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. Boxing Gym
    Boxing Gym is a companion piece of sorts to "La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet," Wiseman's previous doc that played Film Forum last fall. It's not simply that boxing and ballet are understood as kindred activities. Boxing Gym is itself a dance movie-which is to say, a highly formalized exercise in choreographed activity.
  2. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Guy and Madeline is at once self-conscious and breezy, clumsy and deft, diffident and sweet, annoying and ecstatic. It's amateurish in the best sense, and it radiates cinephilia. No movie I've seen this year has given me more joy.
  3. Amer
    The pleasures of this gorgeous, clever, and visceral film are almost exclusively aesthetic. Those unmoved or alienated by the porn of pain may be left flopping as nervelessly as one of the movie's severed limbs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    And Everything Is Going Fine
    Seen as his final monologue, the film is both an invaluable portfolio of his talent, and a tribute rendered in the style of its subject.
  5. The Woodmans
    Ultimately, The Woodmans is a haunting study in family dynamics.
  6. Moneyball
    It really happened, it's really corny, and it's really great.
  7. Melancholia
    Plenty of moments in Melancholia are painfully funny. Some moments are even painful to watch, but there was never a moment when I thought about the time or my next movie or did not care about the characters or had anything less than complete interest in what was happening on the screen.
  8. Certified Copy
    Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy is exactly that: The Iranian modernist's first feature to be shot in the West is a flawless riff on our indigenous art cinema.
    • Village Voice
      • Posted Mar 8, 2011
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jane Eyre
    Fukunaga has made his Jane Eyre an intimate, thoughtful epic, anchored by strong lead performances and the gorgeous, moody 100-shades-of-gray cinematography of Adriano Goldman.
  10. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    A work of unostentatious beauty and uncloying sweetness, at once sophisticated and artless, mysterious and matter-of-fact, cosmic and humble, it asks only a measure of Boonmeevian acceptance: The movie doesn't mean anything-it simply is.
  11. The Desert of Forbidden Art
    It's a must-see for anyone interested in art.
  12. Public Speaking
    The quick-witted malcontent, a Morristown, New Jersey, refugee who arrived at Port Authority in 1969, is the best kind of New Yorker: one with a long memory who's averse to nostalgia.
  13. I Travel Because I Have to, I Come Back Because I Love You
    Road movies don't get any purer.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Moonrise Kingdom
    Shot on Super 16mm, the visible grain giving each image a wonderfully tactile depth and life, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom is, in a lot of ways, the ur–Wes Anderson film.
  15. 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.
  16. The Princess of Montpensier
    The finest Western you'll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Despite the passive-aggressive bickering, Beats, Rhymes & Life is not, thankfully, hip-hop's "Some Kind of Monster."
  18. The Mill and the Cross
    An extraordinary example of both art-historical interpretation and CGI as passport to unknown lands, The Mill and the Cross, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, is a moving-image tribute to the still image, with its ability to "wrestle the senseless moment to the ground."
  19. Take Shelter
    Despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder - a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as "something that's not right."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lips
    With a minimum of dialogue and backstory, the lead actresses (winners of a single special prize at Cannes 2010) movingly portray the depth of these colleagues' compassion, and their struggle to maintain a front of data-gathering objectivity. Unfolding in a remarkably organic fashion, The Lips pays plaintive tribute to the work.
  21. Django Unchained
    Like all of the best pop art, Tarantino's film is both seriously entertaining and seriously thoughtful, rattling the cage of race in America on-screen and off.
  22. Attack the Block
    The smartest, funniest cheap monster-movie import this side of June's "Trollhunter," Attack the Block is a near-perfectly balanced seasonal trifle: Anchored in social realism yet determinedly goofy, it's neither too eager for laughs nor overtly preachy.
  23. Late Autumn
    In remaking the 1966 South Korean film "Full Autumn" and setting it in America, writer-director Kim Tae-Yong uses the melancholic, gray backdrop of Seattle as both character and metaphor, crafting a film that's visually beautiful and incredibly moving.
