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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    American History X
    A mess of a film.
  2. Life Is Beautiful
    Life Is Beautiful is funny (kinda) and even tasteful (sorta). But in its fantasy of divine grace, it is also nonsense.
  3. Pleasantville
    Funny for about half an hour, Pleasantville thereafter becomes an increasingly lugubrious, ultimately exasperating mix of technological wonder and ideological idiocy.
  4. Orgazmo
    A ridiculous soft-core kung-fu porn film about a ridiculous hard-core one, Orgazmo is the kind of movie that improves according to the lateness of the hour.
  5. The Cruise
    The Cruise is being hailed as a harbinger of a future in which indie film will be liberated by low-cost technology. If this is where we're going, I want off the bus.
  6. Happiness
    If Hollywood were truly devoted to telling it like it is, Baker would win a special Oscar. To add to the creepiness, Solondz is (as he made clear in Dollhouse) an extremely sensitive director of kids.
  7. Beloved
    Dutiful as it is, Jonathan Demme's Beloved doesn't succeed so much as it abides…it moves in leisurely fits and--unencumbered by style or narrative complexity--never loses its forward momentum.
  8. Practical Magic
    The title is, to say the least, an understatement. Witchcraft has rarely looked more prosaic and less sexy than it does in Griffin Dunne's Practical Magic.
  9. The Sentinel
    What’s remarkable—and Kafkaesque—about La Sentinelle is how Desplechin grounds the phantasmagoric aspects of his tale in the details, routines, and conflicts of daily life.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Holy Man
    Holy Man's traipse through the wilds of consumerism and higher purpose must have seemed like a chance for the proverbial stretch, but not even Eddie can save this ill-conceived mess of a movie.
  11. What Dreams May Come
    A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.
  12. Antz
    Matching their superbly expressive computer-generated counterparts, the actors are all enjoyably hammy, but the real star of Antz is the art direction, a marvel of teeming detail wittier and more sophisticated than the script.
  13. Clay Pigeons
    It's never clear, by the way, why any of this is supposed to be even remotely funny...This is the kind of movie asinine enough to believe that the mere juxtaposition of sadistic violence and a jaunty tune on the soundtrack is, in itself, clever.
  14. Pecker
    If scandal, sleaze, and celebrity worship are our national religion, then John Waters is an American prophet.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monument Ave.
    Under Ted Demme's accomplished direction, the film unfolds with a kind of ruthless simplicity, observing, rather than stating, the neighborhood's intricate social connections.
  16. One True Thing
    Quindlen's book is wry and deeply sad in its prose, but watching actors run this very simple maze is significantly less entertaining, or convincing.
  17. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    While the acting ensemble is crucial, it's not the only asset here.
  18. Rounders
    An unappealing, conventional, and somnolent piece of work in which, as glumly directed from David Levien and Brian Koppelman's corny script, every scene feels like it's being played for the second time.
  19. Simon Birch
    That Simon Birch is not as maudlin as it might have been is largely due to the intensely thoughtful, prickly performance of 11-year-old Ian Michael Smith, who plays Simon.
  20. Your Friends & Neighbors
    A fascinatingly mean-spirited erotic comedy.
  21. Next Stop Wonderland
    The style of the filmmaking, the freewheeling handheld camera movement, the associative editing, and the buoyant Brazilian score convey Anderson's sense that chance plays a major role in our lives and that what's happening on the periphery is often more important than what's staring us in the face.
  22. The Eel
    This simple, sinuous fable may not be among Imamura’s greatest films–it lacks the crazy libidinal energy of The Pornographers or Eijanaika–but it could hardly have been made by anyone else.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    It's not a very well-made movie, but Stella's many limitations will probably be a side issue among its target audience, irrelevant next to those repeating images of Angela being so rich and beautiful and black.
  24. The Governess
    The Governess is too dirty-minded to fit the Merchant Ivory mold but not salacious enough to qualify as bodice-ripping laff riot. [04 Aug 1998]
    • Village Voice
  25. Lolita
    There's precious few yucks, for one thing, but you can't say you're surprised that the astonishingly humorless Lyne hadn't noticed or cared that the Nabokov original is a droll comedy of errors first and a self-pitying romantic tragedy second.
  26. Henry Fool
    Henry Fool, which runs a leisurely and ultimately tiresome 138 minutes, is so self-conscious it feels uncomfortable in its own skin. [23 Jun 1998]
    • Village Voice
  27. Sliding Doors
    Unduly smug about its flashy conceit and otherwise utterly empty, the film plays like lobotomized Kieslowski, less Blind Chance than dumb luck.
