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. Sound It Out
    Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Transit Cities
    At 71 minutes, the film too schematically ratchets up the inhospitality, but its portrait of Amman - Hushki offsets the increasingly claustrophobic domestic scenes with views of the metropolis, which Laila also now finds too Westernized - is welcome.
  3. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.
  4. Deep End (1970)
    Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
  5. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.
  6. All's Well Ends Well
    Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."
  7. The Story of Film: An Odyssey
    More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.
  8. Pretty Poison (1968)
    Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Color Me Obsessed: A Film About The Replacements
    With so many voices, Color Me becomes a rock version of "Rashomon," and what the film lacks in music and live footage, it more than makes up for with obsessive detail and heated debate. Who's right? Everyone.
  10. How to Start a Revolution
    How to Start a Revolution plays like a Nobel Prize–campaign film and never once demonstrates an understanding of the distinction between encomium and inquiry.
  11. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    Like its title, Heist: Who Stole the American Dream? purports to ask a question but is only interested in forwarding its predictable agitprop answer.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Patriocracy
    Malone reveals himself to have a stunningly low opinion of his audience's powers of bullshit detection.
  13. The Woods
    A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Come on Eileen
    The film betrays an eager crowd-pleaser's impulse toward on-the-nose dialogue and resolution on command.
  15. God Save My Shoes
    There's no escaping the fact that Benasra's documentary does little more than perpetuate the myth of women - all women - as vapid materialists worshipping at the altar of Manolo Blahnik.
  16. Artificial Paradises
    Olaizola pans across peeling building facades to subtly enhance her portrait of characters crumbling under the weight of self-destructive habits and solitude - a weight that might only be lifted through the selfless compassion of others.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fear and Desire
    Treat it like a wobbly, precocious demo from a 24-year-old with mighty aspirations, filled with hints of what he would become, and you'll be properly enthralled.
  18. Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
    Laughton, of course, is elegant rotundity in motion, a naughty, moonfaced cherub in his drunk scene, later sweetly surprised when finding himself elevated into a man by the Gettysburg Address, a recitation of which is the film's palpitating heart.
  19. Kids of Today
    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.
  20. Last Will and Embezzlement
    Mickey Rooney's own ordeal of being swindled by his wife's son gives the material a tiny bit of star power, but his mismatched interview clips merely exacerbate the earnest but graceless documentary's editorial clumsiness, aesthetic flatness, and endless repetition.
  21. Life, Love, Soul
    Admirable only for its sincere responsibility-over-selfishness message and for giving "The Wire" alums Chad Coleman and Jamie Hector some big-screen work, Life, Love, Soul otherwise proves to be just a low-rent Tyler Perry–style melodrama.
  22. Billy Bates
    The director, Jennifer DeLia, doesn't seem aware of the humor inherent in this scenario, which may be why, despite proving thoroughly ridiculous, Billy Bates remains an unabashedly self-serious film.
  23. Snow on Tha Bluff
    Bluff's portrait of street life has a grungy off-the-cuff realism that's only compromised by some obviously staged incidents.
  24. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    A deeply archived and circumspect history of the Joffrey dance company, Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance does a perfect white swan but has trouble developing much of a personality.
  25. Dolphin Boy
    Dolphin Boy stands as an example of how the pitfalls of potentially mushy material can be overcome by smart and sensitive direction.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    You Hurt My Feelings
    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.
  27. Sparks
    This comic noir is best when it's more comic, in both senses of the word.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mahler on the Couch
    Eccentric and expressionistic reverie on love, loss, and the birth of modern marriage.
  29. Never Stand Still
    It's all pretty loose and formless, but there's enough discipline on display to thrill lovers of movement, whether amateur or advanced.
  30. The Woman in the Septic Tank
    The novel and wickedly funny topic is mined for only a portion of its potential, but a little ironic astringency is certainly more unsettling than by-the-book slum drama.
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