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. Concerning Violence
    A commanding indictment of the exploitative nature of geopolitics, and of Europe's and the U.S.'s abuse of native peoples around the world.
  2. 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.
  3. The Strange Little Cat
    This odd little wonder captures the delicate textures and shadowy half-secrets of family life, mapping them out in a mosaic of fragmented dialogue and half-poetic, half-prosaic images.
  4. Saraband
    Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.
  5. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Knowing the real-life inspiration for On the Beach at Night Alone may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better. But the movie’s charms work on a much more immediate level, in the way it captures the ever-shifting dynamic between men and women, and the difficulty of matching one’s feelings to one’s words.
  6. Nine Lives
    In yet another roundelay that, like "Crash" and "Heights," follows the "Short Cuts" template of cosmic interconnection.
  7. Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.
  8. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    The hyperbole can be predictable and the clichés earnest, but by and large, Charlie is a serious, often illuminating, and unavoidably entertaining account of the creature Downey calls "the most endearing superhero you might ever want to watch."
  9. Love & Mercy
    The beauty, and the horror, of Bill Pohlad's exhilarating and inventive Love & Mercy...is the sense it gives us of the world passing through Brian Wilson's ears.
  10. Story of My Death
    Story of My Death is a singular work, and its originality is apparent in every frame.
  11. Pervert Park
    Pervert Park reveals a linked chain of incidents; we are all connected whether we admit it or not. What if we all lived in communities where the people around us agreed to help us get better, rather than blaming and shaming us for our transgressions?
  12. American Honey
    The majority of American Honey has Arnold working overtime to make her movie seem important or scandalous.
  13. True Grit
    For the most part, the Coens' is a highly enjoyable yarn, stocked with pungent bushwa and a full panoply of frontier bozos.
  14. 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.
  15. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable.
  16. The Blair Witch Project
    Paranoid, hysterical, and programmatically subjective, the movie is in every sense a psychological thriller. Although the payoff is ambiguous, the experience remains in the mind. It's an absolutely restrained and truly frightening movie.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Wish
    I Wish makes us feel like we are watching these kids discover each new sensory pleasure of youth for the first time, or that we're experiencing it ourselves.
  18. What Richard Did
    The film feel[s] like a Bergman homage without earning the clunky label "Bergmanesque."
  19. Iris
    Like all good documentaries, Iris is about much more than what we see on the surface, no matter how dazzling that surface may be.
  20. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Star Wars: The Force Awakens steers the franchise back to its popcorn origins. It's not a Bible; it's a bantamweight blast. And that's just as it should be: a good movie, nothing more.
  21. 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.
  22. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    While it achieves its goal of being thoroughly unpleasant, Henry could have used a touch more humor (beyond its one knee-slapper about the Chicago Bears). Still, it’s a gruesomely riveting sucker punch of a movie.
  23. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Odyssey, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet train.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Spellbound
    In their randomness, the bee words take on an oracular quality--shades of kabbalistic gematria, or the "Sortes Vergilanae," the supernatural attributed to symbols on paper.
  25. Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch
    A brilliant appreciation of the last great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.
  26. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    Augmenting his talking heads with animation and inspired stock footage, Gibney dignifies Hubbard with the capacity to conjure feelings of connection and magnificence, never losing sight of what brings people into the fold, which makes their attempts to escape it all the more harrowing. Still, the richness of detail of Wright's book is lost.
  27. My Dog Tulip
    His gift-and the film's-is to transform the seemingly banal relationship between pet and owner into something singular, inimitable, sacred.
  28. White God
    When the violence gets unbearable, take comfort in the troop of trainers on the sidelines who prove that, for now, man and beast still make a good team.
  29. The Century of the Self
    An engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control.
  30. Whale Rider
    Like the film, Pai's character is muddily conceived and ill-focused, but the coltish, tremulously delicate Castle-Hughes is a hypnotic camera subject.
  31. The Mill and the Cross
    An extraordinary example of both art-historical interpretation and CGI as passport to unknown lands, The Mill and the Cross, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, is a moving-image tribute to the still image, with its ability to "wrestle the senseless moment to the ground."
  32. Lean on Pete
    Writer-director Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years) dashes expectations in almost every scene. Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre.
  33. 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.
  34. Resolution
    Ambiguity enlivens the smart, knotty Resolution, which routinely nods to its own artificiality while positing storytelling as a constantly evolving beast apt to save your life one moment and consume you the next.
  35. Minority Report
    Miscast, misguided, and often nonsensical, Minority Report is nevertheless the most entertaining, least pretentious genre movie Steven Spielberg has made in the decade since "Jurassic Park."
  36. 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.
  37. Riding Giants
    Peralta has become a more relaxed filmmaker, and when he trusts the haunting sight of a giant wave breaking to speak for itself, the movie reaches the sublime heights of its subject.
  38. Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    As news, it smokes CNN.
  39. Set Me Free
    Karine Vanasse, as the protagonist Hanna, is perfectly cast because she has the body of a woman and the sweet, sexless face of a child.
  40. Boy and the World
    Tension between the city and the country has been a fertile topic for as long as there've been cities, and Alê Abreu's phantasmagoric The Boy and the World explores the eternal conflict in a familiar yet wholly original way.
  41. Finders Keepers
    Most docs are lucky to have one wild character. The phenomenal Finders Keepers has two.
  42. Room 237
    Even if the theories don't persuade you, the film fascinates. It's revelatory about the nature of spectatorship in an era when technology allows audiences to watch films frame by frame.
  43. Lady Chatterley
    This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness.
  44. Take Out
    This is as exceptional as microbudget cinema gets.
  45. Lucky
    Lynch has crafted an almost proudly minor work, a hangout movie whose reason for being is Stanton’s presence.
  46. Call Me Kuchu
    What makes Kuchu work as taut agitprop, and ultimately to devastating emotional effect, is that Wright and Zouhali-Worrall allow the enormity of the film's political concerns to be telegraphed through the stories, experiences, and astute analysis of ordinary queer folk and their hetero allies.
  47. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    Annotating excerpts from the movies with oral history, Kudlacek's film is a well-wrought introduction not just to Deren but an under-leveraged chunk of the art world.
  48. Berberian Sound Studio
    Berberian may sound like it's more fun to pick over afterward than watch, but it's also masterfully crafted.
  49. Tokyo Sonata
    Kurosawa's abiding concern has always been the alienation of modern living, which he here merely transplants into a more recognizable domestic milieu, where subtle fissures in society's apparent order threaten to short-circuit people instead of their beloved technology.
  50. Il Futuro
    Scherson, adapting Roberto Bolaño's novel, incorporates surrealistic, hyper-expressive visual techniques, resulting in a film that is excitingly unclassifiable.
  51. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.
  52. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    Good Night, and Good Luck's primary handicap is history itself -- the toe-to-toe televised dialogue between McCarthy and Murrow was, however arguably vital to the Wisconsin senator's eventual retreat, brief and less than epochal. Even so, the wonderfully mustered context wins out.
  53. Human Resources
    Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first.
  54. The Survivalist
    Directed with a muted tone but a scenic eye by Brit first-timer Stephen Fingleton, The Survivalist, like most postapocalyptic movies, is both dire and oddly poetic.
  55. The Pearl Button
    The voiceover is lyric, the oceanscapes majestic, the anthropology fascinating, and the connections more quizzical and uncertain than in Nostalgia for the Light. This time you have to look harder to follow him.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Deep Water
    Co-directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell have done a commendable job of making Deep Water . . . well, not boring.
  57. 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.
  58. Lorna's Silence
    The Dardennes retain a company of returning players: Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, and Olivier Gourmet. Such loyalty is rare and touching.
  59. California Typewriter
    It’s a compelling look at a valuable contraption that’s slipping through our grasp, and will send many viewers to flea markets and eBay for one of their own.
  60. 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.
  61. Coraline
    Coraline Jones isn't the pluckiest or most ingratiating sprite ever to take center stage in a children's film, and her (mis)adventures aren't especially novel, but Coraline is still a consistent splendor to behold.
  62. The Uncondemned
    The film is a riveting feat of editing considering the material, the legalistic conundrums, and the profusion of detail.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Goodbye First Love
    Like "Father of My Children," Goodbye First Love loosely fictionalizes lived experience in order to capture the ineffable - in this case, emotional maturation or, as Sullivan phrases it, "becom[ing] a real person."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Little Miss Sunshine
    Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill.
  65. The Endless
    The film’s fast-slow-fast pacing not only gives psychological weight to Benson’s unabashedly pulpy scenario but also constantly keeps viewers on their toes.
  66. Indivisible
    Indivisible is above all else a mood piece humming with energy and marked by wondrous moments.
  67. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass reminds us of the stupefying magnificence of its setting—beautiful for spacious skies and mountain majesties—while never letting us forget its formidable perils.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tarzan
    Visually rich yet numbingly formulaic.
  69. 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.
  70. The Last of the Unjust
    There are no simple denials, nor anything simple at all in Last of the Unjust. Only stories, recovered and retold, of a reality beyond their reach.
  71. West of Memphis
    That makes this the most rare of films: one that indisputably matters. And one that stuns.
  72. Frost/Nixon
    Frost/Nixon's main attraction is neither its topicality nor its historical value, but Langella's re-creation of his Tony-winning performance.
  73. Last Resort
    Pawlikowski, whose background is in documentary film, has an eye for the menacingly forlorn and elegantly bleak. Last Resort, which was shot without a script and developed largely in collaboration with the actors, is a kind of verité fantasy.
  74. Fever Heat [re-release]
    The movie is a superb riff with a boffo finale, a terrific, cynical punch line, and a crazy closing image of Bob's Plymouth on an empty beach.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Siddhartha (re-release)
    Sven Nykvist's golden-hued cinematography perfectly suits Hesse's mind-expanding narrative of Buddhist enlightenment.
  76. From Selma to Soweto
    A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once.
  77. Papirosen
    Solnicki's spliced-together, back-and-forth approach at first seems a jumble, but of course his choices are deliberate, and they pile up into revealing art.
  78. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    This is a masterpiece not because it culminates in some redemptive catharsis or clinching argument for social change, but because, by disavowing such facile ends, it meets the mess of life on its own clear and true terms.
  79. Sunday Ball
    Trash talk among competitors and spectators alike is a constant background hum, the informal banter taking the place of traditional talking-head documentary interviews.
  80. Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
    Over the course of its simple, unadorned 82 minutes, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Hissein Habré: A Chadian Tragedy wrecks you in ways you might not have known were possible.
  81. Not a Pretty Picture
    What’s most unnerving about this four-decade-old film is how little has changed in the time since. We are still learning the same lessons Coolidge was trying to impart so long ago — nothing is different.
  82. Senna
    The aura of a life lived in extremis, undergirded by faith, clings to the film. Even nonbelievers in Senna's sport and church will find it difficult to visit Kapadia's cinematic shrine without emotion.
  83. The Piano Teacher
    The Piano Teacher's study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character.
  84. Monsters, Inc.
    But Monsters, Inc. -- directed by Pixar soldier Pete Docter, not by master digital comic John Lasseter -- turns out to be stingy on context, commentary, and the prism-ing view of pop culture that made the earlier films mint.
  85. Beyond the Hills
    The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.
  86. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    Valedictory and elegiac, Keach's film captures a performer who only truly seems to inhabit himself during the performances.
  87. The Sessions
    Hawkes and Hunt nobly tackle the physical demands their roles require.
  88. March of the Penguins
    The Central Park Zoo is cheaper, you can walk away from the penguins after 10 minutes, and it has snow monkeys and beer.
  89. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    Winter on Fire's thrilling rebellion is neither the beginning nor the end, but it is at least a truly heartening middle.
  90. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death.
  91. Dinner Rush
    The cast never skips a beat, particularly Mark Margolis as the most obnoxious dinner customer in cinema history and Summer Phoenix as his unfazed waitress.
  92. Spring Forward
    The sense of continuing life is quietly remarkable.
  93. Two Family House
    A fairy tale that presents love as a case of mutual enchantment, Two Family House is not only uniformly well acted, superbly designed, lovingly lit, and sensitively scored, it's as romantic as it is funny.
  94. Oasis
    Oasis is utterly beguiling because Lee, like many other percipient Asian filmmakers, is simply more attentive to his characters' emotional tumult than the audience's.
  95. Annihilation
    It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show.
  96. City of God
    Nothing if not confrontational.
  97. Pariah
    The first 10 minutes of Dee Rees's funny, moving, nuanced, and impeccably acted first feature, in which coming of age and coming out are inseparable, sharply reveal the conflicts that 17-year-old Alike (Adepero Oduye) faces.
  98. Stray Dog
    Granik, director of Winter's Bone, captures scenes of rare power.
  99. Lolita
    Kubrick goes through the motions with a hula hoop and the munching of potato chips, but there is nothing intuitive or abandoned about the man-nymphet relationship. The Director's heart is apparently elsewhere. [05 Jul 1962, p.11]
    • Village Voice
  100. Downeast
    Redmon and Sabin carefully tease apart the insidious process of American deindustrialization, and by the end of the film the threads they unravel reveal how the free market can choke like a noose.
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