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. Under Fire: Journalists in Combat
    Fascinating and often devastating.
  2. The Song of Sparrows
    The film is pleasingly meandering, till the more typically Majidian soulful and teary-eyed climax.
  3. State of Fear
    An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.
  4. La faute à Fidel!
    The real treasure here is newcomer Kervel, a child superstar in the making.
  5. Thor: Ragnarok
    In its own weird little way, Thor: Ragnarok manages to poke fun at the constant churn of myth and entertainment of which the movie itself is a part. It’s a candy-colored cage of delights, but it is a cage nevertheless — and it doesn’t hide that fact.
  6. Narco Cultura
    Schwarz's juxtaposition of the human cost of the drug war alongside the glamorization of its henchmen and their brutality is sobering, even depressing.
  7. Teacher's Pet
    Continues Disney's trend of crafting animated movies as much for adult viewers as for their pre-adolescent progeny.
  8. La Sapienza
    A picture that balances heart and mind with nuance.
  9. Lemon Tree
    Promising parallels abound (not least between the two women's burdens), but the direction is stubbornly flat-footed.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha
    This was basically the best idea ever. The setting brims over with the same wicked froth of danger, exoticism, and passion that 19th-century Seville must have had before it got stylized into oblivion.
  11. Wildlike
    Greenwood brings his usual A-game, generating great chemistry with Purnell in their ad hoc paternal relationship, but she's the revelation.
  12. Breach
    This is a spy movie bereft of the genre's usual, casual kicks. It's not interested in cheap thrills or playing gotcha with the audience. (Which isn't to say parts of it aren't exhilarating.)
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    Malte's discomforting interviews with his siblings, supplemented by surreally matter-of-fact, Zelig-like photos of Hanns in Hitler's company, make for gripping and confrontational viewing. Yet the harder he persists, the less clear it is what he wants from his family.
  14. 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.
  15. Tully
    The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.
  16. Les convoyeurs attendent
    Mariage takes his time and allows the film to drift in an almost ostentatiously casual manner.
  17. Japanese Story
    Totally convincing in a physically demanding role, Collette carries the movie on her shoulders -- and that weight is what it's all about.
  18. 28 Days Later...
    On one hand a seat-o'-pants digital-video quickie designed for blunt trauma, and on the other a veritable index of classic genre-stuff, Boyle's film creates an acute sense of movie-viewing danger.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    The ultimate truth, though, is that certain, probably arrested, personalities (like mine) just find this kind of shit pretty funny and any attempt to talk your way around that is, as Cartman would say, blowing bubbles out your ass.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Arna's Children
    Refreshing and depressing.
  21. Novitiate
    There’s a lot of great filmmaking in Novitiate, but there’s also quite a bit still missing.
  22. (T)error
    Inevitably, this tense comedy dips into tragedy, with our fearful intelligence agencies getting everything wrong and the filmmakers using their rare access to chart each mistake as it happens.
  23. All This Panic
    Unconstrained by the need for a neat-and-tidy dramatic arc, All This Panic opts for messy honesty — and, in the process, finds hope for all of its subjects, in ways both big and small.
  24. From Afar
    Despite From Afar's lumbering solemnity, Castro, a Chilean actor best known for his collaborations with compatriot Pablo Larraín, proves ever supple.
  25. Tangerines
    Interior scenes focus theater-like on the dining room table-as-vortex: Threats and insults whip about, but, finally, so do forays of friendship.
  26. 1945
    Collaborating with DP Elemér Ragályi, Török also invests the movie with strong visual motifs, perhaps most prominently a consistency of shots that peer at characters through everyday barriers (windows, curtains). The resultant sensation of uncomfortable prying underlines the boiling suspicions that power the plot.
  27. 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Although the visuals are worth the ticket alone, Fantastic Planet also crackles with emotional and political resonance.
  29. 4 Days in France
    Reybaud’s film similarly serves as a tonic lesson in physical specifics, each location populated with richly idiosyncratic conversation partners.
  30. Into the Wild
    To these eyes, Into the Wild is an unusually soulful and poetic movie that crystallizes McCandless in all his glittering enigma, and allows us to decide for ourselves whether he was the spiritual son of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and John Muir, or the boy most likely to become Theodore Kaczynski.
  31. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    While overstuffed and scattershot, this episodic documentary makes a vital argument: That American popular music, especially the blues and rock ’n’ roll, owe much more to Native Americans than has been commonly credited.
  32. The Party
    Potter isn’t what you’d call subtle, but she also knows not to overstay her welcome, and this pithy comedy is a masterclass in all that a filmmaker can squeeze from the most basic theatrical concept: Put a bunch of characters with opposing motivations in a room and see what happens.
