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. The White Diamond
    Having emerged from his new German cinema heyday as one of the world's most guileless and original documentary filmmakers, Herzog has slowly been crafting a four-dimensional fresco of the planet, its most human-resistant landscapes, and our dubious dramas in confronting the chaos.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    The bold and vivid colors of the paintings themselves and the sets and landscapes contribute heavily to the film's dramatic impact. [10 Jul 1957, p.8]
    • Village Voice
  3. Last Days in the Desert
    Last Days is weighty and somber, familiar and strange, in the way of Bible stories but not of contemporary faith-based filmmaking, which eschews mystery and paradox for homily.
  4. Tropical Malady
    Like "Blissfully Yours" and Apichatpong's first feature, the exquisite-corpse road movie "Mysterious Object at Noon" (2000), Tropical Malady promotes new ways of seeing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Romántico
    Following a hardworking, goodhearted man as life beats the hell out of him, this documentary is moving almost to the point of exploitation.
  6. Che
    Every Bolivian sequence has its Cuban parallel, which is why Che's two parts are best seen together. Guerrilla may be the more realized of the two--and could certainly stand on its own--but it is only comprehensible in the light of The Argentine. Elevating Guerrilla to tragedy, The Argentine puts some hope in hopelessness--and even in history.
  7. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    For an hour and a half, this charming little movie, with its chatty talking heads and its sweet-natured subjects, offers a glimpse into the lives of two fascinating people whom I had never heard of, and who shared an unlikely life filled with achievements and setbacks, wonder and pain.
  8. Burning
    Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film. I’m not sure he sticks the landing, however: The finale, while it doesn’t actually resolve anything, felt to me more convenient than convincing. But maybe that’s because I had too much invested in these characters.
  9. L for Leisure
    What makes L for Leisure more than just a collection of clever, well-photographed jokes is the utter sincerity embedded within the constant sarcasm.
  10. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.
  11. (T)error
    Inevitably, this tense comedy dips into tragedy, with our fearful intelligence agencies getting everything wrong and the filmmakers using their rare access to chart each mistake as it happens.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ip Man
    Like his narrative, Yip's aesthetics are more muted and traditional than those of well-known florid imports "Hero" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Yet such modesty is in tune with his soft-spoken protagonist, and also provides clean, sharp views of Yen's awe-inspiring skills, which, in choreographer Sammo Hung's thrilling one-against-many skirmishes, make literal the term "fists of fury."
  13. The Silence
    Making his feature debut, Swiss-born writer/director Baran bo Odar has turned Jan Costin Wagner’s 2007 novel The Silence into a taut, beautifully acted thriller.
  14. Shakespeare High
    If Shakespeare High lacks the tightness and emotional tension a competition doc needs to take off, we get to know enough of these preternaturally self-assured kids to care about what happens to them beyond the finals.
  15. Daddy Longlegs
    A funny, fantastic, genuinely alarming quasi-autobiographical cheapster by twentysomething New York brothers Josh and Benny Safdie.
  16. The Year of Spectacular Men
    Lea Thompson’s first film as a director — a brisk, breezy, sharp-elbowed, sexually frank, occasionally shout-y, often hilarious comedy — stars the performer’s own daughters and plays like both a raucous family party and an urgently necessary corrective.
  17. Climates
    A terrific movie in the Antonioni tradition, Climates confirms 47-year-old Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan as one of the world's most accomplished filmmakers--handling the end of a relationship and the cloud of human confusion rising from its wreckage as if the subject had never before been attempted.
  18. Good Ol' Freda
    Director Ryan White has crafted a deceptively simple film that should almost immediately win viewers over with its low-key charm.
  19. Dark Night
    Sutton makes the concrete oblique, even mysterious.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Die, Mommie, Die!
    Though Natasha Lyonne as bratty daughter and Philip Baker Hall as the disposable spouse impress, it's Busch's heartfelt Joan Crawford homage that enthralls. Busch can transcend even the smog, making hazy camp seem fresh.
  21. Hillbrow Kids
    Utterly necessary film.
  22. Longing
    Magnificent and moving chamber drama.
  23. The Price of Sugar
    Out of this sorry tale of human trafficking emerges a fascinating portrait of this handsome, pugnacious, one-man NGO, who left a cushy life with his patrician Anglo-Spanish family to work with Mother Theresa and devote himself to the oppressed.
  24. Hours
    The film stirs richer, truer feelings once it becomes a one-man show. This is due both to Heisserer's and Walker's skill — the tension is strong, the scenario elemental, and Walker's harried, urgent hero is compelling — but also the fact that the movies are really good at dudes doing things, especially when those things are scrappy, desperate, and heroic.
  25. Birders: The Central Park Effect
    Kimball's bird footage is attractive on its own, but the way he positions his birders in conversation with one another is why Birders soars.
  26. Lost Boys of Sudan
    Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.
  27. The Forgiveness of Blood
    Marston nails the claustrophobia of small-town life and the turbulent emotionalism of teenagers, but what pushes the film toward sublimity is the way he delicately captures all of the characters' inner lives as their world slowly crumbles.
  28. Jimmy P.
    Amalric's impish dexterity and Del Toro's mild catatonia make for a memorable mismatch, but Jimmy P.'s profound slow burn might be too clinical for some to consider dramatic.
  29. A Hologram for the King
    Tykwer sublimates what Eggers made explicit: the joblessness, the debt, the isolation. He knows the power of an image, a gesture, a brief exchange, so he captures those social themes in flashes, which ironically gives them new power.
  30. Almost Peaceful
    French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.
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