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. Seaside
    Compare it to what passes for sophisticated filmmaking in this country and the movie becomes a living instrument of cinematic humanism: lovingly intent on observing, not judging; concerned with sympathy, not control; accepting the inevitable ambiguities, not denying them.
  2. Shadow Magic
    Properly picturesque but lacks subtlety and substance in blending Chinese and Western history, ideas, and cinematic conventions.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Last Dance is riveting when it focuses on the challenges of crossing a generational divide --The movie loses steam toward the end.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Lost Arcade
    The film meets the open door, come-as-you-are community on its own level, freely following both new and recurring faces over its diffuse 79 minutes and avoiding the forced, interwoven three-character structure that far too many works of American nonfiction seem obliged to employ.
  5. 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.
  6. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    [Whedon] wants to give us everything, and that he fits it all in is its own kind of feat. Age of Ultron is a middling film, yet it's so heavy with his sweat that it never feels like a lazy cash-in — which for a preordained summer megahit is an accomplishment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Captain America: The First Avenger
    (A) hokey, hacky, two-hour-plus exercise in franchise transition/price gouging, complete with utterly unnecessary post-converted 3-D.
  8. Glassland
    Barrett faces the daunting task of trying to contain Collette's tumultuous performance, and he struggles to make Reynor's more restrained turn work in the same space. The film trudges along in Collette's wake, fumbling for something to focus on apart from the bleeding wound just offscreen.
  9. Three... Extremes
    A black-blooded hoot.
  10. Born to Be Wild
    If not for its outsize IMAX presentation, this handsome nonfiction film would be little more than an uplifting episode of PBS's "Nature."
  11. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.
  12. An Open Secret
    Berg might have proven that there's a circle of powerful creeps, but not that the blame for this goes straight to the top.
  13. Our New President
    Our New President merely scratches the surface, and in its own weird way, comes to embody the plague of shallow spectacle it purports to fight against.
  14. City Island
    An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.
  15. Never Here
    Up through the ambiguous ending, Thoman withholds the story’s bigger puzzle pieces, which is satisfying when the focus is on Miranda’s quietly traumatic unraveling. Yet as a mystery, Never Here teases too much naturalism to get away with the haunting abstruseness Lynch does in his masterful return to Twin Peaks.
  16. Something's Gotta Give
    Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect.
    • 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.
  18. The Girlfriend Experience
    Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.
  19. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    Insofar as Ushpiz succeeds in putting the most provocative, salient, and damning aspects of Arendt's work into a lucid context, she exposes the limits of her own approach.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind Game
    All scrunched together into a dense marathon of optical-cranial overload, this mental puzzle-box arrives three decades too late for what would have been an inevitable midnight movie run, but undoubtedly there are American otakus popping this one into multi-region DVD players right now amid the glorbeling of bong hits.
  21. Genius on Hold
    One marvel of the film is how it conveys so much information so quickly, and with such accessibility.
  22. 500 Years
    Yates’s films, like the world itself, have no template — they’re messy, rich with feeling, liberated from simple theatrical structures, always honest about what is possible. That one of hers ends with hope is a gift.
  23. Survivors Guide to Prison
    Thankfully, Cooke crams in so much persuasively appalling information — especially during a tangential aside on mentally ill patients’ high death rates — that it’s easy to forgive him for seemingly trying to push all viewers’ proverbial buttons at once.
  24. The Heart of Nuba
    If Catena has flaws, filmmaker Kenneth Carlson declines to feature them, perhaps because they’ve been friends since their Brown University days thirty years ago. Still, the doctor has earned the adulation, and a visit to a leper colony shows why.
  25. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    Mitchell’s documentary style isn’t flashy or refined, but it is economical. The director does his homework and almost cross-examines the film’s subjects.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diary of the Dead
    Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible "Redacted," nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of "Cloverfield," but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm.
  27. Yossi
    For many of the film's brisk 84 minutes, Fox eclipses his earlier work-and several other same-sex tragedies-by immersing us in his protagonist's quiet turmoil.
  28. Alan Partridge
    An often funny workplace hostage comedy that doesn't demand prior knowledge of the character.
  29. Innocent Voices
    For more than an hour, schmaltzmeister Luis Mandoki (Message in a Bottle) directs as if on assignment for Miramax.
  30. Afterschool
    Afterschool, the almost frighteningly accomplished first feature made by Antonio Campos when he was 24, is high school as horror show.
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