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 7.6 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
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  1. Home
    Warmhearted but never sentimental or condescending, Home finally proves most affecting as an unsparing glimpse into the psychology of poverty.
  2. Yakuza Apocalypse
    If you can get on its wacko wavelength, it's a uniquely crazed, compelling midnight-movie whatsit.
  3. The Summer of Sangaile
    Lesbian coming-of-age tales can be sensationalistic and leering, but this film (directed by a woman, Alanté Kavaïté) casts a sensitive eye on the understated story of Sangaile (Julija Steponaityté), a shy, troubled girl who begins a relationship with the more ebullient Auste (Aisté Dirziuté).
  4. Taxi to the Dark Side
    Taxi is an impressively blueprinted work. Still images--from autopsy tables, makeshift holding cells, the Oval Office--are selected and deployed to maximum effect.
  5. Date and Switch
    Date and Switch isn't a gay movie. It's a zippy, happy, buddy flick.
  6. Lost Bohemia
    Lost Bohemia's real power, though, is in the impromptu interviews Astor conducted with his neighbors.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Like Killing Flies
    A curiously tasty dish, one that could leave even a vegan with a burning desire to sample Shopsin's lamb chops.
  8. Sample This
    The music is incredible, and through interviews with Rosey Grier, Afrika Bambaataa, Questlove, and a squadron of old-school studio musicians, director Dan Forrer unearths some of the hidden history of American pop.
  9. Shanghai Ghetto
    The storytelling is eloquent and genuine, but the Manns' unadventurous approach (compared to, for instance, last year's intimate road movie "Fighter") rarely hits emotional pay dirt.
  10. Predestination
    The Spierigs had the framework for something wonderful here, if only they’d trusted themselves to keep things simple.
  11. Scalene
    Although Scalene slows to a drip in places, strong performances and a Hitchcock-trained eye build unnerving tension into its depiction of the intimate stress of caring for an invalid and the ways people might or might not crack under it.
  12. 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.
  13. Desperate Acts of Magic
    Desperate Acts of Magic is a pleasant little film.
  14. One Lucky Elephant
    Admirably, and gently, raises questions about the folly and hubris of a relationship that may only ever be one-sided.
  15. Unlocked
    Unlocked feels like a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, which makes it a perfect fit for the 76-year-old Apted, whose wonderfully varied career includes the James Bond flick, The World Is Not Enough.
  16. 1408
    The horror wouldn't work without Cusack, who makes what could have been a rote acting exercise--Be tough! Now angry! Now defensively funny!--a cathartic ritual instead.
  17. Lore
    Shortland draws fine work from her actors, particularly the haunting Rosendahl, who manages to seem by turns a perfectly unbending Nazi youth, a frightened little girl forced to grow up too quickly, and a sensuous young woman bursting into bloom.
  18. Personal Problems (1980)
    I guess that’s ultimately what Reed and Gunn wanted to provide: a view of African Americans that’s messy, complicated, dramatic, and, most important, honest. It’s also a fascinating artifact of black people getting together and making their own art — mainly because they wanted to see themselves properly represented onscreen.
  19. Buried Prayers
    With the survivors' physical presence amongst Nazi slaughterhouses as its own powerful statement, Buried Prayers is a nonfiction work that confronts Holocaust atrocities from a piercing ground-level view.
  20. 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.
  21. Monty Python's Life of Brian
    Monty Python's Life of Brian, re-released on its 25th anniversary as an antidote to "The Passion of the Christ," is a single-joke satire of organized religion, including Hollywood's.
  22. Coming Home
    Viko Nikci's undeniably poignant doc surprisingly chooses to follow threads of hope and forgiveness over the angers of injustice.
  23. Turning
    As a whole and in conjunction with the concert snippets, they give an impressionistic glimpse of a performance and the people behind who forge it, no matter how often Atlas's glib multiple-exposure visual concoctions threaten to get in the way.
  24. Definitely, Maybe
    A surprisingly rewarding romantic comedy.
  25. Clandestine Childhood
    A charming, involving first feature, Clandestine Childhood muscles its familiar coming-of-age material into something more vibrant and urgent than the usual.
  26. The Truth About Emanuel
    Despite the psychological extremes, writer-director Francesca Gregorini presents her characters as recognizably human balls of complexity, nudging but never forcing them toward a sad, beautiful conclusion.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bandslam
    Todd Graff's film is written with a desperate cleverness that clamors for attention over the brainless against-the-odds music-competition plot.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Rain People
    The vocabulary of film, with its subliminal grammar is even more susceptible to corruption than mere words. And Coppola, one of the most technically proficient of the new directors, proves himself, once again, a master of the visual cliche. [25 Sep 1969, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  29. Sightseers
    Sightseers is a jet-black comedy that understands exactly how absurdist it is, and its murders are always played for laughs.
  30. Life 2.0
    At once a disturbing vision of escape, a cautious portrait of liberation, and an exploration of authenticity and artificiality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. Nice
    Though told here with appealing drollness, Marks's story makes an odd vessel for the filmmakers' casually advanced legalization arguments, what with its mischief making on the grandest scale possible.
