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 Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    The phoniness of their cross-country saga is compounded by a gaggle of cipher sidekicks.
  2. Habermann
    A World War II melodrama with a hook - affluent Germans as sympathetic victims - Habermann does a credible job of personalizing a period of the war largely unknown outside the Czech Republic.
  3. Gun Hill Road
    Though two late plot developments are borderline-contrived, Green's direction is marked by mature dramatic and aesthetic understatement.
  4. Protektor
    Najbrt gets the look and feel of noir fatalism down, but storytelling that alternates between roughshod and lethargic means the film doesn't hold together as much more than pretty fragments.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    Geographic diffusion aside, Kondracki's fact-based thriller remains somewhat focused on its grim subject, though its principled bid to allure and enlighten the VOD-surfing masses results in a surplus of Hollywood-style eye candy and narrative formula.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cold Fish
    Cold Fish is wild, head-turning, stomach-churning stuff, and it makes a bracing addition to the overstuffed canon of serial-killer cinema.
  7. Magic Trip
    What it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, is a sense of the cosmic Now; the movie recovers, without exactly illuminating, a "long, strange trip" that seems all the stranger as it recedes into the past.
  8. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Change-Up
    The film's final dialogue exchange reveals The Change-Up to be one long setup to a bromantic joke that, in a roundabout way, maybe comes closer than any previous film to fulfilling that woebegone subgenre's implicit homoerotic endgame.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bellflower
    In the end, Glodell's bona fide B-movie is monumentally dumb but damn near undeniable - although perhaps only a midnight drive-in screening in rural Texas, beat-up Chevys dripping muffler fluid and steam hissing from hot gravel, could do it proper.
  11. Good Neighbors
    A murder close to home freaks Louise out, but it's a pointed cat poisoning that sends her, and Good Neighbors, over the edge. Tierney offers what preparations he can for the offbeat darkness to come - faint organ chords and a focus on his character's idiosyncrasies build a sense of dread - but at least one part of the perfect, triple-crossing crime that plays out is so black you may want to wear shades.
  12. House of Boys
    And yet, for all its hanging on the details of the boys' heavily eroticized performances and its graphing of the relationships between the young performers, the film is at once too drawn out and underdeveloped.
  13. Golf in the Kingdom
    From the outset, Streitfeld hopscotches back and forth over her tale's 24 hours with a self-conscious aesthetic affectation (overlapping imagery, shifting camera speeds, elliptical edits) that demolishes any intelligible character or plot development, resulting in a story comprised of pretentious meditative fragments.
  14. All She Can
    The film proves that closely sketched specificity can trump pedestrian plotting. At least, that is, until steroids rears its ugly and inevitable head and the film veers into morality play and, finally, inspirational uplift.
  15. Sleep Furiously
    A lingering, mildly lyrical look at village life, Sleep Furiously does for the mobile librarians of Wales what "Sweetgrass" did for the shepherds of Montana.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    Cooking in Progress is, in fact, all magic and no path: This is extreme fly-on-the-wall vérité, with only the barest context provided (no helpful TV-style titles here - when it comes to identifying ingredients and techniques, viewers are usually left to their own devices) as the culinary impossible is realized one painstaking step at a time.
  17. The Guard
    One senses that The Guard is McDonagh's eulogy for the brusque, warts-and-all character of a passing generation of tough, working-class Irishmen, much as Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" was for vintage Americanism.
  18. The Devil's Double
    Ignoring all but the most obvious tensions in the Uday-Latif symbiosis, Devil's Double is static drama, with Michael Thomas's script establishing relationships as if perfunctorily pressing buttons marked "Father-Son Dynamic" and "Forbidden Love Affair," failing to dignify these themes with individuality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy, Stupid, Love
    Shooting on grainy, high-speed film stock with an often handheld camera, working with a suite of actors who are game to both play light and silly and dig deep, Ficarra and Requa lend a naturalism to highly contrived, patently absurd situations.
  20. Point Blank
    No good deed goes unpunished in former fashion photographer Fred Cavayé's cunningly contrived, energetically directed, thoroughly economical second feature.
  21. True Adolescents
    Johnson establishes an understated, agreeable tone throughout that makes up for the movie's notable lack of hilarity, and in the outdoors sequences nicely captures how seemingly benign nature can turn nasty in an instant.
  22. Life in a Day
    The resulting object is less about the world than about itself, and feels like a hey-that's-neat 90-minute troll through the video-sharing website (which co-presents the project).
  23. Attack the Block
    The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June's "Trollhunter," Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it's neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy.
  24. The Future
    Sophie's (or is it July's?) coy narcissism becomes a criticism of itself, and her "sadness" turns into something truly sad. In short, I have seen The Future and it's heartbreaking.
  25. The Interrupters
    The Interrupters reminds us of the powers and pleasures of well-crafted, immersive nonfiction filmmaking.
  26. Cowboys & Aliens
    Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding - a Western-sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit - is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre.
  27. Friends with Benefits
    What's most crushing is witnessing what should have been the dream pairing of Kunis and Timberlake - both foxy, loose, confident performers - here generating zero chemistry.
  28. A Little Help
    The film is as average and forgettable.
  29. Autoerotic
    Joe Swanberg and Adam Wingard's latest exploration of amorous urban collisions, is only sporadically a good sex comedy, in part because the flat affect favored by its young Chicago cast of hipsters looks an awful lot like, well, seriousness.
  30. Fire in Babylon
    Riley shrewdly maintains focus on how the players co-opted the merciless tactics of their invective-hurling adversaries for their own, and the region's, self-actualization.
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