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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Skyfall
    As much as it's open about its paranoia of the new, Skyfall's fatal misstep is its slavish hewing to event-movie trends. Like this summer's Spider-Man, Batman, and Avengers movies, Skyfall seems to exist primarily to set up the events of subsequent films.
  2. Vamps
    Reteaming with Silverstone, the alpha matchmaker of "Clueless," for Vamps, Heckerling uses the actress as the mouthpiece for her complaints about how dumb everyone is today. The writer-director's nostalgia feeds the laziest type of cultural critique: never piercing, just grumpy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burn
    In this lively and affecting documentary, filmmakers Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez show that Detroit is burning. Literally.
  4. 28 Hotel Rooms
    Not showing us every aspect of their lives is a fine, even novel, approach, but merely telling us about them instead feels like a fruitless middle ground.
  5. Festival of Lights
    Little girls never stop loving their daddies in Festival of Lights, a drama that never stops loving soap-opera-style melodramatics.
  6. The Man with the Iron Fists
    If Iron Fists is sometimes badly made, it is refreshingly badly made. It has a homemade charm that comes from a sense of having gestated in a lifelong obsession.
  7. Here I Learned to Love
    A slight but powerful entry in the family-history-as-world-history archives.
  8. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography
    The film risks self-importance, but when Peralta admits through tears just how much he loves his skater charges, it imparts what every parent knows: that even better than achieving one's own success is shepherding the success of others.
  9. High Ground
    From its low-key, guitar-based score by composer Chris Bacon to the filmmaker's refusal to sugar-coat the tough times some of the soldiers faced after completing the climb, High Ground takes its cues from the worldview of its subjects.
  10. North Sea Texas
    Director Bavo Defurne fills the frame with warm, bright color and the lovely austerity of the Belgian seaside, angling for a soulful, slightly hyperreal comedy rather than the pursuit of a political agenda or a boring awareness-raising endeavor.
  11. This Must Be the Place
    Sorrentino's languorous photography, understated humor, and quiet but profound dramatic reveals coil together into something organic, whole, and achingly sweet.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    The movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character.
  13. A Late Quartet
    It's something of a relief that little is actually resolved in A Late Quartet; Zilberman is at his best when leaving narrative threads hanging rather than trying to tie them together.
  14. Jack and Diane
    Although enthralled by brooding, self-absorbed teenagers, the film doesn't present a single believable one.
  15. The Details
    Top-shelf cast, headed by Tobey Maguire, slips into familiar grooves of adultery, lies, blackmail, and pet poisoning, it's the spectacular blow-ups and dressing-downs that make this such a nervy pleasure.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Café de Flore
    Café de Flore - the title comes from a song heard in both halves - is like a story constructed from the perfume ads in Vanity Fair: the emotional problems of shallow, sexy jet-setters.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bay
    Despite a handful of legit creepy moments, the film's concern with superficial realism prevents it from really hitting home; its fuzzy, fractured depiction of disaster never comes close to conjuring the "holy shit it could happen here don't touch that doorknob" real-world paranoia of last year's artfully Hollywood-ized disaster film, "Contagion."
  18. Wreck-It Ralph
    As with its narrative, Wreck-It Ralph's themes don't develop by branching out in wild, unpredictable ways; instead, they simply become narrower and more monotonous.
  19. Flight
    It is not surprising that Zemeckis's handling of spectacle would be undiminished, but he hasn't lost his touch with actors, either, coaching Washington into one of his rare performances that suggests much more than it shows.
  20. A Man's Story
    The result often plays more like a satire of the fashion industry than a serious look at one of the humans inside it.
  21. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Crewdson and others (including Russell Banks and Laurie Simmons) speak eloquently about his project, but it's the on-set agonies - to achieve the fleeting expression here, dark kiss of light there, and the peculiar relief they bring our maestro - that fascinate.
  22. Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    With horror altogether absent and a plot drowning in insipid convolutions, it's a film whose early warning to Heather should be heeded: "Don't go to Silent Hill."
  23. The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling - Ireland 1965
    Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.
  24. Dust Up
    Billy Jack meets Rob Zombie meets John Waters in this trippy, gory, not-as-fun-as-it-should-be genre mash-up from writer-director Ward Roberts.
  25. Deep Dark Canyon
    The film depletes itself with inter-location crosscutting, presumably intended to stoke suspense, and it all approximates the feel of an early Billy Bob Thornton script but lacks the full investment. Still, Levine commands every scene he's in with great support from a subtle and soulful Martin Starr as his conflicted deputy.
  26. The American Scream
    Though not must-see cinema, it is entertaining and affecting.
  27. The Black Tulip
    There are good intentions here, but too little nuance.
  28. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Too bad this section of the movie is but a temporary reprieve from the obnoxious sentimentality.
  29. Cloud Atlas
    Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe.
  30. Sleep Tight
    Director Jaume Balagueró's film is nothing if not a well-executed bit of escalating craziness.
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