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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    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shit Year
    Barkin is often fascinating in playing a character who, in both her heroic bitchery and hysterical sadness, is more of a concept than a person, in a film that ultimately seems to be "about" nothing more or less than the actress' magnetic face.
  2. Straw Dogs
    There's no matching the sinister village faces in Peckinpah's cast or the psychological acuity of his scene-making, but Lurie shows himself man enough for the material.
  3. Prince of Swine
    A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.
  4. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    That so many of the colossal yokel's mental states are literalized, as when the screen fills with thousands of rats while Margueritte reads Camus's "The Plague" aloud to her new pal, typifies the movie's antipathy to nuance.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy, Happy
    The questionable black-historical shorthand detracts from what is otherwise a well-performed and fitfully amusing film.
  6. Sound It Out
    Finlay's handheld style is as casually intimate as her subjects, and the film stirringly posits music as a path to communal bliss.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    Although its subject is never less than captivating, Jonathan Furmanski's film is frustratingly unfocused, a scattershot collection of candid footage and biographical information. Thankfully, Blowfly's world is weird as promised.
  8. Restless
    Gus Van Sant's latest - a middle-class hetero teen romance, no less - walks the line between mainstream sentimentality and dark art-house humor so effectively that it seems noncommittal.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jane's Journey
    Spectacularly photographed and journalistically lame, Jane's Journey blows a 105-minute kiss to Dr. Jane Goodall.
  10. Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace
    Human characters emerge from photo ops and heroes from the shadows.
  11. 3
    More willing suspension of disbelief - or suppression of giggles - is required.
  12. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    Granito becomes both a humanitarian legal thriller and a quest to find justice through cinema.
  13. The Mill and the Cross
    An extraordinary example of both art-historical interpretation and CGI as passport to unknown lands, The Mill and the Cross, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, is a moving-image tribute to the still image, with its ability to "wrestle the senseless moment to the ground."
  14. Silent Souls
    Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.
  15. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Still, the tapes are great. More than just a flophouse Punch and Judy show, the Raymond vs. Peter dustups elevate cruel bickering to a ritual through which we live life's pain.
  16. I Don't Know How She Does It
    She is also played by Sarah Jessica Parker, a performer so aggressively determined to make us like her that no work-life conflicts in the film ever gain any traction; we're too distracted by the actress's manic tics (the head tilts, the popping of the wounded-deer eyes) to notice any real adversity.
  17. Drive
    Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.
  18. One Fall
    The cast is engaging, and there are a few light-chuckle moments, but the script needed another rewrite, and the film itself needed to be guided by a thornier sensibility than Fuller's.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Position Among the Stars
    Leonard Retel Helmrich's third documentary about the same Indonesian family is a dazzler in at least a couple ways.
  20. The High Cost of Living
    Deborah Chow's ridiculously implausible yet still predictable tale of guilt and redemption is so bipolar in tone that when it's not a more linear rip-off of Guillermo Arriaga's grim and gritty melodramas (21 Grams, Babel), it's the kind of quirky indie romance that made Braff's name.
  21. Brother's Justice
    Like an overlong episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" with none of the wit and twice the irritation, co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard's impotent, largely unscripted showbiz satire is yet another goof on clueless filmmakers who don't know how to make a film.
  22. Grave Encounters
    True terror needs at least some authenticity. That's perhaps too much to ask of a faked movie about a faked reality show that still can't scare up a fresh idea.
  23. Tanner Hall
    From hairstyles and clothes to autumnal-hued cinematography and a raft of clichéd incidents involving pills, suicide, sneaking out, and blackmail, everything feels dainty to the point of stale.
  24. Burke and Hare
    By swinging between broad laughs and cheap pathos - Pegg's specialties as an actor, apparently - while avoiding the more fertile ground between, Landis renders his Burke and Hare sociopolitically toothless and bizarrely insensitive.
  25. Shaolin
    This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.
  26. Beware the Gonzo
    Too cute by half, Beware the Gonzo will appeal to the 20 people left on earth who insist on broadsheets over iPad apps and/or those bewitched by star Ezra Miller's pretty cheekbones.
  27. Where Soldiers Come From
    Much of what's presented is familiar territory, but it's the moments that fracture prejudices and expectations that stick with you.
  28. Echotone
    Too vital for elegy, Echotone tells an old story whose beginning - the inception of a vibrant creative hub - remains mysterious, although the end is easy to predict.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Inside Out
    This WWE-produced thriller is the best kind of bait-and-switch, auguring cranium-crushing action but instead delivering a meandering, eccentric, downright adorable existential crime yarn.
  30. We Were Here
    A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.
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