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. Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Don't Tell
    Spectacularly incompetent, Don't Tell races into self-parody before the end of the opening credits.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dark Hours
    Devine's giddy sex offender nearly rivals William Hurt's preposterous gangster in "A History of Violence" for absurdly enjoyable line readings.
  4. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past.
  5. Land of Plenty
    Land of Plenty is a woozy fantasia on California dreaming, all agog at urban strife and blabby with redundant voiceover.
  6. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    Good Night, and Good Luck's primary handicap is history itself -- the toe-to-toe televised dialogue between McCarthy and Murrow was, however arguably vital to the Wisconsin senator's eventual retreat, brief and less than epochal. Even so, the wonderfully mustered context wins out.
  7. In Her Shoes
    The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.
  8. Two for the Money
    In keeping with his apparent ambition to play each character more berserk than the last, Pacino can't discuss wine choice without sounding on the brink of aneurysm.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting...
    A day in the life at chain restaurant Shenanigan's, Waiting . . . makes a predictable pit stop to elaborately mess with a creep patron's food but otherwise exceeds expectations by handling the real, soul-sucking fears of the double shift.
  10. The Aggressives
    Thankfully, Peddle's film is much more illuminating than a grad school seminar.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Before the Fall
    The movie is too middlebrow to show us the superman-type sexual heroics they must've engaged in, or even allow the illicit subtext to float to the surface (as Sokurov does in Father and Son)--instead we get tepid moralizing on dehumanization in the military.
  12. Dandelion
    Atmosphere trumps plot throughout, enabling the movie to survive an unfortunate, if inevitable, final-act turn.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Never Been Thawed
    Passably offbeat.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Pizzas
    Writer-director Vincent Sassone makes your mouth water with his lovingly photographed images of freshly baked pizza but turns your stomach with extra-cheesy dialogue and an inconsistent narrative.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life, Translated
    Kiefer Liu's eccentric bit of teen sigh candy is veined with enough chewy oddities to give it texture, but its sappy center isn't sustainable over 100 minutes.
  16. The Squid and the Whale
    Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    This latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward.
  18. Zombie Honeymoon
    If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat!
    This mockumentary in which a group of failed Brooklyn rappers switch gears after listening to the Beatles wears out its welcome quicker than the shortest track on "The Grey Album."
  20. Capote
    In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.
  21. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    Ouimet versus Vardon probably was the greatest golf game ever played, and Paxton and Frost do it justice, but I wouldn't sit through another simulated hole of it for Tiger Woods's salary.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Into the Blue
    Granted, the cast has a certain rumpy charm, and setting four-fifths of the movie underwater keeps the pesky surfer-speak to a minimum, but the film is less about thrills than punishing the wicked.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Serenity
    Though richly allegorical, Serenity also works as a rousing and unabashedly manipulative adventure that never takes itself too seriously.
  24. Going Shopping
    Henry Jaglom's latest study of contemporary female obsessions among a noxious clan of West L.A. bourgeoisie is of more pathological than cinematic interest.
  25. Little Manhattan
    Who is this movie's target audience, anyway? Preteens will be bored stupid, while adults are unlikely to want to revisit puppy love in such grueling detail. The lingering, soft-focus, slo-mo shots of Rosemary that punctuate the action suggest a constituency I'd rather not contemplate.
  26. MirrorMask
    The film galumphs along in static panels, prioritizing flash over thought, hyperextending a story that would barely sustain a children's picture book.
  27. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Shameless Eisenhower-era corn.
  28. The War Within
    Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    Akira Kurosawa once said that Toshiro Mifune could give him in three feet of film the emotion any other actor would take 10 to deliver, but in a single flash of Fonda's electric turquoise orbs, Leone (Kurosawa's first and sincerest flatterer-imitator) managed to say as much about John Ford, the devil, and the corruptions of the Way Out Western world as the genre ever would.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    An Adolescent
    Although the movie drags, Okuda (who also directed) makes for a gloriously bad lieutenant, while Ozawa is enjoyably discomfiting in her unblushing carnality.
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