Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Our Idiot Brother
    Its roundelay of shallow types (played by beautiful movie stars) treating one another badly, and having whiny conversations about said treatment, is such a whisper-soft version of social critique that it makes the autobiographical films of Nicole Holofcener (Please Give, Friends With Money) look as cutting as the films of Jean Eustache.
  2. Higher Ground
    Even with her beatific face (the actress looks like one of Parmigianino's Madonnas), Farmiga is never wholly believable as a woman shaken by a crisis of belief.
  3. Tales from the Golden Age
    Sardonic as it may be, Tales From the Golden Age is basically affirmative - its true subject is resilience. Romania suffered under a regime of dangerous stupidity. Drawing on popular memory, Mungiu has orchestrated a contribution to local folklore, a suite of stories in which those rendered witless by oppression were compelled by circumstance to live off their wits.
  4. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    If the grand finale isn't as resonantly scary as the original's, maybe that's just because, try though we might, we're no longer impressionable kids.
  5. 5 Days of War
    Taking the vantage point of civilians rather than combatants allows 5 Days of War to show the toll of the terror and of the relentless, exhausting pursuit of war with unexpected force. Had it rejected the genre's romantic trappings and false heroics more consistently, the movie might've been worth the ride.
  6. Programming the Nation?
    The results are irritating, occasionally educational, and frustratingly insight-free.
  7. Conan the Barbarian
    Squeamish types may balk, but the gory cruelty on display here is faithful to the source material and deeply thrilling.
  8. Mozart's Sister
    These subplots hint at what could have been, nudging the film toward biting rather than obvious commentary on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and creativity, and the costs of thwarting expression of any of them. But Féret barely explores this, and the film suffers for it.
  9. Griff the Invisible
    An Australian misfits-in-love story manufactured from whole quirk, Griff the Invisible is more mannerism than movie.
  10. Atrocious
    A Spanish Blair Witch DIY-er with a nutsy pre-emptive title, this trifle scoots and skitters along guilelessly, as if the mock-doc horror trope hasn't already been tourist-trampled to death.
  11. Flypaper
    Slick, manic, excruciatingly hollow entry in the exhausted subgenre of misfit bank-heist comedies.
  12. The Hedgehog
    Watching Balasko, a veteran actor-writer-director in thick-browed, frumped-up drag, sitting at her kitchen table reading Tolstoy and nibbling on dark chocolate with a cat in her lap, is one of The Hedgehog's purest delights. At the very least, it provides relief from the prating of that junior wisenheimer.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Journals of Musan
    Group scenes, meanwhile, often suffer from a peculiar handheld drift, as if in troubling over which insult to add to which injury, the filmmakers neglected to attend to rudimentary blocking.
  14. The Last Circus
    Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast) is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes "Pan's Labyrinth" look like "Sesame Street."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    Bowen in particular stands out, impressively describing Garrick's hairpin turns from comforting his victims to instinctively throttling them, but director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett exhibit less facility with the big picture.
  16. Iconoclast: Boyd Rice
    The most genial professed social Darwinist you could ever meet, Rice has never stopped to explain how much of his persona is a goof. Likewise, Larry Wessel's documentary portrait Iconoclast doesn't bother to synopsize its subject for the novice before setting off on its four-hour journey.
  17. Amigo
    John Sayles's Amigo aspires more to educate than entertain, but it's no less engrossing for that.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One Day
    For an entry in a genre of films that frequently work as guilty pleasures even at their most formulaic, One Day doesn't offer much pleasure.
  19. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    An Egyptian feminist tale told with both affecting compassion and made-for-TV corniness.
  20. Damn!
    The director ultimately treads too fine a line between exposé and cash-in, in part because he belabors his thesis. Sure, McMillan is at least half charlatan, but 20 minutes into Damn! it's clear that he's also a sad, possibly disturbed man who needs a compassionate caseworker more than the attention of a fickle public or ambitious documentarian.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bad Posture
    Bad Posture, the first narrative feature from director Malcolm Murray, is sure to unsettle those who prefer films to pass clear judgment on not-so-upstanding types, but it's hard not to admire such a drolly off-kilter pass at the domestic regionalist indie.
  22. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    In equal parts mesmerizing and disorienting, Over Your Cities (the title comes from the biblical story of Lilith) plunges viewers into the earth, wind, and fire of Kiefer's massive-scale projects.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summer Pasture
    Summer Pasture is remarkable not merely for documenting the disappearing way of life, but for registering the depth of Yama and Locho's uncertainty about moving on from it.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Littlerock
    Atsuko the character doesn't speak English; Atsuko the actress, speaking mostly un-subtitled Japanese when she speaks at all, gives a performance that's a marvel of nonverbal reaction.
  25. Senna
    The aura of a life lived in extremis, undergirded by faith, clings to the film. Even nonbelievers in Senna's sport and church will find it difficult to visit Kapadia's cinematic shrine without emotion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    30 Minutes or Less
    A comedy that knows it has to move with all due dispatch to keep from disappointing the customer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Help
    We get a fairly typical Hollywood flattening of history, with powerful villains and disenfranchised heroes.
  28. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    As tight as the parallel homo sapiens storylines are lax, Caesar's prison conversion to charismatic pan-ape revolutionist is near-silent filmmaking, with simple and precise images illustrating Caesar's General-like divining of personalities and his organization of a group from chaos to order. All of this is shown in absorbing, propulsive style, as Caesar broodingly bides his time like a king in disguise awaiting restoration.
  29. The Mouth of the Wolf
    A collection of "small great stories," in the words of its unobtrusive narrator, Pietro Marcello's singular doc/fiction hybrid salutes the crumbling grandeur of the northern Italian seaport Genoa.
  30. The Smurfs
    Gosnell directs as if every scene must be either a nauseating roller-coaster ride or a syrupy melodrama, resulting in a seesawing tone that's not stabilized by the presence of Neil Patrick Harris.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »