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. Bad Hurt
    Grief unleashes the possibility of change in this wrenching drama, allowing for an unexpected emotional thaw that rewards both stubborn optimism and traumatic resilience.
  2. Grace Is Gone
    The music--a gently jazzy piano-and-strings theme--is just fine, and a good deal less cloying than what was there before. One can only regret that Eastwood didn't offer to reshoot the whole movie while he was at it.
  3. Spinning Plates
    A love letter to that singular intersection of artistic innovation, cultural legacy, community pride, and family-sustaining (or -straining) commerce known as the restaurant.
  4. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    Takes us through reams of fascinating drama, from the first heroic forest-saving protests to the reactive police violence and resulting dead-of-night firebombs to the core group's implosion after the FBI tightens the net.
  5. The War Wagon
    The War Wagon is good for a few laughs and some spectacle while John Wayne and Kirk Douglas are taking Bruce Cabot and an outlandishly armored wagon apart. [14 Sep 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
  6. Black Dynamite
    No matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in "Coffy"--or the loony genre experimentation in "Pootie Tang."
  7. Bless Me, Ultima
    Volumes are said about class, assimilation, and the ways the assimilated sometimes shame and scar those who haven't shorn themselves of ethnic or racial signifiers. There is pungency in this shorthand, in these sketches that are richly evocative without saying too much or giving too little. You can't help but wish the movie had more of it.
  8. ...So Goes the Nation
    So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.
  9. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    The directors plant a camera in front of Roth and get him talking. To smooth over edits, they show us book covers and old photos—Roth was dashing, charming, a little dangerous, one of his college friends tells us, but she doesn't need to say it. It's manifest, and it's still true. The film is especially recommended to anyone who thinks they hate him.
  10. Staying Vertical
    As always with Guiraudie’s films, Staying Vertical shrewdly (and often hilariously) captures both the seriousness and the absurdity of sex.
  11. Birth of the Living Dead
    What distinguishes this doc from much of the tedious critical prose Romero has inspired is the fan-boy and fan-girl ardor that fuels its smarts--both behind and in front of the camera.
  12. Lemming
    Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.
  13. Ismael's Ghosts
    There’s no way around it: The whole, here, is a mess. Even with the extra minutes, the film seems unfinished, the connections among its disparate scenarios vague and arbitrary. But outside of the espionage-movie and poor-lonely-director-dude-can’t-stop-getting-laid interludes, many of those scenarios unsettle, provoke (intentional) laughter, or prove engrossing, especially in their doublings and mysteries.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Before the Fall
    The movie is too middlebrow to show us the superman-type sexual heroics they must've engaged in, or even allow the illicit subtext to float to the surface (as Sokurov does in Father and Son)--instead we get tepid moralizing on dehumanization in the military.
  15. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Like The Conjuring and the many immersive spook-house thrillers inspired by it, Origin of Evil demands and rewards attentiveness, inviting scrutiny of its frames, study of its negative space.
  16. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels is that rare contemporary filmmaker who's not afraid of melodrama. The Butler is so old-school it feels modern: Stylistically, it could have been made 30 years ago, but its time is now.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.
  18. Life, Above All
    Life, Above All suggests that ignorance and stigmatization are a problem only in the village, not in the highest office of government.
  19. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    There's a palpable avoidance of risk as this new mythology is wheeled gingerly into the marketplace and carefully positioned to zap your pre-sold brain...Solid but uninspired, Harry lacks brio. It's respectable and a bit dull.
  20. Alone with Her
    This first feature is shot "first person" and is first and foremost a concept -- at least as interesting to think about as to actually watch.
  21. The Slaughter Rule
    The lead performances could hardly be better: Gosling, having stolen and propped up entire movies last year ("Murder by Numbers" and "The Believer"), crackles with the economical intensity of a young Tim Roth. Morse, who has racked up decades worth of idiosyncratic character parts, is monumental in this career-peak turn.
  22. The Turandot Project
    A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.
  23. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive--albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality.
  24. Closer
    Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.
  25. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    The doc is also fat with film clips from before and after the 1979 revolution, but innocent of sensationalism as they are, Iranian films aren't terribly quotable—except when used to illustrate how filmmakers must choreograph their action so that men and women never touch on-screen.
  26. Favela Rising
    All in all, the movement turned out to be a godsend for Rio natives, but the film is merely a pep rally.
  27. The Decomposition of the Soul
    The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mundo alas
    Actual insight into these people's hearts and minds is replaced with skin-deep montages of cheery tour-bus road-tripping, hanging out with friends, and writing songs in the studio.
  29. Dzi Croquettes
    It's the mind-blowing performance footage (and there's lots of it) that makes this a must-see film.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Bullet Vanishes
    When two charming detectives are sent in to detect stuff, the movie comes to life with their antsy, noose-escaping, quasi-vaudevillian kinetics.
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