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. The Yellow Birds
    What Moors offers that’s new is a kind of unfolding mystery, as we come to find what really happened to Murphy in the war zone. Too bad that the pacing is botched and that the whole narrative becomes one long dirge of “and then, and then, and then.”
  2. Joy
    Russell enthusiasts — and I consider myself one — often applaud the director's abiding interest in the messiness of his characters' lives, most vividly on display in American Hustle, a movie animated by flamboyant dissemblers and depressives. But the disorder found in Joy is a reflection not of any quicksilver dynamics among the actors but of the odd tonal shifts in the film itself.
  3. Wassup Rockers
    Larry Clark's latest finds the grizzled shock-meister in a thoughtful mode and a mellow mood.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Matador
    The Matador reserves judgment while raising the core issue concerning this traditional ritual: deep, poetic cultural expression or glorified animal cruelty?
  5. Lucha Mexico
    The film's most worthy detour is into the history and personal significance of masks.
  6. The Extra Man
    Going below the surface, the filmmakers and the cast (including a marvelous performance by Marian Seldes as an osteoporotic doyenne) successfully create the hardest characters to pull off: exotic yet recognizable New Yorkers.
  7. That Sugar Film
    That Sugar Film suffers from some of the usual stunt-doc laziness.... But Gameau builds his case well.
  8. A Fragile Trust
    While mostly well made, and certain to serve as a handy précis for the J-school set, A Fragile Trust is more a soiling reminder than a revelation for anyone already familiar with Blair's case.
  9. Monsters vs Aliens
    The grandeur of the effects--the honest-to-God spectacle of the thing--elevates Monsters vs. Aliens to something approaching art. It's not a masterpiece, but it's most certainly a milestone.
  10. W.
    A painful movie to endure.
  11. Going Shopping
    Henry Jaglom's latest study of contemporary female obsessions among a noxious clan of West L.A. bourgeoisie is of more pathological than cinematic interest.
  12. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    The ending has a surfeit of sugar, but writer-director Arvin Chen's story jaunts along, a cheery rom-com tinged with dream visions and a somewhat daring conceit.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kamikaze Girls
    If you value plausibility in movies, skip Kamikaze Girls; this is the sort of picture where getting run over by a truck gives a character gorgeous hair instead of a broken hip.
  14. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The biggest titters at a recent preview screening came during a scene in which Mewes shows off his dick--as though, at last! Still, how Jason Segal of him. Does Apatow always get there first?
  15. Twilight
    In the 17-million-copy land of "Twilight," the calling card isn't blood and fangs, but the exquisite, shimmering quiver of unconsummated first love. By that measure, the movie version gives really good swoon.
  16. The Secret Disco Revolution
    The film isn't as smart on the issue of race as it needs to be, and its feminist read of the music and scene feels forced in places, but as an entry-level conversation starter, it gets the job done.
  17. Bokeh
    Toward the end, the filmmakers relent on all the grieving sightseeing and offers up a couple plot developments, plus colloquies on matters geo- and theological. None of this proves as arresting as Iceland’s cliffs and horses, or those first moments of a city depopulated.
  18. Max
    For all its flaws, Max does propose a credible young Hitler, played by Noah Taylor as an unpleasantly opinionated, arrogantly ascetic, defensively vain autodidact with a diffident sneer and a bottomless well of grievance to draw upon.
  19. The Manson Family
    A film the family might've made themselves: sophomoric, hagiographic, amateurishly strobe-happy, and thoroughly hippiefied.
  20. Soft Fruit
    Bursting with grotesque burlesques of household relations.
  21. Concussion
    Concussion isn't much of a movie, but it's a fascinating bellwether for where the National Football League currently stands on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease associated with many of its former players.
  22. Calling All Earthlings
    There isn’t much marijuana use in Jonathan Berman’s documentary Calling All Earthlings, but its elliptical, ramshackle structure could make one question the merits of legalization.
  23. Edge of Darkness
    Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, Gibson can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.
  24. The Merry Gentleman
    Keaton, who took over directing duties from ill-stricken screenwriter Ron Lazzeretti before shooting started, inherited a stock-still story of two lonely souls and never develops their rapport.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Finding Eleazar
    Only true opera diehards will appreciate the backstage psychodrama, a catalog aria of the singer's multiple neuroses.
  26. Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer?
    Director/producer Eve Marson doesn't characterize Hurwitz as devious or nefarious. Instead, she presents him as a naïve, way-too-trusting schnook — an even more troubling diagnosis.
  27. Touchy Feely
    Worse than the goofy premise, Shelton fails to enliven the incredibly talk-heavy (but subtext-free) inaction with any sort of visual flair.
  28. Dom Hemingway
    If only Shepard's movie lived up to his leading man. It's merely a frame for a character portrait, with Shepard's camera screwing our eyes to Law's performance and pasting in supporting actors and situations for no larger purpose than to see his reaction to them.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Jihad for Love
    Muslims, Jews, and Christians may have their, oh, occasional differences, but as an Islamic scholar observes early in Parvez Sharma's documentary, there is one point on which the world's divine religions agree: Homosexuality is a crime.
  30. I'm So Excited
    I'm So Excited! is characterized by a distinct brand of unsuccessful yet ambitious storytelling, the kind often found in minor works by major masters.
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