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. Northern Light
    [A] strange, singular heartbreaker of a film about life still flourishing in the most inhospitable conditions.
  2. Boxing Gym
    Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.
  3. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Guy and Madeline is at once self-conscious and breezy, clumsy and deft, diffident and sweet, annoying and ecstatic. It's amateurish in the best sense, and it radiates cinephilia. No movie I've seen this year has given me more joy.
  4. Crazy Heart
    It's merely a well-done, adult American movie--that is to say, a rarity.
  5. The Fool
    Bykov's moral tale is clear-eyed and callused over, worrying not over individual lives but over a nation's soul.
  6. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
  7. De Palma
    Paltrow and Baumbach don't get fancy with the filmmaking. They're smart enough to let De Palma's own resonant images — his gorgeous compositions, his smooth camera moves — do much of the work.
  8. Custody
    Legrand demonstrates great skill as a tactician in this closing third, but his overarching framework for Custody — with its considerable reliance on is-he-or-isn’t-he uncertainty — demands that he sacrifice interior perspectives.
  9. Adaptation.
    Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.
  10. Fighter
    Probably more terse than it needs to be, but the dramatic line has an elegance and drive that reinforces the unexpected turns of the story.
  11. The Forbidden Room
    The experience is two-thirds thrilling to one-third enervating, a winning ratio for what's essentially a tightly curated anthology film.
  12. The Secret of the Grain
    Escalates into visceral allegory with an abandon and cruelty that seem positively Romanian. The last 30 minutes more than redeem the preceding two hours.
  13. Miss Kiet's Children
    Much like a day at elementary school, this vérité wonder called Miss Kiet’s Children is exhausting, heartening, raucous, tender, occasionally dull, sometimes tearful, and ultimately a vital public good.
  14. The Wind Rises
    An emotionally generous and expansively detailed romantic fantasy.
  15. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold--with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere.
  16. In the Loop
    Not to detract from the pleasure of watching the consistently excellent actors, who enhance the dialogue's bite with their body language, but the script of In the Loop is so rich that it could work as a radio play.
  17. Bus 174
    Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument.
  18. Amores Perros
    Undeniably high-powered. At 153 minutes, it's also punishingly overlong.
  19. Osama
    Its sluggish, amateur-Kiarostami character would be off-putting if the material weren't so powerful.
  20. The Salt of the Earth
    The movie Wenders and Juliano have made is a tribute that feels both grand and modest in scale: Just as Salgado's photographs do, it extends the notion of friends and family to include every citizen of the world.
  21. Rat Film
    What exactly does it all mean? I’m not sure, but it does make for a disturbing and occasionally absorbing watch.
  22. Office
    Wry and self-aware but never finger-wagging, Office looks back on an economic precipice and finds more humor and spirit than any other depiction yet made about it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chop Shop
    Authentic as all this feels (and smells, and tastes), Chop Shop gives off a heightened sense of reality, a faintly idealized atmosphere akin to the Lower East Side milieu of "Raising Victor Vargas," a close relative in the New York branch of neo-neorealism.
  24. Raising Victor Vargas
    Tender and funny.
  25. '71
    [An] excellent, tensely controlled thriller.
  26. Blackfish
    The movie is revealing, wrenching, and important, a reminder that what feels wrong in our gut—the effort to turn free-roaming and unknowable beasts into caged vaudevillians—is always worth investigating.
  27. The Guilty
    The Guilty beautifully demonstrates how people can act with absolute conviction even when they don’t have the full picture of a situation, and the monstrousness this can in turn lead to. And if that doesn’t speak to our time, then I don’t know what does.
  28. Field Niggas
    Allah, a street photographer of deserved renown, has achieved something here beyond the familiar documentary impulse to show us the people who live on the streets. His immersive, unsettling techniques dig at a sense of what it might feel like to be among them.
  29. Corpse Bride
    Corpse Bride never skimps on the sass (as a good folktale shouldn't). And the variety of its cadaverous style is never less than inspired; never has the human skull's natural grin been redeployed so exhaustively for yuks.
  30. Young Frankenstein
    Longer on charm and cheer than on humor of knee-pounding hilarity...the funniest film of the season by default.
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