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. Frailty
    It's a small, unassuming movie grasping at whole-hog homo psychopathicus, with its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement.
  2. 8 Women
    For all the tumultuous entrances and flouncing exits, the eight principals manage maybe three laughs among them.
  3. Joe the King
    The film belongs to Fleiss, and he makes Joe's inner life so transparent that it's heartbreaking to watch the boy dig himself into a hole.
  4. One Swallow Brought Spring
    The script offers neither a sustained narrative arc nor strong characterizations.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    In the rare moments when a rifle, grenade, howitzer, bayonet, dagger, fist, land mine, or flamethrower isn't being deployed, the film pushes its melodramatic plotline with soap operatic shamelessness.
  6. The Shine of Day
    The Shine of Day shows strangers rockily building a family together.
  7. Dementia
    As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.
  8. Sleeping with Other People
    Headland's film might have been more engaging if it were about its supporting characters.
  9. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    More often than not, these musical interludes are more like distractions aimed only to entice younger audiences (not a terrible thing).
  10. Dreams with Sharp Teeth
    Documentarian Erik Nelson, overcautious of his subject, is content to let Ellison luxuriate in his legacy of infamy--as a lothario, and a litigious and pugilistic combatant.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wanted
    In the end, Wanted may be most notable for cementing the connection between superhero movies and the cinematic craze they have temporarily supplanted, torture porn--both genres that, like "Fight Club," address our ambiguous fascination with being powerless and invulnerable at the same time.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am Taraneh, I Am Fifteen Years Old
    Can nobly stand behind its more celebrated forebears.
  13. Fighting for Life
    Director Terry Sanders's goal of comprehensiveness and some bad sequencing prevents the film from achieving the ringing purity of John Huston's postwar doc "Let There Be Light."
  14. Adoration
    The end result is a movie considerably more absorbing to talk, write, and think about afterward than it is to actually watch.
  15. The King's Choice
    The film is handsomely mounted, traditional in its scenecraft, superbly acted, and much less ham-handed than you might expect from a historical drama about a great man’s great moment.
  16. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    What makes the film — which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name — so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.
  17. JCVD
    What exactly is JCVD? Comedy? Confession? Confusion? No one will ever mistake these backstage shenanigans for "Irma Vep." But as a self-regarding expression of masculine angst, it's a Damme sight more fun than "Synecdoche."
  18. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue.
  19. Dolphin Tale
    By the end of the movie, Winter has become a mascot for human disability, especially for children, and Dolphin Tale has enough depth and sensitivity to tap into emotion without feeling manipulative.
  20. A Better Life
    Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason are unable to commit fully even to this sudsy vision, tacking on a coda that completely undermines their already timid message.
  21. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page.
  22. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    There's nothing earth-shattering going on here, but it's a film you'll want to befriend.
  23. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    The fact that you can sense Westwood’s disillusionment with the documentary project while watching it creates some interesting tension, but director Lorna Tucker doesn’t fully exploit it or turn it into meta commentary.
  24. 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That Man: Peter Berlin
    Tushinski must spin Berlin's self-portrait photography and well-documented peacocking as more than predictable narcissism.
  26. Sister Helen
    Perhaps if Sister Helen had been released when filming was completed in 2000, its tough-loving Irish nun, who gives hell to male drug addicts in a Mott Haven "safe house," might have passed for endearing.
  27. Northfork
    Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.
  28. One Hour Photo
    Romanek's movie is a bit too pat and pleased with its undeniable ambitions, but the setup resonates with quiet desperation. There's not a single vicarious glorch.
  29. Father and Son
    Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.
  30. Dark Touch
    Dark Touch, like much of the best horror, works the fears that connect to real life.
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