Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Flags of Our Fathers
    To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains.
  2. The Prestige
    The result is a lopsided yet absorbing movie in which the director is less drawn to his main characters than to those on the periphery.
  3. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    [Goldthwait] handles it beautifully, crafting from such rough stuff something astoundingly sweet and sharply funny about forgiveness, unconditional love, tenderness, and the things we hide just to get ourselves from one day to the next.
  4. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Requiem
    Sandra Hüller, a young German stage actress making a harrowing feature debut, invests Michaela's terrified, possibly schizophrenic outbursts with unholy conviction.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conventioneers
    Unlike in "Medium Cool," the most telling and dramatic events aren't shown.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweet Land
    Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    51 Birch Street
    Begins shakily, with a naked self-consciousness that can be off-putting, but quickly develops into an absorbing and ever deepening drama.
  9. Hair High
    Too glib to qualify as satire, Hair High nails the high school experience.
  10. Justice
    With its unobtrusive visual style, Justice plays like a near-parody of documentary objectivity, subtly suggesting the malleable nature of "truth," both in the courtroom and the movie theater.
  11. Man of the Year
    Levinson loses his movie, his audience, and his purpose in a tangle of conspiracy theories and crackpot notions that sink the movie just when it begins to transcend expectations. In short, it would have been great if it had stopped, oh, 12 minutes in.
  12. Deliver Us from Evil
    Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse.
  13. Driving Lessons
    The sentiment's a bit thick sometimes, but Walters remains sharp, and is sure to inspire drag queens everywhere.
  14. Infamous
    It's just a lesser version, light in weight and absent the ache that permeated the movie for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award. It can't withstand the comparisons. It's good, especially during its first half, just not good enough.
  15. Nearing Grace
    This '70s-era teen romance from the director of "Halloween II" and the screenwriter of "Mean Creek" is a quietly effective number, a little like an '80s John Hughes movie without the laughs (not an insult in this case).
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ritchie Boys
    These are men who know of what they speak; they're also eloquent, erudite, and funny as hell.
  17. Tideland
    Gilliam has suffered more than his share of butchered projects, but with this exercise in kamikaze auteurism, he appears to have made exactly the mess he wanted.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zerophilia
    A case of provocative issues at the mercy of unskilled execution, Zerophilia is a psychological-horror comedy that pokes its toe into dangerous sexual waters but then scurries away.
  19. Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare
    It's tough to be sure of anything in this murky experimental feature, which sadly fails to live up to its title.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Much So Fast
    The film is no maudlin pity-fest: It's an absorbing account of fraternal love and obsession, as Stephen's brother assembles a "guerrilla science" foundation to find a cure when no one else will.
  21. The Departed
    Neither a debacle nor a bore, The Departed works but only up to a point, and never emotionally--even if the director does contrive to supply his version of a happy ending.
  22. Little Children
    This overly long movie, made sluggish by a superfluously novelistic narrator, feels divided against itself, driven by opposed impulses of tragedy and dark humor that make it impossible for us to identify with these lost souls' break for freedom or wait for them to grow up.
  23. 49 Up
    Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Gold
    No mere Western-guilt-inducing harangue, this highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis is a model of patient storytelling.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One-Third
    A borderline experimental, nearly silent film loosely based on Dante's "Inferno."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shortbus
    There's something refreshingly frisky and celebratory about Shortbus that offsets its flaws. It's a triple-X midnight movie with a heart of squarest gold.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blood Tea and Red String
    A sickly-sweet stop-motion animation 13 years in the making, Blood Tea and Red String is a genuine piece of outsider art.
  28. ...So Goes the Nation
    So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner
    The film's both soothing--as an act of recording promise--and churningly emotive.
  30. The Queen
    More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »