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. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    Thanks to Lynch's expert pacing and modulation of narrative tension, even viewers who already know the outcome of the film's central incident will likely be pulled to the edges of their seats.
  2. Black Cat, White Cat
    Determined to twist every character into an ideogram for vulgar humanity.
  3. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    The film's delighted affinity with Ungerer's well-turned perspective does lend an advertorial slickness to what might have been a more challenging study of a fascinating and famously elusive subject.
  4. Spider-Man
    Mildly cheesy but not overwrought, this long-awaited future franchise is a competent seat-warmer at the box-office table for the two weekends preceding George Lucas's "Attack of the Clones."
  5. The Raid: Redemption
    Lean, fast-moving, and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans's Indonesian martial-arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype.
  6. The Cave of the Yellow Dog
    At times the film's Buddhist lessons feel a bit forced, but the naturalistic performances Davaa has coaxed from a real-life Mongolian family, and her intimate understanding of their culture and values, give this sensitive portrayal its heft.
  7. Sorry Angel
    Honoré’s scenes feel at once composed and curiously mundane, as if he’s trying to take the precision of his earlier work and mix it with a more realist impulse — or, if we’re being less charitable, as if he’s trying to will his aesthetic into something more “mature.”
  8. Karl Marx City
    As too often happens in nonfiction movies, their exploration of these concepts is undermined by ill-considered execution.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan
    More than a vibrant experiment in ethnomusical cross-pollination, it's just great fun.
  10. The Memory of a Killer
    Van Looy has created a fast-paced and stylish thriller. Declair's Ledda, marvelously suave and vulnerable, provides most of the pathos.
  11. 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris
    What kept Paris from the top? The answers provided rarely qualify as revelation, but this affectionate portrait distinguishes itself from the ongoing epidemic of musician docs by mere virtue of staking out ground that hasn't already been thoroughly tilled.
  12. Transpecos
    Transpecos distinguishes itself with a sharp ear for dialogue, keen attention to ground-level detail, and an ending that unexpectedly chooses cautious optimism over blanket cynicism.
  13. Meet the Parents
    Watching Ben get the girl or be seriously injured trying always has its dry, keening pleasures.
  14. Beyond the Lights
    A movie isn’t a cliché when it can sing like this.
  15. The Matrix
    The cumulative effect is perversely deflationary: long before it's over, the film has flushed the paranoia from its system.
  16. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    Guedes's complex performance leaves no doubt regarding the fragility of Veronica's psyche.
  17. The Impossible
    These horrors, and the absorbing performances of Watts and McGregor, will soon be undermined by a surfeit of sentiment.
  18. After the Life
    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.]
  19. Big Animal
    The tale's faux-fable simplicity is cunningly eloquent.
  20. Last Life in the Universe
    Cheeky and elusive, Last Life in the Universe inhabits a high-lonesome world unto itself, a bright daydream that dissipates in the aching gap of a missed connection.
  21. I'm Not Scared
    The upshot is a general fog of two-dimensional characterization, slowly churning plot gearwork, and an ineffective air of forced lyricism.
  22. Super Size Me
    Sometimes exerts the gross-out fascination of reality TV's muckier specimens--its arc suggests a slow-motion "Fear Factor," or "Extreme Makeover" in reverse.
  23. Divorce Iranian Style
    A small, direct, tantalizing documentary.
  24. Woman on the Beach
    Albeit not as textured as Hong's past few films, Woman on the Beach is no less engrossing--a rueful tale of karmic irony, self-deceived desire, squandered second chances, and unforeseen abandonment.
  25. Heading South
    An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.
  26. Le Week-End
    The great insight in director Roger Michell's fourth collaboration with writer Hanif Kureishi is its vision of Paris as an arena equally amenable to romantic comedy and sulking tragedy.
  27. Exiled
    By Hong Kong standards, To's policiers have been fairly down-to-earth, but Exiled--which begins with a tribute to Sergio Leone and ends by acknowledging Sam Peckinpah--exists solely in the world of the movies.
  28. United in Anger: A History of ACT UP
    Crucially, the variety of interviewees in Hubbard's doc - men and women of different races and classes - underscores just how diverse ACT UP was in its heyday.
  29. Gilbert
    In Neil Berkeley’s documentary Gilbert, we’re gifted with intimate moments from the comedian’s life.
  30. Love & Bananas
    Noi Na’s subsequent acclimation to her new home in the refuge is hopeful, but Chailert’s bravery, sacrifice, and manifest love are the only redemption the film holds out for humans.
  31. Cold Mountain
    A big fat war movie and a tender love story. Indeed, Cold Mountain is something of an uneasy struggle between the two modes.
  32. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    Despite the clumsy script and a shaky acting partner, Cattani, at least, is fascinating to watch, never demanding audience sympathy.
  33. Something, Anything
    This is a sure-handed, complex portrait of one woman's attempts to feel alive.
  34. Train to Busan
    Yeon's patient direction and clever plot twists make Seok-woo's transformation from selfish antihero into brave caregiver consistently compelling.
  35. Me and Orson Welles
    Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.
  36. For the Bible Tells Me So
    Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocket Science
    Once Rocket Science enters the realm of the debate competition, the director's eye for detail never deserts him.
  38. American Sniper
    The humble Kyle onscreen is Kyle with his flaws written out. We're not watching a biopic. We're watching a drama about an idealized soldier, a patriot beyond reproach, which bolsters Kyle's legend while gutting the man.
  39. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    A script that consistently finds fresh outlets for its running gags makes for a sufficiently rollicking pleasure cruise.
  40. The Price of Sugar
    Out of this sorry tale of human trafficking emerges a fascinating portrait of this handsome, pugnacious, one-man NGO, who left a cushy life with his patrician Anglo-Spanish family to work with Mother Theresa and devote himself to the oppressed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess
    Stuffed with talking heads, Harlan is overlong and redundant, but its core questions are worthy.
  42. China Blue
    Shot at the peril of Peled and his crew, China Blue feels stage-managed at times.
  43. Family Portrait in Black and White
    The film's emotional and psychological textures suffer for those losses, but Family is still riveting viewing.
  44. Uncle Howard
    A bit disjointed but also vibrant and loving.
  45. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    Form and content collide in inspiring ways in this documentary about Milford Graves — avant-garde jazz percussionist, educator, gardener, martial artist, and cardiovascular researcher. Milford Graves Full Mantis is a jazz movie in every sense of the word.
  46. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Marston nails the claustrophobia of small-town life and the turbulent emotionalism of teenagers, but what pushes the film toward sublimity is the way he delicately captures all of the characters' inner lives as their world slowly crumbles.
  47. Obscene
    Very fine documentary.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Indie Game: The Movie
    An insightful new geek documentary, well directed by first-timers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky.
    • 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.
  50. All Things Must Pass
    The director's native warmth and sympathy are extended here to the store and the personalities that made it a billion-dollar, globe-bestriding colossus.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clan
    Billed as a thriller, The Clan doesn't quite thrill but instead instills a slow-building dread of the inevitable.
  52. L.I.E.
    Preposterous enough to entertain.
  53. Our Lady of the Assassins
    The performances can be stiff, but a kinetic mix of anxiety, dread, and numbed resignation is always palpable.
  54. The Corporation
    A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."
  55. Not One Less
    The film's occasional dips into sentimental cuteness and its too-pat ending can't cancel the gap that yawns ever wider between rural and urban society.
  56. Space Cowboys
    An entertainingly raffish action-comedy.
  57. Titanic Town
    Isn't convincing on every front, but as a political conversation piece, it's potentially effective.
  58. Kill Zone 2
    Dizzily entertaining when the knives, bullets, and feet are flying, and sometimes painfully melodramatic during the interim exposition.
  59. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Spider-Man: Homecoming is comics, unapologetically, as close as blockbuster filmmaking gets to cartooning.
  60. Prince Avalanche
    Prince Avalanche reconciles Green's twin modes into a whole no other director could have, deeply felt and light as laughter.
  61. The Man in the Moon
    In lesser hands, it would be young-adult fiction, but the coda-“Maybe life’s not supposed to make sense”-is anything but kid stuff.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Though the film never transcends its own neo-boho quirk, it concludes in a marvelous final shot: a long take set to Gang of Four, grungy and materialist in the Jacobs tradition.
    • 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.
  64. Germans & Jews
    For a film encompassing generations of fraught history, Germans & Jews is awfully short, but hardly superficial.
  65. Gran Torino
    Above all, it feels like a summation of everything he (Eastwood) represents as a filmmaker and a movie star, and perhaps also a farewell.
  66. Mr. Roosevelt
    Mr. Roosevelt may be slight, but it’s buoyed by Wells’s self-deprecating humor.
  67. Results
    While the polish of good-looking Hollywood types shot in clean, well-lit spaces doesn’t quite connect with Bujalski’s writing style, the film's tone is honestly unorthodox, a quality missing from most mid-budget comedies.
  68. Cars
    What ultimately redeems Cars from turning out a total lemon is its soul. Lasseter loves these animated inanimate objects as though they were kin, and it shows in every beautifully rendered frame.
  69. Appropriate Behavior
    Forget its generic title, its breakup setup, and its indie-standard Brooklyn walk-and-talks: Writer/director Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behavior is the freshest comedy of life and love in the city since Obvious Child.
  70. Saving Banksy
    Saving Banksy, in documenting the struggle of art consultant Brian Greif to preserve a single Banksy painting — one of the artist's trademark Che Guevara rats — inadvertently demonstrates that nearly every response to Banksy's work is wrong.
  71. 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.
  72. Erin Brockovich
    This is the Julia Roberts performance her fans have been waiting for.
  73. Zombieland
    Fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer.
  74. Red Satin
    Noteworthy for its rich characterizations and startling plot twists, including a delightful surprise ending that is both a sexual double entendre and a matriarchal triumph.
  75. 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.
  76. By the Time It Gets Dark
    It's a film, a rather gorgeous one, of glances and ephemera and delicate metaphors.
  77. Julieta
    While Almodóvar may move his characters around like a god (or at least a moralist), his attention to detail and his fondness for unexpected bits of tenderness give these people shape and dimension and keep the narrative from becoming schematic.
  78. Antz
    Matching their superbly expressive computer-generated counterparts, the actors are all enjoyably hammy, but the real star of Antz is the art direction, a marvel of teeming detail wittier and more sophisticated than the script.
  79. The Lookout
    Gordon-Levitt's worth the admission all by his lonesome. He's that good--the proverbial young man with an old soul who brings unexpected depth, complexity, and sincerity to what could have been just another damaged-guy role. He's the one to look out for.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summer Pasture
    Summer Pasture is remarkable not merely for documenting the disappearing way of life, but for registering the depth of Yama and Locho's uncertainty about moving on from it.
  81. Whores' Glory
    Michael Glawogger's fearless Whores' Glory demystifies trick turning with a bluntness and sneaky artistry that's sure to make even the most jaded of us choke on our next sitcom-hooker-joke chuckle.
  82. Planet of Snail
    An unadorned, unsentimental portrait of a marriage, Yi Seung-jun's documentary Planet of Snail celebrates the daily life of an exceptionally collaborative couple.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hangover
    Phillips can't bring himself to push the material into truly outré territory, or to characterize his growth-impaired guys as degenerate creeps rather than lovable scamps.
  84. The Square
    Östlund is specific and exacting as a writer and director, and within The Square’s empty spaces, we’re forced to confront our own values, and our own visions of ourselves.
  85. The Club
    It's all well acted, especially the interrogations, and its specifics haunt and disturb. But as it aspires to parable it slumps into dark melodrama, with competing scenes of mob violence and individual characters freighted with so much allegoric significance that they stop feeling like people.
  86. The Girl Cut in Two
    A Girl Cut in Two is a spry piece of work. Chabrol uses this sinister clown show as a means to puncture the media world's hot-air balloons--as well as to highlight the hypocrisies of his favorite target, the haute bourgeoisie.
  87. Journey's End
    Though set at a specific moment in time, the film could be about terminal cancer patients or condemned prisoners, a deeply felt catalog of the behaviors of men who know they’re about to die.
  88. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Louis Black explores the casual philosophizing of his subject's work in Dream Is Destiny, an admiring documentary that wisely lets Linklater do most of the talking in his plainspoken, unpretentious manner.
  89. A Borrowed Identity
    Traditional coming-of-age films like A Borrowed Identity don't often come from Israel, which is one of the film's points.
  90. 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.
  91. Battle of the Sexes
    Stone and Carell ace both the warmth and the competitive camaraderie of that relationship. But when Billie and Bobby interact with anyone else in this story — love interests in particular — woo, boy, does Battle of the Sexes whiff the serve.
  92. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.
  93. Cold in July
    While Hall and Shepard nail their parts, Don Johnson, still magnetic after all these years, steals the film as a sardonic private eye with a vintage cherry-red convertible.
  94. Layer Cake
    What's abundantly clear is how far this kind of moviemaking has come from any knowledge of real criminal life; it's a geek's ineffectual daydream of mayhem.
  95. The Company
    Not a farce, or comedy or drama, but essentially a doodle interrupted by nouveau ballet performances, the entire contraption assembled to please the ego of Neve Campbell.
  96. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    Far from terrible, Leconte's latest movie suggests the work of a slightly hip preacher.
  97. Ray
    Hackford's movie falls into a meandering saunter. As the music grows dull, so does the movie.
  98. Bam gua nat
    Some of it is hilarious, some sad, all filtered through Hong's inimitably wry take on the unbearable lightness of being . . . himself.
  99. Palio
    While Spender spends enough time with both new and retired jockey legends to collect a gold mine of macho, bullheaded rapport, you wish she delved deeper into the more sinister, behind-the-scenes wheelings and dealings.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mandabi
    Honest but stupid. [19 Mar 1970, p.54]
    • Village Voice
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