  28. Live Flesh
    A soap opera as convoluted as it is overdetermined. [20 Jan 1998]
    • Village Voice
  29. Happy Together
    Acerbic, moody, and provocatively slight, it's a movie of apparent non sequiturs and privileged moments. [21 Oct 1997]
    • Village Voice
  30. Telling Lies in America
    Guy Ferland directs with close attention to surface detail, but he never gets to the heart of the story - quite possibly because there isn't one to begin with. [21 Oct 1997]
    • Village Voice
  31. The Pillow Book
    The Pillow Book's pretentions are boundless, for all its desperate fashion and layered imagery, it's a staggering bore-as vacantly petulant as Kate Moss's stare. [10 Jun 1997]
    • Village Voice
  32. Traveller
    The movie lacks any sense of subcultural specificity, though it has a superabundant country music score. [22 Apr 1997]
    • Village Voice
  33. The Watermelon Woman
    Funny and smart, full of biting humor and astute observations about identity and history, Cheryl Dunye's audacious, joyous debut feature captures the process of falling hopelessly in love with the movies.
  34. The Secret Agent
    The best one can say for Christopher Hampton's dispirited adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is that this weirdly sentimental movie might direct new attention to Conrad's corrosive novela satire. [12 Nov 1996]
    • Village Voice
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Freeway
    As it is, Witherspoon's sweet-as-peach-pie Southern accent only grates and writer-director Bright's incessant winking at the audience bespeaks a project that was running on empty before shooting started. [22 Oct 1996, p.88]
    • Village Voice
  36. Flirt
    Hal Hartley fans, Flirt may be too slight and schematic. [13 Aug 1996]
    • Village Voice
  37. Butterfly Kiss
    This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]
    • Village Voice
  38. Mrs. Winterbourne
    Lake was fab in John Waters's films, especially Hairspray, but Fraser is more adroit in this screwball mode. Lake by now may be too brash and over-the-top for the big screen: too much her own persona. [23 Apr 1996]
    • Village Voice
  39. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    It’s still worth watching at least once, just to see what can go wrong when funny people aren’t allowed to be funny.
  40. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Ostensibly a conventional tale of triad loyalty, As Tears Go By announced the presence of a genuine Hong Kong new wave—as well as an ambitious cineaste.
  41. Girl 6
    Girl 6, the goofy phone-sex comedy that he directed from Suzan-Lori Parks's script, may be incoherent, but it's never boring. Juggling a dozen or more subplots and letting them drop wherever they fall, the movie gives the impression of having been invented as Lee went along. [26 Mar 1996]
    • Village Voice
  42. Dekalog (1988)
    Dekalog certainly lives up to its reputation as a mind-altering masterpiece. You marvel at the precision of its filmmaking even as it spreads an atmosphere of moral unease.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Flower of My Secret
    The Flower of My Secret is a return to form, although not a return to the sort of campy, transgressive comedies that rocketed Almodovar to the top of Spanish cinema during the liberated post-Franco early 1980s. [12 Mar 1996]
    • Village Voice
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rumble in the Bronx
    This cross-cultural circulation of proto-gangster fantasies is ultimately Rumble in the Bronx's lasting irony and perhaps even the source of its outsized hilarity. Better to laugh than to dwell on the fact that not only has Jackie Chan made a lame "American" movie, but he's plagiarized Michael Jackson's "Bad" video to boot. [27 Feb 1996]
    • Village Voice
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    White Squall
    Despite a rousing fourth act (out of five), this disappointing adventure movie plays more like: "Dead Poets Goes to Sea." [06 Feb 1996]
    • Village Voice
  46. Nixon
    Satisfying as it is to at last have Nixon as a Disney character, Hopkins's overheated, self-consciously self-conscious performance doesn't get the overall nuttiness of Nixon's unctuous rage, his iron-butt single-mindedness. [26 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The City of Lost Children
    City of Lost Children is so extravagantly cluttered, so packed to the portholes, it's hard to sort out, or even see, what's there. Under the overload, however, it has some perfectly lovely elements. [19 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Georgia
    On the one hand, Georgia is extremely painful; on the other, there's joy in the enterprise. [12 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
  49. Father of the Bride Part II
    Martin's performance is as impeccable as the set decoration, though one wishes he'd stop wasting his skill. Keaton flaunts her matronly hips, daring us to remember Annie Hall, but despite a jawline that's tighter than it was a decade ago in Baby Boom, she looks past the age of conception (no cosmetic surgery for wombs). [19 Dec 1995]
    • Village Voice
    • 13 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Fair Game
    Cindy Crawford is not the worst thing about Fair Game. Her fully poseable action-figure performance is about what you'd expect: studied and empty at the same time. Far worse is Fair Game's script. [14 Nov 1995]
    • Village Voice
  51. River of Grass
    Reichardt pays clear homage to Breathless and Badlands, but her movie, the title of which is a local name for the Everglades, operates in its own ecosystem, teeming with the droll, shrewd observations about downwardly mobile life explored more solemnly in Reichardt's next two films, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    A Man of No Importance
    The film has that made-for-UK-TV-but-theatriucally-released-inthe-US look, The shots are claustrophobic and grainy for no reason. [27 Dec 1994]
    • Village Voice
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The new Little Women, directed with grace by Gillian Armstrong, adapted with tact by Robin Swicord, and starring an extraordinary ensemble, has made my holiday.
    • Village Voice
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Natural Born Killers
    More bombast than bombshell, Natural Born Killers is still sufficiently schizoid to infect a viewer with a nasty case of ambivalence. [30 Aug 1994]
    • Village Voice
    • 16 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Beverly Hills Cop III
    The formula has stayed the same, but Murphy isn't the Foley of 10 years ago. The only thing that remains is his patented Chic-let grin. [7 Jun 1994]
    • Village Voice
  56. The Age of Innocence
    The Age of Innocence remains a consistent spellbinder, laying bare its inhabitants’ follies and furies with a tender touch and a vigilant quietude that accumulates into a grand force.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Without a Face
    Furiously intent on celebrating male love, Gibson and company try to refuse the erotics of friendship and miserably, wonderously fail. [[31 Aug 1993]
    • Village Voice
  58. Mad Dog and Glory
    Murray's performance is successfully skewed, but in the De Niro oeuvre, Mad Dog is one more doughy characterization flecked with raisins. [16 Mar 1993]
    • Village Voice
  59. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    The film is alarmingly dark. It isn’t especially funny, or quirky, or even much in keeping with the spirit of the series. But in its own singular, deeply strange way, Fire Walk With Me is David Lynch’s masterpiece.
  60. Unforgiven
    Unforgiven is a stark western in slow motion, obsessed with reflection, not action.
  61. Delicatessen
    Delicatessen may be junk food, but it's served with the discretion of nouvelle cuisine. [07 Apr 1992]
    • Village Voice
  62. Daughters of the Dust
    Daughters of the Dust abounds with stunning motifs and tableaux, the iconography seemingly sourced from dreams as much as from history and folklore. But however seductive and trance-inducing, the visual splendor of Dash's film is never vaporous.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Until the End of the World
    To watch the 158-minute 1991 theatrical cut of Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’s globetrotting, apocalyptic, pop-rock-saturated sci-fi odyssey, is to zone in and out of a meandering, wistful dream.
  64. Father of the Bride
    Martin's grin-and-don't-bare-it performance lifts the picture above sitcom level. [31 Dec 1991]
    • Village Voice
  65. The Man in the Moon
    In lesser hands, it would be young-adult fiction, but the coda-“Maybe life’s not supposed to make sense”-is anything but kid stuff.
  66. Trust
    Trust never seems dated and, as a youth film, it may even be usefully pedagogic. [30 July 1991]
    • Village Voice
  67. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    While it achieves its goal of being thoroughly unpleasant, Henry could have used a touch more humor (beyond its one knee-slapper about the Chicago Bears). Still, it’s a gruesomely riveting sucker punch of a movie.
  68. Akira
    Some kind of fever-dream masterpiece, easily the most breathtaking and kinetic anime ever made and one of the most eloquent films about atomic afterclap.
  69. Chocolat
    Denis quickly immerses us in her voluptuous, allusive mode of storytelling.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let's Get Lost
    Let's Get Lost stands as a gorgeous gravestone for the Beat Generation's legacy of beautiful-loser chic.
  71. They Live
    They Live is, to scramble its most famous line, better at chewing bubblegum than kicking ass.
  72. Salaam Bombay!
    The real star of this film is the crowded, neon-lit byways of the city itself.
  73. Distant Voices, Still Lives
    This combination of intimacy and remove — the startling emotional jolt of seeing a family in mourning stare toward you in silence, an image of the felled patriarch hanging on the wall behind them — characterizes Davies’s enthralling thirty-year-old debut feature, an autobiographically informed but hardly event-reliant memory piece.
  74. Tampopo
    Everyone needs nourishment, and Itami found humor and poignancy in how it’s provided and received.
  75. Prick Up Your Ears
    As a portrait of a relationship and a creative partnership, Prick is ever alert to the shifts in power, to the narcissistic wounds that can never be salved when a teacher is surpassed by his pupil.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blue Velvet
    The last real earthquake to hit cinema was David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" -- I'm sure directors throughout the film world felt the earth move beneath their feet and couldn't sleep the night of their first encounter with it back in 1986. (Review of 20th Anniversary Re-Release)
  77. Big Trouble in Little China
    Big Trouble in Little China is a far more enjoyable mash-up of classic Westerns, Saturday-morning serials, and Chinese wu xia than any of the Indiana Jones movies, with Kurt Russell in full bloom as Carpenter’s de rigueur hard-drinkin’, hard-gamblin’, wise-crackin’ loner hero—a bowling-alley John Wayne.
  78. Ran
    A magisterial film, but not quite a great one.
  79. Brazil
    It remains a stunning achievement, if nearly as exhausting and frustrating as the Tex Avery bureaucracy it roasts, but Gilliam's stylistic dysfunctionalities, art-directed out of junkyards, are what still percolate in the forebrain.
  80. To Live and Die in L.A.
    A near-masterpiece. The fashions and music and attitudes on display might have been interpreted at the time as opportunistic stabs at au courant stylization, but the film is nevertheless overpowering and otherworldly rather than quaint or kitschy. It feels like a transmission from a different planet. To Live and Die in L.A. is so of its time that you can only be captivated by it.
  81. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence.
  82. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    Appears strangely dated, and its unspecified location seems existentially hokey.
  83. Blood Simple
    Boldly facetious and monstrously clever.
  84. This Is Spinal Tap
    Begs the question: Did the lads from Squatney trail the zeitgeist at every turn, or were cobandleaders David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel simply in touch with their past and ahead of their time?
  85. Nostalghia
    Stick with it. There are shocking acts that rupture the stillness, and then there’s one of cinema’s great endings,
  86. Born in Flames
    Like her namesake, the filmmaker Lizzie Borden took an ax...to cinema conventions and tidy political resolutions in her 1983 landmark Born in Flames.
  87. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    From Oshima’s later career (after one stroke, he made 1999’s Taboo; after two strokes, it’s unclear whether he’ll direct again), most notable is this bilingual, end-of-WWII tearjerker about forgiveness and understanding between cultures, which could have been dubbed The Man Who Fell to Java.
  88. Liquid Sky
    Liquid Sky has always been caught smack between delirious curio, avant-garde put-on, exploitation cheapie, and naive masterpiece.
  89. Wild Style
    The folks who made Wild Style probably didn’t realize it, but their fiction film was essentially a documentary of history in the early making.
  90. The King of Comedy
    The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    E.T. is a dog movie. Genre-wise, I mean. It's about a boy meeting a dog, naming it, taming it, learning from it, and growing up. Of course, the genre is superficially disguised as science fiction, as was the fashion at the time. [2002 re-release]
  92. Chan Is Missing
    Viewers must ultimately draw their own conclusions about Chan's identity, making Chan Is Missing a classic, albeit unsolvable, brainteaser.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Diva
    Conspicuously clever and shamelessly glam, Diva contrived a neo-new-wave sensibility with a post-Pop gloss that came to be known as “cinéma du look,” a Franglais label for the micro-movement of super-stylish, unabashedly romantic pictures made throughout the ’80s by a clique of bright young things including Beineix, Luc Besson, and Leos Carax.
  94. Out of the Blue (1980)
    For orchestrating lurid goonishness, Hopper can't be beat.
  95. Ms. 45
    It's hard to imagine Ms. 45 with any other actress. Lund is a particularly effective avenging angel, easily making the leap from innocent mouse to worldly wise killer.
  96. The Visitor
    The Visitor is a mess, but a revelatory one, both a ripe, bizarre thriller and a fascinating example of how filmmakers first responded to the interstellar millions stirred up by Spielberg and George Lucas: by thieving the good bits.
  97. Raging Bull
    What's most stunning about Raging Bull is the tension between 19th-century melodrama and 20th-century psychodrama, the narrative form brought into being by the conjunction of Freudian theory and the mechanics of the movie camera.
  98. Scum
    One of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down.
  99. The Big Red One
    Certainly a testament to Fuller's tenacity, but recent raves notwithstanding, it's no masterpiece...The Big Red One isn't even Fuller's greatest war film. Of those, I'd rank it fourth -- but that's not half bad.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ffolkes
    Floating somewhere between thriller and comedy, ffolkes reunites McLaglen with a very game Moore.
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