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. Small Time Crooks
    Allen's funniest, least sour outing in nearly a decade is a small movie with a tidy payoff. The movie gives vulgarity a good name.
  2. Ride with the Devil
    The movie is not unintelligent but it is insipid
  3. Monster's Ball
    Wastes a ton of potent material.
  4. The Pawnbroker
    A pretentious parable that manages to shrivel into drivel.
  5. Kill Me Please
    Here adolescent wanderlust, powered by the characters’ persistent and confused arousal, continually edges against comedy and terror. Scariest as an examination of what fascinates us, this debut feature will annoy and alienate many, but it’s the work of a dynamic new talent.
  6. Operation Avalanche
    It's often more The Office than le Carré, and none of it's anywhere as interesting as the great counter-historical gag at the film's heart.
  7. Fire in Babylon
    Riley shrewdly maintains focus on how the players co-opted the merciless tactics of their invective-hurling adversaries for their own, and the region's, self-actualization.
  8. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The outsize ideas, creativity, and spirit of this birdlike, unconventional-looking woman - called "my ugly little monster" by her mother, Vreeland resembles John Hurt in a jet-black wig - still dominate a project occasionally lacking the same attributes.
  9. Bill W.
    A loving, exhaustive, warts-and-all look at the man who spent years battling his own alcoholism before a spiritual experience in the hospital set him on the course to help others.
  10. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    Despite a melodramatic title, the film is keen and measured. Drama builds in the small moments.
  11. Blockers
    Blockers, on the surface, sticks very much to the formula — even the prom setting is very been there, done that. But it’s subversive in these little details, and the resolution is genuinely touching. The best part is that Cannon doesn’t have to sacrifice any of the laughs to get there.
  12. White Reindeer
    If White Reindeer's satirical elements feel off the rack, that's because what they're satirizing in our real lives is, too.
  13. Alps
    It's quibbling to draw up columns denoting what Lanthimos, a difficult but undeniable talent, does right and does wrong. He's seemingly working intuitively here, and whatever missteps he makes while feeling his way forward, he manages to pass quite near to one of the essential conundrums of being human.
  14. Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
    Big Star may not be the best introduction for those who don't yet have at least some passing familiarity with the bruised-knee wistfulness of songs like "Thirteen," or the quavery undersea despair of "Kangaroo." But for anyone already curious, Nothing Can Hurt Me delivers the goods.
  15. The Only Real Game
    This film is like another work in the canon of baseball poetry.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Avengers
    Every time the movie hints at something rich and evocative, Whedon undercuts it with a punchline - his instincts as a big-picture storyteller crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd.
  17. The Matchmaker
    An old-fashioned Mediterranean coming-of-age story set in the young heart of the Levant, The Matchmaker combines the tender tone of a film like "Cinema Paradiso" with a clear-eyed, street-level vantage on Israel's summer of the Six-Day War.
  18. Venus in Fur
    Polanski orchestrates this cat-and-mouse game with devilish delight, dancing around Ives's play as if it were a pagan bonfire, jabbing at it with his figurative pitchfork.
  19. Beirut
    This engaging and intelligent script could have been more of both if Beirut made room for the experience of anyone besides the Americans. The filmmakers do memorable work examining what it might take to solve this one particular crisis, but do too little examining the city itself. The title promises something the movie doesn’t deliver.
  20. Nurse Betty
    Betty sustains her character, the movie fails to maintain its own.
  21. Imelda
    Entertaining as it is, Imelda seems all too willing to take her at her word.
  22. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    If beauty and revelation is your bottom line, Anthony Powell's rhapsodic Antarctica: A Year on Ice will prove a grand time at the movies.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Hardcore
    The story of American punk rock (1980–1986) isn't a lot easier to summarize than that of any other major war, but it's quite a bit funnier, as this belated documentary overview--based on Steven Blush's like-titled tome--proves in each of its 90 exuberantly irritable minutes.
  24. This Divided State
    Develops into a lively but simpleminded valentine to liberal tolerance.
  25. 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.
  26. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Carbone minimizes dialogue and focuses instead on gestural specificity; he makes a useful inventory of boys-will-be-boys behavior — wrestling in fields, poking at scars or dead critters, shutting down on parents — and stages it in tellingly muted vignettes within the ample copses of rural New Jersey.
  27. Dark River
    It’s in Alice’s battle with her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) that the film is at its most compelling.
  28. Moka
    Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense.
  29. Bad 25
    Spike Lee has given the world the first tribute that fully measures up to Jackson the artist. Come on get your sham on.
  30. Zero Motivation
    Zero Motivation opens as bleak, rebellious comedy but grows into a smart and moving story of entering adulthood.
  31. Joshua
    A nifty psychological thriller--part "Bad Seed," part "Rosemary's Baby"--that deals in a manner both comic and creepy with the parental anxieties of a Manhattan haute yuppie family.
  32. Gook
    At Gook’s best, Chon captures, with sharply memorable dialogue, both the essence of his particular characters but also the broad drift of generations.
  33. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    Perhaps the richest of Resnais's recent efforts.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    This uneven but riveting documentary chronicles Kor's journey to a kind of grace little understood (or appreciated) by many fellow Jews and survivors.
  35. Octubre
    There's a message here regarding loneliness and emotional isolation, but the movie's real miracle is that, however precious its premise, this slow-burning not-quite heart-warmer-never succumbs to cuteness.
  36. Left on Purpose
    An anguished and compassionate chronicle of Schein and Vishner's relationship.
  37. The Girl Next Door
    Occasionally smirky.
  38. The Last September
    The film's pathos lies not with people who have justice on their side, but with those who don't know where they belong.
  39. Horns and Halos
    What emerges is not only an Underdog v. Simon Bar Sinister saga but a fascinating character study.
  40. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Has marked affinities to "Ghost World" and "Donnie Darko." It's more amorphous and less sharply drawn than either but has an acute sense of guilty secrets and secret places.
  41. Farewell, Home Sweet Home
    The movie exudes a cheerful energy--laying out a deck of narrative cards, then reshuffling them in the final 10 minutes.
  42. What Will People Say
    Despite the subject matter, Haq is most often quite tender in her storytelling.
  43. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    It's a smart, funny, tough-minded film crammed with data and personal anecdotes, each illuminating the other, each sketching in the staggering costs—and not just financial—of the ways authorities in this country have shaped the drug issue. It's far from glib.
  44. Gabriel and the Mountain
    The location photography does much of the film’s heavy lifting, especially visits to Mount Kilimanjaro and Mulanje’s Sapitwa Peak. (The rumor is that a young J.R.R. Tolkien visited there, and Barbosa leans into this a bit for the big finish.) The star of the show, however, is the dialogue between cultures.
  45. Chronicle
    Chronicle, with its found-footage storytelling and superpowered teens, at least playfully transcends its "Cloverfield meets Heroes" pitch.
  46. Arthur Christmas
    Arthur was made, in co-production with Sony, by Aardman Animations, the U.K. company best known for Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, and the character animation has some of the same homely charm.
  47. Beautiful Darling
    Denied the opportunity to see Candy at her best, simultaneously mocking and paying homage to golden-age glamour, viewers instead get too much of Jeremiah Newton, a close friend of the actress's and guardian of her papers, personal effects, and ashes (and one of Beautiful Darling's producers).
  48. The Other Dream Team
    Watching Sabonis and company deliver comeuppance to their former rulers on the hardwood, I fully expect The Other Dream Team to join "Do You Believe in Miracles?" and "Undefeated" in your inspirational-sports-doc rotation.
  49. Into the Woods
    Rob Marshall simply cuts from one tale to the next, isolating his actors. There's little sense that the fairytale space is a shared one -- it's just a bunch of noisy incident transpiring in unrelated treestands.
  50. Chronic
    Chronic forces viewers to look closely at things they might rather ignore, and intentionally holds its emotions at a distance.
  51. Blue Jay
    Lehmann shot Blue Jay in a gorgeous black-and-white that looks like silver gelatin prints (a photographic process that captures boundless gradations of gray), which complements the story's heartfelt simplicity.
  52. I Used to Be Darker
    The film exhibits a contemplative quiet and attentiveness to detail that enhances its issues of regret, bitterness, and confusion, many of which are rooted in thorny parent-child relations.
  53. Predestination
    The Spierigs had the framework for something wonderful here, if only they’d trusted themselves to keep things simple.
  54. Fan-Fan the Tulip
    Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward.
  55. Kings of Pastry
    Most of the culinary footage is devoted to documenting-in flat, dull DV-the finalists' piece montée, or "sugar showpiece," in which sucrose is manipulated for its chemical properties, and dessert becomes a weird, often tacky sculpture.
  56. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    A love letter to the group. Packed with fantastic performance footage, it solidly makes the case that, throughout the '80s and early '90s, Fishbone was one of rock's best live acts ever - furiously energetic, innovative, leaping multiple genres in a single song.
  57. T-Rex
    While the narrative is familiar — athlete from rough background trains fiercely, with the sport as a means of salvation — directors Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper make sure the story is all Shields's, keeping her charisma at the center.
  58. Eyes Wide Shut
    Feels like a rough draft at best.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absolute Wilson
    The real value of this film is its treasure trove of archival footage, rare clips that document this genius of an artist as a young man.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Last Winter
    It's the imaginative background, and Fessenden's talent at insinuating it into the action, that counts--and unnerves--in this most chilling of global-warming movies.
  61. Chicken with Plums
    The evocation of passionate love is palpable, what with Amalric's sad longing and Farahani's Nobel Prize–winning face and everything, and the honest undercurrent of melancholy keeps the whole thing from becoming unmoored.
  62. Lover for a Day
    The scenario almost seems an apologia for the film’s own subject matter, crafted with the awareness that audiences have outgrown the May-December trope.
  63. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.
  64. Le bossu
    de Broca's efficient fencing-mania melodrama brings little that's original to the table.
