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. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Not far removed from the director’s interest in trance states, his Nosferatu posits a self-pitying creature exhausted by immortality: Sunken-eyed Kinski inverts his usual frenzy into a fatigue underlining the importance of eternal rest.
  2. Monty Python's Life of Brian
    Monty Python's Life of Brian, re-released on its 25th anniversary as an antidote to "The Passion of the Christ," is a single-joke satire of organized religion, including Hollywood's.
  3. The Warriors
    If the movie is not as dangerous as its detractors claim, neither is it as glorious and memorable as some of its less discriminating admirers would have it. I find the spectacle fading from my memory in a jumble of dislocated colors and motions. In retrospect, it seems too studiously unreal.
  4. Days of Heaven
    It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999]
  5. Revenge of the Pink Panther
    Many reviewers have given the current exhibit low marks for vitality and originality, but then, most reviewers have never been wild about any of the Pink Panther movies. It is the public, not the critics, that made the Clouseau creations the highest grossing comedy series in the history of theatrical motion pictures. It is the perfect entertainment for children of all ages because it is not really designed as the perfect entertainment for children of all ages. [31 July 1978, p.35]
    • Village Voice
  6. Convoy
    Sam Peckinpah's Convoy is not merely a bad movie, but a terrible movie. Anyone can make a bad movie--only a misguided talent can manage to be terrible. [17 July 1978, p.44]
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  7. F.I.S.T.
    I found myself reasonably absorbed in this grown-up though not sufficiently lived-in and thought-through entertainment. [01 May 1978, p.45]
    • Village Voice
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Waltz
    Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz proves Andrew's point by gathering so much talent into one theater that the stage buckles and the subject drops out of sight.
  9. Renaldo and Clara
    Renaldo & Clara is almost petulant in its demand to be taken seriously as film, and as such a good deal of it is dreadful. [30 Jan 1978, p.26]
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  10. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    What makes the film — which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name — so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.
  11. Rolling Thunder
    Performances are made crystalline through a sixth sense for camera placement and curt cutting from director John Flynn, whose 2007 passing was little noted, though his no-BS way of laying down a story is a rare commodity in any era.
  12. 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.
  13. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    Gessner’s film may be for Foster completists only. But the intensity of her dead-eyed stare as the final credits scroll across her face reminds us of her preternatural ability, as a kid and beyond, to transform even the most negligible movie or scene into an event.
    • 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
    • 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
  16. The Marquise of O
    Marquise is almost ironically uninflected, like a tense game of chess. But soon the no-nonsense two-shots and scarlet-satin self-consciousness let the story build to genuine fireworks. No costume-drama escapism here, just distilled social warfare.
  17. Solaris (1972)
    The most pop film the great Russian filmmaker ever made.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gator
    Structurally, Gator is a bit of a mess, largely because of the civilizing and romantic influence Reynolds has brought to the randy domain of the redneck action film.
  19. The Tenant
    it may be the director's quintessential movie. It's an exercise in urban paranoia and mental disintegration that echoes or anticipates everything from "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby" to "Bitter Moon" and "The Pianist."
  20. The Man Who Fell to Earth
    Undeniably long, Panavision-wide, but of questionable depth.
    • 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
  22. 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.
  23. Taxi Driver
    Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed. [35th Anniversary Release]
  24. Barry Lyndon
    Barry Lyndon could be considered Kubrick’s masterpiece. At the very least, this cerebral action film represents the height of his craft.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farewell, My Lovely
    By simply rack-focusing Mitchum in an occasional close-up, Richards evokes an entire biography, a sense of weariness and reflection. [25 Aug 1975, p.66]
    • Village Voice
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Drowning Pool
    The exception to a listless cast is Murray Hamilton as the oil-develper villain, an eloquently indirect Southerner with enough shifts in mood to make one whis he had a larger part, but not regret the movie's one payoff--his well staged and satisfactory demise. [14 July 1975, p.58]
    • Village Voice
    • 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.
