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. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    A funky, nonfiction tribute to the great avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Ornette upends the staid portrait-of-the-artist formula, and it tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio documentary just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.
  2. The Messenger
    What really resonates is the complex tale of camaraderie between two men whose only hope of avoiding self-destruction is to let down their guard--which is, of course, against protocol.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Private Fears in Public Places
    Resnais is now 84 years old; perhaps it takes eight decades of living to make a movie this compassionate, this confident--and this young.
  4. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace.
  5. Sin Nombre
    Lushly photographed and meticulously sound-designed, Sin Nombre is visceral without being vital, researched without ever seeming lived-in.
  6. Children of Heaven
    Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.
  7. Revenge of the Mekons
    What Angio captures, beautifully, is that the Mekons make great music because, together and apart, they’re so alive to the world around them.
  8. Mountain Patrol
    For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.
  9. Child's Pose
    With Child's Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute bourgeoisie life cracks and opens wide.
  10. Grandma
    It gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that's not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.
  11. I, Tonya
    Those expecting camp or catfights won’t find them in Gillespie’s movie, which instead offers thoughtful and somewhat objective critiques, plus much seriously dark humor that’ll elicit a lot of uncomfortable gasps of laughter — and invites you to ponder difficult truths.
  12. God Loves Uganda
    Kudos to the filmmakers for so adeptly laying out the history of American evangelicals' Ugandan mission, and for noting that HIV infection rates there have gone up since the abstinence-only education started.
  13. Evolution
    Clinical in the extreme, Evolution aims for open-endedness, but the film, unlike its pint-size protagonists, remains impenetrable.
  14. Fat Girl
    As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.
  15. Humanité
    Confidently absurd.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Grindhouse
    This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about godd--- time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.
  17. Caesar Must Die
    Almost as much as the play itself, the rehearsals are staged; the inmates learning to act, then, are acting like inmates who are learning to act. This leads to some on-the-nose scenes in which they observe the parallels between the text and their own lives.
  18. The Pool
    This heightened consciousness of objects and obligations ballasts the drama-light, class-conscious fable with tactile life.
  19. Benda Bilili!
    But real-life hard-knock plot twists, as well as some tweaking of form (there's no narrator or voiceover of any kind; the film's subjects outline their grim realities largely through their rhythmically upbeat songs) make the film absolutely riveting, as does the fiercely rousing music.
  20. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Gerhard Richter Painting artfully and convincingly immerses us into the world of one of the greatest, painting.
  21. The War Tapes
    On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.
  22. Songs from the Second Floor
    Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.
  23. Baden Baden
    Lang is uncommonly assured for a first-time director, capturing her scenes in fluid master takes, rarely cutting from one character to the next, letting things unfold at the pace of in-the-moment human feeling.
  24. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    Silver's empathy often produces moments of emotional catharsis.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Band Called Death
    A beautiful tale of life, love, music, and family, of things not working out but also working out just as predicted.
  26. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.
  27. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it.
  28. Starving the Beast
    The gutting of America's public universities is, as Steve Mims says in his documentary Starving the Beast, "one of the nation's most important and least understood fights." His film goes far in correcting that, thanks not just to his thorough research, but also a strong narrative and compelling cinematography.
  29. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible.
  30. Calvary
    Gleeson is one of the finest actors we have, and in casting him as the lead, McDonagh stacks the deck so that regardless of our own religious reservations, we're forced to care about Father James as a man.
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