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. One of Us
    The film is a nuanced and moving illustration of the dilemma facing doubting members of the growing Hasidic community in New York City.
  2. The Light of the Moon
    The frank ways in which Thompson and Beatriz channel Bonnie make it clear that there’s a lot of respect for this complex character navigating life-altering trauma.
  3. Indivisible
    Indivisible is above all else a mood piece humming with energy and marked by wondrous moments.
  4. Nico, 1988
    Nico, 1988 offers all I want from this kind of movie: a sense of what time with someone unknowable might have been like.
  5. The Future Perfect
    With unpretentious formal rigor and a lighthearted deadpan, the film tracks Xiaobin’s development through self-reflexive escalation.
  6. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Seeing the breadth of Didion’s work and its impact on the culture represented cumulatively delivers an unexpected shock to the system.
  7. Boston
    Boston, Jon Dunham’s film about that city’s marathon, is a contender — an emotional comeback story, interspersed with thrilling moments in its history, without gloss, cliche or even nostalgia.
  8. Window Horses
    Many independent animated films in recent years have adopted a hand-drawn and/or collage-heavy aesthetic, but few are quite as heartfelt and charming as Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming.
  9. Frank Serpico
    Most hilarious is the revelation that the first director assigned to the film Lumet eventually made, the manic John G. Avildsen, wanted the eccentric, bearded hipster ex-cop to play himself. On the basis of this exceptional portrait, he very well could have.
  10. Apocalypse Now Redux
    Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one.
  11. Love, Simon
    Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes.
  12. Diamond Island
    Maybe this is a mood more than a movie, but it is a haunting one.
  13. 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.
  14. The Rape of Recy Taylor
    The film is a haunting, damning unpacking of history that also reminds us how little progress we’ve made.
  15. 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.
  16. Dream Boat
    For all the outrageous cosplay and assless trunks on display, director Tristan Ferland Milewski is more interested in exploring the interior lives of gay men.
  17. In Between
    Hamoud’s three bright actresses bring such a sense of authenticity to their roles that this all feels new.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rebels on Pointe
    Serious balletomanes will find much to appreciate here; people who delight in seeing the form lampooned will find more. These guys (among whom are three married couples) are gorgeous dancers, respectful of ballet’s 400-year-old tradition; they’re brash and funny, they’re changing the world, and they have power to spare.
  19. Big Sonia
    The loose structure is bound by a thread of motherhood. Sonia’s children, two daughters and a son, are lively, intelligent, and deeply affected by their parents’ trauma.
  20. Holy Air
    The humor in Shady Srour’s Holy Air isn’t entirely satirical, but the bone-dry wit is breathtaking.
  21. Bill Frisell: A Portrait
    Franz’s doc, unlike too many about jazz musicians, actually makes room for jazz music, capturing the clean-cut, restlessly inventive Frisell in live performance in a variety of ensembles.
  22. Cuba and the Cameraman
    Cuba and the Cameraman distills thousands of hours of footage into 113 lively, whirlwind minutes, covering big news events — the Mariel Boatlift; a Castro visit to the United Nations; the Communist leader’s death in 2016 — but also always taking the time to capture the everyday drift of life.
  23. Shakespeare Wallah
    Just when you think you’ve pinned down what precisely Shakespeare Wallah is, it becomes something else before your eyes.
  24. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Legends of the Mountain’s narrative fuse may be long, but Hu knows exactly when to light it and when to snuff it out.
  25. Freak Show
    [A] bitterly funny and warmly empathetic first feature.
  26. Unsane
    Simple and well acted, Unsane has tension enough to knot the stomach.
  27. Shadowman
    [A] heartbreaking doc.
  28. What Happened in Vegas
    Denison keeps up the pace — those television skills coming in handy — and unpacks a lot. But he also allows in some light. There are plenty of Las Vegas police officers who want things to change, and Denison gives them, and the victims’ families, a voice.
  29. Beuys
    Veiel’s refreshingly open-ended approach invites you to find your own answers.
  30. The Green Fog
    It’s not so much an assemblage as it is a conjuring. You don’t just watch these clips — you see through and between them. The juxtapositions create vital, cosmic connections.
  31. Nostalgia
    Keener, as always, is excellent, a shrewd actor adept at revealing what her characters might not realize they’re revealing. Eventually, she must plumb the depths of grief, and the effect is something like watching a member of your actual family collapse and then pull herself together and keep pressing on.
  32. Oh Lucy!
    Hirayanagi acknowledges that reinvention isn’t as simple as trading Setsuko’s messy stagnation for Lucy’s zany possibility. What Setsuko fears most is losing everything, but that may be her best option.
  33. Pandas
    The unexpectedly impressive nature documentary Pandas is so visually dynamic that even the most pedantic (think Neil deGrasse Tyson level) skeptics will probably not mind listening to narrator Kristen Bell — speaking for writer–co-director Drew Fellman — rattle off 43 minutes’ worth of cutesy panda trivia.
  34. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Watching this movie is like freebasing sincerity — a scarce resource in our current entertainment hellscape. It’ll give you warm fuzzies for days.
  35. Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan
    [Kirchheimer's] arguments — delivered in declarative voiceover by Dylan Baker and scored to music from Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis — have power, but what stirs the mind and the heart, here, is his photography and editing.
  36. Skate Kitchen
    In Skate Kitchen, the kids come as they are, and they’re wildly fascinating.
  37. The Tale
    It takes a remarkably assured artist to make all this work, and Fox is savvy about how she eases us into her complicated narrative.
  38. Juliet, Naked
    Juliet, Naked has its charms, and they are named Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke.
  39. 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.
  40. The Guilty
    The Guilty beautifully demonstrates how people can act with absolute conviction even when they don’t have the full picture of a situation, and the monstrousness this can in turn lead to. And if that doesn’t speak to our time, then I don’t know what does.
  41. 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.
  42. Nancy
    I’d urge any viewer to look closely at the lead actress. The emotional journey of the story— and it’s a fairly dramatic one — comes alive and gathers force through her expressions. She is the movie.
  43. The Peacemaker
    James Demo’s The Peacemaker is an intense, intimate portrait of a visionary capable of sophisticated analysis, abrupt anger, self-deprecating wit, and profound insights — all while existing at considerable remove from his fellow man.
  44. Ramen Heads
    As demonstrated by this exquisite documentary, the preparation of Japan’s national dish is an arduous affair, with the most celebrated chefs — variously referred to here as “ramen gods” and “ramen demons” — toiling fanatically to retain the color, richness, and viscosity of their dishes.
  45. Angels Wear White
    Qu unpacks much that matters in Angels Wear White, including the abuse of power and importance of status and wealth in Chinese society, but her most thoughtful, nuanced observations involve female sexuality.
  46. I Kill Giants
    Walter is riding a tricky line, but it’s his mixing of fantasy and reality, making the edges between the two porous, that ultimately sells the film.
  47. El Mar La Mar
    Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.
  48. Goldstone
    When the violence comes, as it must, Sen stages his shoot-outs with the physical and emotional wallop of the best westerns, but he’s more interested in restoring the faith of law enforcement officers whose belief in justice has eroded.
  49. Dark River
    It’s in Alice’s battle with her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) that the film is at its most compelling.
  50. Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine
    Directors Harris and Sanin provide clear historical and present-day context and furnish alarming proof of Vladimir Putin’s multilayered deceptions.
  51. The Endless
    The film’s fast-slow-fast pacing not only gives psychological weight to Benson’s unabashedly pulpy scenario but also constantly keeps viewers on their toes.
  52. 12 Days
    At times unbearably intimate, even invasive, the photographer-documentarian Raymond Depardon’s 12 Days is the kind of film you might wonder, as you watch, whether you should be watching. I’m glad I did, and I can’t discount the empathy that this study of mental illness and bureaucratic practice stirs or the understanding it crystallizes.
  53. Summer in the Forest
    It’s quite a story, one that, like all good stories, turns out to have meaning for anyone.
  54. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    This is an intimate portrait of the artist in recent years as she returns to Jamaica, the country of her birth and childhood, for a family reunion.
  55. The Gospel According to André
    The Talley of before the election presents himself as a man who believes anything is possible if you swallow your anger, work hard enough, and sacrifice all — especially your chance at love — and the Talley of after seems to worry that much of that progress has proved an illusion.
  56. Good Luck
    As often in Russell’s films, Good Luck splits the interest between observer and observed, between the lives that Russell and crew capture in their painstaking long takes and the very process of composing and shooting those takes.
  57. Mountain
    The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.
  58. The Wife
    It is the depth Close lends to Joan that kept me riveted — and angry.
  59. The Judge
    The Judge is packed tight; it’s enlightening and suspenseful and paced for maximum enjoyment. In the end, it’s not just about Kholoud Al-Faqih, but you’ll be very glad to have met her.
  60. After Auschwitz
    The structure of After Auschwitz may be simple (talking heads and archival footage), but the cumulative effect of six women revealing the physical, psychological, and emotional toll taken on Holocaust survivors is a powerful testament to individual humanity emerging from inhuman horrors.
  61. In the Last Days of the City
    It is not easy to describe In the Last Days of the City, an immersive visual experience with a wisp of a story and a wellspring of ideas.
  62. The Test & The Art of Thinking
    It’s a brutal takedown of a practice now warping K-12 education and should embarrass every school that still requires them.
  63. 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.
  64. The Desert Bride
    The story works largely on the level of metaphor, but it’s never overbearing or suffocating; there’s life here. A lot of credit should go to the actors, particularly the lead. As the film moves along, García’s face seems to change dramatically.
  65. Far from the Tree
    It’s a painstaking inspection of parenthood, which is fraught even in less formidable circumstances than what these families face, and often harrowing. But it’s also a contemplation of what it means to be human and, ultimately, optimistic.
  66. Good Manners
    Rojas and Dutra have created a singular fable where anxiety and fear are directed inward, even when the danger is all too real.
  67. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
  68. Burning
    Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.
  69. Five Easy Pieces
    The plot is sometimes too odd, the style too strained, but the movie holds you just the same. Jack Nicholson plays skillfully and honestly against the sure-fire pathos of the alienated loner, the fallen angel in life’s game of musical chairs.
  70. The Cakemaker
    The Cakemaker is more of a petit four than a belly bomb, but it’s striking in its particularity.
  71. Let the Corpses Tan
    More times than I could count I had no idea what the hell was happening, and also just didn’t care that I didn’t know. Let the Corpses Tan is that strange and beautiful.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breezy
    A love story in which almost everything works and you don't come out of the theatre half hating yourself for succumbing to its charm. [29 Nov 1973, p.86]
    • Village Voice
  73. Never Steady, Never Still
    Usually a tart-tongued scene-stealer, Henderson is devoid of her trademark hauteur in this remarkable performance.
  74. Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
    If Five Seasons is the only opportunity viewers have to experience Oudolf’s artistry up close, Piper’s cinematography (whether through a sunny haze or a snowy blanket) and contemplative storytelling have done these gardens justice.
  75. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Rather than epic or thrilling, justice becomes an errand, an extension of domestic work.
  76. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    Director Stephen Nomura Schible’s understated and moving Coda does a fine job of presenting the composer’s remarkable career as a revelatory journey.
  77. Gavagai
    Gavagai offers moments of sublimity unlike anything you’ll see in most contemporary movies. It also tests the patience. In that key respect, it’s much like life: You have to throw yourself into it to reap its rewards.
  78. The Swan
    Anchored by a remarkable child’s performance, The Swan is a sensitive example of an overlooked element in coming-of-age films: awakening to the outside world.
  79. 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.
  80. On Her Shoulders
    Even though she never loses her focus on Nadia, Bombach subtly shifts her attention from Nadia’s specific requests from the international community to the thornier question of what happens to the Yazidis from here onward.
  81. Blow-Up
    A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni’s what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder.
  82. The Wild Child
    Rather than present a clichéd fall from grace, Truffaut elicits ambivalence by closely tracking the Enlightened scientist’s optimism; after the fascination, our inchoate sadness seeps in.
  83. The Miracle Worker
    A film that storms where most biopics respectfully tiptoe.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Americanization of Emily
    Garner plays the scales of cynicism so gracefully in this anti-war gem, he makes them sound like a symphony.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Walkabout
    A richly picturesque, multi-leveled film. [20 May 1971, p.66]
    • Village Voice
  86. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    By telling this story through the children’s eyes with a magical-realism element, López makes the tragically unthinkable somehow more palatable.
  87. Bunny Lake Is Missing
    A pleasure to watch from beginning to end. [21 Oct 1965, p.21]
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gigi
    Gigi has more imaginative use of cinema than all our recent pseudo-realist movies put together.
    • Village Voice
  90. Klute
    The dread and unease that suffuse the film — never has the peal of a rotary phone sounded more terrifying — seem rooted partly in anxiety over second-wave feminism, the cresting of which nearly coincided with the release of this movie, one that centers on its heroine’s profound ambivalence about growing emotionally attached to a man.
  91. Liquid Sky
    Liquid Sky has always been caught smack between delirious curio, avant-garde put-on, exploitation cheapie, and naive masterpiece.
  92. Z
    The film’s state of play is still less exciting than its famous ancestor (Battle of Algiers) and offspring (The French Connection), but the military junta that ensued in Greece gave the film (shot in Algeria) a sense of urgency approved by Cannes and Oscar alike.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    One of the better farce-comedies. [26 Oct 1955, p.6]
    • Village Voice
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ball of Fire
    The writing, as it is, is a marvel. The patter that flows forth whenever some regular Joe flaps his jaws is a wonder to hear. Garbagemen and waiters, pool hall bums and showgirls, newsboys and college boys — they’re all virtuosos singing the wisecracking arias Wilder and Brackett have given them.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Sacred
    A delirious send-up of bandwagon piety, the film was scripted by that snappiest of Hollywood crank cases, Ben Hecht, and he never got a better, more committed distaff embodiment of his flair for highlighting hooey than Lombard, who throws herself into the role with daffy, tongue-tripping abandon.
  96. Husbands
    Husbands confirms, if indeed any confirmation were needed, that John Cassavetes is one of the major American film-makers of the past decade, and one of the most tortured and turgid as well. [10 Dec 1970, p.69]
    • Village Voice
  97. Chimes at Midnight
    Welles displays here a sensibility from the '30s and '40s when choices, however anguished, still seemed morally meaningful. [30 Mar 1967, p.35]
    • Village Voice
  98. Battleship Potemkin
    For all Potemkin’s rabble-rousing propaganda, Eisenstein’s aestheticism is everywhere apparent.
    • 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
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    Although the visuals are worth the ticket alone, Fantastic Planet also crackles with emotional and political resonance.
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