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. Heart of a Dog
    Her documentary sporadically locates profound truth amid its myriad musings about the momentous and the everyday. Often, however, Anderson's hushed-tone articulations of her thoughts on these subjects prove affected, and her stream-of-consciousness style, though acutely constructed, is more alienating than inviting.
  2. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
    Finlay tells this story with the usual doc techniques. The interviews are marvelous, especially the ones with Ellis's exes, who attest not just to his weakness for groupies but to his collection of trophies.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Personal Problems (1980)
    I guess that’s ultimately what Reed and Gunn wanted to provide: a view of African Americans that’s messy, complicated, dramatic, and, most important, honest. It’s also a fascinating artifact of black people getting together and making their own art — mainly because they wanted to see themselves properly represented onscreen.
  6. 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.
  7. War Witch
    Nguyen's matter-of-fact storytelling proves to be the right match for a life of extraordinary suffering. In art, lives like Komona's are all too often given an alien sheen. Here, they feel unnervingly plausible.
  8. Darwin's Nightmare
    Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.
  9. My Winnipeg
    In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.
  10. 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.
  11. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence.
  12. Blood Simple
    Boldly facetious and monstrously clever.
  13. Oslo, August 31st
    Matching the precision of the film's title, remembrances of things past-whether destructive or salutary, quickly mentioned or dilated upon-are shaped by just enough exacting detail.
  14. The Witch
    The Witch purports, at times, to confront ignorance and hysteria, but in the end, for horror thrills, Eggers's film sides with the preachers and executioners. It literalizes the fevered terrors of our God-mad ancestors — and then brags that it's all steeped in research.
  15. Looper
    Thrilling in its deft juggling of complex narrative elements, utterly clear in its presentation, and unfolding with what feels like serious moral purpose, Looper still can't help but suggest that its larger ambitions are something of a put-on, a nice thematic polish to set off its interpersonal drama.
  16. Kubo and the Two Strings
    From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain.
  17. 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.
  18. Old Joy
    If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.
  19. 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.
  20. Momma's Man
    One of the sweetest, saddest stories Franz Kafka never wrote.
  21. You Were Never Really Here
    A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homo Sapiens
    Instead of uncovering artifacts from long ago, Homo Sapiens shows us our own relics in the making.
  23. A Ghost Story
    “Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ballast
    The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Volver
    Almodóvar isn't what he used to be (who is?), but he's a master of the medium nevertheless, deploying color and light and shadow not merely to express emotions but to tap into ours, directing the blood flow of the audience as much as he directs the movie.
  26. The Square
    [A] powerful, exacting depiction of Egypt's struggle for meaningful change.
  27. Love After Love
    The cast is intoxicating.
    • 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.
  29. Motherland
    Motherland opens with a 24-year-old woman already on her fifth pregnancy — just one of many such cases that director Ramona S. Diaz reveals in the vérité-style documentary, which recalls the observational techniques and insights of the films of Frederick Wiseman.
  30. Museum Hours
    The film, a kind of hybrid between understated drama and essayistic tourism, approaches its subjects with uncommon patience and curiosity, lingering over objects and faces as if to savor their aesthetic qualities, eager to convey truths without authorial imposition.
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