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. The Wonders
    The Wonders has an intimate, subtly buzzing power.
  2. Goodbye to Language 3D
    To muddle through confusion, boredom, vaguely formed interest, brief elation, and confusion again is to experience the work as its creator intended.
  3. Macbeth
    This is a Macbeth to sink into and shrink from, not one to parse.
  4. Wild Tales
    Wild Tales is loose-limbed, rowdy, and exhilarating — in its vibrant lunacy, and with its cartoonishly brash violence, it's a little bit Almodóvar, a little bit Tarantino.
  5. The Blue Room
    Co-writer/director/proudly nude star Amalric cuts everything to the quick: Most shots have the feel of still photos, the camera firmly planted, and the movie always hustles us to the next, back and forward in time, the effect part Resnais and part staccato Kodak slideshow.
  6. National Gallery
    Like so much of his celebrated work, documentarian Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery is long, leisurely paced, wide-ranging, meticulously crafted, intellectually intricate, and touched with profundity.
  7. Mommy
    Mommy is first and foremost a mother-and-son story, but it's also a surprisingly delicate exploration of lonely lives, and the temporary islands of companionship that make them bearable.
  8. Leviathan
    This is a dense, multilayered picture, one firmly rooted in a specific landscape, a dramatic coastal spot dotted with the carcasses of decrepit fishing boats, as well as the magnificent skeleton of one long-dead whale.
  9. Bird People
    Firmly rooted in everyday particulars — primarily the transactions (business, emotional, or otherwise) facilitated by the time- and space-obliterating devices to which we are constantly tethered — Ferran's movie dares to venture, for much of its second half, into fantasy.
  10. Coming Home
    Coming Home obviously has historical and political significance for Chinese who lived through the Cultural Revolution, and for families that were torn apart by it. But Zhang tells this particular story in a deeply personal way — the time and place of its setting have a specific meaning, but its emotional contours spread out into something bigger.
  11. Force Majeure
    Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.
  12. Violette
    Provost's film, like its heroine, is full of active, sparking nerves.
  13. Small Small Thing
    There are many reasons to see this very difficult film, not least to face the grim realities in Liberia, and to wonder what more could be done to save lives and preserve the human spirit when it is so clearly yearning to burn bright given any small small chance.
  14. See You Next Tuesday
    Tobia approaches comedy in the same way that John Cassavetes did, which is to say that he embraces the absurdity of human behavior at the same time that he recoils from it.
  15. Closed Curtain
    Possibly the Iranian new wave's last meta-man, Panahi is in an ideal position to make the unique methodology of his filmmaking merge with its substance. But he's always been fascinated by how a film's bell-jar bubble can be punctured, leaving a viscous interface between real and cinematic.
  16. A Master Builder
    Demme, following in the footsteps of the late Louis Malle, takes a spare, direct approach to the material -- his economy pays off in quiet eloquence.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cannibal
    Despite the film's leisurely pace, nothing is wasted -- no word, no image, no sound. Every element is blended together to create individual scenes that come to feel like stand-alone photographs, leaving viewers both captivated and even ultimately feeling compassion for the anti-hero.
  18. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    The lovely ball-&-socket meeting of the two artists' sensibilities is what makes the doc sing, even if it is a chronicle of a death foretold.
  19. Housebound
    Housebound is a tad long, and its murder mystery a bit of a muddle, but that doesn’t matter. The final third is virtuoso.
  20. We Are Mari Pepa
    We Are Mari Pepa is a sweaty, urgent, beautifully honest bliss out.
  21. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Though it's made with lots of modern tricks and technology, it's old-fashioned in the best sense, and not just because it's set in the Sixties.
  22. Expedition to the End of the World
    Dencik’s gorgeous, surprising, meditative film opens up one of the world’s last unknown places, and it will also make you want to befriend every Dane you can.
  23. Miss Meadows
    Holmes and Dale are ideal together, turning a polite courtship and charged relationship (including a sex scene that's both giddy and profound) into a twisted, compelling expression of unconditional love.
