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 Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    Mildly engrossing, building to a final-act clash between First and Third worlds that is riveting and highly uncomfortable to watch.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Humboldt County
    Jeremy Strong's minimalist performance in the lead role makes for an unconvincing character arc--he seems almost as ill-at-ease and dispirited by the end of the film as he does at the beginning.
  3. Obscene
    Very fine documentary.
  4. Shoot on Sight
    As if only made for ignoramuses who get nervous around brown skin, nearly everything on-screen is condescendingly telegraphed--from its plodding dialogue jammed with black-or-white morals to its lingering reaction shots, one-dimensional racists and radicals, obvious mood music, and thriller clichés.
  5. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Less persuasive is Forbes's perfunctory, psychologically thin rummage through Atwater's childhood for a traumatic event that would explain his utter ruthlessness.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Elite Squad
    This latest pounding slice-of-thug-life thriller from Brazil packs the same cinematic firepower as "City of God," only on the other side of the law.
  7. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    There's nothing earth-shattering going on here, but it's a film you'll want to befriend.
  8. Appaloosa
    Harris and his collaborators are playing it straight with a timeless male fantasy--horse, hat, six-shooter--a traditional approach that will please moviegoers like my dad and yours.
  9. Battle in Seattle
    Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria.
  10. The Duchess
    As a tale of mature self-sacrifice, the movie would be almost unbearably moving were it not for Knightley's insubstantial performance, which allows her to be fatally upstaged by Ralph Fiennes.
  11. Hounddog
    In the wake of the inadvertent betrayal that leads to her now-notorious rape (a sequence that, ironically, seems to have lost the horrific impact it needs), the film turns listless.
  12. Lakeview Terrace
    Like a lot of better genre fare, Lakeview Terrace uses its predictable premise to mount a stealth attack on the audience's sensibilities.
  13. Ghost Town
    If it sounds all so pale and predictable, it is.
  14. All of Us
    Brooklyn filmmaker Emily Abt's well-meaning, pro-feminist doc offers little new insight in seeking to raise awareness that black women are disproportionately at high risk for HIV infection.
  15. Fraulein
    Stylized with a recurring misty focus, the film's economically captured detail shots (gestures, expressions, caught moments) convey genuine sensitivity without the expected weepiness.
  16. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    An elegantly constructed if misleadingly titled class lecture.
  17. Burn After Reading
    The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.
  18. Christmas on Mars
    As a Lips completist, it's at least worth enduring for its homegrown resourcefulness, all General Electric stoves and found industrial objects, but that's the thing about experimentation: Sometimes it's destined to fail.
  19. Flow: For Love of Water
    One of those charming little documentaries that make you question whether the human race is really worth preserving.
  20. Towelhead
    Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.
  21. The Women
    Isn't so much incompetent as it is hopelessly tame and muddled.
  22. Forgiveness
    David's trauma, madness, and recovery (including a relationship with a Palestinian woman) is arranged as a puzzle of dreams, flashbacks, hallucinations, and strikingly choreographed numbers that, while occasionally dazzling, remains in pieces at film's end.
  23. Everybody Wants to Be Italian
    Less a movie than a charm offensive beamed at those who thought "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was a masterpiece.
  24. Mister Foe
    The whole thing's poised uneasily somewhere between urban fairy tale and actual human psychodrama, never really landing in one place or the other.
  25. Ping Pong Playa
    Frantically paced, littered with cute kids, and overstuffed with split screens and a rap score, Ping Pong Playa angles a little too hard for tween attention, but there's no resisting the movie's antic affability or its irreverence.
  26. Save Me
    Though Save Me never quite surmounts its schematic scenario, scene by scene, beat by beat, it's pretty damn good.
  27. A Secret
    Deepened by its complex back-and-forth chronology, deft shifts in perspective, and a significantly counterintuitive color-coding of past and present, A Secret suggests that it's not illicit passion, but rather the crime of denial, that has screwed up this family down the generations.
  28. August Evening
    Perhaps Eska didn't have to write all of his characters into overlapping crossroads of crisis, but he's more nuanced than overt, and his cast (especially Loren and the nonprofessional Castaneda) sells it.
  29. The Pool
    This heightened consciousness of objects and obligations ballasts the drama-light, class-conscious fable with tactile life.
  30. I Served the King of England
    A mischievously hedonistic, Chaplinesque farce, the film buoyantly but seriously traverses the horrors of World War II with a subtlety and sophistication that most American comedies cannot grasp.
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