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. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    The sorry spectacle of the ranting codger never effaces the image of the boy concentrating his entire being over a chessboard. You have to love that kid and pity him.
  2. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary - a standout in last spring's New Directors/New Films - assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Contagion
    If Contagion truly is the first leg of Soderbergh's retirement victory lap, this harrowing film is a potent reminder of what we stand to lose.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    Thankfully, the kids' complicated impulses resist such packaging, whether they're catcalling head-scarved co-eds outside the local gas station or channeling racial resentments into extra hard hits.
  5. The Inheritors
    Unadulterated labor is the focus of this blistering, beautifully modulated documentary from Mexican auteur Eugenio Polgovsky.
  6. Warrior
    Old line-gargler Nolte remains an effortlessly moving presence, while Hardy and Edgerton embody their archetypes and handle the physical demands.
  7. Shark Night 3D
    Aspires to nothing more or less than carrying along an audience through a string of unremarkable kills, often involving high-jumping fish.
  8. Apollo 18
    His (Gonzalo López-Gallego) this-is-authentic conceit is by now a tediously corny device, and his story delivers no scares during the interminably long, uneventful build-up to its deflating climax.
  9. Bodyguard
    The overweight, gays and little people are cheerfully mocked while writer/director Siddique ratchets up his story's disparate comedy-romance-action elements to an insanely over-the-top degree.
  10. Red Desert (1964)
    Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.
  11. That Girl in Yellow Boots
    Koechlin, a striking woman with a slim frame, horse mouth, and big turbulent eyes, has screen presence enough to kick along the frequently-stalling psychodrama up to an ending that seems like a tossing up of hands.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    Resurrect Dead works splendidly as a threadbare urban mystery, teasing out details and complications without withholding too much information.
  13. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Magnificent and cheesy, the latest and most proudly absurd of Chinese historical spectaculars, Detective Dee is a cinematic comic book for people who are sick of the mode.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Seven Days in Utopia
    For a time, the film shoulders its hokum rather well, with Black strutting convincingly and Duvall's mouthy mugging mostly in check. But all those shots of heavenly shafts of light eventually climax in unabashed Christian conversion.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    Despite Whitaker's best attempts, Rebirth never persuasively builds to catharsis, and that's entirely for the best. Forget transcendence: The quintet's return to normal, quotidian lives is the most inspiring development of all.
  16. Love Crime
    Even KST is left floundering as the misconceived, underwritten totem of today's amoral, power-mad executive, wearing flowing trousers and medallion necklaces not seen since Faye Dunaway demanded a meeting in "Network."
  17. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    Scenes showing the tricky process of acclimatizing a child to new surroundings, and the patchwork of experiences that make up an education - both Asia's and Tairo's - are grounded by entirely affectless performances, not least that of little Asia Crippa.
  18. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    Despite the clumsy script and a shaky acting partner, Cattani, at least, is fascinating to watch, never demanding audience sympathy.
  19. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    The movie turns terminally wearisome and even anti-climactic with the triumph of the brain-lodging "Je T'aime" (which, alone among the movie's numbers, is heard in its original version) and Gainsbourg's descent into alcoholic dissolution.
  20. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Is the world of the film ruled by its high concept, its low comedy, its demographic credibility, or its romantic screwball realism? Ultimately, Orgy's refusal to be any one thing - including good or bad - forms a kind of epochal statement.
  21. The Debt
    Predictably, the holes in the narrative set us up for a twist or three, but, in balance, it's a pleasure to be back in the wet alleys and spy-patrolled streets of the GDR, however vague they seem without '60s black-and-white cinematography.
  22. Colombiana
    Possibly worth seeing if you are 13, as the hot Rihanna-looking chick shows sideboob.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stripped Down
    It's a thriller, it's a strip-club soap opera, it's an inner-child reclamation inspirational - it's really unpleasant to look at.
  24. Special Treatment
    That's why Special Treatment is so disheartening. The film, starring Huppert, quickly telegraphs that its ideas are too shallow for a talent as deep as hers.
  25. The Family Tree
    Thin as it is, Family Tree is no slog - the droll, attentive performances by Davis and Mulroney are endearing, and the extraneous guest-star bits (including Christina Hendricks as a secretary, no less) and rambling B stories aren't overly distracting.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Proper Violence
    Scrappy college-age filmmakers Chris Faulisi and Matt Robinson do a commendable job of establishing tone and tension in their debut feature, but things fall apart when words and feelings start to flow.
  27. Circumstance
    Keshavarz's earnest, well-intentioned first feature on women's oppression in Iran has trouble resisting its own heavy hand.
  28. Chasing Madoff
    Too bad Prosserman can't trust his material: Overloading the screen with aesthetic dross, the director offers up tiresome symbolic imagery of blood-soaked hands, burning money, and out-of-focus documents. Rather than amping up the intensity, these fast-cut sequences prove disastrously distracting.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brighton Rock
    The leads are compelling and the chase and fight scenes - scored to a propulsive bass-drum beat - are kinetic, but as Brighton Rock attempts to zero in on Rose and Pinkie's dangerous relationship, it loses momentum.
  30. Iron Crows
    Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.
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