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. Bedazzled
    It might be worth enduring the Limburger to see Fraser morph from freckled-faced Rod McKuen dweeb to seven-foot albino ball star and never miss a beat.
  2. Just Looking
    Marshall Karp's script is clever and funny, though studded with anachronisms.
  3. Cleopatra's Second Husband
    An engagingly grim psychological thriller.
  4. Lost Souls
    Can be blamed foremost on its fire-and-brimstone screenwriter, Pierce Gardner.
  5. The Red Stuff
    Evocative but ahistorical.
  6. Dr T and the Women
    A flabby farce in which everyone seems to be making it up as they go along.
  7. The Contender
    Graceless writing and shameless plot contrivance.
  8. Billy Elliot
    By setting this intimate conflict against a wider social drama, Daldry makes his portrait of a dancer all the more compelling.
  9. Animal Factory
    Tender, poignant, and homoerotically charged, this complicated father-son relationship is brought to life by two brilliant actors and a director who's canny enough to give them all the room they need.
  10. Ratcatcher
    The most audacious debut feature of the year.
  11. Followers
    So seamlessly and comprehensively dreadful that its very existence (let alone its appearance in theaters) beggars belief.
  12. One
    Even more than the subtlety of the writing and acting, it's this sophisticated and emotionally potent visual strategy that suggests Barbieri's promise as a filmmaker and lifts One above the low-budget indie heap.
  13. Taboo
    An action film at once baroque and austere, hypnotic and opaque.
  14. CyberWorld
    A techno-happy bumrush screaming the joy of never thinking twice about repeating things ad nauseam, and as loud as possible.
  15. Two Family House
    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.
  16. Bamboozled
    Primary story line is clumsy and badly acted. But he (Lee) reminds you that movies have power, that they matter, and for a few brilliant moments, Bamboozled matters more than any other American movie this year.
  17. Bootmen
    The best sequences -- auditions in a strip bar and a public bathroom -- still can't compete with that industrial musical called "Pola X."
  18. Yi Yi
    Although dense with incident and motif, the movie has an effortless flow.
  19. Meet the Parents
    Watching Ben get the girl or be seriously injured trying always has its dry, keening pleasures.
  20. Requiem for a Dream
    May be an elaborate stunt, a bungee jump, but even so, it's forceful enough to leave a rare palpitating residue.
  21. Beautiful
    Surpassing Dan Aykroyd's "Nothing but Trouble" as the most astoundingly atrocious walrus-flop of a directorial debut by a languishing actor ever contrived, Sally Field's Beautiful.
  22. The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy
    Bloated loquaciousness, damp self-absorption, and defensive reflexiveness on display here.
  23. Girlfight
    A near-irresistible button-pusher that's agile enough to hold a mirror to its own aspirations: The Sundance prize-winning filmmaker and her prize discovery, Michelle Rodriguez, merge in the image of a self-invented amateur boxer.
  24. Remember the Titans
    Boorish and flatulent.
  25. The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story
    A grassroots refutation of Discovery Channel/National Geographic dispassion, The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story is hot and sweaty with fetching curves.
  26. Barenaked in America
    A pleasant if overlong road show starring five witty, sweet, humble guys.
  27. Best in Show
    Best in Show succeeds only insofar as you're willing to laugh at a bunch of sad freaks.
  28. The Specials
    Wittily conceived but clumsy as a newborn calf.
  29. Prince of Central Park
    A stinky dumpster for sentimental dung about homelessness and the magical mecca that isn't Manhattan.
  30. Chutney Popcorn
    The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.
  31. The Tavern
    Though rife with incidental plot holes, Foote's movie feels right even when nothing important is happening...which is much of the time.
  32. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Simply less campily moronic than its predecessor, a tired kill-by-numbers.
  33. Under Suspicion
    Strangely, there's no thrust and parry to this potentially heavyweight mind game. The effect is more like a tennis match in which every feebly contested point ends with an unforced error.
  34. Woman on Top
    Too flimsily built and baldly unfunny to bolster Cruz's charms, but Almodóvar's blessed Virgin is, as usual, winning and guilelessly seductive.
  35. Double Parked
    Child abuse, domestic violence, and the struggles of single mothers deserve better treatment than this.
  36. Left Luggage
    Krabbé alternates exaggeration with sentiment, but the main characters are relatively complex, and its surprise ending is genuinely affecting.
  37. Tigerland
    In his first major role, the Irish actor Farrell deflects the script's more dubious aspects through sheer magnetic presence.
  38. Dancer in the Dark
    This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.
  39. Twilight: Los Angeles
    Smith's work is a means of cauterizing wounds that have not even begun to heal...certainly not across a continent in Giuliani's New York.
  40. Alma
    As fragmented and unresolved as the experiences of mother and daughter, Alma bears witness to a situation for which there are no easy answers.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    It's worth shelling out to see this doc on a theater screen: The enthralling archival footage of Germany in the 1930s is rare stuff indeed, of superb photographic quality.
  42. On the Run
    A bad one-night stand endured with a jailbroke cad and his put-upon travel-agent pal that hinges somewhat on the characters' impression that Frank Sinatra is still among us.
  43. A Piece of Eden
    Mushy and musty itself, A Piece of Eden takes an eternity...this time to cheat and shortcut its way to lesser Frank Capra moments without the gritty touch of, say, a Garry Marshall.
  44. The Dream Catcher
    A highly talented filmmaker, Radtke draws intense, focused performances from these two inexperienced young actors.
  45. Duets
    A road movie, though there's a decided lack of forward motion.
