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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    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Catfish
    Whether you think Catfish is fact or fiction, it certainly taps into something true: the basic, common need to believe that what feels like love is real.
  2. I Am Legend
    In what has been a pretty remarkable career up to now, it's this performance that fully affirms Smith as one of the great leading men of his generation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    E-Dreams
    That the e-graveyard holds as many good ideas as bad is the cold comfort that Chin's film serves up with style and empathy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    Atlas allows Bowery's genius to retain, in the words of one admirer, "a big bundle of contradictions," not unlike his shocking designs themselves.
  5. Tying the Knot
    We never get to see the dailiness of coupled life or learn what made these relationships tick--and why they are so worthy of legal validation.
  6. Coffee and Cigarettes
    C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to--never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea.
  7. They Call Us Monsters
    Yes, this film is important for its insistence that we see these boys as capable of rehabilitation in the right environment. But it’s the movie’s daring structure and humanity that make it worthy of the Lear name.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Future of Food
    Wisely eschews standard anti-corporate bombast for measured tones.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Wild Blue Yonder
    Though occasionally striking, the footage doesn't pack the evocative punch Herzog intends, and segments that should be lyrical mind trips only result in overstretched longueurs.
  10. The Wedding Song
    Though lovely to look at, The Wedding Song is a little overwhelmed by its relentlessly hyper-poetic imagery.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prince
    Like a purple Lamborghini — or an adolescent boy's first, er, encounter — the film is too fast but almost unquestionably fun.
  12. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Rogue One's creators clearly want to move us deeply — several major plot developments should pack an overwhelming emotional wallop — but they haven’t given this talented cast enough to work with. It’s fast, loud, even lovely — and not terribly engaging.
  13. A United Kingdom
    Asante’s already proven she can world-build while wrangling a romance with her indie hit Belle, but she needs a jewel of a script, and this one is no diamond.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    They gloss over concerns that mainstream Busch isn't as funny or as daring as cult Busch. Still, I'd kill for more footage of his less famous plays, like the intriguingly titled "Pardon My Inquisition," or "Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Buried
    Rodrigo Cortes keeps the action bound to the box, limiting his lighting to naturalistic approximations, so that much of Reynolds's performance consists of him grunting and heaving in the dark.
  16. White Girl
    This is one of those films that merits a long cold shower afterwards. That might actually be a compliment — Wood wants to provoke.
  17. Married Life
    Though the imprint of Douglas Sirk is all over Sachs's homage to old movies about restless men in bad suits and untrustworthy women in lovely frocks, his immediate reference point is clearly Haynes's "Far From Heaven."
  18. We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!
    It's all steak, no sizzle — the opposite of Twisted Sister.
  19. Camille Claudel 1915
    One of the year's thorniest releases.
  20. The Royal Road
    As personal as it is political, Olson's meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history — and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory.
  21. Bad Hurt
    Grief unleashes the possibility of change in this wrenching drama, allowing for an unexpected emotional thaw that rewards both stubborn optimism and traumatic resilience.
  22. Grace Is Gone
    The music--a gently jazzy piano-and-strings theme--is just fine, and a good deal less cloying than what was there before. One can only regret that Eastwood didn't offer to reshoot the whole movie while he was at it.
  23. Spinning Plates
    A love letter to that singular intersection of artistic innovation, cultural legacy, community pride, and family-sustaining (or -straining) commerce known as the restaurant.
  24. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    Takes us through reams of fascinating drama, from the first heroic forest-saving protests to the reactive police violence and resulting dead-of-night firebombs to the core group's implosion after the FBI tightens the net.
  25. The War Wagon
    The War Wagon is good for a few laughs and some spectacle while John Wayne and Kirk Douglas are taking Bruce Cabot and an outlandishly armored wagon apart. [14 Sep 1967, p.31]
    • Village Voice
  26. Black Dynamite
    No matter how many trips to Kung Fu Island our hero makes, nothing in Black Dynamite captures the exhilarating absurdity of Pam Grier hiding razors in her Afro in "Coffy"--or the loony genre experimentation in "Pootie Tang."
  27. Bless Me, Ultima
    Volumes are said about class, assimilation, and the ways the assimilated sometimes shame and scar those who haven't shorn themselves of ethnic or racial signifiers. There is pungency in this shorthand, in these sketches that are richly evocative without saying too much or giving too little. You can't help but wish the movie had more of it.
  28. ...So Goes the Nation
    So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.
  29. Philip Roth: Unmasked
    The directors plant a camera in front of Roth and get him talking. To smooth over edits, they show us book covers and old photos—Roth was dashing, charming, a little dangerous, one of his college friends tells us, but she doesn't need to say it. It's manifest, and it's still true. The film is especially recommended to anyone who thinks they hate him.
  30. Staying Vertical
    As always with Guiraudie’s films, Staying Vertical shrewdly (and often hilariously) captures both the seriousness and the absurdity of sex.
  31. Birth of the Living Dead
    What distinguishes this doc from much of the tedious critical prose Romero has inspired is the fan-boy and fan-girl ardor that fuels its smarts--both behind and in front of the camera.
  32. Lemming
    Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.
  33. Ismael's Ghosts
    There’s no way around it: The whole, here, is a mess. Even with the extra minutes, the film seems unfinished, the connections among its disparate scenarios vague and arbitrary. But outside of the espionage-movie and poor-lonely-director-dude-can’t-stop-getting-laid interludes, many of those scenarios unsettle, provoke (intentional) laughter, or prove engrossing, especially in their doublings and mysteries.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Before the Fall
    The movie is too middlebrow to show us the superman-type sexual heroics they must've engaged in, or even allow the illicit subtext to float to the surface (as Sokurov does in Father and Son)--instead we get tepid moralizing on dehumanization in the military.
  35. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    Like The Conjuring and the many immersive spook-house thrillers inspired by it, Origin of Evil demands and rewards attentiveness, inviting scrutiny of its frames, study of its negative space.
  36. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels is that rare contemporary filmmaker who's not afraid of melodrama. The Butler is so old-school it feels modern: Stylistically, it could have been made 30 years ago, but its time is now.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.
  38. Life, Above All
    Life, Above All suggests that ignorance and stigmatization are a problem only in the village, not in the highest office of government.
  39. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    There's a palpable avoidance of risk as this new mythology is wheeled gingerly into the marketplace and carefully positioned to zap your pre-sold brain...Solid but uninspired, Harry lacks brio. It's respectable and a bit dull.
  40. Alone with Her
    This first feature is shot "first person" and is first and foremost a concept -- at least as interesting to think about as to actually watch.
  41. The Slaughter Rule
    The lead performances could hardly be better: Gosling, having stolen and propped up entire movies last year ("Murder by Numbers" and "The Believer"), crackles with the economical intensity of a young Tim Roth. Morse, who has racked up decades worth of idiosyncratic character parts, is monumental in this career-peak turn.
  42. The Turandot Project
    A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.
  43. Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
    Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller's fond portrait, less documentary than infomercial, is unrelentingly and in the end self-defeatingly positive--albeit effective in showcasing Zinn's charismatic personality.
  44. Closer
    Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.
  45. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    The doc is also fat with film clips from before and after the 1979 revolution, but innocent of sensationalism as they are, Iranian films aren't terribly quotable—except when used to illustrate how filmmakers must choreograph their action so that men and women never touch on-screen.
  46. Favela Rising
    All in all, the movement turned out to be a godsend for Rio natives, but the film is merely a pep rally.
  47. The Decomposition of the Soul
    The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mundo alas
    Actual insight into these people's hearts and minds is replaced with skin-deep montages of cheery tour-bus road-tripping, hanging out with friends, and writing songs in the studio.
  49. Dzi Croquettes
    It's the mind-blowing performance footage (and there's lots of it) that makes this a must-see film.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Bullet Vanishes
    When two charming detectives are sent in to detect stuff, the movie comes to life with their antsy, noose-escaping, quasi-vaudevillian kinetics.
  51. The Dirties
    Matthew Johnson's The Dirties explores high school violence from a refreshingly original angle.
  52. Charlie Victor Romeo
    Charlie Victor Romeo shows us how much of life's weight and meaning can be packed into one second of thought or action; it's a work of shivery intimacy.
  53. Altina
    In this portrait, we are treated to an acquaintanceship with a woman in an almost constant search for a creative life, and that might be its most moving feature.
  54. Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s
    The film mounts a compelling case on behalf of what was, perhaps, a sort of genius — a rare gift for identifying talent in others and nurturing it, even amplifying it.
  55. West
    Schwochow's intimate, handheld camerawork often feels like surveillance, which transforms mundane events into the menacing moments of a psychological thriller.
  56. The Invisible Front
    Befitting a doc about a data-intensive struggle, the movie benefits from a wealth of resources.
  57. Drone
    In her provocative documentary Drone, Tonje Hessen Schei shows how, actually, the U.S. and its military-industrial complex treat war like a video game.
  58. Ants on a Shrimp
    Like a well-executed fine-dining experience, this sleek documentary entertains, delights, and makes viewers comfortable without evident sweat.
  59. Finding Babel
    This lit-doc travelogue gains in power, insight, and urgency as it journeys.
  60. Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life
    It’s a vital and worthwhile project to unpack Di Palma’s career...but Water and Sugar misses the mark.
  61. Revenge of the Pink Panther
    Many reviewers have given the current exhibit low marks for vitality and originality, but then, most reviewers have never been wild about any of the Pink Panther movies. It is the public, not the critics, that made the Clouseau creations the highest grossing comedy series in the history of theatrical motion pictures. It is the perfect entertainment for children of all ages because it is not really designed as the perfect entertainment for children of all ages. [31 July 1978, p.35]
    • Village Voice
  62. Shampoo
    The parts are better than the whole. [24 Feb 1975, p.58]
    • Village Voice
  63. In the Valley of Elah
    Elah comes packaged as a feverish murder mystery groaning beneath too many subplots and the added weight of a strained David and Goliath allegory.
  64. The Debt
    Predictably, the holes in the narrative set us up for a twist or three, but, in balance, it's a pleasure to be back in the wet alleys and spy-patrolled streets of the GDR, however vague they seem without '60s black-and-white cinematography.
  65. The Providence Effect
    The film never completely shakes the feel of being more an advertisement than a documentary, but once it settles into a concrete illustration of Adams's philosophy ("You've got to believe and expect that the children can achieve"), it becomes riveting.
  66. Fishing Without Nets
    Cutter Hodierne's gorgeous, harrowing debut feature, Fishing Without Nets, doesn't just ask you to feel a bit for Somali pirates, as Captain Phillips did -- Hodierne puts you in their shoes.
  67. My Best Friend
    Light, airy, and sweet, Patrice Leconte's latest comedy swings his favorite premise--fruitful encounters between opposites--away from romance and into the wistful hunger for friendship in a careerist world.
  68. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    It’s still worth watching at least once, just to see what can go wrong when funny people aren’t allowed to be funny.
  69. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Even non-fans will appreciate what a tough act Reatard is to follow, though, and anybody with a shred of respect left for rock 'n' roll will feel loss and anger at his passing.
  70. The Good Lie
    Despite its weighty material and some moving scenes (much of the Sudanese cast are survivors of the war), this aggressive crowd-pleaser is slighter than its subject matter deserves.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gay Sex in the 70s
    Lightly entertaining, but--not unlike the cheap action it chronicles--leaves one wanting something much more substantial.
  72. The Visitor
    The Visitor is a mess, but a revelatory one, both a ripe, bizarre thriller and a fascinating example of how filmmakers first responded to the interstellar millions stirred up by Spielberg and George Lucas: by thieving the good bits.
  73. The Great Debaters
    The film avoids potentially interesting frictions by always letting the team debate (and win) on the "correct" side of every issue--that which aligns with generally accepted modern liberal sympathies. The kids follow their party line all the way to the big game, a ridiculous, fallacy-riddled face-off against Harvard.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bay
    Despite a handful of legit creepy moments, the film's concern with superficial realism prevents it from really hitting home; its fuzzy, fractured depiction of disaster never comes close to conjuring the "holy shit it could happen here don't touch that doorknob" real-world paranoia of last year's artfully Hollywood-ized disaster film, "Contagion."
  75. The Other Side of the Street
    Co-writer and first-time director Marcos Bernstein (who also co-scripted the Montenegro-starring Central Station) drowns the film in anesthetizing atmospherics and hot Brazilian bodies, blunting the energy of his septuagenarian star's performance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Polina
    Images planted early in the film betray the path Polina will take; when we watch her move freely in the woods and commune with a moose, we guess that ballet may not be the last stop on her professional train.
  77. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    The slippages and contradictions between who people are, imagine themselves to be, and present themselves as being inform the structure of Machine, a kind of loose container into which people step and out of which they extract more ideal selves.
  78. Beauty and the Dogs
    Director Ben Hania has a rhythmic, urgent sense of filmmaking, but she makes the odd creative decision of dividing her film into nine chapters, each a single take.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Seagull's Laughter
    Provides some swell roles for actresses and intriguing local detail.
  80. Animal Factory
    Tender, poignant, and homoerotically charged, this complicated father-son relationship is brought to life by two brilliant actors and a director who's canny enough to give them all the room they need.
  81. Being Julia
    Bening's comic gifts make the most of Ronald Harwood's witty screenplay, though she falls flat in her character's rare moments of sincerity.
  82. Manos Sucias
    It's not news, of course, that it's a terrible thing to extinguish a life, but it's a relief, when the shoot-'em-ups of Summer Movie Season are bearing down on us, to see a film that regards killing with pained awe. Wladyka's hands are clean.
  83. American Made
    American Made is his first effort in a long while that feels like an honest-to-god Tom Cruise movie; suddenly, his smile means something again. But there’s one huge, beautiful catch: Doug Liman’s electric film is clear-eyed about the cynicism and corruption beneath its hero’s anxious grin. It voraciously breaks down both the star and the country he has symbolized for so much of his career.
  84. The Boy and the Beast
    Mamoru Hosoda's The Boy and the Beast works with many common anime tropes but doesn't find anything new to say about them.
  85. Not Fade Away
    It's a small gem with a killer rock soundtrack, well worth seeking out amid all the awards-season Sturm und Drang.
  86. Hearts Beat Loud
    The real reason to see this film is Kiersey Clemons’s Sam and her romance with aspiring artist Rose (Sasha Lane).
  87. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.
  88. The End of the Affair
    About halfway through I began to imagine it as it might have been directed by Douglas Sirk as a vehicle for Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.
  89. Sex Positive
    It helps that Wein's subject is such a fascinating, garrulous paradox.
  90. Jindabyne
    Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.
  91. Last Flag Flying
    It’s somber and respectful, and even has a couple of genuinely powerful moments, but none of that’s enough to transcend its oppressive dreariness.
  92. Mr. Untouchable
    A fascinating first-person account of drug kingpin and ruthless gangster Nicky Barnes, whose outrageous story of rise, rule, rage, and revenge requires no such stylistic filler.
  93. The Conjuring 2
    Wan is coming off the world-conquering success of his wildly entertaining automotive action sequel Furious Seven, and he sometimes seems to be trying to bring the splashy cacophony of that movie into a world that thrives on sparseness and focus. It doesn’t work.
  94. Velvet Goldmine
    After a most promising beginning, Velvet Goldmine's progress grows increasingly labored, stumbling around the structural roadblocks Haynes has erected in its path.
  95. The Other Side
    It's all shocking, of course, but it also often looks staged and performed rather than merely observed.
  96. Faust
    Faust is not your great-granddaddy's selling-your-soul fable, but something new, a dreamy immersion into the messiness of myth, where hubris and desire can get lost in the chaos of time and retelling.
  97. Whiz Kids
    This quietly absorbing film is finally more about character formation--curiosity, persistence, endurance--than about achievement as a means to some extrinsic social end.
  98. Viva Riva!
    The first from the Democratic Republic of Congo to be distributed in the U.S. That in itself is worthy of some kind of celebration, even if Viva Riva! too lazily indulges in shapeless genre excess.
  99. Corpo Celeste
    Rohrwacher almost overplays her metaphors, but her understated characterizations, cinematographer Hélène Louvart's rapturous range, and especially Vianello's eerie grace combine to make Corpo Celeste the ideal cinematic antidote to the summer doldrums.
  100. A World Not Ours
    Fleifel gathers the messy detritus of everyday living, laughs at it, then shows the viewer what it means.
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