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. Death in Love
    Someday, a wise and potent film will be made about the Holocaust's legacy on succeeding generations. Posing as a study in evil, Death in Love is claptrap that confuses bile with art.
  2. Homecoming
    Glued together with shards from much better movies, the humorless plot offers no mystery about who's doing what to whom, or why.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Off Jackson Avenue
    Despite this tri-part farcical thriller's plot construction, some hackneyed dialogue and actorial mugging--the finest exception being Aya Cash's airily acerbic Slavic hooker--you can't help but eagerly anticipate the finale, when Montias brings his intersecting storylines together. Apparently, amusingly improbable coincidences can satisfy.
  4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    Generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering along on auto-broomstick.
  5. Somers Town
    Without ever trivializing his characters' meager circumstances or resorting to the rags-to-riches fantasy of "Slumdog Millionaire," Meadows has made a lovely film about the ability of the imagination to offset the harshness of reality.
  6. Bruno
    Funny as it is, Brüno could not be as shockingly uproarious as "Borat." No matter how well retold, a joke necessarily loses explosive force the second time around. But a great gag is a thing of beauty forever--so, too, a comic performance.
  7. Humpday
    Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Lynn Shelton's third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy," also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in Seattle.
  8. Blood: The Last Vampire
    Unexciting, incoherent, lamely acted, and carelessly written.
  9. I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Joyless, offensively stupid end-of-high-school farce.
  10. Soul Power
    Takes too long to get to the meat of its matter, but captivates once it does.
  11. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    Celebratory but clear-eyed portrait of Gertrude Berg.
  12. Lake Tahoe
    Eimbcke's droll rhythms are reminiscent of early Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki--here stylistically appropriate for a film about social and emotional inertia.
  13. I Hate Valentine's Day
    Vardalos calls her film "the ultimate indie experiment," and if that's what is meant by ham-fisted pacing, writing, and acting, this is as ultimate and as indie as it gets.
  14. The Girl from Monaco
    The modest pleasure of the film issues chiefly from the performances.
  15. Tony Manero
    Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain's alarming Tony Manero--named not for its protagonist, but rather his ego-ideal, John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever"--is another study of a cinema-struck, solitary daydreamer, albeit a particularly stunted member of the genus.
  16. The Beaches of Agnès
    In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.
  17. Public Enemies
    Mann's exhilarating movie exists in a state of perpetual forward motion.
  18. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    There's no breathing life into a formula that ought to have bowed out gracefully while the going was good.
  19. The Hurt Locker
    A full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot.
  20. My Sister's Keeper
    You don't usually see this unblinking attention to the progress of physical decay in a PG-13 wide-release movie, and to the degree that it represents a real aspect of human experience generally curtained out of sight, it is, in the language of movie people, a brave decision. But makeup department realism alone can't redeem the dramatic fallacies surrounding it.
  21. Afghan Star
    Marking follows the finalists around on the last leg of their PR campaigns and captures something sweetly goofy, with an edge of creepy, about their aping of smarmy American self-promotion (kissing babies, etc).
  22. Chéri
    Frears and Hampton's missteps begin immediately, with the director providing pinched narration as he recounts, over so many cartes de visite, the histories of other famous ladies who made a handsome living on their backs.
  23. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    This is basically self-congratulatory fare for people who feel more "politically conscious" when reminded that women in the Islamic world can have it rough. Right now, you're better off just watching the news.
  24. Surveillance
    Surveillance is the work of a director who has made significant strides in both storytelling and control of the medium, deftly interweaving a grisly thriller, a sicko "Rashômon," a switcheroo, a psychotic love story, an imaginative paean to children, and an inspired resurrection of Julia Ormond.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    New York
    Quite apart from the fact that none of these performers is capable of smoldering with conviction, there's no terror or sensuality in director Khan's images.
  26. Quiet Chaos
    Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.
  27. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    This is blockbuster porn absent even the suggestion of care or concern for anything that might resemble "a point," save the obvious one to move more Hasbro action figures and animated-series DVD boxed sets. In a word: distasteful.
  28. Whatever Works
    Blown opportunity.
  29. The Proposal
    You know every tinny beat and false note by heart, from the implausible setup to the sprint-to-the-airport finish.
  30. Dead Snow
    For more than half of this 90-minute film, director Tommy Wirkola plays things pretty straight--a mistake, perhaps, since the first half is pretty boring--but once the Nazi zombies start arriving en masse, he abruptly shifts to an "Evil Dead"–style zaniness, including the sight of a potential victim hanging off the side of a mountain while using a zombie's entrails as rope.
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