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. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.
  2. The House on Coco Road
    This documentary doesn’t just tell the ill-fated story of the failed Grenada utopia — which failed because of American intervention. The House on Coco Road is instead a sprawling tale of African-American migration, the search for peace, and America’s relentless sabotage of black escape.
  3. Grizzly Man
    For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental.
  4. Shot in the Dark
    It’s a vital, intimate snapshot of a handful of people who have been touched by gun and gang violence.
  5. Bukowski: Born into This
    Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.
    • 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.
  7. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
  8. 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.
  9. Thelma
    Yes, Thelma is a horror movie — a lovely, transfixing one — but don’t look to it for cheap scares. The terror here cuts far deeper.
  10. The Class
    For anyone who loves language, this cut-and-thrust is a heady delight, so rich and free-flowing in its rhythms that it's hard to decide whether what we're seeing is a vérité-style documentary or a realist drama.
  11. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Israel's willingness to honor Frank's own vision powers the film.
  12. A Requiem for Syrian Refugees
    Urgent, deeply painful yet lovely in its aesthetics.
  13. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    This doc is a tearjerker, but it's also enraging.
  14. 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    Fifty-six years after it opened, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life remains the apotheosis of Hollywood melodrama — as Sirk’s final film, it could hardly be anything else — and the toughest-minded, most irresolvable movie ever made about race in this country.
    • 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.
  17. Djomeh
    Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Children Underground
    A horror story, told with Dickensian compassion, permeating outrage, and little hope.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweet Land
    Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm.
  23. 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.
  24. Not Yet Begun to Fight
    It stuns, and what's missing doesn't compare to what it shares.
  25. Vodka Lemon
    Saleem, a Paris-based Kurd, displays the visual confidence and subtle screwball rhythms of a master, exploiting offscreen space, deadpan compositions, and deft visual backbeats, as well as attaining a breathtaking fidelity to real light and landscape.
  26. 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.
  27. Reign Over Me
    If Binder has a considerably heavier hand when it comes to metaphor, his movie nevertheless remains buoyant because the feelings in it are immutable, and because Sandler has never before held the screen with greater intensity.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    Few other directors can get so much violent power from their landscapes and their people. No image is boring. [01 Feb 1962, p.11]
    • Village Voice
  29. Butterfly Girl
    Throughout Butterfly Girl, Abbie jokes, rolls her eyes, and pushes herself to take chances despite the pain she always faces.
  30. 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.
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