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. Horrible Bosses 2
    The miraculous surprise is that Horrible Bosses 2 isn't terrible at all. It's looser, breezier, more confident than its predecessor.
  2. Juno
    Once it works its way through the first-timer's lookatme! snark, Juno evolves into a thing of beauty and grace. By the end, it's unexpectedly moving without ever once trolling for crocodile tears. It's a sneak attack.
  3. The Witch
    The Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners. It literalizes the fevered terrors of our God-mad ancestors — and then brags that it's all steeped in research.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waste Land
    A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception.
  5. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    If the off-kilter pleasures of Volume I is von Trier enticing us to watch the rest, consider me seduced.
  6. The Fearless Freaks
    An all-access fan's valentine as artfully scrappy and likably wide-eyed as its subjects.
  7. For the Plasma
    For the Plasma finds genuine, almost innocent-seeming delight in its own swerves in style and rhythm.
  8. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    Gebbe never asks us to believe in Tore's god, but she asks us to honor his beliefs. She's found an incredible conduit in Feldmeier.
  9. Han Gong-ju
    The cumulative impact of the delayed story revelations and Chun's startling vulnerability is both an elegant gut-punch and a furious indictment of a society that treats its victims with inexcusable aggression and hostility.
  10. Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    As news, it smokes CNN.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Gold
    No mere Western-guilt-inducing harangue, this highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis is a model of patient storytelling.
  12. Kung Fu Hustle
    Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie.
  13. Morris from America
    In Chad Hartigan's lighthearted drama Morris From America, there are a whopping two African-American characters. The difference between this film and most others, however, is that these two are fully yet subtly drawn. They interact in ways that feel genuine, the actors portraying a heartfelt father-son relationship and the director fighting the urge to get either too preachy or mushy.
  14. The Wife
    It is the depth Close lends to Joan that kept me riveted — and angry.
  15. The Eye of the Storm
    Narrative unevenness notwithstanding, those hang-ups are given delicious life by a superb Rush, Davis, and Rampling (the latter often confined to a bed and encased in elderly makeup), who prove a regally dysfunctional trio par excellence.
  16. Silence
    Not since The Tree of Life has Christianity been explored onscreen in such serious, conflicted terms, but Scorsese has crafted a far less grandiose experience than Terrence Malick did five years ago. Silence is restrained, austere, even ascetic.
  17. Outrage
    Moment by moment, Outrage proves duly provocative, well sourced, and almost certain to go more viral than swine flu.
  18. 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.
  19. The Oslo Diaries
    The Oslo Diaries is a striking document, mixing never-before-seen footage shot by the negotiators themselves and current reflections from participants, including the final interview of former Israeli president Shimon Peres.
  20. Le Havre
    Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.
  21. Side Effects
    If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh's final big-screen film, as the director claims it will be, then he has peaked in the Valley of the Dolls.
  22. The Damned United
    A movie about soccer that doesn't spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that is enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby's team owner.
  23. B&B
    Ahearne deftly builds the suspense, raising the stakes before steering the story into surprising new directions. Despite its modern premise, B&B feels classic — a Hitchcockian nail-biter without a platinum blonde in sight.
  24. Las Acacias
    Watching this taciturn man grow close to mother and child - close enough that he experiences twinges of jealousy and abandonment toward the end of Las Acacias - is one of the most satisfying spectacles in a movie this year, a time-lapse of emotions rendered perfectly.
  25. The Heart Machine
    An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.
  26. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Just like high-wire showman Philippe Petit, Tower is a brilliant, dedicated artist who has spent most of his life wowing people with his talents — but is ultimately always out there by himself.
  27. Cinévardaphoto
    A work of great charm and bold aesthetic impurity, Agnès Varda's Cinévardaphoto is a suite of documentary shorts.
  28. Prophet's Prey
    Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly.
  29. Old Joy
    If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.
  30. Don't Say a Word
    Fleder's forgettable thriller has a convincing edge, and Douglas remains unchallenged as Hollywood's most tremulous and disquieting dad-under-pressure.
  31. Gleason
    So while Gleason is the slick, moving, sincere documentary you might expect from this material, there’s something else going on beneath the Oscar-friendly polish: This is a remarkably physical film.
  32. Tell No One
    Among the movie's many delights are the fluctuating rhythms of its pacing, an atmospheric volatility that sets off the doctor's blooming paranoia against his sunlit, leafy surroundings, and a terrific cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas.
  33. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    Olli Mäki isn't a knockout, but it does go the distance.
  34. Bruno
    Funny as it is, Brüno could not be as shockingly uproarious as "Borat." No matter how well retold, a joke necessarily loses explosive force the second time around. But a great gag is a thing of beauty forever--so, too, a comic performance.
  35. 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    A richly picturesque, multi-leveled film. [20 May 1971, p.66]
    • Village Voice
  37. How to Draw a Bunny
    Absorbing documentary portrait.
  38. Cavite
    Cavite is such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage.
  39. A Clockwork Orange
    The first punk tragicomedy, a chain-whipped cartoon meditation on Good, Evil, and Free Will that is as seductive as it is tasteless. That Kubrick misjudged the distance between comedy and cruelty seems to be unarguable.
  40. Hidden in Plain Sight
    John H. Smihula's compelling video documentary aims for both hearts and minds.
  41. Burnt Money
    Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.
  42. Stonehearst Asylum
    With Stonehearst Asylum, director Brad Anderson doles out a vintage Halloween treat — a straightforward Poe adaptation of the sort that Vincent Price used to star in — and gives it a freshness and complexity that make it a delight.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Catch a Thief
    Hitchcock makes it come off with a pair of beauties named Cary Grant and The French Riviera. [09 Nov 1955, p.6]
    • Village Voice
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Daguerrotype
    If the movie doesn’t succeed, per se, as a haunted-house plot of escapist designs, its geologic layering of uncertainties and closed doors produces a chilling effect — all the better to vault past ignoble concerns like screenplay tidiness.
  45. Monsters vs Aliens
    The grandeur of the effects--the honest-to-God spectacle of the thing--elevates Monsters vs. Aliens to something approaching art. It's not a masterpiece, but it's most certainly a milestone.
  46. Hell and Back Again
    Working alone with a camera and his ingenuity, Dennis captured the surreality of firefights with an invisible enemy and the frustration of displaced civilians.
  47. The Measure of a Man
    A feat of workplace naturalism.
  48. Train to Busan
    Yeon's patient direction and clever plot twists make Seok-woo's transformation from selfish antihero into brave caregiver consistently compelling.
  49. Miss Sharon Jones!
    Kopple's film is intimate and rousing.
  50. The Future Perfect
    With unpretentious formal rigor and a lighthearted deadpan, the film tracks Xiaobin’s development through self-reflexive escalation.
  51. Let the Bullets Fly
    Comedy and shifting-allegiances intrigue more than compensate for the dearth of rousing action in this 1920s-set film.
  52. Ping Pong
    Ping Pong shows us people piquantly aware of the deterioration of their bodies and that they don't have much time left.
  53. Berlin Babylon
    To many eyes, Berlin was the saddest city in 20th-century Europe, divided and lost, and as city symphonies go, Siegert's is pragmatic and optimistic.
  54. Compliance
    Compliance lets neither men nor women off the hook.
  55. Almost Famous
    Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.
  56. The Dead
    The Dead, with its vast, pitiless landscapes and moral seriousness, is "Night of the Living Dead" reimagined as a Sergio Leone western. It's a knockout.
  57. Paddington
    The scale of the occasional mayhem is heightened, but its spirit and ingenuity doesn't feel wholly at odds with the books.
  58. Juliet, Naked
    Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke.
  59. The Color of Paradise
    Like a Hollywood dolt, Majidi strives to overwhelm us with emphasis, but it's the reality he was savvy to load his movie with that's touching.
  60. A Stray
    Writer-director Musa Syeed has conjured a drama rich with incident...but most of the turns of plot feel organic, ours to discover, as long as we're paying attention.
  61. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    Silence might be the most perfect expression of scorn, as the saying goes, but like Edvard Munch's "The Scream," you don't have to hear it to get the horror.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Declaration of War
    Shot in the actual hospital where Donzelli and Elkaïm's actual son was treated for cancer, Declaration of War turns autobiography into thrilling expressionist art.
  63. Disgrace
    The austere economy of Coetzee's writing, crisply adapted for the screen by Anna Maria Monticelli, plays out the melodrama with quietly brooding menace.
  64. !Women Art Revolution
    Moves briskly, unfolding as one lively sit-down after another with artists, scholars, and curators who established themselves at the height of second-wave feminism.
  65. Gebo and the Shadow
    Gebo and the Shadow is a film about concrete, hard, and material things, as well as one about illusions.
  66. Into the Forest
    This isn’t torture-porn dystopia; it’s a singular, honest, heartfelt portrait of sisterly devotion at the end of the world
  67. Departures
    Departures is built for simplicity, and, if nothing else, the appeal to decency and integrity of this sweetly old-fashioned tale make it a must for Bernie Madoff's prison Netflix queue.
  68. Armadillo
    While much of Armadillo echoes last year's "Restrepo," the unprecedented access of director Janus Metz and cameraman Lars Skree reveals the alternating waves of frontline tedium and terror with fresh immediacy.
  69. Keep On Keepin' On
    It's part Live at Birdland, part Boy in the Plastic Bubble, all warmly thrilling.
  70. The New Black
    What emerges is an illuminating look at the ways race, specifically blackness, has been cynically portrayed by the mainstream media, rightwing politicians and religious leaders, and even some white queer activists.
  71. Dung che sai duk
    Wittily, earnestly, gorgeously sets up the paradox he has returned to throughout his career--that of romantic memory as both scourge and succor.
  72. Gozu
    Splendidly entertaining.
  73. Room and a Half
    In this ecstatically fanciful film, Russian filmmaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky brings the acclaimed Nobel Laureate back home via his sonorous verse and a montage of archival footage, wickedly doctored photos, re-enactments, and puckish animation featuring two crows and a very large cat.
  74. Nowhere to Hide
    Both Sharif and Ahmed make sure audiences leave Nowhere to Hide well aware that Iraq remains a war zone — one where innocent people remain caught in the crossfire.
  75. Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Casually racist and inordinately sexist, Pépé le Moko is best enjoyed for its offhand surrealism.
  76. Mandy
    The film’s two sides — the soft, textured reverie of its first half, and the surreal, angular savagery of its second — exist in perpetual balance; one would die without the other.
  77. Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter
    You need not be a student or scholar of dance to be completely enthralled by Greg Vander Veer's documentary Miss Hill.
  78. 3 Backyards
    Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's "Judy Berlin" is devoted to finding descriptive correlatives to liminal emotional states through the cast's eloquent reaction shots and the camera's depiction of homely environments - with ornate, flowing visual vocabulary.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Weekend
    Naturalistic without being ineloquent, heartfelt yet unsentimental, Weekend is the rarest of birds: a movie romance that rings true.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock the Bells
    An electrifying, occasionally terrifying documentary.
  81. The Fast and the Furious
    (You) might be charmed by the film's blend of kineticism, car-culture rituals, and hilariously flat-footed dialogue.
  82. Reprise
    Reprise--a masculine story whose women come off best--is less a hermeneutic finger in your face (though it aims wonderfully low blows at literary celebrity) than a savage, funny, tender, tragic, and strangely beautiful riff on growing up in a broken world.
  83. Louder Than Bombs
    The tale isn't new, nor are the characters, but director Joachim Trier's stylistic and narrative dexterity demands attention: He possesses that rare ability to deconstruct his material without denying us the simple beauties of a well-told story.
  84. Byzantium
    Byzantium isn't Jordan's first movie about bloodsuckers—that would be 1994's Interview with the Vampire—but it's the right vampire movie for today, poetic and elegant in an artfully tattered way.
  85. Babygirl
    [A] small, gentle coming-of-age story, exceedingly well-cast.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kawasaki's Rose
    Performed and directed with assured elegance, Kawasaki's Rose is a film that recognizes life as a tumultuous mess of both noble and base intensions and actions, as well as one that understands the thorny tragedies such chaos often leaves in its wake.
  87. Be Here Now
    Foster makes it deeper, using an observational style to reveal the intricacies of a progressive disease and candid interviews with Andy and Vashti to strip away the veneer of celebrity implacability.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guys and Dolls
    Guys and Dolls is a rare example of a filmed musical being as sprightly in its own way as the original stage production. [28 Mar 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    To watch the 158-minute 1991 theatrical cut of Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’s globetrotting, apocalyptic, pop-rock-saturated sci-fi odyssey, is to zone in and out of a meandering, wistful dream.
  90. Colliding Dreams
    Admittedly, it's an awfully low bar that makes a film about the Middle East radical simply for taking into account the opinions and experiences of people of color. But it's really, wonderfully refreshing to find one that centers on storytelling like this.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Annie Get Your Gun (re-release)
    Baritone Howard Keel makes an impressive Hollywood debut as Hutton's leading man. During the nonmusical scenes, Betty Hutton gives a crude and strident performance, exhausting to watch, but she belts out the songs with an appropriately rowdy energy.
  92. Once Upon a Time in China (re-release)
    Gets better as it goes along, building up to a prolonged shipboard finale.
  93. 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Injury to One
    A deft, ambitious exercise in old-school socialist agitprop crafted with the precise multimedia flair of a corporate PowerPoint presentation, Travis Wilkerson's An Injury to One retells the gritty class struggles of the previous century through smoothly contemporary digital means.
  95. Frozen River
    If there's one thing this movie gets dead right, it's the desperation of impoverished single mothers trying to fend for their children.
  96. A Space Program
    The result is something like the best science-fair project ever, an inviting performance piece that tasks viewers with the pleasurable, imaginative engagement that more seamless special effects deny.
  97. Dreamgirls
    Condon grasps what has eluded most of his contemporaries: Anyone can give us the old razzle-dazzle, but what makes a movie musical soar is nothing more or less than the quiet exhilaration of two individuals on the screen, enraptured by song.
  98. J. Edgar
    Although hardly flawless, Eastwood's biopic is his richest, most ambitious movie since the "Letters From Iwo Jima" – "Flags of Our Fathers" duo, if not "Unforgiven."
  99. 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.
  100. Cousin Jules
    Thoroughly transporting, the peacefulness and clarity of Cousin Jules can't help but reveal, by contrast, the restlessness and agitation too common to life today.
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