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 7.5 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. The Reception
    A fresh and uncompromising account of emotional self-immolation and romantic flux. And it has a happy ending to boot.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    Instead of the affectless soundtrack of mopey indie rock, a trip through the Anthology of American Folk Music would have better served the landscape.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sky High
    Clunky and shamelessly transparent, but it's also charmingly earnest, and well designed for kids.
  4. Tony Takitani
    Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.
  6. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    The Virgin script occasionally resets a gold standard for refined crudery.
  7. Red Eye
    Craven's terror-alert white-knuckler is zippy, unpretentious.
  8. Clean
    Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    A revenge tragedy as brutal and Byzantine as "Titus Andronicus," Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance accomplishes a miraculous feat by being harrowing and humane in equal measure.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Baxter
    A sign of The Baxter's charm is that it's essentially spoiler-proof: We know from the get-go which couples will pair off, and the pleasures lie in the spring-stepped vibe, the natty throwback wardrobe, and the intricate goofball patter.
  11. The Memory of a Killer
    Van Looy has created a fast-paced and stylish thriller. Declair's Ledda, marvelously suave and vulnerable, provides most of the pathos.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
    The charm of Tim Irwin's documentary, which charts via archival footage and talking-head reminiscences the arc of the band bassist Watt shared with guitarist D. Boon and drummer George Hurley in the early '80s, is that emphasis on the personal.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music from the Inside Out
    A revealing portrait of painfully withdrawn artists navigating the tug between the divine harmony of an orchestral synthesis and the sweaty glow of individual experimentation.
  14. Thumbsucker
    Endearing and well-acted.
  15. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.
  16. Occupation: Dreamland
    A fair-minded (but hardly apolitical) grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions.
  17. Oliver Twist
    Accomplished if lacking in urgency, this Oliver Twist (scripted by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote "The Pianist") showcases Polanski's proven gift for Dickensian caricature.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Serenity
    Though richly allegorical, Serenity also works as a rousing and unabashedly manipulative adventure that never takes itself too seriously.
  19. In Her Shoes
    The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summer Storm
    One of the film's major assets is Stadlober's winningly natural performance-his moody charisma is irresistible.
  21. Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.
  22. Ushpizin
    As directed by Gidi Dar, Ushpizin has a disarming folk quality.
  23. Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    Beyond the buzz of iconoclasm, our explorers find a regular troubled marriage, only with three sides to every problem.
  24. Protocols of Zion
    This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.
  25. The Weather Man
    The most supremely odd American film of the year.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ballets Russes
    The documentary Ballets Russes enacts its drama with a light editorial hand and unavoidable sentimentality, rather like a roll call of the NBA's "50 Greatest Players."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New York Doll
    In the end, this is less a film about a rock and roller than a film about a Mormon. And Napoleon Dynamite it ain't.
  28. Paradise Now
    Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."
  29. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    Sarah Silverman's cartoon bunny rabbit smile could make her the poster child for orthodontia, but it's her timing that's the real thing of beauty.
  30. Good Morning, Night
    Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.
  31. La sierra
    A stark, relentlessly deglamorized vision of ghetto life, La Sierra is essential viewing for anyone who ponied up for the aestheticized amorality of the Brazilian "City of God."
  32. The Big Risk
    Shot on city streets but unfolds in the world of the movies--in a Godardian touch that anticipates Godard, the Ventura character is identified by the cops as "an old pal of Pierrot le Fou." The new titles are flavorsome, and the restoration is up to Rialto's previous high standards.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Just Friends
    A refreshingly mean-spirited breeze through both the holiday movie and romantic-comedy checklists.
  34. Down to the Bone
    Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.
  35. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seamless
    Though the film is a sober account, the subject alone ensures numerous moments of inspired hilarity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Descent
    In the great B tradition, Marshall gets a lot out of nothing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mrs Henderson Presents
    This is Dame Judi's show. However extraordinary an actor she may be, she cannot conceal the obvious fact that she's having the time of her life here. Isn't that delicious?
  39. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Arriaga's script (a prize at Cannes) has a lovely, fascinating shape to it, even if his crushing portrayal of white Americans--all of them, even Jones, suffering from a zombified affect and crippling shortsightedness--is somewhat counterset against his Mexicans, who are all morally balanced, if not always happy or nice.
  40. The World's Fastest Indian
    The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy Here and Now
    When Amelia takes the full multimedia plunge in the movie's final moments, Happy becomes something inexplicably (and metaphysically) beautiful.
  42. The Producers
    Broderick is a genuine trouper, hoofing his way through his big numbers, while Lane's antics are difficult to resist.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Holiday
    The most surprisingly satisfying Hollywood comedy in ages.
  44. The Fall of Fujimori
    The Fall of Fujimori is more-or less-than the flip side to last week's Film Forum Peru primer "State of Fear": It's a prismatic shudder, a maddening manifestation of historical ambivalence.
  45. Why We Fight
    Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word FREEDOM cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy.
  46. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    Largely content to bask in the great man's glow, Angio provides generous clips and soundbites alongside fond reminiscences, but the celebratory tone leaves room for darker reflections.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Following Sean
    Arlyck's compulsion is to our great fortune. Patient and elegant, his film is a quietly devastating meditation on family, work, and the unrelenting passage of time.
  48. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.
  49. Something New
    Sanaa Hamri's brisk, refreshingly understated romantic comedy Something New is the rare movie that delivers on its title's promise.
  50. The Tenants
    Stilted and gloomy as it sounds (and sometimes is), The Tenants gets by on its nimble approximation of Malamud's robust prose, subtle turns of deadpan humor and gut-tingling menace, and remarkable performances. McDermott does credible work here, but Snoop's casting is a stroke of genius.
  51. The Ister
    The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Through the Fire
    It's slickly shot and structured like a Bruckheimer sports weepie, but director Jonathan Hock also shows the image-production of Telfair as star.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Year Without Love
    Anahí Berneri's promising feature debut (based on Pablo Pérez's autobiographical novel) is at once unsentimental and sympathetic; she evinces rare insight into a gay man's life and sexuality without cringing, passing judgment, or wallowing in pity.
  54. Merry Christmas
    Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    This uneven but riveting documentary chronicles Kor's journey to a kind of grace little understood (or appreciated) by many fellow Jews and survivors.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shakespeare Behind Bars
    Rogerson's structure is ingenious: He dilutes our initial skepticism by showcasing the prisoners' thoughtfulness and intelligence, and as soon as we've come to care for the men he shocks us with the details of their crimes.
  57. Find Me Guilty
    Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Take My Eyes
    A disturbing take on domestic violence.
  59. The Devil's Miner
    Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Iluzija
    Marko's story is far from novel, but its wicked evocation of hopelessness transcends any familiarities.
  61. Inside Man
    Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ATL
    It's entertainment with ambition, but I can't front though; the soundtrack is pretty fly too.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slither
    Gunn doesn't reinvent the wheel but he does tighten its spokes a bit with some terrifying sequences and a witty, deadpan screenplay, and he leaves the audience hungry--for "Slither 2."
  64. Brick
    The hair may thin considerably under Brick's hat after a while, and Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve.
  65. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    With Awesome's insistence on professional sound--only a few times do we get sonically dropped into the cavernous, thumping Garden--and cuts to pristine close-ups of things like Mixmaster Mike's admittedly sick scratch detail work, it plays like a hype victory lap rather than a boundary-smashing study of fan curiosity or pathology.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Adam & Steve
    Lighthearted and funny, it falters only in the rare moments when it takes itself too seriously.
  67. Iowa
    Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Simon
    Eddy Terstall's film is bipolar and ultimately wrenching, but it works if you let it.
  69. 4
    Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty.
  70. Look Both Ways
    An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sir! No Sir!
    As it is, this one is compelling enough, a potent mix of outrage, residual anger, and sorrow that speaks not just to the legacy of our misadventures in Vietnam, but to the entire uncertain future of a nation at war.
  72. Mountain Patrol
    For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Nathalie...
    Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax.
  74. Mongolian Ping Pong
    Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.
  75. Repulsion (re-release)
    The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.
  76. Akeelah and the Bee
    It helps that newcomer Keke Palmer nails it as the 11-year-old prodigy, avoiding cuteness and conveying more angst than all the pasty freaks in "Spellbound" combined.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guys and Balls
    Both totally predictable and unerringly charming, with all of the quirky players, training montages, and father-son drama you'd expect.
  78. Three Times
    My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.
  79. Lady Vengeance
    As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.
  80. Art School Confidential
    Art School Confidential is replete with humorous detail--in that respect, the student art projects are particularly fine--but it's the attitude that rules.
  81. X-Men: The Last Stand
    If little else, the third and supposedly final entry in the X-Men mega-franchise suggests that some movies -- or at any rate some formulas -- are not just critic-proof, they might even be director-proof.
  82. Giuliani Time
    After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sketches of Frank Gehry
    This enjoyably breezy portrait of genius architect Frank Gehry is drawn doodle-style by first-time documentarian Sydney Pollack.
  84. The King
    The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.
  85. Lemming
    Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Puffy Chair
    Like "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's casually raw 2002 faux–cinema vérité indie about a bunch of shiftless twentysomethings, The Puffy Chair uses simple, unadorned dialogue and intimate, off-the-cuff performances to get at the underlying issues.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    In briskly edited sequences peppered with fascinating found footage, each genre is tightly linked to a neighborhood.
  88. The Heart of the Game
    A sweet, engaging journey with the Roosevelt Roughriders, whose kindly coach encourages the girls to snarl like wolves and devour like lions.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only Human
    Intermittently hilarious.
  90. Wordplay
    Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
  91. The Road to Guantanamo
    One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.
  92. The Devil Wears Prada
    A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.
  93. The Forsaken Land
    Beautiful but withholding, The Forsaken Land doesn't offer much in the way of explanation -- the soundtrack features more birdcalls than dialogue -- but the 27-year-old filmmaker's command of film language is evident and his evocation of postwar trauma is haunting.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beowulf & Grendel
    It's good, bloody fun that stirs the intellect whenever it feels like it, and as a swashbuckler, the dead-game Butler outswings just about anyone in Troy or Kingdom of Heaven or Tristan & Isolde.
  95. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Been Rich All My Life
    The Silver Belles are bold, brash, and gorgeously awake, and their willingness to live large is thrilling.
  97. The Ant Bully
    It's a kids' movie for kids, and Davis approaches it as though he and his cast are merely storytellers trying to reach kids rather than show-offs trying to impress their parents.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Night Listener
    Even when the script overstates the obvious, Stettner mines every nuance of unease from the head games between Williams and the unnerving Collette, who embodies the moment passive aggression stops being passive.
  99. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    Ferrell reminds the audience of why he matters: because he's the loudest, driest, and most fearless comic actor working.
  100. World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
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