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. A River Changes Course
    For the most part, the narrative here feels generational, representative, rather than invested in the specific incidents of specific lives.
  2. Expedition to the End of the World
    Dencik’s gorgeous, surprising, meditative film opens up one of the world’s last unknown places, and it will also make you want to befriend every Dane you can.
  3. Icaros: A Vision
    Once in a while a narrator relates facts about the forest; occasional CGI flourishes don’t disappoint so much as they remind us of the challenges of summoning to the screen what the brain simply creates. Icaros comes closer than most movies manage.
  4. Wild Tales
    Wild Tales is loose-limbed, rowdy, and exhilarating — in its vibrant lunacy, and with its cartoonishly brash violence, it's a little bit Almodóvar, a little bit Tarantino.
  5. Best of Enemies
    It's fascinating. It's horrible. It's fascinatingly horrible. It's also, as Gladstone points out, a sterling example of the power that television, when it was still a "public square," could have.
  6. Buzzard
    Potrykus and Burge make this transformation — from funny, oddball character study to darker portrayal of desperation — more naturally than it seems should be possible.
  7. Monty Python's Life of Brian
    Monty Python's Life of Brian, re-released on its 25th anniversary as an antidote to "The Passion of the Christ," is a single-joke satire of organized religion, including Hollywood's.
  8. 24 Frames
    We like cows and crows and snow, but it’s Kiarostami’s phenomenological presence that somehow turns every image or camera posture into a question about living, seeing, empathy, and essence.
  9. Red Riding Trilogy
    The fact that the films hang together at the brink of incoherence is a credit to the assembled acting talent. Rebecca Hall and Maxine Peake deserve note, oases in this nasty, masculine world.
  10. Personal Shopper
    When one goes to see Kristen Stewart — among the most quicksilver of her generation's performers — in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, a shape-shifting, resolutely of-this-moment ghost story that features her in nearly every frame, one goes not to watch her act but refract.
  11. Open Hearts
    However schematic, the movie percolates with immediacy and genuine warmth.
  12. 8 Mile
    Extremely clever in its use of self-deprecation, it's guaranteed to bring down the house at any remotely sympathetic venue.
  13. A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
    Skin is less life story than luxuriant mood bath.
  14. Neighboring Sounds
    A tightening of the two-hour-plus running time might have enhanced the balance between Filho's epic, evocative style and his smaller story about a certain mode of modern life, its lonely confrontations, and the stubborn legacies of the past.
  15. The Ghost Writer
    Saved by often delightfully bitchy British dialogue.
  16. 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.
  17. The Teacher
    The setup may be as unsubtle as a metaphoric morality lesson about Europe’s not-too-distant past, or perhaps it’s politically timeless; it’s not a far leap to also think about a certain someone’s insane need for backscratching loyalty within the White House.
  18. The Jungle Book
    If only all blockbusters could be this exciting, engrossing, and beautiful.
  19. 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guys and Dolls
    Guys and Dolls is a rare example of a filmed musical being as sprightly in its own way as the original stage production. [28 Mar 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  21. The Hunting Ground
    A film about individuals who refuse to be silenced could stand to take a few more chances itself.
  22. While We're Young
    Baumbach has made some fine pictures (Frances Ha) and some deadening, hermetic ones (Margot at the Wedding), but it's While We're Young that really fulfills the promise of his brash but fine-grained debut.
  23. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.
  24. Shut Up & Sing
    The movie's not quite the Bush bashfest its publicity might lead you to believe; it's closer to the Metallica doc "Some Kind of Monster" than to "Fahrenheit 9/11."
  25. The Taste of Tea
    Warm and fantastical family portrait.
  26. Mediterranea
    The film proves a piercing character study whose narrow view frustrates complete empathy.
  27. Miss Sharon Jones!
    Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.
  28. Dallas Buyers Club
    What's remarkable about Dallas Buyers Club is its lack of sentimentality. The movie, like its star, is all angles and elbows, earning its emotion through sheer pragmatism.
  29. Prophet's Prey
    Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly.
  30. Notre musique
    Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films.
  31. Duck, You Sucker
    As ambitious as it is anachronistic, Duck, You Sucker demands to be read through the prism of World War II as well as 1968. Could this be the last movie in the great Italian tradition that began in 1945?
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
    Fight footage is kept to a minimum; in this film, the boxer's best one-two's don't hit inside the ring. Clay's ingenious hype-baiting moxie drives the first half, cut to a nouvelle pop beat.
  33. The Cockettes
    Fond, funny documentary.
  34. The Imposter
    Thick with reenactments and cute cutaways, the movie evolves into a cultural inquisition, following this stranger through the strange land of bad-news America, where the truth is still waiting to be exhumed.
  35. Güeros
    What makes Güeros fascinating, besides the joyous invention of Ruizpalacios's craft, is how the director emphasizes rather than hides his own authorial engagement.
  36. London - The Modern Babylon
    Temple and editor Caroline Richards demonstrate that the London mob (it can seem like there's been only one mob through the ages) time and again rescues the city from its complacency—and safeguards it from the suffocation of class-bound England.
  37. Winter Nomads
    Von Stürler offers raw footage of the four-month trek itself, which is often mesmerizing in its austere beauty; there's no narration, intertitles, or any other authorial hand-holding to trump up the message the images already convey on their own.
  38. Fort Buchanan
    It's squirrelly, surprising, and elusive, but this beaut of a debut is no curio.
  39. A Single Man
    A Single Man, with one significant exception, gives us only a series of immaculate poses. The exception is Firth, who, in spite of Ford's best efforts to turn him, too, into another piece of movable scenery, manages to convey a real human soul stirring beneath George's petrified façade
  40. The Harder They Come
    The definitive postcolonial cult-movie musical.
  41. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    A funky, nonfiction tribute to the great avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman, Ornette upends the staid portrait-of-the-artist formula, and it tinkers with and discards the conventions of the bio documentary just as its pioneering musician subject exploded those of jazz.
  42. The Messenger
    What really resonates is the complex tale of camaraderie between two men whose only hope of avoiding self-destruction is to let down their guard--which is, of course, against protocol.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Private Fears in Public Places
    Resnais is now 84 years old; perhaps it takes eight decades of living to make a movie this compassionate, this confident--and this young.
  44. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace.
  45. Sin Nombre
    Lushly photographed and meticulously sound-designed, Sin Nombre is visceral without being vital, researched without ever seeming lived-in.
  46. Children of Heaven
    Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.
  47. Revenge of the Mekons
    What Angio captures, beautifully, is that the Mekons make great music because, together and apart, they’re so alive to the world around them.
  48. Mountain Patrol
    For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.
  49. Child's Pose
    With Child's Pose, the Romanian tide enters its Cassavetes phase, where the thin ice of haute bourgeoisie life cracks and opens wide.
  50. Grandma
    It gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that's not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.
  51. I, Tonya
    Those expecting camp or catfights won’t find them in Gillespie’s movie, which instead offers thoughtful and somewhat objective critiques, plus much seriously dark humor that’ll elicit a lot of uncomfortable gasps of laughter — and invites you to ponder difficult truths.
  52. God Loves Uganda
    Kudos to the filmmakers for so adeptly laying out the history of American evangelicals' Ugandan mission, and for noting that HIV infection rates there have gone up since the abstinence-only education started.
  53. Evolution
    Clinical in the extreme, Evolution aims for open-endedness, but the film, unlike its pint-size protagonists, remains impenetrable.
  54. Fat Girl
    As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.
  55. Humanité
    Confidently absurd.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Grindhouse
    This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about godd--- time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.
  57. Caesar Must Die
    Almost as much as the play itself, the rehearsals are staged; the inmates learning to act, then, are acting like inmates who are learning to act. This leads to some on-the-nose scenes in which they observe the parallels between the text and their own lives.
  58. The Pool
    This heightened consciousness of objects and obligations ballasts the drama-light, class-conscious fable with tactile life.
  59. Benda Bilili!
    But real-life hard-knock plot twists, as well as some tweaking of form (there's no narrator or voiceover of any kind; the film's subjects outline their grim realities largely through their rhythmically upbeat songs) make the film absolutely riveting, as does the fiercely rousing music.
  60. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Gerhard Richter Painting artfully and convincingly immerses us into the world of one of the greatest, painting.
  61. The War Tapes
    On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.
  62. Songs from the Second Floor
    Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.
  63. Baden Baden
    Lang is uncommonly assured for a first-time director, capturing her scenes in fluid master takes, rarely cutting from one character to the next, letting things unfold at the pace of in-the-moment human feeling.
  64. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    Silver's empathy often produces moments of emotional catharsis.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Band Called Death
    A beautiful tale of life, love, music, and family, of things not working out but also working out just as predicted.
  66. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.
  67. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq is a marvel. It's Lee resurrecting his voice — angry, impassioned, and funny as hell — right when we need to hear it.
  68. Starving the Beast
    The gutting of America's public universities is, as Steve Mims says in his documentary Starving the Beast, "one of the nation's most important and least understood fights." His film goes far in correcting that, thanks not just to his thorough research, but also a strong narrative and compelling cinematography.
  69. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's lost-and-found avant-lulu Who's Crazy? pulses with the newly possible.
  70. Calvary
    Gleeson is one of the finest actors we have, and in casting him as the lead, McDonagh stacks the deck so that regardless of our own religious reservations, we're forced to care about Father James as a man.
  71. The House I Live In
    What's riveting and attention grabbing in Jarecki's recapitulations of failed policy are some of the talking heads he has assembled, including "The Wire" creator David Simon and historian Richard Lawrence Miller.
  72. Apprentice
    In a finale rife with twisted feelings of resentment, fury, and self-loathing, the film transforms into a grave meditation on the corrosive shadow cast by the decisions, and crimes, of yesterday.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Fish
    While Little Fish takes a turn for the generic in its final act, solid acting, an atmospheric soundtrack, and flare-filled cinematography more beautiful than an Apple screensaver are enough to keep the film afloat.
  74. Keep On Keepin' On
    It's part Live at Birdland, part Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all warmly thrilling.
  75. The Hunt
    Unlike in The Celebration, the cruelty and suffering in The Hunt feel both overly schematic and intellectually muddled.
  76. A Touch of Sin
    In A Touch of Sin, Jia is attuned to, and saddened by, the violence he sees creeping through his country, caused at least partly by the ever-widening disparity between rich and poor. He ends on a note that's more haunting than hopeful.
  77. The Beguiled
    Coppola’s a master at taking something that could be portentous and rendering it delicate, thereby reclaiming its depth.
  78. Somers Town
    Without ever trivializing his characters' meager circumstances or resorting to the rags-to-riches fantasy of "Slumdog Millionaire," Meadows has made a lovely film about the ability of the imagination to offset the harshness of reality.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scratch
    Scratch's strongest moments are the live performance sequences, where hip-hop becomes an ultra-rhythmic spiritual experience, with roots in West African trance ritual and South Bronx gang solidarity.
  80. Shanghai Noon
    Unstintingly funny -- far more so than the wince-worthy trailer -- owing to Chan's pairing with droll indie eccentric Owen Wilson, as his would-be gunslinger sidekick.
  81. Daughter from Danang
    Operation Babylift itself was an attempt to provide some semblance of an American happy ending to the Vietnam debacle. But as Daughter From Danang demonstrates, the war's scars may take another generation to heal.
  82. Under the City's Skin
    Bani-Etemad's generational melodrama observes a blue-collar dynastic collapse worthy of Lillian Hellman, but stays steadfastly fixed on the quotidian of Tehran life.
  83. Two Years at Sea
    The imagery has all the solemn ravishment of Béla Tarr's similarly darkening "The Turin Horse" with none of the epochal portentousness, while Rivers's work owes more to Billy Bitzer than most gallery art contemporaries.
  84. 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.
  85. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    [A] tender and low-key documentary.
  86. Presenting Princess Shaw
    It's a mistake, I think, that the movie never addresses the fact that a camera crew is following Shaw around.
  87. Soufra
    In the nourishing documentary Soufra, Thomas Morgan shows the claustrophobic living conditions and dangerous infrastructure of the tightly packed concrete towers, and chronicles how Lebanese government bureaucracy maintains the camp’s invisible borders and keeps occupants in a permanent state of legal limbo.
  88. Carnal Knowledge
    Carnal Knowledge is a movie that almost lives up to it's brilliant title. [08 Jul 1971, p.34]
    • Village Voice
  89. The Holy Girl
    Not the least remarkable thing about this deadpan, deceptively haphazard ensemble comedy, a movie as much choreographed as directed, is the way that--at the final moment--the mist simply evaporates.
  90. Philomena
    The grande dame's performance, alternately goofy and grave, is an absolute tour de force.
  91. Get Low
    Despite that maddening third-act stumble, Get Low is a pleasure to watch.
  92. Jauja
    Even beyond its charismatic star, Jauja is captivating, not least because of Alonso's ability to capture the cruel beauty of the natural landscape — you can almost see the earth itself refusing to accept European imperialism blithely.
  93. The Immigrant
    Gray has a knack for wrapping big themes into an intimate embrace, and The Immigrant feels both epic and fine-grained.
  94. Don't Call Me Son
    A hazy drift through vast subjects — the fluidity of adolescence and the fragility of family — Anna Muylaert's Don't Call Me Son works best when it goes small.
  95. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Arriaga's script (a prize at Cannes) has a lovely, fascinating shape to it, even if his crushing portrayal of white Americans--all of them, even Jones, suffering from a zombified affect and crippling shortsightedness--is somewhat counterset against his Mexicans, who are all morally balanced, if not always happy or nice.
  96. Detroit
    Bigelow has crafted a portrait of the 1967 Detroit uprising that manages to be both history lesson and incendiary device, even if it sometimes sputters.
  97. The Edge of Seventeen
    The scenes that work just make me ache for more of them, signaling that if Craig finds her groove, she’ll be a force to reckon with.
  98. Brooklyn Castle
    We also gain a keen sense of how chess in particular helps otherwise academically challenged kids find a way into their own brains.
  99. Logan
    In Logan, we have an example of a superhero story taken to new extremes and a franchise to a spare, sad, apocalyptic finish (or “finish”), with R-rated action scenes that are both rousing and unbearably violent.
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