Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Office
    Wry and self-aware but never finger-wagging, Office looks back on an economic precipice and finds more humor and spirit than any other depiction yet made about it.
  2. 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
  3. Sita Sings the Blues
    Paley's beguiling, consistently inventive visuals and sly yet melancholy tone are about as warm and winning as heartbreak-fueled empowerment gets.
  4. Dream Boat
    For all the outrageous cosplay and assless trunks on display, director Tristan Ferland Milewski is more interested in exploring the interior lives of gay men.
  5. Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi
    It's the closest most of us will get to spending time with fellow humans who have extraordinary perspectives on ordinary things — and ordinary perspectives, too.
  6. Hearts in Atlantis
    The heartfelt use of extrasensory events as metaphors for a child's grasp of adult mysteries has a poetry to it, and the unblinking sympathy for kids struggling with evil and with the strange frequencies of prepubescent passion can, if your defenses are down, lay you out.
  7. Ponyo
    It's a movie for anyone who, like Miyazaki himself, can still happily commune with his inner five-year-old.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Americanization of Emily
    Garner plays the scales of cynicism so gracefully in this anti-war gem, he makes them sound like a symphony.
  9. Seed: The Untold Story
    It's a wonder of photography, animation, and sound, and it's a testament to its editors that the many interviews with activists and scientists are compelling and informative, sometimes even poetic.
  10. Our Children
    Can a film that holds no surprises be of value? In the case of Our Children, which masterfully plays with stylistic conventions and all-too-common instances of real-life matricide, the answer is decidedly yes.
  11. Holy Air
    The humor in Shady Srour’s Holy Air isn’t entirely satirical, but the bone-dry wit is breathtaking.
  12. Empathy
    Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic.
  13. Francofonia
    Skipping across ages and genres, this cine-essay beguilement from Russian Ark director Alexander Sokurov considers the Louvre — and the miracle of the transmission of art and culture across its history.
  14. Scumrock
    Gripping, strangely beautiful, and poignant.
  15. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    We’re fortunate to witness such impassioned consideration of Houston’s art, career, and life from the people who actually knew her. Still, it’s notable that Crawford isn’t interviewed here.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marathon
    In its ability to transform the drably mundane into something otherworldly, Marathon offers one of the most inventive reimaginings of the MTA since D.A. Pennebaker's 1953 cine-poem "Daybreak Express."
  17. What Time Is It Over There?
    Filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai's deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior.
  18. Logan Lucky
    It’s a relief to watch a commercial movie from a director who trusts you to figure out plot points along the way.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    District B13
    Spread the word: This delirious import is the most (maybe the only) fun action movie of the summer.
  20. Mutual Appreciation
    Gently persistent in its ironies, "Funny Ha Ha" managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so.
  21. Hot Fuzz
    A British variation on Hollywood nonsense, and as such it's a little gloomier, a little coarser, and a lot more cerebral--oh, and funnier than all the "Reno 911!" boxed sets combined.
  22. Hitler's Children
    Interweaving interviews and footage of Rainer Hess's first trip to Auschwitz, Hitler's Children is a powerful and well-judged presentation of the stories and their impossibilities.
  23. Cyrus
    A freakishly engrossing black comedy about excessively mothered men and the women who enable them.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    William Eggleston in the Real World
    Subtle, elegant documentary.
  25. A Family Affair
    It’s a potent psychodrama, pitting Marianne’s reality against the one Fassaert is documenting
  26. Autumn Tale
    If the carefully planted romantic intrigue is serenely slow to ripen, the process is never less than intriguing.
  27. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    The slippages and contradictions between who people are, imagine themselves to be, and present themselves as being inform the structure of Machine, a kind of loose container into which people step and out of which they extract more ideal selves.
  28. Nicholas Nickleby
    The entire unwieldy contraption rests on the shoulders of erstwhile "Queer as Folk" jailbait Hunnam: Bleached and bland, earnest and wooden, he's exactly what the film asks him to be.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chop Shop
    Authentic as all this feels (and smells, and tastes), Chop Shop gives off a heightened sense of reality, a faintly idealized atmosphere akin to the Lower East Side milieu of "Raising Victor Vargas," a close relative in the New York branch of neo-neorealism.
  30. Five Easy Pieces
    The plot is sometimes too odd, the style too strained, but the movie holds you just the same. Jack Nicholson plays skillfully and honestly against the sure-fire pathos of the alienated loner, the fallen angel in life’s game of musical chairs.
  31. Black Rain
    A minor triumph of atmosphere and nightmare imaginings.
  32. Praise
    Projects a confessional frankness about human relationships that has the messy feel of truth.
  33. Field Niggas
    Allah, a street photographer of deserved renown, has achieved something here beyond the familiar documentary impulse to show us the people who live on the streets. His immersive, unsettling techniques dig at a sense of what it might feel like to be among them.
  34. The Big Sick
    For the vast majority of its running time, The Big Sick astutely pulls you between the twin poles of agony and glee.
  35. The Blonds
    Unpretentiously poetic and casually stylish, yet perversely precise. Reconstructing the past, Carri seems to suggest, is akin to grabbing the water in a flowing stream.
  36. Boston
    Boston, Jon Dunham’s film about that city’s marathon, is a contender — an emotional comeback story, interspersed with thrilling moments in its history, without gloss, cliche or even nostalgia.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    There's enough wisdom in this appropriately compact film to suggest avenues of further, though likely not as wondrous, inquiry.
  38. A Touch of Sin
    In A Touch of Sin, Jia is attuned to, and saddened by, the violence he sees creeping through his country, caused at least partly by the ever-widening disparity between rich and poor. He ends on a note that's more haunting than hopeful.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Forbidden Lie$
    This entertaining, provocative film raises pointed issues about con artists and their sometimes-culpable "victims," and also speaks to the elusive pursuit of documentary truth.
  40. Shot in the Heart
    A small-screen aesthetic is evident in the abundant close-ups and tight framing, but Holland makes it work for her.
  41. Skate Kitchen
    In Skate Kitchen, the kids come as they are, and they’re wildly fascinating.
  42. Winnie the Pooh
    At barely over an hour, the film still overflows with musical charm, nostalgic wonder, and visual wit (characters literally interact with the words on Milne's pages). This one will make you feel eight years old again.
  43. Pusher
    As botched-drug-deal tales go, Pusher digs surprisingly deep— its surface clichés give way to an existential despair that finally swallows the movie whole.
  44. Teacher's Pet
    Continues Disney's trend of crafting animated movies as much for adult viewers as for their pre-adolescent progeny.
  45. Cheatin'
    The early scenes, of the couple falling for each other, offer more inspired gorgeous wonder than late Malick films, and the emotions are more piercing.
  46. The Last Christeros
    A war film consumed with waiting.
  47. Black Book
    Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Drama/Mex
    "Amores Perros" is a yappy whelp compared to this striking degrees-of-separation drama by Mexican writer-director Gerardo Naranjo.
  49. Scarlet Diva
    What a world we'd live in if Argento's Hollywood counterparts -- say, Sarah Michelle Gellar, or even Christina Ricci -- had this much imagination and nerve. Few of them, at any rate, have Argento's reserves of lonesome passion and unspigoted woe.
  50. Solas
    The fierce rigor of María Galiana's performance keeps this film from ever falling into sentimentality.
  51. Modern Times (re-release)
    Remains Chaplin's most sustained burlesque of authority.
  52. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    Buirski clearly shows that the spark that made her great couldn't be snuffed out so easily.
  53. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past.
  54. La Nouvelle Ève
    Takes its shape from (Viard's) performance, which is as big as life.
  55. The Settlers
    What Dotan has to say — in arresting new footage — about today’s Hilltop Youth, a right-wing Jewish Israeli settler organization that unites and mobilizes young people to occupy territory in the West Bank, is crucial and, in the American context, frighteningly familiar.
  56. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.
  57. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis.
  58. George Washington
    It's at once brilliant and inept.
  59. Late Marriage
    Kosashvili's camera is restrained, the better to render Late Marriage superbly brash, raunchy, and confrontational.
  60. A River Changes Course
    For the most part, the narrative here feels generational, representative, rather than invested in the specific incidents of specific lives.
  61. Baadasssss!
    Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.
  62. On the Waterfront
    Like many cult films, it is also less than the sum of its parts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    28 Weeks Later
    The sequel trumps its predecessor for sustained doomsday gloom and suggests this might be the man to adapt Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road.
  64. Kedi
    In its own pleasantly dreamy and lilting way, the film embodies what it preaches: As life gets rougher, people endure not by hardening themselves even further, but by continuing to find the freedom to be kind. In Istanbul, the chaos never really stops. Kedi slyly reminds us that the humanity, too, has always been there.
  65. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Crouching Tiger's dramatic line is so blurry that the central character is only a bystander to the climactic fight between forces of good and evil.
  66. Stuck on You
    Damon and Kinnear are both pitch-perfect, inhabiting their ingenuous, codependent little universe together with the commitment of eight-year-old best friends. True to form, the Farrellys toss sophomoric spitballs at us, but nothing stems the rise of big-hearted generosity.
  67. Wampler's Ascent
    From cinematographer Corey Rich's beautifully framed footage, Wampler's wife, Elizabeth, making her directorial debut, has assembled a stirring film that's part documentary, and part promotional tool.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme
    Despite cloying narration, Fitzgerald's footage and interviews are fantastic.
  69. Nocturama
    The film mesmerizes and alienates equally.
  70. Big Sonia
    The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.
  71. Postman Pat: The Movie
    Postman Pat: The Movie is one of the best family films to come down the pike this year.
  72. 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.
  73. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Seeing the breadth of Didion’s work and its impact on the culture represented cumulatively delivers an unexpected shock to the system.
  74. Left on Purpose
    An anguished and compassionate chronicle of Schein and Vishner's relationship.
  75. The Swan
    Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Murphy has never been a typical rock star, and Shut Up is by no means a conventional rock documentary.
  77. The Commuter
    The director’s stylistic obsessions (harried close-ups of cell-service signal bars) and thematic integrity (witness the overworked 9-to-5 crowd banding together in solidarity) elevate the cheap-paperback plot without tipping the movie over into pomposity.
  78. Occupy the Farm
    The film is riveting from the start, with its ragtag multiculti heroines and heroes meshing multiple identity markers (activist, academic, refurbished hippie), often within individual selves.
  79. Up the Yangtze
    By journey's end, Yung has found, in the Yangtze, a brilliant natural metaphor for upward mobility in modern China: Whether they hail from the lowlands or the urban centers, everyone here is scrambling to reach higher ground.
  80. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    A 157-minute police procedural at once sensuous and cerebral, profane and metaphysical, "empty" and abundant, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is closer to the Antonioni of "L'Avventura," and it elevates the 52-year-old director to a new level of achievement.
  81. Step Brothers
    Not to wax too serious here (since this is, after all, a movie in which two nearly middle-aged men beat each other over the heads with blunt instruments on their front lawn), but ticking away just beneath Step Brothers' freely associative surface is a fairly astute commentary on how we define such abstract concepts as "growing up" and "making something of yourself."
  82. 24 City
    Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.
  83. Margarita Happy Hour
    Chaiken ably balances real-time rhythms with propulsive incident -- she catches subtler interior strains, too.
  84. My Mother's Smile
    "A very odd thriller" is how Italian director Marco Bellocchio describes My Mother's Smile, his uncannily beautiful and deeply humanist exploration of the nightmares that resurface from a Roman atheist's Catholic childhood.
  85. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    As tight as the parallel homo sapiens storylines are lax, Caesar's prison conversion to charismatic pan-ape revolutionist is near-silent filmmaking, with simple and precise images illustrating Caesar's General-like divining of personalities and his organization of a group from chaos to order. All of this is shown in absorbing, propulsive style, as Caesar broodingly bides his time like a king in disguise awaiting restoration.
  86. Alexandra
    Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in general and the Russian occupation of Chechnya in particular, this is a movie in which combat is never shown.
  87. Okraina
    Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.
  88. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    This is an intimate portrait of the artist in recent years as she returns to Jamaica, the country of her birth and childhood, for a family reunion.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede (First Sequence)
    Centipede plays on the notion that the only thing more frightening than death is a state bridging life and death, in which, though one's body is no longer his own to control, the mind remains conscious.
  90. Workingman's Death
    Michael Glawogger's rather majestic Workingman's Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe.
  91. You're Next
    You're Next streamlines the gory stuff for something truly shocking: good characters. Not deep, mind you. But characters who are crayoned in bright enough that they're interesting even while alive.
  92. A Song for Martin
    Scenes from a marriage unfolding at the limits of love and personality.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    Kuenne lovingly assembles home-movie footage and new interviews, while deftly borrowing a narrative trick from fiction--the plot twist--to create a true-crime story so gripping, devastating, and ultimately unforgettable that it easily trumps any thriller Hollywood has to offer this year.
  94. Café Lumière
    Exquisitely understated.
  95. Brothers Hypnotic
    We see Phil's sons honoring him while going their own ways in a years-long effort to find the right pitch.
  96. The Price of Milk
    A shaggy, appealing parable involving two lovers, some gorgeous heifers, gentle Maori gangster-golfers, and a dilapidated suitcase packed with used baby shoes, The Price of Milk throws itself onto the magic-realist sword with aplomb.
  97. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's modern-day retelling of a Korean fairy tale is an experiment in space, narrative and physical.
  98. Osmosis Jones
    Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.
  99. The Best Man Holiday
    Lee seems less interested in capturing how people of color talk than in capturing how people talk. He coaxes us to step in and listen, and the very casualness of his invitation is the key to the joyousness of The Best Man Holiday, flaws be damned.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »