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. The Killer Inside Me
    This withholding actor's (Affleck) impish smile and mild, pale-eyed stare--not to mention the Clintonesque hoarseness with which he spins his convoluted lies--are sufficiently convincing to keep The Killer Inside Me from being just a steamy, stylish, punishing bloodbath.
  2. LBJ
    LBJ slips from an examination of a sometimes admirable leader into a hagiographic daydream, a fantasy of a father figure to save us all. That’s a matter of Reiner’s politics, of course, but even more so a matter of his instincts as a popular filmmaker: He’s offering us an American presidency to escape to.
  3. Femme Fatale
    A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.
  4. Vulgaria
    The broadness of the film's comedy might be largely attributable to the conventions of Hong Kong cinema, but to American audiences, the film has an exaggerated notion of its own raunchiness.
  5. Free Birds
    Like so many modern animated features, Free Birds packs too much in; the picture feels cramped and cluttered, and, despite its occasionally manic action, it moves as slowly as a fattened bird waddling toward its doom.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    Lee pays little attention to the roots of breakdancing or how it helped to spread hip-hop worldwide, choosing instead to obsess over the mad skillz of his international subjects.
  7. $ellebrity
    Mazur miscalculates when he tries to direct viewers' outrage at stars' inability to walk down the street without getting cameras thrust in their faces. He's on far surer ground when he uses his on-screen subjects to decry the proliferation of gossip outlets, such as TMZ.
  8. Raze
    The stark prison Sabrina and a half dozen final contestants inhabit make the torture chambers of Hostel look inviting, but to their credit (perhaps), screenwriter Robert Beaucage and director Josh Waller never sugarcoat their grim tale.
  9. The Proposal
    You know every tinny beat and false note by heart, from the implausible setup to the sprint-to-the-airport finish.
  10. Stars in Shorts
    Sequencing is crucial to any anthology, and Stars in Shorts wisely opens with two of the strongest films.
  11. Miss Potter
    By most accounts, Potter was a serious workaholic monomaniacally devoted to the purity of her vision. Undaunted, Noonan and Maltby are determined to squeeze her life into a run-of-the-mill romance in which love heals all wounds.
  12. Steep
    Blandly beautiful, inarticulate extreme-skiing documentary.
  13. Les Miserables
    For the more Hooper tries - and oh, how he tries, ratcheting the filth amp to 11 and shooting almost everything with an arsenal of wide-angled, handheld cameras - the more the moist-eyed storybook romanticism of the source material proves resilient to his efforts.
  14. Everlasting Moments
    The movie satisfies for an hour, but never quite persuades that its subject is worth two.
  15. Guinevere
    Except for Polley and Rea, the performances are heavy-handed.
  16. An Everlasting Piece
    It's a sprightly, low-fiber comedy while the comedy lasts.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dorian Blues
    Inhabiting the breezeway between the sweet sincerity of "Beautiful Thing" and the didacticism of an ABC "Afterschool Special," this upstate New York coming-out saga will warm PFLAG hearts and kindle empathy in those who've had to tread the family-drama-churned waters of small-town gaydom.
  18. Cookie's Fortune
    Long before it ends, its leisurely immersion in the Mississippi Delta has turned downright lukewarm and even chilly.
  19. Music and Lyrics
    Music and Lyrics suggests that it's going to be about redemption, the second act in the life of a punchline, but it feels as though it were made to fit a date on a studio's release schedule. (Happy Valentine's Day!) Oh, well, at least the songs are catchy, and the two-tone video for "Pop Goes My Heart" is inspired.
  20. Auto Focus
    Auto Focus doesn't really go anywhere, but then neither does any form of obsessive-compulsive behavior -- which may be Schrader's point.
  21. Mr. Gaga
    Writer/director Tomer Heymann's uneven doc Mr. Gaga offers a character study of Israeli dance choreographer Ohad Naharin, but the scope and power of Naharin's art only becomes clear when the dancers illustrate rather than comment on his distinctively twitchy, animalistic "gaga" style of movement.
