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. Circo
    Circo is filled with beautiful images and haunting moments, especially in the third act, when the family unravels as the film culminates in a final triumphant, haunting image.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stephanie Daley
    Writer-director Hilary Brougher knows how to rub it in, but Tamblyn is fearless in her attempt to save the narrative from falling into clichéd sermonizing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Water
    This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom.
  4. The Rape of Europa
    Impressive in scope if unremarkable in style, The Rape of Europa provides a chronology of World War II as it was experienced by "David," "Mona Lisa," and other artistic treasures the Nazis plundered.
  5. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Rather than epic or thrilling, justice becomes an errand, an extension of domestic work.
  6. Italian for Beginners
    A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.
  7. Bukowski: Born into This
    Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.
  8. Monsoon Wedding
    An air-conditioned bus tour of Punjabi ritual. Nair stuffs the film with dancing, henna, ornamentation, and group song, but her narrative clichés and telegraphed episodes smell of old soap opera.
  9. Home of the Brave
    Doubles as a narrative of the nascent women's movement.
  10. Gerald's Game
    With rasps and desperate eyes, Gugino communicates Jessie’s thinking and planning so powerfully that cutaways to that other Jessie, the chatty vision, egging her on, prove redundant.
  11. High Ground
    From its low-key, guitar-based score by composer Chris Bacon to the filmmaker's refusal to sugar-coat the tough times some of the soldiers faced after completing the climb, High Ground takes its cues from the worldview of its subjects.
  12. 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.
  13. Code Black
    What will pull viewers in is the empathy of the healthcare workers who battle to retain their idealism in the face of staggering obstacles.
  14. The Wife
    It is the depth Close lends to Joan that kept me riveted — and angry.
  15. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    The plot is needlessly busy, and much of the action is more manic and indistinct. But How to Train Your Dragon 2 cuts deeper than the first picture — it will be particularly resonant for anyone who has ever worked with or adopted rescue animals — and there are a few sequences of cartoon grandeur.
  16. Still Bill
    Withers gets a sleepily even-keel portrait that could use more on musical technique, though it is nice to see him get happy with singer-songwriter Raul Midón.
  17. Dheepan
    Ultimately, Dheepan is the story of three people struggling to maintain their humanity, even as they lose their identities.
  18. The Messenger
    The filmmakers, like the songbirds they advocate for, are only messengers, but their message is persuasive and terrifying.
  19. The Disaster Artist
    Franco’s own movie works best as a portrait of the complicated friendship between Greg and Tommy, and it’s an inspired idea to have real-life brothers Dave and James play best friends — we can sense alternating undercurrents of exasperation and affection beneath every exchange.
  20. Bill Cunningham New York
    No passion for fashion is required to enjoy this absorbing portrait of legendary New York Times "On the Street" photographer Bill Cunningham, but a sense of history and tragedy might help.
  21. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Herzog smartly takes a broad, bird's-eye perspective of our early techno-evolution.
  22. Service (Serbis)
    Serbis may be a raunch-fest, but it's also a mind-trip--a raunch-fest with ideas.
  23. Dig!
    These flashes push Dig! beyond recording-industry kvetch, causing it to stay with you longer than either band's ephemeral music.
  24. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank's long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer.
  25. Leaning Into the Wind
    The film ranges more widely than its predecessor, surveying more landscapes and a greater variety of projects. But it’s still a contemplative beauty, a chance to consider and be moved by a richer sort of connectedness than our lives typically allow.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broken Embraces
    Indeed, three decades into his career as a name-brand fashioner of zesty soapers, Spanish cinema's most beloved export could direct un film de Almodóvar with his eyes shut and still get a rise out of his fans. So who could blame the matador for letting the bull run the show this time?
  27. Rosetta
    Pummeling, jagged, and extremely well-edited film.
  28. Kandahar
    The movie feels truncated, but it communicates a certain urgency and at times a powerful sense of the absurd.
  29. Blue Caprice
    The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.
  30. Spettacolo
    Is this art or is this prophecy? Is there even a difference?
  31. Maggie's Plan
    Maggie's Plan is a fun light comedy with memorable characters, from a writer-director who lives up to her lineage (Arthur Miller's her dad), but it relies heavily on Gerwig's predictable charm and sometimes seems more Woody Allen than Rebecca Miller.
  32. Adventureland
    I've seen Mottola's movie twice, and both times, it has inspired feelings of joy, sadness, and a profound yearning for the unrecoverable past.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Every Little Step
    For Chorus Line fans, though, the documentary--is a singular sensation.
  34. Testament of Youth
    Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), simultaneously poignant and powerful as Vera Brittain, the writer who fought her way into Oxford then chucked that to go to the front as a nurse, gives another indelible performance.
  35. Like Someone in Love
    The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Despite the passive-aggressive bickering, Beats, Rhymes & Life is not, thankfully, hip-hop's "Some Kind of Monster."
  37. Inside Man
    Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.
  38. El Sicario: Room 164
    Our subject retains a noticeable streak of pride in his expertise, though falters when discussing the killing of women. Hoping for his own salvation, the converted killer now claims the scales have fallen from his eyes, but his executioner's hood remains in place to the end - as does the mephitic air of timeless evil that hangs over El Sicario.
  39. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    The lovely ball-&-socket meeting of the two artists' sensibilities is what makes the doc sing, even if it is a chronicle of a death foretold.
  40. Chico & Rita
    The result has only a loose resemblance to Valdés's story - though real-life figures including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and a Cuban songstress who bears some resemblance to Rita Montaner are featured as characters - but it's a dazzling thing to behold.
  41. Something in the Air
    In Something in the Air, that past—a version of Assayas's own—is rendered in visuals so specific and evocative, it's perpetually alive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebirth
    Despite Whitaker's best attempts, Rebirth never persuasively builds to catharsis, and that's entirely for the best. Forget transcendence: The quintet's return to normal, quotidian lives is the most inspiring development of all.
  43. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Gunn has to juggle so many plot elements — so many booming galactic battles, so many whisker-close brushes with death — that it's little wonder he loses his grip on the thing. He inserts occasional moments of wonder but doesn't bother to smooth over the seams.
  44. Nana
    A fiction film that documents the unpredictable, unscripted actions of its pint-size lead, Nana offers new ways of thinking about childhood, or, at the very least, about children in movies.
  45. The Unspeakable Act
    Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    This is one of the most fully rounded, unsentimental portraits of an artist you'll ever see on film.
  47. 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.
  48. Lore
    Shortland draws fine work from her actors, particularly the haunting Rosendahl, who manages to seem by turns a perfectly unbending Nazi youth, a frightened little girl forced to grow up too quickly, and a sensuous young woman bursting into bloom.
  49. A Prayer Before Dawn
    A Prayer Before Dawn feels scarily authentic, and may be too much for some. But there are moments of grace amid the setting’s despair.
  50. Jesus' Son
    Though Maclean uses every trick available to make up for the missing inner voice, we never get into Crudup's mellow loser like we should. Maclean's got an incisive eye, but it's poised on the outside of the terrarium looking in.
  51. In America
    Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Morning Sun
    Gripping, relentlessly tragic retelling of life in revolutionary times.
  53. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai is more than just another bid for respectability, like "13 Assassins" -it may well be Miike's best film, a patient, ominous piece of epic storytelling that conscientiously rips the scabs off the honorable samurai mythology.
  54. 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.
  55. Room and a Half
    In this ecstatically fanciful film, Russian filmmaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky brings the acclaimed Nobel Laureate back home via his sonorous verse and a montage of archival footage, wickedly doctored photos, re-enactments, and puckish animation featuring two crows and a very large cat.
  56. Dirty Wars
    Dirty Wars is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know how we wage war right now; it's also a chilling prologue for what's likely a global future of endless war and blowback.
  57. Machuca
    Machuca is still a half-measure. Wood is fastidious about period set design, but not much else; rather than burning with experience, the film feels opportunistic.
  58. Night School
    As an introduction to its arresting, charismatic subjects, Night School is invaluable.
  59. 3:10 to Yuma
    The movie's best performance belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jane Eyre
    Fukunaga has made his Jane Eyre an intimate, thoughtful epic, anchored by strong lead performances and the gorgeous, moody 100-shades-of-gray cinematography of Adriano Goldman.
  61. 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.
  62. Buck
    Meehl finds the real story in Brannaman's fractured past as a child celebrity trick-roper who, along with his older brother, Smokie, was systematically abused by his alcoholic father.
  63. Machines
    Machines proves both uncompromising and unforgettable.
  64. Shaun of the Dead
    The actors are all on target (particularly Penelope Wilton as Shaun's relentlessly cheery mum), and taken on its own shaky legs it's a wittier genre coda than "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    And Everything Is Going Fine
    Seen as his final monologue, the film is both an invaluable portfolio of his talent, and a tribute rendered in the style of its subject.
  66. Their Finest
    The combined charms of Britishness and nostalgia often prove a potent blend for American moviegoers, but Their Finest could have delivered something more.
  67. Creepy
    What's the opposite of a jump scare? Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has mastered it in the superb Creepy, revealing the upsetting details with such slow-build subtlety that you don't notice your skin crawling until it's halfway out the door.
  68. Syriana
    Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is "Frontline" meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler.
  69. Silent Souls
    Dour yet affirmative, this laconic, deliberately paced, beautifully shot movie seeks the archaic in the ordinary - and, though somewhat off-putting in its diffidence, largely succeeds.
  70. Djomeh
    Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.
  71. Vengeance
    More than once does To's grandiose imagism miraculously grant this rote thriller a gleam of the sublime, as in a trash-dump face-off staged as an epic field maneuver, or a campground shoot-out timed to the fickle light of the moon.
  72. Evolution of a Criminal
    Vital, thoughtful, and deeply personal, first-timer Darius Clark Monroe's autobiographical doc stands as a testament to the power of movies to stir empathy.
  73. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    The movie is a sweeping, hectic docudrama that would have been immeasurably helped by the use of informational intertitles.
  74. It Felt Like Love
    It Felt Like Love is brilliantly, brutally tactile.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Intimate Stories
    It's a perfectly realized grace note whose lack of any obvious message only reinforces the movie's abundant wisdom and patient humanism.
  76. Dreamgirls
    Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.
  77. Outside In
    The drama of Outside In is largely underplayed. It’s a tale of people seeking simple lives on their own terms, and while it may be withholding, its small scale seems a statement on just how many worthy stories are kept behind bars.
  78. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.
  79. Flight
    It is not surprising that Zemeckis's handling of spectacle would be undiminished, but he hasn't lost his touch with actors, either, coaching Washington into one of his rare performances that suggests much more than it shows.
  80. 99 Homes
    The film is more closing argument than portrait of life in the downturn, but it's thrillingly vigorous in its damning.
  81. The Lunchbox
    Batra isn't ambitious with the visuals, but he creates an effective, unfussy sense of urban space, both indoor (cramped apartments, crowded buses) and outdoor (even leafy residential streets seem to be swarming with playing children).
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shine a Light
    Shine a Light's only point seems to be: You try this at 60. One would hope that, after "The Last Waltz" and "No Direction Home," Scorsese might venture beyond making a glossy episode of "Ripley's Believe It or Not." Nope, and we're not supposed to question it: Like the Stones, Marty's earned the right to coast, especially in his senior years.
  83. Chuck & Buck
    Manages to be not only consistently droll but cumulatively poignant and even scary.
  84. The Sleepy Time Gal
    Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection.
  85. Blue Car
    Blue Car gets so much of the hard stuff (including Meg's Plath-via-Tori poetry) that it assumes the easy stuff will take care of itself. It doesn't.
  86. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Both resonant and skillfully devious.
  87. A Very Long Engagement
    Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.
  88. Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!
    The filmmaker uncovers a foul, lurid, corrupt, and perversely compelling conspiracy--which is to say, he successfully turns The Night Watch into a Peter Greenaway film.
  89. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    The doctors' motivations remain somewhat enigmatic, even as the two veterans emerge as more fully drawn characters.
  90. This Ain't California
    This Ain't California is a masterful lie that illuminates a little-known reality.
  91. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    Despite the poetry its subtitle promises, the fascinating crows-in-the-skyline doc Tokyo Waka is more informative than lyric, which is not at all a complaint.
  92. The Death of Louis XIV
    Delicately balanced between grandeur and absurdity, Serra's film maintains this tricky equilibrium largely thanks to the icon whose face fills the screen.
  93. The Light of the Moon
    The frank ways in which Thompson and Beatriz channel Bonnie make it clear that there’s a lot of respect for this complex character navigating life-altering trauma.
  94. Cartel Land
    Cartel Land is interested in how idealism becomes corrupt.
  95. Soul Power
    Takes too long to get to the meat of its matter, but captivates once it does.
  96. An Honest Liar
    The film's heart, like Randi's, is in the penetration of illusion, rather than its manufacture.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer
    A good deal livelier than the usual music-doc embalming.
  98. Soul Kitchen
    Since the filmmaker's main agenda here is to keep things bumping along, the fraught situations are happily played and funk-scored as crowd-pleasing rather than issue-stroking.
  99. Housebound
    Housebound is a tad long, and its murder mystery a bit of a muddle, but that doesn’t matter. The final third is virtuoso.
  100. The Student
    For most of its running time, The Student is immensely compelling, a terrifying ride between hothouse realism and dreamy metaphor. If by the end it feels unresolved, perhaps that’s because the nightmare is far from over.
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