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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Though the film never transcends its own neo-boho quirk, it concludes in a marvelous final shot: a long take set to Gang of Four, grungy and materialist in the Jacobs tradition.
  2. Alpha Dog
    If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor--his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events--he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Grew Tired of Us
    A borderline lazy but nonetheless compelling documentary co-produced by National Geographic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tears of the Black Tiger
    Nothing is too crazed, corny, or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called "Blissfully Yours."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    Despite its structure, Abduction sheds light on the disturbing politics North Korea deploys to simultaneously intimidate the world and guard itself from attack.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ever Since the World Ended
    Like Emmanuel Lubezki's phantasmagoric images for "Children of Men," the performances in the film are so remarkable it's easy to ignore the implausibilities that surface. But even as its self-aware approximation of the doc format startles, Ever Since the World Ended lacks vigor.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Comedy of Power
    An enjoyable but curiously weightless trifle that lowers rather than raises the temperature of the affair. Comedy of Power has to be the most polite, untroubled conspiracy film since the genre first tapped a phone.
  8. Happily N'Ever After
    Director Paul J. Bolger and screenwriter Rob Moreland have drained the affectionate wit out of the Shrek franchise's satire, giving us instead a barely sketched out story line and quantities of unimaginative CGI.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freedom Writers
    Reaction shots of the class's befuddled white boy are played for cheap laughs, but writer-director Richard LaGravenese otherwise keeps it real by recruiting cinematographer Jim Denault from Indieville High and Imelda Staunton--here playing Bitchy Old Department Head.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thr3e
    Marc Blucas as the hunted seminary student Kevin Parson might as well be dead for all his charisma.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sacrifice
    The effect is not unlike a Terrence Malick "Real Sex" episode -- only Bruno thwarts any viewer who craves titillation in a plain brown wrapper of moral outrage.
  12. Pan's Labyrinth
    Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.
  14. Miss Potter
    By most accounts, Potter was a serious workaholic monomaniacally devoted to the purity of her vision. Undaunted, Noonan and Maltby are determined to squeeze her life into a run-of-the-mill romance in which love heals all wounds.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff's glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Factory Girl
    Poor little girl, chewed up in the Factory machinery. It was inevitable, perhaps, that a biopic of the Pop princess would stick to pop psychology, but did it have to feel as flat as a silkscreen? With its hackneyed party scenes and jet-set montages, Factory Girl fails even at frivolity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unconscious
    The movie's message is clear: Freud's greatest contribution to society was not the idea that all little boys long to sleep with their mothers--rather, it's the concept of the unconscious, a hidden place where our secret desires yearn to be free.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tiger and the Snow
    The results are neither profound nor funny, but merely uncomfortable. A hubristic failure at risky humor, The Tiger and the Snow provides Benigni his own Michael Richards moment.
  19. Notes on a Scandal
    Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work -- "Fatal Attraction" for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny.
  20. Children of Men
    It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that Children of Men functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the Wachowski Brothers' "V for Vendetta" (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    The product itself isn't so much afterthought as afterbirth -- a bloody mess to be dumped discreetly.
  22. The Good Shepherd
    The Good Shepherd needed to be either considerably longer -- more like 1979's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" miniseries -- or considerably shorter (word has it De Niro cut 30 minutes). Right now, it's stuck in the deadly dull middle in which everything happens but nothing matters since the filmmakers can't stick with one event or idea long enough for it to, well, stick.
  23. Night at the Museum
    The first half-hour's too slow; the last half-hour's too manic, as if to compensate. But at least it entertains, thanks in large measure to the buddy-pic relationship between Owen Wilson's miniature cowpoke and his Roman pal Steve Coogan.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Are Marshall
    Even by the low standards of the young-jocks-as-good-clean-soldiers movie, there's little at stake here, unless you count the kids' hunger to win one for the Gipper.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Venus
    Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    Like his "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter.
  27. Letters from Iwo Jima
    The special power of Eastwood's achievement is that, save for one indelible moment, the mutual recognition between sworn adversaries happens not on-screen, but later, as we piece the two films together in our minds.
  28. The Painted Veil
    Bolstered by a strong ensemble-- "Infamous's" Toby Jones as a deputy commissioner gone native, and a wonderfully wrinkled Diana Rigg as a Mother Superior, speaking up for disillusioned decency--and by the ecstatic cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh, The Painted Veil lifts Maugham's story clear of its prissy, attenuated spirituality, and into genuine passion.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocky Balboa
    Rocky Balboa, effortlessly reflexive and patently, even proudly, absurd, is a tough movie to dislike -- and believe me, I've tried.
  30. Chats perchés
    Approaching 85, cine-essayist Chris Marker remains as lively, engaged, and provocative as ever--and no less fond of indirection.
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