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 7.6 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. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Through his efforts, McKay captures a genuine sense of the bittersweet reality of the American dream and the people who give up their only weekly day of rest just to keep it alive.
  2. Jane
    There are no loose ends or wasted time; everything builds to a rising crescendo that makes you feel like your heart is going to burst. The immense strength of this remarkable woman is on such powerful display that, twenty minutes into the film, tears welled from my eyes and did not stop, even after I left the theater.
  3. We Are the Best!
    Brash and sweet, We Are the Best! captures perfectly the aimlessness of adolescence, the waiting to become something that's so often intertwined with the desire to make something, to leave your mark on the world in some small way.
  4. Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    The roles of affect and artifice in mediating the realities of racism, homophobia, and poverty are perhaps the true subjects of Shirley Clarke's landmark doc.
  5. My Journey Through French Cinema
    The key word in the title is My. Bertrand Tavernier’s three-hours-and-change film-essay is not a history lesson. It’s an invitation to take the seat next to a renowned director as he shares the movies that mean something to him.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    This latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward.
  7. About Elly (2009)
    This superb, suspenseful film, completed in 2009, opens as a playful comedy of vacationing couples and awkward romance, one that might be set in the French countryside, but by the end has become a moral drama likely to corrode your certainties.
  8. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    [Wiig's] great, but the film's in the pocket of Powley's rib-high corduroys from the second she struts onscreen — and long after she takes them off.
  9. Lincoln
    This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.
  10. Elena
    All of this builds into the film's last image, Elena's family finally welcomed into Vladimir's apartment, as the cautious, controlling, abstemious bourgeoisie are overtaken by the heedlessly fertile lower orders, the temporary inheritors of a terribly weary earth.
  11. All Is Lost
    A genuine nail-biter, scrupulously made and fully involving, elemental in its simplicity.
  12. Love & Friendship
    With the plotting and the epigrams taken care of, Stillman seems liberated as a craftsman: Never before has one of his films been so crisp, so tart, so laugh-out-loud funny.
  13. Hereditary
    In Aster’s story, as in life, the devil is in the details. As the film goes on, these details accumulate, coalesce, and then hang heavy over the characters.
  14. Listen to Me Marlon
    There's nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley's presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.
  15. Gideon's Army
    Porter's film is dramatic, unsettling, despairing, and in the end thrilling -- at some point, it grows from a portrait of this country's problems into a celebration of a possible solution.
  16. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    An explicit ode to mortality, not without a certain grim humor.
  17. Maria Full of Grace
    It's a remarkably assured and humane feature debut.
  18. Shakespeare in Love
    It soon becomes evident just how inane a film this is.
  19. Fateless
    Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.
  20. Happy as Lazzaro
    Lazzaro Felice has genuine sweep and grandeur, and Rohrwacher’s most impressive feat here might be her ability to find just the right narrative and emotional distance for each section of the story, as it moves from rustic drama to picaresque journey to more pointed social allegory; we’re always given just enough information to understand and appreciate the characters’ interactions and motivations.
  21. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    No matter what your opinion of McNamara, The Fog of War is a chastening experience.
  22. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.
  23. Brokeback Mountain
    The most straightforward love story--and in some ways the straightest--to come out of Hollywood, at least since "Titanic."
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Kid with a Bike
    The Kid With a Bike seems to unfold in a different world than that of previous Dardenne joints, one with a wider range of spiritual and practical possibilities.
  25. The Wicker Man
    Knowing something is up and knowing just what that is prove to be two very different things for both protagonist and viewer, however, and The Wicker Man is propelled by the thrill of not knowing.
  26. Particle Fever
    Levinson follows the ups and downs of bringing that beast of a collider online, but the movie's deepest thrill lies in what these men and women will theorize next, and how they will test it.
  27. Tarnation
    A tale of sadness and hysteria so raw that it bleeds.
  28. 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.
  29. Life Itself
    James — the director of Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters — gives us a sense of Ebert as a man who kept reinventing life as he went along — out of necessity, sure, though he also took some pleasure in adapting. It couldn't always have been easy, but that, too, is part of the story.
  30. The Shape of Water
    It speaks both to del Toro’s confidence and generosity that, having designed this world so thoroughly, he essentially hands the whole thing over to Hawkins — not just so she can breathe life into her own character, but so she can conjure all the emotional connections required for any of this to work on any level. And my god, how she runs with it.
  31. Caché (Hidden)
    Binoche and Auteuil are both quietly sensational in their fracturing personae, but the film is Haneke's premier postmodern assault--less visceral, perhaps, than "Code Unknown" and the criminally underappreciated "Time of the Wolf," but more thoughtful and, in the end, deeper in the afterplay.
  32. The King and the Mockingbird
    The director invites us in, to play and dream.
  33. Bisbee '17
    The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.
  34. All About My Mother
    As straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be.
  35. Moneyball
    It really happened, it's really corny, and it's really great.
  36. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Crewdson and others (including Russell Banks and Laurie Simmons) speak eloquently about his project, but it's the on-set agonies - to achieve the fleeting expression here, dark kiss of light there, and the peculiar relief they bring our maestro - that fascinate.
  37. Rushmore
    I can't remember a teenage romance this engagingly offbeat since "Lord Love a Duck."
  38. The Duke of Burgundy
    Strickland builds the film, artfully, into a complex and ultimately moving essay on the privileges of victimhood and the nuances of what it means to suffer for love.
  39. My Golden Days
    There is serious pain in this movie — pain that endures throughout the years — but also a sincere love for life lived, and life remembered.
  40. The Wind Will Carry Us
    To my mind, the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.
  41. Force Majeure
    Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.
  42. Tampopo
    Everyone needs nourishment, and Itami found humor and poignancy in how it’s provided and received.
  43. Ten
    Conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.
  44. Point Blank
    Point Blank never makes too much sense. But the forward momentum of Lee Marvin's mysterious vendetta against the skyscraper underworld manages to overcome Boorman's laborious exposition. [19 Oct 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
  45. Tangerine
    In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.
  46. The Tillman Story
    The Tillman Story goes deeper, exposing a system of arrogance and duplicity that no WikiLeak could ever fully capture.
  47. Room
    Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.
  48. Nebraska
    Nebraska is the antidote to other family charmers about goofballs in matching sweaters.
  49. Under the Sand
    Rampling has never been as beautiful, not to mention as emotionally naked, nuanced, and affecting as she is here.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Written on the Wind
    Basically, this is slick magazine stuff, pretty trashy, but so entertainingly and professionally done that you can't help having one hell of a good time. [20 Feb 1957, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  51. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    Patient, observational film demands you surrender to it, that you keep your phone in your pocket, which means that movie theaters now sometimes offer a more unmediated look at the world than modern life itself.
  52. Million Dollar Baby
    All the same, Eastwood's point of view has been seasoned enough to locate poignancy and respect for his protagonists where you least expect -- saying it's an old man's movie is a serious compliment.
  53. 42: Forty Two Up
    The 7Up series is thus one of the rare documentaries to have had a positive practical effect on the life of at least one of its subjects.
  54. Last Days in Vietnam
    Vital, illuminating, and terrifying, Rory Kennedy's Last Days in Vietnam probes with clarity and thoroughness one moment of recent American history that has too long gone unreckoned with.
  55. Krisha
    Even the familiar elements of this particular family's drama are invested — through vigorous scripting, directing, and acting — with almost elemental power.
  56. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    It’s an orgy for film geeks and history jonesers, to be sure, and the revelation of how exactly the prints got waylaid and then buried in the permafrost, saved by virtue of Dawson City’s fading away in the twentieth century, proves a sweet narrative reward.
  57. Shadows
    Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.
  58. The Babadook
    Jennifer Kent's maternal nightmare The Babadook is the imperial stout of recent fright flicks -- it's the one that will have you walking funny and might rip into your sleep. It's hard to say that you'll enjoy this film, but it's hard not to admire it, if maybe with your eyes half shut.
  59. Little Men
    Sachs, a clear-eyed humanist, honors all his characters' pained perspectives.
  60. The Kids Are All Right
    Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist.
  61. The Straight Story
    Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.
  62. Manakamana
    Among the many remarkable qualities boasted by Manakamana, perhaps the most surprising is its humor.
  63. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    For better or worse, the movie does for Chauvet what Baudrillard complained an on-site replica did for Lascaux-render the real thing false.
  64. How to Survive a Plague
    Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."
  65. My Happy Family
    There isn’t a single second that doesn’t ring as achingly true.
  66. Chasing Coral
    The film is a devastating success, moving in its beauty and wrenching when that beauty withers: Acres of coral waste away to chalky ash before our eyes.
  67. Loveless
    Two representative moments define Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless — and they are among the most devastating, harrowing things I’ve ever seen on a screen.
  68. In the Bedroom
    Increasingly unconvincing, In the Bedroom turns genteel rabble-rouser. Field's leisurely buildup forestalls but doesn't prevent his movie's mutation into a granola "Death Wish."
  69. Barbara
    A transfixing Cold War thriller set in the East Germany of 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era "woman's picture," the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director.
  70. Of Gods and Men
    Beauvois's film is cool while Denis's is hot-but the main difference is that where "White Material" is knowingly postcolonial, Of Gods and Men aspires to the timeless.
  71. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer.
  72. The Beaches of Agnès
    In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.
  73. Children of Hiroshima
    This is a movie of blunt juxtapositions-death accompanied by the sound of raucous street musicians-as well as awkward flashbacks. Still, the strategy works.
  74. Deliver Us from Evil
    Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse.
  75. Maidan
    Easily the most rigorous, vital, and powerful movie of 2014, Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan may be a perfect Bazinian cinema-machine — reality is captured, crystallized, honored for its organic complexity, and delivered unpoisoned by exposition or emphasis.
  76. Drug War
    Drug War might arguably be [To's] best film for this reason—it doesn't attempt to raise the stakes on its genre, but instead fully exploits what's there, piecing together an elaborate narc campaign tale out of classic clichés and tight-knot plotting, and letting the disaster of balls-out crime make its own statement.
  77. The Great Beauty
    There's little sense in trying to resist the film's relentless boogie-woogie party vibe, its tumultuous visual banquet, its unpredictable sense of switchblade satire, its fools' parade of modern grotesques, or its river of startling melancholy, turning from a wary trickle to a flash flood by film's end. Sorrentino's vision is the size of Rome itself, and his confidence is dazzling.
  78. 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.
  79. Patton
    George C. Scott's full-bodied performance and Franklin Schaffner's chillingly stylized direction will satisfy neither the doves nor the hawks, but it does reverberate with paradoxical impressions. [28 May 1970, p.60]
    • Village Voice
  80. The Big Sick
    For the vast majority of its running time, The Big Sick astutely pulls you between the twin poles of agony and glee.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Argo
    A "gritty" historical drama overwhelmed by its love of Hollywood as an inventor of imaginary narratives with real consequences, a great generator of American bedtime stories whose magic works on suburban kids and foreign enemies alike.
  82. 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.
  83. Traffic
    Traffic is not just an ultra-procedural--it's the Big Picture, the Whole Enchilada, complete with a complicated war between two Mexican drug cartels.
  84. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.
  85. Talk to Her
    Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Master
    It's a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem.
  87. Boys Don't Cry
    Scorches the screen like a prairie fire.
  88. The Wild Pear Tree
    Ceylan delivers what might be his funniest, most politically poignant work yet. It also happens to be achingly personal.
  89. Distant Voices, Still Lives
    This combination of intimacy and remove — the startling emotional jolt of seeing a family in mourning stare toward you in silence, an image of the felled patriarch hanging on the wall behind them — characterizes Davies’s enthralling thirty-year-old debut feature, an autobiographically informed but hardly event-reliant memory piece.
  90. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.
  91. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    It is an essay in film form with near-universal interest and a remarkable degree of synthesis.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This Is England
    Facile pop psychology is the real tragedy here, a double disappointment given the film's smart take on pop culture.
  93. City of Ghosts
    Heineman’s film urges us not to take any horrors for granted. It is invaluable, as both moral instruction and documented history.
  94. Springtime in a Small Town
    Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.
  95. The Son
    For all its quasi-documentary materialism, The Son is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man's inchoate desire to return good for evil. The movie requires a measure of faith, and like a job well done, it repays that trust.
  96. Sweet Sixteen
    In a remarkably subtle, assured debut performance, Compston evokes Billy in Loach's "Kes" and, in the heartbreaking final seaside shot, Antoine in Truffaut's "400 Blows."
  97. Ponyo
    It's a movie for anyone who, like Miyazaki himself, can still happily commune with his inner five-year-old.
  98. The Last Detail
    The Last Detail is the first good honest-to-goodness American movie of 1974.
  99. Strong Island
    What emerges is a very close, tender look at the Ford family.... The film is unflinching in its portrayal of their devastation after the loss of their eldest son.
  100. The Interrupters
    The Interrupters reminds us of the powers and pleasures of well-crafted, immersive nonfiction filmmaking.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »