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 7.5 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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    • 59 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rubber
    An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlock - one infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a post–"Easy Rider" road movie - Rubber is some kind of miracle.
  2. A Dangerous Method
    Cronenberg's film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a compelling narrative, and a splendidly acted love story.
  3. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries-or almost-documentaries-ever made.
  4. Le Rayon Vert (1986)
    Rohmer's 1986 masterpiece (being re-released with its original French title, which translates as "The Green Ray"), Le Rayon Vert centers on those themes, too, but delivers something much richer: an absorbing, empathic portrait of a complex woman caught between her own obstinacy and melancholy.
  5. My Joy
    My Joy is a maddening vision and one of the year's must-see provocations.
  6. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.
  7. Gravity
    Gravity is harrowing and comforting, intimate and glorious, the kind of movie that makes you feel more connected to the world rather than less.
  8. Inside Llewyn Davis
    Although the Coens are consummate craftsmen, they don't always show the lightness of touch or the depth of feeling they do here.
  9. Zero Dark Thirty
    It's a sensational performance by Chastain...She's a most unlikely leading lady, pale and slight of stature, with a raging mane of strawberry blond hair, but she holds the screen with a feral intensity, an obsessive's self-possession.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Not a Film
    It's a political statement, an act of defiance, a master class in one auteur's body of work and process, and a document of a life unseen. But above all, it's a gripping entertainment.
  11. Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)
    Laughton, of course, is elegant rotundity in motion, a naughty, moonfaced cherub in his drunk scene, later sweetly surprised when finding himself elevated into a man by the Gettysburg Address, a recitation of which is the film's palpitating heart.
  12. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    The playfulness of Rivette's sublime female-buddy picture, recalling the fun of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," would inform Susan Seidelman's "Desperately Seeking Susan" 11 years later. But its greatest descendant is David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.
  13. It's a Disaster
    The story's outline may be familiar, but its emphasis and quality are not.
  14. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like "13 Assassins" -it may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology.
  15. Almayer's Folly
    One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.
  16. All Is Lost
    A genuine nail-biter, scrupulously made and fully involving, elemental in its simplicity.
  17. 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.
  18. West of Memphis
    That makes this the most rare of films: one that indisputably matters. And one that stuns.
  19. The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling - Ireland 1965
    Charlie Is My Darling captures the quintet at their most impossibly vernal and beautiful.
  20. Like Someone in Love
    The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.
  21. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight—visually stunning, in a late-summer way—is more vital and cutting than another recent marriage picture, Michael Haneke's old-folks-together death march Amour; it has none of Amour's tasteful restraint, and in the end, it says more about the nature of long-term love.
  22. Spring Breakers
    Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.
  23. Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's genius is how completely it tunes in to his 
experience, delicately outlining Joey's private moments of shame, elation, despondency, and pride.
  24. Porfirio
    Landes's tone is never salacious or exploitative, nor for that matter pandering or sentimental. This is a sui generis work—warm, sporadically funny, deeply human, and altogether beguiling.
  25. Leviathan
    Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.
  26. Stories We Tell
    This wondrous, absorbing little picture covers a great deal of winding meta-territory, reflecting on the ways in which a single family's story can be told—or maybe, more accurately, examining the idea that there's no such thing as a "single story."
  27. Something in the Air
    In Something in the Air, that past—a version of Assayas's own—is rendered in visuals so specific and evocative, it's perpetually alive.
  28. The Act of Killing
    More terrifying than any horror film, and more intellectually adventurous than just about any 2013 release so far, The Act of Killing is a major achievement, a work about genocide that rightly earns its place alongside Shoah as a supreme testament to the cinema's capacity for inquiry, confrontation, and remembrance.
  29. Viola
    The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.
  30. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    Thanks to Lynch's expert pacing and modulation of narrative tension, even viewers who already know the outcome of the film's central incident will likely be pulled to the edges of their seats.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    This is one of the most fully rounded, unsentimental portraits of an artist you'll ever see on film.
  32. Paradise: Love
    It might be the most lonesome film about a tropical vacation we've seen, and the greatest film ever made about the weird socioeconomics of tourism.
  33. This Ain't California
    This Ain't California is a masterful lie that illuminates a little-known reality.
  34. Pompeii
    Anderson distinguishes himself as the rare action director who shows us real bodies in real space in real reaction to each other, who prizes legibility over quick-cut dazzlement, who stages his fights with comic-book zeal rather than puffed-up graphic-novel miserableness.
  35. Short Term 12
    It's a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition, and resonance. Easily one of the best films so far this year, it's a nearly perfect blend of pimple-faced naturalism, righteous moral fury, nuanced social insight, and unsentimental but devastating drama.
  36. Fill the Void
    Burshtein's lush visual sensibility, and the subtle performances of the excellent cast, create an aching portrayal of longing and interdependence that transcends the boundaries of the family's small world.
  37. Passion
    Passion is pretty good.