  33. A Scanner Darkly
    Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.)
  34. Cropsey
    Embracing what's really standard tabloid fodder of the decade with earnest engagement and doled-out suspense, Cropsey is one step from macabre comedy.
  35. The Great Man
    While Renier embodies his PTSD-afflicted soldier as a man similarly out of sync with his surroundings, his heartfelt performance isn't enough to overshadow the fact that this often incisive look at modern identity confusion and redefinition loses its dramatic momentum long before its finale.
  36. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    Riley doesn't portray this fellowship of black athletes as victims, but as pioneers proving themselves against white supremacy behind enemy lines. And yet this doc also pulls them back down to earth as mere men and women competing against the odds, human to human.
  37. The House of the Devil
    Pumping the audience with inhale-exhale zooms and out-of-the-way close-ups, director Ti West's ratcheting of suspense in this alone-in-an-empty-house tale is proficient, if not psychologically piercing, in the best "Let's Scare Jessica to Death" fashion.
  38. Red Cliff
    Red Cliff exudes a physical grandiosity that few movies of the past 20 years have attempted--no matter that Woo, even at his best, is still more at ease with down-and-dirty action than epic pageantry.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cool and Crazy
    If music be the food of love, Cool & Crazy could stand a few more hits from the spice rack.
  40. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Skillfully reinforces Chisholm as a refreshingly quixotic populist, running on fervor and indignation.
  41. The Limey
    A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.
  42. Behind the Sun
    The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.
  43. Show Me Love
    Easily the best teen movie of the year.
  44. My Terrorist
    Her (Gerstel's) apparent marginalization in Israeli society renders this political psychodrama all the more depressing.
  45. Keep the Change
    Keep the Change, despite David’s knack for making offensive jokes, is a charming, sensitive picture that embraces the characters as they are, without mocking them.
  46. Rust and Bone
    Audiard himself might have benefited from a simple reminder of left from right; his rudderless film confuses a pileup of preposterous, sentimental scenarios with genuine emotion.
  47. Inland Empire
    Inland Empire is Lynch's most experimental film since "Eraserhead." But unlike that brilliant debut (or its two masterful successors, "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Dr."), it lacks concentration. It's a miasma. Cheap DV technology has opened Lynch's mental floodgates.
  48. The Rape of Recy Taylor
    The film is a haunting, damning unpacking of history that also reminds us how little progress we’ve made.
  49. Eye in the Sky
    The problem with movies depicting the banality of anything, of course, is that they tend to be pretty banal themselves; in setting out to be the exception to that rule, Eye in the Sky only proves it.
  50. Kiki
    Jordenö, in a recurring motif, honors the kiki denizens the most when she captures them motionless, staring directly into the camera, regal and indefatigable.
  51. The Illinois Parables
    Stratman often juxtaposes static, serene landscape footage with an increasingly agitated soundtrack, arriving at an odd consonance amid so much dissonance.
  52. Frantz
    The savage derangements of grief so guttingly explored by Ozon in Under the Sand (2000), a career-revitalizing project for Charlotte Rampling, are decorously treated in Frantz.
  53. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    It's a uniquely lonely film, and one of the year's most memorable.
  54. Wordplay
    Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
  55. Like Father, Like Son
    It's charming, gently humorous, and beautifully attuned to the interior lives of children.
  56. Most Beautiful Island
    As a rumination on the experiences of undocumented immigrants, Most Beautiful Island presents an extreme example of what people will do to scrape by — but it does so without belittling its vulnerable characters.
  57. Night Owls
    Charles Hood's Night Owls is a mostly satisfying two-hander that never quite lives up to its full potential.
  58. Filmworker
    Perhaps if Kubrick himself wasn’t obsessed, if his films weren’t so thoroughly overwhelming in real life, then they wouldn’t have exploded in our minds the way they did. Filmworker is both a cautionary tale and a tribute to this kind of compulsion.
  59. Queen of Katwe
    Nair's immersive, energetic style, combined with her talented cast's ability to invest even the most obvious lines with genuine feeling, gives Queen of Katwe a powerful clarity.
  60. Werewolf
    Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time
    Simply put, Time is about the eternal war between infatuation and familiarity, and our irreconcilable need to find both in the same person. In other words, it's a parable about the root of human unhappiness.
  62. A Field in England
    It's sweaty, disorienting, thrilling. Rarely has a narrative feature so marvelously integrated a sequence of experimental filmmaking, and that sequence alone guarantees A Field in England should thrive on the midnight circuit.
  63. I'm Not There.
    I'm Not There is the movie of the year.
  64. The Proposition
    The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift.
  65. Himalaya
    Himalaya lacks such lightness, humor, and grace, offering instead the surface beauty of an ancient and inviolate culture.
  66. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    A movie of cutting humor, near-constant talk, and one show-stopping dance routine.
  67. The Son's Room
    A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.
  68. Derrida
    The movie is ultimately about the philosopher's personality -- if you loved "Lingua Franca" (and what lumpen academoid did not?), you'll certainly dig Derrida.
  69. The Man Who Wasn't There
    This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."
  70. The Bourne Supremacy
    The loss of the first film's hurtling who-am-I? story engine is keenly felt, and too much time is spent observing the characters get on and off planes, trains, and automobiles.
  71. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    You Don't Like the Truth focuses on the pathetic manipulations of Canadian intelligence officers as they interrogate Toronto-born Omar Khadr, the youngest prisoner held in Guantánamo Bay.
  72. The King of Comedy
    The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.
  73. Khodorkovsky
    Though the PR bit is right on, Khodorkovsky goes some way toward questioning the guilt.
  74. Laurence Anyways
    The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.
  75. Sollers Point
    Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.
  76. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    By focusing on the Sungs, [James] puts real, human faces to this corporation, leaving little doubt they’re the ones to root for.
  77. Dukhtar
    Dukhtar is an issues film with the twisted, heart-pounding feel of a road-trip thriller, but Nathaniel based her script on a true story, and there's a low-key quality to the conversations that feels real, intimate, and all the more urgent for it.
  78. Les Destinées
    An impressively coordinated enterprise that lasts three hours, manages a large cast, and covers a period of 30-odd years while successfully unfolding as a series of scenes from the life of a single character.
  79. Hounds of Love
    Hounds may be predictable in plot, but it succeeds in making a psychological web of this troubled threesome.
  80. An African Election
    Even those who closely follow African (or global) politics will likely be bowled over by the real-life plot twists unfolding before Merz's camera. What makes the film especially resonate now is the frustration with the status quo that is consistently voiced by the people on the street.
  81. A Most Wanted Man
    A Most Wanted Man is simply a complex tale superbly told, with time for nuance and to soak in its mysteries.
  82. Arbitrage
    Slick and grown-up as Richard Gere himself, this intricate fiscal thriller takes a dead bead on extreme privilege.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somersault
    There are lots of ways to grow up. The method offered in this Australian drama is to do something awful and then flee from it.
  84. Blue Beard
    Psychologically rich, unobtrusively minimalist, at once admirably straightforward and slyly comic, Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard is a lucid retelling and simultaneous explanation of Charles Perrault's nastiest, most un-Disneyfiable nursery story.
  85. The Princess and the Frog
    The Princess and the Frog is pleasantly, if unmemorably, drawn. But the movie as a whole never approaches the wit, cleverness, and storytelling brio of the studio's early-1990s animation renaissance (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) or pretty much anything by Pixar.
  86. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery makes us question not only art, but the experts who claim to understand it best.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    In briskly edited sequences peppered with fascinating found footage, each genre is tightly linked to a neighborhood.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Two Escobars
    A stranger to this story will guess how it ends by virtue of the fact that neither Andrés nor Pablo appear in current-day footage, but nonetheless, The Two Escobars ends up being quite the nail-biter.
  89. Araya
    Another stunningly photographed document of a singular culture.
  90. ABC Africa
    The emphasis in this surprisingly cheerful film is on the resilience of the living.
  91. Lola
    Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does.
  92. Urbania
    Derails toward the end, becoming platitudinous, not to mention kitschy, but, given the Cheerios wholesomeness of most gay indies, its grief-stricken delirium is a welcome relief.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Execution of Wanda Jean
    Achieves a torturous, race-against-time desperation.
  94. Cuban Rafters
    Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.
  95. *Corpus Callosum
    The Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in this exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, titled for the "central region" of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain's two hemispheres.
  96. Strange Fruit
    Mining the song's associative richness, Katz's film works as jazz genealogy, Meerpol bio, Jewish-leftist puzzle piece, performance homage, and exegetic history of lynching.
  97. School Life
    The central couple’s unforced benevolence is hard to resist; the bespectacled John, in particular, exhibits remarkable comfort in front of the camera, his frizzy white hair and knowing reaction shots lending him a kind of quizzical charisma throughout.
  98. Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case
    With such a compelling central figure it would be tough for the doc to not stimulate, but stimulation aside, its rather shapeless narrative can feel desultory.
  99. 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.
  100. Wind River
    Sheridan’s feel for psychology and setting are in fine evidence here. Wind River’s landscapes are forbidding and beautiful.
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