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. From Up on Poppy Hill
    This film's gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional payoffs of melodrama without ruining one's suspension of disbelief.
  2. Reincarnated
    The film is as lightweight as the ganja-puffing is plentiful, little more than a vanity project that allows its subject to wax philosophical on his past triumphs, tragedies, and spiritual development (aided by Louis Farrakhan) from gangland pimp to nonviolent family man.
  3. Vanishing Waves
    For those who found Inception too plotty and sexless, Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte's sleek sci-fi reverie is hereby advised.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Costa's grainy footage looks amateurish at times—at one point, she runs out of battery and the screen goes dark—but her rule-breaking is bold.
  5. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film's biggest surprise is that, after Wonderstone loses everything, we're expected to feel something besides impatience as he learns to become a better person—and gapes like a child at the wonder of magic.
  6. Spring Breakers
    Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.
  7. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    The directors plant a camera in front of Roth and get him talking. To smooth over edits, they show us book covers and old photos—Roth was dashing, charming, a little dangerous, one of his college friends tells us, but she doesn't need to say it. It's manifest, and it's still true. The film is especially recommended to anyone who thinks they hate him.
  8. Downeast
    Redmon and Sabin carefully tease apart the insidious process of American deindustrialization, and by the end of the film the threads they unravel reveal how the free market can choke like a noose.
  9. Thinly Veiled
    This ludicrous, overlong, pathetically conceived, instant festival rejection might just be sincere enough to rank among laughable drunk-crowd curios like Troll 2, Birdemic and, ye Gods, The Room.
  10. The Other Side of the Ice
    Too much of the movie is just people being crabby (or, later, dumb!) in fascinating places, which is less enthralling than the places themselves.
  11. Dead Man Down
    It's all so much turgid brooding, dialogue underlined with import, and leaden symbolism involving Rapace's white and red dresses, none of which is salvaged by a typically understated Farrell performance.
  12. Girl Rising
    The stories, shaped by anecdotal brevity, are often charmingly modest. Only an insistence on blandly inspirational rhetoric and a series of didactic interludes threaten to reduce the film to a PSA about the plight of young women in developing countries.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electrick Children
    Electrick Children juggles heavy things, with humor and sobriety in their proper, Book of Ecclesiastes turn. Best of all, Thomas has an aversion to the easy resolution—she knows precisely which mysteries to keep dangling.
  14. Citizen Hearst
    Sometimes Citizen Hearst feels as breezy and electric as the newsreels Hearst pioneered; other times it feels like the video they'll make you watch during orientation on your first day at 300 West 57th.
  15. The Last Exorcism Part II
    When the creators of The Last Exorcism Part II swapped pseudo-verité realism for psychological realism, they made it a lot harder to take their franchise seriously.
  16. The Attacks of 26/11
    Attacks doesn't establish the severity of a real-life tragedy, it only crassly devalues the loss of human life.
  17. The Silence
    Making his feature debut, Swiss-born writer/director Baran bo Odar has turned Jan Costin Wagner’s 2007 novel The Silence into a taut, beautifully acted thriller.
  18. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Monk
    The finale, in which godly rites are juxtaposed against the vilest of sins, builds to an unholy power.
  20. Le Petit Soldat (re-release)
    It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.
  21. Language of a Broken Heart
    Full of familiar tropes, exhausted rhythms, self-conscious references to genre forebears...Language of a Broken Heart, directed by Rocky Powell from a screenplay by Juddy Talt, is pure product.
  22. Gut Renovation
    What a shame it is that Friedrich, so impassioned by her subject matter, couldn’t get enough objectivity to make a film that’s more than just a complaint.
  23. Greedy Lying Bastards
    It’s too bad that Rosebraugh himself can be so off-putting. The data presented is horrifying enough without sarcastic narration, or his Roger & Me–style pursuit of an interview with ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.
  24. Emperor
    Given its true-life basis, the story is already devoid of suspense regarding Hirohito’s ultimate fate, and Fellers’s inquiry is made more sluggish by dramatically inert conversations with Japanese officials.
  25. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    It’s a moving tale made more so because even after he’s “won,” Pineda maintains a clear-eyed pragmatism about what living a fairy tale costs.
  26. Beyond the Hills
    The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.
  27. The We and the I
    At its finest and most affecting, The We and the I is a window onto youth’s forever moments
  28. Welcome to Pine Hill
    At times the improvised dialogue seems too schematic and superfluous, especially in view of such exploratory and observant handheld camera work. Otherwise, though, this is wonderful stuff.
  29. The Lost Medallion
    The first in a projected series of four values-encouraging family films, The Lost Medallion is so corny that even the most conservative parent might beat a hasty retreat.
  30. The Sweeney
    The Sweeney—a new British police drama—feels a lot like an American-made cop movie circa 1990.
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