Village Voice's Scores

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 7.6 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:
11162 movie reviews
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Her savvy for self-presentation, though admirable from a business standpoint, makes for a more boring movie. You never get the sense that the camera was ever allowed to see anything that Perry didn't want it to see.
  1. With more actual grrrl power, Maleficent would be a bold redo. Instead, it's a beautiful snooze, a story that hints at the darkness underneath our fairy tales and tarnishes the idea of true love without quite daring to say what's really on its mind: that even the best of us might not live happily ever after.
  2. The movie rambles in a way that dilutes any possibility of edgy discomfort. Lucas and Moore have good control over the timing within the gags; it's the spaces between them that stretch out awkwardly. You can't hate 21 & Over, and you can't laugh at it. The most you can do is just pity it for not being as outrageous as it thinks it is.
  3. Refraining images of the mind-controlled sleepwalker Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem to submit Adrien as a Svengali-like figure to the kids, even as his "Iggy used to say . . ." pickups to fresh-faced scenesters don't seem to pay off.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    It's a fascinating fishbowl in concept, yet Simon's storytelling is unevenly textured and oddly listless - fatal for a film about a banal document - pushing felon clock-watching to a known outcome.
  4. Noah is here not to set the record straight, but to set it on its head. This isn't a lavish work of mad genius, it's a movie designed to be a lavish work of mad genius, and there's a difference.
  5. Green is sexy, funny, dangerous, and wild -- everything the film needed to be -- and whenever she's not on-screen, we feel her absence as though the sun has blinked off.
  6. The Broken Tower is sincere, amateurish, and misguided.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For all of its gradual build and minimalist focus, the film misses out on something essential, something more crucial than clarity, context, and connecting tissue - all of which the film aggressively eschews. It lacks a center, a sense that within its strenuously ambiguous story is a thrumming motor.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    At once downbeat and claustrophobic, it's also often grueling to watch.
  7. 42
    The movie sugars up Robinson's story, and like too many period pieces it summons some vague idea of a warmer, simpler past by bathing everything in thick amber light, as if each scene is one of those preserved mosquitoes that begat the monsters of Jurassic Park.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Like the hashish-laced pastries the ladies make to sedate the male population, the film feels like it has been dosed with sugar to mask its distressingly bitter taste.
  8. There are moments when the tedium loosens you to melt into the landscape, and you swear you can hear the moss on the rocks start talking.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chuldenko doesn't aspire to hard realism, but a lifestyle comedy with hard-to-buy fundamentals and a central couple you can't invest in is a dubious proposition nonetheless.
  9. The Color Wheel is funny, but it has a dark streak that takes it into increasingly creepy territory as the siblings face down a procession of people who are even more screwed-up than they are.
  10. The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it.
  11. While making a priority of squeezing in every usable bit of celebrity face-time, Mansome passes by potentially interesting digressions without more than a wayward glance.
  12. The mood is generally melodramatic and ends as mushy, aided by the soft-focus cinematography that drenches it all in melancholic nostalgia.
  13. The trio's mourning feels more like immature self-absorption.
  14. Much as I want to believe in Cortés, who is clearly talented and ambitious, there is just too much in Red Lights that encourages agnosticism.
  15. The zippy screwball energy - and fantastic roster of cameos - that mitigated the fratty humor of Broken Lizard's last movie, the restaurant send-up "The Slammin' Salmon," is missing here, resulting in generic, feeble laffs and an ending as sticky as the pilfered substance.
  16. Unfortunately, mocking jibes and cutaways to Team America and Wonder Woman (among other movies and TV shows) establish a jokey attitude that weakens the overall case.
  17. Despite referring to the tribe as "my people," Routh is wholly miscast, yet his ill-fitting presence is part and parcel of the plotting's general illogicality.
  18. There are dozens of better, riskier, more interesting films that go unreleased every year - why this militantly dull effort is taking their place is its only worthwhile mystery.
  19. A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.
  20. Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe.
  21. Nick Sandow's Ponies can claim the not negligible achievement of bringing one of the more irritatingly objectionable characters in recent cinema to the screen.
  22. The dialogue is as stock as the characters, and James's visual palette never surpasses the adequate.
  23. Raunchy dude comedy is hardly the sole province of American cinema, as Klown all too dispiritingly reconfirms.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Throughout, stereotypes are trotted out so that the movie can wink that it's too smart for them.

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