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 7.6 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:
  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. Distorted
    If there’s one thing I can say for this movie, it’s that the cast is delivering, even if the story they’re in cannot.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    I Had Nowhere to Go
    Mekas, who has built his career on recording his memories, seems like the ideal subject for Gordon. It’s just that Nowhere to Go is unilluminating; it doesn’t have the theoretical puckishness of 24 Hour Psycho or Zidane. I Had Nowhere to Go might prove more effective as an installation piece, where people can drift in and out at intervals, but as a 100-minute film, it’s just tedious.
  3. Yadvi - The Dignified Princess
    The Singhs aren’t able to make Yadvi more distinctive than any other women whose fate is controlled by the hubris of men, or who’ve lost the wealth their titles once afforded them.
  4. The Doctor from India
    Sometimes a filmmaker is so taken with a subject that a documentary fizzles into hagiography, a problem of Jeremy Frindel’s The Doctor From India, a film about Vasant Lad, who brought the ancient Indian healing practice of Ayurveda to the U.S. in the late 1970s.
  5. Occupation
    The cast, led by Dan Ewing, Temuera Morrison, and Stephany Jacobsen, delivers sturdy character work, and the action is clear and well-executed, but none of it ventures beyond well-trod ground.
  6. Spiral
    Fairrie’s unfocused examination of anti-Semitism illuminates little.
  7. Path of Blood
    Documentary is an inherently tricky field, requiring objectivity, but Path of Blood leans so far into it that any sense of narrative or purpose dissolves.
  8. Believer
    A better doc would have used its superstar lead as a linchpin, structuring it so that he’s absorbed into the cause, gradually upstaged by those directly affected by sanctioned bigotry. Instead, director Don Argott (of the more dynamic music docs Rock School and Last Days Here) fills the running time with borderline Akerman-esque mundanity.
  9. Elizabeth Harvest
    Gutierrez works some twists on the familiar premise, and one standout thrill of a chase scene employs Brian De Palma’s signature split screens. But as it nears the two-hour mark, the film becomes exhausting, shedding very little light on the futuristic implications of the story.
  10. Casino Royale
    Things pick up a little bit when Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, and Woody Allen stumble into the scene, but the total experience remains boringly incoherent.
  11. Songwriter
    Songwriter sells the “nice boy” bit well, but if you aren’t already a fan, it eventually becomes tiresome. There are occasional glimmers of a real person (wishing to topple Adele, laying down a “no Snapchat” rule at his house, etc.) but rarely is a feature film so bluntly just marketing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    Does for the black movement what Getting Straight did for the student movement: reduces it to escapist entertainment, cinematic stylishness, and near nonsense. [13 May 1971, p.68]
    • Village Voice
  13. Barefoot in the Park
    Gene Saks directs his first film so clumsily that he even muffs Mike Nichol’s exploitation of the climbing the stairs gag that kept Neil Simon’s feeble farce running for 79 years on Broadway.
  14. The Anderson Tapes
    I thought there were about 11 good minutes in it, and the rest confused and uncertain. [22 Jul 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Scorpio exists merely as a succession of stylistic flourishes without feeling, representative of the emptiest, most uninteresting kind of cinema. [24 May 1973, p.83]
    • Village Voice
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mandabi
    Honest but stupid. [19 Mar 1970, p.54]
    • Village Voice
  17. Plaza Suite
    Plaza Suite is a strenuous bore, far less amusing than the play, but no less empty and heartless in its insistence on creating grotesques for easy laughs and then forcing them to feel sorry for even easier pathos. [20 May 1971, p.61]
    • Village Voice
  18. That's Entertainment!
    After two hours of which I felt almost every minute, I could find only a handful of positive things to say about this production. [25 Jul 1974, p.67]
    • Village Voice
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Magic Christian
    For Southern to be funny at all, jokes must be carried too far and decorum exploded at every turn. Even if McGrath were inclined to handle the material this way, mush of it has dated, and the screenplay by Southern, McGrath, and Peter Sellers does not so much update it as displace it. [26 Feb 1970, p.60]
    • Village Voice
  20. The Ipcress File
    The Ipcress File was reasonably entertaining while I was watching it, but after it was over I felt I'd been had... Among the tiresome directorial tricks in The Ipcress File is the repetitively off-angle anti-climax with the heavies feeding parking meters, hibernating in libraries, and plotting at band concerts. Nothing happens most of the time, and this is supposed to be funny and ironic.
  21. Support Your Local Sheriff!
    Unfortunately, Support Your Local Sheriff is basically serial material that in straining to be something more ends up being something less. [08 May 1969, p.47]
    • Village Voice
  22. The April Fools
    There doesn't seem to be enough plot for a minute commercial, much less 100 minutes plus of madcap farce. [12 Jun 1969, p.53]
    • Village Voice
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    They Might Be Giants
    The wit turns into Christmas Card cuteness, and the film winds up, in the blinding bathos of the last scene, in a veritable miasma of mush. [24 Jun 1971, p.60]
    • Village Voice
    • 90 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Days and Nights in the Forest
    Whatever virtues Ray's defenders may claim for him, I find it difficult to get very far beyond the sylistic mess of this film. Ray's style ranges from half-baked artsiness to total artlessness without managing to find any real art in the transitions. [12 Apr 1973, p.91]
    • Village Voice
  25. Renaldo and Clara
    Renaldo & Clara is almost petulant in its demand to be taken seriously as film, and as such a good deal of it is dreadful. [30 Jan 1978, p.26]
    • Village Voice
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Valentine's Day
    Shoddy enough within its primary genre, Valentine's Day becomes deadly in its attempt to be a Los Angeles Ensemble Movie.
  27. The Road
    Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.
  28. 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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ninja Assassin
    A triple-cross plot with Harris's superiors doesn't help the movie's clarity--neither does the clattering sound design. Shouldn't throwing stars be silent? If they're gonna sound like gunshots, why not just use guns?
  30. The Invention of Lying
    Lying brushes more big ideas than commonplace comedies, but hasn't taken those ideas through enough drafts to work out their implications or--harder still--make them killingly funny.
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