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
  1. The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    The beloved Kiwi duo, who frequently perform as a rotating cast of corny alter egos, can charm even the crankiest viewers, thanks to their soaring, clarion harmonies and cuddly-butch personas.
  2. True Legend
    In countless over-the-top set pieces, Yuen delivers striking combat clarity without sacrificing the visceral editing and crazy digital effects of modern bloodbaths.
  3. Skateland
    If Skateland is the sort of work Ritchie's future holds, it's proof that some talents are better off staying home.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    L'amour fou
    It plays like an extended auction catalog with commentary. Thematically recalling Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours"-another film dealing with objects in a French art collection as receptacles for memory and personal biography-it sorely lacks that drama's tension between insular nostalgia and the wider, rapidly evolving outside world.
  5. How to Live Forever
    Suffice it to say, life's too short for such self-indulgent glibness.
  6. Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
    The overall effect is flattering but shallow, making Murphy's movie the last thing Mockingbird needs-another toothless encomium. No wonder Lee dodges the limelight.
  7. Hesher
    Still, Hesher finds uncommon sympathy for people at loose ends, and although Hesher himself is sentimentalized and backhandedly inspiring, he never softens into an actual role model.
  8. The First Grader
    Chadwick veers frequently into flashbacks to Maruge's past as a Mau Mau resistance fighter-mostly prolonged scenes of torture and violence that do little to inform or propel the present-day story. Poorly defined tribal lines flare up, and Jane's life is threatened, the point at which the script's Hollywood contrivances open up and swallow this often charming film whole.
  9. Everything Must Go
    Everything Must Go, which is ostensibly set in Scottsdale, Arizona, has a generic resemblance to broken-heartland movies like "Up in the Air" and "Cedar Rapids," although this suburban meltdown is more depressed than either.
  10. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?
  11. The Big Bang
    Though the setup is pure Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, specifically), the film's bleary, neon glamour and penchant for the bizarre suggests an attempted-and wayward-homage to David Lynch.
  12. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death is far more convincing as a spectacle of mass atrocity than a drama of individual conscience.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bridesmaids
    Many of the chaotic set pieces cataloging Annie's self-destruction have a kind of dumb crassness that works against Bridesmaids' often smart, highly class-conscious deconstruction of female friendship and competition.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thor
    An astonishingly awkward marriage of ancient Norse mythology and 21st-century nonsense, Thor, directed by Kenneth Branagh, works too hard at simply functioning to assert why it, or we, should bother.
  15. Vito Bonafacci
    Factor in the consistently subpar acting and Vito Bonafaccistands as one project better suited to Sunday schools than movie theaters.
  16. Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story
    Among the alleged virtues of the game cited by the doc's subjects are its ability to bring people together, its usefulness as a tool to indoctrinate (er, teach) children, and its building of a global culture.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People vs. George Lucas
    It's an exhausting airing of nerd grievances, the monolithic arguments leavened only slightly by counterpoints seemingly inserted for comic relief.
  18. Octubre
    There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.
  19. The Makioka Sisters (1983)
    The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.
  20. Lord Byron
    Vacillating between free-associative shtick and complete inertia, Lord Byron is lost in thought and allergic to reason.
  21. Harvest
    This is largely a non-narrative piece, the director employing a slice-of-life-in-crisis approach that only works if the characters or the situations are sharply drawn. Neither are.
  22. The Colors of the Mountain
    Arbeláez indulges in occasional twinges of Hollywood "emphasis," but mostly the film glides on its matter-of-fact textures.
  23. An Invisible Sign
    Jessica Alba gets plain-Jane crazy for An Invisible Sign, a syrupy "A Beautiful Mind" redux in which the starlet sports big brown bangs and Pippi Longstocking pigtails.
  24. Forks Over Knives
    Some of the data is less convincing than Fulkerson would have us believe, but nothing trumps the clear eyes and shiny coats of a trio of newly minted vegans.
  25. Daydream Nation
    Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.
  26. There Be Dragons
    Its appeal for the rest of us is buoyed by cinematographer Gabriel Beristain's attentiveness to the ravishing Argentinian locations, but the geriatric pacing, flat-footed Old Hollywood pastiche, and Joffé's inexplicable penchant for tear-jerking Catholic mysticism make Dragons more punishing than a hundred Hail Marys.
  27. Hobo with a Shotgun
    Pick a reason to balk at this spot-on, garishly threadbare paean to '80s no-budget sleaze.
  28. Jumping the Broom
    A late-act crisis precipitated by scandalous maternity news is straight out of the Tyler Perry Academy of Plotting, and all the beseeching of the Lord sounds like little more than product placement.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Night
    First-time director Massy Tadjedin conjures some essence of constrained desire, but mostly from the architecture.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caterpillar
    It's cinema that risks blunt silliness to achieve emotional and experiential seriousness.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »