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. Hooligan Sparrow
    Wang's film allows the public activist to be privately human, showing Ye at home with her lively daughter, sharing moments of friendship with other women activists or clearing brush and describing the hard rural lives of her family.
  2. Ex Machina
    It's a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It's also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes double as threats, and vice versa.
  3. Oldboy
    Whatever its oversteps and excesses (I do think Park ran a little amok with the computer gimcrackery), Oldboy has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic.
  4. The Tribe
    It's a staggering film, but not a brilliant one — a superior version would have played more with the gulf between our senses and theirs.
  5. Morvern Callar
    More engrossing than convincing.
  6. La Ciénaga
    A veritable Chekhov tragicomedy of provincial life.
  7. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Frank De Felitta's guilt over having aired the footage is moving, yet it's ultimately countered by this piercing film's stance - promoted by the subject's proud children and grandchildren - that Wright's statements, far from a slip of the tongue, were an intentional act of courageous defiance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Real Dirt on Farmer John
    At times, the film plays like an extended infomercial for John's new company, Angelic Organics, but the agrarian fantasy is so compelling here that the revitalization of the American family farm begins to seem not just possible, but probable.
  9. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    Generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering along on auto-broomstick.
  10. Zootopia
    Heavy with pop allusions and references to other crime underworld movies, including The Godfather and Chinatown, Zootopia is impressive in its visual conception and scope: At once straightforward and densely layered with wit and incident, it manages a lively clip and the odd fresh joke.
  11. Innocence
    Innocence is not merely the year's best first film, but one of the great statements on the politics of being 'tween.
  12. Lost Boys of Sudan
    Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.
  13. Best in Show
    Best in Show succeeds only insofar as you're willing to laugh at a bunch of sad freaks.
  14. Shadowman
    [A] heartbreaking doc.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ball of Fire
    The writing, as it is, is a marvel. The patter that flows forth whenever some regular Joe flaps his jaws is a wonder to hear. Garbagemen and waiters, pool hall bums and showgirls, newsboys and college boys — they’re all virtuosos singing the wisecracking arias Wilder and Brackett have given them.
  16. Much Ado About Nothing
    With its interrogations of gender, feminism, and marriage, Shakespeare's comedy is an apt vehicle for Whedon's own storytelling agenda.
  17. Scum
    One of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down.
  18. The Breadwinner
    It’s notable that since her hair is cut short and she’s wearing male clothes, none of the men suspect that she’s not a boy despite her chosen male name being only slightly less conspicuous than “McLovin.” Being evil is not the same thing as being intelligent or observant.
  19. Up and Down
    Up and Down is not exactly the toughest movie on the block, but especially compared to most American comedies, it conveys a sense of scrofulous rue.
  20. Endless Poetry
    This self-reflexive ode to following muses, finding meaning in nothingness, and transcending the sensitive roadblocks between fathers and sons is loopy, irreverent, and more intensely personal than anything its mystic creator has invented before.
  21. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    It’s hard not to experience Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? and not get shivers up your spine — from fear, from anger, and from the beauty of Wilkerson’s filmmaking.
  22. Beach Rats
    Hittman’s depictions of sexuality, emotional crisis, and parent-teen relationships are rendered here without sentimentality — and with the burning urgency of a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.
  23. The Last Mistress
    A highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's mid-19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Live-In Maid
    The result is a film of startling insight and grace.
  25. The Saddest Music in the World
    Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.
  26. Tracks
    The film’s strength derives from how Wasikowska makes Davidson’s seemingly suicidal wanderlust relatable.
  27. The Princess of Montpensier
    The finest Western you'll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation.
  28. The Fearless Freaks
    An all-access fan's valentine as artfully scrappy and likably wide-eyed as its subjects.
  29. Magnolia
    Highly audacious, hugely enjoyable, exceptionally well-written, brilliantly edited, and exuberantly actor-driven extravaganza.
  30. Tempestad
    Huezo’s approach situates us right there beside Miriam — it’s as if a new acquaintance is unburdening herself to trek south together.
  31. Sorry to Bother You
    I will be very clear with you, dear readers, that this surrealist comic moral tale, about a poor man selling his soul to ascend in a golden elevator to the heights of a dubious corporation, is a balls-to-the-wall, tits-to-the-glass, spectacular orgy of fist-pumping, anti-capitalist, pro-labor ideas rolled into 105 minutes of gloriously unpredictable plot.
  32. The Case Against 8
    The stirring new documentary The Case Against 8, showcasing the lawyers and plaintiffs who challenged California's 2008 gay marriage ban, is the best kind of popular history, a film that trembles with tears and hope, and I dare you to get through it without bawling some yourself.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Devil Came on Horseback
    Ultimately, Devil ponders the optimism/pessimism = apathy/x equation as honestly and studiously as any doc I've ever seen.
  34. Teza
    Gerima's film stands as a richly expansive portrait of a man caught between an untenable exile and the terrible consequences of his homeland's violent past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moby Dick
    The virtues of this Moby Dick are many. [17 Oct 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  36. A Simple Life
    A deceptively simple film, gingerly peels layer after layer of sharp insights into the dynamics of familial love, using compassion and droll humor as its tools. Its strength is that it manages to tap genuine emotion without succumbing to sentimentality.
  37. 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waste Land
    A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception.
  39. 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.
  40. Murderous Maids
    Genuinely unnerving movie.
  41. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself.
  42. Last Orders
    The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.
  43. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Dynamic but preachy.
  44. Son frère
    Chéreau's film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion.
  45. Afghan Star
    Marking follows the finalists around on the last leg of their PR campaigns and captures something sweetly goofy, with an edge of creepy, about their aping of smarmy American self-promotion (kissing babies, etc).
  46. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
    The Power of Nightmares is essentially polemical. As partisan filmmaking it is often brilliant and sometimes hilarious-a superior version of "Syriana" (which also prudently subtracts Israel and the Palestinians from the Middle East equation).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Aura
    A hypnotic unease hangs over the film.
  48. Paradise: Hope
    Seidl's visual style -- bitter-comic three-walled tableaux -- makes the scenario's tension between desire and reality almost unbearable, but Melanie offers hope by simple virtue of her youth, her unformed romantic folly, and her guileless courage.
  49. 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Scorsese tries to balance tries to balance irony and lyricism, but it has no internal truth, it means nothing in terms of wht we know of Alice or what Scorsese feels about her. [6 Jan 1975, p.71]
    • Village Voice
  51. 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.
  52. 2046
    Mood is everything, trumped up by a score so rich with pop songs, bossa nova drama, and symphonic mournfulness it's almost a movie on its own. 2046 may be a Chinese box of style geysers and earnest meta-irony, but that should not suggest there aren't bleeding humans at the center of it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emitaï
    As usual with Sembene, there is much fascinating ethnological detail; more importantly, this is a film by an African for Africans, designed to make them share discovery and revelation: the limitations of myth, the cruelty of the oppressor, the fortitude of the people, the need for revolution. [22 Jun 1972, p.75]
    • Village Voice
  54. A Quiet Passion
    In his sympathetic and intelligent Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies honors his subject by remaining true to this observation from the poet herself: "To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Sacred
    A delirious send-up of bandwagon piety, the film was scripted by that snappiest of Hollywood crank cases, Ben Hecht, and he never got a better, more committed distaff embodiment of his flair for highlighting hooey than Lombard, who throws herself into the role with daffy, tongue-tripping abandon.
  56. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    This doc is a tearjerker, but it's also enraging.
  57. Tickling Giants
    Tickling Giants comes off as both a fact-based look at fighting fire with funny and a prescient cautionary tale.
  58. Kung Fu Hustle
    Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie.
  59. Meru
    This is a crowd-pleaser, and it's no surprise it snagged the audience award for documentaries at Sundance last winter. Getting to these moments is a bit of a climb itself, though.
  60. Command and Control
    Despite the high stakes, Command and Control is morbidly fun to watch, in the manner of good suspense thrillers and disaster films.
  61. Panic
    Steeped in metaphor as it is, Panic offers a more naturalistic analysis of male midlife crisis than the grotesquely overpraised "American Beauty."
  62. The Aviator
    The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.
  63. Ratcatcher
    The most audacious debut feature of the year.
  64. A Talking Picture
    Still astonishingly vital at 96, the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira here takes a becalmed trip through stormy waters.
  65. The Big Red One
    Certainly a testament to Fuller's tenacity, but recent raves notwithstanding, it's no masterpiece...The Big Red One isn't even Fuller's greatest war film. Of those, I'd rank it fourth -- but that's not half bad.
  66. Hukkle
    Deranging a venerable Hungarian tradition of "village sociology," Pálfi employs a bizarrely associative montage to fashion a portrait of a traditional peasant community -- just a midsummer Sunday on Mars.
  67. Above and Below
    The film is a wonder of desert skies, slick tunnels, bumptious fence- and wall-climbing, and occasional staged reveries.
  68. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    [An] inspiring cinematic journey — full of overwhelming beauty, and ready to set the curious viewer's mind aflame.
  69. Legion of Brothers
    It’s clear in their eyes that they’ve seen some shit—and this doc not only gives us a glimpse of it too, but adds valuable context in a way not many others do.
  70. Abuse of Weakness
    Breillat's impressive film is a study of bodies and how we carry them, and it explores the manner in which weakness seeks out strength on an almost primal level, bypassing the higher modes of human thought.
  71. Christmas, Again
    Christmas, Again is a low hum of a downer, but maybe that's appropriate.
  72. Have a Nice Day
    The surprisingly vibrant, hand-drawn images of Have a Nice Day revitalize the story’s more tired elements. It may not give us anything new, but Jian Liu’s film looks lovely and, at 77 minutes, doesn’t overstay its welcome. And sometimes that’s enough.
  73. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    She might not be our kin, but filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour's anecdotal, warm-humored tribute to his grandmother - and, to a limited extent, to her cultural heritage - taps into the universal desire to hang onto loved ones in their waning years.
  74. Finding Dory
    Finding Dory might be messy, but through its central interplay — between present and past, light and dark, joy and pain — it manages an emotional complexity that puts most supposedly grown-up movies to shame.
  75. Rescue Dawn
    Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a "real" movie that Herzog has ever made. The lone conquistador has joined the club. Rescue Dawn is a Rambo movie without the Man (who, if I remember my Rambology, was himself of German descent).
  76. A Clockwork Orange
    Let me report simply that A Clockwork Orange manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy...The last third of the movie is such a complete bore that even audiences of confirmed Kubrickians have drowned out smatterings of applause with prolonged hissing.
  77. Human Flow
    You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a movie “stunning.” But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Happy Feet
    Children, innocent as they are, may not yet have grown to loathe the actor's (Robin Williams) shtick, but you might like to know that he has two--yes, two--roles in this film.
  79. The Weather Underground
    One leaves with barely a clue as to how this group was able to orchestrate a successful string of terror bombings.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Facing the Music
    In a meticulous style that often appears offhanded, the directors chronicle Boyd's journey step-by-step, pausing to eavesdrop on the teacher talking to herself.
  81. China Heavyweight
    In the end, once we realize the title doesn't refer to these bantams' weight class but to their strength of heart, or something, the film feels blandly respectful and, oddly enough, apolitical.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Gelb might flit around a bit too much, but his appealing documentary always comes back to its subject's determination (sometimes overbearing) to leave the most meaningful possible legacy to his family and his craft.
  83. The Dark Horse
    James Napier Robertson's film combines several potentially tired subgenres — the inspirational-teacher drama, the mental illness drama, and the gang thriller — but, helped immeasurably by Curtis's performance, makes something new out of them.
  84. Victoria
    This sparse marvel leaves the audience rattled by how small decisions lead to big consequences. Still, you're most likely to leave the theater gushing about the cast's bravura unbroken performances.
  85. Mugabe and the White African
    As their extraordinarily brave black female attorney points out, at stake are not merely the rights of this family or indeed of all white farmers, but the future of race relations and human rights in Africa.
  86. Bunny Lake Is Missing
    A pleasure to watch from beginning to end. [21 Oct 1965, p.21]
    • Village Voice
  87. Queen of Earth
    Queen of Earth is also a semi-comedy, often funny in an intentionally bleak way. And that, besides Moss, is what makes it work.
  88. Paddington
    The scale of the occasional mayhem is heightened, but its spirit and ingenuity doesn't feel wholly at odds with the books.
  89. Mississippi Grind
    Bitterly funny gambling comedy Mississippi Grind transcends its generic lovable-losers-on-a-bender plot by foregrounding exceptionally well-developed skid-row protagonists and weirdly charming dive-bar ambiance.
  90. The Virgin Suicides
    Coppola looks beyond the seductive metaphysical puzzle and locates the core of Eugenides's allegory in an obsessive, almost forensic act of remembering, both futile and inexplicably essential.
  91. Mother of George
    As Adenike, Gurira is wonderful: Her face is equally radiant whether she's channeling anguish or joy, and she captures the ways in which this woman, so old-country dutiful, also longs to join the modern world.
  92. Wetlands
    Helen's extreme behavior is at once a reaction to, and rebellion against, her mother and father (and their separation), which, along with a captivating go-for-broke lead turn by Juri, lends the film a poignancy to help offset the juvenile shock-tactic impulses.
  93. Pollock
    The movie's best moments evoke the thrill of doing something new. Pollock convincingly retails the beauty and originality of the painter's best work -- it may not be an intellectual adventure, but it does represent one.
  94. Our Song
    The patient camera leans in closely on the three lead actresses -- extraordinary first-timers all.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Annie Get Your Gun (re-release)
    Baritone Howard Keel makes an impressive Hollywood debut as Hutton's leading man. During the nonmusical scenes, Betty Hutton gives a crude and strident performance, exhausting to watch, but she belts out the songs with an appropriately rowdy energy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    51 Birch Street
    Begins shakily, with a naked self-consciousness that can be off-putting, but quickly develops into an absorbing and ever deepening drama.
  97. Alamar (To the Sea)
    Alamar provides a nearly hypnotic immersion in the brilliantly aqua, impossibly tranquil Caribbean--a Paradise Regained not just for Natan, but for everyone
  98. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Additional substance comes from Dorman's ongoing use of period photos and newsreel footage. In the spirit of the Sholem Aleichem oeuvre, Laughing in the Darkness is a collective family album.
  99. Las Acacias
    Watching this taciturn man grow close to mother and child - close enough that he experiences twinges of jealousy and abandonment toward the end of Las Acacias - is one of the most satisfying spectacles in a movie this year, a time-lapse of emotions rendered perfectly.
  100. The World Before Her
    With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.
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