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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Gold
    No mere Western-guilt-inducing harangue, this highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis is a model of patient storytelling.
  2. Deliver Us from Evil
    Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ritchie Boys
    These are men who know of what they speak; they're also eloquent, erudite, and funny as hell.
  4. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    [Goldthwait] handles it beautifully, crafting from such rough stuff something astoundingly sweet and sharply funny about forgiveness, unconditional love, tenderness, and the things we hide just to get ourselves from one day to the next.
  5. 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Requiem
    Sandra Hüller, a young German stage actress making a harrowing feature debut, invests Michaela's terrified, possibly schizophrenic outbursts with unholy conviction.
  7. Climates
    A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absolute Wilson
    The real value of this film is its treasure trove of archival footage, rare clips that document this genius of an artist as a young man.
  9. The History Boys
    The film version of The History Boys is a lesser thing, more fixed in space and time and rendered almost unbearably "cinematic" in patches by Hytner's gymnastic camerawork. Yet the ideas and feelings of the piece remain so rich that it almost doesn't matter.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Filthy World
    Waters's best bits are nostalgic, as he remembers his late friend and frequent collaborator Divine. Part memoir, part lecture, This Filthy World reaffirms what most of us already know from "The Wire": In a town full of delightful misfits, Waters may be Baltimore's sanest citizen.
  11. Dreamgirls
    Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Venus
    Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.
  13. Notes on a Scandal
    Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work -- "Fatal Attraction" for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tears of the Black Tiger
    Nothing is too crazed, corny, or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called "Blissfully Yours."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Make It Funky!
    A love letter to New Orleans, Make It Funky! reminds us of what has been lost in the flood, and of an artistic spirit that will never dissipate.
  16. Mafioso [re-release]
    Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Unreasonable Man
    If the film shows that few men are as unreasonable as Ralph Nader, it also shows that few have so succeeded in shaping their world: His legacy of progressive legislation will affect generations to come.
  18. Breach
    This is a spy movie bereft of the genre's usual, casual kicks. It's not interested in cheap thrills or playing gotcha with the audience. (Which isn't to say parts of it aren't exhilarating.)
  19. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller.
  20. Shooter
    Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    My long strums are pretty f---ing tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive mock-rock and/or the further decline of Western civ.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    This was basically the best idea ever. The setting brims over with the same wicked froth of danger, exoticism, and passion that 19th-century Seville must have had before it got stylized into oblivion.
  23. Black Book
    Black Book, which takes its title from a secret list of Dutch collaborators, is an impressively old-fashioned yet fashionably embittered movie.
  24. Red Road
    No one does poetic British with more remorseless hyper-realism than the Scots, and Arnold, who amassed a raft of reputable awards for her 2003 short film "Wasp," directs with a precociously sure touch and a raw taste for graphic sexuality rare in a woman helmer. It shocks, yet feels organic to the paranoid, loveless milieu portrayed in Red Road.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock the Bells
    An electrifying, occasionally terrifying documentary.
  26. 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.
  27. Fracture
    Gosling is the kind of actor who makes other actors look lazy. He is Brando at the time of "Streetcar," or Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces," and altogether one of the more remarkable happenings at the movies today.
  28. Triad Election
    To's take on the plight of the modern gangste is inspired.
  29. Les amitiés maléfiques
    Not for nothing did this movie open the International Critics' Week (and win its grand prize) last year at Cannes; Poison Friends may be all talk, but it's cut like an action flick.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Golden Door
    With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan
    More than a vibrant experiment in ethnomusical cross-pollination, it's just great fun.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strike
    This is Iron Curtain porn at its most shameless--a rousing industrial rock song plays in the background every time Schlöndorff wants to invoke the Spirit of Labor--but Thalbach's Agnieszka is irresistible.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Manufactured Landscapes
    Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes.
  34. 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time
    Simply put, Time is about the eternal war between infatuation and familiarity, and our irreconcilable need to find both in the same person. In other words, it's a parable about the root of human unhappiness.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Willow Tree
    There's very little explicit exposition here; instead, Majidi presents us with a series of glistening tone poems.
  37. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In the Shadow of the Moon
    In the Shadow of the Moon recalls the wondrous moment when America had the entire world looking up, up, and not away.
  39. Shoot 'Em Up
    Extremely violent guilty pleasure of a thriller.
  40. The Rape of Europa
    Impressive in scope if unremarkable in style, The Rape of Europa provides a chronology of World War II as it was experienced by "David," "Mona Lisa," and other artistic treasures the Nazis plundered.
  41. Lake of Fire
    At once monumental and ghostly.
  42. Michael Clayton
    Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kurt Cobain About a Son
    About a Son is essentially a dead rock star talking about his life for an hour and a half, and—here, jacket-blurbers!—it's deeply moving.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Culture
    Slipping in and out of character, variously embodying, studying, and commenting on their counterparts, the actors manage both dramatic reenactment and its deconstruction with aplomb.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone Baby Gone
    In his strikingly downbeat directorial debut, Affleck has created something of a blue-moon rarity: an American movie of genuine moral complexity.
  46. Terror's Advocate
    Terror's Advocate is largely a mix of talking heads and archival footage, but as Vergés's connections to Swiss neo-Nazis and Congo secessionists are explored, the movie becomes a fantastic international thriller.
  47. We Own the Night
    The closest thing Gray's done to a commercial actioner, the film also applies his genius for tone (aided by superlative sound work) to set pieces that throb with trauma: a tinnitus-soundtracked shoot-out and a rain-slick car chase set to the tempo of windshield wipers.
  48. American Gangster
    As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott's would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson article on Lucas that inspired the movie, a real-life Superfly.
  49. Starting Out in the Evening
    This wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché in the book.
  50. Looking for Cheyenne
    A beguiling comedy from a Marxist-inflected thesis that is filled with characters who rage against the machine with pessimism, optimism, and naïveté--sometimes in rotation.
  51. Charlie Wilson's War
    Dark and funny and mean and sexy, damned near pitch-black-perfect considering that at the end of this boozy comedy you wind up with, oh, Osama bin Laden.
  52. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    No Greek tragedy, this Hollywood Sweeney is a FUN creepy-crawly. If nothing else, Burton has learned that the successfully gruesome is its own reward.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Witnesses
    The Witnesses forms a magnificent trilogy with "Son Frère" (2003), Patrice Chéreau's devastating account of fraternal devotion in the face of death, and the amazing, acerbic "Before I Forget," a brooding and bitter tale of survival coming soon from Jacques Nolot, here lending an iconic cameo as the proprietor of Manu's hooker hotel.
    • 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.
  55. 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.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable.
  59. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Despite the rosary beads Red wraps around his wrist, Hellboy II doesn't have much on its mind, but few will care since del Toro and his stellar "Pan's Labyrinth" team, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, stage one virtuoso set-piece after another.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    Last year's Academy Award nominee from Kazakhstan for Best Foreign Film, Mongol is purportedly the first in a multi-film saga on the wrath of Khan; as such, it's probably the last thing you'd expect--great fun.
  61. My Winnipeg
    In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.
  62. Pineapple Express
    A savvy nod to 1980s action comedies, down to the Huey Lewis original that plays over the end credits. But its greatest achievements lie in the tossed-off non sequiturs, the pop-culture (and Scott Baio) allusions, and the unexpected respites in the midst of all the bang-bang-boom.
  63. 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."
  64. Boy A
    The film's both smart and devastating as it unthreads interwoven questions about redemption, justice, and the pivotal role of history in shaping an individual and his actions.
  65. Bustin' Down the Door
    Engaging, elegantly made surf documentary.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble the Water
    The resilience of the movie's subjects--survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV--irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine.
  67. Body of Lies
    Its generic attributes (and title) notwithstanding, Scott's film may be the sharpest of all the post-9/11 thrillers--and also the most purely entertaining--in the way it maps the vectors and currents of the modern intelligence-gathering game without losing us in its dense narrative thicket.
    • 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.
  69. Splinter
    Buoyed by solid ensemble work, some yuckily effective special effects, and a script that subverts genre convention by having its characters do smart things instead of stupid ones (mostly), Splinter earns our respect while delivering 82 minutes of lean, mean fun.
  70. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    In adapting Irishman John Boyne's acclaimed young-adult novel, writer-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) draws beautifully modulated performances from his two child actors, who navigate a full range of emotions from wonder to betrayal to guilt.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eden
    This portrait of an imploding marriage is remarkable for every reason that counts in a good film.
  72. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    Impressionistic and lyrical, as well as somber and gripping, The Betrayal conveys a ceaseless flow. It's as if the filmmaker has opened a window onto a parallel world traveling beside our own.
  73. Milk
    Milk is so immediate that it's impossible to separate the movie's moment from this one.
  74. Bolt
    Bolt carries two tales for the price of one, both handled by Disney veterans and first-time directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard with wit, grace, and the dazzling craftsmanship we've come to expect from the studio that's hitched its wagon to Pixar.
  75. Medicine for Melancholy
    Tender, smart, soulful.
  76. 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.
  77. Monsters vs Aliens
    The grandeur of the effects--the honest-to-God spectacle of the thing--elevates Monsters vs. Aliens to something approaching art. It's not a masterpiece, but it's most certainly a milestone.
  78. 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Escapist
    A taut thriller that ends on a note of unexpected grace.
  80. Il Divo
    Il Divo plays like an elegantly ritualized black comedy.
  81. Outrage
    Moment by moment, Outrage proves duly provocative, well sourced, and almost certain to go more viral than swine flu.
  82. Rudo y Cursi
    Rudo y Cursi is as fatalistic as any film noir, but it's played for cartoonish screwball comedy. At once smooth and frantic, filled with cozy clutter and vulgar jive, the movie subsumes its moralizing in frat-house entertainment.
  83. O'Horten
    The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly.
  84. Jerichow
    Jerichow forgoes the prolonged double-crosses of "The Postman Always Rings Twice," its simpler ending made all the more powerful--and a little heartbreaking.
  85. Easy Virtue
    Quick! Noël Coward--sage or supercilious bitch? No matter where you stand, Stephan Elliott's deliciously cheeky screen adaptation of one of the satirist's lesser-known jabs at the British upper crust will charm your pants off.
  86. A Woman in Berlin
    One of the best of a new breed of indigenous movies prying open the Pandora's box of German suffering in World War II, A Woman in Berlin takes on the mass rape of German women by victorious Russian soldiers entering the country in 1945.
  87. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    The rise of video and the death of the drive-ins would eventually bring the curtain down on the Aussie schlock industry, but for two glorious hours, Not Quite Hollywood returns us to a time when the price of admission was cheap and the thrills even cheaper.
  88. Amreeka
    There's nothing bitter or cynical about Amreeka, which is directed with impish wit, an observant visual competence, and an open, conciliatory spirit.
  89. Disgrace
    The austere economy of Coetzee's writing, crisply adapted for the screen by Anna Maria Monticelli, plays out the melodrama with quietly brooding menace.
  90. You, the Living
    You, the Living flips through 50-some single-panel vignettes, many very funny.
  91. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Mainly, Fix the World is about the beauty of the riff. The Yes Men are funniest when addressing a straight audience, making outlandish claims in favor of the free market and the benefits of unregulated catastrophe--the Black Plague gave us capitalism!
  92. Off and Running
    A tactful but probing and richly satisfying study of an entire family thrown into self-doubt by a teenager venturing into risky territory as she struggles to find her way.
  93. Easier with Practice
    From the virtuoso 10-minute single shot that encompasses the initial phone call, to a long, traveling shot of Davy all but running from a humiliating sexual encounter, Alvarez trusts Geraghty's fear-and-wonder-filled eyes to tell the tale. These two need to make more movies together.
  94. Green Zone
    A master of smash-mash montage and choreographed chaos, Greengrass is the best action director working today, adroit at producing the sense of everyone converging and everything happening simultaneously.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    May be a shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own. Catch it before the inevitable U.S. remake.
  96. Greenberg
    Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.
  97. Swimming
    Director Robert J. Siegel allows the characters to inhabit their world without cleaving to a narrative arc. It's a luxurious hangout; spaces burgeon with goofy love and generous confusion.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    End of the Century
    Johnny's analysis and will carry the film. Of course they didn't get along--they were a rock group.
  99. How to Draw a Bunny
    Absorbing documentary portrait.
  100. Taboo
    An action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque.
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