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 7.7 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. dream/killer
    This is a real-life horror story, raw and galling — but not surprising. The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured.
  2. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
    The usual doc mix of interviews and vintage photos is moving and surprisingly funny.
  3. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
    Finlay tells this story with the usual doc techniques. The interviews are marvelous, especially the ones with Ellis's exes, who attest not just to his weakness for groupies but to his collection of trophies.
  4. The Letters
    Riead's reverential portrait belies Teresa's thorny complexities and turns her into a single-minded proponent of work hard, pray hard.
  5. My Friend Victoria
    My Friend Victoria has a specific vibrancy as delicate and understated as Lessing's social critique. It's an accumulation of small moments: telling gazes, sour notes in the dialogue, the persistent impression of a woman who's in a room but never fully present.
  6. Macbeth
    This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.
  7. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    This is a masterpiece not because it culminates in some redemptive catharsis or clinching argument for social change, but because, by disavowing such facile ends, it meets the mess of life on its own clear and true terms.
  8. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    The stories have an almost dreamlike sweep and imaginative energy, and the film never exhausts that exuberance. More extraordinary still is its emotional depth.
  9. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    However you enjoy its nearly four hundred minutes, I expect you'll be held rapt till the last second by a film of abundant wit and generous heart.
  10. Christmas, Again
    Christmas, Again is a low hum of a downer, but maybe that's appropriate.
  11. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    Every Thing Will Be Fine is torturously slow and hopelessly mannered.
  12. Dementia
    As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.
  13. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.
  14. A Royal Night Out
    The film relies heavily on the coltish charms of its young leads, and Powley's effervescent, well-timed performance as the younger princess (she calls herself "P2") is skillful enough to bring out the screwball latencies in an otherwise bland screenplay.
  15. MI-5
    Led by the honorably dour Firth and the charisma-free Harington, MI-5 is convoluted and dull, though Harry's revenge against that dastardly mole is pleasingly diabolical. But it's too little too late.
  16. Uncle Nick
    Posehn, flaunting his insulin-resistant physique and middle-aged dong, is the perfect counterpoint to the wretched American Beauty, providing a way more accurate portrayal of midlife creepiness.
  17. Bikes vs Cars
    It's not that anyone is opposed to bikes; they're opposed to anything that might threaten the profits of car manufacturers and oil companies.
  18. The World of Kanako
    Yakusho's breathless, riveting performance grounds The World of Kanako even as it threatens to devolve into an unbearable series of nihilistic plot twists and gory set pieces.
  19. The Lady in the Van
    It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.
  20. Mustang
    The film could do with fewer panty shots of the listless sisters flopped across each other like kittens. Yet it manages to capture the lethargy of watching your life goals winnow into wifely servitude.
  21. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it.
  22. Karski & the Lords of Humanity
    In their abstraction, a number of striking animated sequences prove more effective in conveying these horrors than the talking-head segments that contextualize them.
  23. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young
    [A] lighthearted and immensely entertaining doc.
  24. TransFatty Lives
    A doc as vibrant as its auteur's mind, even as his body is rendered immobile.
  25. Stink!
    Though not as funny as Moore's earliest work, Jon Whelan's Stink! is way more emotionally affecting.
  26. Iraqi Odyssey
    Heartrending throughout, Iraqi Odyssey is everything you want in a documentary — informative, involving, and eager to decipher complex, often paradoxical historical conundrums. Everything, that is, except visually interesting.
  27. Close Range
    It's as unsubtle as a boot to the head, but its dour-and-campy lo-fi style is far preferable to the spastic flash of its big-budget genre compatriots.
  28. Killing Them Safely
    Footage of the now-wealthy Smiths being deposed is damning, the brothers' legal jiujitsu is appalling, and the stories of deaths are heartbreaking.
  29. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    As the film heaps all its sadnesses on us, the rest of Joplin languishes unexamined.
  30. The Danish Girl
    If The Danish Girl dared to critique its main characters, it'd be brave. If it had celebrated a modern marriage that worked for 26 years — much longer and stranger than the film lets on — it'd be truly pioneering. Real life is full of kinks, mistakes, and selfish behavior. Biopics, however, are made of formulaic virtue.
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