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. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    Wendy J.N. Lee's Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey powerfully connects the dots between the enormity of global warming as a phenomenon and the havoc it wreaks in ordinary lives.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The American
    Despite its director's disinterest in letting people in, there is nevertheless something exciting about a movie this uncompromised, in which the big change from the book to the screen actually toughens up the story instead of watering it down.
  3. My Cousin Rachel
    Tense and at times downright frightening.
  4. The Innocents
    Where "Ida" takes a drearier, more realistic approach to the story, The Innocents, despite its dark focus on a group of women living in fear of getting repeatedly raped by their allies, actually has a mightier finish, something of a crescendo to cut through the quiet grief.
  5. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death.
  6. GMO OMG
    A documentary that is by turns exasperating, illuminating, and intentionally infuriating.
  7. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded.
  8. The Winding Stream
    The film stands as a reminder of how much it can mean just to listen.
  9. School of Rock
    Jack Black is consistently hilarious--and not just in his dreams of moshpit glory.
  10. Gemma Bovery
    Fontaine handles the assignations with sympathetic shorthand — we see what Martin sees, but we see more, too, enough to understand that Gemma's dalliances are vital to her but not overwhelming. She has a handle on them.
  11. The White Diamond
    Having emerged from his new German cinema heyday as one of the world's most guileless and original documentary filmmakers, Herzog has slowly been crafting a four-dimensional fresco of the planet, its most human-resistant landscapes, and our dubious dramas in confronting the chaos.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    The bold and vivid colors of the paintings themselves and the sets and landscapes contribute heavily to the film's dramatic impact. [10 Jul 1957, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  13. Last Days in the Desert
    Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.
  14. Tropical Malady
    Like "Blissfully Yours" and Apichatpong's first feature, the exquisite-corpse road movie "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), Tropical Malady promotes new ways of seeing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Romántico
    Following a hardworking, goodhearted man as life beats the hell out of him, this documentary is moving almost to the point of exploitation.
  16. Che
    Every Bolivian sequence has its Cuban parallel, which is why Che's two parts are best seen together. Guerrilla may be the more realized of the two--and could certainly stand on its own--but it is only comprehensible in the light of The Argentine. Elevating Guerrilla to tragedy, The Argentine puts some hope in hopelessness--and even in history.
  17. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    For an hour and a half, this charming little movie, with its chatty talking heads and its sweet-natured subjects, offers a glimpse into the lives of two fascinating people whom I had never heard of, and who shared an unlikely life filled with achievements and setbacks, wonder and pain.
  18. Burning
    Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.
  19. L for Leisure
    What makes L for Leisure more than just a collection of clever, well-photographed jokes is the utter sincerity embedded within the constant sarcasm.
  20. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.
  21. (T)error
    Inevitably, this tense comedy dips into tragedy, with our fearful intelligence agencies getting everything wrong and the filmmakers using their rare access to chart each mistake as it happens.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ip Man
    Like his narrative, Yip's aesthetics are more muted and traditional than those of well-known florid imports "Hero" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Yet such modesty is in tune with his soft-spoken protagonist, and also provides clean, sharp views of Yen's awe-inspiring skills, which, in choreographer Sammo Hung's thrilling one-against-many skirmishes, make literal the term "fists of fury."
  23. The Silence
    Making his feature debut, Swiss-born writer/director Baran bo Odar has turned Jan Costin Wagner’s 2007 novel The Silence into a taut, beautifully acted thriller.
  24. Shakespeare High
    If Shakespeare High lacks the tightness and emotional tension a competition doc needs to take off, we get to know enough of these preternaturally self-assured kids to care about what happens to them beyond the finals.
  25. Daddy Longlegs
    A funny, fantastic, genuinely alarming quasi-autobiographical cheapster by twentysomething New York brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.
  26. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
  27. Climates
    A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.
  28. Good Ol' Freda
    Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.
  29. Dark Night
    Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Die, Mommie, Die!
    Though Natasha Lyonne as bratty daughter and Philip Baker Hall as the disposable spouse impress, it's Busch's heartfelt Joan Crawford homage that enthralls. Busch can transcend even the smog, making hazy camp seem fresh.
  31. Hillbrow Kids
    Utterly necessary film.
  32. Longing
    Magnificent and moving chamber drama.
  33. The Price of Sugar
    Out of this sorry tale of human trafficking emerges a fascinating portrait of this handsome, pugnacious, one-man NGO, who left a cushy life with his patrician Anglo-Spanish family to work with Mother Theresa and devote himself to the oppressed.
  34. Hours
    The film stirs richer, truer feelings once it becomes a one-man show. This is due both to Heisserer's and Walker's skill — the tension is strong, the scenario elemental, and Walker's harried, urgent hero is compelling — but also the fact that the movies are really good at dudes doing things, especially when those things are scrappy, desperate, and heroic.
  35. Birders: The Central Park Effect
    Kimball's bird footage is attractive on its own, but the way he positions his birders in conversation with one another is why Birders soars.
  36. Lost Boys of Sudan
    Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.
  37. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Marston nails the claustrophobia of small-town life and the turbulent emotionalism of teenagers, but what pushes the film toward sublimity is the way he delicately captures all of the characters' inner lives as their world slowly crumbles.
  38. Jimmy P.
    Amalric's impish dexterity and Del Toro's mild catatonia make for a memorable mismatch, but Jimmy P.'s profound slow burn might be too clinical for some to consider dramatic.
  39. A Hologram for the King
    Tykwer sublimates what Eggers made explicit: the joblessness, the debt, the isolation. He knows the power of an image, a gesture, a brief exchange, so he captures those social themes in flashes, which ironically gives them new power.
  40. Almost Peaceful
    French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.
  41. The Forbidden Room
    The experience is two-thirds thrilling to one-third enervating, a winning ratio for what's essentially a tightly curated anthology film.
  42. Hawking
    Finnigan wisely seizes on the gentle strength and charisma of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde. She imprints on the film as fully as her former husband.
  43. Michael Clayton
    Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other.
  44. Herb & Dorothy
    Watching the Vogels mull over art that they don't need to understand only makes their delight more infectious.
  45. 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.
  46. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    Impressionistic and lyrical, as well as somber and gripping, The Betrayal conveys a ceaseless flow. It's as if the filmmaker has opened a window onto a parallel world traveling beside our own.
  47. Superstar in a Housedress
    A fabulously fond and entertaining tribute to the quick-witted Lower East Side kid.
  48. Tap World
    It's rare to find a film that portrays dancers of all shapes, colors, ages, and sizes as beautiful, which they are.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Although the visuals are worth the ticket alone, Fantastic Planet also crackles with emotional and political resonance.
  50. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    Few horror debuts unnerve and fascinate as much as this one.
  51. I Love You, Man
    The movie delivers an absolutely complete, fully realized, delightfully novel redo of the hoariest of forms: the meet-cute, love-at-first-sight, break-up-and-make-up, racing-to-the-altar slapstick weepy that's been a staple of cinema since the invention of cinema.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Time That Remains
    Suleiman's a more assured director than he is a comedian. But individual, Tati-worthy gags still have great power.
  53. Space Station 3D
    You're paying for the view, and it's truly breathtaking.
  54. Racing Dreams
    No less than for the black inner-city teens of "Hoop Dreams," cash is the name of the game in Curry's fascinating doc, even as the kids' motivation remains a pure love of the sport.
  55. Battleship Potemkin
    For all Potemkin’s rabble-rousing propaganda, Eisenstein’s aestheticism is everywhere apparent.
  56. The Isle
    Kim's movie rocks -- I saw it cold a year ago, and I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's "Iron Man."
  57. Muscle Shoals
    Greg "Freddy" Camalier's engaging new doc Muscle Shoals stands as a winning tribute to the coastal Alabama studio, musicians, and engineers who laid down some of the greatest pop tracks of the late '60s and early '70s.
  58. The Lesson
    It's a tough, gripping watch made emotionally rewarding through trenchant plotting and Gosheva's tight-lipped expressiveness.
  59. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    [An] intense and dazzling new documentary.
  60. Crimson Peak
    Though this movie waltzes to its own strange rhythm, del Toro hits every note.
  61. Almost There
    After guiding his fate, the filmmakers step back and dispassionately capture a series of frustrated caregivers passing the baton, each nudging Anton toward a new life. This decision makes Almost There a richer, more compassionate portrait.
  62. 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.
  63. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    The film is like his life: scabrous, upsetting, kind of moving, funny as hell, alive with hints of how we've become what we are.
  64. 2 Autumns, 3 Winters
    Despite this gender imbalance, 2 Autumns, 3 Winters extends tremendous compassion to all of its characters, gently exploring their hopes and anxieties as they try to settle into adulthood.
  65. 99 Homes
    The film is more closing argument than portrait of life in the downturn, but it's thrillingly vigorous in its damning.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Golden Door
    With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Man on Wire
    While largely lighthearted, Petit's walk and Marsh's film take on new meaning post-9/11. Man on Wire never mentions the events of that day, but the Trade Center's collapse continues to weigh on Petit, as if its destruction was every bit as tragic as the human lives lost that day.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    Brook offers himself as a teacher whose goal is to help his students discover brief, ephemeral moments of bliss.
  69. Teenage
    The old footage — newsreels, scraps of home movies — is entrancing, and even those familiar details eventually accrete with the fresh ones into something grand and stirring, especially near the conclusion.
  70. 45365
    The result is a poetic documentary of quiet American surfaces and intimately eavesdropped people.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doing Time, Doing Vipassana
    It's a stunning sight inside this notorious jail compound, which is better known for violence and corruption.
  72. The Circle
    Panahi is a maestro of anxiety. Whatever its political significance, this is a dark, sustained, and wrenching film.
  73. A Sinner in Mecca
    Stirring, sad, and at times truly frightening.
  74. Bad Hurt
    Grief unleashes the possibility of change in this wrenching drama, allowing for an unexpected emotional thaw that rewards both stubborn optimism and traumatic resilience.
  75. Seymour: An Introduction
    The film Hawke has made — which borrows its title, though little else, from J.D. Salinger — works both as a celebration of Bernstein, whose spirit is at once gentle and boldly generous, and as a way of exploring creativity and the meaning it can have in our lives.
  76. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels is that rare contemporary filmmaker who's not afraid of melodrama. The Butler is so old-school it feels modern: Stylistically, it could have been made 30 years ago, but its time is now.
  77. Frontera
    Berry isn't afraid to use melodrama as a tool to highlight injustice. It's his very un-flashiness that makes Frontera effective.
  78. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    No Greek tragedy, this Hollywood Sweeney is a FUN creepy-crawly. If nothing else, Burton has learned that the successfully gruesome is its own reward.
  79. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    Many filmmakers have tried in recent years, but few have nailed the elusive formula of the two-hander romantic comedy quite like Emily Ting with Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong.
  80. Unsane
    Simple and well acted, Unsane has tension enough to knot the stomach.
  81. Casting JonBenét
    Green's doc — like the case at its center — defies resolution or easy answers.
  82. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Watching this movie is like freebasing sincerity — a scarce resource in our current entertainment hellscape. It’ll give you warm fuzzies for days.
  83. The Woodsman
    An engrossing study of a protagonist who variously inspires pity, clinical interest, fondness, and revulsion-sometimes all at once.
  84. 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.
  85. Brother
    If nothing else, Brother confirms Kitano's stature as the most original purveyor of on-screen mayhem since Sam Peckinpah.
  86. Boy A
    The film's both smart and devastating as it unthreads interwoven questions about redemption, justice, and the pivotal role of history in shaping an individual and his actions.
  87. Rackstraw Downes: A Painter
    Rackstraw Downes: A Painter is glacial and mesmerizing, the documentary equivalent of droning Tibetan singing bowls, a work crafted to induce its audience into the same contemplative state as its subject at work.
  88. The Deep Blue Sea
    Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience, that we can or will find every quality that we want in a single person.
  89. X-Men
    When it comes to stoopid fun, X-Men could be the summer movie to beat.
  90. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Both resonant and skillfully devious.
  91. The Raid: Redemption
    Lean, fast-moving, and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans's Indonesian martial-arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype.
  92. The Peacemaker
    James Demo’s The Peacemaker is an intense, intimate portrait of a visionary capable of sophisticated analysis, abrupt anger, self-deprecating wit, and profound insights — all while existing at considerable remove from his fellow man.
  93. Black Panther
    Written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther brings grounded history — in Black History Month, no less — to a fantastical story, carefully considering the world in which the characters reside.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Dodgeball is the most satisfying comedy of the past year--at least among the ones starring Stiller.
  95. Tatsumi
    If the structure sometimes disrupts the story of his life, the strong lines and melancholy sensibility of the illustration form an anchor that keep the power of Tatsumi's work firmly in view.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Restrepo
    For a movie that's both a study and a product of blood, sweat, and tears, an oft-cited mid-'60s quote from film and combat vet Samuel Fuller seems to apply: "Film is a battlefield," Fuller said in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. "There's love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word: emotions."
  97. Sully
    There is in Sully — as there is in Sniper — a purposefully conflicted reckoning with the very tenets of American heroism.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    The ultimate truth, though, is that certain, probably arrested, personalities (like mine) just find this kind of shit pretty funny and any attempt to talk your way around that is, as Cartman would say, blowing bubbles out your ass.
  99. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Despite the rosary beads Red wraps around his wrist, Hellboy II doesn't have much on its mind, but few will care since del Toro and his stellar "Pan's Labyrinth" team, including Oscar-winning cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, stage one virtuoso set-piece after another.
  100. Hollidaysburg
    Martemucci intertwines these stories gracefully, and with the charm and charisma of her cast, makes clever banter and script contrivances seem completely natural and unaffected.
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