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. Hairspray
    The movie is visually flat: not pasty and garish in the Waters signature style, but merely serviceable and competent in the worst tradition of Hollywood "professionalism."
  2. I'm the One That I Want
    The time-outs from wisecracking -- invariably, to impart a simplistic self-esteem lesson or two -- feature the most awkward silences you're likely to endure in a comedy routine.
  3. King Kong
    For King Kong is an accountant's movie at heart. Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.
  4. Chicago
    It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.
  5. TransFatty Lives
    A doc as vibrant as its auteur's mind, even as his body is rendered immobile.
  6. Daughters of the Dust
    Daughters of the Dust abounds with stunning motifs and tableaux, the iconography seemingly sourced from dreams as much as from history and folklore. But however seductive and trance-inducing, the visual splendor of Dash's film is never vaporous.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Battle Royale
    [Fukasaku's] genius is finding the overlap between teenage dreams and nightmares, between the intensity of first love and the terror of extinction.
  8. Goodnight Mommy
    Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.
  9. Two Step
    Extraordinary ordinariness is Two Step's saving grace.
  10. Summer 1993
    The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.
  11. Starred Up
    This is an unsparing picture, one whose violence, though deftly handled, is bone-crunchingly rough. Yet its emotional contours are surprisingly delicate, thanks, in large part to O’Connell’s performance.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight in Paris
    The latest in a long line of actors playing a "Woody Allen type" in a Woody Allen film, Wilson bends his own recognizably nasal Texan drawl into an exaggerated pattern of staccatos and glissandos that's obviously modeled on the writer/director's near-musical verbal cadences.
  13. The Guardians
    Unassumingly powerful details make The Guardians one of the year’s most affecting love stories.
  14. A War
    Perhaps the best film yet set against the mess of the ongoing Middle Eastern wars, Tobias Lindholm's latest is a scrupulous, unglamorized examination of battlefield decision-making — and its potentially devastating impacts, both there and back home.
  15. Chaos
    Fast-paced feminist thriller and witty black comedy.
  16. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Beyond its rare visions of remote vistas, Camel's great charm lies in its seeming simplicity. The camera records the events of the day -- from a little girl's tears to an afternoon sandstorm -- with a childlike clarity and curiosity.
  17. Faat Kiné
    In every way a sunny film. Supremely affirmative, it ends with the funniest, sexiest close-up of the year.
  18. Tuesday, After Christmas
    Unrelentingly mundane, as if made with the sole purpose of draining the topic of adultery of any prurient interest.
  19. The World's End
    The World's End is a big, shaggy dog of a thing, a free-spirited ramble held together by off-kilter asides, clever-dumb puns, and seemingly random bits of dialogue that could almost become catchphrases in spite of themselves.
  20. Racing Extinction
    When they devote most of their film to the horrors wrought by humanity and barely ten minutes to their solutions, and when those solutions are all about mitigating problems, it's hard to feel anything but despondent.
  21. Top Spin
    With sleek and informative onscreen graphics and thrilling slow-motion demonstrations of game technique, Top Spin packs a lot of information into its 80-minute running time, arguing that a great table tennis player is one part boxer, one part chess master.
  22. Thy Father's Chair
    This immersive, richly detailed snapshot of hoarders undergoing a mandated apartment cleaning is equal parts horror film and existential howl.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Menashe
    Weinstein, who is neither a member of a Haredi community nor a speaker of Yiddish (on set, he used a translator), has created a work of interest partially because he is aware of his own distance from his subject matter.
  24. District 9
    District 9 whizzes by with a resourcefulness and mordant wit nearly worthy of its obvious influences: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "Dawn of the Dead," and "Starship Troopers."
  25. The World
    On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting.
  26. To Live and Die in L.A.
    A near-masterpiece. The fashions and music and attitudes on display might have been interpreted at the time as opportunistic stabs at au courant stylization, but the film is nevertheless overpowering and otherworldly rather than quaint or kitschy. It feels like a transmission from a different planet. To Live and Die in L.A. is so of its time that you can only be captivated by it.
  27. Right Now, Wrong Then
    In the end, Right Now, Wrong Then is a two-piece puzzle that's less than the sum of its parts.
  28. Bad Education
    There's something dull and evasive at the film's center--for one thing, contrary to its festival buzz, Bad Education tiptoes around the issue of priesthood pedophilia; lovelorn gazes are as desperate as it gets.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Linings Playbook
    Manic as it might be stylistically, emotionally Silver Linings Playbook maintains too even of a keel. It's a film about the alienated that makes sure to alienate no one, a movie depicting wild mood extremes that never rises or falls above a dull hum of diversion, never exploding into riotous comedy or daring to be devastatingly sad.
  30. 12 Days
    At times unbearably intimate, even invasive, the photographer-documentarian Raymond Depardon’s 12 Days is the kind of film you might wonder, as you watch, whether you should be watching. I’m glad I did, and I can’t discount the empathy that this study of mental illness and bureaucratic practice stirs or the understanding it crystallizes.
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