Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. I Served the King of England
    A mischievously hedonistic, Chaplinesque farce, the film buoyantly but seriously traverses the horrors of World War II with a subtlety and sophistication that most American comedies cannot grasp.
  2. Gangs of New York
    Cost well over $100 million, and the money is up there for the gawking. Illuminated by the orange flames of hell, the vast New York City set looks great. The least engaging aspect of the movie is its script -- which passed through the hands of three separate writers and perhaps even producer Harvey Weinstein.
  3. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    An unusually rich music doc.
  4. Felicia's Journey
    Egoyan, whose sophisticated eye is connected to a brain that seems, for the moment, to have gone dead.
  5. Nowhere in Africa
    A straightforward epic, almost alarmingly quaint in the telling.
  6. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.
  7. A Beautiful Mind
    It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.
  8. Slow West
    Its central journey lives up to the title: Maclean finds time to savor rivers and starscapes and layers of light and mountainous land. The dialogue is flighty yet weighty, each line like some delicate woodcut.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    One of the better farce-comedies. [26 Oct 1955, 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
  11. Post Mortem
    Often drolly, coolly morbid, Post Mortem also operates just as effectively in a more nakedly direct register.
  12. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    Ron Howard's documentary often plays as an advertorial gunning for maximum intergenerational appeal.
  13. Your Sister's Sister
    As Alex Ross Perry's "The Color Wheel" - another micro-budgeted sibling story - shows, a film about relentlessly repellent characters is much more fascinating, if not courageous, than one that tries to explain, redeem, or forgive them so easily.
  14. Un Flic (re-release)
    Haunted by death-obsessed men of action, Un Flic (A Cop) is a fitting final act for noir master Jean-Pierre Melville
  15. He Never Died
    He Never Died is a Tootsie Pop of a movie. It has the outer shell of Taken...but there's an altogether different treat in the center.
  16. It's All So Quiet
    The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.
  17. The Woodsman
    An engrossing study of a protagonist who variously inspires pity, clinical interest, fondness, and revulsion-sometimes all at once.
  18. Summertime
    For all of its wise, welcome focus on the libidinal, Summertime additionally succeeds in presenting the liberationist fervor of the time without devolving into school-play pageantry.
  19. Shame
    Another creature of need, if the temperamental opposite of self-contained Brandon, Sissy is equally prepared to push her way into his life or push herself in front of a subway. She's also a performer - and Mulligan's blowsy desperation makes for the movie's best turn.
  20. Akeelah and the Bee
    It helps that newcomer Keke Palmer nails it as the 11-year-old prodigy, avoiding cuteness and conveying more angst than all the pasty freaks in "Spellbound" combined.
  21. Crazy Horse
    Every shot and edit in Wiseman's film also suggests without over-explaining, allowing a viewer to lose herself in pleasure.
  22. Brick
    The hair may thin considerably under Brick's hat after a while, and Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve.
  23. Doctor Strange
    It's not all that strange, but it's restlessly arresting and always technically impressive. Unlike most studio franchise fantasies, Doctor Strange rewards the eye rather than assaults it.
  24. Ghost Town
    If it sounds all so pale and predictable, it is.
  25. The Lottery
    An electrifying community meeting finds Harlem Success president Eva Moskowitz both vilified and heralded as "our Obama" by local parents, as the unions depend on such poorly understood class and neighborhood tensions to maintain the status quo.
  26. Agrarian Utopia
    Raksasad manages to keep the film afloat on the real drama of his nation's political and social issues, bringing an added measure of poignancy to the quiet desperation of his characters.
  27. The Heart Machine
    An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.
  28. Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends)
    This poignant documentary champions the curative powers of rock 'n' roll — and also reminds us: Always know your exits.
  29. Pressure Cooker
    The intersection of food and identity is briefly explored, and the prep/exam sequences have a tension and charm that keeps the film moving toward its literally rewarding climax.
  30. The Day After
    The imaginative and compassionate leaps of Hong’s other recent films — which spin stories out of the wounded women in the filmmaker’s life — are nowhere to be found. Still, the candor is impressive, and the pain feels real. The Day After may not be a particularly great film, but it does feel like a necessary one.
  31. Escapes
    When Fancher’s weathered visage finally appears, he recounts more regrets than triumphs, but in Almereyda’s affectionate biographical scrapbook, his accomplishments are small manifestations of an iconoclastic existence whose reward is a messy, cherished independence.
  32. Tiny Furniture
    A comedy of youthful confusion that gets its kick not only for evoking a world of unromantic hookups, casual BJs, and iPhone porn, but for satirizing New York's bourgeois bohemia.
  33. Bringing Out the Dead
    The mood is less angst-ridden than hypercaffeinated, as Scorsese keeps cranking the velocity-bloodbath in the reggae inferno, exploding skyline pietà, climactic white light of redemption.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    My long strums are pretty f---ing tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive mock-rock and/or the further decline of Western civ.
  35. The Closet
    Tumbles happily into every pitfall that lines its well-trodden path.
  36. Journey to the Sun
    A remarkably vivid portrait of a teeming third-world metropolis
  37. Mostly Martha
    Handsomely shot, German filmmaker Sandra Nettelbeck's third feature suffers from a certain romantic predictability.
  38. Walk the Line
    In no way obsessive, Walk the Line is more sincerely--which is to say, more boringly--sincere. It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.
  39. When Marnie Was There
    At its most beautiful, Yonebayashi's picture is about the magic of female friendship at its purest.
  40. Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
    Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh.
  41. Control
    Bulcsú never surfaces from the underworld. Neither does the movie-literally or figuratively.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Terri
    Humanistic without being moralistic, and very funny, Terri is a measured, observational examination of the stratification of teenage loser-dom.
  43. Dormant Beauty
    Subtle emotional intelligence has always distinguished Bellocchio's filmmaking, and Dormant Beauty is constructed from fine-grained layers of it, the filmmaker's equivalent of a master cabinetmaker's craft.
  44. Obit
    Obit rarely strays from the anodyne tone of the advertorial.
  45. Amer
    The pleasures of this gorgeous, clever, and visceral film are almost exclusively aesthetic. Those unmoved or alienated by the porn of pain may be left flopping as nervelessly as one of the movie's severed limbs.
  46. Daylight
    Punctuating views of the bucolic countryside and sky attest to nature or God's indifference to human suffering, but such formalist touches don't overwhelm the responsive ensemble work in this resourceful, taboo-prodding sickie.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    Time Is Illmatic goes remarkably deep.
  48. Match Point
    A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.
  49. Still Alice
    The triumph of Still Alice is that it’s not about an illness; it’s about a person.
  50. Sound of Noise
    More an intriguing premise than a successful film, the Malmö-set Sound of Noise, about a group of "musical terrorists," quickly loses its novelty and becomes about as bold as a Swedish production of "Stomp."
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. Siddharth
    The photography fascinates even when the story flags, and the film bristles with small revelations.
  54. The Talent Given Us
    Raw, fascinating, often unpleasant film.
  55. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    Sinking Into the Sea is fun, but an hour of just Rudolph and Watts in the recording studio would be no less buoyant.
  56. Manifesto
    The actress is equally committed, regardless of whether content and context click, but she soars when they do.
  57. Surfwise
    Whether you call this a Rousseau-ian paradise or "Capturing the Friedmans" by the Sea will depend on where you stand on hippie living--up to a point.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    Jordan's interviews, from John Zorn to John Waters, all attest to Smith's reputation as a pivotal influence on film, performance art, gallery installation, and photography; as Richard Foreman once declared, everybody stole from Jack.
  59. The Back of the World
    What saves this deeply affecting film from being merely a collection of wrenching cases is Corcuera's attention to detail.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Step Into Liquid
    Like many late-franchise attempts, it stretches its material thin and grasps at novelty, overstaying its welcome despite a handful of requisite dude-that-is-so-fucking-cool moments.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Isn't This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal
    Engaged but measured hagiography.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Four Eyed Monsters
    Fortunately, these artists know how to tap in to the universal longing for acceptance, making for a fresh, witty, and contemporary take on the perennial boy-meets-girl story.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    Despite its structure, Abduction sheds light on the disturbing politics North Korea deploys to simultaneously intimidate the world and guard itself from attack.
  64. Despicable Me
    So, yes, kiddies--it's funny. Silly. Slight. Though, grown-ups, be warned: I had more fun watching the kid giggle through the screening than I did watching the movie itself. It's no "Toy Story 3."
  65. The Silence
    Making his feature debut, Swiss-born writer/director Baran bo Odar has turned Jan Costin Wagner’s 2007 novel The Silence into a taut, beautifully acted thriller.
  66. Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony
    Each anecdote builds upon the next to create that rarest of films: a documentary as ineffable and transformative in its reach as it sets out to be.
  67. Master of the Universe
    Bauder's film is a diagnosis of a system that is hopelessly sick and not being treated. Bring a stress ball to squish up as you watch.
  68. Doomsdays
    Doomsdays is winsome because it embraces its narcissistic subjects without asking viewers to forget that they've just befriended a couple of selfish dillholes.
  69. Donald Cried
    In a bitterly funny performance, Avedisian lets Donald's freak flag fly, a big-toothed grin lighting up his face, framed by a shaggy haircut not deliberate enough to be a mullet.
  70. The Incredible Jessica James
    Strouse drops the ball with this meandering, flat film that shows few signs that he effectively coached his actors, as they rush to recite their dialogue.
  71. In the Intense Now
    Immersive, involving, sometimes revelatory, sometimes curiously naive, and on occasion thuddingly obvious, João Moreira Salles’s found-footage study of revolutionaries in the streets of Paris, Prague, and other countries in 1968 would stand as an invaluable assemblage simply on the basis of its archival finds alone.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Out of Towners
    Because Simon is dealing with a place — and a commonplace — rather than people, it is only too easy to see the jokes coming long before they arrive. We feel the boredom of anticipation rather than the shock of recognition, and sometimes the jokes themselves ring false.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Great World of Sound
    A fitting 21st-century addition to the genre. The film's meager plotting and casual melancholy peg it as a modest indie, but these ingredients dovetail nicely with Zobel's bigger theme about the futility of the modern world.
  74. The Kill Team
    The emotional disconnect between a soldier's perception of reality and reality itself is the subject of this documentary, which finds drama in evenhanded storytelling that is the inverse of its characters' emotional shakiness.
  75. Sweet Virginia
    The concepts Sweet Virginia explore through this setup — lives intersecting after a tragedy in a small town and a dangerous outsider tearing through a community — aren’t new for noir or westerns, but the understated, intense performances of Dagg’s cast make this slow burner a standout.
  76. The Double Hour
    The Double Hour sustains a minimum of attention thanks to the naturally beguiling presence of long-stemmed Rappoport-but what might've a less cautious director done with the material?
  77. 12
    Miklahkov keeps 12 tops spinning at all times in the school gymnasium that serves as their deliberation room, and though the speech/conversion pattern grows a little pat, the movement toward consensus raises the further, richly complicated question of how to decide not only what is right, but what is best.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tuya's Marriage
    Wang's vision is preferable to the esoteric chic of "Khadak," but the Chinese director still maintains an emotional remove from his subject.
  79. Undefeated
    Honestly, Courtney and his crew all seem like nice people, but if there's an unironic audience for this kind of romantic jock-cup fondling, I'm not interested in knowing it.
  80. Stolen Seas
    The protracted 2008 ship-napping of the CEC Future...is couched in illuminating context.
  81. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    In narrative terms, not that much happens, but as for Harry's emotional journey--well, that's nearly epic.
  82. Fed Up
    Fed Up is a workmanlike documentary, as undistinguished in style as a PowerPoint slide show. It nonetheless finds traction in its depiction of the food industry's Montgomery Burns–like practices.
  83. Sylvio
    Birney and Audley have an impressive visual sense — the smart framing and thrifty, ingenious production design (by Peter Davis) at times suggest a Wes Anderson–directed installment of Between Two Ferns — and also the good sense to lean on Birney’s nuanced physical performance.
  84. Smashed
    Movies about drugs and alcohol might be a dime (bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt's Smashed is so beautifully shot and well acted as to transcend the genre.
  85. Paradise Now
    Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."
  86. What Doesn't Kill You
    Goodman's movie tends to limp along.
  87. Swimming
    Director Robert J. Siegel allows the characters to inhabit their world without cleaving to a narrative arc. It's a luxurious hangout; spaces burgeon with goofy love and generous confusion.
  88. Manito
    Unusually impassioned indie.
  89. Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII
    Slesin's film is a profound meditation on the resilience of children -- their ability to take sustenance from whatever love is available -- and on the persistent presence of the child hidden within each grown-up.
  90. Marion Bridge
    A scrupulous and impeccably acted account of the fallout from a family secret.
  91. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    It's less interesting watching them do what they both feel they have to do -- talk about their craft -- especially as both give off the prickly energy of artists who would rather create than explain. They're more comfortable asking one another questions, even though the answers are shrugged off humbly.
  92. Waking Ned Devine
    It's instructive that Waking Ned Devine is being so aggressively sold as a feel-good comedy; the "good" feeling in question is called condescension.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jess and Moss
    Achingly sad and surpassingly lovely.
  94. Land of the Dead
    Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further.
  95. Inspector Bellamy
    It's an ostensive crime film at once symmetrical, surprising, and knowingly cinephilic.
  96. The Boss of It All
    Colors and angles and sound levels don't match from one cut to the next. The movie is ugly as sin to look at. But it's all intentional on the part of von Trier.
  97. Will You Dance with Me?
    An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.
  98. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Constance Marks's documentary on Kevin Clash, the kind, gentle man who created the Muppet beloved by every single child in the world, rushes through the intriguing points its interviewees bring up to devote more time to banalities.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monument Ave.
    Under Ted Demme's accomplished direction, the film unfolds with a kind of ruthless simplicity, observing, rather than stating, the neighborhood's intricate social connections.
  100. The Imitation Game
    Tyldum has robbed his own film of emotional depth — this Turing is as simple as Morse code. Rather than a complex human portrait, this is an assemblage of triumphs, tragedies and tics.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »