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. Hats Off
    Weddell isn't really representative of an older generation of actors; she's one of a kind. But this visually indifferent documentary never explains why that matters.
  2. Alexandra
    Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Grand
    It has a lot of affection for its screwy characters, and it has a cast worth watching even when the plot's held captive by a bunch of boring cards.
  4. The Hammer
    Former "Loveline" and "The Man Show" co-host Adam Carolla brings his self-deprecating, improvisational, regular-dude deadpan--as well as his former Golden Gloves status--to this semi-autobiographical comedy with ambitions so low that one might call it charmingly mediocre.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shelter
    As far as coming-out dramas go, Shelter is a puppy dog, well-acted but rife with cliché received wisdom and at least one ingeniously arbitrary bit of mid-scene dialogue: "That's why you never tell a woman how to cook a chicken."
  6. Meet the Browns
    Surprisingly half-decent--surprising because Perry’s not about to switch up his hardly revelatory but consistently bankable box-office signature:
  7. Shutter
    Ostensibly a remake of a Thai film--by a Japanese director with a Hollywood cast--this plays more like a video copy of "The Ring" that’s been so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.
  8. Boarding Gate
    There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.
  9. Love Songs
    That Honoré knows a lot about movies is beyond question--but from first frame to last, Love Songs stays as icy to the touch as Julie's premature corpse.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Planet B-Boy
    Lee pays little attention to the roots of breakdancing or how it helped to spread hip-hop worldwide, choosing instead to obsess over the mad skillz of his international subjects.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Irina Palm
    Nobody can reduce tawdry material to doddering quaintness like the British, but this staggeringly inane joint effort of U.K., Belgian, French, German, and Luxembourgian film financing represents a true coalition of the witless.
  12. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    The duo's travels never gain a traction of their own, and the film's destination feels overdetermined despite its sweetness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horton Hears a Who!
    Horton Hears a Who! has blessedly been conceived and executed in reverence to Seuss's story, padding out the original narrative with some meaningful new ideas and casting a mercifully muzzled Jim Carrey as the titular beast.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never Back Down
    A modest surprise: better acted than needed, better made than expected.
  15. Sleepwalking
    Theron and Woody Harrelson provide vitality against the film's heavy load, but they aren't around long enough to keep it from collapsing under its own portentous weight.
  16. Heartbeat Detector
    Here, knowledge and understanding raise more questions than they answer, and the film ends not in closure, but in openness. It is precisely those qualities that give Heartbeat Detector its epic sense of humanity. Take them away and you'd be left with a leaner but markedly less compelling workaday workplace thriller: "Michael Clayton" with Nazis instead of lawyers.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    City with No Mercy
    Flash Point treats its audience like dogs, making us suffer through routine, almost inscrutable plot points and inconsequential characterizations to get to these episodes, and as such reveals itself as nothing more than a dumb action picture with delusions of Johnnie To–dom.
  18. Funny Games (2008)
    Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there's no reason why you should.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hacia la oscuridad
    Admirably tough-minded if overstuffed, Towards Darkness delivers on its foreboding title.
  20. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    The doc is sobering, straightforward, and a bit drab, but to the participants' credit, it's also an entirely nonpartisan endeavor. Good luck telling that to the right once they hear the film is narrated by Sean Penn.
  21. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    An appropriately mellow chronicle of a Tribeca nightclub's lifespan.
  22. Blind Mountain
    Blind Mountain forces its way through numerous illogicalities and several plot lapses to a violently abrupt ending.
  23. Married Life
    Though the imprint of Douglas Sirk is all over Sachs's homage to old movies about restless men in bad suits and untrustworthy women in lovely frocks, his immediate reference point is clearly Haynes's "Far From Heaven."
  24. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    What makes Watson's novel a delight is its guilelessly homoerotic subtext. By downplaying that, the movie argues the case for Watson's innocent sensuality--and against its own worldly update.
  25. Paranoid Park
    The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Snow Angels
    What saves this heavy, heavy material from sinking into the chill, familiar turf of the Small-Town Midwinter Tragedy is Green's practiced ear for verbal idiosyncrasy and off-kilter conversation rhythms.
  27. Fighting for Life
    Director Terry Sanders's goal of comprehensiveness and some bad sequencing prevents the film from achieving the ringing purity of John Huston's postwar doc "Let There Be Light."
  28. Girls Rock!
    While the camp is all about liberation, the film hews to a predictable doc template and comes off as a drag.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blindsight
    Blindsight works best when it casts off the constraints of the adventure tale it wasn't meant to be and settles into a deft and humanistic treatment of blindness in Tibet.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    City of Men
    Paulo Morelli directs capably, with a heavy dash of MTV-generation flair: hyper-saturated colors, close-ups of skin glittering with sweat, and a constant patter of gunfire that undergirds the soundtrack like a steady heartbeat.
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