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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    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mack
    It is almost perfect as escapist entertainment -- as a carefully schematized synthesis of fantasies for black audiences. [03 May 1973, p.81]
    • Village Voice
  2. 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.
    • 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
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oklahoma!
    The songs, the somewhat corny Western dialogue, the zest, and especially the integrated dance patterns of Agnes DeMille are all a delight. [02 Jan 1957, p.6]
    • Village Voice
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    Let It Be is a very lovely spectacle--a film to make you smile, and with its .16mm tawny colors and pastels, one that invites repeated viewings. [11 Jun 1970, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  6. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Ostensibly a conventional tale of triad loyalty, As Tears Go By announced the presence of a genuine Hong Kong new wave—as well as an ambitious cineaste.
  7. The Sentinel
    What’s remarkable—and Kafkaesque—about La Sentinelle is how Desplechin grounds the phantasmagoric aspects of his tale in the details, routines, and conflicts of daily life.
  8. There Was a Crooked Man...
    I thoroughly enjoyed There Was A Crooked Man for its inhaling the fresh air of liberty on today's screen without its gagging on the fumes of gratuitous license. [31 Dec 1970, p.39]
    • Village Voice
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    Pulse-pounding thriller.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    The bold and vivid colors of the paintings themselves and the sets and landscapes contribute heavily to the film's dramatic impact. [10 Jul 1957, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  11. Wild Style
    The folks who made Wild Style probably didn’t realize it, but their fiction film was essentially a documentary of history in the early making.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emitaï
    As usual with Sembene, there is much fascinating ethnological detail; more importantly, this is a film by an African for Africans, designed to make them share discovery and revelation: the limitations of myth, the cruelty of the oppressor, the fortitude of the people, the need for revolution. [22 Jun 1972, p.75]
    • Village Voice
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
    Grave is the fourth entry in Hammer’s Dracula rotation but doesn’t possess a whiff of being a retread, given its innovative formal choices and series-best direction. [24 Jul 2018]
    • Village Voice
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Moby Dick
    The virtues of this Moby Dick are many. [17 Oct 1956, p.6]
    • Village Voice
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    A fine, sharp movie nonetheless, "The Laughing Policeman" is the raunchiest--and no doubt the best--floor show in town. [31 Jan 1974, p.79]
    • Village Voice
  16. The Tales of Hoffmann
    A hellzapoppin’ filmization of the Offenbach opera, with stops pulled out by P&P’s resident design team and choreography by Brit-ballet arch-pope Frederick Ashton, the movie was as intensely expressionistic as any film since Caligari, and at the same time a nova of springtime élan.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Uncle
    A comedy that is subtle, biting, observing, and above all, personal. [12 Nov 1958, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  18. Avatar
    Avatar is a technological wonder, 15 years percolating in King Cameron's imagination and inarguably the greatest 3-D cavalry western ever made. Too bad that western is "Dances With Wolves."
  19. Shutter Island
    Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.
  20. Edge of Darkness
    Onscreen much of the time, thicker and more creased than you remember, Gibson can make this rather unshapely movie seem taut.
  21. From Paris with Love
    He (Morel) brings in lobotomized entertainment at 90-odd minutes. During the February doldrums, this cannot be underestimated.
  22. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    This is potentially wonderful, if not exactly new stuff, but Gilliam and McKeown's willful refusal of coherent narrative and determination to pack every idea about art they ever had into one scenario, make this fiendishly gorgeous movie more exhausting than exhilarating to watch.
  23. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, Precious still packs a wallop.
  24. The Last Station
    Tolstoy fought a love-hate war with his bipolar wife, Sonya, and thank God for that, since it allows Helen Mirren, basically playing a cross between Ibsen drama queen Hedda Gabler and the little squirrel from "A Doll's House," to waltz away with the movie.
  25. The Girl on the Train
    For better or worse, there isn't a human experience that French director André Téchiné can resist lathering into a tone poem.
  26. (500) Days of Summer
    It's more like a love story in a blender. What is unexpected is the sincerity beneath the modest conceit that, yup, love hurts.
    • 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.
  28. Me and Orson Welles
    Deft, affectionate, and unexpectedly enjoyable.
  29. Summer Hours
    Too chatty to be ascetic, Summer Hours is nevertheless almost Ozu-like in its evocation of a parent's death and the dissolving bond between the surviving children. It's also an essay on the nature of sentimental and real value--as well as the need to protect French culture in a homogenizing world.
  30. Bright Star
    It's more conventionally romantic than wildly Romantic--but no less touching for that.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Perfect Getaway
    A Perfect Getaway is never great, but Twohy isn't aspiring for greatness--he's after gritty and lively and weird. And that's good enough.
  32. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    Vardalos's parodies of Greek family values are loving and witheringly hilarious.
  33. Extract
    The movie is characterized by its crisp, cutting, classical framing, and comic timing. The style and approach recall classic Albert Brooks. Indeed, the beleaguered, cuckolded Joel would have been a great role for the young Brooks--adding a certain self-aggrandizing je ne sais quoi or a neurotic zetz that the appealing, but bland, Bateman lacks.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cold Souls
    It may be only in the film's last ambiguous, evocative image that Barthes and Parekh finally transcend the material and arrive at something beautiful and ineffable.
  35. Synecdoche, New York
    Like most of Kaufman's work as a writer, Synecdoche, New York is a head trip that time and again returns to a place of real human emotion--in this case, to the idea that no matter how brilliant we may be or think we are, we're all looking for a little guidance (or, yes, direction) in life.
  36. The Lives of Others
    A compelling thriller but an unsatisfying character drama.
  37. Waiting for Armageddon
    Line up this terrific documentary about end-times evangelical Christians against Bill Maher's sneering "Religulous," and you'll see an excellent argument for restraint and a fair fight.
  38. Pride & Prejudice
    Director Joe Wright coordinates a delightfully cohesive acting ensemble.
  39. The Brothers Bloom
    Johnson has infused The Brothers Bloom with so much heart and beauty that one can and should easily overlook its discomfiting moments. The truth is, the film's even more profound and touching upon second viewing.
  40. Brokeback Mountain
    The most straightforward love story--and in some ways the straightest--to come out of Hollywood, at least since "Titanic."
  41. Revolutionary Road
    Revolutionary Road isn't a great movie -- it lacks the full, soul-crushing force of the novel -- but what works in it works so well, and is so tricky to pull off, that you can't help but admire it.
  42. Murderball
    What keeps Murderball from devolving into redemptive drivel is its insistence on treating the players it profiles as jocks first and disabled men second.
  43. The Edge of Heaven
    It's not brilliant, but it wears current events on its sleeve, feeling out the state of German-Turkish relationships as the former Ottomans clean house for E.U. membership, and the demographic earthquake of 70 million Muslims waits at Europe's door.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thirst
    The most intriguing aspect of Thirst is the steady erosion of Sang-hyeon's ethics, slackened from "do not" to "do not kill" to "do not kill the undeserving" by the lure of those O+ cocktails.
  45. The Wrestler
    Present in every scene, if not each shot, Rourke gives a tremendously physical performance that The Wrestler essentially exists to document.
  46. House of Flying Daggers
    If only this epic had enough substantial melodramatic hooks to hang this woman's beauty on; emotional traction is most often buried under acres of carefully coordinated vistas and CGI-hued flora.
  47. Burn After Reading
    The Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity.
  48. Atonement
    Wright wouldn't recognize unobtrusive if it tapped him on the nose--he's cross- pollinated the first half of Atonement into an Oscar-buzzy brew of Masterpiece Theatre and "Upstairs, Downstairs," with the wild English countryside tamed into an artfully lit fairy glade, and into just enough of a bodice-ripper to reel in the youth market. And not a bad one at that.
  49. Role Models
    Wain, Marino, and Rudd pull it off because theirs is a funnier, brainier, bawdier brand of feel-good.
  50. The Host
    Gross-out horror is never far from comedy and The Host, Bong Joon-ho's giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old "Mad" magazines.
  51. The Girlfriend Experience
    Grey isn't the first porn actress to go straight, but she may be the first to allegorize her own situation--projecting an on-screen self-confidence that’s indistinguishable from pathos.
  52. Humpday
    Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Lynn Shelton's third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt's "Old Joy," also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in Seattle.
  53. Capote
    In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.
  54. Travelers and Magicians
    In interviews, Norbu has compared the editing process to meditation. While his pacing echoes that of polestars like Ozu and Makhmalbaf, his edits make striking events out of mundane motions like hands moving under running water and mouths meeting cups of butter tea.
  55. Assault on Precinct 13
    A surprisingly credible action flick.
  56. Head-On
    Head-On loses its merry mojo once events turn irrevocable and the action switches from Hamburg to Istanbul.
  57. Monsieur N.
    As modest conspiracy-mongering, the movie is perfectly robust, earning its dramatic impact from its classical sense of intrigue and Philippe Torreton's testy performance in the title role.
  58. Watermarks
    Though Zilberman's affection for the women leads to some indulgent digression, the doc's low-key tone (and lack of the stock, timpani-backed Nazi iconography) throws certain anecdotes into powerful relief.
  59. Aliens of the Deep
    Often thrilling almost-feelie.
  60. Hitch
    While far from perfect, Hitch is a rare studio product that earns the goodwill it smugly demands.
  61. Inside Deep Throat
    In a Kafkaesque turn of events, Reems was the fall guy--facing prison, he became a Hollywood cause célèbre. Inside Deep Throat includes footage of him partying with Jack and Warren and debating Roy Cohn on TV.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    Several sharp jolts give the doc its dramatic shape, and one episode in particular, caught with a neighbor's lens, will make you gasp with grief.
  63. Schultze Gets the Blues
    Ends up an intricate, becalmed take on a soul adrift.
  64. The Animation Show 2005
    Expertly programmed by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt, the second go-round of The Animation Show features 12 films from five countries.
  65. Up and Down
    Up and Down is not exactly the toughest movie on the block, but especially compared to most American comedies, it conveys a sense of scrofulous rue.
  66. Gunner Palace
    Floating on the surface of confusion, Gunner Palace has a raw home video quality that's often quite beautiful. Much of the movie is hardly more than an immersion in sights and sounds. Vivid as it is, Gunner Palace is dominated by what isn't shown. It's the human face of Abu Ghraib.
  67. Robots
    Entertaining enough that it leaves one wishing for more in the way of android mythology—a pint-sized Blade Runner or A.I. The screenplay goes on autopilot, grinding toward a happy ending just when it has a shot at something darker and more memorable.
  68. Don't Move
    A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.
  69. Nowhere Man
    Nowhere Man, despite a tossed-off ending, is a compulsive bit of meta-exploitation.
  70. Milk and Honey
    In the end, Milk and Honey's contrived connections blossom into a disarmingly effective reckoning with loss and regret.
  71. Mondovino
    Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.
  72. Look at Me
    Little in a Jaoui film is particularly original, but it's all perfectly convincing.
  73. The Interpreter
    The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.
  74. First Love
    Probing the trust-based power games of a sadomasochistic dynamic, the movie is a reasonably thoughtful study of obsessive love.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Friend
    Shot on DV, the film looks awful, but this homemade quality fosters an authenticity that allows for startling suspense as Yunes's secret life comes to light.
  76. Save the Green Planet!
    Mad conspiracy rules in Korean writer-director Jang Jun-hwan's snazzy, playful, some-what gory, often hilarious, and generally unpredictable first feature.
  77. Double Dare
    Micheli's documentary finds a fresh angle via the intersecting stories of two stuntwomen.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    3-Iron
    Taut even when ridiculous, with flashes of comedy, 3-Iron has less to offer than its predecessors, but at minimum it's the playful exhaustion of a formal constraint.
  79. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Less a tale of desperado lovers than a cruel story of youth, Tout de Suite is framed largely in close-up, with few transitional shots and a narrative that grows increasingly fragmented.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ladies in Lavender.
    So tastefully subdued it makes Merchant Ivory look like Gaspar Noé. And while they never look bored, Smith and Dench are clearly slumming, having played these roles in other costume pics.
  81. Mad Hot Ballroom
    Like "Spellbound's" glimpse of the darker side of childhood competition, Mad Hot Ballroom--a look at New York City schools' fifth-grade ballroom dance program--is best when exploring issues of class and gender and definitions of success.
  82. Tell Them Who You Are
    Busting with clips from films Haskell Wexler shot and directed, the doc is a rare thing: an ingenuous portrait of a thoroughly Four-Square Artist, Assembled With Love And Rockets Inside A Family's Spite-Tainted Gates.
  83. Mojados: Through the Night
    Davis strives to keep himself out of the film, favoring a harrowing yet compassionate you-are-there aesthetic that underscores the hardship of the migrant workers' struggles.
  84. 6ixtynin9
    Though overlong at two hours, 6ixtynin9—only the director's second outing (after 1997's spoofy" Fun Bar Karaoke')—is impressive for the tonal control Ratanaruang applies to his swerving scenario.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bomb the System
    A needlessly circuitous plot twist leaves a bitter taste, but not before the film's scruffy charm does its work.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Common Thread
    Sequins hinges on its performances and newcomer Naymark is a marvel of quiet intelligence, endowing Claire with a complex mix of virginal purity and hormonal rage.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cinderella Man
    Despite the tale's dusty pedigree, Ron Howard spins a ticket-worthy two-plus hours of movie-movie entertainment.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    The multiple story lines can feel choppy, but the dialogue has snap, and the pants' powers never distract from the teenagers' emotions.
  89. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    A tongue-in-cheek allegory on the hazards of harboring secrets in a relationship, Mr. & Mrs. Smith is most entertaining when the Smiths are hell-bent on mutual annihilation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Story of an African Farm
    A modest tale intermittently well told.
  91. 5x2
    Deceptively placid and subtly unpredictable drama.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paternal Instinct
    As intimate as a home movie, Instinct has only one flaw: its length.
  93. Me and You and Everyone We Know
    July's witty ode to only-connecting sustains a delicate tone of pensive whimsy.
  94. My Summer of Love
    Slowly evolves into an oddly affecting mood piece.
  95. The Talent Given Us
    Raw, fascinating, often unpleasant film.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rize
    Highly entertaining but underdeveloped documentary.
  97. War of the Worlds
    Although it's thoroughly retooled, H.G. Wells's scenario doesn't allow for many soft landings, and the extreme respect for havoc on view quite properly keeps the Spielbergian cutesies to a minimum.
  98. Twist of Faith
    Director Kirby Dick (Derrida) shapes the movie in such a way as to leave everyone flummoxed.
  99. Saraband
    Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.
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