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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Garden of Earthly Delights
    There is magic in these intimate passion plays, which are filled with sloppy, loving detail and are mounted without a hint of pretension. Each banal moment becomes achingly gorgeous, not least because of Spiteri's disarmingly straightforward performance.
  2. Boiler Room
    Takes us inside the consciousness and the coded masculine world of a single character.
  3. 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.
  4. The Survivalist
    Directed with a muted tone but a scenic eye by Brit first-timer Stephen Fingleton, The Survivalist, like most postapocalyptic movies, is both dire and oddly poetic.
  5. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    Like a great amusement park ride, Shaun the Sheep Movie is consistently enjoyable.
  6. Sleepy Hollow
    There isn't a bankable Hollywood director with a flintier sense of aesthetic integrity.
  7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    Sure, all the studios offer anymore are big, dumb adventure spectacles, but that's not a knock against the achievement of this one, which at least parades wonders before us, not the least being the greatest dragon in the history of movies.
  8. Mind Game
    The exhilarating Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy Mind Game plays out like a hallucinogen-fueled shaggy-dog joke that only ends after twenty-year-old horndog Nishi (Kôji Imada) discovers that the world does not revolve around him.
  9. The Humbling
    Levinson and Pacino's willingness to explore the creakier end of life isn't a drawback; it's what gives The Humbling its bittersweet vitality.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Phenomenal rockumentary.
  11. Found Memories
    Initially treated like the parasite she appears to be, over the course of this crisp, gracefully inflected meditation on time's passage, Rita develops the interest in her subjects that turns an image into more than stolen light.
  12. Mission Blue
    It helps that Earle and her oceanographer colleague at the Smithsonian Institute, Jeremy Jackson, are both scientists with unusual abilities to speak not just in understandable terms but also in eloquent ones. And it helps, too, that the music, images, storytelling, and editing are all so tight, and so enjoyable.
  13. The First Time
    Something of a wonder, a palm-size ball of banter and irony and earnestness that never stops rolling and almost never misses the sweet spots.
  14. Divine Intervention
    A movie of long, expressive silences, Divine Intervention articulates things that have never been articulated, at least on the screen.
  15. 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.
  16. Rank
    Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.
  17. Tape
    The movie takes shape as an entertaining psychological armwrestle between rank belligerence and blustery condescension.
  18. The Divine Order
    Though the story has a predictable ebb and flow, the film includes some stunning moments
  19. Holy Hell
    Will Allen's sunny gut-punch cult exposé Holy Hell plays like a thriller, all right, with a darkness edging slowly over its swimsuit revelry, but Allen never cheats in the interest of suspense.
  20. Dinner Rush
    The cast never skips a beat, particularly Mark Margolis as the most obnoxious dinner customer in cinema history and Summer Phoenix as his unfazed waitress.
  21. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    By telling this story through the children’s eyes with a magical-realism element, López makes the tragically unthinkable somehow more palatable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    One of the better farce-comedies. [26 Oct 1955, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  23. The Artist
    The Artist is movie love at its most anodyne; where Guy Maddin has used the conventions of silent film to express his loony psychosexual fantasias for more than a decade, Hazanavicius sweetly asks that we not be afraid of the past.
  24. 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.
  25. Alive and Kicking
    The dancers in Alive and Kicking all share a rapturous expression, and Glatzer makes the case for this Depression-era diversion as a modern tonic for isolation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Goyangileul butaghae
    As rich in incidental detail as it is narratively diffuse.
  27. A Housekeeper
    In a flawless performance, Bacri lets us glimpse the tender desperation beneath his character's harsh, curmudgeonly exterior.
  28. Goldstone
    When the violence comes, as it must, Sen stages his shoot-outs with the physical and emotional wallop of the best westerns, but he’s more interested in restoring the faith of law enforcement officers whose belief in justice has eroded.
  29. La Dolce Vita
    In one movie, at least, the ethical baseline (heisted, you could argue, from "Sweet Smell of Success") gave Fellini's roaming, cluttered mise-en-scène a chilling gravity he could never genuinely locate again.
  30. Town Bloody Hall
    What finally makes Town Bloody Hall so compelling -- and unsettling -- is the impression that such serious, spirited debate is a thing of the past.