  38. Drinking Buddies
    With dexterity and care, Swanberg illuminates our muddled perceptions of our own relationships. He fixates on the minutiae of hanging out, the stuff of little loves and lies, the feints and thrusts we make in sorting matters of head and heart.
  39. Voyage to Italy (re-release)
    Voyage to Italy is close to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you're paying attention.
  40. Valentino's Ghost
    A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.
  41. Like Father, Like Son
    It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.
  42. The Great Beauty
    There's little sense in trying to resist the film's relentless boogie-woogie party vibe, its tumultuous visual banquet, its unpredictable sense of switchblade satire, its fools' parade of modern grotesques, or its river of startling melancholy, turning from a wary trickle to a flash flood by film's end. Sorrentino's vision is the size of Rome itself, and his confidence is dazzling.
  43. The Immigrant
    Gray has a knack for wrapping big themes into an intimate embrace, and The Immigrant feels both epic and fine-grained.
  44. Only Lovers Left Alive
    Only Lovers Left Alive is silly and deeply serious at once, an elegy with a light touch and more than a dash of hope.
  45. The Past
    Bolstered by performances that convey profound grief and remorse without look-at-me histrionics, The Past is steeped in the believable micro details of its scenario while also expanding to universals.
  46. The Selfish Giant
    Devastating in its simplicity and honesty, The Selfish Giant is a colossus of feeling.
  47. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Kechiche and his actresses explore the in-between—ecstasy, exploration, the comfort and eventual boredom of domesticity—and the aftermath, the painful shards of feeling we cling to after something has shattered. And they don't mess around when it comes to the ferocity of love, sex, or, God help us, the two combined.
  48. Museum Hours
    The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.
  49. Dallas Buyers Club
    What's remarkable about Dallas Buyers Club is its lack of sentimentality. The movie, like its star, is all angles and elbows, earning its emotion through sheer pragmatism.
  50. Big Men
    This film, a great one, demands a follow-up.
  51. Gideon's Army
    Porter's film is dramatic, unsettling, despairing, and in the end thrilling -- at some point, it grows from a portrait of this country's problems into a celebration of a possible solution.
  52. Best Kept Secret
    If Secret can leave the viewer despairing, it's also hugely inspiring, thanks to Mino. She's one of the cinematic heroines of the year.
  53. Generation Iron
    Yudin pulls lovely philosophical grace notes from his subjects as they illuminate some universal truths from their very specific world.
  54. Stranger by the Lake
    Stranger abounds with precision and detail, evinced not just in the spectacular visual composition but also in the observation of behavioral codes in carnally charged spaces.
  55. Palo Alto
    The movie perfectly captures the vibe of late high school, in a way that's both of its time and timeless.
  56. We Are the Best!
    Brash and sweet, We Are the Best! captures perfectly the aimlessness of adolescence, the waiting to become something that's so often intertwined with the desire to make something, to leave your mark on the world in some small way.
  57. Under the Skin
    Very little in Under the Skin is clear at all. Its secrets unspool in mysterious, supple ribbons, but that's part of its allure, and its great beauty.
  58. Locke
    What director Knight excels at is continually inventive framing and composition, at suggesting, through layers of window and reflected traffic, the mental state of Locke, the hero.
  59. The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture is so immediate, so vital, it practically breathes. Not all memoirs need to exist. But the gentle urgency of Panh's story is right there in the filmmaking. This is a story that had to be told. Even in its stillness, it moves.
  60. For Those in Peril
    The film's finale is wild and daring and so perfectly executed that it marks Wright as one of the film year's most audacious new voices.
  61. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    Demme has crafted yet another superb document of musicians at work, one as much about creation—and the sources of inspiration—as it is about performance. A wonderful film, as in, it's full of wonders.
  62. Medora
    This stellar, incisive slice-of-life doc centers on the kind of crowd-pleasing competition story that lures in audiences and then lays bare heartsick truths about small-town America today.
  63. Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony
    Each anecdote builds upon the next to create that rarest of films: a documentary as ineffable and transformative in its reach as it sets out to be.
  64. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    This is a film to see and then see again, to soak in and marvel at and -- like its director -- try to keep up with.
  65. Intolerance
    It is at least one of cinema’s great vexations, an astonishing and Herculean visual achievement cursed in various amplitudes by auteurism, guilt, memories of bigotry, evolving norms, and the power of cinema itself.
  66. Spy
    It's a comedy of exasperation where, for once, the joke isn't on McCarthy, but on everyone who can't see her skills.
  67. Lenny Cooke
    Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men.
  68. Mad Max: Fury Road
    For all the ways the movie feels singular and impossible, like something the studio suits couldn't possibly have signed off on, Fury Road also feels entirely of its era.
  69. Ernest & Célestine
    Ernest & Celestine -- a contender for this year's best animated film Oscar -- is pure delight.
