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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    Temple's engrossing portrait of the Clash's late frontman uses endlessly suggestive montage to show how he kept punk's precepts alive, even after he left the music and eventually the earth itself.
  2. P2
    If it weren't for two excessively violent deaths, P2 could be termed a refreshingly old-fashioned thriller, one dependent on hairbreadth escapes and the pluck of its heroine.
  3. King Corn
    King Corn will put you off corn for a long, long time, but this is as much a thoughtful meditation on the plight of the American farmer as it is a rant against our expanding waistlines.
  4. Southland Tales
    In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Margot at the Wedding
    Hard as it may be to imagine a comedy that inflicts all the psychic torment of "Cries and Whispers," Baumbach has pulled off a more psychologically acute--and funnier--version of the Bergman pastiches that Woody Allen attempted 30 years ago, with a jumpy, nerve-rattling rhythm all his own.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy the Kid
    I have seen more than 25 documentaries this year, and after a while they all start to run together, both structurally and thematically. Billy the Kid is utterly original in both respects.
  7. Nanking
    While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today.
  8. Youth Without Youth
    For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.
  9. Taxi to the Dark Side
    Taxi is an impressively blueprinted work. Still images--from autopsy tables, makeshift holding cells, the Oval Office--are selected and deployed to maximum effect.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Business of Being Born
    Epstein and Lake have crafted an absorbing, thought-provoking inquiry into what modern birth has become and how to make it better.
  11. Rambo
    A sort of parody "Apocalypse Now," complete with listless coochie dancers entertaining the Burmese troops, the movie finds its own heart of darkness once Rambo drops the doctors in Burma.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How She Move
    Especially good are Wesley, whose expressions are a study in shifting thought, and Tre Armstrong as her street-hardened but good-hearted rival, a stock role that Armstrong fills with unmediated feeling.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elite Squad
    This latest pounding slice-of-thug-life thriller from Brazil packs the same cinematic firepower as "City of God," only on the other side of the law.
  14. Caramel
    Beauty-parlor romantic comedy has been done to death and beyond, but what Caramel lacks in originality is redeemed by its exuberant sensuality and astute commentary on the way Lebanese women sit uncomfortably in the crosshairs of their country’s clash between patriarchal tradition and Westernized modernity.
  15. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    Although the big comic setups in Lee's script feel a bit forced--the director continually sets up moments of rapid-fire, barb-filled interplay among his accomplished cast.
  16. Definitely, Maybe
    A surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy.
  17. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    The movie's richly autumnal look is by swift turns cozily naturalistic and terrifyingly baroque, and director Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) sustains the balance between real and surreal with mischievous brio.
  18. The Counterfeiters
    At its best--and queasiest--The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diary of the Dead
    Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible "Redacted," nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of "Cloverfield," but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    This warmly engaging film benefits from its understated approach (it suggests rather than spells out the political turmoil), and its light, comedic tone never mitigates the drama of the central story.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snow Angels
    What saves this heavy, heavy material from sinking into the chill, familiar turf of the Small-Town Midwinter Tragedy is Green's practiced ear for verbal idiosyncrasy and off-kilter conversation rhythms.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horton Hears a Who!
    Horton Hears a Who! has blessedly been conceived and executed in reverence to Seuss's story, padding out the original narrative with some meaningful new ideas and casting a mercifully muzzled Jim Carrey as the titular beast.
  23. Heartbeat Detector
    Here, knowledge and understanding raise more questions than they answer, and the film ends not in closure, but in openness. It is precisely those qualities that give Heartbeat Detector its epic sense of humanity. Take them away and you'd be left with a leaner but markedly less compelling workaday workplace thriller: "Michael Clayton" with Nazis instead of lawyers.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Grand
    It has a lot of affection for its screwy characters, and it has a cast worth watching even when the plot's held captive by a bunch of boring cards.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Run, Fatboy, Run
    Pegg has staked out a peculiar slant on genre material that ventures beyond irony toward rehabilitation--and nobody plays blithe humiliation with more style.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cool School
    All told, and well told, this is essential history.
  27. My Brother Is an Only Child
    Tumultuously shot "rawness" is the stylistic house rule, but it's Elio Germano's Accio who vitalizes the film.
  28. Priceless
    Priceless begins as standard, unconvincing, assembly-line French farce and ends as a cop-out, feel-good rom-com. In between, it develops into something considerably more interesting.
  29. Meduzot
    An Israeli movie with neither politics nor religion--and only one casual, if fraught, mention of the Holocaust--bespeaks an underlying desire for normality that's as poignant and fantastic as Keret and Geffen's modest, shabby Tel Aviv settings.
  30. Water Lilies
    French director Céline Sciamma doesn't quite have the stun of discovery--mortified adolescent sexuality is something of a national specialty, after all--but she inexhaustibly endeavors after the indelible image.
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