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. Paradise
    Steadily maintaining momentum and a meditative mood without narration or editorialization is itself a feat, but more vitally, Paradise appreciates and shares the curious mysteries in the seemingly banal.
  2. Capitalism: A Love Story
    Scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.
  3. In Search of Beethoven
    The film's real resource is its impressive array of talking heads, their intimate familiarity with the music, and their ability to impart graspable insight.
  4. The Informant!
    Unlike the director's usual organic efforts--in which great style never results in overstylized--The Informant! feels overamped from start to shrugging finish.
  5. Jennifer's Body
    This is the sophomore production from "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, similarly told through ultra-stylized slangy teen dialogue, which is cool, in theory, in the way it respects the verbal resourcefulness of idle flyover kids, but is excruciating to listen to in actual fact.
  6. Paris
    At a 124-minute runtime, though, the writer-director has stretched a wide canvas, and only sporadically found anything worth filling it with.
  7. The Burning Plain
    The writer's most successful works--"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" and "Amores Perros"--were bolstered by directors who brought genuine emotion to the screen, but The Burning Plain marks Arriaga's behind-the-camera debut, and his obviousness is staggering.
  8. Disgrace
    The austere economy of Coetzee's writing, crisply adapted for the screen by Anna Maria Monticelli, plays out the melodrama with quietly brooding menace.
  9. Fatal Promises
    Outlines a culture of cross-border corruption that preys on poverty and has become so widespread that it can now be mentioned in the same breath as the drug trade. The film also critiques the willful ignorance of law-making bodies that turn a blind eye to these atrocities.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Fuel
    Those outside the bio-church aren't likely to drive--even on regular and currently cheap gasoline--to see Fuel at their local theater.
  11. If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
    A shoot with Fassbinder actress Irm Hermann signifies Tillmans's desire--and the desire of every high-profile German-speaking artist (hello, Fatih Akin)--to huff the fading smell of RWF's genius. Like the rest of the film, though, it does little to convince the unconverted of Tillmans's own.
  12. Harmony and Me
    Slight, indifferently shot, and entirely lacking in ballast, Harmony and Me's sole justification for being is that it's consistently very funny.
  13. Bright Star
    It's more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic--but no less touching for that.
  14. 35 Shots of Rum
    35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.
  15. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    Makes a few distracting embellishments--re-enactments (some shabbily animated), melodramatic cloak-and-dagger scoring--but in the main, it's a professional job, standing above the crowd of politico documentaries that proliferate like kudzu over arthouse screens.
  16. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
    Lang's film, the last he made in the U.S., exposed the immorality of the death penalty; Hyams's retread offers only more plot and longer, louder car chases.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Not Forgotten
    If the film's first two-thirds are dreary and preposterous, give Soref credit for a truly--what's the proper cinematic terminology?--batshit-crazy finale.
  18. No Impact Man: The Documentary
    We could all do better, definitely, but how much can we possibly glean from a guy whose idealism can be measured with a calendar?
  19. Donne-moi la main
    The movie is most compelling when demonstrating the gorgeousness of the South of France—a truth that is always worth emphasizing, but was never really in dispute.
  20. The Other Man
    It hurts to see a terrific cast (including the lovely and intelligent young Irish actress Romola Garai as the couple's quietly seething daughter) squandered on such dreary filmmaking.
  21. Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    An exhilarating document.
  22. The Painter Sam Francis
    For aficionados, the evidently rare footage of Francis squatting on hairy thighs, scampering ahead to stay intuitive before intellectual, will justify the film.
  23. Skiptracers
    The primary source of comedy is tiresome pottymouthing.
  24. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
    The resulting experience could very easily be described as off-putting -- which well suits the uneasiness of the subject.
  25. 9
    The result is never as gripping in narrative terms--a well-worn litany of dystopian-future chestnuts--as it is visually.
  26. Crude
    Remarkable documentary.
  27. Walt & El Grupo
    Both a gargantuan, multi-family home movie and a slight, if entertaining, curio that'll be of most interest to hardcore Disney aficionados.
  28. Black Dynamite
    No matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in "Coffy"--or the loony genre experimentation in "Pootie Tang."
  29. Extract
    The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.
  30. Amreeka
    There's nothing bitter or cynical about Amreeka, which is directed with impish wit, an observant visual competence, and an open, conciliatory spirit.
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