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. The Observers
    There are moments when the tedium loosens you to melt into the landscape, and you swear you can hear the moss on the rocks start talking.
  2. Mother's Day
    Mother's Day is distinguished, at least, by De Mornay's porcelain-smile lampoon of castigating matriarchy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Chronicling a Crisis
    At once downbeat and claustrophobic, it's also often grueling to watch.
  4. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    The playfulness of Rivette's sublime female-buddy picture, recalling the fun of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," would inform Susan Seidelman's "Desperately Seeking Susan" 11 years later. But its greatest descendant is David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    You Hurt My Feelings
    For all of its gradual build and minimalist focus, the film misses out on something essential, something more crucial than clarity, context, and connecting tissue - all of which the film aggressively eschews. It lacks a center, a sense that within its strenuously ambiguous story is a thrumming motor.
  6. Jesus Henry Christ
    Making their screen debuts, young Spevack and Weinstein give the film's most natural performances and provide its little bit of warmth, but it seems time to petition Collette, a truly gifted actress, to take a long hiatus from playing bitter single moms.
  7. Last Call at the Oasis
    Ultimately, it's all connected, and with as fascinating and far-ranging an issue as this one, you can't fault the director for wanting to fit it all in.
  8. The Perfect Family
    Renton's competing tones and intentions result in a film at odds with itself and its lead performance.
  9. First Position
    The result is a film that eschews in-depth insight in favor of easily digestible who's-going-to-win suspense, a tack that's aided by Kargman's rather poignant (and visually graceful) evocation of pre-performance anxiety but ultimately leaves the material feeling deflated once the winners emerge.
  10. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The plot twists are about as venerable as the cast and predictably affecting when performed with such old-hand proficiency.
  11. A Little Bit of Heaven
    A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Avengers
    Every time the movie hints at something rich and evocative, Whedon undercuts it with a punchline - his instincts as a big-picture storyteller crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd.
  13. The Raven
    It's a pathetic missed opportunity - and one occasion of actually going broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
  14. Dolphin Boy
    Dolphin Boy stands as an example of how the pitfalls of potentially mushy material can be overcome by smart and sensitive direction.
  15. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Worse, the film never challenges the traditional Zionist narrative of the kibbutzim developing an untamed land, paying only lip service to the fact that it was already inhabited before the Jewish settlers got there.
  16. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    A deeply archived and circumspect history of the Joffrey dance company, Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance does a perfect white swan but has trouble developing much of a personality.
  17. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Frank De Felitta's guilt over having aired the footage is moving, yet it's ultimately countered by this piercing film's stance - promoted by the subject's proud children and grandchildren - that Wright's statements, far from a slip of the tongue, were an intentional act of courageous defiance.
  18. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    It's not clear what Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale values more - endless preaching about ancestral spirits or gruesome CG decapitations.
  19. Citizen Gangster
    First-time writer-director Nathan Morlando shows commendable focus (even Cox dials it down), and his movie's modest aspirations nicely reflect the condition in which Boyd, his damaged charisma spent, finally thrives.
  20. The Giant Mechanical Man
    Tim eventually evolves out of smugness, but unfortunately, the film merely trades it for sappiness. Fischer, meanwhile, imbues Janice with a wounded soulfulness that cuts right through the clichés. The less said about a hideously wigged Topher Grace as a smarmy self-help author, the better.
  21. Headhunters
    Plenty of twisty scripting makes the queasy damage seem conceptually neat and tidy, as if that's a good idea, but what we need here is a little more meat.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Elles
    It's entirely too much for co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska to coherently flesh out in an hour and a half, especially with so much time dedicated just to the state of arousal.
  23. Restless City
    Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    96 Minutes
    The narrative machinery grows creakier as the plot advances, and the film is a bit too strident about some of the issues at play, but 96 Minutes is admirably knotty nonetheless.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sound of My Voice
    The bland, jittery visual "realism" can't counteract overheated performances of tin-eared dialogue, which strain for pulp but often land at soap.
  26. Whores' Glory
    Michael Glawogger's fearless Whores' Glory demystifies trick turning with a bluntness and sneaky artistry that's sure to make even the most jaded of us choke on our next sitcom-hooker-joke chuckle.
  27. Bernie
    Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic.
  28. Payback
    Cinematic globe-trotting doesn't necessarily trump reading a good book, it turns out; then again, more movies should be burdened with the flaw of being too intellectually curious.
  29. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    A script that consistently finds fresh outlets for its running gags makes for a sufficiently rollicking pleasure cruise.
  30. Safe
    A preposterously enjoyable - or enjoyably preposterous - action-thriller.
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