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 Catechism Cataclysm
    Taking the notion of toilet humor literally but incapable of delivering its promised religious satire, The Catechism Cataclysm is more muddled than its tongue-twister title.
  2. Cargo
    With the certainty of bad melodrama, Cargo moves gradually into superficial moral complexity, an inevitable display of heroics, and the perfunctory title card ensuring us that sex slavery is indeed a real-life problem.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Thing
    As written by Eric Heisserer (Final Destination 5), the new Thing lacks much wit or self-awareness. It's more of a "final girl" formula film, but on ice. Still, why did it take 29 years to create this solid double-feature? And will they unfreeze Russell for a trilogy?
  4. Oka!
    Oka!, a loose-limbed tapestry of cultural nuances, atmosphere, and song, is a tuneful tribute to the Bayakan spirit.
  5. Father of Invention
    The rather unappealing character of Axel is indulged with every opportunity for redemption, as Spacey is indulged with every opportunity to showboat.
  6. Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology
    Like Shlain's hand-written diagram in which lines twist and knot while linking various subjects, the film resembles not a coherent thesis but a tangle of semi-related ideas.
  7. The Dead
    The Dead, with its vast, pitiless landscapes and moral seriousness, is "Night of the Living Dead" reimagined as a Sergio Leone western. It's a knockout.
  8. The Woman
    Even with a nauseous climax, The Woman never gets under the skin, and its artsy-languid pacing and incessant lite-metal commentary tunes finally seem like part of an effort to disguise what it really is: torture porn for people who'd never admit to liking torture porn.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    However uplifting, To Be Heard, shot over the course of several years, takes a surprisingly unflinching look at the home lives of the three high schoolers.
  10. Happy Life
    The most spot-on scenes show passive-aggressive hipster clerks snorting at Keith's flyers for a comeback fundraiser rave and a city suffocating on its own cool.
  11. Trespass
    A home-invasion movie as instantly forgettable as its title, Trespass is not without disturbing images: namely, Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman as spouses.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Skin I Live In
    The film deflates in its final third, with crude matter-of-fact set pieces, dumb explanatory psychology, and bursts of intentional camp overwhelming and canceling out the unmoored creepiness.
  13. Fireflies in the Garden
    Despite an A-list roster, the performances are universally one-note, a fact largely attributable to a script overflowing with blunt dialogue and heavy-handed symbolism.
  14. Chalet Girl
    Chalet Girl is just a compendium of genre clichés - minus the usual racism and t&a.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Footloose
    Nothing in Footloose comes close, in this respect, to the best moments of Brewer's previous, vibrant if uneven films "Hustle & Flow" and "Black Snake Moan," but this heartfelt retread of a notably thin popcorn property does come alive during an illicit dance-off.
  16. Texas Killing Fields
    The plot is a chaos of underdeveloped relationships and frayed loose ends, but every so often, Mann does something so right that it makes this seem less a matter of narrative disorganization than a commentary on the anarchy intrinsic to any investigation.
  17. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    A tedious exercise in filling in historical blanks through exhausted tropes.
  18. The Nine Muses
    The result is not without beauty, though at a certain point, one begins to notice that each new muse rather resembles the previous, a uniformity that restrains the film from true symphonic swell.
  19. 1911
    If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here.
  20. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    All the words that follow assault the ear in this unnecessary rehashing of the earthy virtues of low-paid laborers versus the stiffness of the bourgeoisie.
  21. Dirty Girl
    For a film that's supposed to be rooted in such a specific time and place, Sylvia isn't really concerned with details: Costumes, hair, and décor appear to be the work of "That '70s Show" interns; William H. Macy, as Danielle's Mormon soon-to-be stepdad, continuously muffs a Sooner State drawl.
  22. The Way
    As a director, Estevez exhibits a bland visual sense, but he does manage to convey some of his scenic locations' multifaceted textures. Mostly, though, his dramatically inert, spiritually generic The Way seems like it was far more fun to shoot than it is to endure.
  23. Blackthorn
    This modest oater should tickle western fans.
  24. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    A love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, it solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever - furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    It's perhaps the sequel we deserve. But that doesn't mean this dumb, blunt follow-up - both more unspeakably grotesque and less scary than the first film - is worth sitting through. Once Six's conceptual project becomes clear, his escalating audience-mocking torture is increasingly pointless.
  26. Real Steel
    Based very loosely on a short story by "I Am Legend" author Richard Matheson, Real Steel in fact comes closer to road-bonding movies featuring children and hesitant papas: "Paper Moon" or "Over the Top," say.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Ides of March
    Compelling enough as a methodic moral inquiry, a step-by-step account of how lines in the sand move, Ides is less successful when attempting to capture the feeling of the times.
  28. Courageous
    Borderline creepy, Courageous endlessly expounds on the importance of God in men's lives but fails to answer the more pressing question of why religious sagas such as this treat subtlety as a sin.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Even if the speechifying is cringingly trite, and even though it's evident from Colin's first frame onscreen that 21 will be Ally's lucky number, at least her roundelay through exes allows for a few scant moments of inspired lunacy, led by Faris's cartoon-perfect vocal talents.
  30. Dream House
    Dream House also manages to commit a cardinal thriller sin: casting well-known actors in ostensibly inconsequential roles, which in this case reveals the real culprit before the mystery proper has even begun.
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