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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    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Safe House
    [A] scattered but not totally disagreeable CIA conspiracy thriller.
  2. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    What gives the film its human dimension are the conflicting memories of former residents.
  3. Private Romeo
    The hunky ensemble shares a fine chemistry, but Brown's stylistic choices lie somewhere between perverse and nonsensical.
  4. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    Ideal only for the junior-high classroom, Holly Mosher's dull-as-dishwater documentary fudges the line between socially progressive message-spreading and suspicious hagiography in its celebration of Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dish & the Spoon
    For once, an American indie's muted modesty at least makes emotional sense, suiting a bittersweet romance that, by nature, has neither a name nor a future.
  6. Chico & Rita
    The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés's story - though real-life figures including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and a Cuban songstress who bears some resemblance to Rita Montaner are featured as characters - but it's a dazzling thing to behold.
  7. In Darkness
    Another break in the tension is the inescapable fact that every Holocaust movie, however hair-raising, essentially thrums the same self-sacrifice-versus-self-preservation chord. It's not fair, but there it is: We've been here before.
  8. Return
    Firmly in the unassuming indie vein, Return treads lightly and leaves little imprint.
  9. The Miners' Hymns
    It speaks eloquently about the disappearance of most any indigenous working-class culture.
  10. The Turin Horse
    An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve.
  11. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    The film is endurable owing solely to Johnson, a veteran of bad kids' movies whose sense of when to dial up the charm in such a generic, soulless entertainment remains impeccable.
  12. Crazy Horse
    Every shot and edit in Wiseman's film also suggests without over-explaining, allowing a viewer to lose herself in pleasure.
  13. The Woman in Black
    If director James Watkins's second film is about as scary as the haunted house your big cousins made in the basement, Radcliffe, as widowed lawyer Arthur Kipps, at least gives a moving portrayal of grief.
  14. Splinters
    The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).
  15. The Story of Film: An Odyssey
    More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.
  16. Pretty Poison (1968)
    Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    W.E.
    Certainly, W.E. is the work of a woman who apparently hasn't spent time with normal human beings in a while. But Madonna's anachronistic use of music is the least of her movie's problems. It's basic storytelling that stymies her.
  18. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    Dori Berinstein's desultory, fawning profile of the nonagenarian performer devotes many of its padded 88 minutes to Channing's greatest success, playing the title yenta in "Hello, Dolly!"
  19. Bad Fever
    If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.
  20. Perfect Sense
    Perfect Sense beautifully captures the ache and counterintuitive thrill of "the days as we know them, the world as we imagine the world" fading away by degrees.
  21. Kill List
    Brutal and bloody and utterly unnerving, thanks in no small measure to Jim Williams's brilliant score, which is filled with strings so taut, they sound like screams you might hear in the distance and decide (quite sensibly) to ignore.
  22. The Innkeepers
    It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness - until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain.
  23. Big Miracle
    While rooting for the marine mammals (and wishing for more footage of them - and even of their animatronic incarnations), your heart will also go out to the cast, stuck even more pitiably in syrupy manufactured crises.
  24. One for the Money
    Making even more appearances than the rodent is the Big Gulp; the lady bounty hunter is constantly consuming junk - though at least when Heigl is snacking, she isn't talking.
  25. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.
  26. Five Time Champion
    Rule of thumb: If a movie about how life is messy features someone lecturing about how messy life is, that movie is not nearly messy enough to do justice to life.
  27. All's Well Ends Well
    Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."
  28. After Fall, Winter
    Schaeffer can't be trusted or believed as a broken man - he's got no humility.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    By the time this fawning documentary gets to Foster's CG-animated rendering for a $15 billion planned city in Abu Dhabi (a movie within the movie), you realize it's essentially an infomercial for the company he unsuccessfully tried to sell before the 2008 crash.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Declaration of War
    Shot in the actual hospital where Donzelli and Elkaïm's actual son was treated for cancer, Declaration of War turns autobiography into thrilling expressionist art.
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