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. Seven Samurai
    Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.
    • Village Voice
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Children Underground
    A horror story, told with Dickensian compassion, permeating outrage, and little hope.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    Petri's visually flamboyant film turns into a heady mix of Marx, Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Brecht, with a bit of Dashiell Hammett thrown into the blender.
  4. 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.
  5. A Simple Plan
    As straightforward in narrative as it is gut-wrenching in effect, A Simple Plan is a sort of slow-motion skid down an icy blacktop— it's a movie you watch with a mounting sense of dread...[It's] an extremely credible thriller and an affecting brother-story.
  6. 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.
  7. Bukowski: Born into This
    Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.
  8. Seaside
    Compare it to what passes for sophisticated filmmaking in this country and the movie becomes a living instrument of cinematic humanism: lovingly intent on observing, not judging; concerned with sympathy, not control; accepting the inevitable ambiguities, not denying them.
  9. Bloody Sunday
    Bloody Sunday doesn't surrender its grip on the viewer even after the action shifts from the streets of Bogside to a local hospital where the weeping masses are still under the guns of the war-painted British soldiers.
  10. Bamboozled
    Primary story line is clumsy and badly acted. But he (Lee) reminds you that movies have power, that they matter, and for a few brilliant moments, Bamboozled matters more than any other American movie this year.
  11. The Agronomist
    This affecting eulogy underscores not only Demme's own tribute to Dominique but also the film's homage to radio. This is a motion picture that's in love with the magic of airborne speech.
  12. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.
  13. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Beyond its rare visions of remote vistas, Camel's great charm lies in its seeming simplicity. The camera records the events of the day -- from a little girl's tears to an afternoon sandstorm -- with a childlike clarity and curiosity.
  14. Joy Ride
    Redoubtably hilarious as always, Zahn also lends his character unpredictable flashes of anger, pathos, and faint psychosis, even when the movie jumps the median from ticklishly discomfiting black comedy into by-the-numbers horror jolts.
  15. The Sleepy Time Gal
    Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection.
  16. Salaam Bombay!
    The real star of this film is the crowded, neon-lit byways of the city itself.
  17. The Rage: Carrie 2
    A smart, realist drama -- I wouldn't be surprised if this one winds up on my 10-best list for '99.
  18. American Splendor
    Clever, engaging, and cannily faux populist.
  19. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
  20. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Va Savoir has its own unhurried pace and unpredictable humor. This is the sort of comedy Robert Altman could only dream about.
  21. Far From Heaven
    A supremely intelligent pastiche.
  22. Since Otar Left
    If Otar is, finally, a mite thin and predictably structured, that takes little away from the filmmaker and her cast, who work hard at fashioning the most outlandish special effect of all: believable human life.
    • Village Voice
  23. Aberdeen
    Norway's hallucinatory, edge-of-the-world beauty imbues the story with a woozy, alcoholic haze and a sense of the marginal spaces into which the messiest aspects of private life are shoved.
  24. 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.
  25. Topsy-Turvy
    Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.
  26. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.
  27. Boys Don't Cry
    Scorches the screen like a prairie fire.
  28. Blind Shaft
    Blind Shaft means to leave the viewer dazed, and it does.
  29. Ten
    Conceptually rigorous, splendidly economical, and radically Bazinian.
  30. The Hours
    It's an astonishing Kidman who contributes the film's -- and maybe the year's -- most inspired turn.
  31. Memento
    The video stores are filled with examples of retro-noir and neo-noir, but Christopher Nolan's audacious timebender is something else. Call it meta-noir.
  32. Sexy Beast
    There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.
  33. A Bug's Life
    There are big crowd scenes, intimate close-ups, and lots of bug’s-eye point-of-view shots. Call me gullible: I believed every second of it.
  34. Moolaadé
    This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation.
  35. The Thin Red Line
    As mystical as it is gritty, as despairing as it is detached.
  36. Fanny and Alexander (re-release)
    Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make F&A feel like his youngest film.
  37. Robot Stories
    A quietly impassioned, genuinely stirring indie rarity.
  38. Strayed
    As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.
  39. Oasis
    Oasis is utterly beguiling because Lee, like many other percipient Asian filmmakers, is simply more attentive to his characters' emotional tumult than the audience's.
  40. The Producers
    However familiar, it delivers like a shorted slot machine.
  41. In the Mood for Love
    A wondrously perverse movie that not only evokes a lost moment in time but circles around an unrepresentable subject. Mood is the operative word. A love story far more cerebral than it is emotional.
  42. All About My Mother
    As straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be.
  43. Adaptation.
    Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.
  44. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.
  45. New Waterford Girl
    A tender and hilarious vision of female adolescence.
  46. In Praise of Love
    A sustained immersion in gorgeously austere street photography and casual portraiture, the images punctuated by bits of black leader and gnomic intertitles, the action propelled by sweetly pulverized music and an effortlessly layered soundtrack of enigmatic conversations. Poetry is really the only word for it.
  47. Shadow of the Vampire
    Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.
  48. Capturing the Friedmans
    I've seen only a few films in my lifetime that so potently express the golden hopes of childhood and parenthood, as well as the inevitable decimation of that hopefulness -- that forward-looking bliss -- at the hands of catastrophe, or merely age, spite, and exhaustion. Or, as for the Friedmans, all of the above.
  49. The Royal Tenenbaums
    May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.
  50. Rushmore
    I can't remember a teenage romance this engagingly offbeat since "Lord Love a Duck."
  51. Lost in Translation
    As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."
  52. Spirited Away
    A very nutty fruitcake, Spirited Away is characterized by wonderfully detailed animation, packed with incident and populated by all manner of comic creatures.
  53. Yi Yi
    Although dense with incident and motif, the movie has an effortless flow.
  54. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Naomi Watts is a tremendous movie actress. She need only sidle on camera and glance over the terrain to claim the scene. What's her secret? Like the great Isabelle Huppert, Watts doesn't radiate feelings so much as she absorbs them.
  55. The Others
    This is one scary movie, not because we see ghosts or monsters, but because Kidman makes us feel her fear as our own.
  56. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.
  57. Ghost World
    Keep your "Lara Croft" and your "Shrek": For me, the summer's reigning icons are Enid, Thora Birch's geek goddess in Ghost World, and her action-movie analogue.
  58. Mulholland Dr.
    Thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual. The rest is silencio.
  59. 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."
  60. The Twilight Samurai
    Yamada shoots his movie with a grandfatherly expertise, never squeezing the drama for juice or distancing us too far from the characters -- it's a pleasure to see a movie that makes every shot count, narratively and emotively.
  61. Easy Rider
    Easy Rider displays an assortment of excellences that lifts it above the run and ruck of its genre. [03 Jul 1969, p.45]
    • Village Voice
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The new Little Women, directed with grace by Gillian Armstrong, adapted with tact by Robin Swicord, and starring an extraordinary ensemble, has made my holiday.
    • Village Voice
  63. I Love You Phillip Morris
    Nothing tops ILYPM's Jim Carrey ... in the most gloriously raunchy, unrepentant moment in the an(n)als of Hollywood A-listers doing gay-for-pay.
  64. Djomeh
    Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.
  65. Fighter
    Probably more terse than it needs to be, but the dramatic line has an elegance and drive that reinforces the unexpected turns of the story.
  66. Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch
    A brilliant appreciation of the last great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.
  67. Set Me Free
    Karine Vanasse, as the protagonist Hanna, is perfectly cast because she has the body of a woman and the sweet, sexless face of a child.
  68. Marion Bridge
    A scrupulous and impeccably acted account of the fallout from a family secret.
  69. Pellet
    At once subtle and visceral, the film never succumbs to the trap of the maudlin or tearful, offering instead with its unflinching gaze a measure of faith in the future.
  70. Thirteen
    The movie is as eloquently uninflected and filled with quirks as its star.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chain
    A dreamlike travelogue that transforms a mundane world into something strange and new.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Outsider
    Nicholas Jarecki's The Outsider is among the great docs about moviemaking.
  73. Day Night Day Night
    Terror is existential in this highly intelligent, somewhat sadistic, totally fascinating movie.
  74. The Boss of It All
    Colors and angles and sound levels don't match from one cut to the next. The movie is ugly as sin to look at. But it's all intentional on the part of von Trier.
  75. Golda's Balcony
    Jeremy Kagan's excellent adaptation of William Gibson's stage play.
  76. The Last Mistress
    A highly entertaining adaptation of French dandy Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly's mid-19th-century novel Une vieille maîtresse.
  77. Before I Forget
    Exquisitely sad, idiosyncratic film à clef about an aging gay gigolo grasping at the embers of memory before they--and he--turn to ash.
  78. The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story
    Boys is first-rate cinema archaeology. What pushes it beyond that is the brutal honesty with which the sibling rivalry between the elder Shermans is depicted; theirs is a palpable mixture of love and disdain that led to the men not socializing with each other for more than 40 years.
  79. Passing Strange
    Passing Strange conjures a rare kind of theatrical magic with its emotionally raw, frequently euphoric portrait of the artist as a young man.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Still Walking
    Koreeda imbues the story with such specificity, tactility, and humanity that yet another movie about a dysfunctional family reunion becomes a cinematic tone poem.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    At the Edge of the World
    By turns stupendously beautiful and grimly terrifying, and best appreciated in a movie theater.
  82. 35 Shots of Rum
    35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.
  83. The Maid
    In a remarkable performance that won her a special award from the world cinema jury at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Chilean television vet Saavedra goes through one of the most uncanny psychophysical transformations I've ever seen in a movie without the benefit of obvious makeup or other prosthetics.
  84. Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!
    The filmmaker uncovers a foul, lurid, corrupt, and perversely compelling conspiracy--which is to say, he successfully turns The Night Watch into a Peter Greenaway film.
  85. Neil Young Trunk Show
    Removing even stage banter, the focus is entirely on performance, save for a few "candid backstage" bits--Young getting a cracked nail filed down, etc. Devotees will thrill to rarities like "Kansas" and "Mexico."
  86. From Selma to Soweto
    A triumph of maximalist filmmaking. And you won't look at your watch once.
  87. Oceans
    Océans is a jaw-dropper as a visual travelogue--even its anthropomorphic indulgences (an ocean floor is turned into a rough neighborhood, complete with trespassers and shy weirdos) are winning.
  88. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    The Duel is the most successful literary adaptation I've seen since Pascal Ferran's 2006 "Lady Chatterley."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Casino Jack and the United States of Money
    Indispensable viewing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    The result is an intellectual history of Warhol, bucking the trend toward the star-studded VH1-ization of biodocs and constructed with a mission to dispel the artist's own self-created image as high-fashion hobnobber in favor of a more profound depiction. Burns argues for a cogitating, agitating Warhol: deep thinker, cultural barometer, and world changer.
  91. The Girlfriends
    Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure.
  92. Kisses
    The movie's ending may be less satisfying than that of "Slumdog Millionaire"--a film you can love for its infectiously wishful exuberance, but never fully believe in--but Kisses is truer to the tragedy of a generation of children whom we have utterly failed. If they're anything like Kylie and Dylan, they'll be back to let us know.
  93. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    As he did in "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz", Wright immerses his heroes in pop culture's detritus and diversions, but doesn't drown them in it. You don't have to be dazzled or tickled by the movie, or get every joke, to be touched by it, too.
  94. A Film Unfinished
    The artificial look of the added footage, counterpointed by the commentary of inmates and survivors, only underscores the unending shock of the film's unadulterated images, even though we have seen them in other Shoah documentaries.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Centurion
    Up to now, writer-director Neil Marshall has specialized in horror movies (Dog Soldiers, The Descent), but here, he imagines and communicates a remote world with terrific energy and a passion for detail.
  96. My Dog Tulip
    His gift-and the film's-is to transform the seemingly banal relationship between pet and owner into something singular, inimitable, sacred.
  97. Marwencol
    Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot.
  98. White Material
    Claire Denis's strongest movie in the decade since "Beau Travail," her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty.
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