2012 Village Voice Film Critics’ Poll

Les Miserables Movie Review: It Doesn’t Dream Daringly

Django Unchained Review: Quentin Tarantino Upends the Western and America’s Original Sin

Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Is Self-Conscious Monument Art

The filmmaker talks 70mm, Joaquin Phoenix, and researching Scientology for his sixth and most anticipated movie.

On Its Centennial, Paramount Pictures Celebrates Its Peak: The 1970s

It’s Complicated: Nancy Meyers can’t keep making the same movie over and over again

The Princess and the Frog: Disney’s first black princess can’t escape the ghetto

Fantastic Mr. Fox: Wes Anderson and animation are a fantastic fit

Precious: Diary of a sad black woman

An Education and its star, Carey Mulligan, get good marks.

The zombie movie — that evergreen vessel for all manner of social and political allegory — gets stripped down to its “Holy shit! Zombies! Run!” chassis in this fitfully amusing romp directed with little ambition and even less distinction by first-timer Ruben Fleischer. Set in a not-too-distant future (Roland Emmerich’s…

It’s Thingamabob vs. Machine in 9

In the same week that the South African import District 9 gives us a Johannesburg beset by alien invaders, the latest film by animation legend Hayao Miyazaki envisions a small Japanese port town turned upside down by visitors from the bottom of the sea. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s…

The aliens have already been with us for 20 years at the beginning of South African director Neill Blomkamp’s fast and furiously inventive District 9, their huddled masses long ago extracted from their broken-down mother ship and deposited in the titular housing slum on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Unlike the…

Funny People: It’s a Wacky Life

Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps surprising just when one would expect it to be puttering along on…

“They’re all about where people come from. Nobody seems to wonder where somebody’s going.” So says the Depression-era bank-robber-cum-folk-hero John Dillinger upon surveying the clientele of a chic Chicago eatery in a key scene from Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. And, much like its subject, Mann’s exhilarating movie exists in a…