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. The Wise Kids
    The Wise Kids suffers from a theater workshop-y tendency to rest too long on pauses and silences to convey dramatic heft. But the blunder is ultimately overshadowed by Cone's excellent young actors, particularly Torem, burrowing deeply into her character's zealotry and anguish about being left behind.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black God, White Devil
    The best parts of the film arise from the tension generated between the conventional use of myth and the simultaneous debunking of it. [16 Sept 1971]
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
    Shallower than the level of vermouth in a Claude Rains Martini, FMBD nonetheless has a wonderful breadth of characterization, delightful thrills, and philosophical speculations to boot. [30 Apr 1970, p.60]
    • Village Voice
  4. Southside with You
    Both actors occasionally hit stumbling blocks with the wordy script and Tanne's direction, neither of which allows quite enough room for the characters to think and feel onscreen.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rize
    Highly entertaining but underdeveloped documentary.
  6. Wild
    Both the material and the setting seem to have shaken something loose in Witherspoon (who is also one of the movie's producers): She's moved further away from those uptight, humorless romantic-comedy cuties she played in the mid 2000s and more toward the breezy, blunt, self- determined characters of her early career.
  7. The Ground Truth
    The details are eye-opening (or ear-opening, in the case of marching songs taught to the new Marines about slaughtering Arab schoolchildren), but soon Foulkrod's film backs itself into a Support Our Troops corner.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bombay Beach
    That it documents rural poverty in the American West without exploiting or sanctifying its subjects would be cause enough for praise. But this doesn't begin to approach what Alma Har'el pulls off with her hybrid documentary knockout Bombay Beach.
  9. The Decay of Fiction
    The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.
  10. Iron Island
    Depending on one's mood, the movie might seem boldly simplified and poetic--or boringly simpleminded and prosaic.
  11. Humpday
    Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Lynn Shelton's third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy," also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in Seattle.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shakespeare Behind Bars
    Rogerson's structure is ingenious: He dilutes our initial skepticism by showcasing the prisoners' thoughtfulness and intelligence, and as soon as we've come to care for the men he shocks us with the details of their crimes.
  13. Wasted! The Story of Food Waste
    As with many recent environmental documentaries, the filmmakers’ call to action is simple and upbeat: This isn’t so hard, people, we can do it if we try!
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Heartbreak Kid
    May's second feature is a funny and sometimes side-splitting film whose whole never approaches the success of its best moments in which the two levels of romantic fantasy and satire are reconciled. [28 Dec 1972, p.53]
    • Village Voice
  15. 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.
  16. Porfirio
    Landes's tone is never salacious or exploitative, nor for that matter pandering or sentimental. This is a sui generis work—warm, sporadically funny, deeply human, and altogether beguiling.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Polisse
    The strange, unsettling juxtapositions, even when mashing up the mawkish and mockery, are full of life.
  18. The Sea Inside
    Unfortunately, Bardem is confined by more than Ramón's paralysis. He also must work within the limits of a partially numbed script.
  19. The Others
    This is one scary movie, not because we see ghosts or monsters, but because Kidman makes us feel her fear as our own.
  20. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    Her (Davis) homage--tender, never hagiographic--also contains some biting analysis of the racism, both overt and insidious, that the artist was up against.
  21. Flushed Away
    What's not to love about a movie in which thousands of rodents stand together against a Big Wave generated by TV-watching soccer fans flushing their toilets at halftime?
  22. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    Mary and the Witch’s Flower and its eye-popping cavalcade of creations and colors speak not to the shock and awe of technology but to the can-do magic of human achievement.
  23. The Measure of a Man
    A feat of workplace naturalism.
  24. Liv & Ingmar
    Liv & Ingmar is an anecdotal treasure chest for cinephiles, but more than that, it's a beautifully told love story.
  25. McCullin
    Famous for his war photography, McCullin's gift is his sensitivity, a capacity to feel the pain of other people that informs both the images he produced and the ones he refused to take.
  26. Like Crazy
    Like Crazy seems content to coast on the contrast between Beatrice's abrasive energy and Donatella's quiet anguish, with neither character developed with depth sufficient to justify the time we spend with them.
  27. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Aspiring to evoke an unreal city stranded in the autumn of the soul, the film succeeds only when it peers up from the intro-philosophy book for the occasional glimpse of everyday beauty.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where Are You Taking Me?
    Takesue doesn't presume to tell anyone's story for him or her, but rather lets the activity on-screen speak for itself.
  29. The Cakemaker
    The Cakemaker is more of a petit four than a belly bomb, but it’s striking in its particularity.
  30. Duck Season
    Shot in silvery black-and-white, Duck Season is not charmless, just insubstantial.
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