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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  1. Daisies (1966)
    A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.
  2. Starry Starry Night
    Lin fills in the gaps with some handsome CG-fantasy sequences and a rather obvious central metaphor involving a missing puzzle piece, but he can't make up for the fact that the film wants to say more about the fragility of childhood than it's capable of communicating through its characters and their delicate, perpetually uncertain situations.
  3. Invisible
    Earnest and blessed with immediate visual textures, Aviad's film is nevertheless much more a matter of feelings - shared or suppressed and then shared - than of story.
  4. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.
  5. Collaborator
    On one level, it's a dark, funny tragedy, but it's also Donovan's thesis on his own craft.
  6. The Pact
    A musty ghost story that morphs into a sluggish serial-killer mystery, Nicholas McCarthy's film tries to distinguish itself by minimizing dialogue and settings, a stripped-down approach that extends to sketchy characters and a script rife with convenient, easy-to-assemble clues.
  7. The Magic of Belle Isle
    With graceless melodramatist Rob Reiner at the helm, it's predictably ironic that The Magic of Belle Isle champions the unparalleled power of imagination while displaying absolutely none of its own.
  8. China Heavyweight
    In the end, once we realize the title doesn't refer to these bantams' weight class but to their strength of heart, or something, the film feels blandly respectful and, oddly enough, apolitical.
  9. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    Uncompromising in its way, the film's portrait of codependent compulsion is so organically conceived, you start to smell the sulfur of traumatized childhood, no exposition needed.
  10. Last Ride
    Newcomer Russell, at once tough and vulnerable, canny and damaged, delivers a performance of nuanced naturalism that starkly conveys the sorrow and sacrifice that sometimes come with learning to achieve self-sufficiency.
  11. Crazy Eyes
    The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Her savvy for self-presentation, though admirable from a business standpoint, makes for a more boring movie. You never get the sense that the camera was ever allowed to see anything that Perry didn't want it to see.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Savages
    Soul is something Savages has in short supply, not least because Kitsch and Johnson register as blanks on-screen. In contrast, Hayek and del Toro, both sporting apparently intentionally terrible wigs, give big, scenery-chewing performances and earn our interest and empathy even while committing heinous acts.
  14. Neil Young Journeys
    Teaming with the Canadian legend again, Demme and five other camera operators expertly capture an intense, pared-down 2011 solo show at Toronto's Massey Hall in the absorbing new Neil Young Journeys.
  15. The Amazing Spider-Man
    The film is also faithful to the smartassery of the Spider-Man of the comics, and Garfield's spindly physicality evokes the Marvel illustrations of the 1960s.
  16. Madea's Witness Protection
    An agent of spiritual regeneration and showman, Perry's dramaturgy is as subtle as a Bible-thump, but until a logy last act that has Levy disguised as a faux-Frenchman, his instincts are on-target here.
  17. Busong
    Splendid vistas and sun scapes add mythic punctuation to the proceedings, but director Auraeus Solito (Tuli) generates too little of the magic that holds a story as tenuous as this one together.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unforgivable
    It's some kind of monster of romanticized antiromanticism, filleting and exalting its characters, cheating and rewarding its breathless audience. The closest the film gets to a thesis is this shoulder-shrug torpedo: "People do things like that without knowing why."
  19. A Burning Hot Summer
    Although Angèle's religious faith and Frédéric's belief in luck seem like strained attempts at adding heft to the material, the film nevertheless works up a potent dramatic restlessness, derived from the push-pull between an entitled, obsessive Frédéric and Bellucci's quietly chaotic Angèle.
  20. Gypsy
    You might call it an old story with higher stakes, but a keen sensitivity to its moral difficulties and enlivening details sets Gypsy urgently apart.
  21. Take This Waltz
    There are enough unexpected delights, such as repurposing "Video Killed the Radio Star" during a critical moment between Margot and Daniel, to keep us interested in their drawn-out, teasing, tantalizing courtship.
  22. People Like Us
    Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.
  23. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    In trying through incessant narration to make a six-year-old a prolix sage, Zeitlin can't avoid falling into sticky sentimentality.
  24. Ted
    It's dispiriting enough to witness Kunis still waiting for a comic lead role worthy of her. But the usually nimble Wahlberg - who at least has one great moment rattling off "white-trash girls' names" - suffers the most, playing second fiddle to a knee-high Gund knockoff.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magic Mike
    The highly calculated Magic Mike is pure Hollywood self-mythology - a neo-Depression musical, a wish-fulfillment fantasy for shitty times, an origin-of-the-star story, and a projection of that star's hoped-for future.
  26. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    Possible resulting "fun" is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.
  27. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Ordinary Miracles offers a breezy and informative overview of the legendary photographic collective known as the Photo League.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stella Days
    Thanks to its understated elegance and surpassing central performance, this modest, too-eagerly schematic period drama is more engrossing than it has a right to be.
  29. Men on the Bridge
    Raw yet respectful and tenderly observed.
  30. Nate & Margaret
    Narrative conflicts are introduced and swatted away in favor of an amiable sentimentality, two nice people being nice to each other.
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