  65. Go Tigers!
    This sly, sobering doc exposes the grievously fucked-up priorities surrounding the sport in a small town with little else on which to hang its hopes.
  66. Sunshine State
    The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.
  67. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    The art direction is impeccable, but this is a pop-up book that I was impatient to slam.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    People Say I'm Crazy
    His story is sad but not humorless.
  69. The Amazing Catfish
    Claudia Sainte-Luce's semi-autobiographical indie has a knack for subverting stereotypes without making a big deal about it.
  70. Climax
    Climax isn’t so much about the inevitability of chaos, but about the sadness of watching something beautiful fall apart. And it is never less than electrifying.
  71. Solitary Man
    The film courageously shows its reprobate hero sliding further, not redeeming himself.
  72. Bastards
    Style can't fully compensate for a tale that, underneath its gorgeous affectations, proves undercooked, especially during a third act that provides duly titillating answers to its initially beguiling mysteries.
  73. Little Voice
    The show that Horrocks puts on when she finally takes to the stage is more than worth the wait.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Nathalie...
    Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk to Me
    The banality of Talk To Me is only half disappointing; at least it babbles clichés with conviction.
  76. Nuclear Nation
    Employing straightforward, music-free aesthetics that express the grim realities of his story, director Funahashi captures both grief and outrage in equal measure.
  77. The Birth of a Nation
    The Birth of a Nation offers a troubling tangle of the personal and historical. But above all else it's commercial, an entertainment of purpose and some power. Parker knows how to juice a crowd.
  78. Tears of Gaza
    This is the very unsterile subject of the film: the unimaginable violence with which families were sundered, to which this film makes you a witness. The cameras linger on the faces of children as they tell their stories, unaffected and open.
  79. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    Director Icíar Bollaín mixes Even the Rain's various storytelling modes with an obviousness that ultimately negates enlightening intellectual or emotional discovery.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cannibal
    Despite the film's leisurely pace, nothing is wasted -- no word, no image, no sound. Every element is blended together to create individual scenes that come to feel like stand-alone photographs, leaving viewers both captivated and even ultimately feeling compassion for the anti-hero.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    William Eggleston in the Real World
    Subtle, elegant documentary.
  82. Steal a Pencil for Me
    At once tender and tough-minded, Steal a Pencil for Me offers a useful corrective to the sentimental prevailing notion that the Shoah only happened to saints.
  83. Space Station 3D
    You're paying for the view, and it's truly breathtaking.
  84. Friday Night
    Richer in metaphor than narrative drive.
  85. Zero Day
    The simulation of shaky camera amateur DV is a narrative ploy that often taxes the filmmakers' ingenuity. Still, the movie has a creepy authenticity.
  86. Collateral Damages
    The film's real flaw is its limited focus.
  87. The Elephant in the Living Room
    The film ultimately serves as an edifying (who knew Ohio's Amish were big into exotic-animal auctions?) and unsensational (excepting one horrifying scene involving Brumfield's beloved male lion) look into a peculiar corner of American acquisitiveness.
  88. Out in the Dark
    The movie is involving, the romance affecting, the sex sound, and the catch-as-catch-can handheld camerawork smartly appropriate for the scenario.
  89. The Seven Five
    The Seven Five makes for a fascinating character study, but the doc's drama is also compelling.
  90. Ginger & Rosa
    In its closing minutes Potter restores the calmer observational tone and mood that distinguish much of Ginger & Rosa, providing a lovely summation of its main character's age-appropriate contradictions.
  91. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    Goldfine and Geller pace and structure The Galapagos Affair like the true-crime tale that it is, its mysteries rich and involving, its characters enduring in the imagination long after the film has ended.
  92. Live Flesh
    A soap opera as convoluted as it is overdetermined. [20 Jan 1998]
    • Village Voice
  93. The Armor of Light
    [An] electrifying documentary.
  94. 25th Hour
    Often feels like a mediocre time-waster, and yet it sticks in the mind.
  95. The Fault in Our Stars
    The Fault in Our Stars doesn't quite capture the discreetly twisted humor, or the muted anger, of Green's book, and its problems can be attributed to a constellation of little annoyances rather than any one serious, North Star–size flaw.
  96. Welcome to Me
    This spiky, pushy, sometimes upsetting comedy finds Wiig creating something whole and alive out of her apparent contradictions.
  97. The Last Family
    The movie sticks in the mind not as a full-on, time-honored biopic but as a queasily warts-and-all peeling back of a family dynamic that happened to involve a figure of cultish renown.
  98. 21 Jump Street
    Though these mismatched cops bounce well off each other, Tatum, in his first comedic lead role, is the better performer, both more riotous and affecting.
  99. Redbelt
    With his 10th feature--an entertaining tale of high-stakes martial arts--Mamet has infused the sleight of hand with a measure of two-fisted action.
  100. Vodka Lemon
    Saleem, a Paris-based Kurd, displays the visual confidence and subtle screwball rhythms of a master, exploiting offscreen space, deadpan compositions, and deft visual backbeats, as well as attaining a breathtaking fidelity to real light and landscape.
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