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. Outside In
    The drama of Outside In is largely underplayed. It’s a tale of people seeking simple lives on their own terms, and while it may be withholding, its small scale seems a statement on just how many worthy stories are kept behind bars.
  2. Hondros
    In an era when the propaganda machines of conflicts like Syria are imperiling photojournalists’ work all the more, Campbell’s homage to his friend is a thorough look at a straight shooter.
  3. 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.
  4. Where Is Kyra?
    The way Dosunmu shoots her, she feels somehow both fragile and unchanging: It wouldn’t take much to turn Kyra herself into a blur, to erase her from the screen completely; but the broader sorrow that she represents will never go away. Where is Kyra? She’s in the midst of disappearing, but she’s also everywhere.
  5. Werewolf
    Its story may be thin, its characters not particularly original, but McKenzie’s use of cinematic language is savvy and novel, finding complexity where others might find only emptiness.
  6. Book Club
    Even though it follows the map of every romcom before it, Holderman’s film still offers the too-rare chance to marvel at just how good these women are at their craft, how easily they inhabit the bodies and lives of other people.
  7. Christopher Robin
    Christopher Robin preaches a return to childhood exuberance and frivolity, but its quiet, focused restraint often feels like it’s coming from a very different impulse — an old-world professionalism and humility. It’s a grown-up sensibility applied to a child’s tale, which makes for an occasionally endearing mixture. In today’s world, I’ll take it.
  8. Whitney
    By the time Whitney winds to an end, that massive talent feels like a dangerously valuable resource, one that even the people who were supposed to protect Houston couldn’t resist exploiting.
  9. Maineland
    That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.
  10. Measure of a Man
    The portentously titled Measure of a Man is at once an escapist fantasy and sensitive portrait of adolescent transformation.
  11. Cocote
    Getting one’s bearings isn’t impossible; it’s like divining the trick of a Sunday crossword. But Cocote isn’t purely academic. It’s alternately clinical and sensual.
  12. 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.
  13. The Great Silence (1968)
    Because Silence’s might doesn’t eventually set things right for Snow Hill’s residents, The Great Silence goes out with a devastating bang.
  14. Upgrade
    Upgrade offers memorable, legible fights, a compelling bombed-out retro-apocalyptic look and a mystery that seems obvious at the start but then keeps twisting.
  15. Love & Bananas
    Noi Na’s subsequent acclimation to her new home in the refuge is hopeful, but Chailert’s bravery, sacrifice, and manifest love are the only redemption the film holds out for humans.
  16. Prick Up Your Ears
    As a portrait of a relationship and a creative partnership, Prick is ever alert to the shifts in power, to the narcissistic wounds that can never be salved when a teacher is surpassed by his pupil.
  17. Wanderland
    There’s no rhyme or reason to Alex’s journey, which makes the whole of it equally disarming and daffy.
  18. Anything
    Early absorbs Freda’s pain into his own, and McNeil builds a delicate idyll from their defiant embrace of unexpected second chances.
  19. Sollers Point
    Keith’s sincerity and depth of feeling are embodied in Lombardi’s performance.
  20. Bye Bye Germany
    The story digs deep enough that the cheese Garbarski lays on at the end feels well-earned. It’s a charmingly made film.
  21. Tommy
    Tommy is turning out to be the kind of movie most people probably like more than they care to admit. Modest charm and unpretentiousness are hardly the qualities that I ever thought I would associate with Ken Russell, but there you are, and there Tommy is. [31 Mar 1975, p.68]
    • Village Voice
  22. Eating Animals
    As a work of sustained, thoughtful inquiry, Eating Animals is a bust; as a reminder of what we should all be thinking about, though, it’s searing. After seeing it, pretending not to know is impossible.
  23. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Salomé would be better served by a story that focuses more explicitly on her intellectual life rather than on her personal one, but considering how stodgy biopics can be, Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to Be Free offers a mostly engaging portrait of a charismatic and brilliant figure.
  24. 44 Pages
    Anyone who’s worked in editorial or a similar environment will recognize the staff’s focus, creativity, and sharpness.
  25. Nana
    Nana’s most stirring moment comes when Dykman and her mother reveal the moment when they went from merely knowing about the Holocaust to truly understanding it.
  26. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Boom makes the case that the scene Basquiat came from was more fascinating than Basquiat himself. Even though many of the artists, admirers, and friends interviewed for this doc praise him and his gonzo genius, several of them suggest that he strived to be more of a rock star than a punk artist.
  27. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    In his astute look at the artistry and business of food, de Maistre makes the case that haute cuisine serves the same function as haute couture, creating an indelible experience while encouraging new ideas to filter through the industry.
  28. Papillon
    Shaffner has really made an exhilarating movie out of the most dangerously depressing material. [10 Jan 1974, p.56]
    • Village Voice
  29. What Haunts Us
    It’s a painfully familiar story in the era of #MeToo and the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal, with the added agony that parents, teachers, and school officials were, to varying degrees, complicit.
  30. One October
    Shuman’s sprightly, restless film trails the sprightly, restless WFMU host Clay Pigeon through the boroughs as he checks in with the people he meets.
  31. Bernard and Huey
    As you might hope for a film with a script from the great Jules Feiffer, Dan Mirvish’s Bernard and Huey bristles with anxious, circuitous, hilarious talk.
  32. Set It Up
    While the plot is familiar, Katie Silberman’s witty script plays with expectations.
  33. The Bookshop
    Though nearly nothing happens in this movie besides a woman opening a shop and beginning a standoffish friendship with a reclusive man, I still found myself drawn in, just as I was drawn to Iain’s discreet disaster of a baked Alaska (please check it out if you haven’t seen this TGBBS episode); sometimes the quiet is enticing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Who We Are Now
    While Nicholson’s onscreen, it’s impossible to pay heed to anything but her. She scorches the film with her barely bottled ferocity and vulnerability.
  35. Walking Tall
    Like it or not, Walking tall is saying something very important to many people, and it is saying it with accomplished artistry. [21 Feb 1974, p.61]
    • Village Voice
  36. 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.
  37. The Workers Cup
    Sobel lets these conflicting feelings hang in the air, offering no pat conclusions, or convenient corporate bogeymen. By refusing to resolve or reconcile these contradictions, he ensures that we’ll keep thinking about them.
  38. Pin Cushion
    Pin Cushion has the visual cues of comedy, with its candy-colored kitsch and exaggerated signifiers of eccentricity and snobbery, but at heart, it’s a tragedy of naïveté.
  39. We the Animals
    Brawling yet tender, wild yet rigorously controlled, first-time fiction director Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals is an impressionistic swirl of a film about masculinity, about abuse, about growing up queer, about chaotic family life, about the jumble of incidents and stirrings through which a child discovers a self.
  40. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Cassel’s Gauguin may ultimately be a lightweight cinematic descendant of the monstrous European pioneers that Klaus Kinski played in Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, but he’s also both menacing and pitiable enough to make Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti riveting on a moment-to-moment basis.
  41. Summer of 84
    If you’re patient, though, and not put off by the familiarity of this material, Summer of ’84 gains in interest and urgency as it goes.
  42. Araby
    A soundtrack of folk/country classics takes the edge off, but make no mistake: This is a beautiful bummer, giving voice to someone who’s barely a number, but only to remind us that most of us are OK not thinking about numbers at all.
  43. What Will People Say
    Despite the subject matter, Haq is most often quite tender in her storytelling.
  44. Incident In a Ghostland
    The grisly post-torture-porn horror flick Incident in a Ghostland serves as an effectively punishing critique of the relentless misogyny that has become a staple of every stupid Texas Chain Saw Massacre knockoff that pits sexually active women against emotionally disturbed serial killers.
  45. Beach House
    The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.
  46. The Captain
    Filmed in black and white in the wintry countryside of Görlitz, Germany, Schwentke’s vision of a man who would be posthumously named the Executioner of Emsland is chilling and yet, at times, almost farcical.
  47. Moss
    There’s an edge to the head-trip and the river journey, a sense not just of the characters’ freedom but also of their limited options and never-articulated desperation.
  48. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    Mitchell’s documentary style isn’t flashy or refined, but it is economical. The director does his homework and almost cross-examines the film’s subjects.
  49. Notes on an Appearance
    D’Ambrose proves uncannily adept at conjuring zero-budget paranoia through the sheer accumulation of documents.
  50. Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings
    The equally thrilling and exhausting Hong Kong martial arts fantasy Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings boasts more inventive weapons, monsters, and plot twists than most Western audiences will know what to do with.
  51. 40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie
    Only a monster would begrudge Aronsohn for putting this all together. It doesn’t hurt that Magic Music really do have some chops.
  52. No Date, No Signature
    No Date, No Signature presents a story of flawed but generally decent people trying to put right what went so horribly wrong.
  53. The Island
    There are no good or bad people in The Island, just a group of hapless schmucks who become more sympathetic as they get more desperate.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Whale of a Tale
    Together, these voices paint a complex picture of the clash between globalism and a fast-disappearing localism.
  55. Looking for Mr. Goodbar
    What makes the film — which Richard Brooks directed and scripted, adapting Judith Rossner’s bestselling 1975 novel of the same name — so fascinating and repellent at once is precisely the confusion and anxiety it articulates about women’s sexual freedom.
  56. Rolling Thunder
    Performances are made crystalline through a sixth sense for camera placement and curt cutting from director John Flynn, whose 2007 passing was little noted, though his no-BS way of laying down a story is a rare commodity in any era.
  57. Police Story (1985)
    Chan seems to do everything he can think of to ingratiate himself with viewers.
  58. The Panic in Needle Park
    Winn pretty much plays it as it lays—her obvious acting works with her character’s weak sense of self. Pacino, however, is a force of nature.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ffolkes
    Floating somewhere between thriller and comedy, ffolkes reunites McLaglen with a very game Moore.
  60. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    Not far removed from the director’s interest in trance states, his Nosferatu posits a self-pitying creature exhausted by immortality: Sunken-eyed Kinski inverts his usual frenzy into a fatigue underlining the importance of eternal rest.
    • 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
  62. The Honeymoon Killers
    Despite its horror or rather partly because of it, The Honeymoon Killers is memorable more as a deliriously freakish love story than as a grand guignol.
    • Village Voice
  63. 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
  64. The Front Page
    It is refreshing to find a director who is still making talkies instead of gawkies, and who thus still believes in the spoken word as a vehicle of expression. [23 Dec 1974, p.83]
    • Village Voice
  65. Z
    Reasonably effective entertainment. [11 Dec 1969, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  66. True Grit
    True Grit is well worth seeing, but it is hardly a monument either to Wayne or to the western. [21 Aug 1969, p.37]
    • Village Voice
    • 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
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    The Red Tent manages not to collapse and is on the whole a likable movie. It reminded me of the typical '50s epics - lavishly produced, lushly scored, requiring relatively little thought, and perfect for two hours escape. [26 Aug 1971, p.55]
    • Village Voice
  69. Death Rides a Horse
    Petroni’s direction is crude but effective.
  70. Donovan's Reef
    By any interpretation, Donovan's Reef is a beautiful example of cinematic art, and the atavistic desire to let the movie sweep over the spectator without disruptive analysis is at least understandable. [01 Aug 1963, p.13]
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Heartbreak Kid
    May's second feature is a funny and sometimes side-splitting film whose whole never approaches the success of its best moments in which the two levels of romantic fantasy and satire are reconciled. [28 Dec 1972, p.53]
    • Village Voice
  72. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    From Oshima’s later career (after one stroke, he made 1999’s Taboo; after two strokes, it’s unclear whether he’ll direct again), most notable is this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java.
  73. The Boys in the Band
    Mart Crowley's brilliantly bitchy lines are worth standing on line for, and the original off-Broadway cast stands up well on the screen. [28 May 1970, p.53]
    • Village Voice
  74. The Eel
    This simple, sinuous fable may not be among Imamura’s greatest films–it lacks the crazy libidinal energy of The Pornographers or Eijanaika–but it could hardly have been made by anyone else.
  75. The Sons of Katie Elder
    The spectacle of people in Hollywood trying to do something different in a western at this late date is curiously reassuring. [09 Sep 1965, p.15]
    • Village Voice
    • 93 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Yojimbo
    Kurosawa's imagery is alway exciting. [25 Oct 1962, p.16]
    • Village Voice
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pocket Money
    There's an ease, a simplicity to the thing which often reminds me of Raoul Walsh's stories of simple-minded adventurers venturing into the unknown wilderness. But the carefully-constructed and well-acted buddy-buddy relationship between Newman and Marvin never coalesces into a plot. [08 Jun 1972, p.71]
    • Village Voice
  78. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    As a visceral experience, it’s entrancing, especially during Shinji’s fight sequences, when his anxieties are cruelly exacerbated by having his body and mind symbiotically bonded to his father’s combat toy.
  79. Sunday in New York
    A triumph of bounce over banality. [19 Mar 1964, p.12]
    • Village Voice
    • 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
  81. Dementia 13
    Despite the rough edges, you feel you’re in the hands of someone who enjoys telling a story, and knows how to do it — even when the story’s a disposable one such as this.
  82. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes emerges ultimately as a poetic parable of both storytelling and moviemaking, and somehow it all fits together. [12 Nov 1970, p.59]
    • Village Voice
    • 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
  84. Lady Sings the Blues
    By any formal standards, it is a mess, but, surprisingly often, a moving mess. [23 Nov 1972, p.77]
    • Village Voice
  85. Invictus
    Like every Eastwood production, Invictus is stately, handsomely mounted, attentive to detail right down to the Marmite adorning the team's breakfast buffet, and relentlessly conventional. As a portrait of a hero, the movie effortlessly brings a lump to the throat (Freeman gives a subtly crafted performance that blends Mandela's physical frailty with his easy charm and cerebral wit); as history, it is borderline daft and selective to the point of distortion.
  86. Dear John
    The biggest surprise here is Tatum, whose butch reticence has never been put to better use: His saddest farewell isn’t to his lady, but to a man even more uncommunicative than he is.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broken Embraces
    Indeed, three decades into his career as a name-brand fashioner of zesty soapers, Spanish cinema's most beloved export could direct un film de Almodóvar with his eyes shut and still get a rise out of his fans. So who could blame the matador for letting the bull run the show this time?
  88. Surrogates
    Willis is fine, both as his blond action figure (Zack Morris hair) and actual self, in trusty bruised palooka mode. Mostow does good meat-and-potatoes genre work, coherent even when reckless.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cop Out
    Working with a full-on studio budget for the first time in his decade-and-a-half career, Smith is still making movies about guys just like him.
  90. Funny People
    There's so much that's so disarmingly good and sharp about Funny People that you wish the whole movie weren't so much of a shambles.
  91. The Departed
    Neither a debacle nor a bore, The Departed works but only up to a point, and never emotionally--even if the director does contrive to supply his version of a happy ending.
  92. 9
    The result is never as gripping in narrative terms--a well-worn litany of dystopian-future chestnuts--as it is visually.
  93. Crash
    Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.
  94. Rachel Getting Married
    A middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame.
  95. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    More often than not, these musical interludes are more like distractions aimed only to entice younger audiences (not a terrible thing).
  96. The Notebook
    Amid the sticky-sweet swamp of Jeremy Leven's script, Rowlands and Garner emerge spotless and beatific, lending a magnanimous credibility to their scenes together. These two old pros slice cleanly through the thicket of sap-weeping dialogue and contrivance, locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.
  97. State of Play
    An effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.
  99. For My Father
    While films like “The Band's Visit,” “Jellyfish,” and “Waltz With Bashir” suggest a subtler, more psychologically directed path for Israeli film, Dror Zahavi's For My Father is old-school social melodrama (plus bombs), all the way.
  100. Gladiator
    The digital animation is far more evident here than in "The Phantom Menace."
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