Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Sister
    Writer/director Ursula Meier uses a stripped-down, naturalistic aesthetic full of well-organized compositions that pay close attention to shifts in character mood, comportment, and behavior.
  2. Trade of Innocents
    Not for the first time in films, noble intent is at odds with aesthetics.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Avé
    Outside of a final shot that's more poetically convenient than emotionally convincing, Avé follows a progression that feels intimate even as it mimics things iconic. They, we, move and are moved.
  4. The Paperboy
    When not contriving to get Efron out of his clothes, The Paperboy gropes for familiar movie language of its period setting: Soul music swells up excitedly over a jumble of jerky zooms, befuddling cuts, and spatial vagueness. But sometimes hot messiness has its charms.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    V/H/S
    In too many of the shorts, bad acting quickly undermines the "authenticity" the aesthetics labor to achieve.
  6. The House I Live In
    What's riveting and attention grabbing in Jarecki's recapitulations of failed policy are some of the talking heads he has assembled, including "The Wire" creator David Simon and historian Richard Lawrence Miller.
  7. Wuthering Heights
    Heathcliff does not get the revenge he wants because he wants to escape the specific traumas of his adolescent past, shown in the film's first half. And because Arnold traps her viewers with Heathcliff's murky version of events. There's no room for enriching subtext in this version of Wuthering Heights because all the information we need is inscribed on the film's glassy surface.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    A road movie using undeveloped land as a blank screen on which to project a dark deconstruction of masculinity and manifest destiny.
  9. The Oranges
    The Oranges, an extremely dry comedy directed by Julian Farino, is kind of like a takedown of the suburbs written by the people who designed the menu at Olive Garden: It's inoffensive, forgettable, and you don't actually have to chew anything.
  10. Now, Forager
    A slow-food procedural, commendably devoted yet still underdone.
  11. Frankenweenie
    Frankenweenie, scripted by John August, and based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps from Burton's original story, is tight and brief, hitting all the marks you'd expect from an animated kid's film, and enlivened by Burton's visual style. The man should make more small movies like this one.
  12. Decoding Deepak
    Following the celebrity guru into Thailand for his ordainment as a Buddhist monk, the film is at its best when Gotham can't help but see through his father, who seems entirely restless without an audience and a smartphone through which to be reminded of their adoration of him.
  13. Bel Borba Aqui
    Now he's famous, and the production of the documentary Bel Borba Aqui, practically a montage of color, music, and Borba's constant laughter, coincides with his local acclaim.
  14. The Double Steps
    In the end, we glimpse footage of the real Augiéras, but by then, the film wanders off into its own set of suggested Cagean possibilities, and what you get feels closer to a fable-essay about the meaning of art than a narrative. Sweet stuff.
  15. Dear Mandela
    Triumph follows tragedy as the case unfolds and history is caught repeating, but the larger, more complicated story underlying this brief but bracing missive still feels untold.
  16. 186 Dollars to Freedom
    On every level this production - from Robinson's callow performance to Vila's hackneyed handheld camerawork, punching beats in the stead of the actors - remains firmly on the level of the obvious.
  17. Six Million and One
    All the while, Fisher and his kin's incessant, contentious bickering exposes the ongoing difficulty of reconciling with inherited trauma, though such squabbling's protracted prominence also, ultimately, suggests the need for a bit more editorial trimming.
  18. Won't Back Down
    In Davis's case, marveling at yet another fine performance doesn't stop you from wishing that her first leading role was in a worthier vehicle
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    West of Thunder
    West of Thunder is not a tedious watch at all. In fact, it is oddly absorbing, just not the way writer and star Dan Davies probably meant it to be.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus
    Atwill and other scholars maintain that the Romans were ingenious in pulling off the pacifist hoax, so useful to the ruthless men who administered the Roman empire. They were able to "create a type of Judaism that was benign," says one commentator.
  21. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    The film is funny, weepy, and hairy all the way to the barrel-chested-and utterly predictable-end.
  22. The Iran Job
    Although it presents itself as merely the story of a professional basketball player named Kevin Sheppard, who, never quite making it to the NBA, has spent his career playing in lesser leagues overseas, The Iran Job ends up being quite a bit more: an underdog sports story, a fish-out-of-water tale, and an outsider's perspective on Iran's almost-revolution of early 2009.
  23. Raaz 3: The Third Dimension
    To Western audiences, the most interesting part of director Vikram Bhatt's Raaz 3 will be the Bollywood-narrative conventions--overamplified melodrama, romantic montages, elaborately choreographed dance numbers. But as a horror film, it's about as ambitious as R.L. Stine.
  24. Electoral Dysfunction
    The result being a film that, devoid of both laugh-out-loud humor and the righteous indignation that characterizes most agitprop efforts, winds up being just a voting-for-dummies primer.
  25. Harvest of Empire
    Harvest of Empire is never quite wrong, but it's effectiveness is inversely proportional to how hard it's trying.
  26. Vulgaria
    The broadness of the film's comedy might be largely attributable to the conventions of Hong Kong cinema, but to American audiences, the film has an exaggerated notion of its own raunchiness.
  27. The Waiting Room
    What makes The Waiting Room worth visiting is how well it does without the usual narcotizing documentary tactics.
  28. The Other Dream Team
    Watching Sabonis and company deliver comeuppance to their former rulers on the hardwood, I fully expect The Other Dream Team to join "Do You Believe in Miracles?" and "Undefeated" in your inspirational-sports-doc rotation.
  29. Bringing Up Bobby
    The movie permanently downshifts to moralizing melodrama and retrograde Stella Dallas–like maternal sacrifice when Bobby has an accidental run-in with real estate magnate Kent (Bill Pullman).
  30. Tales of the Night
    The stories are quick, tiny surveys of a given culture's conventions told as monomythic, Joseph Campbell–ish pastiches and animated with fluidity and deliberateness that nearly excuses the film's slightness.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »