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. Brawl in Cell Block 99
    This film is unusually slow-paced for its genre, but Zahler’s screenplay is driven by a solid central character and dialogue that might have made Elmore Leonard sit up straight.
  2. Quadrophenia (re-release)
    It remains one of the most wrenching films about adolescent angst, thanks largely to the performance of Phil Daniels.
  3. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Va Savoir has its own unhurried pace and unpredictable humor. This is the sort of comedy Robert Altman could only dream about.
  4. The Law in These Parts
    Dialectical and precise to the point of exhaustion, The Law in These Parts applies a cold anger to one of the geopolitical world's most passionate discords.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Manufactured Landscapes
    Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes.
  6. Li'l Quinquin
    A Dumont film that paints its small-town milieu with as much humor as violence (though there's a fair dose of that, too) and finds some tenderness in life's absurdities.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Zodiac
    Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love
    A multi-perspectival film vastly superior to "Crash," Vladan Nikolic's dynamic thriller Love reinvigorates a stale cinematic format and imparts a compelling message all without a single head-on collision.
  9. Brand Upon the Brain!
    Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but . . . the gimmick's the prize. Without all the hoopla, there simply isn't enough variation to this stylized fever-dream to justify its fatiguing running time, nor to call it anything less than predictably Maddin–esque.
  10. Sand Dollars
    Guzmán and Cárdenas present this tropical island as both Anne's romantic refuge and Noelí's exploitative landscape, a beautiful, enchanting — and realistic — Eden where snakes are merely snakes.
  11. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Nowhere has Cohen's inner turmoil been better illuminated than in Tony Palmer's lost-and-found 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire.
  12. Run Lola Run
    An enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion.
  13. Contemporary Color
    The approach is experiential, a you-are-there-and-overwhelmed dazzlement, rather than a definitive record of each squad's big moment.
  14. Black Swan
    A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."
  15. Our School
    Despite the efforts of many interviewees to seem broad-minded, Nicoara has a knack for ferreting out moments that reveal actual Romanian attitudes.
  16. Our Children
    Can a film that holds no surprises be of value? In the case of Our Children, which masterfully plays with stylistic conventions and all-too-common instances of real-life matricide, the answer is decidedly yes.
  17. Hilary and Jackie
    Hilary and Jackie tries far too hard to dictate emotional involvement right out of the gate, and you're left counting off the doom-laden cues for things that are sure to return full circle.
  18. Angels Wear White
    Qu unpacks much that matters in Angels Wear White, including the abuse of power and importance of status and wealth in Chinese society, but her most thoughtful, nuanced observations involve female sexuality.
  19. Indignation
    An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.
  20. The Devil's Backbone
    The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"
  21. Oki's Movie
    If the characterizations are fleeting, the recessive mood is not: Hong's signature observational style is at once offhanded and astute, romantic and lightly chilled.
  22. Enough Said
    Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini are lovely together, though her character is the sharper-edged of the two. It's Gandolfini's Albert, soft-hearted and soft-bellied, who suffers more. Gandolfini takes the movie's small, offhand jokes and intensifies them.
  23. Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
    Seeing the film now makes you weep for the passing of both actresses, of course. It also drives home the magnitude of losing Carrie Fisher’s hilarious, acerbic, insightful voice at a time when it seems more vital than ever. You leave the movie wanting so much more of her, it hurts.
  24. The Green Fog
    It’s not so much an assemblage as it is a conjuring. You don’t just watch these clips — you see through and between them. The juxtapositions create vital, cosmic connections.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    28 Weeks Later
    The sequel trumps its predecessor for sustained doomsday gloom and suggests this might be the man to adapt Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road.
  26. The Age of Shadows
    You may have seen parts of The Age of Shadows before, but they're rarely this well assembled.
  27. Insomnia
    Nolan, withholding master of disorientation in his previous non-linear films, allows far too easy access into the psychic tumult of Al Pacino's cop and Robin Williams's prime suspect.
  28. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Control
    Despite excellent performances from Samantha Morton, Craig Parkinson, and the radiant Toby Kebbell, along with a noble effort from pretty newcomer Sam Riley as Curtis himself, Control is like a wake where the guests forgot to bring the booze and, for the most part, have nothing very nice or even particularly interesting to say about the deceased.
  30. The House of Mirth
    Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.
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