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. Fear X
    Perhaps a radical re-editing of Fear X-like Lynch did on “Mulholland Drive”-could rescue the film's workaday unease from the dread taboo of derivative weirdness. It's half a movie, but a half that hums.
  2. Machuca
    Machuca is still a half-measure. Wood is fastidious about period set design, but not much else; rather than burning with experience, the film feels opportunistic.
  3. With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America
    Certainly not as incredulous or mocking as it might have been. If anything, the mood is apprehensive. But it's depressing that--Carter aside--the filmmakers failed to find even one liberal believer.
  4. Arakimentari
    Admittedly compulsive in both sex and shutterbuggery, Araki has long lived on the art-porn border, though this doc aims to show him as conversant in flowers, kitties, skies, and neorealist kids' faces as he is with bondage.
  5. Rory O'Shea Was Here
    A plea for equality of opportunity, a worthy objective somewhat obscured by non-disabled actors occupying the lead roles. In any case, one imagines Rory himself would prefer a Farrelly disability blooper reel.
  6. Swimming Upstream
    Rush and Davis perform strikingly against type, suffusing an otherwise average genre pic with quiet dignity.
  7. Nabbeun namja
    Bad Guy, one of the seven films in Kim's fascinating back catalog, is another kind of cocktail--simple, bitter, served straight and in an unwashed glass.
  8. Be Cool
    Rock is brave, fully invested in his character, and with a wide-open face and foolish grin, outrageously funny. It's a singular performance achieved without condescension or camp. Who'd a-thunk it?
  9. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    Gets by on infectious geniality.
  10. Melinda and Melinda
    Neither comedy nor tragedy, the movie is closest to genteel soap opera.
  11. D.E.B.S.
    Aims for a mix of "Heathers" wit and "Batman" TV-show camp.
  12. Nina's Tragedies
    With improbable charm, Gabizon knits it all together, his characters' sexual obsessions and earthiness tempered by a soulful melancholy.
  13. Winter Solstice
    What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.
  14. One Missed Call
    One Missed Call, one of the five movies he made in 2003, is no more than Miike's shot at generating a polished, rote, expertly composed J-horror flick.
  15. Kingdom of Heaven
    The movie does what any self-respecting politician would do: sidestep the issues, soft-pedal mortal costs, talk a fat game, and divert your attention away from history with exercises in spectacle and power.
  16. Madagascar
    Madagascar's relaxed density is a relief given the DreamWorks tendency to overbear, overblast, and overcaricaturize.
  17. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
    Christopher Browne's entertaining A League of Ordinary Gentlemen goes behind the scenes of the Professional Bowlers Association's comeback bid following the league's 2000 sale (for a mere $5 million) to a trio of retired Microsoft execs.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lords of Dogtown
    Hardwicke's pop-Cassavetes melodrama nevertheless rides as smoothly as a big-budget after-school special, capturing youth struggles from an appropriately blown-out teen's-eye perspective.
  19. High Tension
    Manages--before faltering under the weight of its own pretensions--to be pretty scary.
  20. Batman Begins
    Nolan and his co-screenwriter David Goyer can only press the big buttons so hard—it's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.
  21. Wild Side
    Lifshitz successfully maneuvers his trio of outcasts toward a state of grace: His vision of misfit utopianism, in its own quiet way, is as defiant as anything in Fassbinder.
  22. The Great Water
    Despite the choppy script and cartoonishly bad villains, what emerges is a compelling tale of the moral compromises a corrupt system demands of even its most unwilling participants.
  23. Heights
    In this study of keeping up appearances while everything falls apart, the stakes never seem as high as the title suggests.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Herbie Fully Loaded
    Its vibrating crowd scenes and splashy visuals will please the seven-to-12 set.
  25. Land of the Dead
    Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further.
  26. Yes
    Potter's anachronistic rhyme schemes tumble forth with an out-damned-spot verve that rages against irrelevance.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chronicles
    Leguizamo finds the right mute for his trumpet, modulating his expenditure of emotion to the requirements of the scenario rather than overengaging his capable Mambo Mouth.
  28. On the Outs
    Most importantly, the environment feels real: the accents, the snaps, the working moms and warehouse crack nooks, every dilapidated stairwell, every bodega and lovingly appointed teenage bedroom sanctuary.
  29. The Island
    This is pure essence of Bay--it's big, it's loud, it has no context, and if you show up tanked, I'm sure it's really quite poetic.
  30. The Aristocrats
    The Aristocrats is a veritable talent show itself, albeit one that feels inescapably slight. To rejigger another ancient joke: The food at this place isn't terrible. But the portions are really small.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-screen
    Ulmer emerges as the bigger-than-life symbol he probably desired to project: the brooding Old World artist, eternally frustrated with American market pressures, preferring to rule in Hell than serve in Hollywood.
  32. Duma
    Duma turns out to be surprisingly flat, with little of the child's-eye imagery that gave "The Black Stallion" its poetic thrust and too much of the narrative gear-grinding that grounded stretches of "Fly Away Home."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    A State of Mind
    One leaves the film with the Twilight Zone sense that the place isn't quite the hellhole prior reports have suggested.
  34. Pulse
    With very few strong characters and a great many middle shots, Pulse sometimes plods--it's the price of Kurosawa's restraint and his indifference to structure.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cave
    Spare and single-minded, The Cave is an insistently entertaining piece of pulp.
  36. Wall
    Disturbing and compelling.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Future of Food
    Wisely eschews standard anti-corporate bombast for measured tones.
  38. Lord of War
    Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.
  39. Flightplan
    Becomes more satisfying than the stock thriller–star vehicle it begins and ends as.
  40. Separate Lies
    Fellowes's larger goal seems to be making sympathetic characters of Anne and Bule, who for all their lovey-doveyness never emerge as much more than rich twits à la "The Great Gatsby."
  41. Forty Shades of Blue
    It's Korzun's film, and she is in complete control of her character, never divulging too much of the haunted woman under the studied facade of American hotsiness.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    An Adolescent
    Although the movie drags, Okuda (who also directed) makes for a gloriously bad lieutenant, while Ozawa is enjoyably discomfiting in her unblushing carnality.
  43. The Aggressives
    Thankfully, Peddle's film is much more illuminating than a grad school seminar.
  44. Dandelion
    Atmosphere trumps plot throughout, enabling the movie to survive an unfortunate, if inevitable, final-act turn.
  45. North Country
    Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.
  46. Shopgirl
    Unfolds as a series of slightly disjointed vignettes, padded with redundant voiceover and an oppressively histrionic score.
  47. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    The sort of movie that believes coolness is next to godliness, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang trades heavily and successfully on Downey's unflappable likability.
  48. White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
    A formal hodgepodge, Congo suffers from abrasive voice-over narration, stilted re-enactments, and an awkward courtroom conceit, but gets by on its shocking material.
  49. Emmanuel's Gift
    This feel-good profile barely touches on the political and cultural ramifications of Emmanuel's work. Narration by Oprah increases the aura of a civics lesson.
  50. The Roost
    The Roost proves that West has enough talent to do without the gimmick next time around.
  51. The Dying Gaul
    Entertaining if cornball, lacking the cold-eyed nastiness of something like Mike Nichols's "Closer," The Dying Gaul is tricked out with strident montage sequences and tremulous Steve Reich music. It's already drowning in an icky sea of language when Lucas makes a stretch for Greek tragedy and sends the whole Malibu playhouse abruptly crashing down.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Viewers may not be surprised to learn of Wal-Mart's horrific track record, but they can't deny Greenwald's airtight advocacy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    To this viewer and reader, the decade-old juggernaut is as deeply felt as it is flawed, dense and illogical and laudably "weird."
  54. The Syrian Bride
    The Syrian Bride has no particular visual style, but it exudes affection, for its characters and their culture as well as the unprepossessing beauty of the scrubby terrain that holds them in thrall. Like all wedding films, it's essentially a comedy, albeit a sad one.
  55. Transamerica
    Pleasant even without reaching much of a destination, Transamerica leaves the basic impression that it's not as self-satisfied as it could have been.
  56. King Kong
    For King Kong is an accountant's movie at heart. Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.
  57. The Matador
    Taking the medium slopes and never venturing into extremities, Shepard gets all of his laughs if not the ironic heart-tugs, and his cast is perfectly in tune. (Davis in comedic-observant mode is funnier than most American actresses in fifth gear.)
  58. Electric Shadows
    Electric Shadows is committed to movies-as-escape swoonery, but the script's late disasters are also predicated on cinema and filmgoing, suggesting an ambivalence the rest of the film seems oblivious to.
  59. The New World
    Malick's long, moody, diaphanous account of love and loss in 17th-century Jamestown--shot, more or less, on location--rarely achieves the symphonic grandeur it seeks. As an epic, it's monumentally slight.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tau man ji D
    Another oil-slick ode to man-on-auto lust, Initial D offers enough full-speed money shots to eke out a victory over its barrage of clichés.
  61. When the Sea Rises
    If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    24 Hours on Craigslist
    A diverting infomercial.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Momma's House 2
    Lawrence is an ingratiating performer, sarcastic and sentimental, and does inventive work with a swivel chair, a bathing suit, and steaming rocks. He's helped along by Emily Procter, who plays the overworked wife and should be freed from "CSI: Miami" as soon as possible.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nanny McPhee
    If you have someone under 10 to take to the movies, this one is charming and painless.
  65. A Good Woman
    Pleasant and undemanding, all the more so whenever Tom Wilkinson's on-screen as a possible Erlynne suitor, the movie miscasts Hunt as the pragmatic seductress.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Who Gets to Call It Art?
    A TV-style compilation of big-name talking heads and occasionally fascinating footage, the film convokes an impressive cast of interviewees—David Hockney, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly among them--yet seems too dazzled by their luminance to squeeze a substantial analysis of Geldzahler from their pithy testimonials.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Curious George
    Misanthropic toddlers will be rolling in the aisles.
  68. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madea's Family Reunion
    Perry's vaudevillian shamelessness and indifference to committee-approved taste are energizing and frequently jaw-dropping.
  70. Sorry, Haters
    It's all about the performances. Kechiche is reserved and superbly troubled, but Wright Penn, her stardom-crippling reserves of bitterness and bile rising to the surface, is a scary monster in full bloom, and her habitation of this wacky role makes the movie worth its weight in pixels.
  71. Woman Is the Future of Man
    We're accustomed to an omniscient understanding of what movie characters, particularly in dramas about love and loss, are thinking, but Hong distributes information with a saline drip. Often, of course, his two lonely fools don't quite know what they're thinking, either--Woman can sometimes come off like an introverted "Carnal Knowledge" with two Jack Nicholsons.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fallen
    Thankfully, The Fallen is neither dour nor sentimental, but while the scope is ambitious and the tone refreshingly light on moralism, few of the innumerable characters and subplots elicit much sympathy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Game 6
    Despite a late-inning swoon of pat emotional generosity, Game Six is a gratifying playground of high-wire language.
  74. Thank You for Smoking
    Instead of hitting the gas and allowing the scenario to rock 'n' roll with g-forces, Reitman keeps his movie small, unvaried, slack, and deliberately and oddly, completely smoke-free.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Don't Trip ... He Ain't Through with Me Yet
    Despite more audience cutaways than the State of the Union Address, the movie's largely a you-had-to-be-there affair--except when the star does an uncanny imitation of a double-wide churchgoer scooting through a narrow pew.
  76. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    The idea isn't as odd as it might first appear, since running a salon is one of the few socially acceptable means for a woman in Afghanistan to earn an income. The execution, however, evokes a particularly outlandish Christopher Guest mockumentary.
  77. Mardi Gras: Made in China
    This sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    They gloss over concerns that mainstream Busch isn't as funny or as daring as cult Busch. Still, I'd kill for more footage of his less famous plays, like the intriguingly titled "Pardon My Inquisition," or "Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets."
  79. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Modelworks
    Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.
  80. Take the Lead
    It's no surprise to anyone who's seen his Robert Rodriguez films that Banderas works well with kids. But it may surprise those who saw "Evita" that he can make a music-and-dance movie that doesn't suck.
  81. Friends with Money
    As its title jokingly implies, this is a more grown-up version of Aniston's long- running TV vehicle--complete with the star herself as eternal ingenue.
  82. Quality of Life
    Establishes a strong sense of milieu in these street scenes, and while the movie's not without its flaws--much of the dialogue is colorless and Lisa seems a bit too together to be hanging out with Curtis--it's never less than credible.
  83. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    This is primarily a film for fans of all involved.
  84. One Last Thing...
    Angarano and Mabrey bring something special to the proceedings, and they make it work.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Russian Dolls
    Those who loved the original Auberge will likely be eager to book rooms once again.
  86. Mendy
    Inspired by a 1997 "Voice" article on ex-members of the Satmar sect, Mendy is cast largely with Orthodox or former Orthodox actors, who are utterly credible with dialogue that necessarily teeters between the candid and the offensive.
  87. Twelve and Holding
    To call Twelve and Holding cartoonish is to put it mildly. Marked by reckless tonal shifts, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay traffics in sensationalism and sentimentality.
  88. Cars
    What ultimately redeems Cars from turning out a total lemon is its soul. Lasseter loves these animated inanimate objects as though they were kin, and it shows in every beautifully rendered frame.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stagedoor
    Shiva has a sensitive eye for rarefied outcasts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bombón: El Perro
    Sorin's spare style belies a rich wisdom, as well as impressive performances from a cast of debuting nonpros.
  91. Click
    De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Two Drifters
    If you can look past the film's inexplicably straight face, Two Drifters is an enjoyably daffy picture.
  93. The Blood of My Brother
    A few American soldiers are interviewed in a halfhearted attempt at balance, but Berends, who thankfully eschews narration, makes his own p.o.v. clear enough.
  94. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
    Even more of a party-hearty-Marty potlatch of silliness than its predecessor. The franchise having been established, Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Co. have been liberated to indulge in absurdities, pile on the so-old-they're-new-again clichés, and make jokes at their own expense.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos
    This intermittently fascinating documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the Cosmos --which is also the rise and fall of U.S. soccer.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    13 Tzameti
    The artiest entry in the ever growing torture-movie genre, this playfully wicked French thriller from twentysomething provocateur Gela Babluani blasts its way into your brainpan with the help of black-and-white widescreen cinematography whose striking but smooth textures better suit the upwardly mobile auteur than his poor protagonist.
  97. The Trouble with Men and Women
    The mostly unknown actors are charming, and while the story is formulaic, it never feels blatantly contrived.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Princesas
    De Aranoa never condescends to his subjects, and Caye's mixture of aggression and tenderness is appealingly authentic.
  99. Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    Slow and pretty and duller than you'd hope for from an art-house sophisticate like Zhang.
  100. Bubot Niyar
    Observing the close relationships they develop with clients, the openly gay Heymann becomes, both hilariously and wistfully, part of a community that possesses in spades what's missing in his own life--the gift of happiness and living well in unfriendly surroundings.
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