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. Brothers of the Head
    The golden-hued footage is lovingly faked by ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the straight-faced result is as improbably touching as the Farrelly brothers' underrated "Stuck on You."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Like Killing Flies
    A curiously tasty dish, one that could leave even a vegan with a burning desire to sample Shopsin's lamb chops.
  3. The Bridesmaid
    Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.
  4. Quinceañera
    Saucy, rowdy, heartfelt, and terribly sweet movie.
  5. Conversations with Other Women
    Though the movie is occasionally too clever-talky for its own good, it has the authentic ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place.
  6. Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
    Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh.
  7. Idlewild
    Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fratricide
    A well-wrought, beautifully lensed but ultimately hopeless tale, Fratricide provides a less than optimistic allegory for the intractability of human conflicts: Even far away and decades later, old wars bring fresh miseries.
  9. Invincible
    Invincible joins "Rocky" or "Hoosiers" or "Breaking Away" as one of the few satisfying sports movies in which the foundation built upon a heap of clichés holds strong.
  10. Hollywoodland
    Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.
  11. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.
  12. The Black Dahlia
    Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).
  13. Confetti
    If nothing else, this affectionately off-the-wall confection offers exuberant confirmation of every suspicion you might ever have had that the English are charmingly eccentric. They're barking mad.
  14. The U.S. vs. John Lennon
    Snazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-'60s images. Given its subject, though, this David Leaf–John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Blackout
    This passionate polemic follows Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney, of Georgia, as she campaigns to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
  16. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
    In much the same fashion as Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin", Auraeus Solito's feature debut confronts the taboo of pre-teen sexuality with a startling mix of openness and sensitivity. No less than precocious Maxi, the film is alarming, endearing, and utterly unflappable.
  17. The Last King of Scotland
    An adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker's sensational turn as Idi Amin.
  18. School for Scoundrels
    Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton) is a classy, cool brand of vile--the demented drill sergeant in a designer suit. And Heder, cast in the role of the invisible man, is fine too. The movie wouldn't work without someone as nondescript as Heder.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shortbus
    There's something refreshingly frisky and celebratory about Shortbus that offsets its flaws. It's a triple-X midnight movie with a heart of squarest gold.
  20. 49 Up
    Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man."
  21. ...So Goes the Nation
    So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.
  22. Driving Lessons
    The sentiment's a bit thick sometimes, but Walters remains sharp, and is sure to inspire drag queens everywhere.
  23. Infamous
    It's just a lesser version, light in weight and absent the ache that permeated the movie for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award. It can't withstand the comparisons. It's good, especially during its first half, just not good enough.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Running with Scissors
    Like the book, this deadpan celebration of neurosis makes a valiant effort to repress its comedy--which of course makes it funnier.
  25. The Prestige
    The result is a lopsided yet absorbing movie in which the director is less drawn to his main characters than to those on the periphery.
  26. Flushed Away
    What's not to love about a movie in which thousands of rodents stand together against a Big Wave generated by TV-watching soccer fans flushing their toilets at halftime?
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wondrous Oblivion
    If writer-director Paul Morrison's film traces a predictable arc from racial unease to acceptance, it's often winning--and sometimes tough-minded--in the details.
  28. Commune
    Celebrating the desire to immerse oneself in a collective, world-changing enterprise, Commune is unavoidably nostalgic.
  29. Iraq in Fragments
    Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.
  30. The Cave of the Yellow Dog
    At times the film's Buddhist lessons feel a bit forced, but the naturalistic performances Davaa has coaxed from a real-life Mongolian family, and her intimate understanding of their culture and values, give this sensitive portrayal its heft.
  31. Fast Food Nation
    A more materialist (and successful) ensemble film than the mystical "Babel," in that everyone is connected through the same economic system, Fast Food Nation is exotic for being a movie about work.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes
    The story--is only important in that it gives the Quays a foundation for their fabulous animated tableaux.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Aura
    A hypnotic unease hangs over the film.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deja Vu
    Déjà Vu isn't as sleek a genre pleasure as "Enemy of the State," but it does have a freaky little trick up its sleeve.
  35. The Architect
    In her (Viola Davis) umpteenth turn as a strong ghetto mother, she is the life force that lifts Matt Tauber's workaday movie The Architect into an experience to savor.
  36. Days of Glory
    Days of Glory is as moving as it is ingenuous, with each doomed character symbolizing a different response to the collective dilemma these men face as Arabs with divided loyalties.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Off the Black
    A disarmingly droll and insightful indie.
  38. The Painted Veil
    Bolstered by a strong ensemble-- "Infamous's" Toby Jones as a deputy commissioner gone native, and a wonderfully wrinkled Diana Rigg as a Mother Superior, speaking up for disillusioned decency--and by the ecstatic cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh, The Painted Veil lifts Maugham's story clear of its prissy, attenuated spirituality, and into genuine passion.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Charlotte's Web
    Still, with such stellar source material, this Charlotte's Web won't disgrace your childhood memories -- or your child.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    Like his "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers," Zhang Yimou's third global-market gigaproduction makes little sense in narrative terms even after two screenings, but the sets, costumes, and cinematography are so intoxicating that it doesn't much matter.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff's glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.
  42. Alpha Dog
    If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor--his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events--he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place.
  43. The Cult of the Suicide Bomber
    This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else.
  44. The Situation
    The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation.
  45. The Pied Piper
    More affecting than affected.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bamako
    Bamako brings relief from the latest round of Africa chic in the media, reversing "the flood of information that flows one way." It colors the Africa Problem from the inside out.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coffee Date
    Writer-director Stewart Wade has gracefully expanded his short film, a festival fave, into a warmhearted tale carried by genuine affection and a charming cast rather than cutting one-liners and turbo-charged plotting.
  48. Avenue Montaigne
    Not that Thompson's films lack for romance. She shoots Paris like Woody Allen shoots New York--ritzy, golden, and packed with chance meetings between highly strung arty types.
  49. The Astronaut Farmer
    This movie works precisely because it's bereft of modern cinema's cynicism.
  50. Starter for 10
    The result is something altogether more formulaic, but Starter for 10 nonetheless goes down easy, thanks in large part to the up-and-coming talent from across the pond and a steady infusion of the Cure, Wham!, and Tears for Fears on the soundtrack.
  51. The Taste of Tea
    Warm and fantastical family portrait.
  52. Into Great Silence
    Natural light is used to euphoric effect, inevitably summoning the old masters, and Gröning's frames are balanced and symmetrical, in Renaissance-ready emulation of God's perfection.
  53. The Namesake
    The Namesake carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair's more lightweight movies so much fun to look at--"Monsoon Wedding" was a dandy piece of froth, and "Vanity Fair" survives only on its looks--but it's a quieter, more mature work.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Mimzy
    Mimzy, whose charmingly retro FX date to around 1985, won't post Peter Jackson figures at the box office, but you can't say that Shaye doesn't have the magic touch.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Page Turner
    Anyone who remembers "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie's kitchen, and Dercourt's overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke–esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless.
  56. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    Yunis, as he imploringly reminds us, is the Iraqi people, but he is also steeped in Hollywood references, pulling analogies for the U.S. occupation from "Rambo" and "Dirty Harry."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Wedding
    What happens after the wedding comprises a full three-quarters of Bier's epic, whose near-Biblical twists and turns--I wouldn't think of giving them away--are enough to fill four weepies.
  58. The TV Set
    The TV Set is wry and true about the messy tangle of art, commerce, and family, as talented creative types try to stay true to themselves and put food on the table. The movie is also a treasure trove of inspired comic personalities.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    Jordan's interviews, from John Zorn to John Waters, all attest to Smith's reputation as a pivotal influence on film, performance art, gallery installation, and photography; as Richard Foreman once declared, everybody stole from Jack.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vacancy
    Antal smartly adheres to the no-frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore. And Wilson and Beckinsale superbly execute everything that's required of their characters--namely, yelling and running.
  61. The Valet
    Of all of Francis Veber's farces (The Dinner Game, La Cage Aux Folles, etc.), this is the one that feels most like a sitcom pilot, which is to say it's a farce most forced.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Waitress
    Waitress won't set the world on fire, but it glows.
  63. Jindabyne
    Hand it to Lawrence and Christian. Jindabyne is a soberly, if sluggishly, crafted movie in which the bitterness never stops.
  64. Snow Cake
    Does sidle up to the brink of mawkishness, but it pulls back so nicely into Weaver's rich, hard-headed evocation of Linda's limitations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Hip Hop Project
    From domestic strife to studio triumph, the most impressive accomplishment of Project is not the student-made album, but that when Kazi says cheesy things like "This is healing through hip-hop," you actually believe him.
  66. 9 Star Hotel
    Like all good political documentaries, 9 Star Hotel is more anthropology than agitprop, a portrait of life among the young, poorly educated men who are caught between Israeli exploitation and Palestinian Authority corruption.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bug
    Genuinely freaky-deaky, not to mention more inventively unsettling than anything Friedkin has mustered in the quarter-century since twisting little Linda Blair into a satanic spewer of pea soup and F-bombs.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paprika
    Paprika, based on a serialized novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, isn't a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced--or maybe dreamed.
  69. Radiant City
    Enlightening and disturbingly funny.
  70. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    A casually bleak and neatly structured ensemble comedy--at once deadpan and bemused.
  71. Surf's Up
    If you have to see another penguin blockbuster, you could do worse than this loose-limbed charmer.
  72. 1408
    The horror wouldn't work without Cusack, who makes what could have been a rote acting exercise--Be tough! Now angry! Now defensively funny!--a cathartic ritual instead.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Sheep
    The cartoonish overkill that often makes Black Sheep a hoot proves wearying over an entire movie: The broad comedy and one-note characters eventually cancel out the horror, leaving elaborate set pieces that are more frantic than funny.
  74. Sicko
    It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vitus
    Charming Swiss import.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transformers
    Transformers is mercilessly inhuman and completely hysterical from frame one.
  77. Rescue Dawn
    Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a "real" movie that Herzog has ever made. The lone conquistador has joined the club. Rescue Dawn is a Rambo movie without the Man (who, if I remember my Rambology, was himself of German descent).
  78. My Best Friend
    Light, airy, and sweet, Patrice Leconte's latest comedy swings his favorite premise--fruitful encounters between opposites--away from romance and into the wistful hunger for friendship in a careerist world.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as eloquent as "Brokeback Mountain," and even more radical.
  80. Arctic Tale
    A smarmy score, some orgiastic farting from a herd of walruses, and a modicum of cutesy anthropomorphism from narrator Queen Latifah prove a small price to pay for this stunningly photographed narrative documentary about a year in the endangered life of Arctic ice floe.
  81. The Camden 28
    Fond, stinging, and finally instructive, the film assembles a comprehensive look back at the actions, arrest, and prosecution of a group of political malcontents (most of them young Catholics and some of them priests) in the summer of 1971.
  82. Molière
    Tirard unwinds the action slow and steady, which makes for a slackly paced first hour that all but destroys the movie. Hang in and you'll see the method in this seemingly perverse strategy, as the young blade grows a passion for the highly strung, cultivated lady of the house, beautifully played by Europe's reigning queen of barely suppressed hysteria, Laura Morante.
  83. No Reservations
    The cynic would like to write this off as empty grown-up hooey, "Baby Boom" without an ounce of bang. But you can't do it, because the thing's so charming and frothy and delightful and sentimental and beautifully shot and well-acted and sincere that it takes a good couple of hours before you start craving real nourishment.
  84. The Ten
    More often than not, you'll laugh, and that's all you can hope for in what might as well be a prolonged episode of "The State," from which several of the cast and creators sprang.
  85. La faute à Fidel!
    The real treasure here is newcomer Kervel, a child superstar in the making.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Devil Came on Horseback
    Ultimately, Devil ponders the optimism/pessimism = apathy/x equation as honestly and studiously as any doc I've ever seen.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2 Days in Paris
    Delpy shows Linklater's influence in her willingness to let actors work and walk at length, and she has an unusually playful style for an actor turned filmmaker.
  88. Right at Your Door
    Grounded hard by some terrific smoking-skyline special effects and by Cochrane and McCormack's intensity.
  89. Delirious
    Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.
  90. The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
    Unlike far too many human-interest docs today, director Pernille Rose Grønkjær's fantastic little character portrait doesn't rest on the strength of its personality, with prudent attention paid to aesthetic nuances and the growing quasi-love that the titular bickerers have for one another.
  91. 3:10 to Yuma
    The movie's best performance belongs to Peter Fonda. Tough, terrific, and totally unrecognizable as a bounty hunter, this cantankerous old hippie is so leathery he deserves his own line of rawhide apparel.
  92. Fierce People
    Whereas most of the injustices suffered by "Nanny's" nanny are of the skin-deep variety, the hopelessly reductive Fierce People ups the ante.
  93. The Bubble
    Given the upbeat, tender rhythms of the movie's love story, the climax--a cry of bottomless despair--comes as a profound shock. It's meant to, and though the ending is touched by the goofy absurdities of melodrama, Fox's mix-and-match sampling of apparently incompatible genres nails the nervous blend of vitality and desperation that is Israel today.
  94. The Brave One
    Taken literally, almost everything that follows in The Brave One so seriously strains credibility (even by the standards of the genre) as to enter the realm of the absurd. Taken on the level of a menacing urban fairy tale, however--something akin to what Jane Campion was aiming for with "In the Cut"--it's strangely fascinating.
  95. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    May be one of the wisest studies of urban loneliness since Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty."
  96. The Kingdom
    A timely--if tepid--fantasy of American vengeance on the Qutbian extremists of Saudi Arabia.
  97. For the Bible Tells Me So
    Daniel Karslake's movie is more human interest than agitprop.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Kid Could Paint That
    What began as a human-interest story for filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev led down stranger paths than the Duchampian conundrums of modern art.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Darjeeling Limited
    I was moved by Darjeeling, flaws and all, but if my job is to explain why, I find it difficult for reasons that are none of my business. From the minute Wilson walks onscreen, face covered in scars, eyes full of trouble, Darjeeling is warped by the gravitas of his recent suicide attempt.
  100. Canvas
    Greco's sincerity is so palpable that the frequent uplift feels deserved, but with just-passable filmmaking and the demeaning score, Canvas falls somewhere between powerful indie and made-for-TV diversion.
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