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. Nico and Dani
    The movie avoids grand conclusions, and its restraint heightens the clarity of the perspective shifts that constitute a rite of passage; Nico and Dani is a modest chronicle of a summer during which everything had to change so that everything could stay the same.
  2. Fallen Angels Paradise
    Fawzi shoots the proceedings in clumsy, gotch-eyed spurts, and the level of incoherence is impressively high.
  3. Trolösa
    Much of what Faithless contains happens off-screen, told and retold as stories within stories, and so the actors typically work like oxen.
  4. Two Ninas
    Manages to gracefully step out of the way of its own referential overload.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Sugar & Spice
    Sugar & Spice struggles with the existential challenge of individuating five perky white heterosexual girls wearing identical aquamarine miniskirts and halter tops. And that's before they put on their latex "Betty" masks.
  6. The Wedding Planner
    The Wedding Planner achieves the dubious but perversely impressive feat, for its 90-minute duration, of neutering Jennifer Lopez.
  7. Amy
    Plumbs new depths of craven heartstring-yanking.
  8. R2PC: Road to Park City
    An Indiewood spoof that's more winning than anyone who wasn't a close friend of the director could possibly expect, R2PC satirizes not only wannabe auteurs but also that overworked genre, the faux documentary, while functioning as a credible study guide for Filmmaking 101.
  9. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy
    Goodman and Anker adroitly shape a cohesive drama out of a complicated history.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Amati Girls
    An earnest ensemble weeper I'd at least feel comfortable seeing with my grandmother.
  11. The Pledge
    Though at times it threatens to meander off, Penn's movie fulfills its destiny as an alienated fable of justice and luck, personified by Jack in the twilight of his iconicity, babbling to himself at the crossroads of nowhere.
  12. Snatch.
    For those who care, Madonna has found her match in Guy Ritchie, whose absence of talent when it comes to the film medium is equal to her own.
  13. Zheng hun qi shi
    An intelligent, perceptive film. It's good enough to make you wish Chen hadn't sacrificed emotional complexity for a last-minute surprise.
  14. Panic
    Steeped in metaphor as it is, Panic offers a more naturalistic analysis of male midlife crisis than the grotesquely overpraised "American Beauty."
  15. Antitrust
    It's a kick to see the Tim Robbins version of the man recently described by the Microsoft trial judge as "Napoleonic" installed in a disgustingly opulent Bond-villain HQ/pad, and the overwrought Boiler Room-meets-The Game scenario is not without its own schlocky pleasures.
  16. Save the Last Dance
    The disjointed plotting and afterschool-special dialogue offer scant opportunity for the charismatic leading duo to work up much chemistry.
  17. Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes
    Filled with people who cut Holmes more slack than he deserved.
  18. Chunhyangdyun
    Im's movie approaches a seething, primitivist beauty that evokes Makhmalbaf and parallels the contrapuntal textual investigations of Resnais.
  19. The Claim
    A numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.
  20. Shadow of the Vampire
    Manages to turn a highly dubious concept into a subtle and deliciously mordant comedy.
  21. Traffic
    Traffic is not just an ultra-procedural--it's the Big Picture, the Whole Enchilada, complete with a complicated war between two Mexican drug cartels.
  22. All the Pretty Horses
    The film is too eager to please and falls short of the novel's tragic dimension.
  23. Vatel
    Vatel is dull and silly, but the holiday season doesn't offer a better sets-and-costumes workshop.
  24. Thirteen Days
    A tense and engrossing political thriller.
  25. An Everlasting Piece
    It's a sprightly, low-fiber comedy while the comedy lasts.
  26. Malèna
    A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.
  27. Before Night Falls
    The film's ephemeral, semi-evasive lyricism ultimately works as a modest frame for Bardem's tender, deft portrait, which is in turn suitably expansive and rooted in the most concrete details -- Arenas's pride and anger, his unsentimental wit and defiant vitality.
  28. Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda
    Lee's trickery is dazzling in flashes but also monotonously strenuous -- the derangement factor is high but there's little evidence of authentic lunacy.
  29. The House of Mirth
    Leisurely yet streamlined film, brilliantly adapted by British filmmaker Terence Davies from Edith Wharton's most powerful novel.
  30. Come te nessuno mai
    For a quality horny-Italian-teen frolic, you need look no further.
  31. State and Main
    State and Main is a Hollywood satire as cynical and thickheaded as its supposed targets.
  32. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    The art direction is impeccable, but this is a pop-up book that I was impatient to slam.
  33. Cast Away
    While "Robinson Crusoe" was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.
  34. The Family Man
    It's an easier movie to tolerate than it should be if, like me, you're in love with Téa Leoni, who, as a lithe, lusty, strangely patient firecracker Superwife in a shag, rescues the movie from the tar pit of irrelevance. With some decent lines, she could be the new Myrna Loy.
  35. Finding Forrester
    At times you can feel Van Sant trying to loosen the movie's windpipe-folding collar, but he doesn't get far, except with Busta Rhymes, as Jamal's gone-nowhere big brother.
  36. The Gift
    A creepily effective button-pusher that owes a bit to the original "Cape Fear" both in Sam Raimi's ruthless direction and Keanu Reeves's unexpectedly robust performance as the most violent redneck peckerwood in a steamy Georgia town.
  37. Pollock
    The movie's best moments evoke the thrill of doing something new. Pollock convincingly retails the beauty and originality of the painter's best work -- it may not be an intellectual adventure, but it does represent one.
  38. The Visit
    The last scenes contain so many moral and spiritual turnarounds that Alex (Harper) -- and the film -- are all but buried in the uplift. Harper, in a fierce, nuanced performance, deserves better.
  39. What Women Want
    Gibson has never lacked chemistry with his leading ladies, from Sigourney Weaver in "The Year of Living Dangerously" to Julia Roberts in "Conspiracy Theory," but faced with the awkward Hunt -- Hollywood's bland antidote to the Lolita syndrome -- he doesn't even try.
  40. Dude, Where's My Car?
    My friend even supplied a blurbable quote: "The best dumbass-buddy comedy I've seen since "Wayne's World!"
  41. Chocolat
    Airy, pseudo-folkloric gibberish at best.
  42. The Day Silence Died
    Agazzi's movie rather provincially hints at sexiness, humor, and satire without actually manifesting them.
  43. Vertical Limit
    Vertical Limit's real problem is its digitized sheen. Every shot seems to have been CGI-enhanced, so the movie has an overpasteurized, Velveeta-like glow -- processed movie food.
  44. Dungeons & Dragons
    At once laboriously expository and defiantly incomprehensible.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Art of Amália
    De Almeida's latest hagiographic effort diminishes Amália's legend by purifying it.
  46. Proof of Life
    It's Rambo with a split hero -- Morse absorbing punishment and Crowe wreaking vengeance.
  47. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    Crouching Tiger's dramatic line is so blurry that the central character is only a bystander to the climactic fight between forces of good and evil.
  48. Hillbrow Kids
    Utterly necessary film.
  49. Strippers
    One of a barely acknowledged sub-breed of indie: howling-vanity amateur-work.
  50. Moon Shadow
    If Moon Shadow does sometimes overcome its sentimentalism and faulty parallels, it's because the film is altogether unburdened by cynicism.
  51. A Good Baby
    Made with intelligence and formal sophistication.
  52. Boys Life 3
    French director David Fourier's six-minute mock-instructional free association, "Majorettes in Space," is alone almost worth the price of admission.
  53. Spring Forward
    The sense of continuing life is quietly remarkable.
  54. The Trench
    The acting, by a large cast of little-known young Brits chewing on South London accents like dog bones, is uniformly splendiferous.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    102 Dalmatians
    Cruella is once again bent on collecting enough puppy skins to fashion the frock of her dreams. And once again, yawn.
  56. Unbreakable
    Soggy mysticism, nagging inconsistencies, and coarse horror-playbook jolts.
  57. Quills
    Kaufman's earnestly overblown celebration of the Marquis de Sade.
  58. Lies
    At once distanced and heedless, Lies manages to be lighter and less pretentious than any description suggests. The movie's playful aspect can't be denied.
  59. Bounce
    It's been smoothed over plenty, but this is one creaky, rigged contraption.
  60. La bûche
    By turns hilarious and wounding.
  61. Billy Liar (re-release)
    Often seems less a British new wave front-runner than a charming nouvelle vague tagalong,
  62. Sasayaki
    This dreamy, languorous farce offers a manageable strawberry-flavored alternative, a mildly kinky Hello Kitty sadomasochism.
  63. One Day in September
    It could be described as the most gripping political thriller to hit the big screen in many years, although given the events it depicts through interviews, photographs, and news footage, the words "gripping" and "thriller" have inappropriately frivolous and commercial associations.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rugrats in Paris: The Movie - Rugrats II
    Nicely conveys a family trip abroad as seen from both the exhausted-parent and bewildered-infant points of view.
  65. The 6th Day
    Offers director Roger Spottiswoode a chance to have the worst actor in Beverly Hills play scenes with himself.
  66. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    The movie rises to another level whenever its star has a chance to cut loose -- leading the ensemble in a conga line, winning a sack race in slow motion, torching the Whos' Christmas tree while screaming, "Burn baby burn."
  67. Rebels with a Cause
    Garvy has worked hard to weave the interviews into an exciting narrative, but the focus is perhaps too narrow for the film to be as politically effective as it could have been.
  68. Restless
    Relying on rote culture-clash pratfalls, Gilfillan belabors the symmetries.
  69. Non-Stop
    Exceedingly slow setup and even more tediously static sequence that effectively terminates the movie well before its official running time.
  70. Red Planet
    A pale, patchy amalgam of the year's two unfairly reviled interplanetary adventures, "Supernova" and "Mission to Mars," the lunkheaded Red Planet distinguishes itself with a touching pretense of scientific veracity.
  71. Men of Honor
    The filmmakers at once coarsen and dilute a fascinating life into a lumpy puddle of punishing inspirational hokum.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Looking for an Echo
    The stream of sentimentality is endless and often sickly, and the warm afterglow is decidedly manufactured.
  73. Little Nicky
    Certainly Sandler's most ambitious work. It's not just a bid for respectability but a genuine allegory.
  74. You Can Count on Me
    Seems like a TV movie. A well-written, sympathetically acted TV movie, to be sure, but so timid and clumsy in its deployment of picture, sound, and editing that you have to wonder if executive producer Martin Scorsese bothered to give notes.
  75. Suzhou River
    A ghost story that's shot as though it were a documentary -- and a documentary that feels like a dream. Almost too fashionable for its own good.
  76. Boesman and Lena
    Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.
  77. Blue Moon
    A real midlife crisis might be more enjoyable.
  78. The Weekend
    Bloodless, lip-biting psycho-carnage.
  79. Me & Isaac Newton
    It's a TV show and a facile one at that.
  80. Kippur
    At once shockingly vivid and overwhelmingly antiheroic.
  81. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    More mushy than mystical.
  82. Charlie's Angels
    The cheesy disco action scenes are topped only by the movie's ripe double entendres and continual cheesecake.
  83. Once in the Life
    While the line-readings are often dead-on, Fishburne's movie suffers from the usual one-room claustrophobia and Mametian repetitions.
  84. Loving Jezebel
    An oafish wish-fulfillment wankfest.
  85. A Room for Romeo Brass
    So low-key it could be mistaken for a throwaway. But Meadows's understanding of childhood fears and fantasies and the yearning, heartfelt performances he draws from his two young actors should not be underestimated.
  86. A Time for Drunken Horses
    Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.
  87. Vénus beauté (institut)
    Thanks to some brilliant casting, Venus Beauty Institute provokes ideas about women, movies, sexuality, and age that extend beyond its frothy fiction.
  88. Stardom
    With a few exceptions, most of the laughs in Stardom are cheap...and worse, the ideas beyond platitudinous.
  89. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    Filled with all manner of tawdry tricks.
  90. Lucky Numbers
    From the auteur who assaulted us with "Sleepless in Seattle" comes a more punishing film.
  91. What's Cooking?
    Trades in sitcom stereotypes and crosscuts predictably from family to family as if under the misapprehension that equal time is a dramatic principle.
  92. The Sculptress
    Wright's "British" accent elicits the only shudders.
  93. George Washington
    It's at once brilliant and inept.
  94. Sound and Fury
    Josh Aronson's thoroughly engrossing documentary Sound and Fury is as much about children's rights as it is about the impact of cochlear-implant technology on a family in which deafness runs through three generations.
  95. The Wolves of Kromer
    Largely inept and weirdly endearing.
  96. The Yards
    Gray's brand of film-buffery manifests itself, simply and irresistibly, as ardent, uncynical movie love.
  97. Just One Time
    An arthritic exercise in self-pleasurement.
  98. The Legend of Drunken Master
    The uncertain plot somehow concerns ginseng and stolen objets d'art; the main thrust is acrobatic slapstick with a decided antipatriarchal twist.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Calle 54
    A dazzling, long-overdue tribute to the true stars of Latin music.
  100. Pay It Forward
    An overflowing septic tank of chicken-soupy sanctimony that proceeds from casually offensive hypocrisy to wretchedly inapt religiosity.
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