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. The End of the Line
    A free-form splash of jaw-dropping graphs, impressively accredited talking heads, and sumptuously shot portraits of natural beauty and decay, overdramatically scored to symphonic and other intense musical attacks.
  2. Moon
    Impressively pulled together on a modest budget, Moon has a strong lead and a valid philosophical premise but, despite Bell's fissured psyche, the drama is inert.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Food, Inc.
    Expertly crafted documentary.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    Scott's redo comes up short in almost every regard against the '74 model--against David Shire's knuckled-brass score, against its mugs' gallery of '70s New York character actors, against Peter Stone's serrated script, and certainly against its wordless punchline.
  5. Imagine That
    Imagine That does manage to get a crowd tearing up on cue for its emotional climax; as much as it works, it's through the personal charm of Murphy and Shahidi.
  6. Sex Positive
    It helps that Wein's subject is such a fascinating, garrulous paradox.
  7. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    For all the singer's sincere intentions to build secular-religious bridges, a straight-up concert film might have been a better approach, especially given viewer fatigue with those musicians and their causes.
  8. Tetro
    For writer-director Coppola, Tetro is a cri de coeur, one more from the heart.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hangover
    Phillips can't bring himself to push the material into truly outré territory, or to characterize his growth-impaired guys as degenerate creeps rather than lovable scamps.
  10. Séraphine
    Séraphine's dependence on her patron--a cultivated but emotionally detached homosexual, who knew a fellow outsider when he saw one but came and went in her life without warning--is almost as unbearably moving as her inevitable unraveling--when money and fame cut the artist off from her creative wellsprings and drove her over the edge.
  11. Away We Go
    The road-trippers of Away We Go harbor no discernible ambitions whatsoever, which may make them true to Gen-Y life, but also renders them fatally uninteresting. For all the ground they cover geographically, dramatically their velocity remains zero. Mendes, too, seems to have trouble getting on board with the underachieving set.
  12. My Life in Ruins
    A strangely self-loathing affair that paints Vardalos's tour group as a uniformly ill-mannered, culturally illiterate bunch, while rendering Greece itself as a badly plumbed third-world hellhole run by lazy, Zorba-dancing louts.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Downloading Nancy
    The jump cuts and nonlinear narrative are gratuitously stylish, and when you peel away this film's complex performances, at the core of its drawn-out suicide spectacle is pain so extreme, so alienating, and, in the end, so pointless.
  14. 24 City
    Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.
  15. Herb & Dorothy
    Watching the Vogels mull over art that they don't need to understand only makes their delight more infectious.
  16. Unmistaken Child
    The movie is a drama of faith, a Tibetan monk's search for the reincarnation of his beloved master Lama Konchog.
  17. Up
    The first 10 minutes of Up are flawless; the final 80 minutes, close enough. (Though, note this: Do not see Up in 3-D. It's inessential to the tale and altogether distracting.)
  18. Drag Me to Hell
    If the booga-booga shocks are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its audience right in its last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by crack editor Bob Murawski through a burlesque exorcism.
  19. Departures
    Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue.
  20. Pontypool
    For a film about the perils of too much talk, there's quite a lot of babbling presented as profundity. The political statements in Pontypool, much like those in another recent Canadian offering, Atom Egoyan's trite terrorism hand-wringer "Adoration," seem all the less provocative for appearing several years too late--McDonald's film might have had more punch if it were released when Bluetooth first rolled out.
  21. What Goes Up
    This is rock bottom: I've seen a lot of terrible movies in the line of duty, but What Goes Up might be the only genuinely unreleasable one.
  22. Offshore
    Cheklich's insipid, cheapjack dramedy--about a flagging company's decision to outsource--isn't potent enough to even be called a lukewarm-button movie.
  23. Pressure Cooker
    The intersection of food and identity is briefly explored, and the prep/exam sequences have a tension and charm that keeps the film moving toward its literally rewarding climax.
  24. The Girlfriend Experience
    Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.
  25. O'Horten
    The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly.
  26. Easy Virtue
    Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New World Order
    Neither a call to alarm nor a laugh-at-the-loonies yukfest, the doc charts a temperate middle course through its subjects' heated rhetoric.
  28. Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
    Though it's a little slow to start and some of the humor clunks, the film features a wholesome charm, some truly dazzling effects (the Lincoln Memorial alone is worth it), and enough mild, parent-nip in-jokes to keep all but the stone-hearted happy.
  29. The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
    Boys is first-rate cinema archaeology. What pushes it beyond that is the brutal honesty with which the sibling rivalry between the elder Shermans is depicted; theirs is a palpable mixture of love and disdain that led to the men not socializing with each other for more than 40 years.
  30. Terminator Salvation
    Among the many things junked in McG's chop-shop is the notion of pleasure.
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