Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Mala Mala
    This film does not pander. Rather, it demands that the viewer rise to the occasion.
  2. Stray Dog
    Granik, director of Winter's Bone, captures scenes of rare power.
  3. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Whiskery and restless, grooving and grotesque, the documentarian Les Blank's long-suppressed film A Poem Is a Naked Person plays like your memories of some mad, stoned last-century summer.
  4. Counting
    What surprises (a little) and fascinates (a lot) are the town-to-town commonalities Counting invites you to appraise.
  5. Room
    Lenny Abrahamson's shattering drama Room borrows its fictional plot from the tabloids and strips it of sensationalism.
  6. A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film is novel-rich, so bristling with life that you might not notice how familiar it is in its contours.
  7. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery makes us question not only art, but the experts who claim to understand it best.
  8. Baby Driver
    Baby Driver is an almost perfect pastiche, a thoroughly enjoyable object. But sue me, I kind of miss the losers of the Cornetto Trilogy.
  9. The Iron Ministry
    It's always political when regular people speak plainly about their circumstances — here, it's also moving, revelatory, and often funny, offering plenty to mull over during the long shots of train workers trundling their food carts.
  10. The Mend
    It's a tough film to shake, a slice-of-life that slices, knifelike. It's a funny drama of brothers that first makes you hate its prickly leads but then, after steeping you in their bottomed-out day-to-day, might inspire you to hope for them.
  11. The Marquise of O
    Marquise is almost ironically uninflected, like a tense game of chess. But soon the no-nonsense two-shots and scarlet-satin self-consciousness let the story build to genuine fireworks. No costume-drama escapism here, just distilled social warfare.
  12. Butterfly Girl
    Throughout Butterfly Girl, Abbie jokes, rolls her eyes, and pushes herself to take chances despite the pain she always faces.
  13. Paul Taylor: Creative Domain
    A dance is not only motion, but emotion. This fascinating film reminds us how closely the two are linked.
  14. Chevalier
    Despite the claustrophobic setting and Tsangari's observational style, Chevalier doesn't register as hermetic or coolly condescending; the film feels loose and agile even amid so much capricious rule-making.
  15. The Fool
    Bykov's moral tale is clear-eyed and callused over, worrying not over individual lives but over a nation's soul.
  16. Office
    Wry and self-aware but never finger-wagging, Office looks back on an economic precipice and finds more humor and spirit than any other depiction yet made about it.
  17. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    Winter on Fire's thrilling rebellion is neither the beginning nor the end, but it is at least a truly heartening middle.
  18. Ixcanul
    Even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally premodern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.
  19. Bridget Jones's Baby
    As much as this latest installment draws on affection for the snappy first film, it's the differences that make Bridget Jones's Baby the warmest and most satisfying of the series.
  20. Of Men and War
    This film is raw in the truest sense, yet refined in its sympathy and scope.
  21. Frame by Frame
    Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography, Frame by Frame is about embedded journalists (the photographers) fighting the power, not kowtowing to it.
  22. The Creation of Meaning
    Rapisarda Casanova's film shows just how much natural splendor dominates the region, here caught at the height of estival glory.
  23. TransFatty Lives
    A doc as vibrant as its auteur's mind, even as his body is rendered immobile.
  24. dream/killer
    This is a real-life horror story, raw and galling — but not surprising. The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured.
  25. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It's both an important part of Ghibli's history and a gem in its own right.
  26. Men Go to Battle
    This isn't a film about the Civil War; it's about the minds of white folks so removed from plantation life that they feel they have no stake in it at all. It's not about back then — it's about being.
  27. Closet Monster
    [A] superb coming-of-age drama.
  28. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    Manically imaginative and very funny.
  29. River of Grass
    Reichardt pays clear homage to Breathless and Badlands, but her movie, the title of which is a local name for the Everglades, operates in its own ecosystem, teeming with the droll, shrewd observations about downwardly mobile life explored more solemnly in Reichardt's next two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.
  30. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    One of the most sincere and funny portraits of family life to come along in a while.
  31. The Fits
    For all the film's aestheticism, there's a clarity to this child's dilemma — conveyed ably by Hightower, who is a unique kind of actress.
  32. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Herzog smartly takes a broad, bird's-eye perspective of our early techno-evolution.
  33. The Lure
    The film's messages are cleverly wrapped in Smoczynska's entertaining, original vision. It's sexy, fearless, fun, and unrepentantly nasty.
  34. Fort Buchanan
    It's squirrelly, surprising, and elusive, but this beaut of a debut is no curio.
  35. Things to Come
    As we watch this woman lose her family, her status, and maybe even some part of her pride, we sense both the horror and the intoxication of freedom.
  36. Born in Flames
    Like her namesake, the filmmaker Lizzie Borden took an ax...to cinema conventions and tidy political resolutions in her 1983 landmark Born in Flames.
  37. Daughters of the Dust
    Daughters of the Dust abounds with stunning motifs and tableaux, the iconography seemingly sourced from dreams as much as from history and folklore. But however seductive and trance-inducing, the visual splendor of Dash's film is never vaporous.
  38. The Watermelon Woman
    Funny and smart, full of biting humor and astute observations about identity and history, Cheryl Dunye's audacious, joyous debut feature captures the process of falling hopelessly in love with the movies.
  39. Nuts!
    This marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid couldn't have come along at a better time.
  40. Fire at Sea
    The breach between these two worlds is part of Rosi’s formal and moral gambit.
  41. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    It proves to be not just interesting in how it foreshadows the filmmaker's more mature works, but also a gripping piece of storytelling in its own right.
  42. Above and Below
    The film is a wonder of desert skies, slick tunnels, bumptious fence- and wall-climbing, and occasional staged reveries.
  43. Notfilm
    [A] studious, rigorous, and surprisingly tender documentary.
  44. Sworn Virgin
    Cutting between present, childhood, and recent past, Bispuri constructs a subtle, richly emotional collage.
  45. Hockney
    Hockney is a little work of art of its own, even if it's so very nice and happy about everything.
  46. Approaching the Unknown
    Approaching the Unknown is the best science fiction movie since Gravity, and certainly the most melancholy since Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Solaris.
  47. Tikkun
    Shot like a photo album, gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, it continually suggests that crisis and struggle can be beautiful when viewed from the right angle.
  48. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.
  49. Kaili Blues
    First-time writer-director Bi Gan and cinematographer Wang Tianxing infuse the imagery with a feeling at once otherworldly and familiar — the kind of thing you can't put a name to but would swear you've already experienced.
  50. Loving
    Loving downplays the historical significance of its subject in favor of a quiet humanity.
  51. Personal Shopper
    When one goes to see Kristen Stewart — among the most quicksilver of her generation's performers — in Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper, a shape-shifting, resolutely of-this-moment ghost story that features her in nearly every frame, one goes not to watch her act but refract.
  52. Hell or High Water
    When the movie just sits with the characters on front porches or in backyards, Mackenzie's generous, hands-off approach with his actors — most of the conversation scenes play out in long takes with minimal camera movement — yields poignant rewards.
  53. Raw
    Raw isn’t derivative — it’s fresh, funny, and grounded in reality. Underneath all the blood and guts, this is the story of a woman whose body demands love in extremity and the only person who’ll ever understand her fully: her sister.
  54. Endless Poetry
    This self-reflexive ode to following muses, finding meaning in nothingness, and transcending the sensitive roadblocks between fathers and sons is loopy, irreverent, and more intensely personal than anything its mystic creator has invented before.
  55. The Final Master
    Xu (The Sword Identity) may not be a household name, but The Final Master proves that he's the next big thing in martial-arts cinema.
  56. The Phenom
    The Phenom unfolds as a series of quiet, incisive conversations that showcase subtle, insightful performances.
  57. 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.
  58. Summertime
    For all of its wise, welcome focus on the libidinal, Summertime additionally succeeds in presenting the liberationist fervor of the time without devolving into school-play pageantry.
  59. Ants on a Shrimp
    Like a well-executed fine-dining experience, this sleek documentary entertains, delights, and makes viewers comfortable without evident sweat.
  60. Command and Control
    Despite the high stakes, Command and Control is morbidly fun to watch, in the manner of good suspense thrillers and disaster films.
  61. Hollywood Beauty Salon
    These are stories crafted with care, with glimpses of the filmmaking process — a chance to see the camera operators and director themselves at times in awe of the fortitude they're witnessing.
  62. Spa Night
    There have been upbeat coming-out films (But I'm a Cheerleader) and tragic, infuriating ones (Boys Don't Cry, Brokeback Mountain). Andrew Ahn's Spa Night is executed on a significantly smaller scale, a deliberately anticlimactic one, which makes it all the more doleful.
  63. The Bad Batch
    No matter how confounding the story gets, details and humor ground the narrative, and a simple guiding premise about the importance of human connection and artistic expression fills in the blanks.
  64. Will You Dance with Me?
    An awkward, frequently transcendent document whose sense of rhythm, purpose, and narrative is as unlikely as it is ultimately persuasive, and whose fascination with moments of haunted impermanence signals, perhaps more than anything else, the mark of its maker.
  65. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    This doc is a tearjerker, but it's also enraging.
  66. Happy Hour
    Funny (sometimes caustically so), rueful, and bracingly honest, Happy Hour is also a movie defined by an unshakeable belief that any encounter holds the promise of magic.
  67. The Untamed
    The director’s strength is in crafting fully drawn, sympathetic characters you root for — a big accomplishment when they have to compete for audience attention with a sex monster.
  68. A Woman's Life
    The ending is a joy and a heartbreaker, but what lingers from this revelatory life is that compact world Jeanne inhabits, and how each tragedy, each happiness, and each everyday gesture together accrete into the woman we discover again and again.
  69. My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Kasper Collin's melancholy, beautiful feature debut does more than just chronicle this undervalued musician; it brings Ayler and his message of spiritual unity back to life.
  70. Creepy
    What's the opposite of a jump scare? Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has mastered it in the superb Creepy, revealing the upsetting details with such slow-build subtlety that you don't notice your skin crawling until it's halfway out the door.
  71. Always Shine
    Always Shine is a potent psychological thriller, all right. But it's also a powerful statement on the very industry that produced it.
  72. Tampopo
    Everyone needs nourishment, and Itami found humor and poignancy in how it’s provided and received.
  73. Portrait of a Garden
    Meditative in its slowness and exquisite beauty, Portrait of a Garden is more than a fine documentary — it's a balm for the soul.
  74. Behemoth
    This is a film about the devastation of Inner Mongolia and the systematic annihilation of its migrant workers, but it is no mere coup d'œil of righteous advocacy. It is a work of film art.
  75. Buster's Mal Heart
    It’s science fiction that’s complex, thoughtful and funny, like 12 Monkeys or Primer run through a Fargo filter.
  76. Your Name.
    Makoto Shinkai's lush mindbender Your Name has many elements that are familiar on their own but here combine to create something unique.
  77. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    It's rare that a film this outraged is also this calm.
  78. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.
  79. They Call Us Monsters
    Yes, this film is important for its insistence that we see these boys as capable of rehabilitation in the right environment. But it’s the movie’s daring structure and humanity that make it worthy of the Lear name.
  80. 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.
  81. Wonder
    It tempers its fairly blunt narrative approach by constantly shifting its perspective. It starts off as the portrait of a troubled child, but expands to become a film about community.
  82. The Beguiled
    Coppola’s a master at taking something that could be portentous and rendering it delicate, thereby reclaiming its depth.
  83. Tempestad
    Huezo’s approach situates us right there beside Miriam — it’s as if a new acquaintance is unburdening herself to trek south together.
  84. Starless Dreams
    The world needs to see this spare, revelatory film and hear these girls' pained and sometimes proud confessions.
  85. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Nowhere has Cohen's inner turmoil been better illuminated than in Tony Palmer's lost-and-found 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    Aenne Schwarz and Barbara Sukowa give strong performances as the author’s second and first wives, respectively, but this is Hader’s movie. His is one of the great performances of recent years.
  87. All These Sleepless Nights
    Marczak has captured the specifics of these young folks as they reel through a city that’s been born again, but the film should stir something true in the chest of anyone who ever was lucky enough to run free in their youth, even if only for a night.
  88. Landline
    Few period pieces get our dynamic relationship with the now so right, or chart so smartly how the present shifts even under the feet of the youngish.
  89. Dayveon
    Amman Abbasi’s lush and tender here’s-what-life’s-like debut, Dayveon, captures, in scenes of pained beauty, an adolescent wanderlust that Abbasi’s camera just seems to be observing.
  90. 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.
  91. Dina
    Dina is a story about resilience and a woman’s indomitable will to seek out her best life.
  92. Super Dark Times
    Both a thriller and meditation on the loss of innocence, Super Dark Times is rich with the minutiae of a bygone era...but Phillips and screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski press hard against the instinct for nostalgia.
  93. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Knowing the real-life inspiration for On the Beach at Night Alone may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better. But the movie’s charms work on a much more immediate level, in the way it captures the ever-shifting dynamic between men and women, and the difficulty of matching one’s feelings to one’s words.
  94. The Other Side of Hope
    For all the deadpan comedy and eccentric characterization, Kaurismäki anchors the film in Khaled’s story and his immigration anxieties, all depicted with quiet humanity that never feels exaggerated. It’s a beautiful companion piece to Le Havre, and a film that will gently warm your cold, cynical heart.
  95. A Fantastic Woman
    A Fantastic Woman shows that the obvious insults a trans person may endure will, of course, weigh on the psyche, but the death by a thousand well-meaning cuts hurts as well.
  96. Les Hautes Solitudes (1974)
    Les Hautes Solitudes is both ravishing portraiture and wordless biography, a life and aura distilled to glances and gestures.
  97. Cries from Syria
    His interviews are informative and captivating, but the film’s gut-punch immediacy comes from the astounding visuals caught by participants on digital cameras and cellphones, including shocking images of Assad’s torturers at work.
  98. The Disaster Artist
    Franco’s own movie works best as a portrait of the complicated friendship between Greg and Tommy, and it’s an inspired idea to have real-life brothers Dave and James play best friends — we can sense alternating undercurrents of exasperation and affection beneath every exchange.
  99. By the Time It Gets Dark
    It's a film, a rather gorgeous one, of glances and ephemera and delicate metaphors.
  100. Gemini
    For all the sharp-witted conversations and pinpoint performances, Gemini most impresses as a piece of clean, confident visual storytelling.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »