Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Salesman
    Watching The Salesman, I can’t help but feel that this is the first time Farhadi’s mastery of the particular is undercut by the artificiality with which he’s treated the general. He remains one of the world’s foremost filmmakers, but this time around, his expertise and artistry are undone by phoniness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Children Underground
    A horror story, told with Dickensian compassion, permeating outrage, and little hope.
  3. You Can Count on Me
    Seems like a TV movie. A well-written, sympathetically acted TV movie, to be sure, but so timid and clumsy in its deployment of picture, sound, and editing that you have to wonder if executive producer Martin Scorsese bothered to give notes.
  4. The Pianist
    Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.
  5. Get Out
    Get Out is fully surprising in both concept and craft, with the scares never coming just when you expect them and the secrets more audacious than you might be guessing.
  6. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.
  7. California Split
    California Split never comes to a very fine point in the psychological development of its characters. California Split is thus more about moment-to-moment living than momentous life. [03 Oct 1974, p.81]
    • Village Voice
  8. Song of the Sea
    The picture is beautifully rendered in pencils and watercolors, with some CG, giving it an appropriately timeless storybook look, even though it's set in a mostly modern world of buses and 3-D glasses.
  9. Amy
    A surprisingly seamless biographical documentary, one that, even though it's been constructed largely from found elements, feels gracefully whole.
  10. The Edge of Heaven
    It's not brilliant, but it wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships as the former Ottomans clean house for E.U. membership, and the demographic earthquake of 70 million Muslims waits at Europe's door.
  11. The Savages
    The movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo's liberation.
  12. Gimme Shelter
    A pop culture document for a mass audience.
  13. Ilo Ilo
    Small details and incidents accrete into a pointillist rendering of despair.
  14. An Education
    Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
  15. Lebanon
    Not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010.
  16. The Treasure
    In a manner so sly you could overlook it, Porumboiu invests this tissue-thin premise with the shadows of Romanian history.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Endurance
    Still enigmatic is the figure of Shackleton himself. The film conveys his remarkable leadership without explaining (beyond a because-it's-there romanticism) what would compel such a journey in the first place.
  18. Stranger Things
    The bond between this university graduate and the ragged drifter comes to seem vital and true, undercutting the full-blown sentimentality of the conclusion.
  19. Bridegroom
    Without forcing the material into facile uplift, Bloodworth-Thomason still edges it into the realm of inspirational, never overplaying the anguish or soft-pedaling the bigotry at the heart of the story.
  20. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints is a marvel of neorealism, with nonprofessional actors facing the same hurdles as their characters and writer/director Syeed improvising in shifting circumstances.
  21. I Am Another You
    An excellent, intuitive study of American wanderlust.
  22. The Rider
    Zhao takes a different approach, privileging the narrative, the poetry, and the realism in equal measure, blending them together to create something astonishingly powerful.
  23. Mali Blues
    First-time feature director Gregor never imposes a narrative arc on his subjects; instead, we meet them, hear their hopes and their fears, and then savor performances of singular beauty, power, and invention.
  24. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade rejects predictable plot points and instead lives on the electric edge of awkwardness and uncertainty and doubt that represents the middle school experience; you never quite know what’s going to happen to Kayla, and that feels right.
  25. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    Not just the definitive portrait of street-art counterculture, but also a hilarious exposé on the gullibility of the masses who embrace manufactured creative personas.
  26. Kings & Queen
    This extravagant family melodrama, one of the highlights of last year's New York Film Festival, runs two and a half hours and never lags, so moment-to-moment enthralling are Desplechin's narrative gambits, as well as his reckless eccentricity.
  27. Girlhood
    Raw and insistent, bold and brawling, Girlhood throbs with the global now, illustrating the ways an indifferent society boxes in the people who grow up in project-style boxes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let's Get Lost
    Let's Get Lost stands as a gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation's legacy of beautiful-loser chic.
  29. Offside
    Offside is blatantly metaphoric and powerfully concrete, deceptively simple and highly sophisticated in its formal intelligence.
  30. The Ornithologist
    Though full of mysteries, and, like all of Rodrigues’s work, consistently unpredictable from scene to scene, The Ornithologist may be the director’s most conventional narrative.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »