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. Brawl in Cell Block 99
    This film is unusually slow-paced for its genre, but Zahler’s screenplay is driven by a solid central character and dialogue that might have made Elmore Leonard sit up straight.
  2. Quadrophenia (re-release)
    It remains one of the most wrenching films about adolescent angst, thanks largely to the performance of Phil Daniels.
  3. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Va Savoir has its own unhurried pace and unpredictable humor. This is the sort of comedy Robert Altman could only dream about.
  4. The Law in These Parts
    Dialectical and precise to the point of exhaustion, The Law in These Parts applies a cold anger to one of the geopolitical world's most passionate discords.
    • 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.
  6. Li'l Quinquin
    A Dumont film that paints its small-town milieu with as much humor as violence (though there's a fair dose of that, too) and finds some tenderness in life's absurdities.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Zodiac
    Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love
    A multi-perspectival film vastly superior to "Crash," Vladan Nikolic's dynamic thriller Love reinvigorates a stale cinematic format and imparts a compelling message all without a single head-on collision.
  9. Brand Upon the Brain!
    Not to discredit its wild artistry by saying the gimmick's the prize, but . . . the gimmick's the prize. Without all the hoopla, there simply isn't enough variation to this stylized fever-dream to justify its fatiguing running time, nor to call it anything less than predictably Maddin–esque.
  10. Sand Dollars
    Guzmán and Cárdenas present this tropical island as both Anne's romantic refuge and Noelí's exploitative landscape, a beautiful, enchanting — and realistic — Eden where snakes are merely snakes.
  11. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Nowhere has Cohen's inner turmoil been better illuminated than in Tony Palmer's lost-and-found 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire.
  12. Run Lola Run
    An enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion.
  13. Contemporary Color
    The approach is experiential, a you-are-there-and-overwhelmed dazzlement, rather than a definitive record of each squad's big moment.
  14. Black Swan
    A near-irresistible exercise in bravura absurdity, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan deserves to become a minor classic of heterosexual camp-at the very least, it's the most risible and riotous backstage movie since "Showgirls."
  15. Our School
    Despite the efforts of many interviewees to seem broad-minded, Nicoara has a knack for ferreting out moments that reveal actual Romanian attitudes.
  16. 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.
  17. Hilary and Jackie
    Hilary and Jackie tries far too hard to dictate emotional involvement right out of the gate, and you're left counting off the doom-laden cues for things that are sure to return full circle.
  18. Angels Wear White
    Qu unpacks much that matters in Angels Wear White, including the abuse of power and importance of status and wealth in Chinese society, but her most thoughtful, nuanced observations involve female sexuality.
  19. Indignation
    An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.
  20. The Devil's Backbone
    The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"
  21. Oki's Movie
    If the characterizations are fleeting, the recessive mood is not: Hong's signature observational style is at once offhanded and astute, romantic and lightly chilled.
  22. Enough Said
    Louis-Dreyfus and Gandolfini are lovely together, though her character is the sharper-edged of the two. It's Gandolfini's Albert, soft-hearted and soft-bellied, who suffers more. Gandolfini takes the movie's small, offhand jokes and intensifies them.
  23. Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
    Seeing the film now makes you weep for the passing of both actresses, of course. It also drives home the magnitude of losing Carrie Fisher’s hilarious, acerbic, insightful voice at a time when it seems more vital than ever. You leave the movie wanting so much more of her, it hurts.
  24. The Green Fog
    It’s not so much an assemblage as it is a conjuring. You don’t just watch these clips — you see through and between them. The juxtapositions create vital, cosmic connections.
    • 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.
  26. The Age of Shadows
    You may have seen parts of The Age of Shadows before, but they're rarely this well assembled.
  27. Insomnia
    Nolan, withholding master of disorientation in his previous non-linear films, allows far too easy access into the psychic tumult of Al Pacino's cop and Robin Williams's prime suspect.
  28. 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Control
    Despite excellent performances from Samantha Morton, Craig Parkinson, and the radiant Toby Kebbell, along with a noble effort from pretty newcomer Sam Riley as Curtis himself, Control is like a wake where the guests forgot to bring the booze and, for the most part, have nothing very nice or even particularly interesting to say about the deceased.
  30. The House of Mirth
    Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Flesh and Blood
    Single motherhood has seldom looked as daunting and enervating as it does in this unsentimental documentary.
  32. The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
    Boys is first-rate cinema archaeology. What pushes it beyond that is the brutal honesty with which the sibling rivalry between the elder Shermans is depicted; theirs is a palpable mixture of love and disdain that led to the men not socializing with each other for more than 40 years.
  33. The Supreme Price
    Lipper does an excellent job of using her film as a vehicle for the voices and concerns of Nigerians, and especially of Nigerian women, who are traditionally expected to stay at home while men operate in the public sphere. But Lipper does not limit her camera to political struggles.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Long Strange Trip
    If the story is known, this telling is lusher than any before, the film stuffed with rare archival footage and performance clips. The effect is one of coasting along amid a vast, noisy, variegated parade, vividly rendered. And that works just fine.
