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. 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.
  2. The Hurt Locker
    A full-throttle body shock of a movie. It gets inside you like a virus, puts your nerves in a blender, and twists your guts into a Gordian knot.
  3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    For the reportedly painstaking labor it took to create, the film is a marvel to behold--with wonderful shifts in perspective, an intensely tactile design, and an intentional herky-jerkiness of motion that only enriches the make-believe atmosphere.
  4. The White Ribbon
    Detailed yet oblique, leisurely but compelling, perfectly cast and irreproachably acted, the movie has a seductively novelistic texture complete with a less-than-omniscient narrator.
  5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu's brilliantly discomfiting second feature is one long premonition of disaster.
  6. Killer of Sheep
    Killer of Sheep is an urban pastoral--an episodic series of scenes that are sweet, sardonic, deeply sad, and very funny.
  7. Pan's Labyrinth
    Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics.
  8. Up
    The first 10 minutes of Up are flawless; the final 80 minutes, close enough. (Though, note this: Do not see Up in 3-D. It's inessential to the tale and altogether distracting.)
  9. There Will Be Blood
    This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution.
  10. The Dark Knight
    The Dark Knight will give your adrenal glands their desired workout, but it will occupy your mind, too, and even lead it down some dim alleyways where most Hollywood movies fear to tread.
  11. Police, Adjective
    Police, Adjective is a deadly serious as well as dryly humorous analysis of bureaucratic procedure and, particularly, the tyranny of language. Images may record reality, but words define it.
  12. No Country for Old Men
    The most measured, classical film of their (Coen Brothers) 23-year career, and maybe the best.
  13. WALL-E
    A film that's both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate.
  14. Hunger
    A superbly balanced piece of work, addressing the passion of Irish Republican martyr Bobby Sands.
  15. Tulpan
    In every respect, this unclassifiable movie is an amazing accomplishment.
  16. Knocked Up
    Ultimately, what makes Knocked Up a terrific film--one of the year's best, easily--is its relaxed, shaggy vibe; if it feels improvised in places, that's because Apatow trusts his actors enough to let them make it up as they go, like the people they're playing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Zodiac
    Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire."
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bourne Ultimatum
    Bravura doesn't begin to describe Greengrass's skill in mounting these complex sequences...This is, simply put, some of the most accomplished filmmaking being done anywhere for any purpose.
  19. Taxi Driver
    Taxi Driver was a powerfully summarizing work. It synthesized noir, neorealist, and New Wave stylistics; it assimilated Hollywood’s recent vigilante cycle, drafting then-déclassé blaxploitation in the service of a presumed tell-it-like-it-is naturalism that, predicated on a frank, unrelenting representation of racism, violence, and misogyny, was even more racist, violent, and misogynist than it allowed. [35th Anniversary Release]
  20. Masculine Feminine
    Directed by anyone else, Masculine Feminine--one of three movies that Godard made in his peak year, 1966--would be a masterpiece. For the young JLG it's business as usual.
  21. Howl's Moving Castle
    An organic, childlike wonder, fabulously unpredictable and seethingly inventive.
  22. Last Days
    The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.
    • 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.
  24. The Conformist
    Bertolucci's masterpiece--made when he was all of 29--will be the most revelatory experience a fortunate pilgrim will have in a theater this year is a foregone conclusion.
  25. The Intruder
    The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough--her (Claire Denis) most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling.
  26. Days of Heaven
    It seems almost incontestably...the most gorgeously photographed film ever made. [23 March 1999]
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Water
    This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom.
  28. Flags of Our Fathers
    To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Grindhouse
    This monumentally pointless movie is best summarized by a line from Planet Terror: "At some point in your life, you find a use for every useless talent you have." Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about godd--- time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.
  30. Ten Canoes
    To watch this movie (shot in breathtaking widescreen by cinematographer Ian Jones) is to enter into a whole new language of symbols and meaning, the likes of which I have rarely encountered in cinema outside of the African tribal films of Ousmane Sembene.
  31. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    In narrative terms, not that much happens, but as for Harry's emotional journey--well, that's nearly epic.
  32. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    It's all true--every magical, exhilarating, infuriating, dumbfounding, jaw-dropping second of Gordon's miniature masterpiece.
  33. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The movie grabs hold and runs you through the wringer.
  34. I'm Not There.
    I'm Not There is the movie of the year.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    U2 3D
    The performances, culled from seven shows on the “Vertigo” tour from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, burn with the old unforgettable fire.
  36. Paranoid Park
    The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.
  37. Flight of the Red Balloon
    Flight of the Red Balloon is in a class by itself. In its unexpected rhythms and visual surprises, its structural innovations and experimental perfs, its creative misunderstandings and its outré syntheses, this is a movie of genius.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Adam Resurrected
    One cannot recommend this film strongly enough.
  39. The Night of the Hunter
    Laughton understood Agee's proximity to Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie of its day.
  40. La Ciénaga
    A veritable Chekhov tragicomedy of provincial life.
  41. Eureka
    A film of rare tenderness and mystery.
  42. Zhantai
    One of the richest films of the past decade.
  43. La Commune (Paris, 1871)
    Watkins restages history in its own ruins, uses the media as a frame, and even so, manages to imbue his narrative with amazing presence. No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action.
  44. Quadrophenia (re-release)
    It remains one of the most wrenching films about adolescent angst, thanks largely to the performance of Phil Daniels.
  45. Madadayo
    Unabashedly personal and uncool...but between you and me, dear reader, I love it to death.
  46. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, Warm Water may well be the year's best and most unpredictable comedy.
  47. The Gleaners & I
    Eccentric and thoroughly winning.
  48. Gimme Shelter
    A pop culture document for a mass audience.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Robin Hood (re-release)
    Robin Hood is movie pageantry at its best, done in the grand manner of silent spectacles, brimming over with the sort of primitive energy that drew people to the movies in the first place.
  50. Wonder Boys
    Downey, who radiates more energy doing nothing discernible than most other actors do when they let it all hang out, takes the film to another level.
  51. Medea
    Achieves an abrading, intimate, primal force his later films only hint at. It's difficult to imagine the Euripides original ever being more eloquently adapted.
  52. A Mighty Wind
    Another unforetold career acme: Christopher Guest's seductive and brilliantly modulatory A Mighty Wind, which trains its laser-sight on the decaying legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary-style pop-folk.
  53. Human Resources
    Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first.
  54. 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.
  55. Bus 174
    Tense, engrossing, and superbly structured, Bus 174 is not just unforgettable drama but a skillfully developed argument.
  56. Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.
  57. Solaris
    Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised.
  58. The Wind Will Carry Us
    To my mind, the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.
  59. 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.
  60. The Leopard (re-release)
    The Leopard is the greatest film of its kind made since World War II—its only rivals are Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and Visconti's own "Senso."
  61. Au hasard Balthazar
    To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heart-breaking and magnificent Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) -- the story of a donkey's life and death in rural France -- is the supreme masterpiece by one of the greatest of 20th-century filmmakers.
  62. The Battle of Algiers
    A prototype of news-footage realism, the film makes shrewd use of handheld sloppiness, misjudged focus, overexposure, and you-are-there camera upset; the payoff is the scent of authentic panic.
  63. Spider
    Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings.
  64. Festival Express
    Ultimate geezerfest and rock-doc holy grail.
  65. Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut
    Obsessives will be familiar with the "new" material (almost all available on the original DVD), which elaborates on the time-travel metaphysics and tightens the emotional screws. Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) shares one additional tender exchange with each family member
  66. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.
  67. Springtime in a Small Town
    Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.
  68. The Triplets of Belleville
    The year's most ingenious and original animated feature.
  69. Band of Outsiders
    Along with Raoul Coutard's radiant cinematography, what makes the film extraordinary is Karina, the pure curves of her face a contradiction to the marionette angularity of her body.
  70. Tarnation
    A tale of sadness and hysteria so raw that it bleeds.
  71. Time of the Wolf
    In today's digital bog of empty light and marketing deceptions, this is what early-millennium Euro art-film masterpieces feel like--lean, qualmish, abstracted to the point of parable but as grounded as a gravedigging.
  72. Love & Basketball
    Prince-Bythewood gives the film a style that's easy on the eye but also has muscle -- on and off the court.
  73. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    The film is alarmingly dark. It isn’t especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece.
  74. Beau Travail
    A movie so tactile in its cinematography, inventive in its camera placement, and sensuous in its editing that the purposefully oblique and languid narrative is all but eclipsed.
  75. Brazil
    It remains a stunning achievement, if nearly as exhausting and frustrating as the Tex Avery bureaucracy it roasts, but Gilliam's stylistic dysfunctionalities, art-directed out of junkyards, are what still percolate in the forebrain.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Velvet
    The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" -- I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986. (Review of 20th Anniversary Re-Release)
  77. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven is a stark western in slow motion, obsessed with reflection, not action.
  78. Raging Bull
    What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.
  79. The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence remains a consistent spellbinder, laying bare its inhabitants’ follies and furies with a tender touch and a vigilant quietude that accumulates into a grand force.
  80. Primer
    Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction.
  81. Dogville
    For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact.
  82. Before Sunset
    Summer sequelitis is upon us, but the season is unlikely to bring anything more remarkable than Richard Linklater's sweet, smart, and deeply romantic Before Sunset.
  83. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    The hard-charging originality of the screenplay—the equivalent of turning "The Hot Zone" into a Farrelly comedy—suggests a deficient legacy of credit to Terry Southern's corner.
  84. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    You can call me fanboy, but this is the best anime I've ever seen.
  85. Ratcatcher
    The most audacious debut feature of the year.
  86. Vera Drake
    Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist.
  87. Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures
    A spare, formally ingenious, journalistically acute piece of filmmaking.
  88. *Corpus Callosum
    The Canadian painter-photographer-filmmaker-musician gives full vent to his genius in this exhilarating perceptual vaudeville, titled for the "central region" of tissue that acts as a conduit between the brain's two hemispheres.
  89. Momma's Man
    One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.
  90. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    This may or may not be the greatest instance of college football ever played, but "Brian's Song," J"erry Maguire," and "The Longest Yard" notwithstanding, Rafferty's no-frills annotated replay is the best football movie I've ever seen: A particular day in history becomes a moment out of time.
  91. Word Is Out
    Extraordinary, groundbreaking documentary.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Vincere
    Vincere, though, is the veteran director's stylistic knockout, a movie whose audacious editing fully captures the hot and heavy relationships between past and present, sex and politics, reality and, yes, cinema.
  93. I Am Love
    When Guadagnino focuses solely on the primal, the effect is spellbinding. Only the words get in the way.
  94. Lebanon
    Not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Carlos
    Carlos is nevertheless a movie that one can somehow remember vividly for months. Much of this power is due to the whiplash widescreen cinematography (oft-mistaken for DV), the hopped-up editing, and, not least, Ramirez's aptly arrogant, fully transfixing, Method-style turn.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    Protracted sequences make you impatient for forward motion, but then, in an instant, you’re left to mourn beauties hastened away.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shoah (re-release)
    It has come to serve as a solemn metaphor for remembrance, as well as for butt-numbing endurance.
  98. Secret Sunshine
    One of the year's best films.
  99. The Tree of Life
    Better than a masterpiece - whatever that is - The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.
  100. Poetry
    A perfectly paced and performed character study of a woman raising a child on her own who must contend with a heinous act of violence.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »