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. Shakespeare High
    If Shakespeare High lacks the tightness and emotional tension a competition doc needs to take off, we get to know enough of these preternaturally self-assured kids to care about what happens to them beyond the finals.
  2. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    A documentary saga of heartbreaking concentration-camp horrors, Inside Hana's Suitcase attempts to preserve Holocaust memories through frustratingly fractured means.
  3. Outside the Law
    The production design is nice enough, but Bouchareb's four-country co-production isn't an epic-it's just long.
  4. Nights and Weekends
    Very often, the "rawness" here seems like an inability to distinguish the essential from the banal (or elevate the banal to the essential). A good eye might help, but Swanberg and Gerwig's filmmaking is stubbornly disheveled.
  5. Advantageous
    Challenging viewers this way — denying clean resolutions, chucking out the urgent drama of the first hour of movie — is bound to alienate some audiences. But from its arresting first scenes, Phang's film is as much about why? as it is what next?
  6. Lemon
    A grating protagonist alone does not a bad film make, but the episodic, unsatisfying Lemon revels in purposeful nails-on-a-chalkboard unlikability.
  7. I Smile Back
    Silverman has taken serious, or at least semi-serious, roles before, but she's never had a part that demanded so much of her. She has been open about her own battles with depression, but what makes her turn here work is that it isn't nakedly expressive.
  8. Tower Heist
    More than the marquee names, the second bananas keep the movie bobbing along: Broderick's pharmaceutically vague hangdog act is perfect ("If you need me, I'll be living in this box"), while Peña turns out to be a fine comedian, an enthusiastically yipping dumb puppy here.
  9. Sarah's Key
    Dutifully follows the template of scores of movies about the Shoah: wringing from atrocity the most unseemly sentimentality.
  10. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    The longer versions of all Jackson's Middle-earth films have played better (and made more sense) than their theatrical cuts, but this time he's trimmed out something absolutely vital, the one element that, besides his mad gore-minded grandiloquence, has kept everything together five films running: an attention to the emotional lives of his hobbits.
  11. Don't Move
    A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.
  12. Winter Solstice
    What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.
  13. Sleep Dealer
    Science fiction easily lends itself to allegory, but while the dystopian near-future of co-writer/director Alex Rivera's feature debut focuses, admirably, on how globalization affects the third world, his ideas are as subtle as a light saber to the face.
  14. Happenstance
    Being French, the film at least has indelible details -- something a Hollywood remake would fix but good.
  15. The Child I Never Was
    Kai S. Pieck's debut feature finds a plaintive, compelling route to the pathology of 1960s German child-killer Jürgen Bartsch.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez
    With only a few letters and family photos, director Heidi Specogna never brings her subject to life.
  17. Only When I Dance
    British director Beadie Finzi follows both dancers to international competitions, where the difficult questions raised by their struggles are set aside.
  18. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    That so many of the colossal yokel's mental states are literalized, as when the screen fills with thousands of rats while Margueritte reads Camus's "The Plague" aloud to her new pal, typifies the movie's antipathy to nuance.
  19. This Is Where We Live
    Often threatening sentimentality yet never quite sinking into it, Josh Barrett and Marc Menchaca's This Is Where We Live benefits from the good taste of the filmmakers, whose appetite for understatement ensures that the picture maintains dramatic effectiveness and only rarely lurches into histrionics.
  20. Champs
    There's nothing especially new or vital to these familiar scenes; ditto a late excursion into the realm of concussions — undoubtedly an epidemic for athletes of all stripes, but one that further muddles an already unfocused film.
  21. Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
    HGBP too often relies on caricature.... Yet Cone, who is bighearted toward but not uncritical of his Bible-thumping characters, has a keen sense of seemingly incongruous details.
  22. Amnesia
    Under Schroeder’s direction, Keller and Riemelt deliver wistful, earnest performances that almost make up for the script’s shortcomings.
  23. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    The Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs franchise takes its comic cues from The Muppets and Pee Wee's Playhouse, kids' shows that ripen as their audience matures.
  24. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    A plea for equality of opportunity, a worthy objective somewhat obscured by non-disabled actors occupying the lead roles. In any case, one imagines Rory himself would prefer a Farrelly disability blooper reel.
  25. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Day-Lewis is as rooted as an oak in his character and milieu, yet easefully disengaged from the film's pensive histrionics.
  26. Go for Sisters
    It's not bad, but it feels rote, as if the film's events are just an excuse for us to hang with the film's people.
  27. Cape of Good Hope
    Only Nthati Moshesh, as a single black mother working as a housekeeper wooed by a displaced Congolese (Eriq Ebouaney), makes a dent in white-American-expatriate Mark Bamford's toothless scenario.
  28. The Day Silence Died
    Agazzi's movie rather provincially hints at sexiness, humor, and satire without actually manifesting them.
  29. The Contender
    Graceless writing and shameless plot contrivance.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Blade
    Yuki's streamlined revenge story (the furious, elegant choreography is by HK maestro Donnie Yen) has in its modest dimensions a surprising grace.
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