule
    There's almost no rescuing this wobbly movie from its showdowns and insights. Except, that is, when Lohan's around.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hip Hop Project
    From domestic strife to studio triumph, the most impressive accomplishment of Project is not the student-made album, but that when Kazi says cheesy things like "This is healing through hip-hop," you actually believe him.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Salon
    Where's Al Sharpton's decency parade when you need it?
  39. The Ex
    The movie is Bateman's to steal, however, which he does early and often.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Provoked: A True Story
    Short-changing issues of race and wearing its heart way out on its sleeve, it's the film's amateur exposition that's most dumbfounding -- poised to provoke more sarcasm than righteous indignation.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway
    Producer/director Dori Berinstein knows her way around a Broadway show -- she's produced 11 of them, including her latest, Legally Blonde -- and her insider status no doubt helped secure behind-the-scenes access as she tracks one season in the life of four musicals, and explains the unusual level of intimacy between interviewer and subjects.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Allegro
    Unmotivated jitters and flash-zooms abound, needlessly complicating a flagrantly elaborate premise.
  43. Day Night Day Night
    Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie.
  44. Brand Upon the Brain!
    Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but . . . the gimmick's the prize. Without all the hoopla, there simply isn't enough variation to this stylized fever-dream to justify its fatiguing running time, nor to call it anything less than predictably Maddin–esque.
  45. Away from Her
    It's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Spider-Man 3
    Given that Spider-Man 2 was twice as fun as the first, it's triply disappointing what an overwrought bore S3 turns out to be.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Civic Duty
    Expected ironies about homeland security, racial profiling, and fears of the Other land like a rain of anvils, and director Renfroe matches Krause's worked-up performance with a jiggly, flashy approximation of off-brand Tony Scott.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    L'iceberg
    The result packs all the hilarity of a museum installation on The Semiotics of Silent Comedy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paris, je t'aime
    Paris, Je T'aime's brimming declaration of love to the City of Lights leaves one breathless but dissatisfied.
  50. The Treatment
    Short, sweet, and hardly ever cloying, The Treatment is largely dependent for its success on the quality of its performances--most surprisingly, Eigeman's.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waitress
    Waitress won't set the world on fire, but it glows.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Missing Victor Pellerin
    The result is a satire that somehow doesn't feel satirical: comic yet humane.
  53. Jindabyne
    Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.
  54. Snow Cake
    Does sidle up to the brink of mawkishness, but it pulls back so nicely into Weaver's rich, hard-headed evocation of Linda's limitations.
  55. Les amitiés maléfiques
    Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wedding Weekend
    This uneven romantic comedy is firmly in the Zach Braff–ian mold: It features a group of thirtysomething men who are so terrified of growing up that they behave semi-moronically for the majority of the film.
  57. Diggers
    Rudd is sweet and funny; Ron Eldard and Josh Hamilton are great as the town's aimless stud muffin and philosophizing pothead, respectively. But the movie belongs to Ken Marino, who is riotously funny.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
    With only a few letters and family photos, director Heidi Specogna never brings her subject to life.
  59. Something to Cheer About
    Betsy Blankenbaker's doc doesn't possess the kinetic charge of the tale itself; it's too reliant on talking heads and faded photos. Cheer feels amateurish for a generation raised on sports films. Shoulda been a slam-dunk too.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Zoo
    The beautiful and beguiling new film by Robinson Devor meditates on the Enumclaw incident through a hypnotic blend of original reporting, staged reenactment, testimony of involved parties (both zoophiles and local law enforcement), and pervasive, somewhat precious lyricism.
  61. Triad Election
    To's take on the plight of the modern gangste is inspired.
  62. Hot Fuzz
    A British variation on Hollywood nonsense, and as such it's a little gloomier, a little coarser, and a lot more cerebral--oh, and funnier than all the "Reno 911!" boxed sets combined.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vacancy
    Antal smartly adheres to the no-frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore. And Wilson and Beckinsale superbly execute everything that's required of their characters--namely, yelling and running.
  64. Fracture
    Gosling is the kind of actor who makes other actors look lazy. He is Brando at the time of "Streetcar," or Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces," and altogether one of the more remarkable happenings at the movies today.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Land of Women
    Maudlin, formulaic affair.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    Neel is a compelling subject, but she's more alive in one of her paintings than in all of the voluminous video footage her grandson thrusts upon us.
  67. The Valet
    Of all of Francis Veber's farces (The Dinner Game, La Cage Aux Folles, etc.), this is the one that feels most like a sitcom pilot, which is to say it's a farce most forced.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Goodbye Momo
    Though Momo is dedicated to "the missing children and the children who are coming to save the world," the most provocative question it asks is whether, with its conspicuous product placement, the film was secretly backed by Coca-Cola.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stephanie Daley
    Writer-director Hilary Brougher knows how to rub it in, but Tamblyn is fearless in her attempt to save the narrative from falling into clichéd sermonizing.
  70. Syndromes and a Century
    Syndromes and a Century, which was commissioned by the New Crowned Hope festival to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, is a movie of long serene takes and gentle absurdities.
  71. Red Road
    No one does poetic British with more remorseless hyper-realism than the Scots, and Arnold, who amassed a raft of reputable awards for her 2003 short film "Wasp," directs with a precociously sure touch and a raw taste for graphic sexuality rare in a woman helmer. It shocks, yet feels organic to the paranoid, loveless milieu portrayed in Red Road.
  72. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Narrative's beside the point in a movie created by two guys who gorge on pop culture's high-fat diet and regurgitate it into something approaching . . . art? Close enough.
  73. Perfect Stranger
    Perfect Stranger derives some novelty value from its colorblind casting and from being the most ludicrously silly Hollywood f----fest since the Willis-starring "Color of Night" (minus that movie's comic self-awareness). But as a thriller, it's so by-the-numbers that it's hardly worth keeping count.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dreaming Lhasa
    Primped for easy American consumption, this clunkily performed and staged drama concerns a filmmaker's agenda to document Tibetan oppression under Chinese occupation. This becomes spurious pretext for a rather flat Nancy Drew adventure.
  75. Everything's Gone Green
    It's not the big picture that charms here, it's the details. More than anything, though, it's Costanzo--a spindly Everydork who grows up not because he has to, but because he just kinda wants to.
  76. Lonely Hearts
    Todd Robinson, grandson of the real-life Elmer, never fully commits to the heartlessness of the genre as Arthur Penn did in "Bonnie and Clyde."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Year of the Dog
    Mike White, writer of "Chuck & Buck" and "The School of Rock" (and oddball actor in both), here directs his latest geek's revenge fantasy like a psychotherapeutically treated Todd Solondz.
  78. Modern Man
    Swibel can't keep his HD camera still enough to find poetry in this profound hunk of nothingness, his observational in-and-out zooms as meandering as co-writer Becker's on-screen attention span.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Private Fears in Public Places
    Resnais is now 84 years old; perhaps it takes eight decades of living to make a movie this compassionate, this confident--and this young.
  80. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai
    Expanded by a half-hour from its prior incarnation as a pinku eiga, the formerly titled "Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice" is now an apocalyptic political satire.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    Jordan's interviews, from John Zorn to John Waters, all attest to Smith's reputation as a pivotal influence on film, performance art, gallery installation, and photography; as Richard Foreman once declared, everybody stole from Jack.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock the Bells
    An electrifying, occasionally terrifying documentary.
  83. Disturbia
    There's not one single bombshell dropped in Disturbia; everyone is exactly who you think they are and does exactly what you think they'll do precisely when you think they'll do it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Grindhouse
    This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about godd--- time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.
  85. The Hoax
    To its credit, The Hoax isn't glib--it doesn't chalk up Irving's moral vacuum to anything a bad mommy or daddy did. But there's no other point of view either; the film suffers a fatal equivocation over whether to frame him as a prankster or an American tragedy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ping Pong
    The film vividly portrays the obsessive landscape of Japanese table tennis, but the endless ping . . . pong of that teeny ball bouncing over that teeny net gets tiresome, especially in slo-mo.
  87. The TV Set
    The TV Set is wry and true about the messy tangle of art, commerce, and family, as talented creative types try to stay true to themselves and put food on the table. The movie is also a treasure trove of inspired comic personalities.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Whole New Thing
    Half-new at most, this "Running With Scissors"–type tale of a precocious, effeminate teen who gets hot for teacher while prepping for a life in the arts isn't evidently autobiographical. Neither is it funny--or poignant or insightful or remotely worth one's time.
  89. Daratt
    African director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's austere, hypnotic third feature explores the legacy of Chad's decades-long civil war.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Los Muertos
    Into the river, miraculous landscape: Los Muertos connects with the elemental energies of sunlight, water, and leaf like nothing since Blissfully Yours. Indeed, that might have worked well for a title here -- that, or Heart of Darkness.
  91. The Reaping
    Those two age-old foes--science and blind faith--tango yet again in this noxious slice of Biblical horror about a series of Old Testament plagues being visited upon a Louisiana bayou backwater.
  92. Are We Done Yet?
    Fans of the first film can rest assured that a change in the director's chair has done little to curb the overall tone of slapstick desperation.
  93. Black Book
    Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
  94. Killer of Sheep
    Killer of Sheep is an urban pastoral--an episodic series of scenes that are sweet, sardonic, deeply sad, and very funny.
  95. The Lookout
    Gordon-Levitt's worth the admission all by his lonesome. He's that good--the proverbial young man with an old soul who brings unexpected depth, complexity, and sincerity to what could have been just another damaged-guy role. He's the one to look out for.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Wedding
    What happens after the wedding comprises a full three-quarters of Bier's epic, whose near-Biblical twists and turns--I wouldn't think of giving them away--are enough to fill four weepies.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hawk Is Dying
    I won't pretend it makes for a happy night at the cinema, and it may require a leap of faith to succumb to Goldberger's spell. But I leapt, and found it enthralling up to the point where this legitimately weird movie capitulates to the most conventional catharsis. I'd rather watch Goldberger fail than a hundred others succeed.
  98. Sacco and Vanzetti
    Stirring documentary.
  99. Summer in Berlin
    German director Andreas Dresen has made an oddly buoyant little film about loneliness: Part Sex in der City, part Dogme doldrums, Summer in Berlin is most affecting as a character study of two women in their late thirties.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    This was basically the best idea ever. The setting brims over with the same wicked froth of danger, exoticism, and passion that 19th-century Seville must have had before it got stylized into oblivion.
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