  46. Urbania
    Derails toward the end, becoming platitudinous, not to mention kitschy, but, given the Cheerios wholesomeness of most gay indies, its grief-stricken delirium is a welcome relief.
  47. Human Resources
    Restrained, tough, and subtle enough to be as engrossing on the second viewing as it was on the first.
  48. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Often succumbs to the craven hysteria perhaps inherent in its hoary premise.
  49. Goya in Bordeaux
    What can a movie tell us about the painter that the paintings do not? The effort has done no favors for Picasso or Rivera or Bacon.
  50. 30 Days
    Thuds away at the now familiar New York turf of Jews and their mating habits.
  51. The Price of Air
    Culminates in a second bing-bang-boom triple shoot-out that effectively cancels out the shreds of remaining plot but is shot and cut like a sixth grader's Super-8 struggle for Woo-ness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paragraph 175
    The tales told are bitter, horrific in detail...yet often leavened with irony and humor. Rupert Everett's low-key narration serves the film well.
  53. Almost Famous
    Panoramic yet cozy, enthusiastically glib.
  54. Pola X
    This moody, rapturous adaptation of Pierre, Herman Melville's gothic follow-up to "Moby Dick," is never less than seriously romantic.
  55. The Watcher
    Sidesteps any juicy subtext in favor of routine chase-movie thrills.
  56. Backstage
    High-concept cinema this ain't.
  57. Solas
    The fierce rigor of María Galiana's performance keeps this film from ever falling into sentimentality.
  58. Nurse Betty
    Betty sustains her character, the movie fails to maintain its own.
  59. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Dynamic but preachy.
  60. The Way of the Gun
    Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.
  61. The Bulls' Night Out
    A likable, earnest character study with a rare sense of purpose.
  62. Clouds
    Has nice, pearly, black-and-white cinematography, but it also has the shocking temerity to run over 100 minutes. Sweet air is required.
  63. Turn It Up
    The staging and performances are awkward, the frequent shoot-outs a snore.
  64. Wildflowers
    Wildflowers is the only brand of requiem the '60s get anymore -- worshipful and ass-backward.
  65. Madadayo
    Unabashedly personal and uncool...but between you and me, dear reader, I love it to death.
  66. Whipped
    If all-out headache-nausea-braindeath is what you crave, Whipped's available.
  67. Titanic Town
    Isn't convincing on every front, but as a political conversation piece, it's potentially effective.
  68. Dark Days
    Singer achieves remarkable intimacy with his subjects.
  69. The Art of War
    Far more preposterous in its details than the average blam-quip-kerplow, The Art of War isn't helped by the performances.
  70. God's Army
    Tries to show the oh-so-human side of Gospel-hawking, His Word, the Path, and so on.
  71. Orfeu
    Hovers between mythic poetry and earthbound grit; the result is an inert, drably florid spectacle.
  72. Waga jinsei saiaku no toki
    At heart, a work of infectious, unironic affection.
  73. Fastpitch
    Spear's portrait of unpaid, passionate fastpitchers could give filmmakers of all budgets a notion of how real Americans speak.
  74. Smiling Fish & Goat on Fire
    In this visually malnourished film, quirks substitute for character.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Crew
    The humor is even more geriatric than the cast.
  76. Bittersweet Motel
    As homey as old sweats.
  77. Solomon & Gaenor
    Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.
  78. Love & Sex
    All solipsistic jaded-Cosmo patter.
  79. Bring It On
    She (Dunst) provides the only major element of Bring It On that plays as tweaking parody rather than slick, strident, body-slam churlishness.
  80. Chalk
    What gives the film extra weight is the sense that these are not just actors trying to enhance their careers but real people seizing a chance for immortality.
  81. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    An unusually rich music doc.
  82. Place Vendôme
    Inept as a thriller, Place Vendôme nevertheless intrigues.
  83. The Cell
    Not nearly the mindfuck it wants to be.
  84. Godzilla 2000
    Offers some interesting twists for connoisseurs.
  85. Steal This Movie
    At once simple-mindedly didactic and utterly chaotic, Steal This Movie! is interspersed with fake headlines and botched history.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Original Kings of Comedy
    Simultaneously hilarious and reprehensible.
  87. The Opportunists
    Filled with vivid and likable characters, The Opportunists could be the basis for a TV series as captivating as "The Sopranos."
  88. Intern
    Smartly written, unevenly executed.
  89. Aimee & Jaguar
    Relies on the hefty talents of its two leading ladies.
  90. An Affair of Love
    This sweet, pensive gabfest is neither conventionally romantic nor pornographic.
  91. Bless the Child
    A callous piece of work that exploits images of children in pain or jeopardy.
  92. Cecil B. DeMented
    Has the grace to send the audience out with a piece of Waters-written rap.
  93. The Replacements
    Lame even by triumph-of-the-underdog sports-comedy standards.
  94. The Tao of Steve
    Can any American filmmaker other than the Farrellys make a rom-com in which the principals engage in activities apart from the tiresomely tireless dissection of rom?
  95. The Tic Code
    A sympathetic but conventional disease-of-the-week movie.
  96. Saving Grace
    Constipated English whimsy for the easily tickled.
  97. Psycho Beach Party
    The viewer is left to ponder the number of levels on which this counts as a pointless exercise -- a parody of parodic movies, a deconstruction of transparent genres, a self-negatingly knowing example of camp.
  98. Coyote Ugly
    I'd rather eat ball bearings.
  99. Hollow Man
    Gleefully confrontational in its ludicrous, pulpy tawdriness.
  100. Space Cowboys
    An entertainingly raffish action-comedy.
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