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. All This Panic
    Unconstrained by the need for a neat-and-tidy dramatic arc, All This Panic opts for messy honesty — and, in the process, finds hope for all of its subjects, in ways both big and small.
  2. Mauvais Sang
    Bittersweet, haunting, and as original and eccentric as homage movies get.
  3. 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.
  4. The Rocket
    The Rocket's ample pleasures come from Mordaunt localizing this tested formula rather than trying to reinvent it.
  5. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    This is a tender and engaging portrait of a marvelously elusive personality, whose style remains timeless.
  6. In Secret
    In Secret boasts vigor and thematic richness, that feeling of artists expressing something vital.
  7. The Tillman Story
    The Tillman Story goes deeper, exposing a system of arrogance and duplicity that no WikiLeak could ever fully capture.
  8. Ramen Heads
    As demonstrated by this exquisite documentary, the preparation of Japan’s national dish is an arduous affair, with the most celebrated chefs — variously referred to here as “ramen gods” and “ramen demons” — toiling fanatically to retain the color, richness, and viscosity of their dishes.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eden
    This portrait of an imploding marriage is remarkable for every reason that counts in a good film.
  10. Manos Sucias
    It's not news, of course, that it's a terrible thing to extinguish a life, but it's a relief, when the shoot-'em-ups of Summer Movie Season are bearing down on us, to see a film that regards killing with pained awe. Wladyka's hands are clean.
  11. Frankenweenie
    Frankenweenie, scripted by John August, and based on a screenplay by Lenny Ripps from Burton's original story, is tight and brief, hitting all the marks you'd expect from an animated kid's film, and enlivened by Burton's visual style. The man should make more small movies like this one.
  12. 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.
  13. The Bitter Buddha
    The Bitter Buddha is very funny, and for all its bitterness, Eddie Pepitone's comedy is a taste that's easy to acquire.
  14. 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.
  15. Sing Me the Songs That Say I Love You: A Concert for Kate McGarrigle
    If you somehow manage to stay dry-eyed through the concert numbers, the end should set you bawling.
  16. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    It's less interesting watching them do what they both feel they have to do -- talk about their craft -- especially as both give off the prickly energy of artists who would rather create than explain. They're more comfortable asking one another questions, even though the answers are shrugged off humbly.
  17. Sound and Fury
    Josh Aronson's thoroughly engrossing documentary Sound and Fury is as much about children's rights as it is about the impact of cochlear-implant technology on a family in which deafness runs through three generations.
  18. Keep the Change
    Keep the Change, despite David’s knack for making offensive jokes, is a charming, sensitive picture that embraces the characters as they are, without mocking them.
  19. Girlhood
    Despite similar excess, Garbus's follow-up to 2002's "The Execution of Wanda Jean" provides another powerful glimpse inside the American justice system.
  20. Infernal Affairs
    Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.
  21. Taboo
    An action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque.
  22. Oasis: Supersonic
    As a music comedy, this is up there with Popstar, but with better-defined characters. It's thick with tales of brawls, breakups, stage-walkoffs, busted hotel rooms and astonishing rudeness.
  23. Dark Touch
    Dark Touch, like much of the best horror, works the fears that connect to real life.
  24. McCullin
    Famous for his war photography, McCullin's gift is his sensitivity, a capacity to feel the pain of other people that informs both the images he produced and the ones he refused to take.
  25. The Blair Witch Project
    Paranoid, hysterical, and programmatically subjective, the movie is in every sense a psychological thriller. Although the payoff is ambiguous, the experience remains in the mind. It's an absolutely restrained and truly frightening movie.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Appropriately, Riedelsheimer shoots Goldsworthy's mini-megaliths with a landscape painter's eye; set to Fred Firth's modernist score, some images verge on Kubrick territory.
  27. Danny Collins
    This movie is a narrow character piece that shows Pacino wrestling to reveal layers in a man who's worried he might actually be hollow. He and Fogelman string together dozens of small, perfect moments.
  28. The Filth and the Fury
    The filmmaker might be accused of preaching to the choir were the story not so compelling and the performances so strong.
  29. Nothing But a Man (1964)
    The title almost suggests manhood as something trifling. The film, however, confirms it's a mighty hard ideal to reach.
  30. Song to Song
    Connect with the kineticism of Song to Song, and it might just leave you breathless.
  31. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Pays off in laugh-out-loud lines, adorably ditsy but heartfelt performances, and sparkling, bittersweet dialogue that cuts to the chase of the modern girl's dilemma.
  32. Twinsters
    Twinsters is a heartwarming true story that might not have happened without social media, so score one for modern technology.
  33. Show Me Love
    Easily the best teen movie of the year.
  34. Journey's End
    Though set at a specific moment in time, the film could be about terminal cancer patients or condemned prisoners, a deeply felt catalog of the behaviors of men who know they’re about to die.
  35. Rubberneck
    Karpovsky is unsettlingly good as Paul, and Newman's Danielle is sexy and layered.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Ice
    On the Ice is a marvel of concentrated, classical storytelling. The flat, snowy landscape strips away all but the essentials from its tale.
  37. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The script is solid, and the fight scenes are excellent.
  38. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Through his efforts, McKay captures a genuine sense of the bittersweet reality of the American dream and the people who give up their only weekly day of rest just to keep it alive.
  39. Far from the Tree
    It’s a painstaking inspection of parenthood, which is fraught even in less formidable circumstances than what these families face, and often harrowing. But it’s also a contemplation of what it means to be human and, ultimately, optimistic.
  40. Newlyweeds
    Debut writer-director Shaka King dramatizes her characters' descent into disarray with disarming intimacy.
  41. Actress
    Greene seems fascinated by the contradictory identities — each a kind of real-life performance — that Burre endeavors to reconcile, and he is profoundly sensitive to the emotional truth these performances describe.
  42. Sweaty Betty
    This isn't hard-times reportage or a deep-dive ethnography. It's a life-as-it's-lived picture, a chance to meet and loiter with the people in the places the interstates zip past.
  43. Divan
    Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest.
  44. Dheepan
    Ultimately, Dheepan is the story of three people struggling to maintain their humanity, even as they lose their identities.
  45. What Richard Did
    The film feel[s] like a Bergman homage without earning the clunky label "Bergmanesque."
  46. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    It's rare that a documentary conveys an artist's worldview so compellingly, but then Glennie is no ordinary musician.
  47. 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."
  48. Love, Simon
    Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes.
  49. Meek's Cutoff
    Cinematic as it is, Meek's Cutoff has an uncanny theatricality. The scenes alternating between windswept emptiness and the dark void could be played on a barren stage. For all its detailed authenticity, this minimalist "Wagon Train" is less naturalistic than existential.
  50. 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.
  51. We Won't Grow Old Together (1969)
    "Love" is a quicksilver thing that can't be held in the present tense. It is somewhere between nothing and everything, and no one pinned down more of its complexities and contradictions than Maurice Pialat, hunting barehanded for slippery truths.
  52. Tyrannosaur
    Colman's performance comes as a revelation.
  53. Don Jon
    It's a comedy that moves with a sense of purpose, as Gordon-Levitt does in the title role.
  54. Cuba and the Cameraman
    Cuba and the Cameraman distills thousands of hours of footage into 113 lively, whirlwind minutes, covering big news events — the Mariel Boatlift; a Castro visit to the United Nations; the Communist leader’s death in 2016 — but also always taking the time to capture the everyday drift of life.
  55. The Treasure
    In a manner so sly you could overlook it, Porumboiu invests this tissue-thin premise with the shadows of Romanian history.
  56. The Last Gladiators
    Blending archival footage and new interviews with Nilan, his family, journalists, and fellow combatants, Gibney celebrates hockey's fisticuff traditions while also recognizing how such brutality ultimately takes its greatest toll on those who perpetrate it.
  57. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    By focusing on the Sungs, [James] puts real, human faces to this corporation, leaving little doubt they’re the ones to root for.
  58. Augustine
    The film is something of a paradox, simultaneously passionate and dispassionate, its ending tethered to both bruised triumph and a sense of things falling apart.
  59. Derrida
    The movie is ultimately about the philosopher's personality -- if you loved "Lingua Franca" (and what lumpen academoid did not?), you'll certainly dig Derrida.
  60. Burning Bush
    For all the hurtling plot, and its occasional workaday scenecraft, Burning Bush proves an engrossing historical drama, low-key but in its final moments devastating.
  61. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    Arik Kaplun's smart, scrappy romantic comedy Yana's Friends displays an insouciance rarely found in Israeli film.
  62. Amira & Sam
    Writer-director Sean Mullin gives us some of the usual beats, but he and his performers invest them with rare persuasive power.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waging a Living
    Weisberg, whose stripped-down style seems refreshing amid the current spate of super-produced docs, gives you what you want, if what you want are dismally deferred American Dreams and harsh economic realities. And you should.
  64. 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.
  65. The Sentinel
    What’s remarkable—and Kafkaesque—about La Sentinelle is how Desplechin grounds the phantasmagoric aspects of his tale in the details, routines, and conflicts of daily life.
  66. Louder Than a Bomb
    The movie floats to another realm entirely when the cameras go into the home of Nova Venerable, a smart, eloquent, gorgeous girl whose love for her special-needs younger brother and their hardworking single mom is expressed in terms that sidestep the formulaic verbal and physical bombast of so many of her peers.
  67. Girlfight
    A near-irresistible button-pusher that's agile enough to hold a mirror to its own aspirations: The Sundance prize-winning filmmaker and her prize discovery, Michelle Rodriguez, merge in the image of a self-invented amateur boxer.
  68. 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).
  69. A Scanner Darkly
    Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.)
  70. Patema Inverted
    Yoshiura keeps the story fairly linear, while playing with perspective and composing many stunning, vertiginous images that consider the different possibilities of being at war with gravity.
  71. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oklahoma!
    The songs, the somewhat corny Western dialogue, the zest, and especially the integrated dance patterns of Agnes DeMille are all a delight. [02 Jan 1957, p.6]
    • Village Voice
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jack Goes Boating
    Hoffman's directorial debut transfers to film the company's ethos of an ensemble performing with ruthless honesty encouragingly well. And that's why it's fitting that this drama asks so much of, and gets so much from, Ortiz.
  74. An Education
    Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
  75. The Interrupters
    The Interrupters reminds us of the powers and pleasures of well-crafted, immersive nonfiction filmmaking.
  76. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    The Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs franchise takes its comic cues from The Muppets and Pee Wee's Playhouse, kids' shows that ripen as their audience matures.
  77. 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.
  78. Headshot
    With Uwais choreographing the insane fights and Indonesian genre vets the Mo Brothers catching every bloody, manic minute, both fists and bullets get dished out with equal, frenetic fury — and the movie offers plenty of "Oh shit!" moments.
  79. Cargo 200
    Regardless of intent, Cargo 200 is beautifully filmed and completely disturbing for its entire running time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    It's worth shelling out to see this doc on a theater screen: The enthralling archival footage of Germany in the 1930s is rare stuff indeed, of superb photographic quality.
  81. The Tailor of Panama
    A cut above last season's best studio offerings. The performances are well turned out. The morality is stylishly gray. The attitude is almost fashionable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    This picture remains faithful to the underlying affability of both Chappelle and Gondry, orchestrating a feel-good homestyle vibe that, while peppered with moments of sly political commentary, never harshes its own, slightly bittersweet mellow.
  83. The Army of Crime
    Virginie Ledoyen stars as Missak's impossibly lovely, stalwart wife, and a troupe of supporting players give life to the men and women who died not for the miserable France of that moment, but for the vision of what it could be.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    Pulse-pounding thriller.
  85. Dragon
    The roaring popular success of Peter Chan's Wu xia in China - renamed Dragon for export - is no mystery: It's an adept genre exercise with rare primal depths.
  86. Blood Work
    A bracingly no-nonsense, highly professional policier—as proudly old-fashioned as its curmudgeon hero.
  87. Sunshine Superman
    You may not leave Sunshine Superman wanting to emulate Carl and Jean, but you will feel like you've vicariously bonded with them.
  88. Ahead of Time
    The unspooling of her life is a truly fascinating yarn of proto-feminist achievement and humbling empathy.
  89. The Miracle Worker
    A film that storms where most biopics respectfully tiptoe.
  90. Boom Bust Boom
    Jones presents a stark picture of a bifurcated economic system: the real one, in which ordinary citizens struggle; and the financial economy, in which the livelihoods of citizens are leveraged by the wealthy for speculative bets.
  91. The King's Speech
    A well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor.
  92. Children of Hiroshima
    This is a movie of blunt juxtapositions-death accompanied by the sound of raucous street musicians-as well as awkward flashbacks. Still, the strategy works.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homo Sapiens
    Instead of uncovering artifacts from long ago, Homo Sapiens shows us our own relics in the making.
  94. Proteus
    Broad and pleasantly idealistic, and the evident ardor for 150-year-old graphics (especially Dore's Ancient Mariner masterstrokes) is hard to argue with. But is it a movie or the best-designed episode of "Nova" ever?
  95. Faat Kiné
    In every way a sunny film. Supremely affirmative, it ends with the funniest, sexiest close-up of the year.
  96. Willard
    In a culture clogged with appropriated effluvia and remake cop-outs, Willard is wittier and nastier than we deserve.
  97. 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.
  98. Bustin' Down the Door
    Engaging, elegantly made surf documentary.
  99. Intolerable Cruelty
    Zeta-Jones is merely ravishing, but Clooney owns the film. Ordinarily best at sardonic, man's-man confidence, he strides through Intolerable Cruelty with fantastic screwball zest. To see Clooney tenderize, season, grill, and serve this ham hock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion.
  100. Paint It Black
    No matter her influences, Tamblyn has filmed for us something singular.
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