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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Gold
    No mere Western-guilt-inducing harangue, this highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis is a model of patient storytelling.
  2. Deliver Us from Evil
    Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ritchie Boys
    These are men who know of what they speak; they're also eloquent, erudite, and funny as hell.
  4. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    [Goldthwait] handles it beautifully, crafting from such rough stuff something astoundingly sweet and sharply funny about forgiveness, unconditional love, tenderness, and the things we hide just to get ourselves from one day to the next.
  5. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Requiem
    Sandra Hüller, a young German stage actress making a harrowing feature debut, invests Michaela's terrified, possibly schizophrenic outbursts with unholy conviction.
  7. Climates
    A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absolute Wilson
    The real value of this film is its treasure trove of archival footage, rare clips that document this genius of an artist as a young man.
  9. The History Boys
    The film version of The History Boys is a lesser thing, more fixed in space and time and rendered almost unbearably "cinematic" in patches by Hytner's gymnastic camerawork. Yet the ideas and feelings of the piece remain so rich that it almost doesn't matter.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Filthy World
    Waters's best bits are nostalgic, as he remembers his late friend and frequent collaborator Divine. Part memoir, part lecture, This Filthy World reaffirms what most of us already know from "The Wire": In a town full of delightful misfits, Waters may be Baltimore's sanest citizen.
  11. Dreamgirls
    Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Venus
    Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.
  13. Notes on a Scandal
    Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work -- "Fatal Attraction" for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tears of the Black Tiger
    Nothing is too crazed, corny, or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called "Blissfully Yours."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Make It Funky!
    A love letter to New Orleans, Make It Funky! reminds us of what has been lost in the flood, and of an artistic spirit that will never dissipate.
  16. Mafioso [re-release]
    Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Unreasonable Man
    If the film shows that few men are as unreasonable as Ralph Nader, it also shows that few have so succeeded in shaping their world: His legacy of progressive legislation will affect generations to come.
  18. Breach
    This is a spy movie bereft of the genre's usual, casual kicks. It's not interested in cheap thrills or playing gotcha with the audience. (Which isn't to say parts of it aren't exhilarating.)
  19. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller.
  20. Shooter
    Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    My long strums are pretty f---ing tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive mock-rock and/or the further decline of Western civ.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    This was basically the best idea ever. The setting brims over with the same wicked froth of danger, exoticism, and passion that 19th-century Seville must have had before it got stylized into oblivion.
  23. Black Book
    Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
  24. Red Road
    No one does poetic British with more remorseless hyper-realism than the Scots, and Arnold, who amassed a raft of reputable awards for her 2003 short film "Wasp," directs with a precociously sure touch and a raw taste for graphic sexuality rare in a woman helmer. It shocks, yet feels organic to the paranoid, loveless milieu portrayed in Red Road.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock the Bells
    An electrifying, occasionally terrifying documentary.
  26. Hot Fuzz
    A British variation on Hollywood nonsense, and as such it's a little gloomier, a little coarser, and a lot more cerebral--oh, and funnier than all the "Reno 911!" boxed sets combined.
  27. Fracture
    Gosling is the kind of actor who makes other actors look lazy. He is Brando at the time of "Streetcar," or Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces," and altogether one of the more remarkable happenings at the movies today.
  28. Triad Election
    To's take on the plight of the modern gangste is inspired.
  29. Les amitiés maléfiques
    Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Golden Door
    With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today.
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