  24. We Were Here
    A simple, powerful act of bearing witness, We Were Here is a sober reminder of the not-too-distant past, when gays were focused not on honeymoon plans but on keeping people alive.
  25. The Last Circus
    Baroquely sinister and grotesquely funny, the latest overstimulated bout of dark comic mayhem from writer-director Álex de la Iglesia (Common Wealth, The Day of the Beast) is a stunning funhouse-mirror allegory of Franco-era Spain that makes "Pan's Labyrinth" look like "Sesame Street."
  26. Benda Bilili!
    But real-life hard-knock plot twists, as well as some tweaking of form (there's no narrator or voiceover of any kind; the film's subjects outline their grim realities largely through their rhythmically upbeat songs) make the film absolutely riveting, as does the fiercely rousing music.
  27. The Inheritors
    Unadulterated labor is the focus of this blistering, beautifully modulated documentary from Mexican auteur Eugenio Polgovsky.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Position Among the Stars
    Leonard Retel Helmrich's third documentary about the same Indonesian family is a dazzler in at least a couple ways.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Argo
    A "gritty" historical drama overwhelmed by its love of Hollywood as an inventor of imaginary narratives with real consequences, a great generator of American bedtime stories whose magic works on suburban kids and foreign enemies alike.
  30. Oranges and Sunshine
    At the film's center is Emily Watson's pitch-perfect performance as Margaret Humphreys, the real-life social worker who in 1986 stumbled over the hidden practice.
  31. A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    Yang's anti-nostalgic slice of 1960s Taipei life suggests a Tolstoy-size expansion of the ballads from Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town.
  32. Monsieur Lazhar
    Nélisse, with her tough, Courtney Love puss, and Néron's portrayal of a boy's well-defended torment are extraordinary, as is the film's realization of the small, temporary world that surrounds them. Hitting upon that kind of specificity - of a moment and its emotion - makes for strong memories and a really great movie.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Kid with a Bike
    The Kid With a Bike seems to unfold in a different world than that of previous Dardenne joints, one with a wider range of spiritual and practical possibilities.
  34. Robinson in Ruins
    A rigorous, agile, scathingly funny reckoning with a city and society in the last stages of decline.
  35. Splinters
    The best film ever made about competitive surfing in Papua New Guinea (and Best Documentary of the year as per Surfer Magazine).
  36. Kinyarwanda
    Cast with both professional and novice actors (which results in uneven performances), the beautifully shot film is filled with exquisite moments.
  37. Marley
    Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archival footage, it's a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.
  38. Children of Paradise (1945)
    What's left to be said about Marcel Carné's towering intimate epic of early 19th-century love and the lives of performers, often heralded as the greatest French film of all time?
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Middle of Nowhere
    A slow-motion-enhanced kiss scene, with Corinealdi in top I-don't-give-a-f--- strut, is a startling example of DuVernay's ability to conjure drama that at once takes place in a character's head and in a recognizable real world. It's beautifully nuanced and confidently ambiguous - and so is the movie.
  40. Seven Psychopaths
    Remember the shitty crime comedies every Hollywood brat tried to make after "Pulp Fiction"? It took an Irish playwright to get it right. See it with an audience.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Master
    It's a film of breathtaking cinematic romanticism and near-complete denial of conventional catharsis. You might wish it gave you more in terms of comfort food pleasure, but that's not Anderson's problem.
  42. The LEGO Movie
    Lord and Miller do great work within constraints, taking pre-made pieces and fashioning them into feats worthy of applause. It's no wonder they made a Lego movie — and it's no wonder it's so good.
  43. How to Survive a Plague
    Millions of lives have been saved - and extended - as the result of a tireless cadre of advocates who, as Eigo states, "put their bodies on the line."
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Battle Royale
    [Fukasaku's] genius is finding the overlap between teenage dreams and nightmares, between the intensity of first love and the terror of extinction.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Annie Hall
    Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sparkle like a Larry Hart lyric in this comical-lyrical reminiscence of a lost love. The one-liners are more brilliant than ever, and laid-back L.A. will never seem the same again. [04 July 1977, p.40]
    • Village Voice
  46. Daisies (1966)
    A riot of technical tricks, Daisies shifts between color, black-and-white, and tinted images and includes a scene in which the two Maries, wielding scissors, essentially turn themselves into paper dolls.
  47. Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    Calling the movie simply Buddhist, in form as well as context, might be just another way of saying it's awesome, as in it inspires legitimate awe.
  48. Wagner's Dream
    It remains a rousing portrait of creative renewal and, specifically, the way in which - by attempting something daring and new in the face of an opera culture deeply invested in tradition - Lepage proves that classic art can survive and flourish in a marriage with modern technology and imagination.
  49. Killer Joe
    A hideously funny tabloid noir.
  50. Lincoln
    This Lincoln, stunningly portrayed by Spielberg and Day-Lewis, is real and relatable and so, so cool.
  51. Rush
    It's both a perceptive dual character study and, that rarity of rarities, a large-scale action movie for grown-ups, one worth leaving the house for.
  52. 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.
  53. Smashed
    Movies about drugs and alcohol might be a dime (bag) a dozen, but James Ponsoldt's Smashed is so beautifully shot and well acted as to transcend the genre.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Keep the Lights On
    With its naked but never self-indulgent depictions of sex and all manner of addiction, Keep the Lights On is disarmingly, at times exhilaratingly, human.
  55. My Father and The Man In Black
    As Cash might say, it has the heart, and it has the blood, and by the time childhood chatter is played back again, feeling is soaked through it like the sweat in Cash's guitar strap.
  56. The Flat
    In families, this fascinating film suggests, acknowledging or denying the darker truths of one's legacy is a choice that must be made again and again, each and every day.
  57. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Crewdson and others (including Russell Banks and Laurie Simmons) speak eloquently about his project, but it's the on-set agonies - to achieve the fleeting expression here, dark kiss of light there, and the peculiar relief they bring our maestro - that fascinate.
  58. The Gatekeepers
    The existence of The Gatekeepers is its own chief statement. You don't get the sense that it's any easier for these men to question Israel's leadership from the safety of retirement.
  59. Frances Ha
    Frances Ha is a patchwork of details that constitute a sort of dating manual—not one that tells you how to meet hot guys, but one that fortifies you against all the crap you have to deal with as a young person in love with a city that doesn't always love you back.
  60. Tchoupitoulas
    Bill and Turner Ross - the directors, producers, camera operators, and troublemakers behind Tchoupitoulas - could do posterity a service if they simply resigned themselves to replicating this one-night-in–New Orleans documentary for each of the world's great cities.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tabu
    Tabu manages to be both classical and modern, ironic and heartbreaking.
  62. Barbara
    A transfixing Cold War thriller set in the East Germany of 1980, Christian Petzold's superb Barbara is made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era "woman's picture," the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director.
  63. Tomorrowland
    Bird layers on plenty of dazzle... But his heart is what keeps the story motoring and the ending is perfectly engineered, including a coda that encourages all of us to try harder.
  64. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    It's fitting that this film of people making do with what they have should itself look somewhat humble, without lyricism, a work not of beauty but of work-which is the thing that makes it beautiful, no matter who directed it.
  65. Room 237
    Even if the theories don't persuade you, the film fascinates. It's revelatory about the nature of spectatorship in an era when technology allows audiences to watch films frame by frame.
  66. Muppets Most Wanted
    The story matters only in that it creates opportunities for heaps of ridiculousness, and writer-director James Bobin (who also directed The Muppets), along with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, mines them skillfully and breezily.
  67. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass reminds us of the stupefying magnificence of its setting—beautiful for spacious skies and mountain majesties—while never letting us forget its formidable perils.
  68. Simon Killer
    If Simon Killer's tragic drift is predictable, the seedy particulars still engross. And the storytelling is first-rate.
  69. The Boxtrolls
    The Boxtrolls is a kiddie charmer that makes you laugh, cower, and think of Hitler. That’s an unusual trifecta, but then again, this is an unusual film.
  70. Blancanieves
    The new film from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is a silent, black-and-white film so witty, riveting, and drop-dead gorgeous that moviegoers may forget to notice that they can't hear the dialogue.
  71. Beyond the Hills
    The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.
  72. Genius on Hold
    One marvel of the film is how it conveys so much information so quickly, and with such accessibility.
  73. Reality
    Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loath to remember years from now—if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."
  74. In the House
    In the House is a mystery, but it investigates a far tougher riddle than what makes Claude tick—it's trying to figure out why, exactly, voyeurism and mystery delight us so. In the process, it delights us.
  75. The Unspeakable Act
    Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.
  76. The Spectacular Now
    Director James Ponsoldt gives us long, loose, single-shot courtship scenes, each a marvel of staging and performance.
  77. Le Petit Soldat (re-release)
    It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.
  78. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Lowery isn't a Malick and he's certainly no Kazan, but he's his own man, and a filmmaker to watch.
  79. 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.
  80. American Hustle
    There may not be much behind the sparkling tinsel curtain of David O. Russell's extraordinarily entertaining American Hustle. But what a curtain!
  81. Blue Caprice
    The key question is whether this procedural—as in, here we watch killers proceed—contributes to any greater understanding. I believe it does.
  82. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    Here's a movie with magic.
  83. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    What saves the film—and grandly—is Nance’s wildly ambitious visual imagination. Teetering somewhere between film school precocity and impressively assured audaciousness...It’s almost hypnotic in its style and genre promiscuity.
  84. The Attack
    The Attack is most avowedly "about" terrorism. But that's a subject, not the subject. The film, an arresting and upsetting one, is also about love, trauma, and trust, both within one particular marriage and within entire cultures.
  85. Post Tenebras Lux
    Confusion often reigns here, but the film offers a degree of lush beauty that makes sitting through it well worth the occasional frustrations.
  86. Prince Avalanche
    Prince Avalanche reconciles Green's twin modes into a whole no other director could have, deeply felt and light as laughter.
  87. Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    The roles of affect and artifice in mediating the realities of racism, homophobia, and poverty are perhaps the true subjects of Shirley Clarke's landmark doc.
  88. Un Flic (re-release)
    Haunted by death-obsessed men of action, Un Flic (A Cop) is a fitting final act for noir master Jean-Pierre Melville
  89. Furious 7
    For all the full-throttle dazzle of Furious 7, the best scenes are the quietest ones, in which these characters make observations about love, life, and family that would seem overcooked in any other movie.
  90. Cutie and the Boxer
    With an intimacy and empathy that's all the more powerful for its modesty, the film investigates the complicated feelings of resentment and affection between wife and husband.
  91. Computer Chess
    So far the funniest, headiest, most playfully eccentric American indie of the year, Bujalski's perceptive avant-garde comedy...teases out unanswered existential and behavioral questions about mankind's curious obsession with artificial intelligence and automation.
  92. Nebraska
    Nebraska is the antidote to other family charmers about goofballs in matching sweaters.
  93. The World Before Her
    With extraordinary access, Pahuja illuminates extraordinary conflicts and contradictions facing modern girls in a country even less ready for them than ours.
  94. He's Way More Famous Than You
    As unhinged as it is hilarious.
  95. The Painting (Le Tableau)
    With striking visuals reminiscent of Matisse and Chagall and a refreshingly (for domestic animation audiences) grown-up storyline, The Painting is almost reminiscent of, well, a work of art.
  96. The Girls in the Band
    The retro photos and footage are also bountiful and, natch, jazzily edited enough that the standard talking-head techniques are instantly forgivable.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Band Called Death
    A beautiful tale of life, love, music, and family, of things not working out but also working out just as predicted.
  98. Becoming Traviata
    A spare and ravishing doc.
  99. Old Dog
    Old Dog has the look and feel of a documentary, which adds senses of urgency and immediacy to a tale that moves at a languid, but never boring, pace.
  100. Heli
    A dead-eyed, lyrical art film that kicks you in the throat.
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