Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. From Nowhere
    The naturalistic, handheld camerawork aims to create an intimate space for human connection, but the film only skims the surface, taking cues from other touching dramas without ever reaching its own original core.
  2. Frank
    The masterstroke of Frank, the film ex-Sidebottom collaborator Jon Ronson has now co-written, is that this time the man in the mask is a modern Mozart. And, unsparingly, Ronson has written himself as the jealous goober who risks everything, with the delusion that he's the smart one.
  3. Easy Money
    A hit in its native Sweden as "Snabba Cash," the English title is a piece of cheap irony; this is a crime thriller where no one gets away clean, and every action has its irrevocable reaction.
  4. The Art of the Steal
    The Art of the Steal's thorough research, bolstered by many fiery talking heads, makes it one of the most successful advocacy docs in recent years and may prompt some firsthand investigating of your own.
  5. Tokyo Godfathers
    A welcome exercise in anime weirdness.
  6. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.
  7. Sleepless Night
    There are hints of humor and depth early on, but about halfway through, Sleepless Night clicks into something funny and warm without sacrificing its edge.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fear and Trembling
    A culture-clash comedy that takes the notion of Japanese otherness to ludicrous extremes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power Trip
    Like the best documentaries, this one raises questions instead of providing pat answers. If only Devlin had taken his intrepid reporting a few steps further.
  10. Man on the Train
    Collapses in a heap of affirmational outbursts and metaphysical goop. The fond chemistry between the leads deserves a better movie.
  11. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    The Duel is the most successful literary adaptation I've seen since Pascal Ferran's 2006 "Lady Chatterley."
  12. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    Josue tries to reclaim his narrative with this intimate, positive portrait, but while Shepard's brave and resourceful parents encourage her, they realized long ago that his death means he no longer belongs solely to them.
  13. This Is Congo
    McCabe served as cinematographer, and his images here vary from striking to scarifying to magnificent. But his film’s power comes from its voices.
  14. 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.
  15. The Punk Singer
    It's impossible to watch The Punk Singer and not ask if feminism is dead. That's a fair starting question. But a better one is what if it isn't — what if we've just stopped recognizing it?
  16. It's Not Yet Dark
    It’s Not Yet Dark is an uplifting portrait of a debilitated man driven to excel by a relentless desire to live life and love those who surround him.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It's Always Fair Weather
    Kelly, Dailey, and Michael Kidd are good as the three returning veterans, but their abilities are no match for an unbelievable script and that good old MGM realism. [02 Nov 1955, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  18. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    Makes a few distracting embellishments--re-enactments (some shabbily animated), melodramatic cloak-and-dagger scoring--but in the main, it's a professional job, standing above the crowd of politico documentaries that proliferate like kudzu over arthouse screens.
  19. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    A deft, old-school psychological thriller (or perhaps horror film) that relies mainly on the power of suggestion and memories of hippie cult crazies.
  20. House of Pleasures
    The filmmaker gives full vent to his romanticism by staging an End of the Epoch party, with tearful sex workers dancing to "Nights in White Satin," then steps on the mood with yet another farewell fête, commemorating Bastille Day. The prisoners are free - to walk the streets. Ironic, no?
  21. Silicon Cowboys
    Director Jason Cohen (the Oscar-nominated short Facing Fear) wants his documentary history of Compaq computers to be fun — and indeed, compared to the overly earnest clips of Halt and Catch Fire inserted for contrast, the real slow-talking Texans in the tale are a hoot.
  22. The Settlers
    What Dotan has to say — in arresting new footage — about today’s Hilltop Youth, a right-wing Jewish Israeli settler organization that unites and mobilizes young people to occupy territory in the West Bank, is crucial and, in the American context, frighteningly familiar.
  23. Dina
    Dina is a story about resilience and a woman’s indomitable will to seek out her best life.
  24. The Trip to Italy
    Now we know just what to expect from Coogan and Brydon, although as long as you're willing to settle in for the ride, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Flower of My Secret
    The Flower of My Secret is a return to form, although not a return to the sort of campy, transgressive comedies that rocketed Almodovar to the top of Spanish cinema during the liberated post-Franco early 1980s. [12 Mar 1996]
    • Village Voice
  26. Lovely & Amazing
    Everyone in this chintz-covered world is a little creepy.
  27. Knafayim Shvurot
    This poignant, acutely observed movie is eloquent and suggestive in dramatizing a particular trauma in the context of an ordinary Haifa family.
  28. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    Bravely bucks the "Behind the Music" arc, conveying a reality of constant flux, a sense of the band being jerked in many different directions.
  29. Joy Ride
    Redoubtably hilarious as always, Zahn also lends his character unpredictable flashes of anger, pathos, and faint psychosis, even when the movie jumps the median from ticklishly discomfiting black comedy into by-the-numbers horror jolts.
  30. Lambert & Stamp
    Cooper's interest is in the collaboration between the talent and its managers, in the way the duo urged their charges to begin to conceive of their sound, look, marketing, and live performances as all expressive of a singular vision.
  31. Charlie's Country
    Whether laughing, crying, mumbling to himself, or projecting a valiant stoicism, Gulpilil — beneath a white beard and a blanket of shaggy hair — commands the screen in close-ups liable to run for minutes at a time.
  32. Under the Tree
    The first scenes are hilarious, all sharp surprises and adeptly staged physical comedy. But then the story turns, the way that milk does, curdling into tragedy.
  33. Attack the Block
    The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June's "Trollhunter," Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it's neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy.
  34. The Wolf of Wall Street
    There are hints of greatness, one or two artfully constructed scenes that remind you why you look forward to new Scorsese films in the first place. But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad behavior in the financial sector, Wolf is pushy and hollow, too much of a bad thing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ballplayer: Pelotero
    An unexpectedly gripping portrait of how MLB's sausage gets made.
  36. Notes on Blindness
    By having their actors lip-sync along to Hull and his family's own voices, the staged re-creations that so often pad nonfiction films here achieve a peculiar formalist beauty.
  37. Terror's Advocate
    Terror's Advocate is largely a mix of talking heads and archival footage, but as Vergés's connections to Swiss neo-Nazis and Congo secessionists are explored, the movie becomes a fantastic international thriller.
  38. I don't feel at home in this world anymore.
    Lynskey’s shivering rage and Wood’s Zen incompetence play off beautifully against each other, and Blair deftly juggles the suspense, humor and social overtones of his script. Until, that is, the film’s final 30 or 40 minutes, when he settles for genre schlock and the revelatory film we thought we were watching devolves into a less interesting, more familiar one.
  39. Dark Horse
    The villagers, excitable everyday folks, make for capital interview subjects, and the filmmakers wring poignancy from re-enactments your brain knows are a little much but your heart may thrum to anyway.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweet Land
    Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm.
  41. One Cut, One Life
    It's a fault of feminism, of artistry, of generosity, for the older woman to envy one younger. And yet. How do we escape the myths into which we are born? We tell them, and show the hard work of telling.
  42. 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.
  43. Honey
    With striking compositions and cuts that reveal a deep appreciation of cinema's possibilities, Valeria Golino's Honey could be about anything at all and still demand and hold your attention; that the narrative is as moving as the film is aesthetically precise is an added delight.
  44. Mala Mala
    This film does not pander. Rather, it demands that the viewer rise to the occasion.
  45. The Landlord
    One of the funniest social comedies of its period.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Between Days
    Instantly compelling.
  47. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    A film that's in perfect sync with its subject.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Win Win
    A "quirky" dramedy in the "Juno"/"Little Miss Sunshine" mode, but lacking the latter's vibrant ensemble and the former's snappy patter, Win Win is indie with the edges sanded down completely.
  49. Clean
    Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.
  50. Heaven Knows What
    In the thinly veiled version of her life that appears onscreen, the actress unforgettably shows the deadening toll of always being on the move, only to return to the exact same place.
  51. The Son of Joseph
    Amalric enlivens episodes of limp satire by wholly embracing his unrepentantly self-serving libertine character.
  52. 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.
  53. Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    Solid middlebrow entertainment, a vast period epic with an almost DeMillean taste for excess.
  54. The Cider House Rules
    This adaptation of John Irving's novel--- is as paternalistic, puffed-up, and dull as a congressional debate about abortion rights.
  55. Tumbleweeds
    One of the refreshing aspects of the slight, flawed Tumbleweeds is that it creates a world inhabited by recognizable people.
  56. Croupier
    Polished and adroit ado about next to nothing, Hodges's film owes everything to Owen, who nails the vaguely unsavory, unreadable, half-lidded hunks that inhabit every profitable entertainment-industry outpost.
  57. Girl on the Bridge
    Painless -- not particularly funny and not even remotely moving.
  58. Félicité
    Gomis’s handheld cameras work to keep up with the actors, who seem to move with rare freedom, but he also stages some exquisite and complex flourishes.
  59. Goodbye to Language 3D
    To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended.
  60. Time to Choose
    If An Inconvenient Truth served to scare us, then Time to Choose offers hope, presenting what amounts to an hour-and-45-minute commercial for renewable technology that might inspire confidence in scientific progress even as it reminds us that it isn't cheap being green.
  61. Lost in La Mancha
    The movie neither inspires us to pine for what might've been nor makes Gilliam-style filmmaking seem like a noble pursuit.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Velvet
    The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" -- I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986. (Review of 20th Anniversary Re-Release)
  63. Infernal Affairs
    Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.
  64. Bernie
    Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic.
  65. Chasing Ice
    Still and live-action footage captures the ice sliding into the sea with exquisite grace, which makes it all the more wrenching. Are such images enough to convince the naysayers that something unnatural is occurring? Doubtful.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bridesmaids
    Many of the chaotic set pieces cataloging Annie's self-destruction have a kind of dumb crassness that works against Bridesmaids' often smart, highly class-conscious deconstruction of female friendship and competition.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    Pitched for a sympathetic American audience, the documentary goes for shock with the filmmakers' first trip to "the altar of the world" in 1987, when they happened to be caught in an uprising of monks that was violently crushed by the Chinese army.
  68. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman finds Ralph Fiennes proving as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it.
  69. Tully
    Tully encapsulates the psychological process of maturity with pithy humor and vertiginous insight. Tully’s appearance may have seemed like a magical interlude, but she solidifies Marlo’s reality by exposing the path that led her there.
  70. Elizabeth
    Elizabeth's most triumphant aspect is Blanchett's transformation from saucy, spirited toe-tapper to iconic Virgin Queen.
  71. Born in Flames
    Like her namesake, the filmmaker Lizzie Borden took an ax...to cinema conventions and tidy political resolutions in her 1983 landmark Born in Flames.
  72. The Muppets
    Terrified of alienating those who were raised on the originals, The Muppets panders to them instead, constantly blasting or restaging Top 40 hits from the past three-plus decades, continuing the cheap strategy that worked well on YouTube two years ago with the Muppets' cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody."
  73. Time Out of Mind
    Time Out of Mind is an experiment in empathy, an examination of bureaucracy and streetlife mundanity, and a movie that many will find a tough sit.
  74. Darkest Hour
    Wright’s film is fleet but not especially thoughtful, wholly convincing in its production design, and in one crucial sense something rare: Here’s a war movie about rhetoric rather than battle scenes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Inconvenient Truth
    An Inconvenient Truth does restore one's faith in the value of documentary-as-lecture, not least by extolling the virtues (rare as clean water these days) of politician-as-teacher.
  76. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    As it is, Duris, capable and dull, is no Keitel, 2005 is no 1978, and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is no "Fingers."
  77. Lady Vengeance
    As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.
    • 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.
  79. Enchanted
    Somewhere between conception and execution, what could have been so much smart, sharp fun turned decidedly pedestrian.
  80. Kippur
    At once shockingly vivid and overwhelmingly antiheroic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clay Bird
    The film's critique of Islam is offered without rancor, and it's evident that Masud loves all his characters, whatever their viewpoints.
  82. Lawless Heart
    Like grieving itself, the film is awkward, messily honest, and sometimes darkly funny.
  83. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    A reasonably good Kurosawa pastiche. But overburdened with convoluted flashbacks and interpolated gags, and generally lacking a dynamic sense of cutting, the movie doesn't possess the master's sardonic brio.
  84. Shrek 2
    Some of the buckshot hits its target: Shrek's second sidekick, assassin-turned-comrade Puss in Boots, is voiced by Antonio Banderas as an outrageously mock-dramatic Spaniard with most of the pig-pile screenplay's best toss-offs.
  85. Samson and Delilah
    A deglamorized couple-on-the-run story, Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah doubles as a portrait of a tiny Australian aboriginal community.
  86. The Strange Case of Angelica
    de Oliveira's film is a musical of a sort, its quietude occasionally lifted by work songs or chorales.
  87. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Magnificent and cheesy, the latest and most proudly absurd of Chinese historical spectaculars, Detective Dee is a cinematic comic book for people who are sick of the mode.
  88. I'll See You in My Dreams
    It's crucial to note, too, that this isn't just a nice little movie for older people: There's some real bite to the way it deals with the life questions that come with aging, and whatever sweetness it has is just an undertone, not a feel-good frosting overlay.
  89. Our Little Sister
    Our Little Sister often vibrates with such tenderness of feeling that it’s difficult to dismiss outright. The excellent performances from the four lead actresses help offset the occasional heavy-handedness of the script, with Kore-eda alive to their distinctive tics and gestures.
  90. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
    The usual doc mix of interviews and vintage photos is moving and surprisingly funny.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    Aenne Schwarz and Barbara Sukowa give strong performances as the author’s second and first wives, respectively, but this is Hader’s movie. His is one of the great performances of recent years.
  92. Nico, 1988
    Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.
  93. Spy
    It's a comedy of exasperation where, for once, the joke isn't on McCarthy, but on everyone who can't see her skills.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Lilo & Stitch
    But mostly the film is just hectic and homiletic: two parts exhausting "Men in Black" mayhem to one part family values.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Unreasonable Man
    If the film shows that few men are as unreasonable as Ralph Nader, it also shows that few have so succeeded in shaping their world: His legacy of progressive legislation will affect generations to come.
  96. 24 City
    Jia Zhangke is one of the world's preeminent filmmakers, an essentially contemplative director whose considerable talent is further amplified by the significance of his material--namely, everyday life in the most dynamic economy on earth.
  97. Night Moves
    That patience of Reichardt's, and her dedication to showing us exclusively the things that we must see, makes the scenes of preparation — boat parking, fertilizer buying — hypnotic and suspenseful and practical all at once.
  98. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Sunada's critical distance makes Kingdom of Dreams and Madness the clear-eyed celebration that Ghibli's artists deserve.
  99. Crude
    Remarkable documentary.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »