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. Haywire
    Where faux-empowering "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" confines sexual power play to the old rape-revenge matrix, Haywire is a real war-of-the-sexes tournament, briskly paced with a tickling sense of black humor.
  2. Mister Universo
    His endeavor is one not of major strife but of minor flashes of magic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Requiem
    Sandra Hüller, a young German stage actress making a harrowing feature debut, invests Michaela's terrified, possibly schizophrenic outbursts with unholy conviction.
  4. It Was You Charlie
    Shirinian has made a swift, moody film, with impeccable art design — Abner's diorama of the car wreck is a kooky marvel — a scarily convincing feel for recurring panic, and a thunderous, heart-rending performance at its center.
  5. Silver Bullets
    Silver Bullets is the most affecting "horror" movie I've seen in a while, as Swanberg ignores tired supernatural scare-flick trappings and locates terror in the shadowy, passive-aggressive process of making, and watching, movies.
  6. The Day He Arrives
    Like Rohmer, Hong is wonderful with atmospheric effects, using whirling snowfalls to place his characters' inchoate longing in relief.
  7. Kiss of the Dragon
    A veteran of commercials and music videos, director Chris Nahon crowds out too much of the sprawling combat gymnastics, but his film doesn't lack for luxuriously seedy ambience --his Paris is a retro-futurist sewer.
  8. WTC the First 24 Hours
    Actually manages a fresh perspective. The director, camera in tow, had unimpeded access to the devastation for a full day before being shooed away by officials, and the footage he captured (sans commentary) is both gut-wrenchingly familiar and disconcertingly foreign.
  9. Never Die Alone
    There's something refreshing about a pulp drama that turns on the notion that redemption is a sucker's fantasy. That knowledge may not have saved Goines, but it informs Dickerson's adaptation and results in stellar neo-noir.
  10. Downeast
    Redmon and Sabin carefully tease apart the insidious process of American deindustrialization, and by the end of the film the threads they unravel reveal how the free market can choke like a noose.
  11. The Century of the Self
    An engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control.
  12. Donald Cried
    In a bitterly funny performance, Avedisian lets Donald's freak flag fly, a big-toothed grin lighting up his face, framed by a shaggy haircut not deliberate enough to be a mullet.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Finding Nemo
    Stuffed to the gills with surprises.
  14. Mountain
    The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.
  15. Billy Liar (re-release)
    Often seems less a British new wave front-runner than a charming nouvelle vague tagalong,
  16. Austenland
    The ending is a bit of an audience-pleasing cop-out, a retreat into formula after 80 minutes or so of upending it. But those upendings are memorable, the cast dishy fun, and Jerusha Hess and Shannon Hale's breeze of a script (based on Hale's novel) is smart about the allure of fictional romances.
  17. Deliver Us from Evil
    Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse.
  18. The Armor of Light
    [An] electrifying documentary.
  19. Daratt
    African director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's austere, hypnotic third feature explores the legacy of Chad's decades-long civil war.
  20. Once
    Yet the magic of the movie is how utterly wrenching it renders these songs, which thrive alongside the film's simple, eloquent, dusky narrative.
  21. Downsizing
    The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.
  22. On the Run
    At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]
  23. Night School
    As an introduction to its arresting, charismatic subjects, Night School is invaluable.
  24. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Andersen's restless yet scholarly methods are contagious: He makes you want to become more well-rounded.
  25. The Childhood of a Leader
    Little of what happens will come as a surprise, but Corbet's narrative restraint coupled with his formal daring makes for a gripping experience. It's a slow burn, but the fuse attached had me holding my breath.
  26. Looper
    Thrilling in its deft juggling of complex narrative elements, utterly clear in its presentation, and unfolding with what feels like serious moral purpose, Looper still can't help but suggest that its larger ambitions are something of a put-on, a nice thematic polish to set off its interpersonal drama.
  27. Nobody Knows
    It's a heart-sundering vision of preadolescent helplessness that rivals passages of "Landscape in the Mist" and "Ponette."
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    127 Hours
    As Boyle's film flits from the real world-the heavy reality of a man in a canyon, pinned, near death-to the world of dreams and delusions, so Franco's performance transforms, encompassing both universes.
  29. Les Cowboys
    The strange, ever-changing result is, at times, as original as loose remakes come, with Bidegain using his hallowed source material as a springboard for something rare: a "writer's movie" that loses nothing in the jump from script to screen.
  30. Indivisible
    Indivisible is above all else a mood piece humming with energy and marked by wondrous moments.
  31. Among the Believers
    Each person’s actions here are not theirs alone, but part of a network of complicated needs and conflicting ideologies that make up contemporary Pakistan. Some of the stories are difficult to hear, but they must be listened to.
  32. Divorce Iranian Style
    A small, direct, tantalizing documentary.
  33. The Invitation
    The buildup stretches longer than it should, but the payoff comes with a satisfying bang.
  34. American Jesus
    A restless, sunnily shot, one-thing-after-another travelogue of the peculiarities of American worship and belief.
  35. Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    The daring of the conception is matched only by the brilliance of the execution.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Contagion
    If Contagion truly is the first leg of Soderbergh's retirement victory lap, this harrowing film is a potent reminder of what we stand to lose.
  37. Under the Sand
    Rampling has never been as beautiful, not to mention as emotionally naked, nuanced, and affecting as she is here.
  38. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    In adapting Irishman John Boyne's acclaimed young-adult novel, writer-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) draws beautifully modulated performances from his two child actors, who navigate a full range of emotions from wonder to betrayal to guilt.
  39. Million Dollar Baby
    All the same, Eastwood's point of view has been seasoned enough to locate poignancy and respect for his protagonists where you least expect -- saying it's an old man's movie is a serious compliment.
  40. Jean Gentil
    Although it's steeped in tragedies both personal and cultural, this contemplative, gorgeously shot documentary-fiction hybrid from husband-and-wife auteurs Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán nevertheless keeps an unsentimental distance from its titular saint-savant and the existential crisis he endures.
  41. Alléluia
    Sensuous and arresting, Alleluia constantly feels as though a séance or ritual murder is about to be performed; the actual deaths, when they arrive, turn out to be rather unceremonious affairs.
  42. The New Wizard of Oz
    Majesty's reissue is a delirious and loony surprise in this season of nattier ape-suits.
  43. Cuban Rafters
    Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.
  44. Red Road
    No one does poetic British with more remorseless hyper-realism than the Scots, and Arnold, who amassed a raft of reputable awards for her 2003 short film "Wasp," directs with a precociously sure touch and a raw taste for graphic sexuality rare in a woman helmer. It shocks, yet feels organic to the paranoid, loveless milieu portrayed in Red Road.
  45. Out in the Dark
    The movie is involving, the romance affecting, the sex sound, and the catch-as-catch-can handheld camerawork smartly appropriate for the scenario.
  46. The Eyes of My Mother
    I've been watching horror films since I was three years old. They've never given me nightmares. Until now.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Manufactured Landscapes
    Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes.
  48. I Kill Giants
    Walter is riding a tricky line, but it’s his mixing of fantasy and reality, making the edges between the two porous, that ultimately sells the film.
  49. The Beaches of Agnès
    In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.
  50. Funny Ha Ha
    The final scene is as close to perfection as any Amerindie has come in recent memory--in a single reaction of Marnie's, we see a small but definite shift in perspective; abruptly, Bujalski stops the film, as if there's nothing more to say. It's a wonderful parting shot for a movie that locates the momentous in the mundane.
  51. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a much better and far less silly movie than its predecessor.
  52. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Black nationalism lives and breathes in this remarkably fresh documentary - a standout in last spring's New Directors/New Films - assembled by Göran Hugo Olsson.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Los Muertos
    Into the river, miraculous landscape: Los Muertos connects with the elemental energies of sunlight, water, and leaf like nothing since Blissfully Yours. Indeed, that might have worked well for a title here -- that, or Heart of Darkness.
  54. Yossi
    For many of the film's brisk 84 minutes, Fox eclipses his earlier work-and several other same-sex tragedies-by immersing us in his protagonist's quiet turmoil.
  55. Love After Love
    The cast is intoxicating.
  56. Alias Betty
    Infusing Rendell's intrigue with warmth and humor, Miller makes the film's sometimes mechanical and giddy narrative into something grander -- a meditation on maternity as a form of inspired madness.
  57. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Frank De Felitta's guilt over having aired the footage is moving, yet it's ultimately countered by this piercing film's stance - promoted by the subject's proud children and grandchildren - that Wright's statements, far from a slip of the tongue, were an intentional act of courageous defiance.
  58. Southern Comfort
    Eads's wit, generosity, insight, and courage are irresistible.
  59. The Man Who Wasn't There
    This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."
  60. X2: X-Men United
    Funny, reasonably crazy, and unpretentiously faithful to its source.
  61. The Best of Youth
    The movie has the addictive episodic intimacy of great TV.
  62. Whisky
    The film is a model of precision and economy, from the scrupulous framing and editing to the dryly note-perfect performances.
  63. We Are Still Here
    Early scenes overplay the shock of these phantasms, but just as you expect Geoghegan to crank up the effects, the film mixes in some subtler scares.
  64. Witching and Bitching
    A major achievement in sunny wretchedness, Álex de la Iglesia's splatter-comedy Witching & Bitching projectile pukes its outrages at you with a gusto recalling the early days of those (sadly) reformed upchuckers Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson.
  65. 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.
  66. Before I Fall
    Russo-Young gives this teen parable the thriller treatment to ward off any cheese, and watching Deutch learn her lesson with that expressive face of hers is a singular, moving experience.
  67. 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.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Warlords
    Chan's old-fashioned, highly watchable mega-production comes complete with God's-eye surveys of mass carnage, the moist sounds of sword-skewering, and little or no discernible CGI.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Scandal
    E J-Yong's transposition illuminates, with satisfying crispness, the hyper-Confucian high society of the time, as well as the underground Catholic movement.
  71. The Passenger (re-release)
    The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars.
  72. Spettacolo
    Is this art or is this prophecy? Is there even a difference?
  73. Fan-Fan the Tulip
    Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward.
  74. The Yes Men Fix the World
    Mainly, Fix the World is about the beauty of the riff. The Yes Men are funniest when addressing a straight audience, making outlandish claims in favor of the free market and the benefits of unregulated catastrophe--the Black Plague gave us capitalism!
  75. X-Men: Apocalypse
    This film nimbly mixes narrative exuberance and emotional depth, flamboyant displays of power with quietly terrifying exchanges. It zips along, combining the highs and lows of a real comic book – all the feeling, color, and wonder, even some of the dopiness – with gloriously cinematic storytelling.
  76. Los Sures (1984)
    Echeverria [has a] gift for capturing detail-dense moments in the most casual way.
  77. The Komediant
    A linguistic stew with a zesty, homemade flavor that belies its carefully researched preparation.
  78. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    A Walk Among the Tombstones is an uncommonly well-made thriller.
  79. Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
    The new film is more informational than resonant. But you can still sense a vacuum, a rat pit of stories waiting to be unearthed. The dark something that triggered the whole ordeal in West Memphis is still out there.
  80. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    As things spun out of control, getting ever stranger, I started to wonder if the director had merely written himself into a corner and was doubling down on weirdness to get himself out. And yet the film never quite loses its mythic drive. You walk out feeling like you’ve truly had an experience.
  81. Fading Gigolo
    Fading Gigolo is a breeze, enjoyable both for its sweetness and its unapologetic silliness.
  82. Doomsdays
    Doomsdays is winsome because it embraces its narcissistic subjects without asking viewers to forget that they've just befriended a couple of selfish dillholes.
  83. The World
    On a first viewing, the movie seemed a dilution of the formal strategies Jia had perfected-at once less dispassionate and less empathetic. After a repeat viewing, it still strikes me as Jia's fourth-best film (that it's one of the year's best says plenty about the level at which he's working), but it's more apparent that The Worl d's muffled emotional impact should be understood as a function of its setting.
  84. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    The hyperbole can be predictable and the clichés earnest, but by and large, Charlie is a serious, often illuminating, and unavoidably entertaining account of the creature Downey calls "the most endearing superhero you might ever want to watch."
  85. Godzilla
    As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.
  86. Steamboy
    Steamboy doesn't have the deep melancholia or the visionary élan of last year's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Consistent in its graphic invention from first to last, however, it's a sensationally designed piece of work. (The retro stylistics are comparable to Brazil, David Lynch's Dune, and The Iron Giant.)
  87. The Empty Hours
    Full of long takes and matter-of-fact performances, melancholy low-contrast cinematography and desolate vistas suffused with acute loneliness, The Empty Hours captures the feeling of idling away the time, waiting for something to arrive.
  88. The Milk of Sorrow
    In this wonderfully strange, hypnotically beautiful second feature from writer-director Claudia Llosa, the traumatic experience of the 1980s civil war on Peruvian women is passed down through song and, it is said, through their mothers' milk.
    • 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.
  90. Family Law
    Like his equally father-fixated, and equally wonderful, 2003 film "Lost Embrace," Burman's beguiling tribute to his Jewish father -- or, for all I know, the one he wishes he had -- is warm and deep enough to give humanism a good name.
  91. 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.
  92. Deep End (1970)
    Skolimowski's Eastern Bloc–existentialist chops finally emerge in the last act, as the futility of looking for a diamond in the snow evolves into a sex-death underwater ballet.
  93. Of Horses and Men
    Of Horses and Men is often sprightly, and almost every shot is an eyeful.
  94. Hot Pursuit
    Hot Pursuit is a quiet triumph of tone and timing. Nearly every scene is cut at just the right point, often topped off with a fantastic kicker of dialogue.
  95. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tears of the Black Tiger
    Nothing is too crazed, corny, or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called "Blissfully Yours."
  97. Hard Labor
    The film's brittle and quiet, on occasion touched with the techniques of horror, especially as Helena stalks her store after hours. It's also trenchant, stinging, and acted with great frumping subtlety.
  98. 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.
  99. Ex Machina
    It's a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It's also a hoot, an anti-comedy where all of the jokes double as threats, and vice versa.
  100. I Am I
    I Am I is a remarkably assured debut for director Towne, especially since she's onscreen the majority of the time, and her script eschews the rules of the standard Hollywood amnesia plot, instead following its own internal logic while not shying away from the darker implications of its premise.
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