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 7.5 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. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The script is solid, and the fight scenes are excellent.
  2. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.
  3. Millennium Actress
    Flashbacks integrate with scenes from her films, and it becomes difficult to discern between the two -- cinema is equated with memory. Unfortunately, the trippy disorientation ultimately devolves into outright confusion.
  4. Kadosh
    One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.
  5. Prisoner of Paradise
    A fascinating and painful account of an entertainer trapped not only by his Jewishness but by his overwhelming need to make theater.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    10 Things I Hate About You
    Anyone who hates '80s pop will find this movie awfully tiresome, but Stiles and her underage Petruchio (Australian actor Heath Ledger, as hunky as his name) are charismatic and bold enough to carry any romantic comedy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Freaky Friday
    The situation -- a mother-daughter mind-body switcheroo -- is as enduringly appealing as it is absurd, and the comedy flows therefrom.
  8. Thirteen
    Catherine Hardwicke's directorial debut is less a damozel-in-distress fetish flick than a bird-flipping plunge into coded girl-cult communication.
  9. Hillbrow Kids
    Utterly necessary film.
  10. Sin Alas
    Sin Alas matches the half-awake feeling evoked by Luis's ruminations — on love, on Cuba's history, and on himself — well enough to feel authentic even when it meanders too far from what makes it most compelling.
  11. Sleep Tight
    Director Jaume Balagueró's film is nothing if not a well-executed bit of escalating craziness.
  12. The Brand New Testament
    Testament is full of bad jokes (like a man repeatedly throwing himself from great heights to prove he won't die) and, in spite of Groyne's grave, determined presence as Ea, is borderline offensive.
  13. Merry Christmas
    Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waging a Living
    Weisberg, whose stripped-down style seems refreshing amid the current spate of super-produced docs, gives you what you want, if what you want are dismally deferred American Dreams and harsh economic realities. And you should.
  15. The Silence Before Bach
    Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.
  16. Bugs
    It’s gently comic, a touch naïve, and somewhat moving: These idealists are ready to fight to keep creepy-crawlies farm to table.
  17. The King
    Honestly, I’d probably love this film’s wandering spirit and Elvis-is-everywhere philosophizing if it were half as fast or twice as long, if it pinned any thought down long enough to really TCB. Instead, it’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs Seventies stage banter.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heartbeats
    If Dolan is able to derive a certain comic tension from the simple threat of what could happen with these three in close quarters, he and his co-actors often spoil the mystery of the unsaid with the tells on their faces.
  19. eXistenZ
    Almost buoyant in its creepiness and positively bejeweled in its disgust -- the movie can be enjoyably considered as a self-conscious fiction in the convoluted tradition of Raul Ruiz or Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain."
  20. Far from the Tree
    It’s a painstaking inspection of parenthood, which is fraught even in less formidable circumstances than what these families face, and often harrowing. But it’s also a contemplation of what it means to be human and, ultimately, optimistic.
  21. Gunner Palace
    Floating on the surface of confusion, Gunner Palace has a raw home video quality that's often quite beautiful. Much of the movie is hardly more than an immersion in sights and sounds. Vivid as it is, Gunner Palace is dominated by what isn't shown. It's the human face of Abu Ghraib.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Skin I Live In
    The film deflates in its final third, with crude matter-of-fact set pieces, dumb explanatory psychology, and bursts of intentional camp overwhelming and canceling out the unmoored creepiness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    Like his "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter.
  24. Shall We Kiss?
    Bogs down in the philosophical shallow end and never quite recovers from what's clearly meant to be a deceptively light tone.
  25. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    Landscapes and lyric conundrums distinguish the first two-thirds of this find-your-own-meaning artflick, which unfurls like some stranger's life you're half reliving.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock the Bells
    An electrifying, occasionally terrifying documentary.
  27. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.
  28. Post Tenebras Lux
    Confusion often reigns here, but the film offers a degree of lush beauty that makes sitting through it well worth the occasional frustrations.
  29. Sunshine Superman
    You may not leave Sunshine Superman wanting to emulate Carl and Jean, but you will feel like you've vicariously bonded with them.
  30. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    Largely content to bask in the great man's glow, Angio provides generous clips and soundbites alongside fond reminiscences, but the celebratory tone leaves room for darker reflections.
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