Village Voice's Scores

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:
11162 movie reviews
  1. If little else, the third and supposedly final entry in the X-Men mega-franchise suggests that some movies -- or at any rate some formulas -- are not just critic-proof, they might even be director-proof.
  2. After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This enjoyably breezy portrait of genius architect Frank Gehry is drawn doodle-style by first-time documentarian Sydney Pollack.
  3. The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.
  4. Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Like "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's casually raw 2002 faux–cinema vérité indie about a bunch of shiftless twentysomethings, The Puffy Chair uses simple, unadorned dialogue and intimate, off-the-cuff performances to get at the underlying issues.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In briskly edited sequences peppered with fascinating found footage, each genre is tightly linked to a neighborhood.
  5. A sweet, engaging journey with the Roosevelt Roughriders, whose kindly coach encourages the girls to snarl like wolves and devour like lions.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Intermittently hilarious.
  6. 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.
  7. One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.
  8. A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.
  9. Beautiful but withholding, The Forsaken Land doesn't offer much in the way of explanation -- the soundtrack features more birdcalls than dialogue -- but the 27-year-old filmmaker's command of film language is evident and his evocation of postwar trauma is haunting.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's good, bloody fun that stirs the intellect whenever it feels like it, and as a swashbuckler, the dead-game Butler outswings just about anyone in Troy or Kingdom of Heaven or Tristan & Isolde.
  10. The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Silver Belles are bold, brash, and gorgeously awake, and their willingness to live large is thrilling.
  11. It's a kids' movie for kids, and Davis approaches it as though he and his cast are merely storytellers trying to reach kids rather than show-offs trying to impress their parents.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Even when the script overstates the obvious, Stettner mines every nuance of unease from the head games between Williams and the unnerving Collette, who embodies the moment passive aggression stops being passive.
  12. Ferrell reminds the audience of why he matters: because he's the loudest, driest, and most fearless comic actor working.
  13. World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
  14. The golden-hued footage is lovingly faked by ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the straight-faced result is as improbably touching as the Farrelly brothers' underrated "Stuck on You."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A curiously tasty dish, one that could leave even a vegan with a burning desire to sample Shopsin's lamb chops.
  15. Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.
  16. Saucy, rowdy, heartfelt, and terribly sweet movie.
  17. Though the movie is occasionally too clever-talky for its own good, it has the authentic ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place.
  18. Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh.
  19. Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A well-wrought, beautifully lensed but ultimately hopeless tale, Fratricide provides a less than optimistic allegory for the intractability of human conflicts: Even far away and decades later, old wars bring fresh miseries.
  20. Invincible joins "Rocky" or "Hoosiers" or "Breaking Away" as one of the few satisfying sports movies in which the foundation built upon a heap of clichés holds strong.
  21. Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.

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