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. This Is Martin Bonner
    This Is Martin Bonner isn't exciting, but it's also never dull.
  2. The Patience Stone
    The more typical approach transforms the material, and not for the better—rather than a revelation about how it feels to live her life, this feels like a document of what that life might look like as a conventional, often pokey movie.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Inch'Allah
    This film has a lot to say, and it's sometimes affecting, but most of the time feels too understated to really deliver the powerful effect it seems to be going for.
  5. Implanted
    Writer-director Thomas Verrette's thriller grapples with the foundational relationship between memory and self-identity. It's a well-trod path of exploration, and Verrette-- largely competent, often pedestrian-- doesn't bring much new to the investigative process.
  6. The Happy Sad
    The cast—and Evans's deft hand with them—makes it worth checking out.
  7. Cutie and the Boxer
    With an intimacy and empathy that's all the more powerful for its modesty, the film investigates the complicated feelings of resentment and affection between wife and husband.
  8. Austenland
    The ending is a bit of an audience-pleasing cop-out, a retreat into formula after 80 minutes or so of upending it. But those upendings are memorable, the cast dishy fun, and Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale's breeze of a script (based on Hale's novel) is smart about the allure of fictional romances.
  9. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Lowery isn't a Malick and he's certainly no Kazan, but he's his own man, and a filmmaker to watch.
  10. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels is that rare contemporary filmmaker who's not afraid of melodrama. The Butler is so old-school it feels modern: Stylistically, it could have been made 30 years ago, but its time is now.
  11. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.
  12. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    The slippages and contradictions between who people are, imagine themselves to be, and present themselves as being inform the structure of Machine, a kind of loose container into which people step and out of which they extract more ideal selves.
  13. Prince Avalanche
    Prince Avalanche reconciles Green's twin modes into a whole no other director could have, deeply felt and light as laughter.
  14. Off Label
    Don't discount October Country filmmakers Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher's tragicomically beautiful art-doc, which sensitively favors unflinching testimonials and visually impressionistic observations over journalistic activism.
  15. Lovelace
    Lovelace, ahem, blows it. The narrative rewind gives us new facts and a whole heap of crying scenes, but no added insight into Linda's mind—she's still as empty as an inflatable toy.
  16. Jug Face
    Kinkle shows a deft hand at pacing and the gore is kept to a minimum.
  17. In a World...
    Bell captures the insularity of certain professional pockets of Hollywood, with all their petty rivalries and backstabbing. But she's sharpest in her exploration of what makes women desire success, and what prevents them from getting it.
  18. I Give It a Year
    The funny stuff outweighs the cock-ups, and supporting performances from Stephen Merchant and Minnie Driver kick the movie toward something grander.
  19. The Gardener
    The filmmaker once responsible for virtuoso, tragicomic social critiques like The Cyclist (1987) and Marriage of the Blessed (1989) now delicately works to see how beautiful the world can look when people embrace each other's differences.
  20. Blood
    Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.
  21. Planes
    Can a plane jump a shark when it's already in the air? To Disney, that question is moot. It's so certain that Planes will make a mint in toys, if not in theaters, that it's already slated a sequel for next summer.
  22. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Before it descends into Percy Jackson and the Things That Happen in Movies Like This, the adventure at times clicks into the inventive groove of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, which at their best are touched with the high strangeness of the ancient tales that inspire them.
  23. We're the Millers
    This film's eagerness to please functions as a slow poison, draining The Millers of its vitality by rendering its characterization uneven, its potential undeveloped, and its plot predictable and stupid.
  24. Breaking the Girls
    A decently acted, often drolly funny, tautly directed thriller that proves to be a Russian doll of motivations, coincidences, and plot-twists; it would have been more satisfying if it weren't so unnecessarily convoluted.
  25. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.
  26. Elysium
    Damon is as buff as ever, maybe even more so... But watching him lumber through Elysium's bramble of lofty ideals is no damn fun.
  27. Rising from Ashes
    Rising from Ashes is not just about a cycling team; it's a testament to what happens when human beings care for one another.
  28. Our Children
    Can a film that holds no surprises be of value? In the case of Our Children, which masterfully plays with stylistic conventions and all-too-common instances of real-life matricide, the answer is decidedly yes.
  29. Drift
    The crookedness of the narrative is compounded by the film's failure to display its characters' great pleasures (surfing and drugs) in visually expressive ways.
  30. Breakup at a Wedding
    Those who believe weddings to be exorbitant, empty spectacles have a fair-weather friend in writer-director Victor Quinaz, whose inventive debut, Breakup at a Wedding, attempts an aloof, smirking pose but surrenders to sentimentality in the end.
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