  22. Fight Club
    This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Quid Pro Quo
    Farmiga is captivating, Stahl less so--although a bigger problem is writer/director Carlos Brooks's script, which sets up one story, then shifts gears into something more personal and psychologically specific. That's normally a plus, deepening the viewer's sense of involvement, but the transition here is bumpy and, ultimately, unconvincing.
  24. A Hole in One
    First-time writer-director Richard Ledes's mystical tone and pervasive swipes from David Lynch tend to suffocate his satire, and stunt casting doesn't help.
  25. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    The movie rises to another level whenever its star has a chance to cut loose -- leading the ensemble in a conga line, winning a sack race in slow motion, torching the Whos' Christmas tree while screaming, "Burn baby burn."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela
    A sincere but sapless attempt to meld personal and political documentary.
  27. TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer
    [Kosareff] backburners what's most fascinating (stories of former titans of the industry; segments discussing how shifting social mores impacted said industry, the key roles of women in the factories) and squanders a chance to discuss the larger implications.
  28. Cut to Black
    While Eberle's execution falls short, the scale of his ambition can't help but stir admiration.
  29. Song One
    Hathaway's performance is brave, strong, wistful, and misty, and she's especially affecting when being wooed, gently, by Flynn, playing an indie-folkstar.
  30. Mary
    Tightly framed and tightly wound, Mary is a claustrophobic, incandescent, nutty 83 minutes with everyone in the cast teetering on the ledge of madness.
  31. The Intended
    A taut noirish thriller that unfolds in a fever of firelit ambience.
  32. No Impact Man: The Documentary
    We could all do better, definitely, but how much can we possibly glean from a guy whose idealism can be measured with a calendar?
  33. Phyllis and Harold
    What's interesting about the filmmaker's rummage through her parents' conjugal closet--another in a thriving sub-genre of domestic-turmoil docs as told by their spawn--is the abyss between the husband and wife's points of view.
  34. Dead Night
    Crampton’s performance, the squelchy sound design, and spurts of blood provide occasional jolts, but Dead Night ends up being muddled, never committing to either solemn supernatural horror or its elements of camp.
  35. Paulina
    The film is ultimately frustrating for the unending opacity of Paulina’s psychology.
  36. Four Brothers
    What results is unremarkably schizophrenic--half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.
  37. Harry Is Here to Help
    Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.
  38. Rana's Wedding
    It's tempting to read Abu-Assad's view of his ostentatiously wealthy heroine and her debutante narcissism as satirical of a certain cross-section of modernized Palestinians amid the occupation, but the placid, earnest way her dilemma takes up emotional space in his film suggests half-bakery.
  39. The American Astronaut
    Rarely funny and straining to reach feature length, The American Astronaut achieves sweetness via its straight-faced take on utter gobbledygook.
  40. 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.
  41. Unlucky Plaza
    Kwek's refreshing focus on his terrorized protagonists' pre-abduction lives keeps Unlucky Plaza afloat once it invests in generic ticking-clock thrills.
  42. Dark Summer
    Eventually succumbs to the weight of plot contrivance.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    Here, Coco's cast as a femme fatale who preys on a helpless nebbish--the Audrey Tautou--starring "Coco Avant Chanel" was much more fun.
  44. Mrs. Hyde
    The movie comes to life, at times, especially in its detours.
  45. 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.
  46. Hostel
    Falling somewhere between fratboy porno wish fulfillment and Europhobic sex-tourism scare flick, Eli Roth's taut, wily, but ultimately pointless shocker Hostel is neither as transgressive nor as grueling as it aims to be.
  47. Lakay
    There's an off-putting self-absorption in [Tirf's] self-examination-slash-ode-to-Haiti, and it weakens the whole project.
  48. Julie & Julia
    It was the best of movies. It was the worst of movies. Which is to say: There's half of a great movie in Julie & Julia.
  49. Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer
    In its didactic narration and constant on-screen introductions, the film loses a good deal of the very silence and mystery it venerates.
  50. Elizabeth Blue
    Elizabeth inspires empathy, but it often feels like we’re being told to feel a certain way by being shown so much rather than being allowed to naturally warm up to her.
  51. Waydowntown
    With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.
  52. Urbanscapes
    The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Good Year
    Scott can do mayhem, dystopia, and the rampaging alien (extraterrestrial, android, Somali, Demi Moore) with the best of them, but the breezy touch is not his forte.
  54. Low Down
    There are too many notes that, while not false, are neither satisfactorily resolved nor left interestingly unresolved.
  55. Whale Rider
    Like the film, Pai's character is muddily conceived and ill-focused, but the coltish, tremulously delicate Castle-Hughes is a hypnotic camera subject.
  56. Terminator Salvation
    Among the many things junked in McG's chop-shop is the notion of pleasure.
  57. Pirate Radio
    Seven months after its theatrical release in the U.K., and two months after its DVD debut there, Pirate Radio washes ashore with most of its better bits excised.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Private Archives of Pablo Escovar
    Hits just the right balance of pop and political. Though flat by cinematic standards, Beaufort's TV aesthetics--sonorous Telemundo-style narrator, black-backgrounded talking heads, and gaudy titles--nevertheless befit the story.
  59. The Grand Seduction
    The endearing nature of the characters, especially Gleeson's Murray, provides some pleasure.
  60. Indignation
    An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    House of Sand and Fog
    The clunky manipulations of plot, and the sorry fate awaiting everyone in this foggy House is less wrenching than acted.
  62. Red Riding Trilogy
    The fact that the films hang together at the brink of incoherence is a credit to the assembled acting talent. Rebecca Hall and Maxine Peake deserve note, oases in this nasty, masculine world.
  63. Do You Trust this Computer?
    The doc never goes much deeper than the information and arguments on AI that can currently be found in the Sunday papers.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Saving Face
    Despite a fairly explicit lesbian boobfest (projected attendance just went up!), the film is more good-natured than provocative.
  65. Christmas in the Clouds
    Few clichés go unexercised, but there's also something quietly amazing going on here: For once, American Indians are portrayed not as spiritually attuned mystics or powerless patsies but as ordinary working stiffs, or at least the cinematic equivalent thereof.
  66. Hollywood to Dollywood
    Even at a lean 81 minutes, though, Hollywood to Dollywood occasionally gets tiresome; what it does minute to minute is often less interesting than what it represents.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    Twins loses its center and therefore the nightmarish force of the earlier film. [10 Aug 1972, p.57]
    • Village Voice
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Trek: Nemesis
    As Shinzon, a sickly boy-emperor grown from Picard's DNA by scheming Romulans, Tom Hardy channels some of the verve of rich-Corinthian-leather-clad Khan villain Ricardo Montalban, although his real model seems to be Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator.
  69. The Impossible
    These horrors, and the absorbing performances of Watts and McGregor, will soon be undermined by a surfeit of sentiment.
  70. The Little Mermaid
    The effect is like strolling through a lovely display of early-twentieth-century Americana, admiring the streamlined beauty of mass-produced objects that mimicked the handiwork of artisans, all while encountering a cast of bubbly historical park re-enactors.
  71. The Imitation Game
    Tyldum has robbed his own film of emotional depth — this Turing is as simple as Morse code. Rather than a complex human portrait, this is an assemblage of triumphs, tragedies and tics.
  72. XXY
    It takes a controlling hand to chisel something more contoured than monotony out of this dense angst, and director Lucía Puenzo doesn't have it, though Inés Efron, as Alex, gives a committed centerpiece performance with a nice, slightly lupine grin.
  73. Lucie Aubrac
    This extraordinary story still sparks controversy in France, but in Berri's hands, it never comes alive...a shadow play of historical icons, rather than a portrait of people in love.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hate Crime
    When Hate Crime confounds expectations, it transcends the whodunit-of-the-week template. On the other hand, when the plot gets lost in irrational revenge fantasies, you'll wish you had stayed home watching reruns.
  75. Mouth to Mouth
    Murray's story has the no-holds-barred look and feel of a '70s movie, but her digressions into modern dance are a tad unwelcome.
  76. On the Road
    Here is one glimmer of truth in what's otherwise a deliberately unfinished fraud - another "primitive" postwar antique repurposed for boutique sale.
  77. Last Chance Harvey
    Besides being old pros who could elevate such schmaltz in their sleep, Hoffman and Thompson -- despite the 20-plus years between them, and her graceful restraint in contrast to his creepy assertiveness -- have a genuinely sweet chemistry, which is the exact and only reason to seek this one out.
  78. The Legend of Pale Male
    Despite spending nearly 15 years documenting this phenomenon, Lilien proves wholly uninterested in investigating his human subjects' habit of vigorously anthropomorphizing, and projecting their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and Daddy issues onto the striking hawk.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brother to Brother
    First-timer Rodney Evans's leaden script fails to live up to the poetry of its subjects and raises more themes--black-on-black homophobia, light-skin versus dark-skin prejudice, writers' envy--than it can fully develop.
  80. The Water Diviner
    Crowe's visual framing and dramatic staging are as assured as his compelling lead performance. Yet as his story becomes weighed down by issues of cross-cultural understanding, forgiveness, and second chances...the film comes to feel like a slight, straightforward tale distended to tedious lengths.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kicking & Screaming
    Even the intermittent laughs undermine Kicking and its winning-isn't-everything message.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Doom
    As dumb as they come, the entertaining Doom might warrant a place in cinema history as the first movie in which someone rips off their own ear.
  83. Wetlands
    A suitably haunted Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje can’t reconcile Babs’s impulsive actions with the character’s implied moral core.
  84. 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.
  85. All the Pretty Horses
    The film is too eager to please and falls short of the novel's tragic dimension.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    The film takes as many plot-twists as "Pirates of the Caribbean"; distinctly Goya in its emphasis on the grotesque, it shows none of the Spaniard's artistic economy.
  87. No Light and No Land Anywhere
    There are some nicely shot moments throughout, but they feel empty — slow montages that mostly just fill out the film’s thin plot and already slim runtime.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
    In its best moments, it has the qualities of a ribald folk tale. But it's a slight work, slackly directed, that gets a needed boost from Braga's endearing performance and Chico Buarque's intoxicating score.
  89. King Arthur
    Everything is pre-medieval and unwashed, but with Antoine Fuqua at the steering wheel King Arthur is still a comic book, if a little more "Classics Illustrated" in tone than we'd have the right to expect.
  90. From Afar
    Despite From Afar's lumbering solemnity, Castro, a Chilean actor best known for his collaborations with compatriot Pablo Larraín, proves ever supple.
  91. The Big Carnival
    Ace in the Hole is a movie about the fascination of disaster that is itself a fascinating disaster.
  92. Anna and the King
    Dusted off for one more run-through, and for those who applauded "Titanic's" old-is-new ethos, the moth-eaten, barely breathing Anna and the King will serve as a slap in the face.
  93. Level Up
    Director Adam Randall keeps the action tightly paced and the dialogue to a refreshing minimum, helping to heighten Matt's growing isolation.
  94. Coldwater
    Coldwater is almost boastfully grim.
  95. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    Pollock drags when Horton's offscreen, and with its NPR-inflected narration and executive producer Don Hewitt, the film might have fared better as a PBS special.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Evergreen
    Though the acting is tentative at times, with performances not quite landing on the same page, Evergreen is a compassionate slice of Pacific Northwest misery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    Even setting aside the clumsy inconsistency of its interior logic, Sith is an underachievement of escapist entertainment.
  99. Elektra Luxx
    Elektra Luxx's episodic structure and candy-apple compositions make for a good time, even if Gutierrez lacks the narrative and syntactical muscle to pull off the sex-positive Tarantino-esque farce he seems to be after.
  100. Memoir of War
    While clearly adoring Duras’s work, Finkiel doesn’t credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience.
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