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 Great Debaters
    The film avoids potentially interesting frictions by always letting the team debate (and win) on the "correct" side of every issue--that which aligns with generally accepted modern liberal sympathies. The kids follow their party line all the way to the big game, a ridiculous, fallacy-riddled face-off against Harvard.
  2. P.S. I Love You
    Hilary Swank, who was not put in this world to simper, does little else as a young wife whose twinkly leprechaun of an Irish husband (Gerard Butler, who's Scottish, but never mind) has died.
  3. Charlie Wilson's War
    Dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden.
  4. Steep
    Blandly beautiful, inarticulate extreme-skiing documentary.
  5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    No Greek tragedy, this Hollywood Sweeney is a FUN creepy-crawly. If nothing else, Burton has learned that the successfully gruesome is its own reward.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    This burlesque of biopic clichés flounders from one setup to the next without the engine that drives the genre: a strong central character.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Flakes
    Despite a few good one-liners, the dialogue is overwritten, and director Michael Lehmann (Heathers, The Truth About Cats & Dogs) is in thrall with the hipness he tries to chronicle.
  8. I Am Legend
    In what has been a pretty remarkable career up to now, it's this performance that fully affirms Smith as one of the great leading men of his generation.
  9. The Kite Runner
    A drama as bland and beige as its tasteful palette.
  10. Look
    Look isn't processing, critiquing, or even warning; in the end, it's just recording.
  11. Youth Without Youth
    For all its fussy lighting, upside-down camera angles, and overwrought impressionism, Youth Without Youth is essentially playful. It's also pleasantly meandering in its largely faked locations, and drolly matter-of-fact about its mystic visions.
  12. Half Moon
    Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi's picturesque road trip is less about preserving a musical heritage than accepting one's fate, a mythic trek that's both heartrending and boisterous--often as hauntingly absurdist as a Kusturica carnival.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Perfect Holiday
    The actors distinguish themselves mainly by their ability to make the material, directed and co-written by Lance Rivera, seem even more painfully awkward and unfunny than it already is--which is very.
  14. Nanking
    While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today.
  15. Atonement
    Wright wouldn't recognize unobtrusive if it tapped him on the nose--he's cross- pollinated the first half of Atonement into an Oscar-buzzy brew of Masterpiece Theatre and "Upstairs, Downstairs," with the wild English countryside tamed into an artfully lit fairy glade, and into just enough of a bodice-ripper to reel in the youth market. And not a bad one at that.
  16. The Golden Compass
    In drawing and quartering much of the novel's intent, Weitz ends up with a film that feels not just unfinished but undone.
  17. Looking for Cheyenne
    A beguiling comedy from a Marxist-inflected thesis that is filled with characters who rage against the machine with pessimism, optimism, and naïveté--sometimes in rotation.
  18. Grace Is Gone
    The music--a gently jazzy piano-and-strings theme--is just fine, and a good deal less cloying than what was there before. One can only regret that Eastwood didn't offer to reshoot the whole movie while he was at it.
  19. Revolver
    It's no return to rock, this, but rather Ritchie's soporific, proggy-conceptual Film of Ideas, with Vivaldi interludes, fussbudget set design, recurrent references to chess, and a hit man inexplicably got up as Tati's Mr. Hulot.
  20. The Walker
    This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal.
  21. 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
    What kept Paris from the top? The answers provided rarely qualify as revelation, but this affectionate portrait distinguishes itself from the ongoing epidemic of musician docs by mere virtue of staking out ground that hasn't already been thoroughly tilled.
  22. Man in the Chair
    Walsh and Plummer are obviously pros, and they hustle to put across some patently ridiculous business, but, well, it's true about the polishing thing.
  23. Juno
    Once it works its way through the first-timer's lookatme! snark, Juno evolves into a thing of beauty and grace. By the end, it's unexpectedly moving without ever once trolling for crocodile tears. It's a sneak attack.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billy the Kid
    I have seen more than 25 documentaries this year, and after a while they all start to run together, both structurally and thematically. Billy the Kid is utterly original in both respects.
  25. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Far too often, though, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly feels grotesquely calculated, especially the more Schnabel ratchets up the inspirational platitudes of exactly the sort that Bauby--who maintained an acerbic sense of humor about his situation until the very end--would have despised.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oswald's Ghost
    Riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying documentary.
  27. Maurice Richard
    As Richard, Roy Dupuis's tight-clutched performance easily holds down the screen, when he's not hooked by an inelegant script that leaks mythologizing flatus.
  28. Protagonist
    Yu's rousing, difficult-to-classify exercise in parallel storytelling is surprisingly accessible, and all the more insightful for it.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tony N' Tina's Wedding
    The not-exactly-long-awaited movie version is here, trading in stereotypes just as ineptly as the original.
  30. Badland
    Writer-director Francesco Lucente's overconfident, emotionally forced 160-minute opus offers trite antiwar platitudes--at best--in chronicling the anguished existence of a soldier who can't shake the horrors he experienced in Fallujah.
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