  24. Memphis
    Sutton's Memphis framed in fascinating layers -- leaves and tree limbs, wig shops and overgrown gravel roads. It's a movie of a place and a character rather than about them.
  25. The Look of Silence
    If it's a far less flashy film than The Act of Killing, it's also a better and possibly more honest one.
  26. Faith Connections
    [A] gorgeous and unsettling documentary.
  27. Still Alice
    The triumph of Still Alice is that it’s not about an illness; it’s about a person.
  28. Ned Rifle
    Hartley's humor and intellectual musings are, as always, fully present, but by anchoring them to a genuinely compelling story of familial retribution, he's made his best film in years.
  29. The Supreme Price
    Lipper does an excellent job of using her film as a vehicle for the voices and concerns of Nigerians, and especially of Nigerian women, who are traditionally expected to stay at home while men operate in the public sphere. But Lipper does not limit her camera to political struggles.
  30. Waiting for August
    What's perhaps most moving in Waiting for August, a quiet film of weight and joy, is its sense of desperate normalcy.
  31. Watchers of the Sky
    Accomplishes the nearly impossible trick of updating viewers on the prevalence of genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries without rubbing our noses in our failure to stop it.
  32. Stations of the Elevated
    A 45-minute proto-hip-hop bliss-out, a masterpiece of train- and tag-spotting dedicated to memorializing the extravagant graffiti on its era's MTA trains and how those trains rumbled across Brooklyn and the Bronx, bearing not just exhausted New Yorkers but gifted artists' urgent personal expression.
  33. A Requiem for Syrian Refugees
    Urgent, deeply painful yet lovely in its aesthetics.
  34. Moana
    It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath everything, is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat.
  35. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    Valedictory and elegiac, Keach's film captures a performer who only truly seems to inhabit himself during the performances.
  36. Happy Valley
    Nothing in this film (and little in any other movie this year) compares to the scenes of Sandusky's adopted son, Matt, recounting his realization that the charges of pedophilia against Sandusky squared with the ways Sandusky had treated him, too — treatment he'd never been brave enough to admit.
  37. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    If beauty and revelation is your bottom line, Anthony Powell's rhapsodic Antarctica: A Year on Ice will prove a grand time at the movies.
  38. Zero Motivation
    Zero Motivation opens as bleak, rebellious comedy but grows into a smart and moving story of entering adulthood.
  39. Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    Our glimpses of what's already occurred and what will soon come are vivid and impressionistic, prophetic warnings about which everyone seems powerless to do anything other than silently observe.
  40. Butter on the Latch
    There are no jump-scares in this sensuous thriller, and the lack of anything corporeal on which to focus our unease only makes Butter on the Latch more darkly exhilarating.
  41. Monk With a Camera
    Monk With a Camera hints at answers, but imposes nothing. Like a good photograph, or a wise abbot, it only presents the evidence and allows us to arrive at truth.
  42. About Elly (2009)
    This superb, suspenseful film, completed in 2009, opens as a playful comedy of vacationing couples and awkward romance, one that might be set in the French countryside, but by the end has become a moral drama likely to corrode your certainties.
  43. Ballet 422
    Ballet 422 is more visually sumptuous than most narratives you're likely to see this year, featuring careful compositions that make watching the film an aesthetic experience as much as an intellectual one.
  44. Remote Area Medical
    Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.
  45. Time Out of Mind
    Time Out of Mind is an experiment in empathy, an examination of bureaucracy and streetlife mundanity, and a movie that many will find a tough sit.
  46. Human Capital
    The biggest suspense: As everything gets worse for everyone, will this consummate director's outraged worldview afford anyone any pity? At first you'll seethe — then your heart will ache.
  47. The Visit
    The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's witty, crowd-jolting spook-house of an eleventh feature, is its writer-director's best movie since the tail-end of the last Clinton era. And it's the best studio horror flick in recent years, combining the but-what's-in-those-shadows? immersion of The Conjuring, James Wan's basement-wandering simulator, with the crack scripting and meta-cinematic surprises of Shyamalan's best early films.
  48. The Jungle Book
    If only all blockbusters could be this exciting, engrossing, and beautiful.
  49. The Revenant
    If you can work up interest in such meager material, the film is a chilling, stirring, experiential immersion in what life-and-death drama might actually feel like.
  50. Songs from the North
    In Songs From the North, the South Korean–born, U.S.-based filmmaker Soon-Mi Yoo takes her camera to North Korea and, through a purposeful mix of on-location footage, poetic intertitles ("Is North Korea the loneliest place on Earth?"), and archival media, creates an empathetic snapshot of a country that is almost never depicted in such an accessible light.
  51. The Salt of the Earth
    The movie Wenders and Juliano have made is a tribute that feels both grand and modest in scale: Just as Salgado's photographs do, it extends the notion of friends and family to include every citizen of the world.
  52. Appropriate Behavior
    Forget its generic title, its breakup setup, and its indie-standard Brooklyn walk-and-talks: Writer/director Desiree Akhavan's Appropriate Behavior is the freshest comedy of life and love in the city since Obvious Child.
  53. Something, Anything
    This is a sure-handed, complex portrait of one woman's attempts to feel alive.
  54. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints is a marvel of neorealism, with nonprofessional actors facing the same hurdles as their characters and writer/director Syeed improvising in shifting circumstances.
  55. Hard to Be a God
    Textually, the setting's brutalist conflation between the far future and the distant past makes the film timeless, an elusive fable told with the viscous immediacy of a life on the diseased edge of civilization.
  56. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    [Wiig's] great, but the film's in the pocket of Powley's rib-high corduroys from the second she struts onscreen — and long after she takes them off.
  57. Dope
    Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it's not new at all.
  58. Tangerine
    In the early minutes you might not be sure what you're watching. Tangerine's a comedy, of course, laced with rambunctious, exuberantly ragged dialogue. But by the end, Baker and his actors have led us to a place beyond comedy — you may still be laughing, but your breath catches a little on the way out.
  59. Z for Zachariah
    The film works on its own terms, capturing, at least, the mournful vibe of O'Brien's book. What's more, Zobel's revision opens up plenty of space for the three actors who inhabit this circumscribed little world, all of whom are terrific.
  60. Grandma
    It gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that's not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.
  61. Slow West
    Its central journey lives up to the title: Maclean finds time to savor rivers and starscapes and layers of light and mountainous land. The dialogue is flighty yet weighty, each line like some delicate woodcut.
  62. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    Garbus's film is a portrait of a soul torn apart by forces beyond it and within it.
  63. The Wolfpack
    The Wolfpack is more like a diorama of the Angulos' unusual childhood than an explanatory documentary.
  64. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    There's something wonderful in how these scenes, so breezy and funny, reveal so much.
  65. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    Ronit's remarkable sensitivity makes Gett a tough but essential melodrama.
  66. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    The complexity of feminism for young girls today is displayed with rare hilarity and insight.
  67. 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.
  68. Aferim!
    Quite possibly the only film ever made focused on the centuries-long enslavement of the Romani in Eastern Europe, Aferim! plays like a sleight of hand, amusing us at a distance with vulgarisms and entrancing us with countryside while the bloody work of civilization grinds on out of the corner of our eye.
  69. Eastern Boys
    What a relief to watch this small, expert film — a pane of glass in a concrete wall — that whispers, that dares to stand still and witness ordinary human pain.
  70. 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.
  71. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    Diliberto has managed to make a political comedy that seems at once tremendously funny and intensely serious — a provocative, and perhaps even important, combination.
  72. 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.
  73. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve, and visual charm.
  74. Iris
    Like all good documentaries, Iris is about much more than what we see on the surface, no matter how dazzling that surface may be.
  75. 52 Tuesdays
    Grippingly plotted and exquisitely thoughtful, 52 Tuesdays is a poignant reminder that neither confusion nor crisis is doomed to be calamitous.
  76. Experimenter
    The movie is itself a rat-maze of one-sided mirrors, windows upon windows, anonymous hallways, compartmentalized instances of watching, being watched, seeing and not-seeing.
  77. Lambert & Stamp
    Cooper's interest is in the collaboration between the talent and its managers, in the way the duo urged their charges to begin to conceive of their sound, look, marketing, and live performances as all expressive of a singular vision.
  78. Dior and I
    Dior and I is a great fashion movie, but it's also a superb picture about the art of management, applicable to any field.
  79. Black Souls
    The makers of Black Souls, a superior Italian gangster movie, deserve praise for executing with atypical sensitivity a generic times-are-changing/nostalgia-for-an-imaginary-chivalrous-yesteryear scenario.
  80. Soul Boys of the Western World
    In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.
  81. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    Gibney dissects Jobs's image with the calm curiosity of a coroner.
  82. One Cut, One Life
    It's a fault of feminism, of artistry, of generosity, for the older woman to envy one younger. And yet. How do we escape the myths into which we are born? We tell them, and show the hard work of telling.
  83. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    Don't Think I've Forgotten is a testament to how much a song can mean: You can destroy the vinyl it's been recorded on, but the sound itself, and all it stands for, is indestructible. Groove is in the heart.
  84. Heaven Knows What
    In the thinly veiled version of her life that appears onscreen, the actress unforgettably shows the deadening toll of always being on the move, only to return to the exact same place.
  85. American Made
    American Made is his first effort in a long while that feels like an honest-to-god Tom Cruise movie; suddenly, his smile means something again. But there’s one huge, beautiful catch: Doug Liman’s electric film is clear-eyed about the cynicism and corruption beneath its hero’s anxious grin. It voraciously breaks down both the star and the country he has symbolized for so much of his career.
  86. The Seven Five
    The Seven Five makes for a fascinating character study, but the doc's drama is also compelling.
  87. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    The film is fascinating, even if you're resistant to this dark star's gravity.
  88. Cemetery of Splendor
    As is his custom, Weerasethakul addresses his nation's martial history with the lightest of touches.
  89. The Lobster
    Lanthimos's consistently hilarious, borderline anti-humor slowly gives way to a romantic streak of surprising warmth.
  90. Amy
    A surprisingly seamless biographical documentary, one that, even though it's been constructed largely from found elements, feels gracefully whole.
  91. Tale of Tales
    Tale of Tales is the most faithful and creatively rendered fairytale onscreen to date, bizarrely satisfying and totally worth a patient, focused viewing.
  92. Green Room
    Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room is an impeccably crafted cinematic torture machine — in the best possible way.
  93. In the Shadow of Women
    In so shrewdly exploring the illusions — namely (self-) deception — required to keep a dyad functioning, Garrel shows just how much we all remain, consciously or not, in the dark.
  94. Disorder
    [Winocour] elevates the action hero beyond his physical assets, drilling through his psyche to offer a rare and welcome lens into a type of man usually reduced to stoicism or sulking, hiding behind a rubber mask.
  95. Uncertain Terms
    The film is brisk, brief, well acted, smartly crafted, and shrewdly judged.
  96. My Golden Days
    There is serious pain in this movie — pain that endures throughout the years — but also a sincere love for life lived, and life remembered.
  97. I Believe in Unicorns
    The performances are strong, the imaginary visions are suggestive and fleeting, and the film as a whole is swoony, tender, skittish, a little scary — in short, this is what young love feels like. More Meyerhoff, please!
  98. Every Last Child
    This film is a wakeup call in the best sense: urgent, clear, understated.
  99. Listen to Me Marlon
    There's nothing quite like it in the world of Hollywood documentaries, though Riley's presentation of this rich material is at times a little discomfiting.
  100. Being Evel
    He may not be likable, but he remains fascinating. The film is on firm ground when examining Knievel's actual measurable impact: the action/extreme sports that have flourished since his retirement.
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