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 Dog
    What makes The Dog so compelling isn't Wojtowicz's cinematic imprint but the place in history that was very likely denied him by chance and his own irascibility.
  2. We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks
    Gibney, a prolific and skilled documentarian, marshals and organizes a raft of information as deftly as anyone could wish. But his conclusions are murkier than they might be.
  3. Cinévardaphoto
    A work of great charm and bold aesthetic impurity, Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto is a suite of documentary shorts.
  4. Midnight Special
    Nichols has a light touch when it comes to genre, which is Midnight Special's great blessing and curse.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Unforeseen
    Making her first feature, Austin filmmaker Dunn no doubt included some unnecessary detours for star power's sake (like the inessential footage of Redford and Nelson). But it's ultimately the movie's glacial pace and willingness to let its mind and eye wander that produces its spiritual and intellectual heft--not to mention its atypical visual splendor.
  6. Spa Night
    There have been upbeat coming-out films (But I'm a Cheerleader) and tragic, infuriating ones (Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain). Andrew Ahn's Spa Night is executed on a significantly smaller scale, a deliberately anticlimactic one, which makes it all the more doleful.
  7. Undertow
    Undertow, is sublime. Set in a small, picturesque Peruvian fishing village, it's less a coming-out tale than a magic realism–infused coming-of-consciousness love story.
  8. Zhantai
    One of the richest films of the past decade.
  9. Bay of Angels
    Most of all, it's an early chapter of Demy's courtship with the provincial France of his youth, with the most bewitching generation of French actresses, and with movies.
  10. Japan
    A notably confident and achieved debut.
  11. Brothers
    Brothers emerges as no less or more than Bier's claustrophobic compositions and unimaginative choices.
  12. The Last Station
    Tolstoy fought a love-hate war with his bipolar wife, Sonya, and thank God for that, since it allows Helen Mirren, basically playing a cross between Ibsen drama queen Hedda Gabler and the little squirrel from "A Doll's House," to waltz away with the movie.
  13. The Guest
    A transcendent comic chiller, when The Guest's characters are in peril we actually care, and Wingard respectfully makes the kills clean and quick.
  14. Margin Call
    Unlike "The Company Men," which successfully explored the moral conscience and despair of its corporate titans and middle managers, Margin Call's bids for sympathy for its most conflicted character, Spacey's Sam, fail.
  15. Listen Up Philip
    The vainglorious pas de deux between Philip and Zimmerman is entertaining for a while, though the novelty gradually wears off.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ritchie Boys
    These are men who know of what they speak; they're also eloquent, erudite, and funny as hell.
  17. Regular Lovers
    Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.
  18. Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    It's an ominous, claustrophobic, unhappily sapphic work whose thunderclap of a climax instills terror and awe of the fates' petty, whimsical cruelties.
  19. The Wonders
    The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.
  20. World on a Wire (1973)
    A bit of a slog at 205 minutes, World on a Wire builds up to a satisfyingly nutty finale.
  21. Wonder Woman
    When the separatist compound must accommodate an interloper — Steve Trevor, fished out of the sea by Diana after his plane goes down — any hopes that Wonder Woman will sustain its appealing misandry are soon dashed.
  22. The Hidden Blade
    Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.
  23. The Iron Ministry
    It's always political when regular people speak plainly about their circumstances — here, it's also moving, revelatory, and often funny, offering plenty to mull over during the long shots of train workers trundling their food carts.
  24. Cries from Syria
    His interviews are informative and captivating, but the film’s gut-punch immediacy comes from the astounding visuals caught by participants on digital cameras and cellphones, including shocking images of Assad’s torturers at work.
  25. (500) Days of Summer
    It's more like a love story in a blender. What is unexpected is the sincerity beneath the modest conceit that, yup, love hurts.
  26. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    July's witty ode to only-connecting sustains a delicate tone of pensive whimsy.
  27. The Secret Lives of Dentists
    Unlike those in the not dissimilar “American Beauty,” Dentists' characters are needier than the actors who play them -- and therein lies the problem.
  28. The Revenant
    If you can work up interest in such meager material, the film is a chilling, stirring, experiential immersion in what life-and-death drama might actually feel like.
  29. La grande strada azzurra
    The neophyte director has a tendency to pose his actors and musically overscore each new dramatic development. The combination can border on the ludicrous.
  30. Natasha
    With naturalistic honesty, Ozerov and Gordon tap into their characters’ insecurities and sexuality (because, duh, teens). But Bezmozgis delves deeper than pubescent angst, exploring the immigrant experience through family dynamics, dinner-table debates about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and old-country dreams.
  31. Night Across the Street
    Proof that Ruiz was still teeming with ideas himself, Night is a characteristic work of surreal wit and circuitousness—and the filmmaker's winking but mournful goodbye.
  32. Stronger
    It’s almost as if, in their fascination with trauma, the filmmakers have forgotten entirely what everyday life looks like.
  33. The Miners' Hymns
    It speaks eloquently about the disappearance of most any indigenous working-class culture.
  34. Horses of God
    Director Nabil Ayouch depicts the sprawling, ramshackle Sidi Moumen slums with fluid camera movements... He finds the humanity and the hopelessness in its narrow streets, its fields of rubble, monstrous trash dumps, and grim marketplaces.
  35. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    Buirski clearly shows that the spark that made her great couldn't be snuffed out so easily.
  36. The Dance of Reality
    The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky's best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show hyperbole and symbology stew, the one most invested in narrative meaning.
  37. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    The rise of video and the death of the drive-ins would eventually bring the curtain down on the Aussie schlock industry, but for two glorious hours, Not Quite Hollywood returns us to a time when the price of admission was cheap and the thrills even cheaper.
  38. Obvious Child
    Obvious Child is perfect for those who want more honesty in fiction.
  39. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    Justman's affectionate doc provides the pleasure of hearing one classic pop hook after another performed by a still tight unit, as well as the spectacle of veteran sidemen sitting around talking music. (The movie would have benefited from more period footage and fewer restaged scenes.)
  40. Iris
    Some critics wondered if "Elegy for Iris" was an act of revenge or reverence. The film, like the book, leaves behind a sad and sour image: of an indomitable woman gradually infantilized by glitches in her brain chemistry, and the man who finally is allowed to take custody of her.
  41. Tim's Vermeer
    Penn and Teller are bright guys, and their act can be fun in small doses. Yet Tim's Vermeer accentuates one of their worst impulses: They think they're mischievously raining on our parades when, really, they're not telling us much at all.
  42. Chevalier
    Despite the claustrophobic setting and Tsangari's observational style, Chevalier doesn't register as hermetic or coolly condescending; the film feels loose and agile even amid so much capricious rule-making.
  43. Reality
    Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loath to remember years from now—if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."
  44. The Animation Show 2005
    Expertly programmed by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt, the second go-round of The Animation Show features 12 films from five countries.
  45. The Loneliest Planet
    Julia Loktev's marvelous, slow-burning follow-up to her minimalist thriller "Day Night Day Night" somehow manages to be both audacious and subtle.
  46. Nanking
    While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today.
  47. mother!
    What I feel compelled to say, which can get lost in the myriad interpretations we may have of the film’s story or meaning, is that for all its self-indulgences and excess and ghastly sights, I was quickly enamored with Mother! in a way I’ve not been with any other Aronofsky film.
  48. Black Souls
    The makers of Black Souls, a superior Italian gangster movie, deserve praise for executing with atypical sensitivity a generic times-are-changing/nostalgia-for-an-imaginary-chivalrous-yesteryear scenario.
  49. What We Do in the Shadows
    What We Do in the Shadows is never as self-conscious as you fear it might be, and it has some of the loose, wiggy energy of early Jim Jarmusch, only with more bite. It makes getting poked a pleasure.
  50. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    As a gamelike, simulationist PG-13 horror chamber piece, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a success: well shot and -staged, arrestingly acted, edited with a crisp unpredictability. It's less compelling in terms of character and meaning.
  51. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    The sorry spectacle of the ranting codger never effaces the image of the boy concentrating his entire being over a chessboard. You have to love that kid and pity him.
  52. A Dangerous Method
    Cronenberg's film is at once a lucid movie of ideas, a compelling narrative, and a splendidly acted love story.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rabbit Hole
    Becca and Howie's extracurricular relationships are the saving grace of a movie that's otherwise a sledgehammer of plot and score.
  54. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Birdboy: The Forgotten Children is its own unique, damaged creature.
  55. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    By telling this story through the children’s eyes with a magical-realism element, López makes the tragically unthinkable somehow more palatable.
  56. American Gangster
    As archetypal as its title, Ridley Scott's would-be epic aspires to enshrine Harlem dope king Frank Lucas in Hollywood heaven, heir to Scarface and the Godfather. Or, as suggested by the Mark Jacobson article on Lucas that inspired the movie, a real-life Superfly.
  57. The Royal Tenenbaums
    May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.
  58. Mud
    It's too bad...that a movie so attuned to natural currents in the end gets caught up in Hollywood's impossible ones.
  59. Nightcrawler
    On the strength of Gyllenhaal's performance, Nightcrawler works best as a character study. It's chilling, but also wickedly funny and strange, like a good, dark Brian De Palma joke — in short, it's everything the stolid and humorless Gone Girl should have been.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Far Side of the Moon
    Reworking his own raw material, Lepage spins a rich, moving film that acknowledges humanity's power to break out of Earth's daily gravity; in the process, he leaves audiences floating.
  61. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Catching Fire suffers from the movie equivalent of middle-book syndrome: The story is wayward and rangy, on its way to being something, maybe, but not adding up to much by itself. Still, it’s entertaining as civics lessons go, and it’s a more polished, assured picture than its predecessor.
  62. Submarine
    Though Submarine isn't a dull head-movie, amid the bells and whistles, Roberts seems less its star than its cameraman.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Marguerite
    It is Frot's performance — full of warmth, humor, and hope — that carries the story and even leads to some laugh-out-loud moments.
  64. Superbad
    Superbad is duly ribald and often achingly funny, brewed from the now-familiar Apatow house blend of go-for-broke slapstick and instantly quotable, potty-mouthed dialogue.
  65. The Tales of Hoffmann
    A hellzapoppin’ filmization of the Offenbach opera, with stops pulled out by P&P’s resident design team and choreography by Brit-ballet arch-pope Frederick Ashton, the movie was as intensely expressionistic as any film since Caligari, and at the same time a nova of springtime élan.
  66. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping, moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period.
  67. Down to the Bone
    Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.
  68. Suzhou River
    A ghost story that's shot as though it were a documentary -- and a documentary that feels like a dream. Almost too fashionable for its own good.
  69. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It's a sign of how watered-down the movie is that only the supporting actors have any bite.
  70. 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.
  71. Dead Man's Burden
    Dead Man's Burden is a fine example of economical storytelling.
  72. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    This is a film to see and then see again, to soak in and marvel at and -- like its director -- try to keep up with.
  73. Happy Valley
    Nothing in this film (and little in any other movie this year) compares to the scenes of Sandusky's adopted son, Matt, recounting his realization that the charges of pedophilia against Sandusky squared with the ways Sandusky had treated him, too — treatment he'd never been brave enough to admit.
  74. A Hard Day
    Kim Seong-hun's riveting if empty-headed A Hard Day will be remembered for its increasingly ominous jump-cuts to mobiles ringing, vibrating, and flashing profane messages.
  75. 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.
  76. Sound City
    Dave Grohl's Sound City is an exciting, sometime illuminating documentary about how a squad of technicians and engineers in a hole-in-the-Valley music studio helped great rock 'n' rollers make great rock 'n' roll.
  77. Greenberg
    Greenberg is a movie of throwaway one-liners and evocatively nondescript locations. The style is observational, the drama is understated, and, when the time comes, it knocks you out with the subtlest of badda-booms.
  78. The Mend
    It's a tough film to shake, a slice-of-life that slices, knifelike. It's a funny drama of brothers that first makes you hate its prickly leads but then, after steeping you in their bottomed-out day-to-day, might inspire you to hope for them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    May be a shallower experience than the book, but it has a headlong velocity all its own. Catch it before the inevitable U.S. remake.
  80. Five Star
    New York onscreen is often a fantasy of hustlers, hardened cops, and the spoiled urban yuppies of the Baumbach and Dunham universes. In that sense, writer-director Keith Miller's modest drama Five Star is the kind of depiction the city sorely needs.
  81. Stuff and Dough
    Puiu seems content to embrace the dynamism of youth and possibility; if "Lazarescu" was a movie of dead ends, Stuff and Dough is one, quite literally, of open roads.
  82. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    Robust, engrossing, and surprisingly restrained in saving most of its effects for the grand finale, the first Chronicles of Narnia installment eschews Harry Potter's satanic subtext and "The Lord of the Rings'" Wagnerian cosmology. It may be as close to adult-friendly kid fare as Hollywood will ever get.
  83. For Ahkeem
    Levine and Van Soest (who are both white) deserve credit for eliding or treating obliquely a number of seemingly obvious narrative beats.
  84. Loveless
    Despite inventive moments between the performers, the central character, true to his type, is too casually drawn to sustain our interest in whether he loves or loses.
  85. Kids for Cash
    The documentary is stellar, despite some vague visual-metaphor stuff involving dioramas in an attic. Bring something you can punch, as you will be furious.
  86. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.
  87. The Bad Kids
    Desert flowers can be hard to spot, but are often distinctly beautiful, and The Bad Kids has them in focus.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    There's enough wisdom in this appropriately compact film to suggest avenues of further, though likely not as wondrous, inquiry.
  89. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    Gere jabbers amusingly, and there's something touching in his Norman's persistence.
  90. A Family Affair
    It’s a potent psychodrama, pitting Marianne’s reality against the one Fassaert is documenting
  91. Ascent
    In Fiona Tan’s glorious ode to a Japanese volcano, Mount Fuji is both geological marvel and malleable symbol, its solidity and grandeur inspiring conquest and contemplation.
  92. Taboo
    An action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque.
  93. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
    In the absence of any greater cultural context, the ritual reiteration of Greenberg's greatness grows wearisome.
  94. Pistol Opera
    Suzuki has made the ultimate meta-movie, a self-parodying, surrealist gangster daydream as intoxicating and insubstantial as an absinthe swoon.
  95. State and Main
    State and Main is a Hollywood satire as cynical and thickheaded as its supposed targets.
  96. OT: Our Town
    Kennedy takes pains to illuminate aspects and insights that buck cliché.
  97. Mistress America
    Like Brooke's dream business, a café/convenience store/hair salon, Mistress America is a mishmash of ideas — fortunately, Kirke gives a fantastic performance that quietly grounds the film.
  98. Rango
    For all its genre-bending cleverness and technical dexterity, Rango's overstuffed plot fails to consistently blend its brainy pretensions with its chase-and-slapstick family-film obligations. Like Dirt's H2O supply, laughs are scarce.
  99. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    While some of the workers' chitchat is translated via subtitles, long passages of it are not. Oreck's imagery of the forbidding Arctic landscape through its seasonal transformations (the movie covers roughly a year) is eloquent enough.
  100. Waiting for August
    What's perhaps most moving in Waiting for August, a quiet film of weight and joy, is its sense of desperate normalcy.
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