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. Noise
    Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy.
  2. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    A frequently uproarious send-up of Jean Bruce's long-running series of spy novels.
  3. Surfwise
    Whether you call this a Rousseau-ian paradise or "Capturing the Friedmans" by the Sea will depend on where you stand on hippie living--up to a point.
  4. Turn the River
    Turn the River can't weather the ante-upping into pathos when Kailey desperately reasserts her privilege of motherhood--but the sense of storytelling intelligence is undeniable.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Before the Rains
    Saddled with a predictable lushness--even a streak of blood on a dirty window is aestheticized until it looks like stained glass--and the sensuality here can crowd out the sense. Still, director Santosh Sivan imparts a vastness and a sense of wonder to the film, qualities reminiscent of a Thomas Cole painting.
  6. The Tracey Fragments
    Beyond its overarching aesthetic, The Tracey Fragments co-stars Toronto rockabilly punk Slim Twig as a Tim Burton caricature of Pretty in Pink’s Duckie and boasts a score by Broken Social Scene; it would all swagger dangerously close into hipster-trash territory if not for Page's pathos and wit, honest to blog.
  7. Unsettled
    Adam Hootnick's burningly smart documentary, delves into this national crisis, which was a relative blip on the international media's radar.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Battle for Haditha
    An engaging Iraqudrama that straddles the line between blistering exposé and Spielbergian heart-tugger.
  9. Iron Man
    Iron Man, too, is something that people will see regardless of the reviews, but here is the point: Where Michael Bay (Transformers) has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller who engages the audience's imagination rather than crushing it in a tsunami of digital noise.
  10. Fugitive Pieces
    Fugitive Pieces is a cerebral excavation into history, written in lush cadences meant to be read or recited. It may be unfilmable, and in pursuit of sensitivity, Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa hollows out the novel's urgency in favor of a vaguely spiritual morbidity.
  11. Made of Honor
    Director Paul Weiland and the three (!) screenwriters it took to boil down thousands of bad movies into 101 minutes haven't provided this one with a single original thought; it should only entertain those still getting adjusted to the idea of talkies.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mister Lonely
    Co-written with his brother Avi, Mister Lonely is startlingly straightforward compared to his earlier work. But, like that work, it stands or falls on each single, self-contained scene.
  13. Redbelt
    With his 10th feature--an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts--Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Son of Rambow
    At its most likable, Son of Rambow evokes the rush of discovery that turns budding cinephiles into lifers--that delight in finding a film that seems to express or coalesce some inchoate yearning, including a yen to share.
  15. XXY
    It takes a controlling hand to chisel something more contoured than monotony out of this dense angst, and director Lucía Puenzo doesn't have it, though Inés Efron, as Alex, gives a committed centerpiece performance with a nice, slightly lupine grin.
  16. The Favor
    As an unconscious parody of everything that's wrong with Indiewood, Eva Aridjis's The Favor is brilliant. Otherwise, it's an unwatchable nightmare that brought back bad memories of NYU screenwriting classes.
  17. Viva
    About half an hour of this was enough for me—long before the orgy, LSD drugging, and hallucination animation, I'd gotten the joke—though Biller's re-creation is not only right-on but rigorous.
  18. Baby Mama
    Ultimately, that's all this shrugging disappointment is: a "Saturday Night Live" sketch stretched a good hour past its breaking point of no return.
  19. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    A largely mind-numbing experience.
  20. Roman de gare
    This goofy tale of self-emancipation, a love story made by a mature man wise to the possibilities of the improbable, is also a thriller with an unexpectedly dark edge.
  21. Standard Operating Procedure
    Since "The Thin Blue Line's" remarkable intervention, Morris's work has grown more public and more problematic--lofty yet snide, a form of know-it-all epistemological inquiry.
  22. Then She Found Me
    In short, it's the kind of film that only a mother, which is to say my mother, would love.
  23. Up the Yangtze
    By journey's end, Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground.
  24. Without the King
    A cut above the average Quad-bound video agit-prop doc, Michael Skolnik's Without the King succeeds mostly through negative virtues.
  25. Stuff and Dough
    Puiu seems content to embrace the dynamism of youth and possibility; if "Lazarescu" was a movie of dead ends, Stuff and Dough is one, quite literally, of open roads.
  26. 88 Minutes
    We may have to sit through worse films to come this year, but with any luck, there'll be none as guilelessly, idiotically misogynist as this one.
  27. The Forbidden Kingdom
    Taken as a whole, though, it's an amiable lost-and-found of epic-adventure tropes. As I still illogically treasure "Willow," many a 10-year-old who sees Forbidden Kingdom will remember it fondly in spite of its flaws.
  28. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Without Segel bravely channeling "his own anxieties and obsessions into his clowning," as Pauline Kael wrote about Woody Allen 24 years ago, Forgetting Sarah Marshall would have been easily forgettable and, one might even say, limp.
  29. The Life Before Her Eyes
    Moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather.
  30. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    An affable action hero in search of the planet's arch supervillain, Spurlock is less irritating than his obvious model, Michael Moore, but also less politically astute; assuming the role of a faux-naïf stranger in a strange land, he's more benign and not nearly as funny as unacknowledged analogue Sacha Baron Cohen.
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