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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    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy, Happy
    The questionable black-historical shorthand detracts from what is otherwise a well-performed and fitfully amusing film.
  2. Sound It Out
    Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.
  3. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Still, the tapes are great. More than just a flophouse Punch and Judy show, the Raymond vs. Peter dustups elevate cruel bickering to a ritual through which we live life's pain.
  4. Anna Karenina
    Just as the characters created by Tolstoy the artist got the advantage of Tolstoy the polemicist - at least until the end of his life - so these confoundingly good performances gradually win the movie from Wright's puerile conceit, giving us an Anna Karenina if not for the ages, than at least for an evening.
  5. Journey from Zanskar
    Although the film might be forced to rely rather heavily on Richard Gere's narration simply to situate the Western viewer, the actor does unify a bumptious collection of material that, taken together, relates what has to be admitted is a remarkable story.
  6. Wuthering Heights
    Heathcliff does not get the revenge he wants because he wants to escape the specific traumas of his adolescent past, shown in the film's first half. And because Arnold traps her viewers with Heathcliff's murky version of events. There's no room for enriching subtext in this version of Wuthering Heights because all the information we need is inscribed on the film's glassy surface.
  7. Surrogate Valentine
    A rambling valentine to San Francisco musician Goh Nakamura, Surrogate Valentine is a stylish pseudo-portrait that refracts Nakamura's gently impassive persona and lilting indie pop ballads through several lenses.
  8. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    A love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, it solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever - furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song.
  9. Oka!
    Oka!, a loose-limbed tapestry of cultural nuances, atmosphere, and song, is a tuneful tribute to the Bayakan spirit.
  10. Trouble with the Curve
    Here is the irony: Trouble With the Curve embodies all of the values it espouses - it is an old-fashioned, proficient, amiable, and decent movie - but it has no instinct.
  11. The Great Gatsby
    It's an expressionist work, a story reinvented to the point of total self-invention, polished to a handsome sheen and possessing no class or taste beyond the kind you can buy. And those are the reasons to love it.
  12. Stuck Between Stations
    There's an overapplication of split-screen and woozy soundtrack cues to this end, but Lister Jones and Rosen do an appealing back-and-forth with lively dialogue, not dulled in the interest of realism.
  13. In the Family
    With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don't feel stretched out so much as given room to breathe, In the Family proves that smart direction and an innate feeling for one's material trumps potentially precious subject matter.
  14. The Assault
    Taut, forceful, ritualistic, and all those other flattering adjectives applied to thrillers that actually thrill, this skyjacking docudrama showcases yet another genre (in addition to shock horror) the French are kicking our asses in.
  15. The Conquest
    Aided by an excellent ensemble cast, director Xavier Durringer and his co-scripter, Patrick Rotman, don't refrain from showing this truly repellent side of Sarko during his rise from minister of justice in 2002 to the highest elected office.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rampart
    Here the director pulls off the formidable task of marrying two unwieldy performances: Harrelson's, a volatile and vulnerable feat of showboating, and Ellroy's, whose writing voice is unmistakably the voice of the movie.
  17. The Innkeepers
    It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness - until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain.
  18. Letters from the Big Man
    Its quiet plea for reconnection with the non-human world is persuasive, and the engaged, agile meditation on the limits of communication at its center aligns it with Munch's earlier work. Oregon's million-dollar scenery, a sweet cameo by Karen Black, and Rabe's tough/tender performance sweeten the pot.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Garbo: The Spy
    Some of this footage feels like filler, but Roch's concept is strong: He's creating a dialogue between the fictions Pujol created to help win the war and the fictions Hollywood created to memorialize that victory.
  20. Knuckle
    Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.
  21. Addiction Incorporated
    With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.
  22. Perfect Sense
    Perfect Sense beautifully captures the ache and counterintuitive thrill of "the days as we know them, the world as we imagine the world" fading away by degrees.
  23. Roadie
    Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Footnote
    Something between a comedy of everyday absurdity and a family tragedy pushed into the realm of the hyper-real, Footnote uses its characters' differing relationships to authenticity as the basis for an enigmatic riff on representation.
  25. Lads & Jockeys
    Director Benjamin Marquet mingles black-and-white footage of students past with that of his current focus - three 14-year-olds in their first year of a jockey apprenticeship - to build a sense of specificity and continuum into a timeless passage.
  26. The Yellow Sea
    If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.
  27. London River
    Director Rachid Bouchareb brings a measured hand to this intimate, occasionally overdetermined sketch of the aloneness at the center of our global confluence.
  28. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.
  29. Captain Phillips
    Even if Captain Phillips treads into some ideologically rough waters, there's one thing that's hard to find fault with: Hanks gives a performance that goes from good (through the first 124 minutes) to extraordinary (in the last 10).
  30. El Sicario: Room 164
    Our subject retains a noticeable streak of pride in his expertise, though falters when discussing the killing of women. Hoping for his own salvation, the converted killer now claims the scales have fallen from his eyes, but his executioner's hood remains in place to the end - as does the mephitic air of timeless evil that hangs over El Sicario.
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