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 World's Fastest Indian
    The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.
  2. Æon Flux
    Gone are Chung's willfully irrational non sequitur surrealisms, vertiginous designs, dry humor, and physiological weirdness; now we have Charlize Theron trying to look icy, leaping about in resistance to a future dystopia that looks a lot like an overlandscaped European Union industrial park.
  3. Transamerica
    Pleasant even without reaching much of a destination, Transamerica leaves the basic impression that it's not as self-satisfied as it could have been.
  4. First Descent
    Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.
  5. The Kid & I
    Qualifies as the most indulgent kind of homemade project, laden with tediously inspirational dialogue and visuals that seem shot through half-fizzled Yuengling. Kudos to Gores, at least, for acquitting himself as an actor.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Far Side of the Moon
    Reworking his own raw material, Lepage spins a rich, moving film that acknowledges humanity's power to break out of Earth's daily gravity; in the process, he leaves audiences floating.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Loving but frank, Brown, by refusing to judge her film's subject, never falls into this trap. Too frequently, however, the side-of-the-road montages that are meant to mesmerize offer only blurry filler instead.
  8. Exist
    Exist is prone to posturing. Demonstrating a noble if wishy-washy faith in activism's power to save the world, the film amounts to a brief, earnest howl against apathy--easily dismissible for those unsympathetic to its views and basically useless for everyone else.
  9. The Boys of Baraka
    The Boys of Baraka's heart may be in the right place, but its portrait of poor Baltimore kids selected to attend boarding school in Kenya is rife with suspect perspectives.
  10. Down to the Bone
    Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.
  11. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seamless
    Though the film is a sober account, the subject alone ensures numerous moments of inspired hilarity.
  13. The Ice Harvest
    From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Just Friends
    A refreshingly mean-spirited breeze through both the holiday movie and romantic-comedy checklists.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rent
    Instead of bringing a universal love story to the living present, the film traps it in a frozen past like a prehistoric bug in amber, as removed from moviegoers' experience as a dusty diorama at the American Museum of Natural History.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Yours, Mine and Ours
    Shrill family comedy.
  17. The Libertine
    The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.
  18. Syriana
    Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is "Frontline" meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    39 Pounds of Love
    Eagerly mimicking reality TV's need to mold life into a digestible narrative, the documentary 39 Pounds of Love simplifies its subject until all that's left is a name and a cloying score.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    To this viewer and reader, the decade-old juggernaut is as deeply felt as it is flawed, dense and illogical and laudably "weird."
  21. Walk the Line
    In no way obsessive, Walk the Line is more sincerely--which is to say, more boringly--sincere. It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.
  22. Oxygono
    Curiously, Blackmail Boy's alternate title is "Oxygen"--and by film's end, you'll be gasping for it.
  23. Private
    Private never reconciles its conflicting impulses, and consequently, the human impact of the struggle--so powerfully explored in "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride" --never acquires the emotional weight it should. The semi-absurdist closer amounts to little more than a knee-jerk declaration of hopelessness.
  24. The Big Risk
    Shot on city streets but unfolds in the world of the movies--in a Godardian touch that anticipates Godard, the Ventura character is identified by the cops as "an old pal of Pierrot le Fou." The new titles are flavorsome, and the restoration is up to Rialto's previous high standards.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unveiled
    An Iranian version of "Boys Don't Cry," Unveiled overflows with sociopolitical outrage even if its portrayal of a gender-confused heroine is ultimately indecisive and laconic.
  26. Zizek!
    Taylor traipses around after Zizek on a continent-hopping lecture tour, and we get a face full of the man's tireless analysis, in a style that can only be characterized as hyperactive grizzly bear, complete with spit-spewing speech impediment.
  27. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Investigates the events leading up to the coup d'état; that it was the second for Aristide (overthrown in 1991, mere months after becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president) darkens the film's triumphalist-sounding title.
  28. Breakfast on Pluto
    May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gilles' Wife
    Devos's performance is an expert workshop of internalized emotions and silent forbearance.
  30. The Syrian Bride
    The Syrian Bride has no particular visual style, but it exudes affection, for its characters and their culture as well as the unprepossessing beauty of the scrubby terrain that holds them in thrall. Like all wedding films, it's essentially a comedy, albeit a sad one.
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