  35. Maison du Bonheur
    Bohdanowicz undertook the project without having previously met her subject, but for both the filmmaker and her audience, making Sellam’s acquaintance proves a rare pleasure.
  36. Starting Out in the Evening
    This wise, observant, and exquisitely tacit chamber piece complicates every May-December, academic-novel cliché in the book.
  37. Princess Mononoke
    Complex, superbly rendered, and wildly eccentric anime-even by Miyazaki's own standards.
  38. Out of the Blue (1980)
    For orchestrating lurid goonishness, Hopper can't be beat.
  39. Head-On
    Head-On loses its merry mojo once events turn irrevocable and the action switches from Hamburg to Istanbul.
  40. Lightning in a Bottle
    Offers a bumper crop of tasty bits.
  41. The Deep End
    Swinton provides her own brand of incandescence, doubling as the film's aching heart and its center of gravity.
  42. Aberdeen
    Norway's hallucinatory, edge-of-the-world beauty imbues the story with a woozy, alcoholic haze and a sense of the marginal spaces into which the messiest aspects of private life are shoved.
  43. The Taste of Others
    A pleasant time-passer.
  44. Thirteen
    The movie is as eloquently uninflected and filled with quirks as its star.
  45. Beware of Mr. Baker
    In spite of Bulger's errors of tone, the movie stands as an engaging tussle with the question of what is permissible with the excuse of art. One former collaborator of Baker's, John Lydon (a/k/a Rotten), comes up with the most eloquent absolution: "I cannot question anyone with end results that perfect."
  46. Public Speaking
    The quick-witted malcontent, a Morristown, New Jersey, refugee who arrived at Port Authority in 1969, is the best kind of New Yorker: one with a long memory who's averse to nostalgia.
  47. In the Fog
    In the Fog has the inevitability of an avalanche, and only our overfamilarity with Nazi-tribulation scenarios, and perhaps its excessively punctuated ending, could slow it down. A better anti-summer blockbuster is hard to imagine.
  48. A Bug's Life
    There are big crowd scenes, intimate close-ups, and lots of bug’s-eye point-of-view shots. Call me gullible: I believed every second of it.
  49. Daratt
    African director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's austere, hypnotic third feature explores the legacy of Chad's decades-long civil war.
  50. The Soft Skin (1969)
    The Soft Skin is a movie about the agony and ecstasy of an extramarital affair. Truffaut treats it like a crime film-low-key yet tense, filled with carefully planted potential "clues" and an undercurrent of anxiety.
  51. Tatsumi
    If the structure sometimes disrupts the story of his life, the strong lines and melancholy sensibility of the illustration form an anchor that keep the power of Tatsumi's work firmly in view.
  52. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
    This film is one of our best documents of the civil rights era, but it is also a portrait of someone with a singular perspective, a big mind, and a joyous aptitude for conversation.
  53. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop.
  54. Funny Ha Ha
    The final scene is as close to perfection as any Amerindie has come in recent memory--in a single reaction of Marnie's, we see a small but definite shift in perspective; abruptly, Bujalski stops the film, as if there's nothing more to say. It's a wonderful parting shot for a movie that locates the momentous in the mundane.
  55. Police Story (1985)
    Chan seems to do everything he can think of to ingratiate himself with viewers.
  56. Before I Forget
    Exquisitely sad, idiosyncratic film à clef about an aging gay gigolo grasping at the embers of memory before they--and he--turn to ash.
  57. Welcome to Leith
    [A] fascinating, unnerving documentary.
  58. Into Great Silence
    Natural light is used to euphoric effect, inevitably summoning the old masters, and Gröning's frames are balanced and symmetrical, in Renaissance-ready emulation of God's perfection.
  59. The Last Man on the Moon
    The Last Man on the Moon puts you there and then asks why in the world we haven't gone back.
  60. Blue Jasmine
    Blue Jasmine is so relentlessly clueless about the ways real human beings live, and so eager to make the same points about human nature that Allen has made dozens of times before, that it seems like a movie beamed from another planet.
  61. The Innocents
    Where "Ida" takes a drearier, more realistic approach to the story, The Innocents, despite its dark focus on a group of women living in fear of getting repeatedly raped by their allies, actually has a mightier finish, something of a crescendo to cut through the quiet grief.
  62. Little Hope Was Arson
    Theo Love's mesmerizing documentary Little Hope Was Arson is as evenhanded as it is unsettling.
  63. Racing Dreams
    No less than for the black inner-city teens of "Hoop Dreams," cash is the name of the game in Curry's fascinating doc, even as the kids' motivation remains a pure love of the sport.
  64. It Comes at Night
    A soul-crushingly dark examination of human nature amid an invisible and unnatural threat.
  65. 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.
  66. Please Give
    It is, for the most part, witty and engrossing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Painted Fire
    Succeeds as the rehumanizing of a near mythical figure.
  68. Lumumba
    As cliché-rich as it is compelling.
  69. How I Killed My Father
    A disappointment after the droll, breezy suggestiveness of Fontaine's equally Freudian "Dry Cleaning," How I Killed My Father is rather less than the sum of its underventilated père-fils confrontations.
  70. Rocks in My Pockets
    With an insightfulness born from firsthand experience, Rocks in My Pockets posits depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia as conditions that, though potentially lethal, remain manageable, if only through persistent battle.
  71. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.
  72. Putty Hill
    Porterfield intersperses these delicately underplayed scenes with doc-style question-and-answer exchanges that, while initially jarring, achieve maximum cumulative impact.
  73. Breathe
    It's a chilly, elegantly assured little picture, a horror story with its roots not in fantasy but in the reality of hurt feelings.
  74. Foreign Parts
    Foreign Parts engages in sociological inquiry without narration or contextual handholding, utilizing incisive, striking aesthetics (a panorama of hanging side mirrors, worn shoes trudging through grimy puddles) to elicit potent subcultural immersion.
  75. Clash
    Unfortunately, Clash buckles under the weight of its many characters.
  76. Becoming Bulletproof
    Becoming Bulletproof extols that virtue of inclusivity by not only showing the diverse actors onscreen, but giving them the chance to share their behind-the-scenes stories as well. Unfortunately, the documentary never transcends its rather conventional structure, relying instead on the do-good intentions of its audience to see it through.
  77. 5 Broken Cameras
    What makes 5 Broken Cameras stand out is its insistence on nuance and its refusal to get caught up in the self-defeating war of words over who is the bigger victim.
  78. One of Us
    The film is a nuanced and moving illustration of the dilemma facing doubting members of the growing Hasidic community in New York City.
  79. How to Draw a Bunny
    Absorbing documentary portrait.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    Hirsch edits segments together to merge disparate voices, showing how for this movement, music was no universal language -- it was specific, pointed, and almost paranormal in its power.
  81. Dirty Pretty Things
    Slick and sober, fiercely contemporary, and rigged by a fail-safe three-act structure, Dirty Pretty Things nimbly straddles the line between realism and popcorn pop, but it knows which side its bread is buttered on.
  82. Punch-Drunk Love
    As elegantly crafted as it often is, Anderson's movie is essentially a one-trick pony that, hampered by an undeveloped script, ultimately pulls up lame.
  83. O'Horten
    The movie, on its own modest terms, satisfies greatly.
  84. In Between
    Hamoud’s three bright actresses bring such a sense of authenticity to their roles that this all feels new.
  85. Not Yet Begun to Fight
    It stuns, and what's missing doesn't compare to what it shares.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Reticker offers perhaps a too-narrow focus on this historical moment, but Pray the Devil remembers the golden rule of moviemaking--rather than tell, it shows, and what it shows is quietly affecting.
  87. The Thin Red Line
    As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached.
  88. Born to Fly
    There's much in Born to Fly to thrill to, dream with, flinch from: dancers leaping from a great whirling wheel and smacking onto mats far below; dancers ducking and leaping a wickedly spinning I-beam or cinderblock.
  89. A Silent Voice
    It has some interesting visuals, but A Silent Voice demands investment in the redemption of someone who’s impossible to root for.
  90. The Counterfeiters
    At its best--and queasiest--The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies.
  91. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
    Lively, exasperating documentary.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Wedding
    What happens after the wedding comprises a full three-quarters of Bier's epic, whose near-Biblical twists and turns--I wouldn't think of giving them away--are enough to fill four weepies.
  93. The Dark Knight Rises
    The Dark Knight Rises is a shallow repository of ideas, but as a work of sheer sensation, it has something to recommend.
  94. The Lost City of Z
    Gradually, the old-world meticulousness of Gray's filmmaking gives way to something more abstract, a drifting impermanence, as if the director were trying to capture — without losing any of his visual grace or sweep — the wide, beautiful unknowability of existence.
  95. A Time for Drunken Horses
    Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.
  96. Blind Shaft
    Blind Shaft means to leave the viewer dazed, and it does.
  97. Southern Comfort
    Eads's wit, generosity, insight, and courage are irresistible.
  98. The Guard
    One senses that The Guard is McDonagh's eulogy for the brusque, warts-and-all character of a passing generation of tough, working-class Irishmen, much as Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" was for vintage Americanism.
  99. Blue Ruin
    As an action film — which in small bursts it is — Blue Ruin is disquieting and raw, like Commando turned inside out.
  100. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    Director Stephen Nomura Schible’s understated and moving Coda does a fine job of presenting the composer’s remarkable career as a revelatory journey.
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