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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    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spoken Word
    Though crudely constructed (the lighting and framing are strictly soap opera), unevenly acted (Becker is a bundle of distracting tics), and bluntly scripted, the film does have an honest integrity--at least whenever Blades is onscreen.
  2. Slingshot
    Though one misses cinematographer Oydssey Flores's camerawork that played such an important role on the three subsequent films--at once more chaotic and more expressive than the digital shooting here--Mendoza's look at the illicit activity of a group of marginal Filipinos is no less feverishly absorbing.
  3. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    Her (Davis) homage--tender, never hagiographic--also contains some biting analysis of the racism, both overt and insidious, that the artist was up against.
  4. Inception
    It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.
  5. Kisses
    The movie's ending may be less satisfying than that of "Slumdog Millionaire"--a film you can love for its infectiously wishful exuberance, but never fully believe in--but Kisses is truer to the tragedy of a generation of children whom we have utterly failed. If they're anything like Kylie and Dylan, they'll be back to let us know.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Contenders
    A mystery with nothing to reveal, a drama without consequence, an elegy of dispassion. Lacking wisdom or even earnest intent, the film's flaws of execution become more apparent.
  7. Alamar (To the Sea)
    Alamar provides a nearly hypnotic immersion in the brilliantly aqua, impossibly tranquil Caribbean--a Paradise Regained not just for Natan, but for everyone
  8. To Age or Not to Age
    Too bad Pappas limits any critical perspective on this project to brief, superficial discussions with a handful of wealthy "artists" at their Hamptons homes whose connection to the filmmaker or the documentary's subject remains unspecified.
  9. Valhalla Rising
    Frequently dull and stupidly obvious, you nonetheless have to applaud the misguided ambition of Refn's career turn. If nothing else, as the metal guitars get louder and louder, the synergy between Viking imagery and the pagan-obsessed metal freaks it spawned has never been clearer.
  10. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    Cage will likely not earn a second Oscar here, but he and director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) make leftovers into fine PG malarkey with their hokey naïveté and prankish hocus-pocus.
  11. The Kids Are All Right
    Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist.
  12. Despicable Me
    So, yes, kiddies--it's funny. Silly. Slight. Though, grown-ups, be warned: I had more fun watching the kid giggle through the screening than I did watching the movie itself. It's no "Toy Story 3."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Stripped of Larsson's social/political minutiae and slimmed down to its thriller chassis, certain clichés become more glaring: Lisbeth's superhuman hacking skills, overfamiliar from a zillion TV procedurals; an exploitative lesbian sex scene that mightn't have pleased the feminist Larsson; the secondary villain, a blond giant incapable of feeling pain--gah!; and the too-comfy manner in which the twin narratives finally interlace.
  14. Winnebago Man
    Rebney's good-natured calm and apparent indifference to his Internet notoriety initially foils the filmmaker. Hoping to re-create the original clip reel, Steinbauer is nonplussed and abashed. Was it all an act--or is this? Pay your money and find out.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    [Rec] 2
    Predictably, [REC] 2 is higher-budgeted than its barebones predecessor, which only means that the spectacular degradation of video in scenes where the zombies get in close and start chomping will test the limits of any HDTV. If only [REC] 2's rabid baddies knew how to push [STOP].
  16. 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup
    It's all slight enough to blow away, and rare enough to warrant seeing it before it does.
  17. Great Directors
    Ten interviews with 10 "name" American and European directors--including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat--diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests.
  18. Only When I Dance
    British director Beadie Finzi follows both dancers to international competitions, where the difficult questions raised by their struggles are set aside.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    Eclipse is the least laughable installment yet in the series, and director David Slade efficiently delivers the fan service that Twihards require.
  20. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    To have been in junior high school when rhapsodic fugues of yearning like "Spanish Harlem," "Uptown," or "Be My Baby" first poured from the radio is to have a sensibility, if not a fantasy life, in some way molded by this monster of self-absorption; to see The Agony and the Ecstasy is to be discomfitingly haunted by the specter of that long-ago innocence.
  21. Love Ranch
    Hackford's pacing throughout is continuously off, with scenes extending several beats too long, his two leads adrift and bored.
  22. Grown Ups
    While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dogtooth
    Director Giorgos Lanthimos lays out the rules largely through action rather than exposition, which allows Dogtooth to play as a richly satisfying, blackly comic mystery in spite of its delayed, horror-sourced housebreak plot.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Restrepo
    For a movie that's both a study and a product of blood, sweat, and tears, an oft-cited mid-'60s quote from film and combat vet Samuel Fuller seems to apply: "Film is a battlefield," Fuller said in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. "There's love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word: emotions."
  25. Wild Grass
    An insufferable exercise in cutie-pie modernism, painfully unfunny and precious to a fault.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    South of the Border
    South of the Border's subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.
  27. Children of Tokyo
    The film retains a measure of tempered hope, born not simply from the father's command-cum-wish to his slumbering offspring ("Don't become a miserable apple-polisher like me, boys"), but also from a final act of youthful compassion that binds Ozu's intensely human characters in glass-half-full solidarity.
  28. The Law
    A movie of cartoon-like mass formations, singing urchins, and operatic outbursts.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Knight and Day
    There's never been a particularly crisp line between intense, SUPER-AWESOME Tom Cruise and the characters he plays. In Knight and Day, his age-old cool curdles into motormouthed neediness.
  30. Cyrus
    A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.
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