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. The Winslow Boy
    This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.
  2. Wattstax (re-released)
    Not only documents the soul-titan concert held at L.A. Coliseum seven years after Watts burned, but illuminates the rue and kinesis of a city in full Black Power flower.
  3. Last Night
    A witty, trenchant script, lots of complicated characters, and a few actors who turn human frailty into something nearly sublime.
  4. Sunshine State
    The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.
  5. Morvern Callar
    More engrossing than convincing.
  6. Mr 3000
    The real news is that Mac has finally found a movie that taps into the dark side displayed in his best stand-up work. A hilarious elementary-school scene plays off the comedian's ambivalence toward kids.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Central Station
    A mildly saccharine but kind-hearted movie.
  8. Pecker
    If scandal, sleaze, and celebrity worship are our national religion, then John Waters is an American prophet.
  9. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Skillfully reinforces Chisholm as a refreshingly quixotic populist, running on fervor and indignation.
  10. The Five Obstructions
    An unclassifiable film-school exercise--one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto--The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.
  11. Read My Lips
    The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.
  12. No Man's Land
    A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.
  13. Deadline
    What Deadline lacks in heft it makes up for in common sense.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Original Kings of Comedy
    Simultaneously hilarious and reprehensible.
  15. Cruel Intentions
    A "guilty pleasure" -- only it's the sort of film that would mock anyone who felt guilt in pleasure.
  16. Such a Long Journey
    The filmmaking is fresh and unemphatic, and the acting is generally gripping.
  17. The Return
    Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Card Player
    Ingenious but relatively tame thriller.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Serendipity
    The most romantic New York movie since August's "Happy Accidents."
  20. 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.
  21. 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."
  22. Blue Gate Crossing
    Set largely in empty public spaces late at night, Blue Gate Crossing supplements its slender narrative with disarming performances and plangent atmosphere.
  23. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    A loud and frequently funny clown show, Full Throttle is less a grim demolition derby than a day at Coney Island, punctuated by the clatter and screams of the Cyclone.
  24. Night and the City (re-release)
    However defined, the movie's a moody piece of Wellesian chiaroscuro (shot by Max Greene, né Mutz Greenbaum) and an occasionally discomfiting underworld plunge, particularly when the mob-controlled wrestling milieu explodes into a kidney-punching donnybrook.
  25. Distant
    Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.
  26. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    What's surprising is the atmosphere of sweet reason--elatively speaking--that distinguishes Kill Bill Vol. 2 from its bloody precursor.
  27. Narc
    Hardly a scene goes by without a digitally fractured flashback or spasm of editing punctuation, rupturing the movie's otherwise carefully wrought sense of authenticity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    10 Things I Hate About You
    Anyone who hates '80s pop will find this movie awfully tiresome, but Stiles and her underage Petruchio (Australian actor Heath Ledger, as hunky as his name) are charismatic and bold enough to carry any romantic comedy.
  29. Chaos
    Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)
  30. The Brown Bunny
    It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.
  31. We Were Soldiers
    Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.
  32. Silent Water
    Sumar's debut feature could scarcely be more relevant to Pakistan's present, or, given this country's history of backing such repressive regimes, to ours.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.
  34. Undertow
    However cloying, the movie creates a powerful vortex. It's surprisingly visceral-at times almost thrilling.
  35. The Corporation
    A leisurely, never boring, grimly amusing, and not entirely hopeless disquisition on the contemporary world's "dominant institution."
  36. Father and Son
    Borders on the risible but, because Sokurov is Sokurov, this exalted, wacky scenario--which uses Lisbon as an imaginary Russian seaport--is amazingly staged, inventively edited, and rich in audio layering, with camera placements that sometimes verge on the Brakhagian.
  37. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    I got a charge out of Going Upriver, but as more than one person has noted, the movie's ideal spectator would be Kerry himself.
  38. Fade to Black
    The film has a feel similar to his songs--airtight, forthright, never spat till they're set.
  39. Open Range
    The scenario recalls everything from "High Noon" to "Unforgiven," but Costner is less interested in grappling with the grim ambiguities underlying those films than in codifying them. There's still much to like, including the warm, thoughtful performances and cinematographer James Muro's fearless use of natural light.
  40. Dancer in the Dark
    This deliriously downbeat vehicle for the postpunk diva Björk has generated the controversy the Danish dogmatist has relentlessly court.
  41. Cast Away
    While "Robinson Crusoe" was a paean to the practical middle-class virtues that allowed its industrious hero (and the nation he represents) to re-create civilization out of nothingness, Cast Away is a far less triumphalist peek into the nothingness at the heart of civilization.
  42. Galaxy Quest
    The many eight-to-11-year-olds in the audience seemed completely enthralled.
  43. The Straight Story
    Sunny as The Straight Story appears, Lynch is still defamiliarizing the normal.
  44. Bandits
    Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.
  45. Bright Future
    Kurosawa strolls through his narrative with relaxed confidence, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular on his mind.
  46. Elephant
    Flagrantly artistic and transfixed by its own enigma, Elephant is strongest on evoking a succession of specific, "empty" moments and weakest on motivation.
  47. 21 Grams
    Watts, who has the most difficult scenes, is splendidly mercurial; what's surprising is that those professional storm clouds Penn and Del Toro are here as powerfully restrained as she is electrifying.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jackass: The Movie
    Shrewdly, the Jackass gang didn't mess with their established formula in the transition to the big screen.
  49. It's All About Love
    It's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.
  50. The Mother
    By turns expansive and astringent, The Mother is a portrait of a woman who, with the dazed courage of someone finally awakened to the world after decades of passivity and repression, keeps on walking.
  51. Gods and Monsters
    The relationship is touching, painful, revealing, and often funny, which is true of the film as a whole as well.
  52. The Matrix Revolutions
    No less than the rankest demagogue, The Matrix Revolutions insists on the primacy of faith over knowledge. Once it locks and loads, however, the triumphant visuals short-circuit anything resembling abstract thought.
  53. 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.
  54. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The week's guilty pleasure is The Count of Monte Cristo, a gorgeously photographed, sumptuously designed adaptation of the Dumas swashbuckler boasting the most ludicrous dialogue since director Kevin Reynolds's "Waterworld."
  55. Lightning in a Bottle
    Offers a bumper crop of tasty bits.
  56. White Chicks
    Harmless slapstick fun.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Flesh and Blood
    Single motherhood has seldom looked as daunting and enervating as it does in this unsentimental documentary.
  58. Jump Tomorrow
    The relationship between the hysterical Gerard and the careful, compulsive George is classic screwball material and more compelling than the relationship between George and Alicia.
  59. Ali
    Filled with vivid cameos and set to an infectious soul beat that effectively covers the underlying hum of calculated precision.
  60. Malèna
    A nostalgic coming-of-age sex comedy tastefully lecherous enough to indicate that its intended demographic is several decades past puberty.
  61. Series 7: The Contenders
    Series 7 could have turned out as ugly as the second season of "Survivor," were it not for the pleasure Minahan takes in melodrama.
  62. Tokyo Godfathers
    A welcome exercise in anime weirdness.
  63. The Matrix Reloaded
    Where The Matrix was a heady cocktail of gnostic Zen Philip K. Dick cyberpunk '60s psychedelic bull, well spiked with high-octane digitally driven Hong Kong action pyrotechnics, those elements reloaded soon separate out. The refreshing draft of effervescent movie magic leaves a sludgy sediment of metaphysics.
  64. Amélie
    The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.
  65. Human Traffic
    Sweet, ribald, and even inspired in an off-the-cuff way.
  66. After Midnight
    What makes After Midnight more than just another ménage à trois (in homage to Truffaut) is the way Ferrario, who also writes about movies, weaves the allure of early film into a contemporary story, shot with the latest high-definition technology.
  67. The Deserted Station
    Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's "Leila," makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable.
  68. In America
    Like a kid playing make-believe, In America is blithely confident of its own contrivances; it only benefits from a certain unselfconscious naïveté. And as with a misjudged Christmas gift or a mawkish sympathy card from a kindly relative, one can hardly doubt its uplifting intentions.
  69. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    Less a movie than a seething psychological bonanza.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jesus, You Know
    Complex and deeply moving documentary.
  71. Come Undone
    Come Undone's true subject is, simply enough, the perspective-warping enormity of first love, as preserved in a scrapbook of before-and-after snapshots.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    Convoluted but diverting.
  73. Promises
    An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.
  74. Danny Deckchair
    Weird, frivolous, and impossible to dislike.
  75. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.
  76. A Talking Picture
    Still astonishingly vital at 96, the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira here takes a becalmed trip through stormy waters.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clearing
    Kidnapping movies invariably crescendo to a fever pitch of procedural complexity. At a terse 91 minutes, The Clearing offers the reverse, a movie that only grows more conceptually minimal as the clock ticks down.
  78. Noi the Albino
    A lightly comic slacker drama that takes the desperation of teenage tedium seriously.
  79. Seeing Other People
    While lacking a knockout scene, the script is full of solid laughs punctuated with pangs of emotional insight.
  80. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.
  81. The Pianist
    Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.
  82. The Way of the Gun
    Way of the Gun is a self-consciously American odyssey.
  83. Ned Kelly
    The film marks a welcome departure from the usual rah-rah machismo of the semi-nationalist action adventure, but Jordan never escapes the mighty shadow of "The Thin Red Line"--from the grace-note inserts of exotic birds, snakes, and foliage to Ledger's laconic, sometimes haiku-like voice-over to Klaus Badelt's embarrassingly Zimmer-derivative score.
  84. Ocean's Eleven
    The movie is slick and studiously cool -- with plenty of visual flourishes but not too much soul.
  85. I'm Going Home
    Restrained, precise, and unobtrusively wry.
  86. Mystic River
    An urban crime thriller of considerable gravitas.
  87. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    A reasonably good Kurosawa pastiche. But overburdened with convoluted flashbacks and interpolated gags, and generally lacking a dynamic sense of cutting, the movie doesn't possess the master's sardonic brio.
  88. 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.
  89. Hukkle
    Deranging a venerable Hungarian tradition of "village sociology," Pálfi employs a bizarrely associative montage to fashion a portrait of a traditional peasant community -- just a midsummer Sunday on Mars.
  90. Dude, Where's My Car?
    My friend even supplied a blurbable quote: "The best dumbass-buddy comedy I've seen since "Wayne's World!"
  91. Fahrenheit 9/11
    If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.
  92. American Pimp
    Alternately mind-expanding and brain-numbing.
  93. They Live
    They Live is, to scramble its most famous line, better at chewing bubblegum than kicking ass.
  94. The Keys to the House
    If the film's redemptive ending is a fairy tale, it's one we willingly embrace.
  95. The Assassination of Richard Nixon
    Moody, pretentious, but potent.
  96. Hero
    Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.
  97. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
    All told, and in giant widescreen, it's only blood-red adolescent fun, but it blooms like Douglas Sirk with a Gatling gun compared to the teenage demographic's current fare. Matrix, schmatrix: This is the season's supreme party movie.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Door in the Floor
    Eliminates much of its source's plot, focusing on the book's first third. The result is a crisply shot chamber piece for husband, wife, and boy.
  99. 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.
  100. City of God
    Nothing if not confrontational.
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