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. The Manchurian Candidate
    Demme, who works a clever permutation on the original ending, is more than capable of doing the thriller thing--even with material that will strike a good percentage of his audience as familiar. As an intelligent genre flick, the movie plays to his strengths. His direction of actors has never been better.
  2. Weiner
    Weiner is about as entertaining as a film about someone destroying a life and career can be. You can't turn away from the car wreck, and Weiner himself can't stop commenting on it.
  3. 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.
  4. Time Out
    Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.
  5. U-571
    It's a simple pleasure watching an American movie that respects genre, knows its limitations, and genuflects at the memory of Don Siegel in the age of Spielberg.
  6. Steve Jobs
    This is a swift and searing attempt to pull back the curtain on Jobs and, in the process, investigate the relationship between the myth and the man.
  7. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore.
  8. The Cold Lands
    In the thoughtful and touching coming-of-age tale The Cold Lands, writer-director Tom Gilroy examines self-reliance as a philosophy and way of life.
  9. Alien Abduction
    Credit this spirited, uncommonly effective found-footage thriller for breaking the templates promised by its genre and title.
  10. The Eagle
    The Eagle is full of action and fleet of foot-it's a movie of smoky, lowering battlefields and trippy, space-bending flashbacks, pausing only for admiring location shots of Scotland's wild, craggy vistas.
  11. Charge
    There's no dearth of adrenaline as engineering teams face challenges every bit as bumpy, winding, perilous and exhilarating as the famous course itself.
  12. A Hijacking
    Danish director Tobias Lindholm's wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the shape of believable fiction, although the movie is most remarkable for everything it doesn't show.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    This latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward.
  14. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller.
  15. West
    Schwochow's intimate, handheld camerawork often feels like surveillance, which transforms mundane events into the menacing moments of a psychological thriller.
  16. Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine
    Directors Harris and Sanin provide clear historical and present-day context and furnish alarming proof of Vladimir Putin’s multilayered deceptions.
  17. Blow-Up
    A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni’s what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder.
  18. Shake Hands with the Devil
    Though the film, based on Dallaire's memoir, can veer toward deification of the general, it's hugely effective.
  19. Notre musique
    Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films.
  20. The Arbor
    Barnard makes the psychological mayhem Dunbar endured and inflicted tangible.
  21. When Marnie Was There
    At its most beautiful, Yonebayashi's picture is about the magic of female friendship at its purest.
  22. The Squid and the Whale
    Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.
  23. Mood Indigo
    Mood Indigo is bitter candy, a heartbreaker that uses sugar as a trap.
  24. Apocalypse Now Redux
    Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.
  25. Domestic Violence
    The most compelling Wiseman epic of recent years -- reminiscent of his hellish 1975 masterpiece, "Welfare," in its open-ended articulation of chaotic, violent, luckless lives.
  26. Philomena
    The grande dame's performance, alternately goofy and grave, is an absolute tour de force.
  27. Young Adult
    Young Adult might be brushed off as curdled rom-com were it not for two things. The first is the depth of Theron's performance...The second, less predictable aspect is the utter absence of the corny rehabilitation found in "Juno" and Reitman's glib, downsizing dramedy "Up in the Air."
  28. Inside Job
    There's not much sense that the system can be voted out-not least because Barack Obama, shown campaigning on the crisis and elected in part to change the game, recruited his economic advisers from those who enabled the disaster.
  29. The Golden Age
    Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jess and Moss
    Achingly sad and surpassingly lovely.
  31. Stranger Things
    The bond between this university graduate and the ragged drifter comes to seem vital and true, undercutting the full-blown sentimentality of the conclusion.
  32. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Odyssey, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet train.
  33. Chinatown
    In 1974 a director, a screenwriter, and a producer (Robert Evans, who for once deserves a few of the plaudits he's apportioned himself) could decide to beat a genre senseless and then dump it in the wilds of Greek tragedy. [Review of August 8, 2003 re-release]
  34. Empty Nest
    Dark and light invariably go hand in hand in Burman's work, but this tender, goofily circular portrait of how we fill up the cavernous space once occupied by children begins and ends, beautifully, with an image of a man and a woman floating head to head on water--hapless, helpless, happy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Brothers
    As in "The Bear," Annaud eschews animal voice-over and visual F/X in favor of live, almost wordless action. The result is the humanization of animals and the animalization of humans.
  36. From Hell
    Superbly shot around Prague -- From Hell is even more stylish than gruesome -- it has the lush decrepitude of an autumn compost heap or an old Hammer werewolf flick.
  37. Rolling Papers
    Without coming across as a soapbox for narcs or unserious stoners, Rolling Papers gives a clearheaded account of things as they stand and where they might be headed.
  38. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    Crucially, all four men, plus the ancillary characters who appear throughout the film, prove to be excellent company, holding forth on literature, Europe's future, inner-ear ailments, and side triceps.
  39. Red Lights
    A satisfyingly well-wrought, old-school thriller: Character drives the plot, literally.
  40. Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
    If Five Seasons is the only opportunity viewers have to experience Oudolf’s artistry up close, Piper’s cinematography (whether through a sunny haze or a snowy blanket) and contemplative storytelling have done these gardens justice.
  41. The Iron Giant
    Remarkably unassuming, genuinely playful, and superbly executed, The Iron Giant towers over the cartoon landscape.
  42. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    Habicht has made a lovely film that’s partly about Pulp and partly about Sheffield: It’s hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins.
  43. On the Rocks
    Staging multiple sequences as extended Altman-esque tapestries in which overlapping voices uneasily harmonize with the soundtrack's swelling jazz, On the Rocks is like a blood pressure–raising anxiety attack extended to an hour and a half — except funny.
  44. The Human Surge
    Surreal and wordlessly unsettling, Eduardo Williams’ globe-crossing feature The Human Surge is intimate and pleasurably inscrutable.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moby Dick
    The virtues of this Moby Dick are many. [17 Oct 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  46. Tokyo Sonata
    Kurosawa's abiding concern has always been the alienation of modern living, which he here merely transplants into a more recognizable domestic milieu, where subtle fissures in society's apparent order threaten to short-circuit people instead of their beloved technology.
  47. Adela
    With its art-perfect snapshot of a community-in-flux, Adela calls to mind Pedro Costa's similarly rigorous slum-life portrait "Colossal Youth."
  48. Man from Reno
    Though it ticks on too long, watching Fujitani's fascinating sleuth overestimate her skills is as satisfying as a mug of hot matcha on a soul-chilling night.
  49. Mysterious Skin
    With remarkable directness and composure, it shatters the myth of childhood innocence and the deathless taboo of prepubescent sexuality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Make It Funky!
    A love letter to New Orleans, Make It Funky! reminds us of what has been lost in the flood, and of an artistic spirit that will never dissipate.
  51. Wonderland
    There's not a false note among the performances: Henderson, Hart, Shepherd, Markham, and in particular McKee add unspoken complexities to their portrayals.
  52. Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein
    This evocative film is a poignant testament to the twin forces of love (however blighted) and the unconscious.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    My long strums are pretty f---ing tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive mock-rock and/or the further decline of Western civ.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gone Baby Gone
    In his strikingly downbeat directorial debut, Affleck has created something of a blue-moon rarity: an American movie of genuine moral complexity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Rabbi's Cat
    An absorbing, nuanced, and vividly animated tale of adventure, ambivalent morality, colonial injustice, talking animals, and the vagaries of religious zeal and colonialism.
  56. Kiki
    Jordenö, in a recurring motif, honors the kiki denizens the most when she captures them motionless, staring directly into the camera, regal and indefatigable.
  57. Children of Love
    Chillingly naturalistic.
  58. The Women's Balcony
    This light and predictable movie, with its overwhelming box office success, still offers tremendous insight into day-to-day Israeli society.
  59. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Inoffensively glib and innocuously arty.
  60. Superman Returns
    The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.
  61. Haute Cuisine
    Writer-director Christian Vincent and co-writer Étienne Comar, aided by Frot's quiet intensity, imbue Hortense's quest to pull off culinary miracles with an urgency that's almost absurdly compelling, and all the more entertaining for it.
  62. Diggers
    Rudd is sweet and funny; Ron Eldard and Josh Hamilton are great as the town's aimless stud muffin and philosophizing pothead, respectively. But the movie belongs to Ken Marino, who is riotously funny.
  63. Bang! The Bert Berns Story
    Blending stock footage, vintage audio, re-creation, and many testimonials from heavy hitters from Ben E. King to Van Morrison, Berns' son Brett keeps things visually lively, and not as morose as may be implied.
  64. Risk
    Though it could benefit from less hopping around in time and space, and it bears the scars of Poitras’ multiple edits — she showed one cut to Assange, who hated it — if you care about what’s happening to the internet and to global politics, it’s essential viewing.
  65. Emptying the Skies
    Emptying the Skies performs a grand and aching love by telling its story with a power that enrages.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Midnight in Paris
    The latest in a long line of actors playing a "Woody Allen type" in a Woody Allen film, Wilson bends his own recognizably nasal Texan drawl into an exaggerated pattern of staccatos and glissandos that's obviously modeled on the writer/director's near-musical verbal cadences.
  67. La bûche
    By turns hilarious and wounding.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    However uplifting, To Be Heard, shot over the course of several years, takes a surprisingly unflinching look at the home lives of the three high schoolers.
  69. Out of My Hand
    The story spins out in painful directions that feel surprising yet inevitable.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Siddhartha (re-release)
    Sven Nykvist's golden-hued cinematography perfectly suits Hesse's mind-expanding narrative of Buddhist enlightenment.
  71. Stinking Heaven
    Never a banal depiction of dysfunctional group dynamics, Stinking Heaven, which was shaped, as in Silver's previous work, largely through improvisation, remains consistently absorbing.
  72. 12 Days
    At times unbearably intimate, even invasive, the photographer-documentarian Raymond Depardon’s 12 Days is the kind of film you might wonder, as you watch, whether you should be watching. I’m glad I did, and I can’t discount the empathy that this study of mental illness and bureaucratic practice stirs or the understanding it crystallizes.
  73. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Charlie Victor Romeo shows us how much of life's weight and meaning can be packed into one second of thought or action; it's a work of shivery intimacy.
  74. The Lovers
    Jacobs lets casually observed details and offhand humor advance the story. There are no grand pronouncements in The Lovers, which smartly communicates its ideas about relationships during its long stretches of silence.
  75. Flame and Citron
    Flame & Citron is the film that the horribly overrated "Black Book" could have been, had Paul Verhoeven not indulged in the puerile reversals of sensitive Nazis and treacherous partisans.
  76. Friday Night Lights
    Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members.
    • 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.
  78. The Trip to Spain
    It is at once a desperate echo of long-gone glories and a glory itself.
  79. My Perestroika
    The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.
  80. On the Way to School
    The film quietly reveals these four small stories as epically heroic and timeless journeys.
  81. 12 O'Clock Boys
    What lingers in Nathan's documentary isn't the swaggering trails of diesel fumes. It's the sadness of watching Pug narrow his options.
  82. Il Divo
    Il Divo plays like an elegantly ritualized black comedy.
  83. Gimme the Loot
    Leon’s grungy resume indie is a conscientiously modest deal in the end, with a sweet, mumblecoresque ending, but it glows with unmistakable star power.
  84. Tumbleweeds
    One of the refreshing aspects of the slight, flawed Tumbleweeds is that it creates a world inhabited by recognizable people.
  85. Red Desert (1964)
    Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    What is shocking is seeing the aggressive and malicious response to the movement.
  87. Miami Connection (1987)
    Absurd, yes, but director Richard Park and his game and guileless cast have the highest of spirits, and the nonsense bubbles like a bottle uncorked.
  88. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    The latest Tinker Tailor is, in some ways, more explicit regarding various characters' sexual proclivities than was the miniseries. It's also more concise, but what's lost is George's pathos.
  89. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Scrappy, remarkably expansive, crazily watchable.
  90. Easier with Practice
    From the virtuoso 10-minute single shot that encompasses the initial phone call, to a long, traveling shot of Davy all but running from a humiliating sexual encounter, Alvarez trusts Geraghty's fear-and-wonder-filled eyes to tell the tale. These two need to make more movies together.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paragraph 175
    The tales told are bitter, horrific in detail...yet often leavened with irony and humor. Rupert Everett's low-key narration serves the film well.
  92. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Has marked affinities to "Ghost World" and "Donnie Darko." It's more amorphous and less sharply drawn than either but has an acute sense of guilty secrets and secret places.
  93. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    In the end, this morphing of ideas and styles is more deadpan romantic than sociocritical, and sweeter for it.
  94. Nancy
    I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.
  95. Red White & Blue
    The pacing and performances are more organic than in most horror.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mysterious Object at Noon
    Far from an empty vessel, the film encourages an ever increasing proliferation of odd topics and perspectives.
  97. About Schmidt
    One may not realize how truly sad this movie is until the forlorn final moments, when Payne resists an inspirational closer, and, with exquisite tact, averts his eyes.
  98. Frost/Nixon
    Frost/Nixon's main attraction is neither its topicality nor its historical value, but Langella's re-creation of his Tony-winning performance.
  99. Change Nothing (Ne Change Rien)
    Call it the Passion of Jeanne: Accompanied for much of the movie by a single reverb-heavy guitar and a snare drum, Balibar demonstrates a carefully calibrated lack of affect and a voice as smoky as a carton of Gitanes.
  100. Black Girl (1966)
    Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966) is dense with cool fury.
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