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. Cuba and the Cameraman
    Cuba and the Cameraman distills thousands of hours of footage into 113 lively, whirlwind minutes, covering big news events — the Mariel Boatlift; a Castro visit to the United Nations; the Communist leader’s death in 2016 — but also always taking the time to capture the everyday drift of life.
  2. 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gigi
    Gigi has more imaginative use of cinema than all our recent pseudo-realist movies put together.
    • Village Voice
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Venus
    Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.
  5. The Academy of Muses
    In effect, [Guerín] seems to be making Pinto's case — the intellectual necessity of passion and Muse-force, in order to compel men toward Art — while utterly enjoying the messy, unpredictable, real-world tumult the women make of it.
  6. The Love Witch
    Anna Biller's ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love.
  7. Billy Liar (re-release)
    Often seems less a British new wave front-runner than a charming nouvelle vague tagalong,
  8. 3 Women
    Today, the movie doesn't portend Altman's subsequent tailspin into irrelevance as much as it suggests a restlessness with the comic realism he had mastered.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Appropriately, Riedelsheimer shoots Goldsworthy's mini-megaliths with a landscape painter's eye; set to Fred Firth's modernist score, some images verge on Kubrick territory.
  10. The Second Mother
    As we switch sympathies from scene to scene, Muylaert forces us to think big about the clash between idealism and acceptance, a philosophical war that spills beyond the walls of this small story into every corner of our own lives.
  11. Nowhere to Hide
    Both Sharif and Ahmed make sure audiences leave Nowhere to Hide well aware that Iraq remains a war zone — one where innocent people remain caught in the crossfire.
  12. Window Horses
    Many independent animated films in recent years have adopted a hand-drawn and/or collage-heavy aesthetic, but few are quite as heartfelt and charming as Ann Marie Fleming’s Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming.
  13. Three Times
    My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.
  14. Ajami
    To the extent that its sympathies lie with the occupied and with those who must do the work of enforcing occupation, Ajami brings a warmly generous spirit to its subjects, almost all of whom become gangsters by default. No one is demonized or sanctified. The movie's sensibilities are humanistic.
  15. Viola
    The world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    127 Hours
    As Boyle's film flits from the real world-the heavy reality of a man in a canyon, pinned, near death-to the world of dreams and delusions, so Franco's performance transforms, encompassing both universes.
  17. Tell No One
    Among the movie's many delights are the fluctuating rhythms of its pacing, an atmospheric volatility that sets off the doctor's blooming paranoia against his sunlit, leafy surroundings, and a terrific cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas.
  18. The Illusionist
    For its 80 minutes, the movie creates the illusion that not just Tati but his form of cerebral slapstick lives.
  19. The Deep Blue Sea
    Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience, that we can or will find every quality that we want in a single person.
  20. The End of the Tour
    [The] conversation peters out as the film grinds on, the men getting competitive and the camera nosing into their faces. Everyone involved sifts the material a little too hard for clues to Wallace's eventual suicide.
  21. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Soberly entertaining documentary.
  22. Safe Conduct
    Safe Conduct -- a rangy, irreverent, episodic odyssey through French filmmaking during the Occupation -- is one of the very best movies ever made about the life of moviemaking.
  23. El Velador
    El Velador still sharply conveys what life is like in a traumatized nation.
  24. War for the Planet of the Apes
    The effects are incredible, the action is exciting, the music is great, and Andy Serkis, once again embodying a non-human character through motion-capture technology, remains terrific. But there’s something more here.
  25. Duma
    Duma turns out to be surprisingly flat, with little of the child's-eye imagery that gave "The Black Stallion" its poetic thrust and too much of the narrative gear-grinding that grounded stretches of "Fly Away Home."
  26. The Constant Gardener
    Although le Carré's story may seem predictable and unduly focused on the plight of a pale, wealthy Old Worlder adrift in a sea of needy East Africans, the movie's human material is masterfully manipulated.
  27. Short Term 12
    It's a delicate yet passionate creation, modest in scope but almost overwhelming in its emotional intricacy, ambition, and resonance. Easily one of the best films so far this year, it's a nearly perfect blend of pimple-faced naturalism, righteous moral fury, nuanced social insight, and unsentimental but devastating drama.
  28. A History of Violence
    Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it--impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way.
  29. Our Beloved Month of August
    Transparently a movie about a group of filmmakers who attempt to possess a particular location, Our Beloved Month relaxes into a meditation on the mysteries of place, personality, and process.
  30. Sugar
    Without a trace of didacticism, Boden and Fleck portray the insidious details of exploitation and hollow American maxims.
  31. 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.
  32. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Catch a Thief
    Hitchcock makes it come off with a pair of beauties named Cary Grant and The French Riviera. [09 Nov 1955, p.6]
    • Village Voice
  34. The Lobster
    Lanthimos's consistently hilarious, borderline anti-humor slowly gives way to a romantic streak of surprising warmth.
  35. The Squid and the Whale
    Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.
  36. Winged Migration
    Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration is merely about birds, and though you learn less about the various species Perrin circled the globe to document than you might from an afternoon with Animal Planet, you become intensely chummy with the process and labor of flying.
  37. Rebels of the Neon God
    Tsai isn't without mischief — one key to this film's hypnotic power is humor so subtle it's practically subliminal — but his preferred takeaway is the pathos, the still-universal frustration, of an unanswered ringtone.
  38. School of Rock
    Jack Black is consistently hilarious--and not just in his dreams of moshpit glory.
  39. Star Trek
    Not only does this Star Trek proffer smart thrills and slick kicks, but it builds upon the original's history–from its very first pilot episode to Robert Wise's 1979 "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and beyond–while creating an entirely new future.
  40. A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is full of fabulous, virtuoso action set pieces, but mere hours after seeing it, what I’m already flashing on the most are the ways in which each member of this family, children and adults alike, tries to carry the weight of their central burden, which isn’t fear and dread, but guilt and grief, two monsters no third act plot twist can ever quite vanquish.
  41. The Namesake
    The Namesake carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair's more lightweight movies so much fun to look at--"Monsoon Wedding" was a dandy piece of froth, and "Vanity Fair" survives only on its looks--but it's a quieter, more mature work.
  42. 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.
  43. Hunger
    A superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands.
  44. Howl's Moving Castle
    An organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and seethingly inventive.
  45. In the Family
    With an incisive understanding of character, believably naturalistic acting, and lengthy scenes that don't feel stretched out so much as given room to breathe, In the Family proves that smart direction and an innate feeling for one's material trumps potentially precious subject matter.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burn
    In this lively and affecting documentary, filmmakers Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez show that Detroit is burning. Literally.
  47. A Hijacking
    Danish director Tobias Lindholm's wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the shape of believable fiction, although the movie is most remarkable for everything it doesn't show.
  48. Crimson Gold
    Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    Kuenne lovingly assembles home-movie footage and new interviews, while deftly borrowing a narrative trick from fiction--the plot twist--to create a true-crime story so gripping, devastating, and ultimately unforgettable that it easily trumps any thriller Hollywood has to offer this year.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Phenomenal rockumentary.
  51. The Trip
    The verbal jousts are droll and the countryside is splendid, although the food - an endless succession of fussy little presentations - may be an acquired taste.
  52. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    A mild upkick in pacing and texture can be credited to director Alfonso Cuarón (more Little Princess than Y Tu Mamá), who avoids Chris Columbus's mastodon-like setups and knows a bit more about whipping up atmospherics.
  53. Michael Clayton
    Gilroy's up to the challenge, as is his uniformly astounding cast--Clooney, especially, as the charmed and charming man stripped of his superpowers, but also Wilkinson and Swinton as the mirror images of each other.
  54. Levitated Mass
    With a deft hand, Pray juxtaposes a history of Heizer's revolutionary career as a "negative space" sculptor with an insider's view of the insanely complex planning it took to move the two-story monolith.
  55. Downfall
    Downfall may be grimly self-important and inescapably trivializing. But we should be grateful that German cinema is more inclined to normalize the nation's history than rewrite it.
  56. The Spectacular Now
    Director James Ponsoldt gives us long, loose, single-shot courtship scenes, each a marvel of staging and performance.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Man Godfrey
    In one of her greatest roles, as burbling blonde heiress Irene Bullock in Gregory La Cava’s 1934 screwball masterpiece My Man Godfrey, Lombard creates a ditz so rare, a creature so otherwordly in her oblivion to what others call reality, that she comes off less as a thing of flesh and blood than as a shimmering cloud of butterflies flying in perfect, girl-shaped formation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let the Right One In
    A coolly balanced and utterly compelling examination of alienation and love.
  59. Rams
    The movie, wry and melancholy, doesn't linger over its artistry.
  60. Big Words
    Drumming doesn't quite have the skills to finesse the varying tones demanded by his textured script...and he could have taken one more pass on smoothing out character arcs, which are too truncated to be believable in a few cases. Still, the ensemble cast is fantastic, and Drumming is a talent to watch.
  61. 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
  62. 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.
  63. A Stray
    Writer-director Musa Syeed has conjured a drama rich with incident...but most of the turns of plot feel organic, ours to discover, as long as we're paying attention.
  64. Nuts!
    This marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid couldn't have come along at a better time.
  65. Marjorie Prime
    Leave it to Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) to make a science fiction movie that consists of little more than scenes of two characters talking in plushly appointed living rooms.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    Akira Kurosawa once said that Toshiro Mifune could give him in three feet of film the emotion any other actor would take 10 to deliver, but in a single flash of Fonda's electric turquoise orbs, Leone (Kurosawa's first and sincerest flatterer-imitator) managed to say as much about John Ford, the devil, and the corruptions of the Way Out Western world as the genre ever would.
