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. Pride
    Pride hits some bumpy patches when it switches gears between comedy and gentle pathos, which it does often. But its spirit is bold enough to power through the rough spots. It’s easy to find fault with Pride, but it’s not so easy to resist it.
  2. 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.
  3. Hotel Rwanda
    It's a gut-twisting story handled, largely and predictably, with asbestos mitts.
  4. Eureka
    A film of rare tenderness and mystery.
  5. Photographic Memory
    Alternating between time periods and geographic locations, all of it connected by McElwee's narrated thoughts, the film proves a bracing and sometimes uncomfortable peek into private fears and regrets about mortality and missed opportunities. It's also, in its portrait of wayward Adrian, further proof that there's nothing more difficult, frustrating, messy, and insufferable than teenagerdom.
  6. 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.
  7. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    For all the frenzied activity, Joan Rivers is less informative dish than infomercializing cliché.
  8. Baran
    Remains simplistic and gimmicky in the context of Iranian cinema.
  9. Chunhyangdyun
    Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.
  10. High Fidelity
    It may seem perverse to fault a movie for being too accurate, but when surface accuracy is coupled with tunnel vision about self and society the result is a wee bit irritating.
  11. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    The film, with its traditional mix of talking heads and vintage footage, does not try to hide the Panthers' advocacy of violence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Coriolanus
    In the case of Ralph Fiennes's adaptation of Coriolanus - the transposition to present day is confusing and counterproductive, dulling the impact of an otherwise fierce, often unbearably immediate production.
  13. Counting
    What surprises (a little) and fascinates (a lot) are the town-to-town commonalities Counting invites you to appraise.
  14. A Most Violent Year
    Grand in its aims but tepid in its conclusions, A Most Violent Year burns slow and gives off very little heat. It's not really that violent. But it sure feels like a year.
  15. I Am Love
    When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way.
  16. Gone Girl
    The movie, while entertaining and extremely well crafted, is too self-conscious about its depravity to be either truly disturbing or disturbingly funny. Ticking along with metronome-like efficiency, it's more slick than sick.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Central Park Five
    Because the filmmakers were unable to enlist anyone from the NYPD or the DA's office to participate, we are left with the sense that mistakes of this magnitude require those in error to hide from them.
  18. Mountains May Depart
    It's a powerful idea in the abstract, the culmination of three acts that cover a 25-year catastrophe with a time-lapse breathlessness. It just never leaves the abstract and becomes flesh.
  19. Wagner's Dream
    It remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which - by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition - Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination.
  20. Kinsey
    Opening too late for the election but still one the year's most politically relevant movies, Condon's earnestly middlebrow biopic is an argument for tolerance and diversity.
  21. Sami Blood
    Matter-of-fact in its scenecraft but searing in its content, Sami Blood is about girlhood and racism, passing and escape.
  22. Good Luck
    As often in Russell’s films, Good Luck splits the interest between observer and observed, between the lives that Russell and crew capture in their painstaking long takes and the very process of composing and shooting those takes.
  23. Gabrielle
    At once robust and ethereal, this is an existential ghost story, with fresh blood pulsing through its veins.
  24. Beautiful People
    It seems like a more witty, wise, and succinct "Magnolia."
  25. Madadayo
    Unabashedly personal and uncool...but between you and me, dear reader, I love it to death.
  26. War Photographer
    The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.
  27. Sexy Beast
    There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.
  28. Policeman
    Lapid is so unconcerned with crafting a conventional crime drama that merely titling his film Policeman reads as a minor subversion, a way of defining the narrative in relation to a genre it hardly fits into.
  29. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played, but "Brian's Song," J"erry Maguire," and "The Longest Yard" notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time.
  30. 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]
  31. Dear White People
    The small miracle of the movie is that Simien finds so many laughs in what are genuinely bewildering issues.
  32. 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.
  33. Broken Flowers
    With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)
  34. Loving
    Loving downplays the historical significance of its subject in favor of a quiet humanity.
  35. Silence
    Not since The Tree of Life has Christianity been explored onscreen in such serious, conflicted terms, but Scorsese has crafted a far less grandiose experience than Terrence Malick did five years ago. Silence is restrained, austere, even ascetic.
  36. November
    Above all else, November, shot in gorgeous black-and-white by Mart Taniel, is a smorgasbord of deliciously grotesque imagery.
  37. I've Loved You So Long
    A modestly satisfying tale of sisterly love weighed down by a history of family betrayal and mendacity.
  38. The Crash Reel
    Walker never has Pearce explain why he wants to return the lifts, and he never has to. The heights speak for themselves.
  39. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Kent Jones's documentary take on François Truffaut's exhaustive career-survey 1966 interview with Alfred Hitchcock is an arresting précis, sharply edited and generous with its film clips — it's a smashing supplement to Truffaut's classic study.
  40. The Order of Myths
    Quietly shocking, The Order of Myths is a deft, engrossing cross-section of Mobile life, heavy on local color and insight.
  41. Flags of Our Fathers
    To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains.
  42. Reprise
    Reprise--a masculine story whose women come off best--is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic, and strangely beautiful riff on growing up in a broken world.
  43. Bright Leaves
    Continuing the autobiographical torrent begun nearly 30 years ago, Bright Leaves is an utterly mundane miracle, a sampling of gentle insight and poetic retrospection quietly at odds with the exploitative culture around it.
  44. The Winslow Boy
    This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.
  45. What Time Is It Over There?
    Filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai's deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior.
  46. El Mar La Mar
    Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.
  47. Night Comes On
    All through the film, you pray it doesn’t go down the bleak routes that films like this usually go — and, most of the time, it does. Night Comes On is an assured first shot from Spiro but, damn, I couldn’t wait for this fucking thing to be over.
  48. Look at Me
    Little in a Jaoui film is particularly original, but it's all perfectly convincing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Summer Palace
    The director is at his best portraying the dingy dorms and vivid idealism of college life; his film stalls when it meanders away from these particulars toward a sweeping but empty attempt at the epic.
  50. Drive
    Basically, Drive is a song of courtly love and devotion among the automatons. It's a machine, but it works.
  51. The Fighter
    It plays as a "Rocky"-fied fairy tale for our time: Consigned to Palookaville, a sweet, unassuming boxer with more heart than brains steps up-all the way to the top of the world.
  52. Jodorowsky's Dune
    At least we have this gem, the rare tease of what could have been that actually proves satisfying enough on its own.
  53. The Five Obstructions
    An unclassifiable film-school exercise--one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto--The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.
  54. Iron Monkey
    Anyone expecting the decorous serenity of the Ang Lee film should be aware that Iron Monkey strives for no more or less than comic-strip thwack and thump.
  55. Godzilla
    As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.
  56. The Visitor
    McCarthy unquestionably means well, but he's made one of those incredibly naïve movies that gives liberals a bad name, and which does more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it.
  57. Bang! The Bert Berns Story
    Blending stock footage, vintage audio, re-creation, and many testimonials from heavy hitters from Ben E. King to Van Morrison, Berns' son Brett keeps things visually lively, and not as morose as may be implied.
  58. Green Room
    Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way.
  59. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    Don't Think I've Forgotten is a testament to how much a song can mean: You can destroy the vinyl it's been recorded on, but the sound itself, and all it stands for, is indestructible. Groove is in the heart.
  60. Colliding Dreams
    Admittedly, it's an awfully low bar that makes a film about the Middle East radical simply for taking into account the opinions and experiences of people of color. But it's really, wonderfully refreshing to find one that centers on storytelling like this.
    • 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
  62. Iron Man
    Iron Man, too, is something that people will see regardless of the reviews, but here is the point: Where Michael Bay (Transformers) has mastered a kind of sensory-assaulting pop art, Favreau is a born storyteller who engages the audience's imagination rather than crushing it in a tsunami of digital noise.
  63. Silent Light
    The results are extraordinary. As understated as it is, the movie is both deeply absurd and powerfully affecting.
  64. Control Room
    This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.
  65. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    Here's a movie with magic.
  66. Salaam Bombay!
    The real star of this film is the crowded, neon-lit byways of the city itself.
  67. Only Lovers Left Alive
    Only Lovers Left Alive is silly and deeply serious at once, an elegy with a light touch and more than a dash of hope.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Much So Fast
    The film is no maudlin pity-fest: It's an absorbing account of fraternal love and obsession, as Stephen's brother assembles a "guerrilla science" foundation to find a cure when no one else will.
  69. In a World...
    Bell captures the insularity of certain professional pockets of Hollywood, with all their petty rivalries and backstabbing. But she's sharpest in her exploration of what makes women desire success, and what prevents them from getting it.
  70. Selma
    With Selma, DuVernay has pulled off a tricky feat, a movie based on historical events that never feels dull, worthy, or lifeless; it hangs together as a story and not just part of a lesson plan. The movie is at once intimate and grand in scope.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tabu
    Tabu manages to be both classical and modern, ironic and heartbreaking.
  72. Walking Out
    It’s a beautiful movie about unthinkable things.
  73. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Andersen's restless yet scholarly methods are contagious: He makes you want to become more well-rounded.
  74. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a much better and far less silly movie than its predecessor.
  75. Trolösa
    Much of what Faithless contains happens off-screen, told and retold as stories within stories, and so the actors typically work like oxen.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    It's worth shelling out to see this doc on a theater screen: The enthralling archival footage of Germany in the 1930s is rare stuff indeed, of superb photographic quality.
  77. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    That unexpected rage is the movie's most powerful emotional truth.
  78. Affliction
    As chilly a spectacle as you're likely to see. It's like watching a comeback in an empty stadium.
  79. Praise
    Projects a confessional frankness about human relationships that has the messy feel of truth.
  80. Let the Sunshine In
    An existential whirlwind even when it seems sitcom-flippant, Sunshine sees Denis continuing on an elevated cinematic plane.
  81. Life of Pi
    Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone.
  82. Let Me In
    There's a human tragedy somewhere here-but aggrandized puppy-love romance and stylish revenge fantasy is all that lingers.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Costa's grainy footage looks amateurish at times—at one point, she runs out of battery and the screen goes dark—but her rule-breaking is bold.
  84. For Those in Peril
    The film's finale is wild and daring and so perfectly executed that it marks Wright as one of the film year's most audacious new voices.
  85. Metalhead
    The film deftly marries the essence of the music to a moving coming-of-age framework.
  86. Fences
    This screen adaptation...is vital because it has the potential to reach marginalized communities. But it also stands as an aching, lyrical, performance-driven masterpiece in its own right, a film so intense and engrossing that movie houses really should screen it with an intermission.
  87. Chats perchés
    Approaching 85, cine-essayist Chris Marker remains as lively, engaged, and provocative as ever--and no less fond of indirection.
  88. The Witness
    As James D. Solomon's compelling and sometimes frustrating doc The Witness makes clear, what the case actually tells us isn't that we live lives of pitilessness or blinkered fear. It's that we're gullible as hell.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Miss Bala
    The character is intentionally lightly drawn: Laura's suffering is symbolic, a surrogate for the suffering of a society helplessly caught in the crossfire.
  90. Birders: The Central Park Effect
    Kimball's bird footage is attractive on its own, but the way he positions his birders in conversation with one another is why Birders soars.
  91. Mother
    For all its jarring sound design and herky-jerky pacing, founded on sudden incidents or shocking accidents, Mother is deftly plotted, applying Hitchcockian suspense with a Hitchcockian sense of fair play.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Keep the Lights On
    With its naked but never self-indulgent depictions of sex and all manner of addiction, Keep the Lights On is disarmingly, at times exhilaratingly, human.
  93. Fill the Void
    Burshtein's lush visual sensibility, and the subtle performances of the excellent cast, create an aching portrayal of longing and interdependence that transcends the boundaries of the family's small world.
  94. Hermia & Helena
    There are a few different potential films within Hermia & Helena — a Shakespeare adaptation, a tale of romantic relationships, a tale of family — but the totality proves a sunny and affable literary collage.
  95. 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    Temple's engrossing portrait of the Clash's late frontman uses endlessly suggestive montage to show how he kept punk's precepts alive, even after he left the music and eventually the earth itself.
  97. Searching for Sugar Man
    Fluid, open-ended documentaries that demand more of an audience than foregone assent or fleeting bouts of passive outrage are rare these days, which is what makes Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man such a gift.
  98. Sing Street
    Sing Street pleases, all right, and even occasionally hits on truth.
  99. Keane
    Keane is a painfully specific figure but at the same time a totem, lean and frightening, for a morass of modern anxieties. That might be this phenomenal film's emergent achievement: Its raw hopelessness is its universality.
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