  32. Everybody's Famous!
    Too brisk and plucky to dislike.
  33. Together
    The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.
  34. Human Weapon
    Religious fanaticism gets even scarier in this hour-long doc.
  35. Seeing Other People
    While lacking a knockout scene, the script is full of solid laughs punctuated with pangs of emotional insight.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Arna's Children
    Refreshing and depressing.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Repo Chick
    Goofy-funny, fluffy yet sharp, for all its flaws Repo Chick is a midnight-movie blast.
  38. Wuss
    A witty black comedy with sociological aspirations that hits unexpected emotional marks while nimbly sidestepping clichés.
  39. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Directors Tom Bean and Luke Poling never shy away from the possibility that Plimpton at times was more a personality than a serious writer.
  40. Lucky Them
    Strangely Bechdel Test-failing and as far removed from real life as Middle Earth, Lucky Them nonetheless hits familiar beats in welcome and unexpected ways, and does it by the book.
  41. The Teacher
    The setup may be as unsubtle as a metaphoric morality lesson about Europe’s not-too-distant past, or perhaps it’s politically timeless; it’s not a far leap to also think about a certain someone’s insane need for backscratching loyalty within the White House.
  42. Protocols of Zion
    This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.
  43. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    Annenberg's attitudinous Shakespeare riff is a unique blend of psychodrama, ethnographic experimentation, and high-concept hustle.
  44. Dick
    Most conveniently synopsized as Romy and Michelle's Watergate Adventure.
  45. Rescue Dawn
    Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a "real" movie that Herzog has ever made. The lone conquistador has joined the club. Rescue Dawn is a Rambo movie without the Man (who, if I remember my Rambology, was himself of German descent).
  46. The Girl
    Hernandez is soulful and affecting, though, and Cornish embodies Ashley's self-centered character with nuance and subtlety.
  47. Father and Son
    Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.
  48. 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.
  49. War Machine
    It’s a complex subject, to say the least. And the film struggles at times with trying to make parodic jabs at a serious topic – it never quite seems to go far enough with its satire. But Pitt’s ridiculous, wildly over-the-top performance somehow keeps it all together. Whenever he’s onscreen, the film finds its soul, its heart, and its funny bone.
  50. Family Fundamentals
    Compassionately explores the seemingly irreconcilable situation between conservative Christian parents and their estranged gay and lesbian children.
  51. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Is the world of the film ruled by its high concept, its low comedy, its demographic credibility, or its romantic screwball realism? Ultimately, Orgy's refusal to be any one thing - including good or bad - forms a kind of epochal statement.
    • 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.
  53. Akira
    Some kind of fever-dream masterpiece, easily the most breathtaking and kinetic anime ever made and one of the most eloquent films about atomic afterclap.
  54. It's All So Quiet
    The film is work, but it's upsetting, insightful, and sometimes gorgeous — admire its cold suns and withering cornfields.
  55. Bokeh
    Toward the end, the filmmakers relent on all the grieving sightseeing and offers up a couple plot developments, plus colloquies on matters geo- and theological. None of this proves as arresting as Iceland’s cliffs and horses, or those first moments of a city depopulated.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clay Bird
    The film's critique of Islam is offered without rancor, and it's evident that Masud loves all his characters, whatever their viewpoints.
  57. Korengal
    The frank honesty of these accounts testifies to the trust Junger and Hetherington cultivated among the Second Platoon in 2008.
  58. Notes on an Appearance
    D’Ambrose proves uncannily adept at conjuring zero-budget paranoia through the sheer accumulation of documents.
  59. 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.
  60. Sacco and Vanzetti
    Stirring documentary.
  61. 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.
  62. Bright Future
    Kurosawa strolls through his narrative with relaxed confidence, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular on his mind.
  63. Art School Confidential
    Art School Confidential is replete with humorous detail--in that respect, the student art projects are particularly fine--but it's the attitude that rules.
  64. Girl Model
    The radiant sadness of its two subjects - one a soulfully impassive stripling, one a symmetrical husk - forms the center of Girl Model, and that is enough.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diary of the Dead
    Visually, Romero's ersatz-DIY experiment isn't as suave as Brian De Palma's similar effort in the recent and risible "Redacted," nor as exactingly engineered as the video convulsions of "Cloverfield," but its scrappy, ultra-low-budget edges are part of its charm.
  66. Trashed
    The form is straightforward, if a little meandering, as is the message: We have to fix this.
  67. Avengers: Infinity War
    The Russos and the hundreds of craftspeople who worked on this film have dreamed up marvelous battles — especially the one where a motley assortment of heroes take their cracks at the purportedly unstoppable Thanos. But only once here did an intergalactic vista catch my breath the way a splash page in a Silver Surfer comic might.
  68. Pecker
    If scandal, sleaze, and celebrity worship are our national religion, then John Waters is an American prophet.
  69. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    When isn't it a good time to show a movie tracing the development of a kind, charismatic yellow Labrador retriever from frolicsome puppy to devoted seeing-eye companion to weary senior?
  70. The Shine of Day
    The Shine of Day shows strangers rockily building a family together.
  71. The Ant Bully
    It's a kids' movie for kids, and Davis approaches it as though he and his cast are merely storytellers trying to reach kids rather than show-offs trying to impress their parents.
  72. Captain Phillips
    Even if Captain Phillips treads into some ideologically rough waters, there's one thing that's hard to find fault with: Hanks gives a performance that goes from good (through the first 124 minutes) to extraordinary (in the last 10).
  73. Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    The film is as simple, straightforward, and elegant as its title.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Reticker offers perhaps a too-narrow focus on this historical moment, but Pray the Devil remembers the golden rule of moviemaking--rather than tell, it shows, and what it shows is quietly affecting.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    This Sinbad misses the verve, the exuberant high spirits, of the best of Fairbanks and Flynn, but it's wonderfully good-natured all the same. [16 May 1974, p.109]
    • Village Voice
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Kids Grow Up
    Seemingly modest but stealthily ambitious, Block's feature-length home movies have a way of spiraling outward just as he's drilling inward, of becoming profoundly universal when most nakedly personal. And despite their candor, the Blocks are less exhibitionistic than welcoming. They make for very dear company.
  77. I'll Sing for You
    The reverent pacing lags a bit, but the film's meditation on the struggle to find spirituality that reconciles Islam with tribal belief systems is powerful in its understatement, and its wordless observation of France's Malian community quietly evidences daily cultural preservation amid the hard labor.
  78. The Bridesmaid
    Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.
  79. In the Name Of
    A nuanced, character-driven critique of the Catholic Church and its regressive stance on homosexuality.
  80. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Carrera's filmmaking is more workmanlike than stylish, but Padre Amaro is richly character driven and, for all its insolent, grotesque humor, straightforwardly humanist in its psychology.
  81. Food Evolution
    Kennedy unabashedly admires scientists, and Food Evolution is his rallying cry to make advocacy as important as lab work.
  82. King Leopold's Ghost
    Sleeker and more ambitious than the 2003 BBC-produced "Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," which focused more narrowly on long-suppressed Belgian atrocities of that era.
  83. The Duelist
    What's most arresting is the way Mizgirev's vision of 1860s Russia shines through in the perspiration on Champagne goblets, the flicker of candlelight on faces, and the sheen of polished-steel dueling pistols.
  84. Fierce People
    Whereas most of the injustices suffered by "Nanny's" nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante.
  85. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    Justman's affectionate doc provides the pleasure of hearing one classic pop hook after another performed by a still tight unit, as well as the spectacle of veteran sidemen sitting around talking music. (The movie would have benefited from more period footage and fewer restaged scenes.)
  86. Jack Reacher
    Cruise is definitely too short for the gig, but in this first fight, he proves his tough-guy chops. Outraged Reacher readers can stand down.
  87. Mohawk
    Mohawk takes its time revealing all its generic elements, but at its high point dares to vault toward something grander and more mythic than action-adventure realism.
  88. Ghost Bird
    It's the sort of film that builds up familiar frenzy--newspaper notoriety, tourism uptick, government attention--only to dissolve in a what-just-happened daze.
  89. Post Mortem
    Often drolly, coolly morbid, Post Mortem also operates just as effectively in a more nakedly direct register.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Caroline and Jackie
    Clark lures you into the chaos through beautiful visuals like the sparkly evening lights of an L.A. dinner party, and the night's principal characters, two attractive brunette sisters...Both irritate. That's the gist and charm of this family's dynamic, which is so real that at times it's unbearable.
  91. The Talent Given Us
    Raw, fascinating, often unpleasant film.
  92. World War Z
    Forster's meticulousness—coupled with ample excuses to blow stuff up—isn't enough to turn World War Z into one of those class-A end-of-everything movies that leaves you feeling just a little bit queasy, momentarily uncertain of your own small place in this unmanageable world.
  93. Pelican Dreams
    The most effective part of Irving's film is how deftly she captures the pelicans' clear anxieties, curiosities, and joys.
  94. The legend of Sarila
    A vibrant color scheme and the deliciously evil cackle of Christopher Plummer elevate this kid-friendly animated adventure from Canada.
  95. The Station Agent
    Manages to explore the darker facets of friendship without being dark.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    A revenge tragedy as brutal and Byzantine as "Titus Andronicus," Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance accomplishes a miraculous feat by being harrowing and humane in equal measure.
  97. Rosetta
    Pummeling, jagged, and extremely well-edited film.
  98. SiREN
    Bishop isn't afraid to leave the club behind, confidently expanding beyond the seedy premise to become a three-way chase among the bachelor party guys, the club management, and a ferocious supernatural force.
  99. Lunch
    The appeal of Lunch might be limited to Hollywood-nostalgia buffs, but they will be enthralled not only by the stories told, but also how they're told. These guys are still some of the sharpest wits in town.
  100. Custody
    Legrand demonstrates great skill as a tactician in this closing third, but his overarching framework for Custody — with its considerable reliance on is-he-or-isn’t-he uncertainty — demands that he sacrifice interior perspectives.
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