Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    The sorry spectacle of the ranting codger never effaces the image of the boy concentrating his entire being over a chessboard. You have to love that kid and pity him.
  2. A Dangerous Method
    Cronenberg's film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a compelling narrative, and a splendidly acted love story.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rabbit Hole
    Becca and Howie's extracurricular relationships are the saving grace of a movie that's otherwise a sledgehammer of plot and score.
  4. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is its own unique, damaged creature.
  5. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    By telling this story through the children’s eyes with a magical-realism element, López makes the tragically unthinkable somehow more palatable.
  6. American Gangster
    As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott's would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson article on Lucas that inspired the movie, a real-life Superfly.
  7. The Royal Tenenbaums
    May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.
  8. Mud
    It's too bad...that a movie so attuned to natural currents in the end gets caught up in Hollywood's impossible ones.
  9. Nightcrawler
    On the strength of Gyllenhaal's performance, Nightcrawler works best as a character study. It's chilling, but also wickedly funny and strange, like a good, dark Brian De Palma joke — in short, it's everything the stolid and humorless Gone Girl should have been.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Far Side of the Moon
    Reworking his own raw material, Lepage spins a rich, moving film that acknowledges humanity's power to break out of Earth's daily gravity; in the process, he leaves audiences floating.
  11. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Catching Fire suffers from the movie equivalent of middle-book syndrome: The story is wayward and rangy, on its way to being something, maybe, but not adding up to much by itself. Still, it’s entertaining as civics lessons go, and it’s a more polished, assured picture than its predecessor.
  12. Submarine
    Though Submarine isn't a dull head-movie, amid the bells and whistles, Roberts seems less its star than its cameraman.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Marguerite
    It is Frot's performance — full of warmth, humor, and hope — that carries the story and even leads to some laugh-out-loud moments.
  14. Superbad
    Superbad is duly ribald and often achingly funny, brewed from the now-familiar Apatow house blend of go-for-broke slapstick and instantly quotable, potty-mouthed dialogue.
  15. The Tales of Hoffmann
    A hellzapoppin’ filmization of the Offenbach opera, with stops pulled out by P&P’s resident design team and choreography by Brit-ballet arch-pope Frederick Ashton, the movie was as intensely expressionistic as any film since Caligari, and at the same time a nova of springtime élan.
  16. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping, moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period.
  17. Down to the Bone
    Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.
  18. Suzhou River
    A ghost story that's shot as though it were a documentary -- and a documentary that feels like a dream. Almost too fashionable for its own good.
  19. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It's a sign of how watered-down the movie is that only the supporting actors have any bite.
  20. The Manchurian Candidate
    Demme, who works a clever permutation on the original ending, is more than capable of doing the thriller thing--even with material that will strike a good percentage of his audience as familiar. As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths. His direction of actors has never been better.
  21. Dead Man's Burden
    Dead Man's Burden is a fine example of economical storytelling.
  22. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    This is a film to see and then see again, to soak in and marvel at and -- like its director -- try to keep up with.
  23. Happy Valley
    Nothing in this film (and little in any other movie this year) compares to the scenes of Sandusky's adopted son, Matt, recounting his realization that the charges of pedophilia against Sandusky squared with the ways Sandusky had treated him, too — treatment he'd never been brave enough to admit.
  24. A Hard Day
    Kim Seong-hun's riveting if empty-headed A Hard Day will be remembered for its increasingly ominous jump-cuts to mobiles ringing, vibrating, and flashing profane messages.
  25. The Lovers
    Jacobs lets casually observed details and offhand humor advance the story. There are no grand pronouncements in The Lovers, which smartly communicates its ideas about relationships during its long stretches of silence.
  26. Sound City
    Dave Grohl's Sound City is an exciting, sometime illuminating documentary about how a squad of technicians and engineers in a hole-in-the-Valley music studio helped great rock 'n' rollers make great rock 'n' roll.
  27. Greenberg
    Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.
  28. The Mend
    It's a tough film to shake, a slice-of-life that slices, knifelike. It's a funny drama of brothers that first makes you hate its prickly leads but then, after steeping you in their bottomed-out day-to-day, might inspire you to hope for them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    May be a shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own. Catch it before the inevitable U.S. remake.
  30. Five Star
    New York onscreen is often a fantasy of hustlers, hardened cops, and the spoiled urban yuppies of the Baumbach and Dunham universes. In that sense, writer-director Keith Miller's modest drama Five Star is the kind of depiction the city sorely needs.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »