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 7.6 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. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    Form and content collide in inspiring ways in this documentary about Milford Graves — avant-garde jazz percussionist, educator, gardener, martial artist, and cardiovascular researcher. Milford Graves Full Mantis is a jazz movie in every sense of the word.
  2. Maison du Bonheur
    Bohdanowicz undertook the project without having previously met her subject, but for both the filmmaker and her audience, making Sellam’s acquaintance proves a rare pleasure.
  3. The Landlord
    One of the funniest social comedies of its period.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bound for Glory
    Ashby--working through a magnificent performance by Carradine--has converted technical virtuosity to his own ends, creating a richly ambiguous character study that sings and provokes and celebrates. [13 Dec 1976, p.45]
    • Village Voice
  5. The Magnificent Ambersons
    The Magnificent Ambersons is a pretty sensational movie. The film language is more fluid and adept than Kane‘s, the expressionist lighting is more rigorously modulated.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nashville
    I think that the power and the theme of the film lie in the fact that while some characters are more “major” than others, they are all subordinated to the music itself. It’s like a river, running through the film, running through their life. They contribute to it, are united for a time, lose out, die out, but the music, as the last scene suggests, continues.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Woman Under the Influence
    Falk and the rest of the cast are exceptional—even the smallest roles feel spot-on—but Rowlands (who will be on hand for the opening-night screening) is the film.
  8. Don't Look Now
    Time has tamed some of the terror and eroticism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but it’s still a haunting thriller about guilt and the supernatural. What’s notable (more notable even than the much celebrated bedroom scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, in which sex is displaced into memory even as it’s taking place) is that Roeg’s use of the death of a child as the focus of a horror film never feels exploitative.
  9. Shadows
    Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    The 1958 film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is not a good adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play of the same name. But as a portrayal of the depths of loneliness we create for ourselves, and an example of the power of star performance, it’s a great film.
  11. Carnal Knowledge
    Carnal Knowledge is a movie that almost lives up to it's brilliant title. [08 Jul 1971, p.34]
    • Village Voice
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Family Plot
    Its visual wit and spiritual resonance are truly inimitable even in this age of merchandised mimicry. [19 Apr 1976, p.64]
    • Village Voice
  13. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    Ultimately, McCabe and Mrs Miller shapes up as a half baked masterpiece with a kind of gutsy gradeur. It's personal as all-get-out, and I thought that's what everyone had been screaming for all these years. [08 Jul 1971, p.49]
    • Village Voice
  14. The 39 Steps
    The movie with which Hitchcock became Hitchcock.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    Max von Sydow gives a performance of a high order as the knight who returns from the Crusades to find his country at the mercy of plague and witch hunts.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    My Man Godfrey
    In one of her greatest roles, as burbling blonde heiress Irene Bullock in Gregory La Cava’s 1934 screwball masterpiece My Man Godfrey, Lombard creates a ditz so rare, a creature so otherwordly in her oblivion to what others call reality, that she comes off less as a thing of flesh and blood than as a shimmering cloud of butterflies flying in perfect, girl-shaped formation.
  18. Scum
    One of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down.
  19. Chocolat
    Denis quickly immerses us in her voluptuous, allusive mode of storytelling.
  20. Limelight
    There is no test of behavioral range in Limelight that Chaplin does not pass superbly. [01 Oct 1964, p.15]
    • Village Voice
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Mother and the Whore
    It is a searing, painful, revealing, egotistical, irritating, often beautiful document that captures, in orgies of sexual gorging and verbal disgorging, the clash, among people of a certain generation and milieu, between Left Bank libertinism and an astonishingly deep conservatism--deep, because it is mystical rather than political, and based on matters of life and death rather than left and right. [04 Apr 1974, p.90]
    • Village Voice
  22. Not a Pretty Picture
    What’s most unnerving about this four-decade-old film is how little has changed in the time since. We are still learning the same lessons Coolidge was trying to impart so long ago — nothing is different.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Diva
    Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam, Diva contrived a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss that came to be known as “cinéma du look,” a Franglais label for the micro-movement of super-stylish, unabashedly romantic pictures made throughout the ’80s by a clique of bright young things including Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.
  24. An Education
    Something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon--a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
  25. Frozen River
    If there's one thing this movie gets dead right, it's the desperation of impoverished single mothers trying to fend for their children.
  26. The Messenger
    What really resonates is the complex tale of camaraderie between two men whose only hope of avoiding self-destruction is to let down their guard--which is, of course, against protocol.
  27. The Beaches of Agnès
    In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.
  28. The Damned United
    A movie about soccer that doesn't spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that is enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby's team owner.
  29. Ponyo
    It's a movie for anyone who, like Miyazaki himself, can still happily commune with his inner five-year-old.
  30. Drag Me to Hell
    If the booga-booga shocks are sometimes repetitive, Drag Me does its audience right in its last-act burst of giddy momentum, sustained by crack editor Bob Murawski through a burlesque exorcism.
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