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 7.6 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. Postman Pat: The Movie
    Postman Pat: The Movie is one of the best family films to come down the pike this year.
  2. The Strange Little Cat
    This odd little wonder captures the delicate textures and shadowy half-secrets of family life, mapping them out in a mosaic of fragmented dialogue and half-poetic, half-prosaic images.
  3. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Seeing the breadth of Didion’s work and its impact on the culture represented cumulatively delivers an unexpected shock to the system.
  4. Left on Purpose
    An anguished and compassionate chronicle of Schein and Vishner's relationship.
  5. The Swan
    Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Murphy has never been a typical rock star, and Shut Up is by no means a conventional rock documentary.
  7. The Commuter
    The director’s stylistic obsessions (harried close-ups of cell-service signal bars) and thematic integrity (witness the overworked 9-to-5 crowd banding together in solidarity) elevate the cheap-paperback plot without tipping the movie over into pomposity.
  8. Occupy the Farm
    The film is riveting from the start, with its ragtag multiculti heroines and heroes meshing multiple identity markers (activist, academic, refurbished hippie), often within individual selves.
  9. Up the Yangtze
    By journey's end, Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground.
  10. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.
  11. Step Brothers
    Not to wax too serious here (since this is, after all, a movie in which two nearly middle-aged men beat each other over the heads with blunt instruments on their front lawn), but ticking away just beneath Step Brothers' freely associative surface is a fairly astute commentary on how we define such abstract concepts as "growing up" and "making something of yourself."
  12. 24 City
    Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.
  13. Margarita Happy Hour
    Chaiken ably balances real-time rhythms with propulsive incident -- she catches subtler interior strains, too.
  14. My Mother's Smile
    "A very odd thriller" is how Italian director Marco Bellocchio describes My Mother's Smile, his uncannily beautiful and deeply humanist exploration of the nightmares that resurface from a Roman atheist's Catholic childhood.
  15. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    As tight as the parallel homo sapiens storylines are lax, Caesar's prison conversion to charismatic pan-ape revolutionist is near-silent filmmaking, with simple and precise images illustrating Caesar's General-like divining of personalities and his organization of a group from chaos to order. All of this is shown in absorbing, propulsive style, as Caesar broodingly bides his time like a king in disguise awaiting restoration.
  16. Alexandra
    Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown.
  17. Okraina
    Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.
  18. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    This is an intimate portrait of the artist in recent years as she returns to Jamaica, the country of her birth and childhood, for a family reunion.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
    Centipede plays on the notion that the only thing more frightening than death is a state bridging life and death, in which, though one's body is no longer his own to control, the mind remains conscious.
  20. Workingman's Death
    Michael Glawogger's rather majestic Workingman's Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe.
  21. You're Next
    You're Next streamlines the gory stuff for something truly shocking: good characters. Not deep, mind you. But characters who are crayoned in bright enough that they're interesting even while alive.
  22. A Song for Martin
    Scenes from a marriage unfolding at the limits of love and personality.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    Kuenne lovingly assembles home-movie footage and new interviews, while deftly borrowing a narrative trick from fiction--the plot twist--to create a true-crime story so gripping, devastating, and ultimately unforgettable that it easily trumps any thriller Hollywood has to offer this year.
  24. Café Lumière
    Exquisitely understated.
  25. Brothers Hypnotic
    We see Phil's sons honoring him while going their own ways in a years-long effort to find the right pitch.
  26. The Price of Milk
    A shaggy, appealing parable involving two lovers, some gorgeous heifers, gentle Maori gangster-golfers, and a dilapidated suitcase packed with used baby shoes, The Price of Milk throws itself onto the magic-realist sword with aplomb.
  27. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's modern-day retelling of a Korean fairy tale is an experiment in space, narrative and physical.
  28. Osmosis Jones
    Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.
  29. The Best Man Holiday
    Lee seems less interested in capturing how people of color talk than in capturing how people talk. He coaxes us to step in and listen, and the very casualness of his invitation is the key to the joyousness of The Best Man Holiday, flaws be damned.
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