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. Ride with the Devil
    The movie is not unintelligent but it is insipid
  2. Toy Story 2
    The kitsch is back in full bloom.
  3. The World Is Not Enough
    Makes the strongest case for retirement since late-period Roger Moore.
  4. All About My Mother
    As straightforward and plot-driven as any movie about life imitating art imitating life could possibly be.
  5. Sleepy Hollow
    There isn't a bankable Hollywood director with a flintier sense of aesthetic integrity.
  6. 42: Forty Two Up
    The 7Up series is thus one of the rare documentaries to have had a positive practical effect on the life of at least one of its subjects.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mansfield Park
    In trying so hard to entertain, ends up sabotaging itself.
  8. Liberty Heights
    Buoyant with quiet smiles and unpretentious fondness.
  9. Felicia's Journey
    Egoyan, whose sophisticated eye is connected to a brain that seems, for the moment, to have gone dead.
  10. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    Inexplicable as it is, the Joan of Arc story encourages contemplation of ourselves as a species. The Messenger is more apt to prompt meditation on the nature of show business.
  11. Dogma
    A tediously childish exhibition.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light It Up
    Unexpectedly satisfying feel-good agitprop.
  13. Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back!
    Possibly the most deranged, pointlessly complex, automatic-writing-like cultural manifestation outside the cosmologies of the more creative psychotics.
  14. A Moment of Innocence
    A meditation-brilliant, humorous, and moving-on history and memory.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Portraits chinois
    The performances are uniformly strong.
  16. Rosetta
    Pummeling, jagged, and extremely well-edited film.
  17. Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
    A first-person doc assembled largely from footage taken in the course of the five features they made, being madmen together.
  18. Train of Life
    It's entertainment that never lets us off the hook.
  19. American Movie
    Although I don't begrudge Borchardt his year of fame, what he doesn't seem to understand about his exploitation creeps me out.
  20. The Bone Collector
    So formulaic and predictable that you're bored even when you're scared.
  21. The Insider
    May be pumped-up, but it's rarely boring
  22. Last Night
    A witty, trenchant script, lots of complicated characters, and a few actors who turn human frailty into something nearly sublime.
  23. Some Fish Can Fly
    Some dogs can bark.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beefcake
    Beefcake's messiness has real charm, and its tribute to Mizer is both appropriately complicated and poignantly sexy.
  25. Music of the Heart
    Solid raw material, but the execution is overcooked.
  26. The Legend of 1900
    Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Speaking in Strings
    A clumsy labor of love with unforgivable lapses...key footage is missing, and it fails to show why Salerno-Sonnenberg's controversial interpretations are so original and valid.
  28. Princess Mononoke
    Complex, superbly rendered, and wildly eccentric anime-even by Miyazaki's own standards.
  29. Being John Malkovich
    The most offbeat studio comedy since "Rushmore."
  30. Man of the Century
    Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.
  31. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    The last scene reads like an admission of defeat.
  32. The Best Man
    Everything about the film is familiar except that the twentysomethings are all African American.
  33. Body Shots
    Vomitous.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Men Cry Bullets
    This amateurish no-budget effort has earnest charm, and a sensitivity to the tragic dimension of amour fou that saves it from lapsing into shtick.
  35. Show Me Love
    Easily the best teen movie of the year.
  36. Bringing Out the Dead
    The mood is less angst-ridden than hypercaffeinated, as Scorsese keeps cranking the velocity-bloodbath in the reggae inferno, exploding skyline pietà, climactic white light of redemption.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That's the Way I Like It
    Writer- director Glen Goei, a London stage actor, ably guides his likable cast through this by-the-numbers story, but he is hobbled by the film's lifeless soundtrack.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
    As full of flickering warmth as it is bereft of larger insight.
  39. Julien Donkey-Boy
    A handheld and grainy exercise in cine-stupefaction...too spastic to connect...the movie just flails the air.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Story of Us
    Maudlin, irritating marital drama.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L'ennui
    The plump, Rubenesque Guillemin steals the show. Her understated simplicity is her strength -- this is one of the major movie debuts of recent years.
  42. Joe the King
    The film belongs to Fleiss, and he makes Joe's inner life so transparent that it's heartbreaking to watch the boy dig himself into a hole.
  43. The Straight Story
    Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.
  44. Defying Gravity
    Denying Reality, more like. John Keitel's first feature is impossibly naive, even as smoothed-over coming-out tales go.
  45. Fight Club
    This malevolently gleeful satire...is extremely funny, surprisingly well- acted, and boldly designed...at least until its steel-and-chrome soufflé falls apart.
  46. New Rose Hotel
    What's on the screen is so dreadful that it inspires the ontological question "What are films and why is this not one of them?"
  47. Whiteboyz
    Not a movie that can afford to take itself seriously.
  48. The Sticky Fingers of Time
    Psychologically resonant despite the intermittently clunky performances...one of the only Amerindies in recent years to match intellectual with formal ambitions.
  49. Random Hearts
    Everyone in the film is a walking cliché.
  50. The Grandfather
    Not only is the dialogue endless...it's like driving behind a 15 mph geezer on a one-way street.
  51. Beyond the Clouds
    It's not easy to endure, despite -- or due to the embarrassment of -- an all-star cast.
  52. The Limey
    A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.
  53. Boys Don't Cry
    Scorches the screen like a prairie fire.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Plunkett & Macleane
    The script is as full of holes as some of the highwaymen's bullet-riddled victims -- why not throw a drum-and-bass track over everything?
  55. Love, etc.
    The admirable Gainsbourg refrains from overacting, but her leading men never quite transcend the emptiness and inanity of their characters' dilemma.
  56. Mystery, Alaska
    Slack, saccharine script.
  57. Happy, Texas
    Sputters to a dead halt right out of the gate. One labored scenario follows another.
  58. Bandits
    A confusingly edited music-video hodgepodge.
  59. Three Kings
    Increasingly muddled, cumulatively monotonous, would-be heartwarming, Three Kings becomes its own entertainment allegory -- searching, Hollywood style, for the point at which blatant self-interest can turn humanitarian, while still remaining profitable.
  60. Divorce Iranian Style
    A small, direct, tantalizing documentary.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    On the Ropes
    Burstein and Morgen take all this in from an unobtrusive middle distance, letting the subjects themselves slowly complicate the profusion of athletic and ghetto-real clichés that fly scattershot in the early going.
  62. Out of Season
    There are many dramatic possibilities in an interracial lesbian romance set in a provincial town, but Out of Season focuses on the women's fears of commitment, which would be fine - even refreshing - if they seemed to, well, like each other or something.
  63. Mumford
    Mumford is good for a few chuckles and not nearly as egregious or cloying as it might have been.
  64. Fever Pitch
    The entire matter of totemistic home-team dementia is roasted on a spit and then embraced for all its sorry pointlessness.
  65. Dog Park
    A series of moments that don't quite add up to a movie...one bland, maundering stroll.
  66. Guinevere
    Except for Polley and Rea, the performances are heavy-handed.
  67. Het ondergrondse orkest
    A world-beat city symphony.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taxman
    A wintertime crime caper that truly leaves you cold.
  69. Splendor
    Might as well be bad TV...Splendor is what happens when a director whose natural mode is subversion runs out of things to subvert.
  70. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    Even Mastroianni cannot hold our attention for over three hours.
  71. Sugar Town
    Neither as lively nor as tough as the original, and compared to the hardcore punk of "Border Radio," the score for Sugar Town sounds like Muzak.
  72. Breakfast of Champions
    Begins on a note of total migraine-inducing hysteria, which continues unabated throughout.
  73. Lucie Aubrac
    This extraordinary story still sparks controversy in France, but in Berri's hands, it never comes alive...a shadow play of historical icons, rather than a portrait of people in love.
  74. Get Bruce
    I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.
  75. Blue Streak
    The contortional physical shtick familiar from Lawrence's sitcom, laden with a dollop of Three Stooges violence, should keep the boys happy.
  76. For Love of the Game
    Costner himself is the doggedly humorless heart and soul (and brains?) of this monumentally maudlin picture.
  77. Romance
    A dark and unsparing study of female masochism and a brittle sex comedy of manners, Romance is unsettled in tone, to say the least.
  78. American Beauty
    Bland and nasty, American Beauty has the slightly stale feel of a family sitcom conceived under the spell of "Married . . . With Children."
  79. The Minus Man
    Less interesting for what it has to say about evil -- namely, that it's banal/unknowable/random/everywhere -- than for the microsurgical procedures it performs on genre conventions and expectations.
  80. Earth
    Mehta feels compelled to twist the screw, shamelessly plying her audience with mawkish tropes wearing the garb of "innocence."
  81. B. Monkey
    B. Monkey is crawling with smart actors saying things they don't quite mean.
  82. Stigmata
    Despite exposition delivered so redundantly and witlessly you think you're in a Kaplan class, Stigmata manages to be incoherent.
  83. Best Laid Plans
    A creakily mechanical B-noir.
  84. Black Cat, White Cat
    Determined to twist every character into an ideogram for vulgar humanity.
  85. I Woke Up Early the Day I Died
    That this mime show works better than it should is, in a sense, the ultimate dis.
  86. Outside Providence
    Cross "Rushmore" with "Cheech and Chong" and you might get Outside Providence.
  87. The Muse
    As consistently funny as it is smartly tooled.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The 13th Warrior
    A well-marbled, albeit derivative, slab of action-movie man meat.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Too Deep
    The film does have a canny appreciation for how ghetto realness is acted out.
  90. Mickey Blue Eyes
    The last half hour bogs down badly, with a cynical fake-out ending and a final scene that borders on non-sensical.
  91. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    Yet another black comedy that misunderstands and misrepresents the genre.
  92. Brokedown Palace
    Part cautionary tale, part moral-uplift saga, Brokedown Palace is as dull as it's absurd.
  93. Bowfinger
    Never hits a note of high hilarity.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Detroit Rock City
    There's an awful lot of rocking out going on in Detroit Rock City, but then rocking out is this occasionally clever but lifeless movie's reason for being.
  95. Autumn Tale
    If the carefully planted romantic intrigue is serenely slow to ripen, the process is never less than intriguing.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mystery Men
    Mystery Men is wryly sentimental stuff, but it's also pretty sharp.
  97. The Thomas Crown Affair
    A sealskin-slick, cat-and-mouse romance-caper trifle with a hard-on for wealth that feels downright Trumpian.
  98. The Acid House
    There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Illuminata
    For all its ambitions, Illuminata sheds only murky light on what separates theater from life.
  100. The Iron Giant
    Remarkably unassuming, genuinely playful, and superbly executed, The Iron Giant towers over the cartoon landscape.
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