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. Prodigal Sons
    As with most fam-cam documentaries, dysfunction pushes the story along, tipping over into exploitation.
  2. Toe to Toe
    The performances are top-notch and occasionally moving, but Abt nearly smothers it all with some embarrassing coming-of-age teen-angst false notes, plus clichéd Ivy League ambitions, a cartoonishly neglectful mother, STDs, unfair expulsion, martyrdom for both the rich and poor, and a non-reciprocal lesbian crush.
  3. Shutter Island
    Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.
  4. Happy Tears
    Continuing both his bad filmmaking and obsession with lethal orifices, Mitchell Lichtenstein follows up "Teeth," his clumsy debut about a dismembering vagina, with a voluminous explosion of poop.
  5. The Good Guy
    DePietro is no cynic, and he means well--but he also means to corner the coveted "Dear John" demographic, which, in turn, means that The Good Guy suffers from the dreary want of imagination about the specificity of twentysomething life that has sunk so many other specimens of this battered genre.
  6. Blood Done Sign My Name
    An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).
  7. The Ghost Writer
    Saved by often delightfully bitchy British dialogue.
  8. Phyllis and Harold
    What's interesting about the filmmaker's rummage through her parents' conjugal closet--another in a thriving sub-genre of domestic-turmoil docs as told by their spawn--is the abyss between the husband and wife's points of view.
  9. The Last New Yorker
    Considering how meticulously Wang location-scouted the project--documenting all the barely surviving (or since closed down) luncheonettes, Irish pubs, hosieries, and shoe repair joints of yesteryear--it's a shame he couldn't stick to his shutterbug roots and shoot a documentary instead.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lourdes
    The film delves deeper into the pain and pleasure of watching other people experience the wonderful things you dream of happening to you. In that sense, Hausner has crafted a kind of meta-riff on the masochistic lure of cinema itself.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Valentine's Day
    Shoddy enough within its primary genre, Valentine's Day becomes deadly in its attempt to be a Los Angeles Ensemble Movie.
  12. Videocracy
    Videocracy is hopelessly infected with the very prurience it means to expose--again and again, Gandini returns to images of pretty women grinding away for the camera in hopes of scoring their 15 minutes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    October Country
    Best understood as a work of creative nonfiction. The directors employ art-film techniques to aestheticize a swamp of big issues--the military, poverty, madness, family planning, spousal and child abuse--and give a family's (and America's) angst a clear voice and seductive form without leveling judgment.
  14. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    American Radical shows--albeit with great reluctance--how a formidable intellect partnered with an absolutist disposition can get you absolutely nowhere.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    3 Idiots
    In writer-director Rajkumar Hirani's tuneful, enjoyable college comedy, 3 Idiots, Khan plays "Rancho," an engineering student so brilliant that he barely has to break a sweat to place first in his class.
  16. Tano da morire
    Manically entertaining, Tano may have been a popular hit, but its caricatured world of papier-mâché bad taste fulfills at least one Underground criteria: Save for a big showstopper in the Vucciria market, it all could've been shot in someone's basement.
  17. From Paris with Love
    He (Morel) brings in lobotomized entertainment at 90-odd minutes. During the February doldrums, this cannot be underestimated.
  18. Dear John
    The biggest surprise here is Tatum, whose butch reticence has never been put to better use: His saddest farewell isn’t to his lady, but to a man even more uncommunicative than he is.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    District 13: Ultimatum
    Works only when at full sprint.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shinjuku Incident
    Despite its Hong Kong pedigree (veteran Derek Yee directs), Shinjuku Incident forgoes flashy action scenes in favor of old-fashioned moralism. Warner Bros. could have made it in the 1930s, and that's a compliment.
  21. Frozen
    Green also can't maintain the suspension of disbelief necessary as we watch three charmlessly written characters bicker and attempt inane ideas. It's one thing to be scared with them, and quite another to feel trapped with them.
  22. Terribly Happy
    Cedergren is a little too bland, but that works with Hansen's air of haplessness and sets him apart from the colorful locals. His self-inflicted reckoning is a horizon visible throughout the movie, and the bog outside of town is a thudding but effective metaphor of willful repression.
  23. Eyes Wide Open
    Mostly, though, it wins with excellent performances: Strauss never overplays his character's internal tension, nor does Danker camp up his youthful virility.
  24. Promised Lands
    Promised Lands is the only western documentary made about the war, but today, the movie seems more remarkable as a Sontag artifact than as political filmmaking.
  25. Ajami
    To the extent that its sympathies lie with the occupied and with those who must do the work of enforcing occupation, Ajami brings a warmly generous spirit to its subjects, almost all of whom become gangsters by default. No one is demonized or sanctified. The movie's sensibilities are humanistic.
  26. Edge of Darkness
    Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, Gibson can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.
  27. When in Rome
    Bell, unlike Katherine Heigl and Sandra Bullock, who executive-produced their big-screen debasements of 2009, brings enough effervescence to the film that she's able to spark believable chemistry with a usual dud like Josh Duhamel.
  28. Saint John of Las Vegas
    Mostly, Saint John traps good comic performers--including Malco and Peter Dinklage as John's boss--in airless editing and an unproductive, unresolved, sludgy tone.
  29. For My Father
    While films like “The Band's Visit,” “Jellyfish,” and “Waltz With Bashir” suggest a subtler, more psychologically directed path for Israeli film, Dror Zahavi's For My Father is old-school social melodrama (plus bombs), all the way.
  30. Off and Running
    A tactful but probing and richly satisfying study of an entire family thrown into self-doubt by a teenager venturing into risky territory as she struggles to find her way.
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