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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Argo
    A "gritty" historical drama overwhelmed by its love of Hollywood as an inventor of imaginary narratives with real consequences, a great generator of American bedtime stories whose magic works on suburban kids and foreign enemies alike.
  2. Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    In an overlong sequence shot to resemble an actual play, the acting feels so forced, the staging so wooden, that it's impossible to be fully engaged in what's actually going on. The actual story is, if not quite rote, certainly nothing new.
  3. Least Among Saints
    There's nothing but skin-deep warmth to Least Among Saints, a film in which any authority figure who can't magically sober up and play surrogate daddy for a spell is treated as either a meddler or a well-meaning, do-nothing skeptic.
  4. Madrid, 1987
    Miguel uses her beauty and placid demeanor as a screen against which to project his memories of past adventures and the ghost of his libido.
  5. A Whisper to a Roar
    An expertly drawn primer on the soft dictatorships that constrained five different countries and the peaceful revolutions that sought to expunge them.
  6. An Affair of the Heart
    An Affair of the Heart's focus is so vaguely sketched out that it ultimately could be about any grateful artist who enjoys a modicum of celebrity years after his initial success.
  7. The Flat
    In families, this fascinating film suggests, acknowledging or denying the darker truths of one's legacy is a choice that must be made again and again, each and every day.
  8. Bitter Seeds
    Although temperamentally dissimilar, Peled's film complements Anusha Rizvi's 2010 feature debut, Peepli (Live), which responded to the same crisis with a flawed but nervy satire. Bitter Seeds doesn't fool around, not while the enormity persists.
  9. Simon & the Oaks
    Lisa Ohlin's Simon and the Oaks has all the superficial elements of compelling drama but none of the interiority; it looks like a good movie without ever actually feeling like one.
  10. Hotel Noir
    Gutierrez bathes in moodiness while remaining unconcerned with anything so pedestrian as dramatic cohesion.
  11. The Thieves
    Easier to like than it is to follow, Choi Dong-hoon's glossy caper boasts all the pomp and cajolery of the true international blockbuster.
  12. The Big Picture
    For most of the film, Lartigau creates the tension of a Hitchcockian thriller solely through Paul's interior struggle.
  13. Gayby
    Making a kid "the old-fashioned way" becomes the plot engine for the second time this year - after Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends With Kids" - in Gayby, a comedy that, much like the perfunctory p-in-the-v it depicts, gives about 30 seconds of pleasure before going limp.
  14. War of the Buttons
    Of course, everyone in the film - aside from one or two conspicuous villains - turns out to be a resistant, making an otherwise harmlessly corny movie something slightly more bothersome: a revisionist fantasy of French heroism.
  15. Special Forces
    For a while Degan's serious charisma also kind of makes Islamic extremist fundamentalism look cool and badass, which could have been hilariously subversive if director Stéphane Rybojad had pushed it further.
  16. Smiley
    Tell a die-hard horror-movie fan that the latest scary movie is the worst thing ever, and that fan will nod respectfully but still make plans to go see it. Horror fans must always see for themselves. All of which makes it a bit pointless to declare Smiley the year's dullest scare flick (thus far).
  17. Smashed
    Movies about drugs and alcohol might be a dime (bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt's Smashed is so beautifully shot and well acted as to transcend the genre.
  18. Photographic Memory
    Alternating between time periods and geographic locations, all of it connected by McElwee's narrated thoughts, the film proves a bracing and sometimes uncomfortable peek into private fears and regrets about mortality and missed opportunities. It's also, in its portrait of wayward Adrian, further proof that there's nothing more difficult, frustrating, messy, and insufferable than teenagerdom.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Middle of Nowhere
    A slow-motion-enhanced kiss scene, with Corinealdi in top I-don't-give-a-f--- strut, is a startling example of DuVernay's ability to conjure drama that at once takes place in a character's head and in a recognizable real world. It's beautifully nuanced and confidently ambiguous - and so is the movie.
  20. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    Less inept than its worst-of-the-year title suggests, 3, 2, 1 . . . Frankie Go Boom nonetheless proves too ramshackle and aimless to ever achieve true absurdity.
  21. Sinister
    Hawke's taut performance - lightly parodying his own career doldrums while playing an egotistical hack who's a close cousin of John Cassavetes's self-loathing actor in Rosemary's Baby - is totally credible.
  22. Seven Psychopaths
    Remember the shitty crime comedies every Hollywood brat tried to make after "Pulp Fiction"? It took an Irish playwright to get it right. See it with an audience.
  23. Fat Kid Rules the World
    The film succeeds thanks to Lillard's clear affection for the material and on the strength of its performances, especially Billy Campbell as Troy's conflicted father.
  24. Butter
    Plays like one long, slow descent into cloying moralizing and uplift that's well past its expiration date.
  25. Taken 2
    Taken 2 rarely embodies the values of concision and focus that it extols, and any breathing room from the hurtling narrative illogic only allows the audience opportunity to notice slips in Mills's father-knows-best infallibility.
  26. The Prosecution of an American President
    So unabashedly one-sided that the documentary is problematic even when the facts and figures check out.
  27. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    These 2-D characters might as well be wearing T-shirts that say things like "Predatory College Professor" and "Self-Obsessed Father" on them.
  28. My Father and The Man In Black
    As Cash might say, it has the heart, and it has the blood, and by the time childhood chatter is played back again, feeling is soaked through it like the sweat in Cash's guitar strap.
  29. In My Mother's Arms
    Husham's efforts might be a drop in the bucket, but that only makes them more worthy of documenting, perhaps even celebrating.
  30. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Escape Fire winds up feeling like only one half of a larger argument.
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