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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    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    Few other directors can get so much violent power from their landscapes and their people. No image is boring. [01 Feb 1962, p.11]
    • Village Voice
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Still Walking
    Koreeda imbues the story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem.
  3. Gangs of Wasseypur
    The killing is bloody, the power struggles involving, the history-class examinations of the relations between mines and unions and gangsters fascinating, and the tough-guy routines, while sometimes tiresome, never less than credible.
  4. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.
  5. Barry Lyndon
    Barry Lyndon could be considered Kubrick’s masterpiece. At the very least, this cerebral action film represents the height of his craft.
  6. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The original story was called "The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter," but Takahata's title puts the focus where it belongs.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Uncertain
    Uncertain is a film content to be small, one that knows that every atom is a universe.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No End in Sight
    Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups.
  9. 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.
  10. Goodbye Solo
    Bahrani possesses a disciplined sense of composition and form, a vision of the world that extends beyond the boundaries of his own navel, and the understanding that it is possible to make films about class and race in this country without pandering to the audience.
  11. Western
    The film, a hard jewel of beauty and reportage, demands and rewards that second viewing.
  12. The Winding Stream
    The film stands as a reminder of how much it can mean just to listen.
  13. Downhill Racer
    The film is intelligently realistic about all the interlocking hypocrisies of the amateur code, and there is nothing fakey-humanistic about the sexual encounters with a ski-manufacturer's secretary (Camilla Sparv) and the unbilled but unforgettable girl back home always ready, willing, and able to hope in the back seat for auld lang syne.
  14. Columbus
    An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t.
  15. Night of the Living Dead
    Up until 1968, horror had been escapist. But Night of the Living Dead made horror serious business.
  16. The Artist
    The Artist is movie love at its most anodyne; where Guy Maddin has used the conventions of silent film to express his loony psychosexual fantasias for more than a decade, Hazanavicius sweetly asks that we not be afraid of the past.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Zama
    Martel engages directly with Argentina’s colonial legacy, although her approach remains allusive and layered. She transforms Benedetto’s epic into a dizzying, sensory head trip about a man’s gradual psychological decay, allowing larger historical and political themes to emerge organically from her meticulous formal compositions.
  18. Cameraperson
    All this could have easily become a cacophony of disconnected sights and sounds, but Cameraperson unfolds with beauty and purpose — mixing the fluidity of a dream with the acuity of an essay. Johnson teases out themes and finds echoes across the years.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Mother and the Whore
    It is a searing, painful, revealing, egotistical, irritating, often beautiful document that captures, in orgies of sexual gorging and verbal disgorging, the clash, among people of a certain generation and milieu, between Left Bank libertinism and an astonishingly deep conservatism--deep, because it is mystical rather than political, and based on matters of life and death rather than left and right. [04 Apr 1974, p.90]
    • Village Voice
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Quai des Orfèvres [re-release]
    The visual style has an expressionistic undertow, rich in shadowy chiaroscuro compositions.
  21. Piccadilly [re-release]
    Wong is sensationally expressive and projects a modern, coolly appraising sexuality. Visually eloquent and often dazzling, the movie is no less terrific. Piccadilly is both evidence of silent cinema at its rudely aborted peak and Wong's frustrated potential to have been among its greatest stars.
  22. High Noon
    Possibly the most Rorschachian film of all time, a symbol-only text that effortlessly conforms to any political present, and finds a foothold in your social sphere whether you're a free radical or reactionary wing nut.
  23. Letters from Iwo Jima
    The special power of Eastwood's achievement is that, save for one indelible moment, the mutual recognition between sworn adversaries happens not on-screen, but later, as we piece the two films together in our minds.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Woman Under the Influence
    Falk and the rest of the cast are exceptional—even the smallest roles feel spot-on—but Rowlands (who will be on hand for the opening-night screening) is the film.
  25. Anomalisa
    Kaufman builds an emotional world we're nervous to enter, one we're already living in.
  26. I'm Going Home
    Restrained, precise, and unobtrusively wry.
  27. The Conversation
    The Conversation could have used a great deal more vulgar curiosity about its own plot and its own characters. Coppola's good taste has been misplaced on this occasion, but he remains one of our most promising new filmmakers nonetheless. [20 June 1974, p.78]
    • Village Voice
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Diva
    Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam, Diva contrived a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss that came to be known as “cinéma du look,” a Franglais label for the micro-movement of super-stylish, unabashedly romantic pictures made throughout the ’80s by a clique of bright young things including Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.
  29. The Arbor
    Barnard makes the psychological mayhem Dunbar endured and inflicted tangible.
  30. Democrats
    As excellent a documentary about politics as you will ever see.
  31. Crime + Punishment
    Stephen Maing’s searing documentary Crime + Punishment offers a fuller look at the question of what can be accomplished from inside, revealing both the personal toll fighting the system can exact but also the urgent necessity of such battles.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    Max von Sydow gives a performance of a high order as the knight who returns from the Crusades to find his country at the mercy of plague and witch hunts.
  33. 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.
  34. A Serious Man
    As usual, though, the Coens have more venal satisfactions in mind. "The fun of the story for us," they crow in the notes for this loathsome movie, "was inventing new ways to torture Larry."
  35. Capote
    In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.
  36. The Death of Stalin
    The Death of Stalin would be a brilliant, harrowing film even without all that contemporary resonance.
  37. Tulpan
    In every respect, this unclassifiable movie is an amazing accomplishment.
  38. 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.
  39. In Transit
    The film is gently thrilling, often revealing, alive with talk and scenic beauty and well-observed vignettes.
  40. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    McDormand could have carried this film all the way through a minefield of touchy topics, singed but with all parts in the right place, primed for a painful laugh. But goddamnit if the cops in this story didn’t ruin all the fun.
  41. Quest
    [A] tender, humane, gently probing film.
  42. Overlord [re-release]
    It's still a feat of period filmmaking. More than that, Overlord's revivification of a wasteland Europe offers up a powerful whip lesson for the postwar complacent: that the waging of war, even this most romanticized of conflicts, means bringing a corpse-mountain hell to someone's home neighborhood.
  43. A Film Unfinished
    The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries.
  44. Things to Come
    As we watch this woman lose her family, her status, and maybe even some part of her pride, we sense both the horror and the intoxication of freedom.
  45. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    Grand Budapest is Anderson's most mature film, and his most visually witty, too. It's playful without being self-congratulatory, and somehow lush without being cloying.
  46. 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.
  47. Citizenfour
    Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie's a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it's underwhelming as argument or cinema.
  48. Time Out
    Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.
  49. Away from Her
    It's a precociously assured and mature work, at once humble and bold, that keeps faith with Munro's precise, graceful prose while tailoring its linear progression into shapely cinematic form.
  50. Mafioso [re-release]
    Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.
  51. The Fallen Idol (re-release)
    The Fallen Idol has been overshadowed by the noir comedy, giddy style, and Cold War thematics of Reed and Greene's subsequent sensation "The Third Man," but (in similarly dealing with the nature of betrayal) The Fallen Idol is actually a superior psychological drama.
  52. Foxtrot
    Maoz is as good at youthful languor as he is at the process of grief. This middle section of the film abounds with insights and moments of surprising desert beauty.
  53. The Innocents
    Clayton's filmmaking, mustering frisson by both candle and blazing daylight, could serve as an object lesson in its genre.
  54. Inside Job
    There's not much sense that the system can be voted out-not least because Barack Obama, shown campaigning on the crisis and elected in part to change the game, recruited his economic advisers from those who enabled the disaster.
  55. Sweet Country
    Thornton delicately peels back all the layers of Aussie injustice in this film, but what’s most unnerving is that the story proves to be so universal.
  56. Leave No Trace
    Granik films with subtlety and quiet grace, but Leave No Trace explodes in the mind.
  57. Chicken Run
    A combination of "Barnyard Follies" and "Schindler's List."
  58. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
    Obsessives will be familiar with the "new" material (almost all available on the original DVD), which elaborates on the time-travel metaphysics and tightens the emotional screws. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) shares one additional tender exchange with each family member
  59. The King's Speech
    A well-wrought, enjoyably amusing inspirational drama that successfully humanizes, even as it pokes fun at, the House of Windsor.
  60. Hell or High Water
    When the movie just sits with the characters on front porches or in backyards, Mackenzie's generous, hands-off approach with his actors — most of the conversation scenes play out in long takes with minimal camera movement — yields poignant rewards.
  61. Up
    The first 10 minutes of Up are flawless; the final 80 minutes, close enough. (Though, note this: Do not see Up in 3-D. It's inessential to the tale and altogether distracting.)
  62. 45365
    The result is a poetic documentary of quiet American surfaces and intimately eavesdropped people.
  63. Marooned in Iraq
    This lusty, heartfelt movie has a near Brueghelian visual energy and a humanist passion as contagious as its music.
  64. Aquarius
    Brazil might not want you to know it, but Aquarius is something special.
  65. Toy Story 2
    The kitsch is back in full bloom.
  66. 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.
  67. Cemetery of Splendor
    As is his custom, Weerasethakul addresses his nation's martial history with the lightest of touches.
  68. Brooklyn
    The film serves as an authentic examination of the mid-twentieth-century immigrant experience — and an intimate exploration of one woman's attempt to understand who she is and where she wants to belong.
  69. Nobody Knows
    It's a heart-sundering vision of preadolescent helplessness that rivals passages of "Landscape in the Mist" and "Ponette."
  70. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Jackson's movie is one portentous happening after another -- not unreasonable in that his source, J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, is basically the fantasyland equivalent of a world war against absolute evil.
  71. L'Enfant (The Child)
    Above all, this is an action film--or, better, a transaction film. It's not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L'Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence.
  72. Poetry
    A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.
  73. Newtown
    Newtown is an act of memorialization, a demand that this most distractible of countries look close and continue to care.
  74. Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
    While acknowledging some missteps (such as jumping into a strenuous project too soon after surgery), Saffire and Schlesinger exhibit Whelan’s grace in dance and in life.
  75. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Birdman is a marvelously entertaining picture, a work of "look at me!" bravado that's energized every minute. Its proficiency, the mechanically fluid kind, works against it in some ways.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The new Little Women, directed with grace by Gillian Armstrong, adapted with tact by Robin Swicord, and starring an extraordinary ensemble, has made my holiday.
    • Village Voice
  77. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    A rambling daydream that aims literally to supplant your life, it's in effect a serial, in eight ninety-plus-minute chapters, TV-ready but defined by Rivette as a consuming theatrical experience. It consumes, all right, like a drug that won't fade, but it's also a lark, a metafiction without any reality, a magnificent irrelevance.
  78. The Spirit of the Beehive
    Beehive is a graceful and potent lyric on children's vulnerable hunger, but it's also a sublime study on cinema's poetic capacity to reflect and hypercharge reality.
  79. Nothing But a Man (1964)
    The title almost suggests manhood as something trifling. The film, however, confirms it's a mighty hard ideal to reach.
  80. Happy Hour
    Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.
  81. I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You
    Road movies don't get any purer.
  82. The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture is so immediate, so vital, it practically breathes. Not all memoirs need to exist. But the gentle urgency of Panh's story is right there in the filmmaking. This is a story that had to be told. Even in its stillness, it moves.
  83. Of Men and War
    This film is raw in the truest sense, yet refined in its sympathy and scope.
  84. The Long Goodbye
    The Long Goodbye rides off furiously in too many different directions with too many gratuitously Godardian camera movements to make even one good movie. [29 Nov 1973, p.84]
    • Village Voice
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country.
  86. Russian Ark
    Dazzling dance to the music of time.
  87. Gomorrah
    This corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like "Mean Streets" cubed.
  88. To Be and to Have
    Full of observed life, the movie is also a bit of a vacuum, and once we register our admiration for Lopez, we can hardly help contemplating the cold equations of the students' futures, their uneducated families, and the rapturously desolate farmland around them.
  89. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Moving from cafés to poolrooms to movie theaters, it's the prototypical male ensemble film.
  90. In the Mood for Love
    A wondrously perverse movie that not only evokes a lost moment in time but circles around an unrepresentable subject. Mood is the operative word. A love story far more cerebral than it is emotional.
  91. Mulholland Dr.
    Thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual. The rest is silencio.
  92. Fire at Sea
    The breach between these two worlds is part of Rosi’s formal and moral gambit.
  93. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.
  94. Grizzly Man
    For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental.
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