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
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff's glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.
  2. Alpha Dog
    If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor--his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events--he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place.
  3. The Cult of the Suicide Bomber
    This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else.
  4. The Situation
    The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation.
  5. The Pied Piper
    More affecting than affected.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bamako
    Bamako brings relief from the latest round of Africa chic in the media, reversing "the flood of information that flows one way." It colors the Africa Problem from the inside out.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coffee Date
    Writer-director Stewart Wade has gracefully expanded his short film, a festival fave, into a warmhearted tale carried by genuine affection and a charming cast rather than cutting one-liners and turbo-charged plotting.
  8. Avenue Montaigne
    Not that Thompson's films lack for romance. She shoots Paris like Woody Allen shoots New York--ritzy, golden, and packed with chance meetings between highly strung arty types.
  9. The Astronaut Farmer
    This movie works precisely because it's bereft of modern cinema's cynicism.
  10. Starter for 10
    The result is something altogether more formulaic, but Starter for 10 nonetheless goes down easy, thanks in large part to the up-and-coming talent from across the pond and a steady infusion of the Cure, Wham!, and Tears for Fears on the soundtrack.
  11. The Taste of Tea
    Warm and fantastical family portrait.
  12. Into Great Silence
    Natural light is used to euphoric effect, inevitably summoning the old masters, and Gröning's frames are balanced and symmetrical, in Renaissance-ready emulation of God's perfection.
  13. The Namesake
    The Namesake carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair's more lightweight movies so much fun to look at--"Monsoon Wedding" was a dandy piece of froth, and "Vanity Fair" survives only on its looks--but it's a quieter, more mature work.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Mimzy
    Mimzy, whose charmingly retro FX date to around 1985, won't post Peter Jackson figures at the box office, but you can't say that Shaye doesn't have the magic touch.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Page Turner
    Anyone who remembers "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie's kitchen, and Dercourt's overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke–esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless.
  16. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    Yunis, as he imploringly reminds us, is the Iraqi people, but he is also steeped in Hollywood references, pulling analogies for the U.S. occupation from "Rambo" and "Dirty Harry."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Wedding
    What happens after the wedding comprises a full three-quarters of Bier's epic, whose near-Biblical twists and turns--I wouldn't think of giving them away--are enough to fill four weepies.
  18. The TV Set
    The TV Set is wry and true about the messy tangle of art, commerce, and family, as talented creative types try to stay true to themselves and put food on the table. The movie is also a treasure trove of inspired comic personalities.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    Jordan's interviews, from John Zorn to John Waters, all attest to Smith's reputation as a pivotal influence on film, performance art, gallery installation, and photography; as Richard Foreman once declared, everybody stole from Jack.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vacancy
    Antal smartly adheres to the no-frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore. And Wilson and Beckinsale superbly execute everything that's required of their characters--namely, yelling and running.
  21. The Valet
    Of all of Francis Veber's farces (The Dinner Game, La Cage Aux Folles, etc.), this is the one that feels most like a sitcom pilot, which is to say it's a farce most forced.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waitress
    Waitress won't set the world on fire, but it glows.
  23. Jindabyne
    Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.
  24. Snow Cake
    Does sidle up to the brink of mawkishness, but it pulls back so nicely into Weaver's rich, hard-headed evocation of Linda's limitations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hip Hop Project
    From domestic strife to studio triumph, the most impressive accomplishment of Project is not the student-made album, but that when Kazi says cheesy things like "This is healing through hip-hop," you actually believe him.
  26. 9 Star Hotel
    Like all good political documentaries, 9 Star Hotel is more anthropology than agitprop, a portrait of life among the young, poorly educated men who are caught between Israeli exploitation and Palestinian Authority corruption.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bug
    Genuinely freaky-deaky, not to mention more inventively unsettling than anything Friedkin has mustered in the quarter-century since twisting little Linda Blair into a satanic spewer of pea soup and F-bombs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paprika
    Paprika, based on a serialized novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, isn't a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced--or maybe dreamed.
  29. Radiant City
    Enlightening and disturbingly funny.
  30. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »