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. Captivity
    Roland Joffé creates a visually interesting and aurally unsettling vibe, and the story from B-movie maestro Larry Cohen keeps it simple.
  2. For the Bible Tells Me So
    Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.
  3. Itzhak
    The makers of the irresistible character-study doc Itzhak capture Itzhak Perlman’s characteristic warmth and bravado through short, anecdote-centric scenes that make the Israeli American violinist sound like a big-hearted raconteur who’s just dying to tell you everything about himself.
  4. Calendar Girls
    Remains a genial lesson in how to both honor and subvert womanly expectations.
  5. Chico & Rita
    The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés's story - though real-life figures including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and a Cuban songstress who bears some resemblance to Rita Montaner are featured as characters - but it's a dazzling thing to behold.
  6. Chronicle
    Chronicle, with its found-footage storytelling and superpowered teens, at least playfully transcends its "Cloverfield meets Heroes" pitch.
  7. Breaking Upwards
    A low-budget romantic comedy that's smart and lively and, in the end, quite affecting.
  8. Tell Me Something
    Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.
  9. Sisters in Law
    The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forces of Nature
    Well-constructed, if chilly, road romance, with some great throwaway lines.
  11. Darkest Hour
    Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes.
  12. The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain may not always be as grand as it should be, but its thrills compensate for its shortcomings.
  13. Tetro
    For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.
  14. Hero
    Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.
  15. Hyena
    The film's convoluted moral trajectory to hell may be as unoriginal as quoting Taxi Driver, and the pervasive violent menace can be needlessly punishing (including a drugged sexual assault), but as stylish, scorched-earth entertainment, it'll get you in its teeth.
  16. World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ondine
    Ciphers aside, Ondine effectively sustains a mood of a hazy melancholy most affecting when nothing much is happening.
  18. Union Square
    The total effect, of course, is abject sadness as we helplessly watch each enact a unique anti-success story in an inverted reality show.
  19. From Paris with Love
    He (Morel) brings in lobotomized entertainment at 90-odd minutes. During the February doldrums, this cannot be underestimated.
  20. Dark Horse
    The villagers, excitable everyday folks, make for capital interview subjects, and the filmmakers wring poignancy from re-enactments your brain knows are a little much but your heart may thrum to anyway.
  21. Marie's Story
    To play Marie today, Améris found the non-actor Ariana Rivoire at the Institute for the Deaf. And Rivoire is a revelation — showing what it's like to be in, and then break out of, a world of total darkness and silence.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    Geographic diffusion aside, Kondracki's fact-based thriller remains somewhat focused on its grim subject, though its principled bid to allure and enlighten the VOD-surfing masses results in a surplus of Hollywood-style eye candy and narrative formula.
  23. Detroit Unleaded
    Director Rola Nashef's visuals can be clunky, and her script's conversational dialogue is occasionally stilted. Nonetheless, she draws her characters in sharp lines, so that the gaggle of customers who frequent Sami's workplace...feel not like types but, rather, like diverse individuals.
  24. Heartbeat Detector
    Here, knowledge and understanding raise more questions than they answer, and the film ends not in closure, but in openness. It is precisely those qualities that give Heartbeat Detector its epic sense of humanity. Take them away and you'd be left with a leaner but markedly less compelling workaday workplace thriller: "Michael Clayton" with Nazis instead of lawyers.
  25. Dragonball: Evolution
    Far more entertaining than it deserves to be, unless you're a 10-year-old boy, in which case it's only the greatest movie ever made.
  26. Point Blank
    Point Blank never makes too much sense. But the forward momentum of Lee Marvin's mysterious vendetta against the skyscraper underworld manages to overcome Boorman's laborious exposition. [19 Oct 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
  27. World on a Wire (1973)
    A bit of a slog at 205 minutes, World on a Wire builds up to a satisfyingly nutty finale.
  28. Phantom Boy
    Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's superhero story Phantom Boy is no April and the Extraordinary World — but still fine for what it is.
  29. Bandits
    Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.
  30. The Green Prince
    Despite being an aesthetic bore, The Green Prince sets itself apart from the nonfiction pack via a recent story of two unlikely comrades’ heroic sacrifice, moral courage, and cross-cultural dedication to peace that’s not only gripping, but all too timely.
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