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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    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Year of the Dog
    Mike White, writer of "Chuck & Buck" and "The School of Rock" (and oddball actor in both), here directs his latest geek's revenge fantasy like a psychotherapeutically treated Todd Solondz.
  2. Batman Begins
    Nolan and his co-screenwriter David Goyer can only press the big buttons so hard—it's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.
  3. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
    In much the same fashion as Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin", Auraeus Solito's feature debut confronts the taboo of pre-teen sexuality with a startling mix of openness and sensitivity. No less than precocious Maxi, the film is alarming, endearing, and utterly unflappable.
  4. Earth Days
    There's great archival footage.
  5. Bad Company
    A considerably more unsettling tale of one-sided amour fou, reportedly inspired by an actual case of teenage prostitution, Jean-Pierre Améris's Bad Company puts the coy prurience of American high school films in brutal perspective.
  6. Rhythm 'n' Bayous: A Road Map to Louisiana Music
    The performances are uneven, but the spirit never flags.
  7. The Tao of Steve
    Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?
  8. Hamlet
    Stylish, funny, and smart...but only up to a point.
  9. Quills
    Kaufman's earnestly overblown celebration of the Marquis de Sade.
  10. Cure
    Cure has a generic resemblance to "Seven," but it's far more oblique, and that much more troubling.
  11. Amélie
    The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.
  12. Empathy
    Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    Pollock drags when Horton's offscreen, and with its NPR-inflected narration and executive producer Don Hewitt, the film might have fared better as a PBS special.
  14. Bal
    Though this graceful film is a minor addition to the canon of Middle Eastern cinema in which nothing and everything happens, Bal is still a beauty.
  15. The Last Circus
    Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast) is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes "Pan's Labyrinth" look like "Sesame Street."
  16. The Yellow Sea
    If anything, Na's film is too much of a good thing, exceeding credibility too often (the punching-bag hero is far too lucky - good and bad - and absorbs a hilarious amount of punishment) in its pursuit of despairing violence. But that's the Korean way, and Na nails down the bottom feeder realism while slouching toward video-game hyperbole.
  17. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    What gives the film its human dimension are the conflicting memories of former residents.
  18. Exit Elena
    Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Herblock: The Black & the White
    Herblock: The Black & The White falters in cheesy dramatizations of young Herblock with his father, or the off-putting and confusing scripted—based on the real Herblock's speeches and writings—interview with older Herblock (Alan Mandell), but it makes up for it by showing history through Herblock's art.
  20. Fatal Assistance
    Peck's documentary is not a penetrating look at at Haiti's post-quake problems, but a scattered, impressionistic one.
  21. Bird People
    Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Widowmaker
    The Widowmaker is important and terrifying, enough that I became nervously aware of my heartbeat throughout.
  23. Song from the Forest
    Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian... But Obert also slips in powerful critiques of Sarno with the lightest of touches — some so light they might be accidental.
  24. A Murder in the Park
    Directors Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber piece the story together via fresh interviews, vintage footage, and too many iffy reenactments and close-ups of news stories. But the matter here transcends the artlessness.
  25. Our Last Tango
    Viewers will sense that the history of these compelling figures entails more frustration and complexity than can be examined in a short running time.
  26. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    You don't watch prolific doc-master Wang Bing's new film about a Chinese mental hospital so much as get imprisoned within it, pacing its dingy corridors and rooms like a zoo animal.
  27. Chapter & Verse
    The story, scripted by Beaty and poet/author-turned-filmmaker Jamal Joseph (who himself did five-and-a-half years in Leavenworth) dips into sloppy, melodramatic heavy-handedness, sullying the occasional spurts of fresh perspective.
  28. Never Steady, Never Still
    Usually a tart-tongued scene-stealer, Henderson is devoid of her trademark hauteur in this remarkable performance.
  29. Standard Operating Procedure
    Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.
  30. I Love You, Man
    The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the meet-cute, love-at-first-sight, break-up-and-make-up, racing-to-the-altar slapstick weepy that's been a staple of cinema since the invention of cinema.
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