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. Performance
    Performance seems more like eye candy than castor oil in the brave new world of "Freddy Got Fingered."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Under Hellgate Bridge
    "Sopranos" vet Dominic Chianese is squandered as a banal father confessor.
  3. Startup.com
    Has all the hallmarks of a Pennebaker production. The editing is seamless, the drama builds throughout, and the arc of the central character is as shapely as in a Hollywood fiction.
  4. The King Is Alive
    Endearingly pretentious -- as if it swallowed a thick brick of Beckett and can't pass the uncooperative Beckettian stool.
  5. Bread and Roses
    A genuine consciousness-raiser, but it's less a social-realist narrative than a high-volume rally.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    A Knight's Tale
    At best harmless, if not quite fun.
  7. About Adam
    Hudson is ebullient, never cutesy, and her accent stays in tune.
  8. The Man Who Bought Mustique
    Tennant had hoped the documentary would serve as an "instrument of revenge" on Mustique's new owners. It's the filmmakers who end up exacting revenge on Tennant, gleefully recording his every splenetic outburst and infantile hissy fit.
  9. Pavilion of Women
    Yim's film is kneecapped by its soundtrack twice over.
  10. Ice from the Sun
    It's barely a movie.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Young Girl and the Monsoon
    Neither particularly romantic nor especially funny.
  12. Under the Sand
    Rampling has never been as beautiful, not to mention as emotionally naked, nuanced, and affecting as she is here.
  13. Eureka
    A film of rare tenderness and mystery.
  14. Time and Tide
    Jagged and jokey, filled with glam young people, lyrical Canto-Pop, and narrative non sequiturs, Time and Tide is Tsui's version of neo-new wave.
  15. The Mummy Returns
    First and foremost a trial run for a Universal Studios ride.
  16. Deuces Wild
    An endless chain reaction of cartilage-crunching, organ-pulping brawls.
  17. Green Dragon
    Green Dragon's portrait of refugee angst is decidedly glossy; the grief and lostness are glimpsed rather than explored.
  18. Mauvais Sang
    Bittersweet, haunting, and as original and eccentric as homage movies get.
  19. One Night at McCool's
    Oblivious to its own towering obsolescence.
  20. Once Upon a Time in China II (re-release)
    More concentrated and svelte than its precursor, Once Upon a Time II also has the benefit of fights staged by Master Yuen Wo-Ping that show Jet Li -- another camera-age hero -- to even greater advantage.
  21. Once Upon a Time in China (re-release)
    Gets better as it goes along, building up to a prolonged shipboard finale.
  22. The Golden Bowl
    Though it often wallows in louche baroque textures, The Golden Bowl is perhaps the most visually accomplished of the Ivory soaps.
  23. Town & Country
    Limps into theaters at long last, practically begging, with every arthritic pratfall, to be put out of its misery.
  24. Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story
    Manages to have its cake and eat it too -- debunking the Berlin image even while reveling in it.
  25. The Luzhin Defence
    John Turturro, who, given the most romantic role of his career, fully inhabits the ungainly Luzhin.
  26. The Charcoal People
    Even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People becomes repetitive and hopeless.
  27. The Low Down
    Captures the latent anxieties of a hazy, ambling existence with pinpoint accuracy.
  28. The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm
    Pegged to the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War victory celebration, a fiesta that lasted nearly three times longer than the fighting itself.
  29. Harry Is Here to Help
    Moll's style is low-key and straightforward.
  30. Freddy Got Fingered
    A frat-boy remake of "Pink Flamingos" which isn't all bad.
  31. The Center of the World
    Hysterical but inorganic, lacking blood, sweat, or tears.
  32. States of Control
    Takes its heroine, Lisa (Van Dyck), to the neurotic brink.
  33. Lakeboat
    Forster not only makes this unlikely story emotionally believable, he moves you to tears. Lakeboat isn't much of a film, but for Forster fans, it's indispensable.
  34. The Body
    Indiana Jones has never been so missed, but instead this shaggy God story hones in on the faith dilemmas of Banderas and a sputtering Derek Jacobi, so Sunday-hammy you want to rivet him with cloves.
  35. The Circle
    Panahi is a maestro of anxiety. Whatever its political significance, this is a dark, sustained, and wrenching film.