  67. Steve Jobs
    This is a swift and searing attempt to pull back the curtain on Jobs and, in the process, investigate the relationship between the myth and the man.
  68. Marley
    Thoroughly researched and packed with phenomenal archival footage, it's a rousing tribute to a mesmerizing performer that forgoes blind hero worship.
  69. 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.
  70. Touching the Void
    Unexpectedly bridges genres -- it's a buddy movie, a horror story, a boy's-own adventure, and a near metaphysical meditation on the limits of human endurance.
  71. Le Havre
    Le Havre is utopian precisely because it shows everything as it is not.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    However uplifting, To Be Heard, shot over the course of several years, takes a surprisingly unflinching look at the home lives of the three high schoolers.
  73. 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.
  74. Embrace of the Serpent
    Colombian director Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent is a legitimate stunner, a river-trip that will mesmerize and jack with you, leaving you not quite certain, at its end, how to go about the rest of your day.
  75. Side by Side
    At its most fascinating, Side by Side examines the idea that changing formats means changing not just the way movies are made but watched, adjusting the essence of what looks and feels "real."
  76. Days of Glory
    Days of Glory is as moving as it is ingenuous, with each doomed character symbolizing a different response to the collective dilemma these men face as Arabs with divided loyalties.
  77. My Summer of Love
    Slowly evolves into an oddly affecting mood piece.
  78. Isle of Dogs
    Anderson has a sharp grasp of slapstick and visual humor, and he uses deadpan about as well as anybody since the great silent comedians. But for all the laughs and the social resonance, Anderson and his team have first and foremost conjured a work of spellbinding loveliness.
  79. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    There was no happy ending, but if Burma VJ's account of the efficacy of dictatorship threatens to crush you, the sight of a sturdy young back disappearing into the mountains, returning from a Thailand hideout for another round of bearing witness, should make your heart burst.
  80. Blissfully Yours
    A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy.
  81. Read My Lips
    The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.
  82. The Return
    Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.
  83. Mademoiselle Chambon
    Discretely drawn and elegantly photographed, Mademoiselle Chambon gives a French, working-class love triangle the "Brief Encounter" treatment.
  84. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Leisurely and digressive, this generally exhilarating saga ("a storm of misadventures" per Ruiz) variously suggests Victor Hugo, Stendhal, and (thanks in part to the unnatural, emphatic yet uninflected, acting) Mexican telenovelas. The score is richly romantic; the period locations are impeccable.
  85. Flamenco, Flamenco
    Flamenco Flamenco is the most beautifully photographed film in recent memory. Come for the dance, stay for the light.
  86. Approaching the Elephant
    The faults and merits of the free-school movement are elucidated with a steely, journalistic rigor. More surprising is that this candid glimpse plays as exhilarating drama.
  87. Certain Women
    Certain Women is a kind, loving, and deeply moving portrait of bighearted small-town people.
  88. Mountain
    The relationship between image and music, here, proves more rich and rewarding than the movies generally offer today, as one is not clearly subordinate to the other.
  89. Frozen River
    If there's one thing this movie gets dead right, it's the desperation of impoverished single mothers trying to fend for their children.
  90. Heal the Living
    At once sorrowful and optimistic, Heal the Living captures the terrifying fragility of life, even as it also recognizes the strength derived from the many connections — organic, emotional, and associative — that bind and define us.
  91. Love Is Strange
    Sachs and his performers know that the perfect marriage is a thing of phantom beauty — it doesn't exist, yet we persist in believing that someone out there must have it.
  92. Blow-Up
    A prize ‘60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni’s what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate—if not ponder.
  93. The Assassin
    Hou uses very few close-ups here, preferring to tell his story mostly through movement: combat, dance, the act of passing through a landscape of satiny green firs or silvery birch trees and just watching. Shu conveys complicated feelings — longing, regret, anxiety — with little more than the tilt of her chin or the set of her shoulders.
  94. In Jackson Heights
    It's a work of community portraiture that slowly develops into collective drama
  95. The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
    What could have been an impossibly bleak viewing is actually made more unnerving through DeFriest's droll humor and acceptance of his fate — rather than being Zen-like, he's prickly and dark, with such dazzlingly high native intelligence that you mourn for potential needlessly wasted.
  96. Dream of Light
    More analytical than contemplative, never less than straightforward, Dream of Light makes no showy bid for the sublime.
  97. Late Marriage
    Kosashvili's camera is restrained, the better to render Late Marriage superbly brash, raunchy, and confrontational.
  98. One Day in September
    It could be described as the most gripping political thriller to hit the big screen in many years, although given the events it depicts through interviews, photographs, and news footage, the words "gripping" and "thriller" have inappropriately frivolous and commercial associations.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Concert for George
    Both a heartwarming tribute to the late Beatle and a study of hair patterns in the aging British male, Concert for George, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall a year to the day after Harrison's death, manages both reverence and joy.
  100. 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.
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