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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    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Cab to Darwin
    Sims imbues his characters with rich thought and heart, particularly in regards to the understated, racially complicated, on-again/off-again relationship between Rex and Polly.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Entertainer
    The boredom of British film realism is indescribable. I was yawning, and turning around, and fidgeting--what an experience! [08 Dec 1960, p.11]
    • Village Voice
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blockade
    Loznitsa doesn't adorn the eerie footage with talking heads and factoid title cards. What narrative there is, along with a sense of incrementally mounting horror, emerges unbidden from the images.
  4. Casting By
    While Dougherty clearly had an almost eerie sense of how a particular actor might inhabit a part, this film also shows that she may have single-handedly created a filmmaking craft and then made it indispensable.
  5. Big Fan
    It takes considerable effort to make Darren Aronofsky seem like a model of restraint, but Robert Siegel pulls it off in Big Fan.
  6. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    It’s disjointed, and cluttered, but it’s also entertaining in spurts. Is that enough? Just about, and not quite. Ant-Man and the Wasp overloads and underachieves, but it also never entirely squanders the first film’s good will.
  7. The Forsaken Land
    Beautiful but withholding, The Forsaken Land doesn't offer much in the way of explanation -- the soundtrack features more birdcalls than dialogue -- but the 27-year-old filmmaker's command of film language is evident and his evocation of postwar trauma is haunting.
  8. Test
    When Frankie, an understudy in a small dance company, is given his chance to perform, he, and Test itself, come to life.
  9. Mia Madre
    Mia Madre may be a delicate film, but don't be surprised if, in the end, the cumulative power of its humanity obliterates you.
  10. Turn Me On, Dammit!
    Like its title, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a jokey pseudo-provocation.
  11. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    The script is solid, and the fight scenes are excellent.
  12. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.
  13. Millennium Actress
    Flashbacks integrate with scenes from her films, and it becomes difficult to discern between the two -- cinema is equated with memory. Unfortunately, the trippy disorientation ultimately devolves into outright confusion.
  14. Kadosh
    One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.
  15. Prisoner of Paradise
    A fascinating and painful account of an entertainer trapped not only by his Jewishness but by his overwhelming need to make theater.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    10 Things I Hate About You
    Anyone who hates '80s pop will find this movie awfully tiresome, but Stiles and her underage Petruchio (Australian actor Heath Ledger, as hunky as his name) are charismatic and bold enough to carry any romantic comedy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Freaky Friday
    The situation -- a mother-daughter mind-body switcheroo -- is as enduringly appealing as it is absurd, and the comedy flows therefrom.
  18. Thirteen
    Catherine Hardwicke's directorial debut is less a damozel-in-distress fetish flick than a bird-flipping plunge into coded girl-cult communication.
  19. Hillbrow Kids
    Utterly necessary film.
  20. Sin Alas
    Sin Alas matches the half-awake feeling evoked by Luis's ruminations — on love, on Cuba's history, and on himself — well enough to feel authentic even when it meanders too far from what makes it most compelling.
  21. Sleep Tight
    Director Jaume Balagueró's film is nothing if not a well-executed bit of escalating craziness.
  22. The Brand New Testament
    Testament is full of bad jokes (like a man repeatedly throwing himself from great heights to prove he won't die) and, in spite of Groyne's grave, determined presence as Ea, is borderline offensive.
  23. Merry Christmas
    Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Waging a Living
    Weisberg, whose stripped-down style seems refreshing amid the current spate of super-produced docs, gives you what you want, if what you want are dismally deferred American Dreams and harsh economic realities. And you should.
  25. The Silence Before Bach
    Not only very civilized--this cool, deliberate film suggests that Bach's music is the quintessence of European civilization.
  26. Bugs
    It’s gently comic, a touch naïve, and somewhat moving: These idealists are ready to fight to keep creepy-crawlies farm to table.
  27. The King
    Honestly, I’d probably love this film’s wandering spirit and Elvis-is-everywhere philosophizing if it were half as fast or twice as long, if it pinned any thought down long enough to really TCB. Instead, it’s as scattered and disorienting as the infamous LP Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, an official cheapie that consisted of nothing but the King’s between-songs Seventies stage banter.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heartbeats
    If Dolan is able to derive a certain comic tension from the simple threat of what could happen with these three in close quarters, he and his co-actors often spoil the mystery of the unsaid with the tells on their faces.
  29. eXistenZ
    Almost buoyant in its creepiness and positively bejeweled in its disgust -- the movie can be enjoyably considered as a self-conscious fiction in the convoluted tradition of Raul Ruiz or Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain."
  30. 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.
  31. 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Skin I Live In
    The film deflates in its final third, with crude matter-of-fact set pieces, dumb explanatory psychology, and bursts of intentional camp overwhelming and canceling out the unmoored creepiness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    Like his "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter.
  34. Shall We Kiss?
    Bogs down in the philosophical shallow end and never quite recovers from what's clearly meant to be a deceptively light tone.
  35. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    Landscapes and lyric conundrums distinguish the first two-thirds of this find-your-own-meaning artflick, which unfurls like some stranger's life you're half reliving.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rock the Bells
    An electrifying, occasionally terrifying documentary.
  37. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.
  38. Post Tenebras Lux
    Confusion often reigns here, but the film offers a degree of lush beauty that makes sitting through it well worth the occasional frustrations.
  39. Sunshine Superman
    You may not leave Sunshine Superman wanting to emulate Carl and Jean, but you will feel like you've vicariously bonded with them.
  40. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    Largely content to bask in the great man's glow, Angio provides generous clips and soundbites alongside fond reminiscences, but the celebratory tone leaves room for darker reflections.
  41. The Science of Sleep
    Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry's new feature The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction.
  42. Elling
    Elling is nothing if not carefully controlled hokum -- both actors, the director, and screenwriter all worked it through first as a stage adaptation of a novel by Ingvar Ambjornsen.
  43. Elephant
    Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.
  44. Love Songs
    That Honoré knows a lot about movies is beyond question--but from first frame to last, Love Songs stays as icy to the touch as Julie's premature corpse.
  45. Birthright: A War Story
    The doc is thorough.
  46. The Syrian Bride
    The Syrian Bride has no particular visual style, but it exudes affection, for its characters and their culture as well as the unprepossessing beauty of the scrubby terrain that holds them in thrall. Like all wedding films, it's essentially a comedy, albeit a sad one.
  47. The 12th Man
    Harald Zwart’s thrilling The 12th Man, based on the true story of a Norwegian soldier who escaped the Nazis in World War II, is a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart but also an unexpectedly tender adventure that is as celebratory as it is tense.
  48. Meet the Patels
    Meet the Patels is a good-natured documentary that plays like a romantic comedy.
  49. Twist of Faith
    Director Kirby Dick (Derrida) shapes the movie in such a way as to leave everyone flummoxed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strange Culture
    Slipping in and out of character, variously embodying, studying, and commenting on their counterparts, the actors manage both dramatic reenactment and its deconstruction with aplomb.
  51. A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story
    A Brave Heart is not very sophisticated, flitting between Lizzie the internet celebrity, Lizzie the anti-bullying activist, Lizzie the beloved eldest daughter of a close-knit family, and Lizzie the young woman whose health challenges make her advocacy even harder.
  52. Doubt
    Doubt is only marginally, and tendentiously, about moral uncertainty--it's more about the sins of a nosy old biddy who pulls out all the stops when going through the official channels of a male-dominated Catholic Church would get her nowhere.
  53. A Man Called Ove
    A Man Called Ove — preaching tolerant togetherness as the key to happiness — earns its sentimentality by striking a delicate balance between barking-mad comedy and syrupy melodrama.
  54. On the Job
    Matti sets a brisk pace, utilizing the squalor and desperation of Manila's slums and prisons as well as powerful, against-type performances by Torre and Pascual to give us a familiar yet engaging thriller (with more than a few surprises).
  55. Informant
    Informant is riveting as it slowly assembles a damning profile of its subject. It's also timely.
  56. Happy Together
    Acerbic, moody, and provocatively slight, it's a movie of apparent non sequiturs and privileged moments. [21 Oct 1997]
    • Village Voice
  57. Stop the Pounding Heart
    Nothing wrenching happens, just unforgettable moments of piercing isolation and sadness.
  58. Sidemen: Long Road to Glory
    Sidemen seems at first like a didactic cultural corrective. It’s only when Rosenbaum digs into the trio’s life stories that their historic impact becomes clear:.
  59. The Hoax
    To its credit, The Hoax isn't glib--it doesn't chalk up Irving's moral vacuum to anything a bad mommy or daddy did. But there's no other point of view either; the film suffers a fatal equivocation over whether to frame him as a prankster or an American tragedy.
  60. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    You can fully enjoy Belladonna of Sadness if you either overlook or participate in the objectification of a gorgeous victim.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Who Killed the Electric Car?
    The real question is why this purportedly impassioned documentary investigation of a great subject--the culture's conspiratorial dismissal of eco-friendly alternatives to the gas-guzzler -- would assume such massive viewer disinterest that it coats the pill with C-list celebrity NutraSweet, including Martin Sheen voiceovers -- that would sound unforgivably hackneyed even on basic cable.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    Outsourced has all the charm and color of its made-in-India locations, yet it's crafted--well crafted--according to familiar Hollywood convention.
  63. Journey from the Fall
    Tran's reliance on declamatory political dialogue and movie-of-the-week inspirationalism feels decidedly old-fashioned and, finally, even phony.
  64. Fados
    Saura is formally ambitious--a troupe travels through the film, articulating lyrics in dance--but the movie missteps when departing wholly from the intrinsic nostalgia of its subject, as the seventysomething director imposes his idea of contemporary cool.
  65. Pauline and Paulette
    Without condescension, Debrauwer offers comic glimpses into their separate dreams of grandeur, but he lets Pauline's touching simplicity unite them.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tosca
    Two hours fly by -- opera's a pleasure when you don't have to endure intermissions -- and even a novice to the form comes away exhilarated.
  67. Our Father
    By way of a tragic left hook, Haroun's relaxed movie climaxes back where it began, on the devastated home ground. The journey, however pessimistic, is like a gentle handshake.
  68. Yom Yom
    A darkly comic tale of characters riven by divided loyalties and neurotic inhibitions.
  69. Audition
    After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.
  70. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    I got a charge out of Going Upriver, but as more than one person has noted, the movie's ideal spectator would be Kerry himself.
  71. Pellet
    At once subtle and visceral, the film never succumbs to the trap of the maudlin or tearful, offering instead with its unflinching gaze a measure of faith in the future.
  72. Teddy Bear
    These self-imposed limitations prevent Teddy Bear from having the breadth of a great work, but they give it the coherence of a good tale, simply told.
  73. I Am Divine
    A worthy documentary tribute to the drag queen icon.
  74. Wuthering Heights
    Heathcliff does not get the revenge he wants because he wants to escape the specific traumas of his adolescent past, shown in the film's first half. And because Arnold traps her viewers with Heathcliff's murky version of events. There's no room for enriching subtext in this version of Wuthering Heights because all the information we need is inscribed on the film's glassy surface.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only Human
    Intermittently hilarious.
  76. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman — “I’m a very simple, complicated person” — finally gets her due.
  77. 21 Grams
    Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
  78. Merchants of Doubt
    This material might be familiar to Frontline viewers and magazine readers, but Kenner's telling of the stories proves independently dramatic.
  79. The Lady in the Van
    It's an honest and incisive and peppery examination of one of his life's strangest but most enduring relationships — and the way that timidity and kindness often work out to being the same thing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    Affecting, straightforward presentation of tightly knit, contrapuntal interviews and crosscut rally footage--Hamzeh's film eschews voice-over to allow the more despicable characters to embarrass themselves with their ludicrously foolish invective.
  81. Eyes Wide Open
    Mostly, though, it wins with excellent performances: Strauss never overplays his character's internal tension, nor does Danker camp up his youthful virility.
  82. Queen to Play
    The supporting cast is uniformly fine, but the film rests on the delicate shoulders of Bonnaire, who carries it with a soulful, magnetic presence.
  83. Caramel
    Beauty-parlor romantic comedy has been done to death and beyond, but what Caramel lacks in originality is redeemed by its exuberant sensuality and astute commentary on the way Lebanese women sit uncomfortably in the crosshairs of their country’s clash between patriarchal tradition and Westernized modernity.
  84. 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rampart
    Here the director pulls off the formidable task of marrying two unwieldy performances: Harrelson's, a volatile and vulnerable feat of showboating, and Ellroy's, whose writing voice is unmistakably the voice of the movie.
  86. The Painting (Le Tableau)
    With striking visuals reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall and a refreshingly (for domestic animation audiences) grown-up storyline, The Painting is almost reminiscent of, well, a work of art.
  87. Your Friends & Neighbors
    A fascinatingly mean-spirited erotic comedy.
  88. The Other City
    In her absorbing, alarming investigation into the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the nation's capital, Koch cuts a cross-section through a bitter D.C. winter, following about half a dozen local victims, caregivers, family members, and activists as they grapple with a disease without the benefit of social awareness or political will.
  89. The Student
    Racing handheld camerawork and a pulsing rock score energize Roque's bargaining and bribing for the sake of changing an institution's antiquated customs.
  90. Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
    In this stylish documentary, Cattelan talks effusively on camera about his career, his work, and his private life in unexpectedly candid interviews.
  91. Sacco and Vanzetti
    Stirring documentary.
  92. Ginger Snaps
    This Canadian cheapie plays like an above-average "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode, filtered through the sensibility of early David Cronenberg.
  93. Life of Riley
    Resnais's lightheartedness is infectious as he dispenses with the cinematic "reality" he never quite trusted, shooting the six-person farce on obvious sets, with curtains for doors and flat theatrical lighting.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shanghai Blues
    For the most part, the film is charming in its insouciance, the comedy by turns easy, funny, and slapstick. [23 May 2018]
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Jun 18, 2025
  95. Donkey Skin (re-release)
    Seasonally it's more appropriate as a May Day bacchanal, but in any month Demy's movie makes for an evocative globe-paperweight tableau of its place and time, and a concise demonstration of the disquietude inherent in classic fairy tales.
  96. A Town Called Panic
    A Town Called Panic, which has more strident colors and less synopsizable action than a year's worth of comic-book adventures, embodies a sensibility that might be termed "extreme quirk."
  97. !Women Art Revolution
    Moves briskly, unfolding as one lively sit-down after another with artists, scholars, and curators who established themselves at the height of second-wave feminism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Contagion
    If Contagion truly is the first leg of Soderbergh's retirement victory lap, this harrowing film is a potent reminder of what we stand to lose.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fido
    Vancouver-based writer-director Andrew Currie leads us to stop expecting actual jokes while squandering the talents of an overqualified cast
  100. Almost There
    After guiding his fate, the filmmakers step back and dispassionately capture a series of frustrated caregivers passing the baton, each nudging Anton toward a new life. This decision makes Almost There a richer, more compassionate portrait.
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