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. We Won't Grow Old Together (1969)
    "Love" is a quicksilver thing that can't be held in the present tense. It is somewhere between nothing and everything, and no one pinned down more of its complexities and contradictions than Maurice Pialat, hunting barehanded for slippery truths.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Master Qi and the Monkey King
    Quietly admiring of its subjects' skill and dedication, Govenar's straightforward documentary does a capable job of extending that mission.
  3. Ikland
    Soling and co-director David Hilbert divide their screen into multiple visual quadrants, an aesthetic strategy that soon becomes a wearisome affectation that's barely mitigated by their refusal to romanticize the landscape or soft-pedal the hazardous hardships of Ik life.
  4. Busong
    Splendid vistas and sun scapes add mythic punctuation to the proceedings, but director Auraeus Solito (Tuli) generates too little of the magic that holds a story as tenuous as this one together.
  5. Daisies (1966)
    A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.
  6. Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    Calling the movie simply Buddhist, in form as well as context, might be just another way of saying it's awesome, as in it inspires legitimate awe.
  7. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
    Chodorov follows the first-person tradition accordingly, entering the subject through his own early immersion in these films via his father, television presenter Stephen Chodorov.
  8. The Lion of Judah
    It is an affecting movie - who cannot be affected by the mountains of discarded eyeglasses and shoes and children being dumped by way of slides into mass graves? - but ultimately, The Lion of Judah is no more essential than the sum of its stock footage.
  9. Sundowning
    Role reversals, many mirrors, and a lesbian brushstroke indicate someone involved might have recently taken film courses on female melodrama; other thematic red herrings flip-flop, too irritatingly clichéd to recount.
  10. Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar
    At first, Hoffman appears to be juxtaposing the savoir faire and genuine deprivation of the Depression society with the spoiled, consumption-crazed world we have now, but then he merely lapses into a vague Occupy-ish indictment of the 1 percent and the collapse of community as a cultural foundation.
  11. Knight Knight
    Making fun of such an inoffensive, amateurish production would be easy and mean, like punching a baby.
  12. Hollywood to Dollywood
    Even at a lean 81 minutes, though, Hollywood to Dollywood occasionally gets tiresome; what it does minute to minute is often less interesting than what it represents.
  13. The Stand Up
    For a film about a stand-up comedian to be mirthless is dispiriting; more problematic, however, is that The Stand Up doesn't make up for that absence of humor with any legitimate drama.
  14. Versailles '73: American Runway Revolution
    "Beautiful clothes on good-looking people just moving across the stage" to the sounds of Barry White and Al Green. "It was the presence of these African-American models that really animated the stage," notes Harold Koda of the Met's Costume Institute-- a sentiment that fashion historian Barbara Summers expresses more memorably: The crowd was "peeing in their seats because these girls were so fabulous."
  15. Blinky & Me
    Tomasz Magierski's lovely and lovingly made portrait of Gross's life and career...
  16. Raaz 3: The Third Dimension
    To Western audiences, the most interesting part of director Vikram Bhatt's Raaz 3 will be the Bollywood-narrative conventions--overamplified melodrama, romantic montages, elaborately choreographed dance numbers. But as a horror film, it's about as ambitious as R.L. Stine.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
    Atwill and other scholars maintain that the Romans were ingenious in pulling off the pacifist hoax, so useful to the ruthless men who administered the Roman empire. They were able to "create a type of Judaism that was benign," says one commentator.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    West of Thunder
    West of Thunder is not a tedious watch at all. In fact, it is oddly absorbing, just not the way writer and star Dan Davies probably meant it to be.
  19. Dear Mandela
    Triumph follows tragedy as the case unfolds and history is caught repeating, but the larger, more complicated story underlying this brief but bracing missive still feels untold.
  20. The Double Steps
    In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Avé
    Outside of a final shot that's more poetically convenient than emotionally convincing, Avé follows a progression that feels intimate even as it mimics things iconic. They, we, move and are moved.
  22. The Prosecution of an American President
    So unabashedly one-sided that the documentary is problematic even when the facts and figures check out.
  23. Bitter Seeds
    Although temperamentally dissimilar, Peled's film complements Anusha Rizvi's 2010 feature debut, Peepli (Live), which responded to the same crisis with a flawed but nervy satire. Bitter Seeds doesn't fool around, not while the enormity persists.
  24. Sheer
    This modest crime drama is infused with the joy and expectation that only comes from young filmmakers instinctively awed by their urban surroundings.
  25. Dinotasia
    If they're never fully convincing as photo-realistic figures, they're certainly as much good gory fun to watch as any old-school monster kids had to stick with dreary first acts to see.
  26. The American Scream
    Though not must-see cinema, it is entertaining and affecting.
  27. Deep Dark Canyon
    The film depletes itself with inter-location crosscutting, presumably intended to stoke suspense, and it all approximates the feel of an early Billy Bob Thornton script but lacks the full investment. Still, Levine commands every scene he's in with great support from a subtle and soulful Martin Starr as his conflicted deputy.
  28. Dust Up
    Billy Jack meets Rob Zombie meets John Waters in this trippy, gory, not-as-fun-as-it-should-be genre mash-up from writer-director Ward Roberts.
  29. The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling - Ireland 1965
    Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.
  30. Here I Learned to Love
    A slight but powerful entry in the family-history-as-world-history archives.
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