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. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    While overstuffed and scattershot, this episodic documentary makes a vital argument: That American popular music, especially the blues and rock ’n’ roll, owe much more to Native Americans than has been commonly credited.
  2. The Party
    Potter isn’t what you’d call subtle, but she also knows not to overstay her welcome, and this pithy comedy is a masterclass in all that a filmmaker can squeeze from the most basic theatrical concept: Put a bunch of characters with opposing motivations in a room and see what happens.
  3. A Scanner Darkly
    Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.)
  4. Cropsey
    Embracing what's really standard tabloid fodder of the decade with earnest engagement and doled-out suspense, Cropsey is one step from macabre comedy.
  5. The Great Man
    While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.
  6. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    Riley doesn't portray this fellowship of black athletes as victims, but as pioneers proving themselves against white supremacy behind enemy lines. And yet this doc also pulls them back down to earth as mere men and women competing against the odds, human to human.
  7. The House of the Devil
    Pumping the audience with inhale-exhale zooms and out-of-the-way close-ups, director Ti West's ratcheting of suspense in this alone-in-an-empty-house tale is proficient, if not psychologically piercing, in the best "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" fashion.
  8. Red Cliff
    Red Cliff exudes a physical grandiosity that few movies of the past 20 years have attempted--no matter that Woo, even at his best, is still more at ease with down-and-dirty action than epic pageantry.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cool and Crazy
    If music be the food of love, Cool & Crazy could stand a few more hits from the spice rack.
  10. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Skillfully reinforces Chisholm as a refreshingly quixotic populist, running on fervor and indignation.
  11. The Limey
    A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.
  12. Behind the Sun
    The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.
  13. Show Me Love
    Easily the best teen movie of the year.
  14. My Terrorist
    Her (Gerstel's) apparent marginalization in Israeli society renders this political psychodrama all the more depressing.
  15. Keep the Change
    Keep the Change, despite David’s knack for making offensive jokes, is a charming, sensitive picture that embraces the characters as they are, without mocking them.
  16. Rust and Bone
    Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.
  17. Inland Empire
    Inland Empire is Lynch's most experimental film since "Eraserhead." But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr."), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch's mental floodgates.
  18. The Rape of Recy Taylor
    The film is a haunting, damning unpacking of history that also reminds us how little progress we’ve made.
  19. Eye in the Sky
    The problem with movies depicting the banality of anything, of course, is that they tend to be pretty banal themselves; in setting out to be the exception to that rule, Eye in the Sky only proves it.
  20. Kiki
    Jordenö, in a recurring motif, honors the kiki denizens the most when she captures them motionless, staring directly into the camera, regal and indefatigable.
  21. The Illinois Parables
    Stratman often juxtaposes static, serene landscape footage with an increasingly agitated soundtrack, arriving at an odd consonance amid so much dissonance.
  22. Frantz
    The savage derangements of grief so guttingly explored by Ozon in Under the Sand (2000), a career-revitalizing project for Charlotte Rampling, are decorously treated in Frantz.
  23. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    It's a uniquely lonely film, and one of the year's most memorable.
  24. Wordplay
    Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
  25. Like Father, Like Son
    It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.
  26. Most Beautiful Island
    As a rumination on the experiences of undocumented immigrants, Most Beautiful Island presents an extreme example of what people will do to scrape by — but it does so without belittling its vulnerable characters.
  27. Night Owls
    Charles Hood's Night Owls is a mostly satisfying two-hander that never quite lives up to its full potential.
  28. Filmworker
    Perhaps if Kubrick himself wasn’t obsessed, if his films weren’t so thoroughly overwhelming in real life, then they wouldn’t have exploded in our minds the way they did. Filmworker is both a cautionary tale and a tribute to this kind of compulsion.
  29. Queen of Katwe
    Nair's immersive, energetic style, combined with her talented cast's ability to invest even the most obvious lines with genuine feeling, gives Queen of Katwe a powerful clarity.
  30. Werewolf
    Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.
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