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. Whip It
    Highlights: Andrew Wilson as the roller girls' coach (ah, so there's the Wilson brother who can act) and the roller-derby vets (played especially well by Juliette Lewis and Kristen Wiig) about whom we learn just enough to wish the movie was focused on them instead.
  2. In the Basement
    Seidl's study reminds us, with each new basement, that the places where we're most ourselves might as well have grown off us like the shells of mollusks.
  3. Z for Zachariah
    The film works on its own terms, capturing, at least, the mournful vibe of O'Brien's book. What's more, Zobel's revision opens up plenty of space for the three actors who inhabit this circumscribed little world, all of whom are terrific.
  4. Go Down Death
    Schimberg, in this debut, demonstrates rare assuredness in shooting and staging scenes, coaxing unexpected but true-feeling flourishes from his cast of mostly amateurs blessed with extraordinary faces.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Praying with Lior
    Trachtman’s movie is not technically accomplished--the camerawork is run-of-the-mill, the structure is rambling--but it’s redeemed by the deliciously complex, practically Balzac-ian family at its center.
  6. The Housemaid
    Despite eccentric touches, like a handheld street-shot overture and Grand Guignol Omen references, there's little difference between this story and soap-opera intrigue.
  7. The President's Last Bang
    From mid-movie on, confusion escalates (along with one's incredulity).
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    This impressionistic approach eschews traditional biography, instead giving the viewer the feeling of being inside a moment, without necessarily providing all the information we might need to contextualize what we're seeing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Age of Consequences
    Scott's filmmaking does a smooth job of linking A to B to Z, with slick, studiously understated montage and an effective music score, although some of the arguments made seem a bit of a stretch, as if climate change is being shoehorned into things artificially.
  10. Primer
    Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction.
  11. The Girl on the Train
    For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into a tone poem.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Four Lions
    He's (Chris Morris) breaking taboos because broken taboos can be hilarious.
  13. 40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie
    Only a monster would begrudge Aronsohn for putting this all together. It doesn’t hurt that Magic Music really do have some chops.
  14. Into Eternity
    It is meant to boggle the mind and inspire awe-and it does.
  15. The Good Thief
    His movie (Jordan's) winnows the original's existentialist fable into a busy caper thriller, copping plot devices from Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11" and even straining to Wong Kar-wai its camera's way around the fleshpots of Nice. It's all pizzazz, and the pizzazz is all borrowed.
  16. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
    The film has its insights, but perhaps its greatest value is in how it offers something of a record of what time with the talkative, tireless Hentoff is like.
  17. The President
    Makhmalbaf makes you feel the enormity of the president's loss of self even if you don't actually feel for him.
  18. Gladiator
    The digital animation is far more evident here than in "The Phantom Menace."
  19. S#x Acts
    S#x Acts works as a crash course in sexual ethics, but it also fails to transcend its genre trappings as a morality tale about the dangers of low self-esteem.
  20. Bluebird
    For all its piteousness, [it's] often moving, always well acted, and distinguished by rare stillness and beauty.
  21. The Divine Order
    Though the story has a predictable ebb and flow, the film includes some stunning moments
  22. Moon
    Impressively pulled together on a modest budget, Moon has a strong lead and a valid philosophical premise but, despite Bell's fissured psyche, the drama is inert.
  23. The Sentinel
    What’s remarkable—and Kafkaesque—about La Sentinelle is how Desplechin grounds the phantasmagoric aspects of his tale in the details, routines, and conflicts of daily life.
  24. Last Days in the Desert
    Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.
  25. Band Aid
    I like this couple. And their songs aren’t bad! Not so the gender-binary Mars-Venus mumbo jumbo that dominates the resolution. Still, these are quibbles with an otherwise charming and honest marriage story.
  26. The Captain
    Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical.
  27. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Without Segel bravely channeling "his own anxieties and obsessions into his clowning," as Pauline Kael wrote about Woody Allen 24 years ago, Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been easily forgettable and, one might even say, limp.
  28. Home
    Ursula Meier's confident, appealingly bizarre theatrical debut.
  29. American Promise
    The film ends on up notes, but its strength is that it's not really a feel-good movie, instead shining a light on both how far we have come in terms of race in America and how very far we still have to go.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snow Angels
    What saves this heavy, heavy material from sinking into the chill, familiar turf of the Small-Town Midwinter Tragedy is Green's practiced ear for verbal idiosyncrasy and off-kilter conversation rhythms.
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