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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  1. Most Beautiful Island
    As a rumination on the experiences of undocumented immigrants, Most Beautiful Island presents an extreme example of what people will do to scrape by — but it does so without belittling its vulnerable characters.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Work
    What’s terrifying about The Work is that this introspection is merely the first step. It’s a snapshot, not the full picture of men becoming more in tune with themselves and ceasing to filter all emotional processes through outward aggression. What’s comforting about The Work, then, is seeing society’s forgotten and discarded beginning this journey.
  3. One Week and a Day
    Rambling in the best manner imaginable, it’s an amusingly heartbreaking (and hopeful) portrait of misery’s messiness.
  4. Truman
    The film is restrained and observational, its impact cumulative.
  5. Last Men in Aleppo
    The film has plenty of unflinching truth and emotion and outrage, and it ends with a gut punch. It's the subtly unreal quality of what we're seeing throughout, however, that truly highlights the obscenity of war.
  6. Heal the Living
    At once sorrowful and optimistic, Heal the Living captures the terrifying fragility of life, even as it also recognizes the strength derived from the many connections — organic, emotional, and associative — that bind and define us.
  7. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    The Meyerowitz Stories doesn’t quite have the drive and stylistic panache of other recent Baumbach efforts, but it makes up for that with sincerity, as well as moments of subtle satirical genius.
  8. The Shape of Water
    It speaks both to del Toro’s confidence and generosity that, having designed this world so thoroughly, he essentially hands the whole thing over to Hawkins — not just so she can breathe life into her own character, but so she can conjure all the emotional connections required for any of this to work on any level. And my god, how she runs with it.
  9. Thelma
    Yes, Thelma is a horror movie — a lovely, transfixing one — but don’t look to it for cheap scares. The terror here cuts far deeper.
  10. The Post
    The Post is a tale that weaponizes nostalgia. It depicts how this long-established system of chummy collusion between politicians and press, one at times recalled with some anxious wistfulness by both Bradlee and Graham, came to be shattered. And it shows us how a strong press was instrumental in that shattering.
  11. Natasha
    With naturalistic honesty, Ozerov and Gordon tap into their characters’ insecurities and sexuality (because, duh, teens). But Bezmozgis delves deeper than pubescent angst, exploring the immigrant experience through family dynamics, dinner-table debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and old-country dreams.
  12. Leaning Into the Wind
    The film ranges more widely than its predecessor, surveying more landscapes and a greater variety of projects. But it’s still a contemplative beauty, a chance to consider and be moved by a richer sort of connectedness than our lives typically allow.
  13. In the Fade
    Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.
  14. Sweet Virginia
    The concepts Sweet Virginia explore through this setup — lives intersecting after a tragedy in a small town and a dangerous outsider tearing through a community — aren’t new for noir or westerns, but the understated, intense performances of Dagg’s cast make this slow burner a standout.
  15. Tully
    Tully encapsulates the psychological process of maturity with pithy humor and vertiginous insight. Tully’s appearance may have seemed like a magical interlude, but she solidifies Marlo’s reality by exposing the path that led her there.
  16. 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.
  17. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is its own unique, damaged creature.
  18. Midnight Cowboy
    The performances and presences of Voight and Hoffman are so extraordinarily affecting that their scenes together generate more emotional power than the dramatic wiring of their relationship deserves. [29 May 1969, p.47]
  19. 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.
  20. The Square
    Östlund is specific and exacting as a writer and director, and within The Square’s empty spaces, we’re forced to confront our own values, and our own visions of ourselves.
  21. Wonderstruck
    There is so much packed in here; Wonderstruck is simultaneously the densest and loosest film Haynes has made. And, like many stories based on books for children, much of it makes more emotional than logical sense.
  22. My Friend Dahmer
    My Friend Dahmer is both sensitive and fascinating, distinguished by a stellar, mouth-breathing performance of insecurity from Lynch.
  23. Let the Sunshine In
    An existential whirlwind even when it seems sitcom-flippant, Sunshine sees Denis continuing on an elevated cinematic plane.
  24. Claire's Camera
    For all its airy lightness and apparent simplicity, it’s hard not to watch Claire’s Camera and sense beneath its placid surfaces the fretful voice of a filmmaker who longs to return to the elements of his art.
  25. Better Watch Out
    It’s only October, but Christmas has come early for horror fans.
  26. Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
    While acknowledging some missteps (such as jumping into a strenuous project too soon after surgery), Saffire and Schlesinger exhibit Whelan’s grace in dance and in life.
  27. The Rider
    Zhao takes a different approach, privileging the narrative, the poetry, and the realism in equal measure, blending them together to create something astonishingly powerful.
  28. 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.
  29. Sami Blood
    Matter-of-fact in its scenecraft but searing in its content, Sami Blood is about girlhood and racism, passing and escape.
  30. Raising Bertie
    Raising Bertie charts nothing less than what it’s like to try to grow up free in the prison capital of the world.
  31. Ascent
    In Fiona Tan’s glorious ode to a Japanese volcano, Mount Fuji is both geological marvel and malleable symbol, its solidity and grandeur inspiring conquest and contemplation.
  32. The House on Coco Road
    This documentary doesn’t just tell the ill-fated story of the failed Grenada utopia — which failed because of American intervention. The House on Coco Road is instead a sprawling tale of African-American migration, the search for peace, and America’s relentless sabotage of black escape.
  33. Harmonium
    Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada’s film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.
  34. My Journey Through French Cinema
    The key word in the title is My. Bertrand Tavernier’s three-hours-and-change film-essay is not a history lesson. It’s an invitation to take the seat next to a renowned director as he shares the movies that mean something to him.
  35. Mali Blues
    First-time feature director Gregor never imposes a narrative arc on his subjects; instead, we meet them, hear their hopes and their fears, and then savor performances of singular beauty, power, and invention.
  36. Kuso
    Kuso is an astounding feat of animation, humor, and practical effects.
  37. Night of the Living Dead
    Up until 1968, horror had been escapist. But Night of the Living Dead made horror serious business.
  38. Our Beloved Month of August
    Transparently a movie about a group of filmmakers who attempt to possess a particular location, Our Beloved Month relaxes into a meditation on the mysteries of place, personality, and process.
  39. The Force
    The Force is hypnotic and eye-opening. Nicks has a style that is both experiential and ethereal: From its ground-level immersion in the minutiae of police work to its sweeping helicopter shots of the city at night, The Force has the texture of a Michael Mann film combined with the clarity of a Frederick Wiseman documentary.
  40. Thy Father's Chair
    This immersive, richly detailed snapshot of hoarders undergoing a mandated apartment cleaning is equal parts horror film and existential howl.
  41. Suspiria
    A veteran of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the deadpan Harper puts her training to good use, gracefully eluding the attacking furniture and skillfully dodging the imploding set, as she flees—arms protectively crossed before her face—out into the night.
  42. Strong Island
    What emerges is a very close, tender look at the Ford family.... The film is unflinching in its portrayal of their devastation after the loss of their eldest son.
  43. Walking Out
    It’s a beautiful movie about unthinkable things.
  44. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    This doc could have been a mess, frankly. But Philippe has put the film together smartly, taking us from the general to the particular.
  45. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    It’s hard not to experience Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? and not get shivers up your spine — from fear, from anger, and from the beauty of Wilkerson’s filmmaking.
  46. Nobody's Watching
    There’s nothing fussy about any shot of Nobody’s Watching, but there’s also no shot wasted, and no shot that doesn’t communicate something vital about the city or her protagonist.
  47. I, Tonya
    Those expecting camp or catfights won’t find them in Gillespie’s movie, which instead offers thoughtful and somewhat objective critiques, plus much seriously dark humor that’ll elicit a lot of uncomfortable gasps of laughter — and invites you to ponder difficult truths.
  48. Sweet Country
    Thornton delicately peels back all the layers of Aussie injustice in this film, but what’s most unnerving is that the story proves to be so universal.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Zama
    Martel engages directly with Argentina’s colonial legacy, although her approach remains allusive and layered. She transforms Benedetto’s epic into a dizzying, sensory head trip about a man’s gradual psychological decay, allowing larger historical and political themes to emerge organically from her meticulous formal compositions.
  50. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    Mary and the Witch’s Flower and its eye-popping cavalcade of creations and colors speak not to the shock and awe of technology but to the can-do magic of human achievement.
  51. The Departure
    Wilson’s film, a quiet wonder, emphasizes the courage it takes to choose the hard work of living.
  52. Blockers
    Blockers, on the surface, sticks very much to the formula — even the prom setting is very been there, done that. But it’s subversive in these little details, and the resolution is genuinely touching. The best part is that Cannon doesn’t have to sacrifice any of the laughs to get there.
  53. Ghost Stories
    Equal parts spooky and cheeky, this film nails its black humor and finds a bizarre but satisfying conclusion to manage all the loose ends.
  54. Quest
    [A] tender, humane, gently probing film.
  55. No Dress Code Required
    Cristina Herrera Borquez’s elegant documentary No Dresscode Required is a masterful, layered story of commissar-crossed lovers.
  56. 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.
  57. Saturday Church
    With Saturday Church, Cardasis has crafted a beautiful story about young, queer people of color championing one another and finding themselves.
  58. Empathy
    A hybrid documentary distinguished by emotional tenderness and compositional elegance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bitter Money
    We are not, as in so many a contemporary documentary, made to merely identify with the position of cameraperson, but are forced to consider and find our own ethical and political positions.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
  62. 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Padmaavat
    The finished work itself is actually a stellar achievement, its raucous meta-narrative more than worthy of a spot in Bhansali’s visually splendid canon.
  64. Shot in the Dark
    It’s a vital, intimate snapshot of a handful of people who have been touched by gun and gang violence.
  65. 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.
  66. The Guardians
    Unassumingly powerful details make The Guardians one of the year’s most affecting love stories.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. Ava
    Foroughi’s movie surveys how the mounting external pressures in Ava’s life bring her to a near-breaking point, and the director has devised (with the cinematographer, Sina Kermanizadeh) an explosive visual grammar to approximate the depths of Ava’s isolation and pain.
  70. The 12th Man
    Harald Zwart’s thrilling The 12th Man, based on the true story of a Norwegian soldier who escaped the Nazis in World War II, is a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart but also an unexpectedly tender adventure that is as celebratory as it is tense.
  71. The Misandrists
    As in many of his films, The Misandrists finds the oppressed themselves oppressing others, a warning among all the dizzy outrageousness.
  72. 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.
  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. 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.
  75. The King of Comedy
    The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.
  76. 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.
  77. The Wild Pear Tree
    Ceylan delivers what might be his funniest, most politically poignant work yet. It also happens to be achingly personal.
  78. Five Easy Pieces
    It’s a great work of the Discover America Seventies.
  79. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence.
  80. 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.
  81. 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.
  82. 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.
  83. The Landlord
    One of the funniest social comedies of its period.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bound for Glory
    Ashby--working through a magnificent performance by Carradine--has converted technical virtuosity to his own ends, creating a richly ambiguous character study that sings and provokes and celebrates. [13 Dec 1976, p.45]
    • Village Voice
  85. The Magnificent Ambersons
    The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane‘s, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nashville
    I think that the power and the theme of the film lie in the fact that while some characters are more “major” than others, they are all subordinated to the music itself. It’s like a river, running through the film, running through their life. They contribute to it, are united for a time, lose out, die out, but the music, as the last scene suggests, continues.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Woman Under the Influence
    Falk and the rest of the cast are exceptional—even the smallest roles feel spot-on—but Rowlands (who will be on hand for the opening-night screening) is the film.
  88. Don't Look Now
    Time has tamed some of the terror and eroticism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but it’s still a haunting thriller about guilt and the supernatural. What’s notable (more notable even than the much celebrated bedroom scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in which sex is displaced into memory even as it’s taking place) is that Roeg’s use of the death of a child as the focus of a horror film never feels exploitative.
  89. Shadows
    Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    The 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a good adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play of the same name. But as a portrayal of the depths of loneliness we create for ourselves, and an example of the power of star performance, it’s a great film.
  91. Carnal Knowledge
    Carnal Knowledge is a movie that almost lives up to it's brilliant title. [08 Jul 1971, p.34]
    • Village Voice
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Family Plot
    Its visual wit and spiritual resonance are truly inimitable even in this age of merchandised mimicry. [19 Apr 1976, p.64]
    • Village Voice
  93. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    Ultimately, McCabe and Mrs Miller shapes up as a half baked masterpiece with a kind of gutsy gradeur. It's personal as all-get-out, and I thought that's what everyone had been screaming for all these years. [08 Jul 1971, p.49]
    • Village Voice
  94. The 39 Steps
    The movie with which Hitchcock became Hitchcock.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    Max von Sydow gives a performance of a high order as the knight who returns from the Crusades to find his country at the mercy of plague and witch hunts.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Man Godfrey
    In one of her greatest roles, as burbling blonde heiress Irene Bullock in Gregory La Cava’s 1934 screwball masterpiece My Man Godfrey, Lombard creates a ditz so rare, a creature so otherwordly in her oblivion to what others call reality, that she comes off less as a thing of flesh and blood than as a shimmering cloud of butterflies flying in perfect, girl-shaped formation.
  98. Scum
    One of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down.
  99. Chocolat
    Denis quickly immerses us in her voluptuous, allusive mode of storytelling.
  100. Limelight
    There is no test of behavioral range in Limelight that Chaplin does not pass superbly. [01 Oct 1964, p.15]
    • Village Voice
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