  70. Blue Ruin
    As an action film — which in small bursts it is — Blue Ruin is disquieting and raw, like Commando turned inside out.
  71. Boyhood
    Boyhood had the curious effect of making me feel lost, uneasy, a little alone in the inexorable march forward — and also totally, emphatically alive.
  72. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    Most astonishingly, with the franchise's powerful climax, Lawrence has managed to align her parallel Hollywood lives and reinvent the prestigious popcorn flick, a crowd-pleaser with intelligent class.
  73. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The movie's true center, the meteorological phenomenon that makes it so pleasurable to watch, is the half-prickly, half-affectionate interplay between Binoche and Stewart.
  74. 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.
  75. Love Is Strange
    Sachs and his performers know that the perfect marriage is a thing of phantom beauty — it doesn't exist, yet we persist in believing that someone out there must have it.
  76. The Guest
    A transcendent comic chiller, when The Guest's characters are in peril we actually care, and Wingard respectfully makes the kills clean and quick.
  77. Nostalghia
    Stick with it. There are shocking acts that rupture the stillness, and then there’s one of cinema’s great endings,
  78. The Babadook
    Jennifer Kent's maternal nightmare The Babadook is the imperial stout of recent fright flicks -- it's the one that will have you walking funny and might rip into your sleep. It's hard to say that you'll enjoy this film, but it's hard not to admire it, if maybe with your eyes half shut.
  79. The Overnighters
    Jesse Moss's documentary The Overnighters is a heart-wrencher about the clash between economics and ethics. Its story sounds like the sort of dry news blurb you'd skim over in the Sunday paper but unfolds into an epic tragedy.
  80. Blind
    This is a haunting puzzle of a movie, one to pick at, to unpeel, to see a second time through eyes that have adjusted to it. It's also alive with tender, tremulous feeling.
  81. 20,000 Days on Earth
    20,000 Days on Earth is meticulously crafted but nonetheless feels casual and heartfelt. It's revelatory, and wonderful, to watch Cave walking (or driving) around, being a real person — if the movie is somewhat staged, it's never stagey.
  82. Jobriath A.D.
    Kieran Turner's Jobriath A.D. is an exceptional example of this subgenre, a cubist portrait of an unknowable man and a dramatic whodunit about an artist-victim who died by a thousand cuts.
  83. Starred Up
    This is an unsparing picture, one whose violence, though deftly handled, is bone-crunchingly rough. Yet its emotional contours are surprisingly delicate, thanks, in large part to O’Connell’s performance.
  84. Alphaville
    Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, it's a thing of insensible beauty.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    More than 40 years old, Francois Truffaut’s whirling dervish remains an ageless beauty. The film appears to us as like a specter, with a sensibility about cinematic language and sexual relations rarely seen today.
  86. It Felt Like Love
    It Felt Like Love is brilliantly, brutally tactile.
  87. Particle Fever
    Levinson follows the ups and downs of bringing that beast of a collider online, but the movie's deepest thrill lies in what these men and women will theorize next, and how they will test it.
  88. Manakamana
    Among the many remarkable qualities boasted by Manakamana, perhaps the most surprising is its humor.
  89. Ida
    Ida unfolds partly as chamber play and partly as road movie, following the two women on a search for their dead beloveds' anonymous graves.
  90. Soft in the Head
    Surprising, challenging, and never less than thrilling.
  91. Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache
    A must-see documentary.
  92. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    Patient, observational film demands you surrender to it, that you keep your phone in your pocket, which means that movie theaters now sometimes offer a more unmediated look at the world than modern life itself.
  93. The Case Against 8
    The stirring new documentary The Case Against 8, showcasing the lawyers and plaintiffs who challenged California's 2008 gay marriage ban, is the best kind of popular history, a film that trembles with tears and hope, and I dare you to get through it without bawling some yourself.
  94. Sol LeWitt
    Chris Teerink's superb film documents the work of artist Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), whose legacy lies not only in past accomplishments, but in the work he left for others to complete.
  95. Still I Strive
    But the directors elevate the picture to a level of emotional genius by filming the children's play as a full-on cinematic adaptation, shot and edited with seriousness and polish.
  96. 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.
  97. Timbuktu
    The film is consistently visually stunning in a way that's ever more rare, and Sissako's bravura moment of filmmaking is embedded in a scene on a river that seals the Tuareg patriarch's fate.
  98. Girlhood
    Raw and insistent, bold and brawling, Girlhood throbs with the global now, illustrating the ways an indifferent society boxes in the people who grow up in project-style boxes.
  99. Jauja
    Even beyond its charismatic star, Jauja is captivating, not least because of Alonso's ability to capture the cruel beauty of the natural landscape — you can almost see the earth itself refusing to accept European imperialism blithely.
  100. Wrinkles
    Ignacio Ferreras's traditionally animated Wrinkles is a beautiful, subtle horror movie about the rigors of old age, made all the more horrifying because it will happen to all of us fortunate enough to live a long life.
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