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. The Class
    For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama.
  2. No Country for Old Men
    The most measured, classical film of their (Coen Brothers) 23-year career, and maybe the best.
  3. Chinatown
    In 1974 a director, a screenwriter, and a producer (Robert Evans, who for once deserves a few of the plaudits he's apportioned himself) could decide to beat a genre senseless and then dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. [Review of August 8, 2003 re-release]
  4. 35 Shots of Rum
    35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.
  5. Umberto D (re-release)
    It's too bad that the film is sporadically crude (a moment of suicidal angst is illustrated with a shove-zoom to the pavement), prone to mega-Italian extroversion, and far too in love with stupid pet tricks.
  6. The Florida Project
    Though Moonee’s story may not have a Hollywood happy ending when she’s grown and the world has been cruel, Baker has created an indomitable character who’s at least got a fighting chance.
  7. 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.
  8. Almayer's Folly
    One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.
  9. 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Beauty and the Beast (re-release)
    Viewers must get in touch with their inner child to fall for Belle's eventual love for Beast. The film seems somewhat aware of this, casting an ambiguous hue on its happily-ever-after conclusion.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    E.T. is a dog movie. Genre-wise, I mean. It's about a boy meeting a dog, naming it, taming it, learning from it, and growing up. Of course, the genre is superficially disguised as science fiction, as was the fashion at the time. [2002 re-release]
  12. Apocalypse Now Redux
    Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Annie Hall
    Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sparkle like a Larry Hart lyric in this comical-lyrical reminiscence of a lost love. The one-liners are more brilliant than ever, and laid-back L.A. will never seem the same again. [04 July 1977, p.40]
    • Village Voice
  14. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms.
  15. Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992
    In those days after the misbegotten verdict in the trial of the four police officers who kicked and beat Rodney King, these Angelenos discovered what they and their neighbors were capable of. Ridley’s patient, humane approach allows us, over his film’s 145 minutes, to discover it, too.
  16. Leviathan
    This is a dense, multilayered picture, one firmly rooted in a specific landscape, a dramatic coastal spot dotted with the carcasses of decrepit fishing boats, as well as the magnificent skeleton of one long-dead whale.
  17. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Toy Story 3
    TS3, like its predecessors, is a clever, engrossing adventure.
  19. This Is Spinal Tap
    Begs the question: Did the lads from Squatney trail the zeitgeist at every turn, or were cobandleaders David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel simply in touch with their past and ahead of their time?
  20. 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.
  21. The Look of Silence
    If it's a far less flashy film than The Act of Killing, it's also a better and possibly more honest one.
  22. Tower
    Through the recollections of witnesses and victims, the film simultaneously builds a present-tense narrative while portraying the terrifying resilience of memory and trauma.
  23. 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.
  24. Moolaadé
    This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation.
  25. A Summer's Tale
    The Rohmer touch consists of nonchalance and effortless sensuality, not just in the people, but also in the landscape, somehow even in the air.
  26. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.
  27. 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.
  28. Lost in Translation
    As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."
  29. Son of Saul
    Nemes does everything he can to connect the audience to Saul's numbness, shielding us as much as possible from the cacophony of human misery that rings in his ears. The chill seeps in regardless, as it should, and Nemes doesn't try to counter it with more than a tiny, stubborn flicker of hope.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Frankenstein
    The most influential horror film ever made, this stark and stylish work has a weird fairytale beauty. Boris Karloff gives one of the most indelible performances in American cinema as the monster, misjudged by the society that created him, at once terrifying and pathetic, a moving study of alienation and primitive anger.
  31. Her
    Instead of just being desperately heartfelt, Her keeps reminding us — through cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema's somber-droll camera work, through Phoenix's artfully slumped shoulders — how desperately heartfelt it is.
  32. The Triplets of Belleville
    The year's most ingenious and original animated feature.
  33. Repulsion (re-release)
    The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.
  34. Children of Tokyo
    The film retains a measure of tempered hope, born not simply from the father's command-cum-wish to his slumbering offspring ("Don't become a miserable apple-polisher like me, boys"), but also from a final act of youthful compassion that binds Ozu's intensely human characters in glass-half-full solidarity.
  35. A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    Yang's anti-nostalgic slice of 1960s Taipei life suggests a Tolstoy-size expansion of the ballads from Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town.
  36. 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."
  37. On the Waterfront
    Like many cult films, it is also less than the sum of its parts.
  38. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    There's something wonderful in how these scenes, so breezy and funny, reveal so much.
  39. 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.
  40. Beau Travail
    A movie so tactile in its cinematography, inventive in its camera placement, and sensuous in its editing that the purposefully oblique and languid narrative is all but eclipsed.
  41. Waltz with Bashir
    Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature.
  42. Ghost World
    Keep your "Lara Croft" and your "Shrek": For me, the summer's reigning icons are Enid, Thora Birch's geek goddess in Ghost World, and her action-movie analogue.
  43. Nostalgia for the Light
    Often stark and ravishing, Nostalgia for the Light is most moving as a manifestation of the filmmaker's stubborn righteousness.
  44. The Gatekeepers
    The existence of The Gatekeepers is its own chief statement. You don't get the sense that it's any easier for these men to question Israel's leadership from the safety of retirement.
  45. 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.
  46. Before Sunset
    Summer sequelitis is upon us, but the season is unlikely to bring anything more remarkable than Richard Linklater's sweet, smart, and deeply romantic Before Sunset.
  47. The Girls in the Band
    The retro photos and footage are also bountiful and, natch, jazzily edited enough that the standard talking-head techniques are instantly forgivable.
  48. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It's both an important part of Ghibli's history and a gem in its own right.
  49. 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Winter's Bone
    In the end, the most interesting aspect of this quiet, sometimes frustrating, sometimes thrilling film is the way it teases out the intricate power structures that flourish even in as godforsaken (and lovely) a place as the Ozarks.
  51. The Queen
    More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring.
  52. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    Ronit's remarkable sensitivity makes Gett a tough but essential melodrama.
  53. I Called Him Morgan
    Collin and company are after climate, not weather. They steep us in our awareness that Morgan and his New York have been lost, that our glimpses of it must either be through memory or hazed-up photography — or the music itself.
  54. Bloody Sunday
    Bloody Sunday doesn't surrender its grip on the viewer even after the action shifts from the streets of Bogside to a local hospital where the weeping masses are still under the guns of the war-painted British soldiers.
  55. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    All told, and in giant widescreen, it's only blood-red adolescent fun, but it blooms like Douglas Sirk with a Gatling gun compared to the teenage demographic's current fare. Matrix, schmatrix: This is the season's supreme party movie.
  56. 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.
  57. American Splendor
    Clever, engaging, and cannily faux populist.
  58. Phantom Thread
    Most tales of people finding love present hard, angular worlds and allow romance to soften the edges. Phantom Thread does the opposite: It presents a soft, even sensuous world, and shows us how sometimes love can come in the cuts and the tears.
  59. Gosford Park
    As with Altman's best movies, Gosford Park is above all an entrancing hum of atmosphere and texture.
  60. The Birds
    Jaws before the world was ready, Hitch’s much misappreciated follow-up to Psycho is arguably the greatest of all disaster films—a triumph of special effects, as well as the fountainhead of what has become known as gross-out horror.
  61. La Commune (Paris, 1871)
    Watkins restages history in its own ruins, uses the media as a frame, and even so, manages to imbue his narrative with amazing presence. No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action.
  62. My Perestroika
    The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.
  63. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Warped keyhole-size images stack atop one another in a Frankenstein-ian collage that evokes the films of Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Conner. Seeing "the years [slip] out of [Bill's] head" in this 71-minute compendium is nothing short of revelatory.
  64. Paths of the Soul
    The film is restful and exhausting, inviting us into contemplation: of Tibet's epic-scale natural beauty, which has rarely been filmed with such you-are-there patience and intimacy, each new horizon these pilgrims reach a reward for their perseverance — and yours.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Finding Nemo
    Stuffed to the gills with surprises.
  67. Topsy-Turvy
    Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.
  68. Being John Malkovich
    The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore."
  69. The Incredibles
    Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Days and Nights in the Forest
    Whatever virtues Ray's defenders may claim for him, I find it difficult to get very far beyond the sylistic mess of this film. Ray's style ranges from half-baked artsiness to total artlessness without managing to find any real art in the transitions. [12 Apr 1973, p.91]
    • Village Voice
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Prophet
    Sold to the global arthouse market as the "French Scorsese," Audiard does know his genre. A Prophet, the director has said, is the "anti-Scarface."
  72. Almost Famous
    Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.
  73. 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.
  74. Once
    Yet the magic of the movie is how utterly wrenching it renders these songs, which thrive alongside the film's simple, eloquent, dusky narrative.
  75. Big Men
    This film, a great one, demands a follow-up.
  76. The Tale
    It takes a remarkably assured artist to make all this work, and Fox is savvy about how she eases us into her complicated narrative.
  77. Paterson
    With each step, the film gains depth. Small variations in routine start to feel monumental, and the briefest encounter can seem like a sign of something great.
  78. The Blue Angel
    Dietrich is the movie's primary cannon: Her amused eyes, open face, and relaxed sensuality monopolize our sympathies.
  79. The Fits
    For all the film's aestheticism, there's a clarity to this child's dilemma — conveyed ably by Hightower, who is a unique kind of actress.
  80. Raging Bull
    What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.
  81. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.
  82. United 93
    Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember.
  83. Capturing the Friedmans
    I've seen only a few films in my lifetime that so potently express the golden hopes of childhood and parenthood, as well as the inevitable decimation of that hopefulness -- that forward-looking bliss -- at the hands of catastrophe, or merely age, spite, and exhaustion. Or, as for the Friedmans, all of the above.
  84. American Hustle
    There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what a curtain!
  85. The Passenger (re-release)
    The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars.
  86. Persepolis
    Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation. Not because of technical innovation--though it moves fluidly enough, and its drawings have a handcrafted charm forgotten in the era of the cross-promoted-to-saturation CGI-'toon juggernauts--but because it translates a sensitive, introspective, true-to-life, "adult" comic story into moving pictures.
  87. The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence remains a consistent spellbinder, laying bare its inhabitants’ follies and furies with a tender touch and a vigilant quietude that accumulates into a grand force.
  88. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.
  89. The Best of Youth
    The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.
  90. 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.
  91. Whiplash
    If Whiplash doesn't quite hang together, Chazelle has still managed to pack it with some wonderful ideas.
  92. Fat City
    The movie’s bleak, but it’s funnier than most comedies, and it suggests that life’s toughness doesn’t preclude joyfulness.
  93. The Lives of Others
    A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.
  94. House of Flying Daggers
    If only this epic had enough substantial melodramatic hooks to hang this woman's beauty on; emotional traction is most often buried under acres of carefully coordinated vistas and CGI-hued flora.
  95. 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Petri's visually flamboyant film turns into a heady mix of Marx, Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Brecht, with a bit of Dashiell Hammett thrown into the blender.
  97. Two Days, One Night
    What anchors Two Days, One Night, and eases its gaps, is Cotillard's extraordinary performance.
  98. National Gallery
    Like so much of his celebrated work, documentarian Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery is long, leisurely paced, wide-ranging, meticulously crafted, intellectually intricate, and touched with profundity.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Man on Wire
    While largely lighthearted, Petit's walk and Marsh's film take on new meaning post-9/11. Man on Wire never mentions the events of that day, but the Trade Center's collapse continues to weigh on Petit, as if its destruction was every bit as tragic as the human lives lost that day.
  100. Y Tu Mamá También
    It has the charm of the original American road movies, feasting on the gorgeous, ramshackle landscape of the filmmaker's motherland.
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