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. Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee
    By setting the film in a deliberately distanced '70s, writer-director Justin Lin gets the benefit of looking-back-in-superiority.
  2. For the Bible Tells Me So
    Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.
  3. The Good Night
    Director Jake Paltrow's feature debut has all the hallmarks of an earnest young man's feature debut, and while that is not necessarily a bad thing, I can only imagine that it fit Sundance like a fingerless glove when it had its premiere there earlier this year.
  4. Michael Clayton
    Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Kid Could Paint That
    What began as a human-interest story for filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev led down stranger paths than the Duchampian conundrums of modern art.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Culture
    Slipping in and out of character, variously embodying, studying, and commenting on their counterparts, the actors manage both dramatic reenactment and its deconstruction with aplomb.
  7. The Girl Next Door
    Any resonance from that real-life atrocity gets smothered by a script that interlaces clichéd dialogue so tightly as to block out any glint of recognizable human behavior.
  8. Lake of Fire
    At once monumental and ghostly.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kurt Cobain About a Son
    About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Darjeeling Limited
    I was moved by Darjeeling, flaws and all, but if my job is to explain why, I find it difficult for reasons that are none of my business. From the minute Wilson walks onscreen, face covered in scars, eyes full of trouble, Darjeeling is warped by the gravitas of his recent suicide attempt.
  11. Trade
    It's pure exploitation--the kind of movie after which you need a long, hot shower. German director Marco Kreuzpaintner's movie looks like "Traffic" and "Syriana"--clearly his role models--but is little more than our generation's version of 1979's "Hardcore."
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Feast of Love
    For a film that purports to be an epic consideration of Love in Our Time, Feast is strikingly unthoughtful and uninterested in any but the most obvious kind of romantic love.
  13. The Kingdom
    A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.
  14. Lust, Caution
    Ang Lee's latest foray into forbidden love is as monotonous and disaffecting as "Brokeback Mountain" was gripping and immediate.
  15. The Price of Sugar
    Out of this sorry tale of human trafficking emerges a fascinating portrait of this handsome, pugnacious, one-man NGO, who left a cushy life with his patrician Anglo-Spanish family to work with Mother Theresa and devote himself to the oppressed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    Outsourced has all the charm and color of its made-in-India locations, yet it's crafted--well crafted--according to familiar Hollywood convention.
  17. Into the Wild
    To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Last Winter
    It's the imaginative background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action, that counts--and unnerves--in this most chilling of global-warming movies.
  19. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western "Dead Man," Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks.
  20. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Perfectly pleasant, perfectly undistinguished adaptation of a market-driven novel about six Sacramento lovelies trying to mend their stalled or broken lives while massaging each other's feet.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Man of My Life
    The film's arresting beauty--shots of a curtain blowing into a shadowed stairwell, or a meadow of sunflowers, or a head resting on a shoulder--is nearly enough.
  22. Beauty Remains
    The film plays like the work of a fifth-generation Chinese hack faking a lavish Hollywood saga on an indie budget: It's all soft focuses, sax flourishes, and silky slo-mos.
  23. Across the Universe
    Across the Universe, which filters the cultural revolt through a blizzard of early Beatles songs, ends up both reductive and smugly condescending to a presumptively know-nothing audience.
  24. December Boys
    If Daniel Radcliffe is hoping for an acting life after Harry Potter, he might want to be choosier than this cloying little Australian number.
  25. Eastern Promises
    A rhapsodic movie directed with considerable formal intelligence and brooding power from an original screenplay by Steve Knight, Eastern Promises is very much a companion to "A History of Violence."
  26. In the Valley of Elah
    Elah comes packaged as a feverish murder mystery groaning beneath too many subplots and the added weight of a strained David and Goliath allegory.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ira & Abby
    The overall effect is that of an aging vaudevillian making a good-hearted but embarrassing attempt to entertain us with stock characters and stock jokes and stock shtick.
  28. King of California
    Hard to tell what’s more annoying in this empty character study of eccentrics and the suckers who love them: the braying, blurting soundtrack or Douglas himself, who can’t find his way into a man tortured by dull demons.
  29. Mr. Woodcock
    Amy Poehler ekes out a smirk or two as a boozy broad publicist trying to keep her paycheck in check, but even the best gags feel like leftovers, again.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Silk
    Silk isn’t just bad. It’s utterly mad. It stutters and hiccups from scene to scene, from country to country, but never once does it make narrative or emotional sense.
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