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. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    The third installment, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb may be the best, and even the generally wound-too-tight Ben Stiller — once again playing a bemused Museum of Natural History guard — is easy to tolerate.
  2. The Interview
    The more desperately a comedy tries to be outrageous, the less likely it is to be outrageous -- or even just funny. And that's the fate that befalls The Interview, which offers a few moments of casual brilliance... but otherwise trips itself up in the threads of its contrived absurdity.
  3. Song of the Sea
    The picture is beautifully rendered in pencils and watercolors, with some CG, giving it an appropriately timeless storybook look, even though it's set in a mostly modern world of buses and 3-D glasses.
  4. Sagrada: The Mystery of Creation
    Haupt persuades viewers to surrender to a place, to a vision, and to a scale of thinking beyond our own lives.
  5. Inside the Mind of Leonardo
    [A] goof/stunt of a movie.
  6. Into the Woods
    Rob Marshall simply cuts from one tale to the next, isolating his actors. There's little sense that the fairytale space is a shared one -- it's just a bunch of noisy incident transpiring in unrelated treestands.
  7. If You Don't, I Will
    While you may be left craving more emotional fireworks than you get, Fillières's intelligent film is accomplished in its portrayal of a marriage in crisis, the union's last gasps rife with poignant exchanges.
  8. Goodbye to All That
    The title indicates a major transition, but despite assertions that the dissolution of a marriage is a life-altering event, divorce doesn't change Otto as much as rouse him from stupefaction, and Schneider deftly balances bewilderment with resolve.
  9. Winter Sleep
    This patient, beautiful, painful, engrossing film pits husband and wife against each other and their world in a series of extended conversations/confrontations.
  10. Mr. Turner
    Leigh, Spall, and cinematographer Dick Pope — who borrows lots of lighting tricks from Vermeer and Ingres and even Turner himself, to glorious effect — have gently atomized Turner's character, breaking it into small, potent fragments that affect us in ways we don't see coming.
  11. Annie
    It presumes that children care a great deal about cellphone towers, political campaigns, and Twitter. Still, Quvenzhané Wallis, as Annie, is raw, charismatic, alive, and unpredictable.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Take Care
    It's only in the closing moments when Tuccillo lets up, delivering a skip-into-the-sunset ending that seems a bit canned. Take Care's laughs feel better than its romance.
  13. Tip Top
    Serge Bozon's smart, surprising, marvelously realized French crime-and-sex police drama/comedy distinguishes itself with trenchant plotting, inspired framing, and performances that honor true human feeling even as they lunge into the screwball.
  14. Songs from the North
    In Songs From the North, the South Korean–born, U.S.-based filmmaker Soon-Mi Yoo takes her camera to North Korea and, through a purposeful mix of on-location footage, poetic intertitles ("Is North Korea the loneliest place on Earth?"), and archival media, creates an empathetic snapshot of a country that is almost never depicted in such an accessible light.
  15. Maidan
    Easily the most rigorous, vital, and powerful movie of 2014, Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan may be a perfect Bazinian cinema-machine — reality is captured, crystallized, honored for its organic complexity, and delivered unpoisoned by exposition or emphasis.
  16. Expelled
    Expelled isn't going to change the world, but it's a fun and promising debut film.
  17. Immoral Tales (re-release)
    Immoral Tales works best when its creator is focused on surprising viewers with his perverse imagination, and not his misguided cynicism.
  18. We Are the Giant
    Barker's tactlessness wouldn't be so bad if he weren't too high on his own patchwork rhetoric to ask his subjects what specifically motivates them.
  19. Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
    For a film whose central motif is dance, there's remarkably little dancing done onscreen, and though Rowland and her co-star share moments of tender, revealing conversation, the movie is ultimately underwhelming, its emotional range as limited as that of its characters.
  20. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Sturdy and rudimentary, Magician may be Welles 101, but it's dotted liberally with TV and radio clips of the famously loquacious auteur talking, talking, and doing more talking — and how could anybody with ears and a brain resist that buttery voice, spinning out clause-laden sentences that take more twists and turns than the streets of Venice but always end, somehow, in a place that's ravishingly articulate?
  21. A Little Game
    A Little Game is an OK children's movie that can only be appreciated by kids, who have not yet been callused by the awfulness of both chess metaphors and the old ladies in films who are always spouting gauzy generalities about the magic of life.
  22. Isn't It Delicious
    Too much of Isn't It Delicious is either sketchy or hokey, trading an honest exploration of Joan's destructive self-absorption for a family finding peace through dispassionate compassion.
  23. Free the Nipple
    It's too rare for movies to depict women working together as friends to effect political change, and this one makes it seem righteous, loud, and fun as a rock concert. Free the Nipple won't change the conversation, but it might help start one.
  24. The Color of Time
    Franco is a fine reader, but ultimately the film adds little more than his handsome face and trite confessional origins to Williams's experiential vernacular. When the words are so direct, powerful, and inviting, who needs Franco's books on video?
  25. The Captive
    When it isn't TV-movie familiar, Egoyan's film is bughouse crazy, mixing in campy pulp elements that bleed pressure away from the story.
  26. After The Fall
    The movie's flaws — silly plotting and unconvincing psychological groundwork — are Klein's doing.
  27. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    For a story that's pro-poor and anti-wealth, every frame of it looks like it cost as much as human life itself — and that, more than any bludgeoned battle cries for freedom, is the pleasure of the film.
  28. Inherent Vice
    Inherent Vice isn't the towering masterpiece that those who admired There Will Be Blood and The Master were probably hoping for, and thank God for that. It's loose and free, like a sketchbook, though there's also something somber and wistful about it — it feels like less of a psychedelic scramble than the novel it's based on.
  29. Top Five
    Chris Rock couldn't have planned it this way, but his exuberant and wondrous comedy Top Five, opening at just the right time, is like an airdrop of candy over the city, if not the country.
  30. A Small Section of the World
    It can be unsettling, for regular documentary viewers, to take in a film so relentlessly optimistic, communal, and lacking in nostalgia, but those qualities were key to the success of the women of Biolley.
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