Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,163 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 11163
  2. Mixed: 4,554 out of 11163
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11163
11163 movie reviews
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  1. A Good Man
    Director Safina Uberoi struck gold with her title subject, a congenital joker with an implacable will whose load-bearing personality could prop up at least three documentaries.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dear Lemon Lima
    Still, Lima's "Be yourself, and you'll eventually find your tribe" moral is so well-meaning that we might as well be generous and grade on a curve-it's more appealing than anything Hollywood has recently offered the eight- to 13-year-old female demographic.
  3. 0s & 1s
    During his quest to track down his missing laptop, James's unrelenting douchiness and his friends' essential emptiness grow tiresome, but that's precisely the point. As digital media becomes more vivid, people tend to hollow out.
  4. Curling
    In Curling, his (Cote) interest in individuals with "one foot outside of society" continues with a crisp portrait of a Québécois solitary man and his cloistered preteen daughter.
  5. Drawing with Chalk
    Slight and sweet with a bit of a paunch in the middle, Drawing With Chalk resembles the aging would-be rock stars at its center.
  6. An Affirmative Act
    The film veers into the narrow channels of the bare-bulb courtroom melodrama and then the rapids of the lurid conspiracy thriller before washing ashore in pieces.
  7. They're Out of the Business
    The film's recognition of its (and its makers') own failings doesn't stop them from being unbearably accurate.
  8. Mysteries of the Jesus Prayer
    In its didactic narration and constant on-screen introductions, the film loses a good deal of the very silence and mystery it venerates.
  9. The Family Jams
    Only a true fanatical follower of the "freak folk" musical scene with a high tolerance for artless verité camerawork will find much merit in Kevin Barker's extended home video.
  10. What on Earth?
    Framed in a series of casual chats, Taylor's subjects make interesting suppositions (invoking particle physics, higher consciousness, and the laws of geometry), but their credibility is sometimes undermined by editorial drift and a beseeching New Age soundtrack.
  11. We Go Way Back
    For all of the film's preciousness, the pungent notion of having your young-teen self gazing in horrified disappointment at the adult you've failed to become is as fresh a thematic undertow as it is disquieting.
  12. Vito Bonafacci
    Factor in the consistently subpar acting and Vito Bonafaccistands as one project better suited to Sunday schools than movie theaters.
  13. The Makioka Sisters (1983)
    The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.
  14. The Colors of the Mountain
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
  15. Lord Byron
    Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Vacation!
    The narrative doesn't arc so much as slope down at a 45-degree angle-from the high of innocent fun to the depths of absolute moral vacuity-with a break in the dead center for a visually stunning, perfectly weird acid-trip scene, something like an excerpt from "Inland Empire's" would-be nautically themed sequel.
  17. Raw Faith
    Shining an intimate light on an individual in order to reveal greater truths about life and the world, Raw Faith focuses on progressive-minded Portland, Oregon, Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell.
  18. We Are the Night
    Director/co-writer Dennis Gansel compensates for the story's lack of emotional heft with rousing chase scenes and impressive, near-poetic CGI set pieces, and works in a sly suggestion that vampirism is the ultimate expression of consumerist indulgence.
  19. Dirty Old Town
    Directors Jenner Furst and Daniel Levin go for montaged ambience, and Levin's lyrical camerawork limns a beguiling, modestly Wong Kar-wai–ish rhapsody out of very little. When Levin's lens is focused on Shirtcliff's unwashed hair and spectral eyes, the film grabs hold of something sweet and sad.
  20. Le Rayon Vert (1986)
    Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as "The Green Ray"), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lips
    With a minimum of dialogue and backstory, the lead actresses (winners of a single special prize at Cannes 2010) movingly portray the depth of these colleagues' compassion, and their struggle to maintain a front of data-gathering objectivity. Unfolding in a remarkably organic fashion, The Lips pays plaintive tribute to the work.
  22. The High Life
    This vision of free self-expression bubbling forth under authoritarian pressure echoes sentiments in Zhao's previous work. But the rest of the movie lacks the thrilling organic open-endedness of Zhao's nonfiction depictions; real life (or 2006's Street Life) trumps this Life.
  23. Late Autumn
    In remaking the 1966 South Korean film "Full Autumn" and setting it in America, writer-director Kim Tae-Yong uses the melancholic, gray backdrop of Seattle as both character and metaphor, crafting a film that's visually beautiful and incredibly moving.
  24. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    Human characters emerge from photo ops and heroes from the shadows.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flying Fish
    Pushpakumara's debut feature portrays the recent Sri Lankan civil war as a gauntlet of private humiliations, endured by largely nameless, barely individuated villagers - making this would-be multi-strand narrative more of an impenetrable tangle.
  26. Psychohydrography
    A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.
  27. Atrocious
    A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy pre-emptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death.
  28. Iconoclast: Boyd Rice
    The most genial professed social Darwinist you could ever meet, Rice has never stopped to explain how much of his persona is a goof. Likewise, Larry Wessel's documentary portrait Iconoclast doesn't bother to synopsize its subject for the novice before setting off on its four-hour journey.
  29. Red Desert (1964)
    Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.
  30. That Girl in Yellow Boots
    Koechlin, a striking woman with a slim frame, horse mouth, and big turbulent eyes, has screen presence enough to kick along the frequently-stalling psychodrama up to an ending that seems like a tossing up of hands.
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