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. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    In narrative terms, not that much happens, but as for Harry's emotional journey--well, that's nearly epic.
  2. Fed Up
    Fed Up is a workmanlike documentary, as undistinguished in style as a PowerPoint slide show. It nonetheless finds traction in its depiction of the food industry's Montgomery Burns–like practices.
  3. Sylvio
    Birney and Audley have an impressive visual sense — the smart framing and thrifty, ingenious production design (by Peter Davis) at times suggest a Wes Anderson–directed installment of Between Two Ferns — and also the good sense to lean on Birney’s nuanced physical performance.
  4. Smashed
    Movies about drugs and alcohol might be a dime (bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt's Smashed is so beautifully shot and well acted as to transcend the genre.
  5. Paradise Now
    Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."
  6. What Doesn't Kill You
    Goodman's movie tends to limp along.
  7. Swimming
    Director Robert J. Siegel allows the characters to inhabit their world without cleaving to a narrative arc. It's a luxurious hangout; spaces burgeon with goofy love and generous confusion.
  8. Manito
    Unusually impassioned indie.
  9. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Slesin's film is a profound meditation on the resilience of children -- their ability to take sustenance from whatever love is available -- and on the persistent presence of the child hidden within each grown-up.
  10. Marion Bridge
    A scrupulous and impeccably acted account of the fallout from a family secret.
  11. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    It's less interesting watching them do what they both feel they have to do -- talk about their craft -- especially as both give off the prickly energy of artists who would rather create than explain. They're more comfortable asking one another questions, even though the answers are shrugged off humbly.
  12. Waking Ned Devine
    It's instructive that Waking Ned Devine is being so aggressively sold as a feel-good comedy; the "good" feeling in question is called condescension.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jess and Moss
    Achingly sad and surpassingly lovely.
  14. Land of the Dead
    Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further.
  15. Inspector Bellamy
    It's an ostensive crime film at once symmetrical, surprising, and knowingly cinephilic.
  16. The Boss of It All
    Colors and angles and sound levels don't match from one cut to the next. The movie is ugly as sin to look at. But it's all intentional on the part of von Trier.
  17. Will You Dance with Me?
    An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.
  18. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Constance Marks's documentary on Kevin Clash, the kind, gentle man who created the Muppet beloved by every single child in the world, rushes through the intriguing points its interviewees bring up to devote more time to banalities.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monument Ave.
    Under Ted Demme's accomplished direction, the film unfolds with a kind of ruthless simplicity, observing, rather than stating, the neighborhood's intricate social connections.
  20. The Imitation Game
    Tyldum has robbed his own film of emotional depth — this Turing is as simple as Morse code. Rather than a complex human portrait, this is an assemblage of triumphs, tragedies and tics.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Smiley Face
    On the plus side, 100 percent sober when I watched it, I can say with some authority that Dylan Haggerty has written an eleventh-hour candidate for the funniest movie of 2007, that Gregg Araki has directed his finest film since 1997's "Nowhere," and that Faris, flawless, rocks their inspired idiot odyssey in a virtuoso comedic turn.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Viewers may not be surprised to learn of Wal-Mart's horrific track record, but they can't deny Greenwald's airtight advocacy.
  23. To the Limit
    Daring enough to appeal to more than just the usual extreme-sports junkies.
  24. Leap Year
    There are trifling signs of freshmanship, but also a steady observant eye, and in the end Leap Year bears heartbreaking witness to hopeless depression, isolation, and the failure of sex as few movies ever have.
  25. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    Raluy, a Mexican TV and stage star making her movie debut, is captivating as a woman whose terror at her own behavior is matched only by her bewilderment at the system around her.... But the real star here is Plá, with his total control of the frame.
  26. Sisters in Law
    The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.
  27. Man Push Cart
    Man Push Cart is a diminutive film, finally--vying for a neorealist vibe, it lacks the Italian history makers' narrative urgency, and the sociopolitical conflict at the heart of the immigration "issue" is hardly engaged.
  28. Tadpole
    As sweet and unassuming a film as they come, embraces both perspectives -- it's sympathetic to the batty throes of a first infatuation, but affably demurs at indulging them.
  29. Spy Kids
    Has an intemperate vitality that's hard to resist.
  30. Wonderland
    There's not a false note among the performances: Henderson, Hart, Shepherd, Markham, and in particular McKee add unspoken complexities to their portrayals.
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