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. Quartet
    Sentimental and pandering.
  2. Prometheus
    With this overreaching Prometheus, Scott seems a bit like David carefully arranging his hair in imitation of O'Toole's Lawrence. He can still mimic the appearance of an epic, noble, important movie - but the appearance is all.
  3. Orgasm Inc.
    Too scattered in its arguments and piecemeal in its sources to weave together a convincing institutional condemnation.
  4. Northern Soul
    This debut feature by Elaine Constantine has no shortage of style, but ultimately relies a lot on cliché.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
    It's a stunning sight inside this notorious jail compound, which is better known for violence and corruption.
  6. Goon
    When considering the moral implications of such gladiatorial violence, the film comes out squarely in favor, asking what's crueler: enjoying the spectacle of blood on ice or taking away a livelihood from those who can't do anything else?
  7. Slash
    It's both funny and enlightening, a nuanced yet strikingly bold look at how teens see themselves, not how adults would like to see them. Parents: Take note. Teens: Relax, you'll figure it out.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Princesas
    De Aranoa never condescends to his subjects, and Caye's mixture of aggression and tenderness is appealingly authentic.
  9. Teenage
    The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.
  10. The Patience Stone
    The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.
  11. Jean Gentil
    Although it's steeped in tragedies both personal and cultural, this contemplative, gorgeously shot documentary-fiction hybrid from husband-and-wife auteurs Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán nevertheless keeps an unsentimental distance from its titular saint-savant and the existential crisis he endures.
  12. Soft in the Head
    Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Renoir
    Wisely, director Gilles Bourdos keeps the pace slow, what with all the tensions beneath the surface: Oedipal conflict, career choices, even class struggle.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grateful Dawg
    It's like an 80-minute flip through the Grisman family photo album -- complete with live, unreleased soundtrack.
  15. Big Bad Wolves
    Even though Papushado and Keshales raise some ticklish questions, it's hard to know exactly what they're going for, beyond some mischievous, grisly thrills. At least they're skillful at delivering those.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    The Red Tent manages not to collapse and is on the whole a likable movie. It reminded me of the typical '50s epics - lavishly produced, lushly scored, requiring relatively little thought, and perfect for two hours escape. [26 Aug 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  17. The Pursuit of Happyness
    Too emotionally slick to work, too visually glib to have an impact, made by people who think grit is something that's brought in by the prop department.
  18. In Praise of Love
    A sustained immersion in gorgeously austere street photography and casual portraiture, the images punctuated by bits of black leader and gnomic intertitles, the action propelled by sweetly pulverized music and an effortlessly layered soundtrack of enigmatic conversations. Poetry is really the only word for it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eight Below
    A gorgeous art film full of snowy silences and spare, gestural performances threatens to break loose (the most inspired acting comes courtesy of the canines), though the plot's slavish schmaltz proves as oppressive as the harsh winter that descends upon the dogs.
  20. Belle
    There's a great story here, but Asante — who has made one previous feature, the 2004 drama A Way of Life — can't quite harness its power.
  21. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Would that Harris had simply let the images and their historical context speak for themselves. His narration is simplistic and narcissistic... and the textual ideas he and his interviewees present about the intersection between race and imagery are hardly fresh.
  22. Avenue Montaigne
    Not that Thompson's films lack for romance. She shoots Paris like Woody Allen shoots New York--ritzy, golden, and packed with chance meetings between highly strung arty types.
  23. 1408
    The horror wouldn't work without Cusack, who makes what could have been a rote acting exercise--Be tough! Now angry! Now defensively funny!--a cathartic ritual instead.
  24. The Low Down
    Captures the latent anxieties of a hazy, ambling existence with pinpoint accuracy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
    John and John, it cannot be denied, are charming, witty, adorable, and quite capable of rocking.
  26. Mondays in the Sun
    It's forgivable, and even appropriate, that Mondays itself suffers from a certain lack of definition -- a drifting, repetitive dead-endedness that, at the inconclusive finale, shows no signs of abating.
  27. Blackboards
    Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.
  28. Enigma
    Doesn't coddle the audience. But neither does it play fair. The narrative takes several fast turns and stops short with the sudden introduction of new material; the exposition is hurried and lazily predicated on characters' thinking aloud.
  29. Unlikely Heroes
    It's also frustrating-we long to learn more about each individual. Still, the sheer fascination and profoundly moving power of these stories transcend the film's more conventional limitations.
  30. The Sixth Sense
    Complain all you want about Willis's posturing and the rabbit-in-the-hat ending (predicated as it is on a vast plothole), the film is still a rarity, a studio horror movie focused on a child's traumatic stress.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »