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. Hatchet II
    This time out, Green is not as self-aware, devoting a solid hour of his film's 90-minute running time to pre-mayhem character development so witless and dull that Hatchet II might as well be "Friday the 13th, Part 14."
  2. Blood Done Sign My Name
    An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).
  3. Stalingrad
    Lush with feeling that could easily be mistaken for sentimentality, Stalingrad is more like a 19th-century novel than a 21st-century blockbuster. It's theatrical and intense, sometimes in an overbearing way, but it's never boring.
  4. The Good Night
    Director Jake Paltrow's feature debut has all the hallmarks of an earnest young man's feature debut, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I can only imagine that it fit Sundance like a fingerless glove when it had its premiere there earlier this year.
  5. Sold
    All the characters are broadly sketched, though well acted. Beyond that, the innate tension of the subject matter — and the shamelessly manipulated emotions — carries the film to its uplifting ending.
  6. The Children of Huang Shi
    A tale as ploddingly familiar as it is good-looking and worth telling.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stagedoor
    Shiva has a sensitive eye for rarefied outcasts.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    Frindel can't rescue Kagel from marginalization as a New Agey preacher man, but he does portray this hippest of all Krishnas as someone who deeply believes in the self-sacrificing mantra he chants, even if the very act of starring in a film seems to threaten it.
  9. Azumi
    If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.
  10. Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
    Jean-Paul Jaud's indignant doc is equally worthless for preaching the merits of organic chow via an emotionally reactive argument instead of an investigative one.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lola Versus
    More than subverting or satirizing the modern lady-in-crisis movie, he has made a big, broad stoner comedy, shot and performed naturalistically, from a woman's point of view. Narratively, it's not a huge shock where the film ultimately goes, but there are a number of fun surprises along the way.
  12. The Promise
    As drama and spectacle, it’s not quite first-rate — I rarely feared for these characters or believed that I knew their souls, and George is too much of a humanist to wring real-life tragedy for cineplex suspense. But as a moral corrective and a call to decency it moved me.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crazy Like a Fox
    Whether you find the protagonist of Richard Squires's comedy-drama--a dangerous Confederate crackpot or an exemplar of principled defiance likely depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you see the movie.
  14. Me, Myself & Irene
    This is the first movie I've ever seen -- porn included -- in which a guy gets coldcocked with a dildo.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zhou Yu de huo che
    Devolves from opaque mystery into boring melodramatics and incoherent contrivances.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Thorn in the Heart
    It's a shock, then, that The Thorn in the Heart, Gondry's documentary about his own family, is so unimaginative and inaccessible.
  17. A Christmas Horror Story
    The anthology is a mixed stocking; if you reach inside, something's likely to grab you.
  18. Thérèse
    If the banality of life within the Bordeaux gentry is the point, then the ensuing oppressiveness is immaculately depicted through precise performances and camerawork—just don't call it emotionally engaging drama.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nomad
    With commendable sincerity but also an unfortunate Hollywood veneer, Nomad is a poor man's "Gladiator."
  20. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    Granito becomes both a humanitarian legal thriller and a quest to find justice through cinema.
  21. Nine
    Wisely keeping her distance, Cotillard mostly lurks along the sidelines projecting a wounded visage, before finally stepping into the spotlight for the movie's single moment of emotional sincerity. It's the only point at which Nine seems more than a total zero.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    30 Minutes or Less
    A comedy that knows it has to move with all due dispatch to keep from disappointing the customer.
  23. The Happy Sad
    The cast—and Evans's deft hand with them—makes it worth checking out.
  24. They Remain
    They Remain wants to unsettle us and invade our brains. Instead, what little power it has vanishes long before the credits roll. What remains is tedium.
  25. Soul Men
    Mac and Jackson carry the show--particularly Mac, who's at his crackly, cranky best here. As swan songs go, Soul Men is pretty sweet.
  26. Silent House
    Silent House does superficially spiff up the haunted-house movie, but it's not built to last.
  27. Dark Matter
    First-time filmmaker Shi-Zheng Chen shows little aptitude for accurately transcribing the textures of human interaction; there's not a single credible performance here, not excluding Meryl Streep as a faculty Sinophile, doing that thing where she grinds every line through a gauntlet of tremulous inflections.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hart's War
    Seriously off balance.
  29. Dr. Dolittle 2
    It's dispiriting to watch him (Murphy) stand patiently by and concoct reaction shots for quipping raccoons and dancing bears.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Emperor's Club
    Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.
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