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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    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sobreviviré
    Bears some resemblance to "All About My Mother," but lacks its compatriot's flamboyance, content to traffic in glib banalities and unwitting self-absorption.
  2. Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain
    Despite its candy-hued costumes, hyperbolic acting, sudden lapses into song, and mystical context (all Bollywood staples), it lacks "Lagaan's" sweep, humor, and colorful characters.
  3. New Suit
    Despite frequent cuts to mambos and cha-chas, this insulated tale of rich interns swindling rich studio bosses has no “Clueless”-style SoCal breeze (or righteous “Working Girl” gotcha).
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Catching Out
    Ultimately everything feels one-sided and sanitized.
  5. Made-Up
    A ham-fisted satire on the American obsession with appearance, Made-Up is ultimately self-defeating and even offensive.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Games People Play: New York
    Think Fear Factor: Soft Porn anchored by a third-act twist that results in confused meta-mayhem.
  7. Rhinoceros Eyes
    Live by the meta-movie rules, die by the meta-movie rules: Rhinoceros Eyes is a parable on cine-enchantment that itself fails to enchant.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Burning Man
    Less sentiment and more peculiarity would have limned a richer, though probably less audition-tape-worthy, reflection of Burning Man's 25,000-strong community of the absurd.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Firedancer
    Grim headlines aside, FireDancer is hard to recommend, with its haphazard tone, wobbly acting, and cipher-like lead.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Anonymous
    Relatively thin on conventional story and acting (the cast ranges from indie thesp Craig Chester to transsexual flaming creature Amanda Lepore) and thick with atmosphere.
  11. Flavors
    Unfortunately, the constant cell phone chatter and pervasive split screen do little to prop up a limp, poorly structured screenplay.
  12. L'autre monde
    It's too bad that Allouache's insurgent Islamists, into whose clutches Yasmine falls for a time, come off like Indiana Jones villains.
  13. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    All in all, Hijacking is less a movie than a litany of arguments intended as, or at least only useful as, a brickbat in the discourse, aimed at your neighbor's Republican noggin.
  14. Bob, Verushka & the Pursuit of Happiness
    Patently unfunny romantic comedy.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Wife's Name Is Maurice
    Aside from Laspalès's enlivening physical humor, Poiré's forced, formulaic comedy of errors has little to offer.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    AmnesiA
    So true to its title that I've forgotten many of the details already--and I just saw it this morning. This latecomer has been rendered completely obsolete by “Memento.”
  17. Straight-Jacket
    Jacket's shrill, Necco-colored sets and distractingly awful CGI long shots almost mask the movie's real coup: Letscher's physique.
  18. Wall Street: A Wondering Trip
    Surprisingly lacking in depth and overall political perspective.
  19. Daybreak
    A studied, overwrought look into Personal Crisis and Redemption.
  20. The Other Side of the Street
    Co-writer and first-time director Marcos Bernstein (who also co-scripted the Montenegro-starring Central Station) drowns the film in anesthetizing atmospherics and hot Brazilian bodies, blunting the energy of his septuagenarian star's performance.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    With Friends Like These...
    Messina's characters gripe at being typecast as goombah hit men, yet the director seems blissfully unaware that he dooms them to the very fate they protest by painting them with such prosaic, uninspired strokes. (review of re-release)
  22. Raging Dove
    Raging Dove can't avoid the biodoc pitfall of fixating on its subject's personal saga to the virtual exclusion of all else; by the end it's essentially blaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Abu Lashin's professional demise.
  23. Night of Henna
    Hobbles a likable cast with dialogue flatter than Bollywood's cheesiest.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    In deliberate, clinical fashion, Zev Asher's documentary catches up with a notorious Canadian case of art versus animal cruelty.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Finding Eleazar
    Only true opera diehards will appreciate the backstage psychodrama, a catalog aria of the singer's multiple neuroses.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life, Translated
    Kiefer Liu's eccentric bit of teen sigh candy is veined with enough chewy oddities to give it texture, but its sappy center isn't sustainable over 100 minutes.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Derailroaded
    Wild Man Fischer's music is disarmingly honest and heartfelt, but even its charms can't save Derailroaded from ending up a train wreck.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unveiled
    An Iranian version of "Boys Don't Cry," Unveiled overflows with sociopolitical outrage even if its portrayal of a gender-confused heroine is ultimately indecisive and laconic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    39 Pounds of Love
    Eagerly mimicking reality TV's need to mold life into a digestible narrative, the documentary 39 Pounds of Love simplifies its subject until all that's left is a name and a cloying score.
  30. Moonlight
    Not only is the candid (but never prurient) treatment of early-teen sexuality and drug use too hot to handle, but the narrative blend of fairy-tale wonder and nightmare logic feels sui generis.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Tollbooth
    How is czarist Russia like modern-day Brooklyn? Touché, but let's say this time the answer's not Brighton Beach. It's not The Tollbooth either, but what with the movie's dramatization of the opposition between tradition and individualism for a Jewish family's three "marrying age" daughters, "Fiddler on the Roof" parallels will inevitably be drawn.
  32. What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole
    The movie is a sloppy amalgamation of animated instruction, dramatic vignettes (starring actualization-starved single gal Marlee Matlin), and talking-heads interviews.
  33. Desert Wind
    Nicely rendered moments of casual intimacy between the men attest to the trip's therapeutic value, but very little of it transfers to the audience. The dull large-group scenes consist mostly of old standbys like writing problems on slips of paper and burning them.
  34. Toro negro
    As his story emerges-rape, assault, manslaughter, prison, and torrential self- destruction-it becomes clear that Pacheco is some kind of sociopath, and the movie evolves into a monstrous portrait of economic annihilation on the outskirts of the global village.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Slow Jam King
    More fun to listen to than watch -- though this still leaves the problem of dialogue.
  36. Guernsey
    Leopold's movie is superbly shot and restrained, but not economical; the brooding and introversions profitlessly pad out what might've been a leveling featurette.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Satellite
    Nice low-budget cinematography and authentic New York City locations aside, there's little to engage viewers over the course of 100 wandering minutes.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rittenhouse Square
    With just enough art-lack and speak-for-itself whiz (call me cheesy), this doc understands the famoustorical Philly park's appeal: Hot girls sunbathe there, and the bums are ka-razy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Room 314
    Writer-director Michael Knowles is interested in what happens when you shove people into the anonymous space of a hotel room, but these mostly unconnected short cuts are neither unusual nor substantial.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Pit
    In the Pit's empathy feels strictly skin-deep, its insight even shallower.
  41. 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.
  42. Fay Grim
    As "Henry Fool's" belated sequel, Fay Grim seems nearly an act of desperation.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lights in the Dusk
    Lights in the Dusk derives scant excitement from its melodramatic plot, which satisfies a dismal, ineluctable formula with stultifying efficiency. Nor is it enlivened by the airless performances.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Closing Escrow
    Closing Escrow can't even execute the bare-bones requirements of mediocre mockumentaries, as its unbelievably quirky characters' not-funny behavior is punctuated with awkward silences and L.A. clichés.
  45. 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.
  46. House
    The central problem here is one common to faith-based films: The heroes (Reynaldo Rosales and Heidi Dippold) are both overly bland and poorly cast.
  47. Khadak
    Khadak recedes deeper and deeper into esoterica as it progresses.
  48. Man in the Chair
    Walsh and Plummer are obviously pros, and they hustle to put across some patently ridiculous business, but, well, it's true about the polishing thing.
  49. Girls Rock!
    While the camp is all about liberation, the film hews to a predictable doc template and comes off as a drag.
  50. Boarding Gate
    There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.
  51. Smart People
    It's like the entire season of a sitcom whittled down to a single episode. There's no time for characterization, no room for emotion, no interest in anything other than moving the story forward. It's all action, no reaction. One minute they're miserable; 90 minutes later, aww better.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Full Grown Men
    For better and for worse (at least for a story about a man struggling to behave like an adult), Full Grown Men feels and thinks with the heart and mind of a child.
  53. Canary
    Writer-director Akihiko Shiota's dramatic strategies are limited to the point of monotony.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Patti Smith: Dream of Life
    109 mostly black-and-white minutes of punk's wet nurse floating through the modern world while endlessly ruminating on mortality, art, and the occasional bodily function. Problem is, there's nary a hint of context, even with biographic essentials.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Mexican Shivah
    Kvetches its way through an insipid vision of cross-cultural conflict.
  56. Nights and Weekends
    Very often, the "rawness" here seems like an inability to distinguish the essential from the banal (or elevate the banal to the essential). A good eye might help, but Swanberg and Gerwig's filmmaking is stubbornly disheveled.
  57. The Caller
    The Caller begins as a multinational corporate thriller more ambiguous and geopolitically senseless than "Demonlover."
  58. An American Affair
    Only Noah Wyle, as Adam's unreadable dad, rises above the muck; he deserves his Tarantino-aided resurrection sooner rather than later.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Skeptic
    Though a few scary skeletons (and one doll) rattle in and out of the film's closet, Bardwell is a slave to television lexicon, allowing Bryan and his lawyer buddy (Tom Arnold) to brave the banter of shrill detective comedies, and framing his images with all the brio of your average "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" episode.
  60. Wolke Neun
    Besides the frank, blithe sex scenes, a melodramatic ending aims to banish any last hope of gemütlichkeit, but the film comes to feel curiously incomplete, like one long fretful afternoon.
  61. Play the Game
    This Lifetime-ready comedy is hardly provocative--let alone perceptive, funny, or fresh
  62. Where Is Where?
    Ultimately, the film attempts to confront its vague ideas with a self-contained bit of narrative, whose neat rendering clashes with, but fails to make sense of, the messiness of what came before.
  63. The Little Traitor
    Terminally mild, ill-structured adaptation of Amos Oz's novel "Panther in the Basement."
  64. Killing Kasztner
    Ross is very good at teasing out the politics behind Kasztner's shifting fortunes, not to mention his murky ambitions. But closure is the last thing that's needed here.
  65. Looking for Palladin
    Requiring cuts, some sense of direction, and dialogue that doesn't either declare or dither, the film looks like it was fun to make.
  66. Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    A glorified informercial, complete with enough blandly upbeat guitar-cues to power all 22 seasons of "Real World" intros.
  67. Women in Trouble
    Awkwardly mixes blue material with sob stories.
  68. The Missing Person
    The film has been gesturing toward a profundity that isn't there.
  69. The Paranoids
    Maybe it's appropriate that Argentinean writer-director Gabriel Medina's chokingly offbeat debut is as aimless and confused as its prototypical slacker-comedy hero, who seems to have wandered into a glum dramedy with a hazy noirish aesthetic.
  70. Blood Done Sign My Name
    An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).
  71. Kimjongilia
    Arguably the most dysfunctional culture of the past few centuries, North Korea is a cosmically mad movie waiting to happen. But for now, Heikin's is merely insubstantial.
  72. Godspeed
    The tone fits the material and the performances are surprisingly measured, but Saitzyk's sappy pontifications on loss, redemption, and zealotry don't register as headily as they're meant to (every character gets at least one melodramatic speech), and the spirituality invoked feels about as sincere as the Christian who only attends Christmas mass.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Thorn in the Heart
    It's a shock, then, that The Thorn in the Heart, Gondry's documentary about his own family, is so unimaginative and inaccessible.
  74. After.Life
    Somewhere in Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo's awkward debut feature is a macabre and almost quaint Gothic mystery begging to be left alone.
  75. La mission
    As subtle as a face-punch, La Mission nobly continues a necessary conversation about homophobia, but paves the way to hell with its own good intentions.
  76. The Square
    This Down Under noir confuses incoherent body pileups with "twists."
  77. Pornography
    Ambitiously layered and almost completely incoherent, Pornography: A Thriller is a somber thesis film buried under a host of nightmarish, Lynchian conceits.
  78. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    Kim's filmmaking is generally cartoonish in a bad sense, as he squanders his set pieces, flashbacks, and other attention-getting with sometimes downright wretched staging.
  79. In My Sleep
    The biggest problem with Allen Wolf's thriller is that there are so few characters that it's immediately clear what's going on; there's simply no one to suspect besides the obvious.
  80. Paper Man
    An artist-in-crisis piece run through a drab but quirk-conscious indie processor, Paper Man is everything a film like "Lost in Translation" fought not to be.
  81. Ramchand Pakistani
    In the end, however, Ramchand Pakistani sadly negates its intentions with frequent TV producer Jabbar's soapy storytelling and too-clean production values.
  82. Iron Man 2
    The elements that made the first Iron Man a rather likable blockbuster have not entirely evaporated. Favreau brings together interesting American movie stars and lets them actually play through scenes.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Letters to Juliet
    Gary Winick's flat direction does the material no favors: If Egan and Seyfried have any chemistry, it's framed out of their awkwardly staged climactic kisses.
  84. Entre nos
    The postscript reveal that Entre Nos, which follows a newly single immigrant mother as she ekes out a living on the streets of New York, is based on the filmmaker's own story is more affecting than anything that made it to the screen.
  85. Two in the Wave
    Director Emmanuel Laurent extends de Baecque's essay with clips from Truffaut-Godard films (diminished in HD) and, rather than new interviews with contemporaries, footage of an attractive actress (Isild Le Besco) flipping through old photos and looking pensively at the entrance of the old Cinémathèque Française.
  86. Convention
    The film's frustrating treatment is actually more like the local reporter who is shown struggling to stay in the loop.
  87. Reel Injun
    Combining a road trip from his native Arctic reservation to Los Angeles with an archival cinematic survey, Diamond's treatment of each is perfunctory to the point of inutility.
  88. Wah Do Dem
    Methinks we're meant to actually feel sorry for this overprivileged twerp in neon sunglasses.
  89. The Nature of Existence
    There's something a tad disingenuous about the director's quest for meaning, as if the whole arc of the project has been contrived to adhere to a scripted template rather than to document a genuine search.
  90. Ramona and Beezus
    Wholesome to the point of being dull.
  91. Mama Africa
    These after-school specials are distinctly depoliticized and seem tailored for Western audiences, so the African settings feel oddly superfluous.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    [Rec] 2
    Predictably, [REC] 2 is higher-budgeted than its barebones predecessor, which only means that the spectacular degradation of video in scenes where the zombies get in close and start chomping will test the limits of any HDTV. If only [REC] 2's rabid baddies knew how to push [STOP].
  93. Countdown to Zero
    This is another well-intentioned but preaching-to-the-choir doc, and boring as well.
  94. The Concert
    Beyond fans of Mélanie Laurent--who furiously fingers a fiddle and wears flashback wigs--The Concert may appeal to those who delight in stereotypes.
  95. Twelve
    Though Crawford's bangs and facial hair are the most art-directed aspect of the movie, he's costumed to look like a member of the Trenchcoat Mafia (Madison Avenue branch).
  96. The People I've Slept With
    (It) notably liberated itself from the fusty tradition that a sex comedy should either titillate or tickle an audience.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Going the Distance
    Distance is rated R because everyone swears excessively for no reason, the supporting cast of smart comedians (Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis) saddled with delivering painfully dumb, often unnecessarily dirty dialogue.
  98. Hiding Divya
    Though the leads make for a believable family unit, the performances in writer-director Rehana Mirza's thin-skinned, no-frills drama unevenly range from functional to histrionic.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's Kind of a Funny Story
    "I used to think art was just bourgeois decadence," a wiser Craig says in the end, which is funny, because that's kind of what this film is.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life as We Know It
    The feminine fantasies Berlanti seemingly seeks to stoke are undercut by a vibe that's weirdly misogynistic.
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