  36. Bridget Jones's Diary
    The three-act structure is too predictable, and at 90 minutes, feels both draggy and hacked to the bone.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Josie and the Pussycats
    The excellently irrelevant music is played by excellently irrelevant real-life rockers.
  38. Kingdom Come
    Demands high tolerance for low comedy.
  39. Chopper
    Bana, who appears in nearly every shot, talking all the while, gives a remarkably mercurial performance.
  40. The Girl
    Agathe de la Boulaye, as The Painter, gives off an appealing air of good-natured amusement, which is appropriate given her surroundings.
  41. Just Visiting
    Not only microwaves what is already four-day-old fish in Paris, but lets the original director, screenwriters, and stars do the reheating.
  42. Beautiful Creatures
    Dorothy and Petula leave a bloodier trail than Thelma and Louise did.
  43. The Day I Became a Woman
    Opens cute and poignant, turns wildly visceral, and ends in a burst of magical realism.
  44. Along Came a Spider
    A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.
  45. Shadow Magic
    Properly picturesque but lacks subtlety and substance in blending Chinese and Western history, ideas, and cinematic conventions.
  46. Booye kafoor, atre yas
    A humorously death-haunted psychodrama.
  47. Blow
    Hopefully ambitious yet hopelessly lightweight.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    It all seems an advertisement -- ostensibly for a retrograde vision of the R.O.C.K.
  49. Amores Perros
    Undeniably high-powered. At 153 minutes, it's also punishingly overlong.
  50. The Tailor of Panama
    A cut above last season's best studio offerings. The performances are well turned out. The morality is stylishly gray. The attitude is almost fashionable.
  51. Someone Like You...
    The movie is trite like the ocean is big.
  52. Spy Kids
    Has an intemperate vitality that's hard to resist.
  53. Faat Kiné
    In every way a sunny film. Supremely affirmative, it ends with the funniest, sexiest close-up of the year.
  54. Butterfly
    He (Wolens) captures Crayola-vivid images of both the unspoiled forest canopy and denuded expanses of slash-and-burned landscape -- a bleak summation, perhaps, of the area's past and future.
  55. The Brothers
    An epidemic of solipsism breaks out among four lifelong African American friends when one of them announces his impending nuptials. Cringe-inducing slapstick jockeys for screen time with undermotivated high-volume confrontation.
  56. Heartbreakers
    Heartbreakers gives redemption a bad name, but gives conniving misanthropy a worse one.
  57. Say It Isn't So
    Elicits not the voluptuous discomfort stirred by the boys' (Peter and Bobby Farrelly) best corporeal shenanigans but creeping embarrassment for everyone on screen.
  58. Too Much Sleep
    An understated gem.
  59. Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the 1979 Revolution
    The doc is also fat with film clips from before and after the 1979 revolution, but innocent of sensationalism as they are, Iranian films aren't terribly quotable—except when used to illustrate how filmmakers must choreograph their action so that men and women never touch on-screen.
  60. No Sex Last Night
    Compelling viewing, even if there's nothing pretty (pictorially or emotionally) about it.
  61. American Desi
    Clubfooted but earnest, Pandya's movie never forgets about its second-gen issues, but never quite plumbs them, either.
  62. Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale
    Schneebaum is a great subject; the film doesn't quite make the most of him.
  63. Memento
    The video stores are filled with examples of retro-noir and neo-noir, but Christopher Nolan's audacious timebender is something else. Call it meta-noir.
  64. Enemy at the Gates
    It does offer Annaud the opportunity to show his directorial muscle in elaborate battle scenes, where many bodies are torn apart and blood flows freely.
  65. The Dish
    Harmless and affectionate, The Dish gives its clichés breathing room, and so a few are pleasantly surprising.
  66. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Pays off in laugh-out-loud lines, adorably ditsy but heartfelt performances, and sparkling, bittersweet dialogue that cuts to the chase of the modern girl's dilemma.
  67. Simon Magus
    Though Hopkins lovingly re-creates the surfaces of shtetl life, its deep spirituality seems to elude him.
  68. Biandan, guniang
    The elliptical, even fragmented editing style clashes with the reiterative voice-over, which could indicate a stylistic choice or cutting under duress.
  69. When Brendan Met Trudy
    Doyle loves bad jokes and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off.
  70. 15 Minutes
    15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.
  71. The Gleaners & I
    Eccentric and thoroughly winning.
  72. Me You Them
    Me You Them can't find a rhythm or a consistent tone.
  73. Hit and Runway
    A show about nothing—its jokes based on stick-figure stereotypes, its lunges at humanism premised on imbecilic pity.
  74. The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick
    Writers are only interesting for what they've written, and for that you'll have to go read.
  75. The Caveman's Valentine
    Valentine isn't exploitative or trendy in the manner of so many indie films. Rather, it seems like the kind of art film that might have been dreamed up by a feverish high schooler.
  76. The Mexican
    Intermittently appealing, fundamentally dysfunctional action-comedy.
  77. Series 7: The Contenders
    Series 7 could have turned out as ugly as the second season of "Survivor," were it not for the pleasure Minahan takes in melodrama.
  78. Monkeybone
    A self-adrenalizing, self-destructing pop-culture whirligig.
  79. Last Resort
    Pawlikowski, whose background is in documentary film, has an eye for the menacingly forlorn and elegantly bleak. Last Resort, which was shot without a script and developed largely in collaboration with the actors, is a kind of verité fantasy.
  80. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    Costner's not a mannered showboat, and what we get isn't a riff—it's a semi-oblivious glimpse of bitter outlaw banality.
  81. The Widow of Saint-Pierre
    Far from terrible, Leconte's latest movie suggests the work of a slightly hip preacher.
  82. Southern Comfort
    Eads's wit, generosity, insight, and courage are irresistible.
  83. Company Man
    Bracingly unfunny.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Down to Earth
    There is a lot of electricity running in these cables, and directors Chris and Paul Weitz, responsible for "American Pie," know how to tap enough of it that almost every minute of Down to Earth is entertaining. But not quite surprising.
  85. Rhythm 'n' Bayous: A Road Map to Louisiana Music
    The performances are uneven, but the spirit never flags.
  86. Yom Yom
    A darkly comic tale of characters riven by divided loyalties and neurotic inhibitions.
  87. Sweet November
    If the movie works on its own insipid level, it's because of high-gear star power -- 50 times the captivator Dennis ever was, Theron is terrific at creating adorable intimacy with little help from the script or director and exudes more guileless élan than any of the film's many puppies.
  88. The Price of Milk
    A shaggy, appealing parable involving two lovers, some gorgeous heifers, gentle Maori gangster-golfers, and a dilapidated suitcase packed with used baby shoes, The Price of Milk throws itself onto the magic-realist sword with aplomb.
  89. Bad Company
    A considerably more unsettling tale of one-sided amour fou, reportedly inspired by an actual case of teenage prostitution, Jean-Pierre Améris's Bad Company puts the coy prurience of American high school films in brutal perspective.
  90. Love, Honor and Obey
    Superhumanly awful BBC bottom-feeder Love, Honour and Obey, which, paramount among its many faults, is not recognizably a film.
  91. Hannibal
    Less monster than monstrosity—albeit, as superfluous sequels go, not on par with the memorably idiotic "Godfather III."
  92. Journey to the Sun
    A remarkably vivid portrait of a teeming third-world metropolis
  93. Signs & Wonders
    Pretension looms, and for many the web of symbolism will be too thick. But Rampling, to her credit, helps hold the nuthouse together.
  94. Saving Silverman
    A sharp-dumb, jack- and goof-off affair.
  95. The Taste of Others
    A pleasant time-passer.
  96. The Invisible Circus
    A more intuitive writer-director could have extracted a credible study of time-warped bereavement from Jennifer Egan's extensively praised novel, but Adam Brooks's turgid adaptation merely emphasizes the book's stiff contrivances and wobbly characterizations.
  97. Fever
    You can see the strenuously grand conclusion of Alex Winter's clammy psychological thriller, Fever, coming a mile off, but the director's impeccably chic expressionism and Henry Thomas's persuasive, dread-soaked performance make the wait a painless one.
  98. The Million Dollar Hotel
    Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel is something of a monstrosity -- liquored self-indulgence taken to its own astral plane.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Head Over Heels
    Head Over Heels is dopey but nontoxic. If you are 17, there are worse date movies.
  100. In the Mood for Love
    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.
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