Village Voice's Scores

For 6,913 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 34% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 63% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 54
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Score distribution:
6,913 movie reviews
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 100
    That makes this the most rare of films: one that indisputably matters. And one that stuns.
  1. The film's genius is how completely it tunes in to his 
experience, delicately outlining Joey's private moments of shame, elation, despondency, and pride.
  2. Landes's tone is never salacious or exploitative, nor for that matter pandering or sentimental. This is a sui generis work—warm, sporadically funny, deeply human, and altogether beguiling.
  3. The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.
  4. Plunging viewers into the thick of chaos, Leviathan explodes the antiquated paradigm of the documentary or ethnographic film, whose mission has traditionally been to educate or elucidate, to create something that seizes us, never letting us forget just how disordered the world is. This may be the greatest lesson any nonfiction film can teach us.
  5. Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.
  6. Thanks to Lynch's expert pacing and modulation of narrative tension, even viewers who already know the outcome of the film's central incident will likely be pulled to the edges of their seats.
  7. This Ain't California is a masterful lie that illuminates a little-known reality.
  8. The story's outline may be familiar, but its emphasis and quality are not.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 100
    This is one of the most fully rounded, unsentimental portraits of an artist you'll ever see on film.
  9. It might be the most lonesome film about a tropical vacation we've seen, and the greatest film ever made about the weird socioeconomics of tourism.
  10. Voyage to Italy is close to watching actual strangers suffer loneliness despite being together. It can leave an aching bruise, but only if you're paying attention.
  11. In Something in the Air, that past—a version of Assayas's own—is rendered in visuals so specific and evocative, it's perpetually alive.
  12. This wondrous, absorbing little picture covers a great deal of winding meta-territory, reflecting on the ways in which a single family's story can be told—or maybe, more accurately, examining the idea that there's no such thing as a "single story."
  13. A crash course in history, politics, and social science, Valentino's Ghost is both sobering and illuminating, and its execution is thrilling.
  14. Before Midnight—visually stunning, in a late-summer way—is more vital and cutting than another recent marriage picture, Michael Haneke's old-folks-together death march Amour; it has none of Amour's tasteful restraint, and in the end, it says more about the nature of long-term love.
  15. Burshtein's lush visual sensibility, and the subtle performances of the excellent cast, create an aching portrayal of longing and interdependence that transcends the boundaries of the family's small world.
  16. Probably more terse than it needs to be, but the dramatic line has an elegance and drive that reinforces the unexpected turns of the story.
  17. This is the Julia Roberts performance her fans have been waiting for.
  18. It seems like a more witty, wise, and succinct "Magnolia."
  19. Not only Mike Leigh's strongest film since "Naked" but a true show-making epic.
  20. Unstintingly funny -- far more so than the wince-worthy trailer -- owing to Chan's pairing with droll indie eccentric Owen Wilson, as his would-be gunslinger sidekick.
  21. Rich in detail, vivid in characterization, leisurely in exposition, this 207-minute epic is bravura filmmaking -- a brilliant yet facile synthesis of Hollywood pictorialism, Soviet montage, and Japanese theatricality that could be a B western transposed to Mars.
  22. An impressively coordinated enterprise that lasts three hours, manages a large cast, and covers a period of 30-odd years while successfully unfolding as a series of scenes from the life of a single character.
  23. A wondrously perverse movie that not only evokes a lost moment in time but circles around an unrepresentable subject. Mood is the operative word. A love story far more cerebral than it is emotional.
  24. One of the best titles in movie history and a cast to match.
  25. A brilliant appreciation of the last great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky.
  26. A fairy tale that presents love as a case of mutual enchantment, Two Family House is not only uniformly well acted, superbly designed, lovingly lit, and sensitively scored, it's as romantic as it is funny.
  27. A must-see for opera lovers and a snappy diversion for cinephiles.
  28. The lovability quotient is as high as the altitude.