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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Buena Vista Social Club
    Feels like a timeless blast from the past.
  2. Norte, the End of History
    Norte tells a big story on a grand scale, but its emphasis, moment by moment, is on the quotidian. It's simplicity that resonates most deeply of all.
  3. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    The kind of movie fans will be quoting for the rest of their lives, Shoot Me, from director-producer Chiemi Karasawa, is as much a playdate as portrait, a jumble of salty highlights attesting to the pleasure of her company.
  4. Waiting for 'Superman'
    Guggenheim's insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious-that "past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers"-seem all the more willfully naïve.
  5. Encounters at the End of the World
    Perhaps because Herzog is approaching old-master status, Encounters at the End of the World skews toward the observational. As in "Grizzly Man," his 2005 portrait of a deranged bear lover, Herzog seems at least as fascinated with other people's obsessions as his own.
  6. The Turin Horse
    An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve.
  7. The King of Escape
    Weaving numerous influences into a rich emotional tapestry, Alain Guiraudie's The King of Escape skillfully absorbs and updates its assertive cinematic forebears.
  8. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    Its title an acknowledgment of the reality of evil, Shake Hands With the Devil touches on the unanswerable hows and whys, but its ultimate subject is the terrible burden of command.
  9. When I Walk
    It's an often gut-wrenching viewing experience in which the triumphs of the hero are hard won.
  10. The Martian
    The Martian is only partly a story about a man in peril; it's mostly a story about men (and a few women) taking control of the uncontrollable. It's confident, swaggering sci-fi, not the despairing kind. That may be why, as elaborate and expensive-looking as The Martian is, it's almost totally lacking in poetry.
  11. Neon Bull
    No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its action might be, Neon Bull always honors the chaotic looseness of everyday living — the way that, unlike in the movies, few of the moments we inhabit seem to be about just one thing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    On the Ropes
    Burstein and Morgen take all this in from an unobtrusive middle distance, letting the subjects themselves slowly complicate the profusion of athletic and ghetto-real clichés that fly scattershot in the early going.
  13. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    Appears strangely dated, and its unspecified location seems existentially hokey.
  14. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.
  15. Wendy and Lucy
    Trembling throughout on the verge of a tearful breakdown, but far too dignified to allow her character to choke up, Williams delivers a sensationally nuanced performance that, were it not so resolutely undramatic, would constitute an aria of stoical misery.
  16. Salesman
    The film doesn't succeed even on its own dubious terms, the phony soliloquies of the salesmen while driving ostensibly alone being particularly disconcerting and unconvincing and ultimately unrevealing. [01 May 1969, p.48]
    • Village Voice
  17. The Wrestler
    Present in every scene, if not each shot, Rourke gives a tremendously physical performance that The Wrestler essentially exists to document.
  18. The Hours
    It's an astonishing Kidman who contributes the film's -- and maybe the year's -- most inspired turn.
  19. Junebug
    It's an exhilaratingly decentered tale, with the perspective shifting around so there's no character with whom we totally identify throughout.
  20. Café Lumière
    Exquisitely understated.
  21. Promises
    An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.
  22. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Campanella, who overconfidently takes his time, outfits the film with ludicrous interrogation scenes, a drunken colleague who provides comic relief and redemptive tragedy, and a climactic flood of memories that plays like a trailer.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Food, Inc.
    Expertly crafted documentary.
  24. Tony Takitani
    Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.
  25. Everlasting Moments
    The movie satisfies for an hour, but never quite persuades that its subject is worth two.
  26. The Secret World of Arrietty
    It's pure magic.
  27. We Come as Friends
    Moments of pain and revelation keep coming, all varied and surprising. These accrete into a mountain of evidence for Sauper's thesis: South Sudan might be new, but the forces shaping it are the same that have damned Africans for centuries — the rest of the world's lust for resources and conversions. That everything is beautiful just makes it hurt all the more.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Central Station
    A mildly saccharine but kind-hearted movie.
  29. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    A triumph of documentary activism nine years in the making.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Queen of Versailles
    I've seen The Queen of Versailles twice, and both times the audience laughed frequently at the Siegel family's sheer tackiness.
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