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. Greenberg
    Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Runaways
    In The Runaways' first hour, there's a guttural pleasure to be had in riding waves of rock-movie cliché spiked with socio-sexual commentary. The movie is at its best when working through the contradictions of teen sex-for-sale, when it's both turn-on and creep-out.
  3. City Island
    An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.
  4. The Killing Jar
    The film has no pulse and feels interminable, with its stilted dialogue, static staging, and usually fine actors who are horrendous here--Amber Benson is all moist-eyed empathy as the waitress while Madsen is laughably bad.
  5. Kimjongilia
    Arguably the most dysfunctional culture of the past few centuries, North Korea is a cosmically mad movie waiting to happen. But for now, Heikin's is merely insubstantial.
  6. Neil Young Trunk Show
    Removing even stage banter, the focus is entirely on performance, save for a few "candid backstage" bits--Young getting a cracked nail filed down, etc. Devotees will thrill to rarities like "Kansas" and "Mexico."
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Vincere
    Vincere, though, is the veteran director's stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema.
  8. Shutterbug
    Papas leans too heavily on expected street types (a black pimp, multi-ethnic skate punks) to populate his underworld, but he compensates with expressionistic HD photography and eerie electronic doodling to sustain an impossible mood of productive unease.
  9. Mid-August Lunch
    Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it's hard to believe writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody mafia hit "Gomorrah."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Exploding Girl
    Girl is narratively slight, but aesthetically and psychologically complex. At times, it feels more like an illustrated audio collage than a movie.
  11. Green Zone
    A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is the best action director working today, adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously.
  12. Mother
    For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.
  13. Our Family Wedding
    Might've made for a progressive film if director and co-writer Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar) hadn't pandered to the lowest common denominator with brainless screwball laughs.
  14. Remember Me
    There's an insult-to-injury quality to a plain bad movie with a "seize the day" message (Remember Me's tagline: "Live in the Moments"), which heckles you with all the other things you should or could be doing while you're marking time waiting on the credits.
  15. Severe Clear
    A potent reminder of how thankless a soldier's job is.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights
    For his part, Jack works it out onstage, in some of the most subtly shot and well-recorded concert footage ever from a band not named the Rolling Stones.
  17. Children of Invention
    The young director Tze Chun is not a flashy filmmaker, but he understands the vulnerability of immigrant workers in the sleazy sub-rosa economies of a floundering 21st-century America.
  18. Ghost Town
    I do not expect to soon find scenes to match Ghost Town's mountaintop funeral, the running along after a rowdy exorcism, or the scanning of faces at the town Christmas chorale. His back to prosperity, Dayong finds hallowed ground.
  19. Stolen
    It's uncertain whether or not Taranto and debuting helmer Anders Anderson looked at the "Law & Order: SVU" and "Cold Case" episodes that also used the crime as a plot thread; the sub-televisual incompetence of their film suggests not.
  20. Alice in Wonderland
    Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game--and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming. So, it would seem, is the character of actualized as well as action Alice.
  21. Brooklyn's Finest
    Filled with every cop-movie convention since the invention of gunpowder and curse words, Brooklyn's Finest is three movies in one, all of which you've seen before.
  22. The Secret of Kells
    Gorgeously mounted tale of enlightenment through art and courage.
  23. Harlem Aria
    Racial tensions and bawdy humor carry the day, until, following an unfunny set piece at a fancy hotel and a street robbery, black and white (far too) easily come together to help their young charge.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess
    Stuffed with talking heads, Harlan is overlong and redundant, but its core questions are worthy.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cop Out
    Working with a full-on studio budget for the first time in his decade-and-a-half career, Smith is still making movies about guys just like him.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Prophet
    Sold to the global arthouse market as the "French Scorsese," Audiard does know his genre. A Prophet, the director has said, is the "anti-Scarface."
  27. The Yellow Handkerchief
    All three leads are solidly convincing in their candor. And Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission) shoots the hell out of the swampy South to make for a nontoxic diversion.
  28. Easier with Practice
    From the virtuoso 10-minute single shot that encompasses the initial phone call, to a long, traveling shot of Davy all but running from a humiliating sexual encounter, Alvarez trusts Geraghty's fear-and-wonder-filled eyes to tell the tale. These two need to make more movies together.
  29. The Art of the Steal
    The Art of the Steal's thorough research, bolstered by many fiery talking heads, makes it one of the most successful advocacy docs in recent years and may prompt some firsthand investigating of your own.
  30. Formosa Betrayed
    Neither the investigation nor the suspense (hobbled by editorializing) have much impact; the movie, necessarily shot in Thailand, plays like secret-history tourism, complete with archival footage haunting the screen.
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