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. Catfish in Black Bean Sauce
    A progressive but not very funny comedy of manners.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    Suffers from a serious case of sophomore slump.
  3. Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
    As documentary filmmaking, it's cheap and suspect. As advocacy, it's necessary.
  4. Girl on the Bridge
    Painless -- not particularly funny and not even remotely moving.
  5. Wonderland
    There's not a false note among the performances: Henderson, Hart, Shepherd, Markham, and in particular McKee add unspoken complexities to their portrayals.
  6. The Wind Will Carry Us
    To my mind, the greatest film by Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami.
  7. New Waterford Girl
    A tender and hilarious vision of female adolescence.
  8. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Cannot help but be merely another debacle that Tammy Faye will survive, eyelashes and integrity intact.
  9. Two Women
    Its awkward mix of polemic and melodramatics probably won't travel very well.
  10. Benjamin Smoke
    As ethereal, moving, and uncompromising as its subject.
  11. Les amants criminels
    May be as gimmicky as Ozon's other features, but it's also more resonant and even haunting.
  12. $pent
    So committed to its by-the-numbers banality you wonder why it isn't part of the fall TV lineup.
  13. Rififi (re-release)
    A vivid exercise in hokum that more or less invented the idea of French film noir...and not just for Americans.
  14. Alice et Martin
    Thrives on vivid incidentals and telling details.
  15. Loser
    The most progressive, good-hearted studio film of the summer.
  16. What Lies Beneath
    Suggest a Clintons-at-home scenario for 2001 -- haunted by the ghosts of dalliances past.
  17. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Inoffensively glib and innocuously arty.
  18. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    A movie of cutting humor, near-constant talk, and one show-stopping dance routine.
  19. The Five Senses
    Beautifully shot and littered with disquieting character business, the film is hog-tied by its own bad Big Idea.
  20. Chuck & Buck
    Manages to be not only consistently droll but cumulatively poignant and even scary.
  21. Shadow Hours
    Isaac Eaton wrote and directed; he evidences little talent in either department.
  22. X-Men
    When it comes to stoopid fun, X-Men could be the summer movie to beat.
  23. The Big Blue
    The results are predictably lachrymose, especially with the reinstated "unhappy" ending from the original French version.
  24. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
    Once Drake reaches the candlelight vigil that acts as his penultimate set piece, he sustains an impossible balance between mordant wit and articulate bewilderment.
  25. Fear of Fiction
    Ahearn's maddening game of connect-the-dots is content to collapse inward with honking, preening abandon.
  26. All the Rage
    More commendable as social protest than as filmmaking.
  27. I'm the One That I Want
    The time-outs from wisecracking -- invariably, to impart a simplistic self-esteem lesson or two -- feature the most awkward silences you're likely to endure in a comedy routine.
  28. But I'm a Cheerleader
    Not as skillful, subtle, or hilarious as "Some Like It Hot," but its anti-essentialism vis-à-vis gender roles is just as sharp and exhilarating.
  29. The Kid
    The Kid's denouement resembles the nightmare that would have transpired had execs foisted a toupee and a happy ending on "12 Monkeys."
  30. Scary Movie
    A big, stupid bull with bodacious tits, but that's not to say it doesn't dish out some lite hardy-hars.
  31. Shower
    It's far too soggy a confection for my taste.
  32. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Spheeris gives every indication of having gotten too close to her material, but her film's overall air of discombobulation is poignant in itself.
  33. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle
    Hardly a project worthy of grown men and women.
  34. The Perfect Storm
    Rains on its own parade.
  35. Trixie
    As overlong and undermotivated as it is absentmindedly incoherent.
  36. The Patriot
    A movie of cornball sentiment, humorously anachronistic dialogue, and expensive Colonial Williamsburg sets.
  37. Me, Myself & Irene
    This is the first movie I've ever seen -- porn included -- in which a guy gets coldcocked with a dildo.
  38. Praise
    Projects a confessional frankness about human relationships that has the messy feel of truth.
  39. Chicken Run
    A combination of "Barnyard Follies" and "Schindler's List."
  40. Boricua's Bond
    Despite its incoherence and inaudible dialogue, this slice-of-life film manages to be simultaneously thuggish and platitudinous.
  41. Marcel Proust's Time Regained
    The daring of the conception is matched only by the brilliance of the execution.
  42. Titan A.E.
    Suggestive of nothing so much as Saturday-morning TV.
  43. Shaft
    As an action flick, Shaft is clumsy out of the gate and overfond of hurtling stuntmen through windows.
  44. Boys and Girls
    A cat-and-dog romantic squabbler so garbled you'd need a centrifuge to sort things out.
  45. Butterfly Tongues
    It's boilerplate Miramax: a sentimental import with lovingly photographed Euro locale.
  46. Humanité
    Confidently absurd.
  47. Jesus' Son
    Though Maclean uses every trick available to make up for the missing inner voice, we never get into Crudup's mellow loser like we should. Maclean's got an incisive eye, but it's poised on the outside of the terrarium looking in.
  48. The Woman Chaser
    The queasiness it makes you feel is more like acid reflux than existential nausea.
  49. Pop & Me
    The most revelatory moment is provided not by the spectacle of the Roes clinging to each other on a bungee cord, but by Julian Lennon, who pops up on the beach in Monaco to give a terse evaluation of his father.
  50. BookWars
    Artless but seductive.
  51. Love's Labour's Lost
    Hamming shamelessly as Berowne, Branagh is overseasoned for his part ... he's as desperate as a veteran social director at a Catskills hotel about to fold.
  52. Groove
    Groove is less a work of subcultural ethnography than a curiously dorky act of hipster sincerity, less party movie than cheesy valentine
  53. Sunshine
    Despite Sunshine's historical scope and multiplicity of characters, it doesn't shed half as much light on its subject -- identity and anti-Semitism -- as does, for example, Agnieszka Holland's claustrophobic chamber piece "Angry Harvest."
  54. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    Doesn't just look and sound like a car commercial. It is a car commercial.
  55. American Pimp
    Alternately mind-expanding and brain-numbing.
  56. Big Momma's House
    Ends up waddling its way toward gentler, mistier climes, stopping just shy of "Doubtfire" country. It doesn't run out of smelly steam so much as downshift and become a different movie.
  57. Grass
    Grass's relentless hard sell ultimately grows wearisome. Although only 80 minutes, it ends, and not a moment too soon, with a pot legalization rally that might well be reproduced outside the theater.
  58. Thirteen
    The movie is as eloquently uninflected and filled with quirks as its star.
  59. Passion of Mind
    An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.
  60. 8 ½ Women
    The deeply ridiculous 8 1/2 Women could have been made only by a cranky dotard.
  61. Shanghai Noon
    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.
  62. Kikujirô no natsu
    An overtly saccharine fairy tale of abandonment that is subverted by its own comic brutality. It's oddly affecting...which is to say, sad in a way that its maker might not have intended.
  63. Mission: Impossible II
    A vaguely absurd epidemiological thriller filled with elaborately superfluous setups and shamelessly stale James Bond riffs.
  64. The Well
    Still most easily defined by its unavoidable parallels to any number of lesbian-overtone psychodramas.
  65. Luminous Motion
    If Lloyd's performance is the film's near-fatal flaw, Unger's is its saving grace.
  66. Small Time Crooks
    Allen's funniest, least sour outing in nearly a decade is a small movie with a tidy payoff. The movie gives vulgarity a good name.
  67. Road Trip
    Gets a lurching spring in its step whenever Tom Green shows up to, say, cram a live mouse in his mouth.
  68. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    Cirque du Soleil's campy, crackbrained, and in no way unenjoyable 3-D IMAX pageant Journey of Man might be the oddest movie offering of the year so far.
  69. Dinosaur
    Dinosaur amounts to 80 minutes of discouraged Cretaceous trudging, punctuated by the occasional fight or stampede and one pyrotechnic coup: a truly thrilling meteor shower.
  70. Young Dr. Freud
    Structured to suggest an extended psychoanalytic session or an episode of "The Twilight Zone."
  71. Shadow Boxers
    As smooth and powerfully packed as its protagonist.
  72. Coming Soon
    Refreshingly direct and even courageous in its confrontation of female pleasure -- specifically orgasms and masturbation, the staple of teen-boy comedies, but hitherto off-limits for girls.
  73. Kadosh
    One of Gitaï's greatest assets in Kadosh is such stillness, which leaves facile outsiders' judgment out of the frame and thereby deepens our immersion in the narrative.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Center Stage
    Pays lip service to the seriousness of craft but won't let us watch the dancing.
  75. Hamlet
    Stylish, funny, and smart...but only up to a point.
  76. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    The movie's mode is brutal and excremental.
  77. Gladiator
    The digital animation is far more evident here than in "The Phantom Menace."
  78. Luminarias
    Chock-full of feisty-frank go-girl sextalk speculating on white guys' underplayable size.
  79. La Nouvelle Ève
    Takes its shape from (Viard's) performance, which is as big as life.
  80. Dream of Light
    More analytical than contemplative, never less than straightforward, Dream of Light makes no showy bid for the sublime.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Basket
    Combines the wholesomeness of "Old Yeller" with the moral and physical claustrophobia of "The Waltons."
  82. I Dreamed of Africa
    Hudson keeps the movie rambling and episodic, deferring to the imposing backdrop whenever possible.
  83. Up at the Villa
    The Haases, whose previous films ("Angels and Insects," "The Music of Chance") evinced a remote, unfussy sensibility, are a poor fit for the melodramatic contortions that the story demands.
  84. Adorenarin doraibu
    Little more than a cartoon, and not a funny one at that.
  85. Human Traffic
    Sweet, ribald, and even inspired in an off-the-cuff way.
  86. Into My Heart
    Anemic.
  87. Where the Heart Is
    Indulges something of a number obsession, amounting not exactly to a movie but rather a tallying of atrocities.
  88. Timecode
    I suspect that Time Code was a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.
  89. J'aimerais pas crever un dimanche
    It manages to be both ponderous and silly.
  90. From the Edge of the City
    The viewer, though unavoidably alert, is before long too numb to care.
  91. The Last September
    The film's pathos lies not with people who have justice on their side, but with those who don't know where they belong.
  92. U-571
    It's a simple pleasure watching an American movie that respects genre, knows its limitations, and genuflects at the memory of Don Siegel in the age of Spielberg.
  93. Croupier
    Polished and adroit ado about next to nothing, Hodges's film owes everything to Owen, who nails the vaguely unsavory, unreadable, half-lidded hunks that inhabit every profitable entertainment-industry outpost.
  94. The Virgin Suicides
    Coppola looks beyond the seductive metaphysical puzzle and locates the core of Eugenides's allegory in an obsessive, almost forensic act of remembering, both futile and inexplicably essential.
  95. Love & Basketball
    Prince-Bythewood gives the film a style that's easy on the eye but also has muscle -- on and off the court.
  96. Where the Money Is
    A caper film hardly worthy of his (Newman's) presence.
  97. The Girl Next Door
    Occasionally smirky.
  98. The Specialist
    An austere and fascinating documentary.
  99. Keeping the Faith
    Its exploration of faith and love is skin deep.
  100. East Is East
    Largely a showcase for Puri, and he rises to the occasion with a performance that bursts from the screen and tears into your heart.
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