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. September 11
    It's hard to say if this devastating, nakedly exploitative work has a larger point beyond the evocation and infliction of trauma. A repeat viewing might clear that up, but it's an experience I'd rather not relive -- and one that I cannot in good faith recommend to anyone.
  2. Stolen
    Despite the soft-spoken Smith, a type-A British liaison self-named the Turbocharger, and the apparent involvement of the IRA, the doc prioritizes flash over facts, leaving you pining for the New Yorker exposé it could've been.
  3. L'ennemi intime
    With its sententious air of historical reckoning, Enemies is an impressive monument, but not a moving one.
  4. Valhalla Rising
    Frequently dull and stupidly obvious, you nonetheless have to applaud the misguided ambition of Refn's career turn. If nothing else, as the metal guitars get louder and louder, the synergy between Viking imagery and the pagan-obsessed metal freaks it spawned has never been clearer.
  5. Big Miracle
    While rooting for the marine mammals (and wishing for more footage of them - and even of their animatronic incarnations), your heart will also go out to the cast, stuck even more pitiably in syrupy manufactured crises.
  6. Wrecked
    Because it's so carefully parceled out and so evocatively framed (in widescreen), Wrecked is an absorbing ordeal, perhaps less for its survival narrative than its metaphoric heft.
  7. Buried Prayers
    With the survivors' physical presence amongst Nazi slaughterhouses as its own powerful statement, Buried Prayers is a nonfiction work that confronts Holocaust atrocities from a piercing ground-level view.
  8. Le Pont du Nord
    Playful and tense, loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy...It seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers—Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry—and expanded our sense of the possible.
  9. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    While it doesn't quite encompass everything, the film's still a bit too busy for its own good.
  10. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    Paley's segment proves that The Prophet is more of a missed opportunity than an ambitious folly.
  11. Yarn
    The film offers fascinating insight into what yarn can do in the talented hands of those determined to elevate mere craft to high art.
  12. This Is Everything: Gigi Gorgeous
    Anonymous haters on YouTube can say Gigi is fake, but her enthusiasm here, and the enthusiasm her teen girl fans have in meeting her, is totally genuine.
  13. Braven
    Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.
  14. This Is Our Land
    At times the film seems to struggle to find the right aperture: It hints at elements I wanted to know more about, and occasionally goes into avenues that seem to distract from Pauline’s compelling storyline.
  15. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Margaret
    It's less successful as a human drama than as a near-Brechtian exercise in what human drama looks and sounds like - a distanced but often car-crash compelling portrait of a teen as an unfinished being.
  17. Grand Piano
    Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.
  18. The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete
    Tillman is clumsy in his handling of a few scenes, and considering what these kids are up against—junkie moms, drug-dealing pimp neighbors—the ending might be a little too implausibly upbeat. But Tillman seems to know that we need to go home feeling hope for Mister and Pete, who, it turns out, aren't so easily defeated.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Bush's stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism. Not incidentally, the film also offers a compact primer in the ways of dharma. A tonic for Buddhists, no doubt, it offers many pleasures to atheists as well.
  20. Ice Age
    Has only its stylized designs to recommend it.
  21. The Boxtrolls
    The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower, and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film.
  22. Roadie
    Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.
  23. Stuck
    Stuck is both darkly comic and disgusting; the name alone reduces the crime to a sick joke.
  24. Nina's Tragedies
    With improbable charm, Gabizon knits it all together, his characters' sexual obsessions and earthiness tempered by a soulful melancholy.
  25. Sunshine Cleaning
    More than a year after its first twirl at Sundance, this Amy Adams–Emily Blunt dramedy finally shrugs its way into theaters, and it feels almost like an afterthought.
  26. Private
    Private never reconciles its conflicting impulses, and consequently, the human impact of the struggle--so powerfully explored in "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride" --never acquires the emotional weight it should. The semi-absurdist closer amounts to little more than a knee-jerk declaration of hopelessness.
  27. Headshot
    With Uwais choreographing the insane fights and Indonesian genre vets the Mo Brothers catching every bloody, manic minute, both fists and bullets get dished out with equal, frenetic fury — and the movie offers plenty of "Oh shit!" moments.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wondrous Oblivion
    If writer-director Paul Morrison's film traces a predictable arc from racial unease to acceptance, it's often winning--and sometimes tough-minded--in the details.
  29. Word Wars
    Even the fast-motion effects and flashy graphics can't make this a spectator sport.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Polar Express
    When it comes to the "humans," the atmosphere collapses. Unnervingly smooth, mouths moving in strange, even frightening formations, the Polar people are the least convincing things on-screen, glaring impostors amid the otherwise painstakingly rendered scenery.
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