Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Jersey Boys
    Eastwood may never show us his boys discovering themselves under that street lamp, but he gives us a clutch of moments worth treasuring — and mostly without overdoing it.
  2. SiREN
    Bishop isn't afraid to leave the club behind, confidently expanding beyond the seedy premise to become a three-way chase among the bachelor party guys, the club management, and a ferocious supernatural force.
  3. Effie Gray
    You can feel the good intentions vibrating off the screen, but it's still a listless affair, one that takes forever to go almost nowhere. The picture struggles so valiantly to be a woman's empowerment fable that it leaves you wishing for just a little romance.
  4. Memoirs of a Geisha
    Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.
  5. Battle for Terra
    Terra, to be fair, looks fairly clean, and the 3-D is totally passable, but watching it will be no fun for either kids or adults.
  6. Hidalgo
    The screwball antics recall "Cannonball Run" more than David Lean.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Milan Hlavsa a Plastic People of the Universe
    For the non-Czech audience, the overview may be patchy. Viewers who know heroes aren't saints deserve more information about the band's internal rifts, the main thing that kept them nonfunctional after 1988. With history this juicy, the music gets upstaged -- it's a limitation of the medium.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    4:44 Last Day on Earth
    The use of stock footage eventually approaches overkill in the montage-heavy climax. Much more impressive is the way Ferrara uses his own "documentary" footage of the city.
  9. He's Way More Famous Than You
    As unhinged as it is hilarious.
  10. Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen
    If Mulholland made The True Gen half as aesthetically pleasing as it is informative, the film would be remarkable.
  11. 12-12-12
    Despite some pleasant backstage-footage filler, however, 12-12-12 ultimately so truncates its artists' performances (each is given one song, and those are heavily edited) that the effect is like watching the original TV broadcast in fast-forward.
  12. A Will for the Woods
    While the film also captures many private, sometimes heartbreaking scenes, it takes a lot of time to make its simple point.
  13. Love Beats Rhymes
    Love Beats Rhymes is more of a showcase for star Azealia Banks than director RZA, but his influence is still felt in this formulaic hip-hop romance.
  14. Free to Run
    The philosophical underpinnings of Swiss director Pierre Morath's well-paced documentary about the evolution of long-distance running evoke the motto of neighboring France: liberté, égalite, fraternité.
  15. The Paris Opera
    Unfortunately, the film has nothing much to say other than that the enterprise is inherently complicated — which isn’t point enough for 111 minutes of screen time.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    David Barba and James Pellerito’s doc foregrounds Marcelo Gomes’s beautiful body even as it revels in his good brain, excellent spirits, flawless dance technique, and sense of humor.
  17. F.I.S.T.
    I found myself reasonably absorbed in this grown-up though not sufficiently lived-in and thought-through entertainment. [01 May 1978, p.45]
    • Village Voice
  18. All Is Bright
    Maudlin and mirthless, it's a film misbegotten enough to almost make one hate Christmas.
  19. Pontypool
    For a film about the perils of too much talk, there's quite a lot of babbling presented as profundity. The political statements in Pontypool, much like those in another recent Canadian offering, Atom Egoyan's trite terrorism hand-wringer "Adoration," seem all the less provocative for appearing several years too late--McDonald's film might have had more punch if it were released when Bluetooth first rolled out.
  20. Art School Confidential
    Art School Confidential is replete with humorous detail--in that respect, the student art projects are particularly fine--but it's the attitude that rules.
  21. Ricki and the Flash
    Demme's film plays out like a catnapping afternoon dream. We recognize the world, yet the logic is screwy.
  22. Save the Date
    Unremarkable, thinly sketched characters, many adorned with creative careers or hobbies, populate the romantic dramedy Save the Date, yet another unfocused movie about generic relationship quandaries.
  23. Sparkle
    The forebear's underwritten melodrama has been supplanted by Tyler Perry–like soap operatics and much jawing about the Lord, riots in the Motor City, marriage proposals, and maternal heartbreak and disapproval.
  24. The Devil's Rejects
    By rubbing your nose in this hillbilly mayhem, Zombie all but dares you to acknowledge your liberal elitism, simply because just now, in Dubya's America, you don't happen to find anything particularly funny or lovable about stupid, dangerous provincials.
  25. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    By Jackass standards, Bad Grandpa is benign—it’s neither as fun nor as thrilling as watching Knoxville play tetherball with a beehive.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    10 Items or Less
    10 Items or Less is a case study in cluelessness.
  27. Hands of Stone
    The bouts are all muddles lacking sustained choreography or a sense of trajectory, with crowd-reaction shots and sports-announcer voice-over carrying the slack.
  28. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Cassel’s Gauguin may ultimately be a lightweight cinematic descendant of the monstrous European pioneers that Klaus Kinski played in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but he’s also both menacing and pitiable enough to make Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti riveting on a moment-to-moment basis.
  29. 12 Strong
    Fuglsig is adept at showing choppers and peaks, caves and campfires, at suggesting the great silence at the roof of the world. He’s also a sure hand with the geography of battle, with ensuring we understand why the bullets fly in the direction they’re flying — and both where they come from and where they hit. That said, the firefights do wear on.
  30. Melinda and Melinda
    Neither comedy nor tragedy, the movie is closest to genteel soap opera.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »