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. Southbound
    Just as most of them can't outrun their pasts, neither can they escape familiar plot contrivances that try too hard and achieve too little.
  2. Shrek the Third
    Blinded by avarice and all out of ideas, once again, Hollywood can't tell when enough is way more than enough.
  3. The Finest Hours
    Just as Pine's Bernie Webber grits his teeth and pilots his 36-foot Coast Guard boat into seas that rise up like angry gods, Gillespie steers head-on into clichés, powering through. They never quite capsize his film, but it does take on some water.
  4. Somm
    The film maintains a sluggish calm, like its mellow jazz soundtrack, and suffers from following four players with similar stories.
  5. Aurora Borealis
    Aurora Borealisulth -- yes, that title eventually comes home to roost -- doesn't offend in any way, but it's so self-consciously quaint, so unwaveringly "nice," that you nearly wish it did.
  6. The Trust
    In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film quickly loses focus and forgets the quirky characters that make the city — and the story — special.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    J.S.A.: Joint Security Area
    Politically, psychologically, and aesthetically schizophrenic.
  8. The Tree
    In her second film, writer-director Julie Bertuccelli, adapting Judy Pascoe's 2002 novel, "Our Father Who Art in the Tree," is sometimes partial to clumsy dialogue and scattershot pacing.
  9. The Seagull
    Onstage, we get to choose which face to regard, to watch each hard truth or unexamined lie crash against each character’s carefully maintained set of illusions. Here, we mostly see one face at a time. Those faces are grand enough that this Seagull still has much to recommend.
  10. The Night Before
    At first the laughs are Hangover III–spare and the picture is too shambling to lunge for them. But these leftovers warm up eventually. The usual setups at last develop variations, and you might be reminded of why audiences first responded to Rogen back in Knocked Up.
  11. Hotel Artemis
    Whether it’s the too-harried pacing or too many central people vying for attention, the film’s heart never quite coalesces. Seizing it is like trying to grab a cloud. Pearce seems to want this movie to be both a neon pulp plot-heavy piece and a character-driven drama, and there’s just not enough time in a single film for all of it to work.
  12. Undisputed
    The movie is typical Hill-pulp: modestly scaled and efficiently cheesy.
  13. Kiss of the Dragon
    A veteran of commercials and music videos, director Chris Nahon crowds out too much of the sprawling combat gymnastics, but his film doesn't lack for luxuriously seedy ambience --his Paris is a retro-futurist sewer.
  14. American Pie
    Returns the teen movie to the uncomplicated glory days of "Porky's" and "Losin' It."
  15. May
    The flavor is textbook '90s indie -- self-regarding quirk with an occasional spasm of Solondzian incorrectness.
  16. Ocean's Twelve
    Funnier and sprightlier than Eleven, which exhibited a genial self-consciousness but never thought to challenge the genre textbook, Twelve is committed to not taking itself seriously.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Burning Man: The Burning Sensation
    As predictable as a segment of "MTV Spring Break," which at least doesn't try to hide its voyeurism, Burning looks more like a travel-agency video targeted at people who like to ride bikes topless and roll in the mud than a worthwhile glimpse of independent-community guiding lights.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Grainy video and gimmicky editing give this documentary an amateurish feel, but Samir's charming, rueful interlocutors shine through.
  19. Our Man in Tehran
    Informative but tedious talking-head doc Our Man in Tehran is for anyone who watched Argo and then wished to hear a ditzy, history-obsessed uncle ramble about the real-life political stakes of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freakonomics
    A quartet of uneven TV pilots posing as a full-length documentary.
  21. Away We Go
    The road-trippers of Away We Go harbor no discernible ambitions whatsoever, which may make them true to Gen-Y life, but also renders them fatally uninteresting. For all the ground they cover geographically, dramatically their velocity remains zero. Mendes, too, seems to have trouble getting on board with the underachieving set.
  22. Heartless
    With erratic success, Heartless tries a number of different veins-urban fairy tale with "There was no magic, it was you all along" twist, supernatural family drama-but it's on firmest footing as a macabre comedy.
  23. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is a breeze, enjoyable both for its sweetness and its unapologetic silliness.
  24. Escape from Tomorrow
    While Escape is filled with inspired touches... Moore lacks the off-kilter psychological nuances of Lynch, as well as the go-for-broke storytelling skills and visual élan. It doesn't help that the cast is largely competent at best.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory Road
    As Coach Haskins would have put it, "It's activity without accomplishment."
  26. Gemma Bovery
    Fontaine handles the assignations with sympathetic shorthand — we see what Martin sees, but we see more, too, enough to understand that Gemma's dalliances are vital to her but not overwhelming. She has a handle on them.
  27. We Bought a Zoo
    The cynics will scoff and dismiss it all as manipulative, the heartstring-tugging machine on hyperdrive. But this movie isn't for them; did you not see the PG? It's a sweet, sincere, utterly affable kids' movie about how parents are all kinds of screwed up and unable to tell their kids what they want or show them how they feel.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    The stats relayed at the movie's end...almost have more impact than the narrative.
  29. Papillon
    Shaffner has really made an exhilarating movie out of the most dangerously depressing material. [10 Jan 1974, p.56]
    • Village Voice
  30. Low Down
    There are too many notes that, while not false, are neither satisfactorily resolved nor left interestingly unresolved.
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