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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    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Project Nim
    Marsh's film remains a deeply haunting portrait of the unbridgeable gap between kindred species.
  2. Neil Young Trunk Show
    Removing even stage banter, the focus is entirely on performance, save for a few "candid backstage" bits--Young getting a cracked nail filed down, etc. Devotees will thrill to rarities like "Kansas" and "Mexico."
  3. Spider-Man 2
    As much as I enjoy Spidey's high-flying Cheez-Doodle swoops through the skyscraper canyons of a digitally rearranged midtown Manhattan, I get no kick from his angst, especially since in this incarnation, as opposed to the '60s comic book version, he's more innocuously depressed than defensively paranoid.
  4. True Grit
    True Grit is well worth seeing, but it is hardly a monument either to Wayne or to the western. [21 Aug 1969, p.37]
    • Village Voice
  5. Mandy
    The film’s two sides — the soft, textured reverie of its first half, and the surreal, angular savagery of its second — exist in perpetual balance; one would die without the other.
  6. 20 Feet from Stardom
    It does what the most powerful films and music have always done, which is to spark contemplation of our own lives and choices, and our place in the world, while also stoking compassion and empathy for lives far removed from our own.
  7. Avatar
    Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is "Dances With Wolves."
  8. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    While its unconventional approach eventually becomes a tad wearisome, Morgen’s film proves a uniquely revealing exploration of the development, and eventual disintegration, of the heart and mind (and spirit) of a musician incapable of finding solace in, or transcendence through, his angst.
  9. 20th Century Women
    Despite the movie's title and Bening's central role, women are oddly peripheral.
  10. My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Kasper Collin's melancholy, beautiful feature debut does more than just chronicle this undervalued musician; it brings Ayler and his message of spiritual unity back to life.
  11. Pina
    Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.
  12. Animal Kingdom
    Michôd wants a Greek epic but doesn't have the material. Animal Kingdom is a work of obvious ambition, and seeing a debut filmmaker swing for the fences like this is its own kind of moviehead satisfaction.
  13. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    This is powerful reportage, beautifully shot and gracefully laid out; too bad that Kendall ties it all up with more deep thoughts from the bus itself, thoughts that sound like outtakes from a TED Talk on the interconnectedness of all living things.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hugo
    Perfunctorily mounted as a children's adventure, Hugo is weirdly staid in its pacing, and the screenplay, by Scorsese's "Aviator" collaborator John Logan, is full of groaners. The movie is far more successful as a barely veiled issue flick.
  15. The LEGO Movie
    Lord and Miller do great work within constraints, taking pre-made pieces and fashioning them into feats worthy of applause. It's no wonder they made a Lego movie — and it's no wonder it's so good.
  16. Drag Me to Hell
    If the booga-booga shocks are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its audience right in its last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by crack editor Bob Murawski through a burlesque exorcism.
  17. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    It's all true--every magical, exhilarating, infuriating, dumbfounding, jaw-dropping second of Gordon's miniature masterpiece.
  18. Spider
    Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings.
  19. Hadewijch
    With Hadewijch, he (Dumont) endorses something like the Dardenne brothers' rugged, squalid secular humanism, offering the barrier-breaking embrace as vague alternative to Despair, Church, or Capital.
  20. The Day He Arrives
    Like Rohmer, Hong is wonderful with atmospheric effects, using whirling snowfalls to place his characters' inchoate longing in relief.
  21. The Selfish Giant
    Devastating in its simplicity and honesty, The Selfish Giant is a colossus of feeling.
  22. A.K.A. Doc Pomus
    Even if you know this history already, A.K.A. Doc Pomus is vital and endearing, a celebration of a great artist, a great character, and the universality of great pop.
  23. Sol LeWitt
    Chris Teerink's superb film documents the work of artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), whose legacy lies not only in past accomplishments, but in the work he left for others to complete.
  24. Ixcanul
    Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.
  25. The Future Perfect
    With unpretentious formal rigor and a lighthearted deadpan, the film tracks Xiaobin’s development through self-reflexive escalation.
  26. Seymour: An Introduction
    The film Hawke has made — which borrows its title, though little else, from J.D. Salinger — works both as a celebration of Bernstein, whose spirit is at once gentle and boldly generous, and as a way of exploring creativity and the meaning it can have in our lives.
  27. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.
  28. 56 Up
    By now, grandchildren are ever-present, and stasis has set in. Apted's entire project is awesome in scale but subject to inevitable diminishing returns.
  29. Triad Election
    To's take on the plight of the modern gangste is inspired.
  30. Serpico
    Ought to look pretty dated. Instead, Sidney Lumet's biopic of Frank Serpico, the virtuous cop who exposed a network of graft in the NYPD, feels depressingly relevant.
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