  28. Tommy
    Tommy is turning out to be the kind of movie most people probably like more than they care to admit. Modest charm and unpretentiousness are hardly the qualities that I ever thought I would associate with Ken Russell, but there you are, and there Tommy is. [31 Mar 1975, p.68]
    • Village Voice
  29. Shampoo
    The parts are better than the whole. [24 Feb 1975, p.58]
    • Village Voice
  30. The Front Page
    It is refreshing to find a director who is still making talkies instead of gawkies, and who thus still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression. [23 Dec 1974, p.83]
    • Village Voice
  31. Young Frankenstein
    Longer on charm and cheer than on humor of knee-pounding hilarity...the funniest film of the season by default.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Scorsese tries to balance tries to balance irony and lyricism, but it has no internal truth, it means nothing in terms of wht we know of Alice or what Scorsese feels about her. [6 Jan 1975, p.71]
    • Village Voice
  33. Murder on the Orient Express
    Murder on the Orient Express falls down so badly as escapist entertainment that it is as if it were designed to prove the proposition that movies and mysteries don't mix.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Earthquake
    Halfway between a movie and a carnival huckster's gimmick, with the gimmick a great deal less interesting than the movie itself. [23 Dec 1974, p.89]
    • Village Voice
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Big Bad Mama
    Big Bad Mama is essentially a soft-core porno movie without the courage of Russ Meyer. [02 Dec 1974, p.90]
    • Village Voice
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    Mazursky's difficulty in making the transition from dramatic middle-shots to long shots, with the accompanying impulse to "universalize" his theme, indicates that he has not yet learned to trust his material, or appreciate his own sublime gift of being able to approach the secret of life through comic misunderstanding rather than cosmic understanding. [15 Aug 1974, p.63]
    • Village Voice
  38. The Wicker Man
    Knowing something is up and knowing just what that is prove to be two very different things for both protagonist and viewer, however, and The Wicker Man is propelled by the thrill of not knowing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Together Brothers
    Working with amateur material, Director William A. Graham coaches natural performances out of the band of black teenagers who organize the manhunt. [22 Aug 1974, p.77]
    • Village Voice
  40. California Split
    California Split never comes to a very fine point in the psychological development of its characters. California Split is thus more about moment-to-moment living than momentous life. [03 Oct 1974, p.81]
    • Village Voice
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Death Wish
    An enjoyable bad movie instead of a purely offensive one. [01 Aug 1974, p.67]
    • Village Voice
  42. That's Entertainment!
    After two hours of which I felt almost every minute, I could find only a handful of positive things to say about this production. [25 Jul 1974, p.67]
    • Village Voice
  43. 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]
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Parallax View
    A movie of splendid bits and pieces disappointingly strung together. [25 July 1974, p.70]
    • Village Voice
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Terminal Man
    I'm not sure I can accept these chilling extremes of "sick" and "well," but Mike Hodges renders them with some of the same grim beauty and sense of absurdity he brought to Get Carter. [17 Jun 1974, p.82]
    • Village Voice
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
    Although it's unlikely that Englishman Hough has connected with the auto culture that has made his latest film the darling of the drive-ins, Hough at the same time has connected with the perfect vehicle for his mechanized, dehumanized concerns. [01 Aug 1974, p.70]
    • Village Voice
  47. The Conversation
    The Conversation could have used a great deal more vulgar curiosity about its own plot and its own characters. Coppola's good taste has been misplaced on this occasion, but he remains one of our most promising new filmmakers nonetheless. [20 June 1974, p.78]
    • Village Voice
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    This Sinbad misses the verve, the exuberant high spirits, of the best of Fairbanks and Flynn, but it's wonderfully good-natured all the same. [16 May 1974, p.109]
    • Village Voice
  49. Zardoz
    Zardoz quickly degenerates from a voyage through a labyrinth into an ego trip round and round the inside of a goldfish bowl. [28 Feb 1974, p.62]
    • Village Voice
  50. The Sting
    The plot has many twists, few surprises, and one gaping hole, which becomes apparent only after you walk out of the theater and have a chance to think. But pure popcorn like this is hardly worthy of serious analysis...Fortunately, the stars have not lost their charm and authority.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    A fine, sharp movie nonetheless, "The Laughing Policeman" is the raunchiest--and no doubt the best--floor show in town. [31 Jan 1974, p.79]
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  52. The Day of the Dolphin
    The problem is not with the subject, nor even with its presumably escapist spirit. The problem is that Mike Nichols and Buck Henry fail to bring it off successfully. [27 Dec 1973, p.51]
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  53. Papillon
    Shaffner has really made an exhilarating movie out of the most dangerously depressing material. [10 Jan 1974, p.56]
    • Village Voice
  54. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is the first good honest-to-goodness American movie of 1974.
  55. 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.
  56. Serpico
    Ought to look pretty dated. Instead, Sidney Lumet's biopic of Frank Serpico, the virtuous cop who exposed a network of graft in the NYPD, feels depressingly relevant.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Although the visuals are worth the ticket alone, Fantastic Planet also crackles with emotional and political resonance.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breezy
    A love story in which almost everything works and you don't come out of the theatre half hating yourself for succumbing to its charm. [29 Nov 1973, p.86]
    • Village Voice
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Mother and the Whore
    It is a searing, painful, revealing, egotistical, irritating, often beautiful document that captures, in orgies of sexual gorging and verbal disgorging, the clash, among people of a certain generation and milieu, between Left Bank libertinism and an astonishingly deep conservatism--deep, because it is mystical rather than political, and based on matters of life and death rather than left and right. [04 Apr 1974, p.90]
    • Village Voice
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    Scorpio exists merely as a succession of stylistic flourishes without feeling, representative of the emptiest, most uninteresting kind of cinema. [24 May 1973, p.83]
    • Village Voice
  61. Scarecrow
    A flawed, fascinating testament to a time of discovery in Hollywood: of how stories could be told onscreen, of what great actors might find within themselves, of just what in the hell this country had become in the late-'60s crackup.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mack
    It is almost perfect as escapist entertainment -- as a carefully schematized synthesis of fantasies for black audiences. [03 May 1973, p.81]
    • Village Voice
  63. The Long Goodbye
    The Long Goodbye rides off furiously in too many different directions with too many gratuitously Godardian camera movements to make even one good movie. [29 Nov 1973, p.84]
    • Village Voice
  64. Walking Tall
    Like it or not, Walking tall is saying something very important to many people, and it is saying it with accomplished artistry. [21 Feb 1974, p.61]
    • Village Voice
  65. Tout Va Bien
    Fonda is a co-conspirator with the filmmakers, slyly tweaking her own offscreen activities.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emitaï
    As usual with Sembene, there is much fascinating ethnological detail; more importantly, this is a film by an African for Africans, designed to make them share discovery and revelation: the limitations of myth, the cruelty of the oppressor, the fortitude of the people, the need for revolution. [22 Jun 1972, p.75]
    • Village Voice
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Train Robbers
    Burt Kennedy wrote and directed the movie, which consists mostly of scenic rides on horseback, waiting for the outlaws to appear, and talking wisely while waiting. [22 Mar 1973, p.83]
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Heartbreak Kid
    May's second feature is a funny and sometimes side-splitting film whose whole never approaches the success of its best moments in which the two levels of romantic fantasy and satire are reconciled. [28 Dec 1972, p.53]
    • Village Voice
  69. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    One of the best titles in movie history and a cast to match.
  70. Lady Sings the Blues
    By any formal standards, it is a mess, but, surprisingly often, a moving mess. [23 Nov 1972, p.77]
    • Village Voice
  71. 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 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Late Spring (1949)
    You either get it or you don't. I get it. At least until I see some Ozus I've missed, Late Spring seems to me his greatest achievement, and, thus, one of the 10 best films of all time. [17 Aug 1972, p.57]
    • Village Voice
  73. Hannie Caulder
    The humor isn't much here either despite a trio of classic bad goon performances by Jack Elam, Strother Martin, and Ernest Borgnine. [06 Jul 1972, p.49]
    • Village Voice
  74. The Candidate
    But why would so many critics fall for a piece of cheese like “The Candidate?” Robert Redford cultism? Partly, I suppose.
  75. Duck, You Sucker
    As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    Twins loses its center and therefore the nightmarish force of the earlier film. [10 Aug 1972, p.57]
    • Village Voice
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    Protracted sequences make you impatient for forward motion, but then, in an instant, you’re left to mourn beauties hastened away.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pocket Money
    There's an ease, a simplicity to the thing which often reminds me of Raoul Walsh's stories of simple-minded adventurers venturing into the unknown wilderness. But the carefully-constructed and well-acted buddy-buddy relationship between Newman and Marvin never coalesces into a plot. [08 Jun 1972, p.71]
    • Village Voice
  79. A Clockwork Orange
    Let me report simply that A Clockwork Orange manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy...The last third of the movie is such a complete bore that even audiences of confirmed Kubrickians have drowned out smatterings of applause with prolonged hissing.
  80. Nicholas and Alexandra
    The sobriety of the entire enterprise is ill-suited to the lurid period in history it represents. [23 Dec 1971, p.61]
    • Village Voice
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    200 Motels
    With all the mumbo jumbo of necromancy and visual pyrotechnics, there is little real magic, and in the absence of any central organizing presence, the film needs more of Zappa's punctuating wit. [25 Nov 1971, p.79]
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    About the only thing to praise in Daughters is the way Seyrig looks: she is stunning in soft focus, chiffon, and egret. The dialogue and plot demands are unsurmountable burdens even for an actress as accomplished as she is. [01 Jul 1971, p.51]
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black God, White Devil
    The best parts of the film arise from the tension generated between the conventional use of myth and the simultaneous debunking of it. [16 Sept 1971]
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    If for nothing else, Jessica is worth seeing for the presence of Zohra Lampert, and intelligent actress whose talent has somehow never been sufficiently appreciated. [14 Oct 1971, p.75]
    • Village Voice
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Night Digger
    The Night Digger is by no means an unalloyed masterpiece. It's director seems preoccupied with nuance to the detriment of narrative, and consequently much of the film looks like a triumph of mood over matter. [17 Jun 1971, p.75]
    • Village Voice
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    The Red Tent manages not to collapse and is on the whole a likable movie. It reminded me of the typical '50s epics - lavishly produced, lushly scored, requiring relatively little thought, and perfect for two hours escape. [26 Aug 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  87. The Panic in Needle Park
    Winn pretty much plays it as it lays—her obvious acting works with her character’s weak sense of self. Pacino, however, is a force of nature.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    A richly picturesque, multi-leveled film. [20 May 1971, p.66]
    • Village Voice
  89. Carnal Knowledge
    Carnal Knowledge is a movie that almost lives up to it's brilliant title. [08 Jul 1971, p.34]
    • Village Voice
  90. Klute
    The dread and unease that suffuse the film — never has the peal of a rotary phone sounded more terrifying — seem rooted partly in anxiety over second-wave feminism, the cresting of which nearly coincided with the release of this movie, one that centers on its heroine’s profound ambivalence about growing emotionally attached to a man.
  91. 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
  92. The Anderson Tapes
    I thought there were about 11 good minutes in it, and the rest confused and uncertain. [22 Jul 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    Paul Wendkos, a director with a cult-following is responsible, and he makes you appreciate Polanski's extraordinary discretion in the handling of similar material. [15 Apr 1971, p.69]
    • Village Voice
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    They Might Be Giants
    The wit turns into Christmas Card cuteness, and the film winds up, in the blinding bathos of the last scene, in a veritable miasma of mush. [24 Jun 1971, p.60]
    • Village Voice
  95. Plaza Suite
    Plaza Suite is a strenuous bore, far less amusing than the play, but no less empty and heartless in its insistence on creating grotesques for easy laughs and then forcing them to feel sorry for even easier pathos. [20 May 1971, p.61]
    • Village Voice
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    Does for the black movement what Getting Straight did for the student movement: reduces it to escapist entertainment, cinematic stylishness, and near nonsense. [13 May 1971, p.68]
    • Village Voice
  97. There Was a Crooked Man...
    I thoroughly enjoyed There Was A Crooked Man for its inhaling the fresh air of liberty on today's screen without its gagging on the fumes of gratuitous license. [31 Dec 1970, p.39]
    • Village Voice
  98. Husbands
    Husbands confirms, if indeed any confirmation were needed, that John Cassavetes is one of the major American film-makers of the past decade, and one of the most tortured and turgid as well. [10 Dec 1970, p.69]
    • Village Voice
  99. Gimme Shelter
    A pop culture document for a mass audience.
  100. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes emerges ultimately as a poetic parable of both storytelling and moviemaking, and somehow it all fits together. [12 Nov 1970, p.59]
    • Village Voice
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