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 7.6 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. Ikiru
    Were it the only film Kurosawa ever made, his name would be rightfully engraved on film history.
  2. Revenge of the Mekons
    What Angio captures, beautifully, is that the Mekons make great music because, together and apart, they’re so alive to the world around them.
  3. Phoenix
    The director's last film was the superb 2012 Barbara, also starring Hoss and Zehrfeld, another romance with a mystery built in; Phoenix is an even finer piece of work, so beautifully made that it comes close to perfect.
  4. The Royal Road
    As personal as it is political, Olson's meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history — and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory.
  5. Boyhood
    Boyhood had the curious effect of making me feel lost, uneasy, a little alone in the inexorable march forward — and also totally, emphatically alive.
  6. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.
  7. Phantom Thread
    Most tales of people finding love present hard, angular worlds and allow romance to soften the edges. Phantom Thread does the opposite: It presents a soft, even sensuous world, and shows us how sometimes love can come in the cuts and the tears.
  8. The Wild Bunch
    At once strongly metaphoric and shamelessly visceral, Peckinpah’s saga of outlaws on the lam is arguably the strongest Hollywood movie of the 1960s—a western that galvanizes the clichés of its dying genre with a shocking jolt of delirious carnage.
  9. The Case Against 8
    The stirring new documentary The Case Against 8, showcasing the lawyers and plaintiffs who challenged California's 2008 gay marriage ban, is the best kind of popular history, a film that trembles with tears and hope, and I dare you to get through it without bawling some yourself.
  10. Lenny Cooke
    Ordinary life comes to look like a humiliation in the late reels of Lenny Cooke, yet another heartbreaker of a doc in which a compelling basketball story powers a discomfiting examination of a crisis facing young American men.
  11. To Live and Die in L.A.
    A near-masterpiece. The fashions and music and attitudes on display might have been interpreted at the time as opportunistic stabs at au courant stylization, but the film is nevertheless overpowering and otherworldly rather than quaint or kitschy. It feels like a transmission from a different planet. To Live and Die in L.A. is so of its time that you can only be captivated by it.
  12. Dormant Beauty
    Subtle emotional intelligence has always distinguished Bellocchio's filmmaking, and Dormant Beauty is constructed from fine-grained layers of it, the filmmaker's equivalent of a master cabinetmaker's craft.
  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. Top Five
    Chris Rock couldn't have planned it this way, but his exuberant and wondrous comedy Top Five, opening at just the right time, is like an airdrop of candy over the city, if not the country.
  15. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The movie's true center, the meteorological phenomenon that makes it so pleasurable to watch, is the half-prickly, half-affectionate interplay between Binoche and Stewart.
  16. 20,000 Days on Earth
    20,000 Days on Earth is meticulously crafted but nonetheless feels casual and heartfelt. It's revelatory, and wonderful, to watch Cave walking (or driving) around, being a real person — if the movie is somewhat staged, it's never stagey.
  17. Concerning Violence
    A commanding indictment of the exploitative nature of geopolitics, and of Europe's and the U.S.'s abuse of native peoples around the world.
  18. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    The film, while wrenching and audacious, is crafted with that humane and observational mastery of great Iranian cinema of recent decades.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Not a Film
    It's a political statement, an act of defiance, a master class in one auteur's body of work and process, and a document of a life unseen. But above all, it's a gripping entertainment.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carlos
    Carlos is nevertheless a movie that one can somehow remember vividly for months. Much of this power is due to the whiplash widescreen cinematography (oft-mistaken for DV), the hopped-up editing, and, not least, Ramirez's aptly arrogant, fully transfixing, Method-style turn.
  21. Spider
    Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings.
  22. Red Army
    Red Army is a riveting look behind the Iron Curtain.
  23. Everybody Wants Some!!
    The experience of watching this film is one of reflective exuberance. It's a movie about people who arrive sure of themselves and depart in the quiet confidence that all they know is that they know nothing.
  24. Western
    The film, a hard jewel of beauty and reportage, demands and rewards that second viewing.
  25. The Tree of Life
    Better than a masterpiece - whatever that is - The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.
  26. Taxi Driver
    You either love it or you love it; in any case, Martin Scorsese's history-making scald is truly a phenomenon from another day and age.
  27. I'm Not There.
    I'm Not There is the movie of the year.
  28. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    The film is alarmingly dark. It isn’t especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece.
  29. Howl's Moving Castle
    An organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and seethingly inventive.
  30. Tarnation
    A tale of sadness and hysteria so raw that it bleeds.
  31. Killer of Sheep
    Killer of Sheep is an urban pastoral--an episodic series of scenes that are sweet, sardonic, deeply sad, and very funny.
  32. Paddington 2
    Aside from being a disarming, refreshing wallow in kindness, Paddington 2 also has the benefit of being well-constructed and exceedingly well-performed.
  33. Brad's Status
    Brad’s Status remains grounded in reality — it’s gentle, human and unresolved. I loved it, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch it again.
  34. Zero Dark Thirty
    It's a sensational performance by Chastain...She's a most unlikely leading lady, pale and slight of stature, with a raging mane of strawberry blond hair, but she holds the screen with a feral intensity, an obsessive's self-possession.
  35. Manakamana
    Among the many remarkable qualities boasted by Manakamana, perhaps the most surprising is its humor.
  36. Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
    Over the course of its simple, unadorned 82 minutes, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Hissein Habré: A Chadian Tragedy wrecks you in ways you might not have known were possible.
  37. Spotlight
    Spotlight feels both timeless and modern, a dexterously crafted film that could have been made anytime but somehow feels perfect for right now.
  38. Maidan
    Easily the most rigorous, vital, and powerful movie of 2014, Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan may be a perfect Bazinian cinema-machine — reality is captured, crystallized, honored for its organic complexity, and delivered unpoisoned by exposition or emphasis.
  39. The Terrorizers (1986)
    Yang keeps all of the balls in the air, resisting definitive answers and conjuring a lean-in sense of intimate dread. Practically every sneaky, off-center image seems to hold a clue, but the takeaway is failed connections and disastrous modern discontent.
  40. Play
    It's the rare contemporary film that's as majestically and gruelingly rigorous in its form as in its thematic interrogations.
  41. Climax
    Climax isn’t so much about the inevitability of chaos, but about the sadness of watching something beautiful fall apart. And it is never less than electrifying.
  42. Dekalog (1988)
    Dekalog certainly lives up to its reputation as a mind-altering masterpiece. You marvel at the precision of its filmmaking even as it spreads an atmosphere of moral unease.
  43. Like Father, Like Son
    It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.
  44. Summer 1993
    The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.
  45. Medea
    Achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted.
  46. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    One of the year's best films, Mary Dore's She's Beautiful When She's Angry is an urgent, illuminating dive into the headwaters of second-wave feminism, the movement that — no matter what its detractors insist — has given us the world in which we live.
  47. Moonlight
    A question is posed to the main character of Barry Jenkins's wondrous, superbly acted new film, Moonlight: "Who is you, man?" The beauty of Jenkins's second feature...radiates from the way that query is explored and answered: with specifics and expansiveness, not with foregone conclusions.
  48. Casablanca
    Casablanca was filmed in the safety of the Warner Bros. lot, but the cast of immigrants and exiles who had fled the Third Reich conveyed their visceral fear. While the future was uncertain, the resolute characters of this exquisite wartime drama found peace through love and resistance.
  49. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    Most astonishingly, with the franchise's powerful climax, Lawrence has managed to align her parallel Hollywood lives and reinvent the prestigious popcorn flick, a crowd-pleaser with intelligent class.
  50. Tip Top
    Serge Bozon's smart, surprising, marvelously realized French crime-and-sex police drama/comedy distinguishes itself with trenchant plotting, inspired framing, and performances that honor true human feeling even as they lunge into the screwball.
  51. The Battle of Algiers
    A prototype of news-footage realism, the film makes shrewd use of handheld sloppiness, misjudged focus, overexposure, and you-are-there camera upset; the payoff is the scent of authentic panic.
  52. 45 Years
    With 45 Years, [Haigh] has created not only a searching examination of a long-term marriage — and the myths that sustain it — but also a compassionate portrait of a woman reconciling herself with those false notions.
  53. Festival Express
    Ultimate geezerfest and rock-doc holy grail.
  54. Elena
    A pained and gorgeous summoning, Petra Costa's haunted doc Elena dances with death, memory, and family, seducing viewers and then breaking their hearts.
  55. Dallas Buyers Club
    What's remarkable about Dallas Buyers Club is its lack of sentimentality. The movie, like its star, is all angles and elbows, earning its emotion through sheer pragmatism.
  56. Springtime in a Small Town
    Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.
  57. Bus 174
    Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    This is one of the most fully rounded, unsentimental portraits of an artist you'll ever see on film.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shoah (re-release)
    It has come to serve as a solemn metaphor for remembrance, as well as for butt-numbing endurance.
  60. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    The playfulness of Rivette's sublime female-buddy picture, recalling the fun of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," would inform Susan Seidelman's "Desperately Seeking Susan" 11 years later. But its greatest descendant is David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive," another film about two women erotically attached, a house with a secret, and transformation.
  61. The Assassin
    Hou uses very few close-ups here, preferring to tell his story mostly through movement: combat, dance, the act of passing through a landscape of satiny green firs or silvery birch trees and just watching. Shu conveys complicated feelings — longing, regret, anxiety — with little more than the tilt of her chin or the set of her shoulders.
  62. I Called Him Morgan
    Collin and company are after climate, not weather. They steep us in our awareness that Morgan and his New York have been lost, that our glimpses of it must either be through memory or hazed-up photography — or the music itself.
  63. It Felt Like Love
    It Felt Like Love is brilliantly, brutally tactile.
  64. Gimme Shelter
    A pop culture document for a mass audience.
  65. Neruda
    Referents and identities are always slightly unfixed in Neruda, a film that reaches dizzying, exhilarating velocity by flouting the conventions of its hidebound genre.
  66. The Babadook
    Jennifer Kent's maternal nightmare The Babadook is the imperial stout of recent fright flicks -- it's the one that will have you walking funny and might rip into your sleep. It's hard to say that you'll enjoy this film, but it's hard not to admire it, if maybe with your eyes half shut.
  67. West of Memphis
    That makes this the most rare of films: one that indisputably matters. And one that stuns.
  68. Momma's Man
    One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.
    • 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)
  70. Aquarius
    Brazil might not want you to know it, but Aquarius is something special.
  71. Mr. Turner
    Leigh, Spall, and cinematographer Dick Pope — who borrows lots of lighting tricks from Vermeer and Ingres and even Turner himself, to glorious effect — have gently atomized Turner's character, breaking it into small, potent fragments that affect us in ways we don't see coming.
  72. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight—visually stunning, in a late-summer way—is more vital and cutting than another recent marriage picture, Michael Haneke's old-folks-together death march Amour; it has none of Amour's tasteful restraint, and in the end, it says more about the nature of long-term love.
  73. Don't Think Twice
    Mike Birbiglia's Don't Think Twice stands as the best, most revealing film about comedy people and one of the best about artistic collaboration. It's a boisterous and sensitive work of many facets.
  74. Viola
    The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.
  75. Krisha
    Even the familiar elements of this particular family's drama are invested — through vigorous scripting, directing, and acting — with almost elemental power.
  76. Fill the Void
    Burshtein's lush visual sensibility, and the subtle performances of the excellent cast, create an aching portrayal of longing and interdependence that transcends the boundaries of the family's small world.
  77. Hooligan Sparrow
    Wang's film allows the public activist to be privately human, showing Ye at home with her lively daughter, sharing moments of friendship with other women activists or clearing brush and describing the hard rural lives of her family.
  78. Almayer's Folly
    One of the year's most hypnotic and fascinating films.
  79. Leave No Trace
    Granik films with subtlety and quiet grace, but Leave No Trace explodes in the mind.
  80. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.
  81. Raging Bull
    What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.
  82. The Tale
    The Tale is a powerful and clear-eyed examination of sexual abuse and the shifting sands of one’s own memories.
  83. Democrats
    As excellent a documentary about politics as you will ever see.
  84. We Are the Best!
    Brash and sweet, We Are the Best! captures perfectly the aimlessness of adolescence, the waiting to become something that's so often intertwined with the desire to make something, to leave your mark on the world in some small way.
  85. Loveless
    Two representative moments define Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless — and they are among the most devastating, harrowing things I’ve ever seen on a screen.
  86. Winter Sleep
    This patient, beautiful, painful, engrossing film pits husband and wife against each other and their world in a series of extended conversations/confrontations.
  87. Match
    Writer-director Stephen Belber's inspiriting, generous Match is so good that it's like some kind of trick.
  88. Like Someone in Love
    The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.
  89. Jealousy
    Vital and vigorous even when its characters feel scraped of vigor/vitality, Philippe Garrel's latest finds boho Parisians facing the ends of marriages, affairs, and the feasibility of bohemian existence itself.
  90. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    [An] inspiring cinematic journey — full of overwhelming beauty, and ready to set the curious viewer's mind aflame.
  91. Time of the Wolf
    In today's digital bog of empty light and marketing deceptions, this is what early-millennium Euro art-film masterpieces feel like--lean, qualmish, abstracted to the point of parable but as grounded as a gravedigging.
  92. Newtown
    Newtown is an act of memorialization, a demand that this most distractible of countries look close and continue to care.
  93. Only the Brave
    Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding, and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages.
  94. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    Grave, beautiful, austerely comic, and casually metempsychotic, Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is one of the wiggiest nature documentaries-or almost-documentaries-ever made.
  95. American Ultra
    Nima Nourizadeh’s American Ultra is a bloody valentine attached to a bomb. It’s violent, brash, inventive and horrific, and perhaps the most romantic film of the year.
  96. Anomalisa
    Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    Protracted sequences make you impatient for forward motion, but then, in an instant, you’re left to mourn beauties hastened away.
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