  31. Blood Simple
    Boldly facetious and monstrously clever.
  32. The Blue Angel
    Dietrich is the movie's primary cannon: Her amused eyes, open face, and relaxed sensuality monopolize our sympathies.
  33. 12 Years a Slave
    12 Years a Slave works so hard to be noble, but it doesn't have to: Ejiofor is there to do all the heavy lifting.
  34. Pina
    Pina gives us the supreme pleasure of watching fascinating bodies of widely varying ages in motion, whether leaping, falling, catching, diving, grieving, or exulting. Wenders's expert use of 3-D puts viewers up close to the spaces, both psychic and physical, inside and out, of Bausch's work.
  35. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman — “I’m a very simple, complicated person” — finally gets her due.
    • 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.
  37. Chaos
    Fast-paced feminist thriller and witty black comedy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power Trip
    Like the best documentaries, this one raises questions instead of providing pat answers. If only Devlin had taken his intrepid reporting a few steps further.
  39. In Search of Beethoven
    The film's real resource is its impressive array of talking heads, their intimate familiarity with the music, and their ability to impart graspable insight.
  40. The Makioka Sisters (1983)
    The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.
  41. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping, moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period.
  42. Wild Style
    The folks who made Wild Style probably didn’t realize it, but their fiction film was essentially a documentary of history in the early making.
  43. Birthday Girl
    It may not be particularly innovative, but the film's crisp, unaffected style and air of gentle longing make it unexpectedly rewarding.
  44. Not One Less
    The film's occasional dips into sentimental cuteness and its too-pat ending can't cancel the gap that yawns ever wider between rural and urban society.
  45. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Gerhard Richter Painting artfully and convincingly immerses us into the world of one of the greatest, painting.
  46. Horses of God
    Director Nabil Ayouch depicts the sprawling, ramshackle Sidi Moumen slums with fluid camera movements... He finds the humanity and the hopelessness in its narrow streets, its fields of rubble, monstrous trash dumps, and grim marketplaces.
  47. Love & Taxes
    As a writer, Kornbluth is vivid, funny and skilled at conveying characters, qualities he actually matches in performance.
  48. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am a Sex Addict
    Caveh Zahedi's one-of-a-kind movie--a funny, inventive, ground-shifting hybrid of essay film, mea culpa, and pathological real-life romantic farce--aims for truth by wrecking its own verisimilitude.
  50. Japan
    A notably confident and achieved debut.
  51. Big Ass Spider!
    This is squirmy, hilarious fun.
  52. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Legends of the Mountain’s narrative fuse may be long, but Hu knows exactly when to light it and when to snuff it out.
    • 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.
  54. 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.
  55. Riding Giants
    Peralta has become a more relaxed filmmaker, and when he trusts the haunting sight of a giant wave breaking to speak for itself, the movie reaches the sublime heights of its subject.
  56. A People Uncounted
    What Yeger stirs up is profoundly unsettling and deeply moving.
  57. Loving Vincent
    An engrossing exploration of the artist’s final days rendered in his signature painting style.
  58. Paradise: Faith
    Though we're never allowed a close-up, Hofstätter's performance comes off as an unselfconscious tour de force, painfully real and culturally lost.
  59. Entertainment
    Entertainment is a painful, poetic watch.
  60. The Loving Story
    Well-timed and well crafted in equal measures, The Loving Story is a thoughtful, terrifically intimate account of the case that dismantled this country's anti-miscegenation laws 100 years after the abolition of slavery.
  61. Grand Piano
    Making this kind of thriller has all but become a lost art, yet Mira clearly believes that high style is worth bothering with.
  62. The Proposition
    The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift.
  63. Princess Mononoke
    Complex, superbly rendered, and wildly eccentric anime-even by Miyazaki's own standards.
  64. 500 Years
    Yates’s films, like the world itself, have no template — they’re messy, rich with feeling, liberated from simple theatrical structures, always honest about what is possible. That one of hers ends with hope is a gift.
  65. Thor: Ragnarok
    In its own weird little way, Thor: Ragnarok manages to poke fun at the constant churn of myth and entertainment of which the movie itself is a part. It’s a candy-colored cage of delights, but it is a cage nevertheless — and it doesn’t hide that fact.
  66. Ticket to Jerusalem
    Largely sidesteps sentiment in favor of a tentative hopefulness.
  67. i hate myself :)
    It's difficult to label Arnow's cinematic voice, and this particular film, or why anyone would even want to watch something so personal, but i hate myself :) is never not fascinating.
  68. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    By focusing on the small details of Byong-man and Gye-yeul's life — from their humble, secluded home to their touches and glances — the film paints a sweet yet tragic portrait.
  69. Monterey Pop
    Though there's considerable footage of hippie activity (crafting kites, sleeping) and moments of prelapsarian frisson (a cop warns that "there's talk of the Hell's Angels coming down"), the film is resolutely performance-driven.
  70. 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.
  71. United 93
    Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember.
    • 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
  73. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    A rambling daydream that aims literally to supplant your life, it's in effect a serial, in eight ninety-plus-minute chapters, TV-ready but defined by Rivette as a consuming theatrical experience. It consumes, all right, like a drug that won't fade, but it's also a lark, a metafiction without any reality, a magnificent irrelevance.
  74. Idiocracy
    Ten years later, Idiocracy’s real achievement isn’t how much of it has come true, but how much it continues to disturb.
  75. 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.
  76. The Hunter
    Filmed during the months leading up to the 2009 presidential election in Iran, The Hunter still seethes with fury - and anticipates the blood that would spill after the vote.
  77. 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.
  78. After Auschwitz
    The structure of After Auschwitz may be simple (talking heads and archival footage), but the cumulative effect of six women revealing the physical, psychological, and emotional toll taken on Holocaust survivors is a powerful testament to individual humanity emerging from inhuman horrors.
  79. The Desert Bride
    The story works largely on the level of metaphor, but it’s never overbearing or suffocating; there’s life here. A lot of credit should go to the actors, particularly the lead. As the film moves along, García’s face seems to change dramatically.
  80. Le Pont du Nord
    Playful and tense, loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy...It seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers—Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry—and expanded our sense of the possible.
  81. Turtles Can Fly
    Amid the muddy scrubbery of the camp and its hinterland surroundings, Ghobadi catches some striking compositions.
  82. Icarus
    A real-life absurdist thriller that, in its electric coverage of one Russian scandal, can’t help but illuminate another ongoing one.
  83. First They Killed My Father
    This is Jolie’s most accomplished work yet.
  84. The Savages
    The movie is dotted with moments of grace and whacked-out humor that got me on board for this damaged duo's liberation.
  85. The Zookeeper's Wife
    True to form, Caro seems unbound by her audience’s expectations of a WWII picture; she delivers a singular, thrilling portrait, filled with surprises and moving performances.
  86. Welcome to Leith
    [A] fascinating, unnerving documentary.
  87. Arrival
    For most of its running time, Arrival is entrancing, intimate, and moving — a sci-fi movie that looks not up at the stars but rather deep within.
  88. 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.
  89. Keanu
    Key and Peele have a special kind of magic they’ve brought to their first feature, but it’s also a crazy-simple formula: Keep saving that damn cat.
  90. Life, Animated
    Life,Animated is rich with insight about the role our popular culture plays in child development, but it's richer still in love.
  91. Let the Corpses Tan
    More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful.
  92. Top Spin
    With sleek and informative onscreen graphics and thrilling slow-motion demonstrations of game technique, Top Spin packs a lot of information into its 80-minute running time, arguing that a great table tennis player is one part boxer, one part chess master.
  93. Space Cowboys
    An entertainingly raffish action-comedy.
  94. An African Election
    Even those who closely follow African (or global) politics will likely be bowled over by the real-life plot twists unfolding before Merz's camera. What makes the film especially resonate now is the frustration with the status quo that is consistently voiced by the people on the street.
  95. The Turin Horse
    An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve.
  96. 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.
  97. Deepwater Horizon
    [Berg] keeps things simple, tight and taut, and does right by the folks who were there for the real thing. He’s made them the heroes of a genuinely exciting action movie.
  98. The Miners' Hymns
    It speaks eloquently about the disappearance of most any indigenous working-class culture.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stake Land
    It's thick with a distinct mood-the sadness and exhilaration of having nothing left to lose-and the characters, in their desperation and drive, feel real.
  100. The Hidden Blade
    Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.
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