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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    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shanghai Blues
    For the most part, the film is charming in its insouciance, the comedy by turns easy, funny, and slapstick. [23 May 2018]
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jun 18, 2025
  2. Holy Motors
    The film itself is filled with a joie de vivre about the possibilities of acting, with Lavant expressing an emotional repertoire from wild humor to great sadness.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.
  4. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    By telling this story through the children’s eyes with a magical-realism element, López makes the tragically unthinkable somehow more palatable.
  5. On Her Shoulders
    Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.
  6. Bisbee '17
    The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.
  7. Let the Corpses Tan
    More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful.
  8. The Little Stranger
    Like many gothic tales, The Little Stranger hangs tantalizingly between genres: It has elements of haunted house thriller, of doomed romance, of psychological thriller, of historical allegory.
  9. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    By sticking to his impressionistic perspective, by fracturing his narrative, Ross achieves something genuinely poetic — a film whose very lightness is the key to its depth.
  10. The Oslo Diaries
    The Oslo Diaries is a striking document, mixing never-before-seen footage shot by the negotiators themselves and current reflections from participants, including the final interview of former Israeli president Shimon Peres.
  11. Maison du Bonheur
    Bohdanowicz undertook the project without having previously met her subject, but for both the filmmaker and her audience, making Sellam’s acquaintance proves a rare pleasure.
  12. Support the Girls
    Bujalski frames most of Support the Girls as an almost real-time delineation of chaos, but his storytelling elegance — delicate, nearly invisible foreshadowing; cogent evocations of backstory — adds reflective layers to the surface anarchy.
  13. The Bookshop
    Though nearly nothing happens in this movie besides a woman opening a shop and beginning a standoffish friendship with a reclusive man, I still found myself drawn in, just as I was drawn to Iain’s discreet disaster of a baked Alaska (please check it out if you haven’t seen this TGBBS episode); sometimes the quiet is enticing.
  14. Papillon
    This new version, directed by Danish filmmaker Michael Noer, brings to the story a refreshing intensity and sweep, and even a sense of adventure.
  15. Crime + Punishment
    Stephen Maing’s searing documentary Crime + Punishment offers a fuller look at the question of what can be accomplished from inside, revealing both the personal toll fighting the system can exact but also the urgent necessity of such battles.
  16. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    Faraut’s film doesn’t just put us courtside — it steeps us in the legend’s boiling mind.
  17. Juliet, Naked
    Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Whale of a Tale
    Together, these voices paint a complex picture of the clash between globalism and a fast-disappearing localism.
  19. Notes on an Appearance
    D’Ambrose proves uncannily adept at conjuring zero-budget paranoia through the sheer accumulation of documents.
  20. The Wife
    It is the depth Close lends to Joan that kept me riveted — and angry.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy Rich Asians
    For all its carnival-like antics, Crazy Rich Asians is all too aware of its own spectacle.
  22. We the Animals
    Brawling yet tender, wild yet rigorously controlled, first-time fiction director Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals is an impressionistic swirl of a film about masculinity, about abuse, about growing up queer, about chaotic family life, about the jumble of incidents and stirrings through which a child discovers a self.
  23. The Darkest Minds
    Yuh Nelson proves adept with her young actors, drawing out relaxed and detailed performances while carefully managing the space between them in the frame.
  24. Christopher Robin
    Christopher Robin preaches a return to childhood exuberance and frivolity, but its quiet, focused restraint often feels like it’s coming from a very different impulse — an old-world professionalism and humility. It’s a grown-up sensibility applied to a child’s tale, which makes for an occasionally endearing mixture. In today’s world, I’ll take it.
  25. A Prayer Before Dawn
    A Prayer Before Dawn feels scarily authentic, and may be too much for some. But there are moments of grace amid the setting’s despair.
  26. The Swan
    Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.
  27. Skate Kitchen
    In Skate Kitchen, the kids come as they are, and they’re wildly fascinating.
  28. The Island
    There are no good or bad people in The Island, just a group of hapless schmucks who become more sympathetic as they get more desperate.
  29. Summer of 84
    If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.
  30. Milla
    We observe moments of living rather than the beats of a story, all that natural lighting and everyday quiet stirring the sense of lives taking shape before our eyes.
  31. 40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie
    Only a monster would begrudge Aronsohn for putting this all together. It doesn’t hurt that Magic Music really do have some chops.
  32. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    Scotty offers more than just salaciousness.
  33. Never Goin' Back
    Writer-director Augustine Frizzell, making her feature directorial debut, is attuned to the giddy intimacies of female friendship, and Mitchell and Morrone are a charismatic pair.
  34. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    Mitchell’s documentary style isn’t flashy or refined, but it is economical. The director does his homework and almost cross-examines the film’s subjects.
  35. Gavagai
    Gavagai offers moments of sublimity unlike anything you’ll see in most contemporary movies. It also tests the patience. In that key respect, it’s much like life: You have to throw yourself into it to reap its rewards.
  36. Nico, 1988
    Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.
  37. No Date, No Signature
    No Date, No Signature presents a story of flawed but generally decent people trying to put right what went so horribly wrong.
  38. Cocote
    Getting one’s bearings isn’t impossible; it’s like divining the trick of a Sunday crossword. But Cocote isn’t purely academic. It’s alternately clinical and sensual.
  39. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    In the end, Cameron Post is a damning indictment of institutional Christianity and adults who make it their mission to tamp down kids’ spirits in the name of God.
  40. Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings
    The equally thrilling and exhausting Hong Kong martial arts fantasy Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings boasts more inventive weapons, monsters, and plot twists than most Western audiences will know what to do with.
  41. Good Manners
    Rojas and Dutra have created a singular fable where anxiety and fear are directed inward, even when the danger is all too real.
  42. The Captain
    Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical.
  43. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.
  44. Pin Cushion
    Pin Cushion has the visual cues of comedy, with its candy-colored kitsch and exaggerated signifiers of eccentricity and snobbery, but at heart, it’s a tragedy of naïveté.
  45. Far from the Tree
    It’s a painstaking inspection of parenthood, which is fraught even in less formidable circumstances than what these families face, and often harrowing. But it’s also a contemplation of what it means to be human and, ultimately, optimistic.
  46. McQueen
    The difference between McQueen and the standard tortured genius documentary lies in the kind of artist McQueen was: Behind the (sometimes incendiary, sometimes infantile) provocations in his designs was a clear humanity, his garments the unfiltered expressions of his emotions and ideas.
  47. Blindspotting
    It’s wild and singular, often beautiful, a feast and feat of self-definition through verbal dexterity. It’s shaking with laughter, teeming with insights and tense as hell when the police roll up.
  48. Minding the Gap
    The film is filled with lengthy, sensuous skateboarding scenes, which feel meditative, therapeutic; we sense that these kids skated not because it was fun, but because it helped them to survive.
  49. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    Form and content collide in inspiring ways in this documentary about Milford Graves — avant-garde jazz percussionist, educator, gardener, martial artist, and cardiovascular researcher. Milford Graves Full Mantis is a jazz movie in every sense of the word.
  50. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Cassel’s Gauguin may ultimately be a lightweight cinematic descendant of the monstrous European pioneers that Klaus Kinski played in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but he’s also both menacing and pitiable enough to make Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti riveting on a moment-to-moment basis.
  51. Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
    This film seems meant to be more a kind, sweet eulogy than an illumination.
  52. What Will People Say
    Despite the subject matter, Haq is most often quite tender in her storytelling.
  53. Sorry to Bother You
    I will be very clear with you, dear readers, that this surrealist comic moral tale, about a poor man selling his soul to ascend in a golden elevator to the heights of a dubious corporation, is a balls-to-the-wall, tits-to-the-glass, spectacular orgy of fist-pumping, anti-capitalist, pro-labor ideas rolled into 105 minutes of gloriously unpredictable plot.
  54. Moss
    There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.
  55. The Citizen
    Vranik’s film couldn’t be more timely in its moral inquiry, but it’s timeless in form and technique, a melodrama tempered with a painstaking realism.
  56. Whitney
    By the time Whitney winds to an end, that massive talent feels like a dangerously valuable resource, one that even the people who were supposed to protect Houston couldn’t resist exploiting.
  57. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    Director Stephen Nomura Schible’s understated and moving Coda does a fine job of presenting the composer’s remarkable career as a revelatory journey.
  58. Under the Tree
    The first scenes are hilarious, all sharp surprises and adeptly staged physical comedy. But then the story turns, the way that milk does, curdling into tragedy.
  59. The First Purge
    The First Purge actually pulls back somewhat on that sense of bloodthirsty anticipation. The violence here feels more tragic than ever, and it’s also some time coming; when Purge Night does start, the killing doesn’t begin immediately.
  60. Incident In a Ghostland
    The grisly post-torture-porn horror flick Incident in a Ghostland serves as an effectively punishing critique of the relentless misogyny that has become a staple of every stupid Texas Chain Saw Massacre knockoff that pits sexually active women against emotionally disturbed serial killers.
  61. Never Steady, Never Still
    Usually a tart-tongued scene-stealer, Henderson is devoid of her trademark hauteur in this remarkable performance.
  62. Set It Up
    While the plot is familiar, Katie Silberman’s witty script plays with expectations.
  63. The Cakemaker
    The Cakemaker is more of a petit four than a belly bomb, but it’s striking in its particularity.
  64. This Is Congo
    McCabe served as cinematographer, and his images here vary from striking to scarifying to magnificent. But his film’s power comes from its voices.
  65. Custody
    Legrand demonstrates great skill as a tactician in this closing third, but his overarching framework for Custody — with its considerable reliance on is-he-or-isn’t-he uncertainty — demands that he sacrifice interior perspectives.
  66. Dark River
    It’s in Alice’s battle with her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) that the film is at its most compelling.
  67. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Del Toro and Moner say everything that’s needed with pained, bewildered eyes. Meanwhile, Graver speaks with relentless American cynicism. He is both funny and unnerving, and maybe more unnerving because he’s being funny.
  68. Araby
    A soundtrack of folk/country classics takes the edge off, but make no mistake: This is a beautiful bummer, giving voice to someone who’s barely a number, but only to remind us that most of us are OK not thinking about numbers at all.
  69. Beach House
    The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.
  70. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Rather than epic or thrilling, justice becomes an errand, an extension of domestic work.
  71. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Through his efforts, McKay captures a genuine sense of the bittersweet reality of the American dream and the people who give up their only weekly day of rest just to keep it alive.
  72. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
  73. Gabriel and the Mountain
    The location photography does much of the film’s heavy lifting, especially visits to Mount Kilimanjaro and Mulanje’s Sapitwa Peak. (The rumor is that a young J.R.R. Tolkien visited there, and Barbosa leans into this a bit for the big finish.) The star of the show, however, is the dialogue between cultures.
  74. Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
    If Five Seasons is the only opportunity viewers have to experience Oudolf’s artistry up close, Piper’s cinematography (whether through a sunny haze or a snowy blanket) and contemplative storytelling have done these gardens justice.
  75. Eating Animals
    As a work of sustained, thoughtful inquiry, Eating Animals is a bust; as a reminder of what we should all be thinking about, though, it’s searing. After seeing it, pretending not to know is impossible.
  76. Incredibles 2
    Incredibles 2 is at its best — which is to say, its funniest and most exciting — when it tackles the internal dynamics of the family itself.
  77. Nancy
    I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.
  78. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    In his astute look at the artistry and business of food, de Maistre makes the case that haute cuisine serves the same function as haute couture, creating an indelible experience while encouraging new ideas to filter through the industry.
  79. Hereditary
    In Aster’s story, as in life, the devil is in the details. As the film goes on, these details accumulate, coalesce, and then hang heavy over the characters.
  80. Bernard and Huey
    As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.
  81. The Workers Cup
    Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.
  82. The Tale
    The Tale is a powerful and clear-eyed examination of sexual abuse and the shifting sands of one’s own memories.
  83. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Watching this movie is like freebasing sincerity — a scarce resource in our current entertainment hellscape. It’ll give you warm fuzzies for days.
  84. Upgrade
    Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.
  85. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    It is an uncompromising work that will make many viewers frustrated and even furious. I adored pretty much every single glorious, gorgeous goddamn minute of it.
  86. The Wild Pear Tree
    Ceylan delivers what might be his funniest, most politically poignant work yet. It also happens to be achingly personal.
  87. The Misandrists
    As in many of his films, The Misandrists finds the oppressed themselves oppressing others, a warning among all the dizzy outrageousness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who We Are Now
    While Nicholson’s onscreen, it’s impossible to pay heed to anything but her. She scorches the film with her barely bottled ferocity and vulnerability.
  89. Summer 1993
    The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.
  90. The Gospel According to André
    The Talley of before the election presents himself as a man who believes anything is possible if you swallow your anger, work hard enough, and sacrifice all — especially your chance at love — and the Talley of after seems to worry that much of that progress has proved an illusion.
  91. Burning
    Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.
  92. Happy as Lazzaro
    Lazzaro Felice has genuine sweep and grandeur, and Rohrwacher’s most impressive feat here might be her ability to find just the right narrative and emotional distance for each section of the story, as it moves from rustic drama to picaresque journey to more pointed social allegory; we’re always given just enough information to understand and appreciate the characters’ interactions and motivations.
  93. Book Club
    Even though it follows the map of every romcom before it, Holderman’s film still offers the too-rare chance to marvel at just how good these women are at their craft, how easily they inhabit the bodies and lives of other people.
  94. Cold War
    Narratively, the music in Cold War is a means to an end; emotionally, however, it’s everything, often expressing what the characters cannot say themselves.
  95. Climax
    Climax isn’t so much about the inevitability of chaos, but about the sadness of watching something beautiful fall apart. And it is never less than electrifying.
  96. BlacKkKlansman
    It’s alternatingly comic, heroic, tragic, horrifying, ridiculous, dead serious, clear-eyed, and confused; it shifts into moments of documentary and even essay film, but it’s also one of Lee’s more entertaining and vibrantly constructed works. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie exploit its tonal mismatches so voraciously and purposefully.
  97. Disobedience
    As a whole, the film is directionless, with few individual character-study scenes making it compelling enough. It’s almost as though there are miniature, worthy films within this film, and watching for those can be a thrill.
  98. Sollers Point
    Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.
  99. First Reformed
    The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing.
  100. Lives Well Lived
    Full of such bon mots, the documentary is the epitome of positive thinking, perhaps the closest thing America has to a state religion. Still, like social worker Wendy Lustbader’s book What’s Worth Knowing, which took a similar tack years ago, it’s an opportunity to connect with souls who’ve been around more than a few blocks.
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