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
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Iron Lady
    Despite the story's conceit of placing the viewer inside Thatcher's head, she never feels like a real person - but this is more the fault of Morgan's script than Streep's typically studied performance, much of it buried under prosthetics.
  2. Pariah
    The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces.
  3. A Separation
    What's fascinating is how the various issues - religious or practical - are played out in these two quite different families, yet always come down to irreconcilable differences between rebellious women and their stiff-necked, controlling men.
  4. El Sicario: Room 164
    Our subject retains a noticeable streak of pride in his expertise, though falters when discussing the killing of women. Hoping for his own salvation, the converted killer now claims the scales have fallen from his eyes, but his executioner's hood remains in place to the end - as does the mephitic air of timeless evil that hangs over El Sicario.
  5. Pina
    Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.
  6. Miss Minoes
    Conveying, with a light touch, important lessons for kids on the necessity of civic engagement, the perils of edit-ad conflicts, and the need to honor difference, Miss Minoes is also an ailurophile's dream, featuring a fantastic array of tabbies, calicos, and Birmans that always hit their marks.
  7. Albert Nobbs
    Close's prosthetic makeup renders her face too immobile, a marked contrast with her unfixed accent; both highlight the pitfalls of a star's idée fixe. It's a shame, because the material - based on a novella by George Moore published in the 1927 collection Celibate Lives - deserves better.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    In the Land of Blood and Honey
    The denouement that sorts it all out moves from predictable tragedy to ludicrous redemption; closing titles confirm that the motivating intent in making In the Land of Blood and Honey was activist rather than artistic.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Flowers of War
    With The Flowers of War, Zhang mostly just proves that there's no tragedy too terrible that it can't be turned into an operatic pageant - human suffering reduced to visual showmanship.
  10. We Bought a Zoo
    The cynics will scoff and dismiss it all as manipulative, the heartstring-tugging machine on hyperdrive. But this movie isn't for them; did you not see the PG? It's a sweet, sincere, utterly affable kids' movie about how parents are all kinds of screwed up and unable to tell their kids what they want or show them how they feel.
  11. The Adventures of Tintin
    Adventures is an awesome movie mechanism, but awe comes at a cost. The Tintin character is something like a blank spot at the movie's center, most vivid (unfortunately) as a plucky, priggish motivational speaker when he coaches Haddock out of a drinking problem.
  12. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Such an abundance of "epiphanies," one after another, amount to a tactical assault on viewer sentiments. The deluge of tears is Daldry's idea of pathos, but to these eyes, it's Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch.
  13. War Horse
    Since he's (Spielberg) a director largely incapable of understatement, War Horse is served up with a self-aggrandizing, distracting surplus of Norman Rockwell backlighting, aerial landscape shots designed to out-swoop David Lean's, and an aggravated sense of doggone wonderment amplified by the director's dependence on John Williams's bombastic score.
  14. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The remake is an altogether leaner, meaner, more high-powered, stylish, and deftly directed affair, though similarly hampered by a too-long narrative fuse.
  15. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.
  16. Sleepless Nights Stories
    More often, Mekas's focus on "names" comes off as a cloistered insensitivity to the wider world.
  17. The Pill
    What makes Khoury's film work - at least until its cop-out ending - is the consistency of Fred's loathsomeness.
  18. Deep End (1970)
    Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
  19. Cook County
    Rather than viewing moral chaos from the eye of a storm, director David Pomes watches his movie blow off into the storm itself.
  20. Addiction Incorporated
    With a name that not even the PR team at Smokefree America could dream up, Victor DeNoble emerges as the hero of Charles Evans Jr.'s mostly muscular documentary on the 1990s campaign to expose Big Tobacco.
  21. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Lackluster screenwriting and the absence of actorly communion are breezed past with monotonous banter, as is the fleetingly visible plot.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Carnage
    In the final stage of the film's programmatic chaos, Alan announces that he believes in the god of carnage and cops to the pleasure he gets from watching people deviate from social convention and tear one another apart. You'd have to agree with him in order to embrace this film - there's nothing else to see here.
  23. Knuckle
    Palmer's grainy, handheld camerawork won't win any aesthetic prizes, but it's in tune with his subject.
  24. Fanny, Annie & Danny
    Mostly the movie just gets off on how awful and/or pathetic its characters are, calling on the viewer to judge or pity rather than sympathize with its gallery of grotesques.
  25. Red Hook Black
    Reprinting its entire script would be the only way to properly convey the unintentionally hilarious awfulness of Red Hook Black, which complements its stilted and goofy writing with equally inept performances.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seducing Charlie Barker
    In adapting her recent play The Scene, Theresa Rebeck can't find a consistent tone for her material or players.
  27. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    In a career that began nearly 60 years ago, Agnès Varda has shown an extraordinary gift for capturing the theatricality of the mundane, particularly in her documentaries.
  28. London River
    Director Rachid Bouchareb brings a measured hand to this intimate, occasionally overdetermined sketch of the aloneness at the center of our global confluence.
  29. My Piece of the Pie
    A feeble stab at topicality from that master of overripe Gallic melodrama, Cédric Klapisch.
  30. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    The latest Tinker Tailor is, in some ways, more explicit regarding various characters' sexual proclivities than was the miniseries. It's also more concise, but what's lost is George's pathos.
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