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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
    For those who have let the war drift into the background noise of talking heads, Iraq for Sale is a much needed reminder of the criminal negligence of those who led the troops into this mess and those who have gotten rich off of it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red Doors
    Everything you'd expect from a frosh-indie effort: stilted dialogue, oversimplified relationships, sitcommy goofiness, and cringe-inducing romances. And yet Red Doors is so well-meaning, with such obvious affection for its characters, that it pleases nonetheless.
  3. Aurora Borealis
    Aurora Borealisulth -- yes, that title eventually comes home to roost -- doesn't offend in any way, but it's so self-consciously quaint, so unwaveringly "nice," that you nearly wish it did.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Train Man
    Adapted from a Japanese bestseller that's apparently based on true events, Train Man: Densha Otoko is a lot like its protagonist: sweet, weird, and likable despite some irritating quirks.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    Whatever the first-time filmmaker lacks in subtlety and finesse--not even the snow-white Sundance Screenwriters Lab could bleach Montiel's script of its corner-deli grit--he recoups by other, more playfully attitudinal means.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies
    The entire affair looks and feels like a reality television show minus the cheap drama.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blood Tea and Red String
    A sickly-sweet stop-motion animation 13 years in the making, Blood Tea and Red String is a genuine piece of outsider art.
  8. Nearing Grace
    This '70s-era teen romance from the director of "Halloween II" and the screenwriter of "Mean Creek" is a quietly effective number, a little like an '80s John Hughes movie without the laughs (not an insult in this case).
  9. Marie Antoinette
    A graceful, charming, and sometimes witty confection -- at least for its first hour.
  10. Cocaine Cowboys
    The story is fascinating, if a little overlong.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Wild Blue Yonder
    Though occasionally striking, the footage doesn't pack the evocative punch Herzog intends, and segments that should be lyrical mind trips only result in overstretched longueurs.
  12. Copying Beethoven
    Screenwriters Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson, best known for the two ponderous biopics "Ali" and "Nixon," deliver a film awkwardly composed.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Captive
    This intriguing debut by Argentinean writer-director Gaston Biraben sets up a lot of tough choices before finally taking the easy way out.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Happy Feet
    Children, innocent as they are, may not yet have grown to loathe the actor's (Robin Williams) shtick, but you might like to know that he has two--yes, two--roles in this film.
  15. Let's Go to Prison
    Much funnier and weirder than you think.
  16. Backstage
    An enjoyably overwrought meditation on the consequences of celebrity and the vicissitudes of fandom, Backstage stars Le Besco as the schoolgirl acolyte of Emmanuelle Seigner's pop diva, a singer-songwriter and high priestess of cheese.
  17. The Nativity Story
    There are a few quietly affecting scenes here, in which we see Mary and Joseph as the terribly frightened newlyweds they probably were, unsure of what to make of their extraordinary circumstances. But too often, the actors register as little more than set dressing and, despite Hardwicke's resolve to give us the realNativity as we've never seen it before, much of the movie smacks of convention.
  18. The Holiday
    Meyers can write a good zinger, and she has a knack for casting actors who not only look good in bed, but are talented enough to rise above the material and, in some cases, nearly transform it (save Diaz). But make no mistake: We're a long way here from Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocky Balboa
    Rocky Balboa, effortlessly reflexive and patently, even proudly, absurd, is a tough movie to dislike -- and believe me, I've tried.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Comedy of Power
    An enjoyable but curiously weightless trifle that lowers rather than raises the temperature of the affair. Comedy of Power has to be the most polite, untroubled conspiracy film since the genre first tapped a phone.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unconscious
    The movie's message is clear: Freud's greatest contribution to society was not the idea that all little boys long to sleep with their mothers--rather, it's the concept of the unconscious, a hidden place where our secret desires yearn to be free.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Grew Tired of Us
    A borderline lazy but nonetheless compelling documentary co-produced by National Geographic.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nomad
    With commendable sincerity but also an unfortunate Hollywood veneer, Nomad is a poor man's "Gladiator."
  24. Making Grace
    Real, dramatic tension erupts as the strains placed on the women's relationship surface, offering a candid look at what the stresses of parenthood can do to any couple.
  25. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Investigates the events leading up to the coup d'état; that it was the second for Aristide (overthrown in 1991, mere months after becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president) darkens the film's triumphalist-sounding title.
  26. Alone with Her
    This first feature is shot "first person" and is first and foremost a concept -- at least as interesting to think about as to actually watch.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The GoodTimesKid
    Though the film never transcends its own neo-boho quirk, it concludes in a marvelous final shot: a long take set to Gang of Four, grungy and materialist in the Jacobs tradition.
  28. The Italian
    Lured, perhaps, by the promise of international markets, Kravchuk instead opts for routine uplift, and once the heroic journey is set in motion, the rest is ballast.
  29. Regular Lovers
    Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.
  30. Smokin' Aces
    Carnahan does have an oddball sense of comic timing; what his picture lacks in hilarity it recuperates with a well-developed, albeit mumbling, sense of the absurd.
  31. Seraphim Falls
    Seraphim Falls has decent pep in its step till the final 30 minutes, when it's finally revealed why Neeson's bounty hunter is after Brosnan's surly mountain man. The flashback finale and all that comes after (and keeps on comin') drags on so long even the leads look exhausted. Till then, it's yet another replay of "The Most Dangerous Game," and Brosnan and Neeson are game for it.
  32. Shockproof
    For a disposable entertainment, Shockproof has an intensity that sticks to the mind--yours, mine, or Richard Hamilton's.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Exterminating Angels
    One audaciously, endearingly ludicrous movie.
  34. Beyond the Gates
    Though hobbled by its anxious impulse to teach history to an audience that by now surely knows the basic contours of Rwanda's tragedy, the script apportions blame where it belongs (on high), while leaving smaller fry--including an admirably un-cute BBC journalist--dangling, however sympathetically, on the hook.
  35. Pride
    If nothing else, Pride has the best sports-film soundtrack ever--Philly funk and soul, '70s style. And hell, that'll get ya wet.
  36. Boy Culture
    All told, this is a harmless, well-packaged bit of overly familiar fluff.
  37. The Hoax
    To its credit, The Hoax isn't glib--it doesn't chalk up Irving's moral vacuum to anything a bad mommy or daddy did. But there's no other point of view either; the film suffers a fatal equivocation over whether to frame him as a prankster or an American tragedy.
  38. Disturbia
    There's not one single bombshell dropped in Disturbia; everyone is exactly who you think they are and does exactly what you think they'll do precisely when you think they'll do it.
  39. Everything's Gone Green
    It's not the big picture that charms here, it's the details. More than anything, though, it's Costanzo--a spindly Everydork who grows up not because he has to, but because he just kinda wants to.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Year of the Dog
    Mike White, writer of "Chuck & Buck" and "The School of Rock" (and oddball actor in both), here directs his latest geek's revenge fantasy like a psychotherapeutically treated Todd Solondz.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Civic Duty
    Expected ironies about homeland security, racial profiling, and fears of the Other land like a rain of anvils, and director Renfroe matches Krause's worked-up performance with a jiggly, flashy approximation of off-brand Tony Scott.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crazy Love
    However sick this tabloid star may be, Crazy Love is a celebrity doc by definition, with all its attendant trade-offs, and even the director admits that his access wasn't free.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Day Watch
    The worst thing Bekmambetov has picked up from his American models is the tendency of megasequels to aggrandize material grown enervated, to compensate for thinness by spreading out.
  44. Broken English
    Posey remains touching as the woman with happiness in sight but bewilderingly out of reach.
  45. Hula Girls
    It's all warm, well-shot, instantly forgettable, and familiar to a fault.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Interview
    The result, though anchored mostly to a single set cleverly sectioned by hammocks, curtains, and a kitchen bar, is the least concrete and most artificial of Buscemi's films.
  47. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Neither disposable nor a long-lost masterpiece, she might not be loved by all the boys, but she's still worth a Friday night date.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sunshine
    Ideas scintillate over the surface of Sunshine without ever quite igniting, but at least the movie sparkles. What it doesn't do is cohere. Action flick, sci-fi thriller, metaphysical adventure, incoherent allegory, ethical hypothesis, and horror film all at once, this mad multitasker has the agenda of a dozen movies. Problem is, we know which ones.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This Is England
    Facile pop psychology is the real tragedy here, a double disappointment given the film's smart take on pop culture.
  50. Becoming Jane
    Becoming Jane turns into a presentable Harlequin romance, with hurdle after hurdle succeeded by an eleventh-hour turnaround.
  51. Charlie Bartlett
    Like most wannabe heroes of the eager-to-please teen comedy, poor little rich boy Charlie Bartlett (Anton Yelchin) is too charming by half and not nearly quirky enough.
  52. Them
    The characters in Them are paper-thin: They're mere props to be manipulated by co-directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud, who want nothing more than to scare you sh--less in what, with its nonstop chase sequences and booby traps, often comes off as a live-action video game.
  53. Descent
    A well-acted trifle straining to be a hard-hitting morality play.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocket Science
    Once Rocket Science enters the realm of the debate competition, the director's eye for detail never deserts him.
  55. Rush Hour 3
    Chan is still the Gene Kelly of martial arts.
  56. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Although not as radically defamiliarizing as Jim Jarmusch's avant-western "Dead Man," Jesse James has the feel of an attic ransacked for abandoned knickknacks.
  57. The Jane Austen Book Club
    Perfectly pleasant, perfectly undistinguished adaptation of a market-driven novel about six Sacramento lovelies trying to mend their stalled or broken lives while massaging each other's feet.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    Shallow, very officially sanctioned, and overly compressed, The Power of Song plays like a PBS infomercial for the inevitable DVD box set, which will surely include even more archival footage.
  59. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    A well-wrought indie written and directed by Goran Dukic, has to be the kewpie doll of current zombie flicks: Its walking dead are a bunch of attractive slackers whose wounds are largely internal. They've got attitude.
  60. Dan in Real Life
    Dan in Real Life steals from that line in "Virgin" about Carell kinda looking like Luke Wilson, since here Carell is, after all, playing the Luke Wilson role from "The Family Stone."
  61. Music Within
    Sheen, like the movie itself, is trying too hard to inspire when the story doesn't need the help.
  62. August Rush
    Acclimate yourself to the frenzied vibe, and you'll feel the movie grow into itself as an urban fairy tale whose rapturous finale stakes a wishful claim on the redemptive power of love and art.
  63. Enchanted
    Somewhere between conception and execution, what could have been so much smart, sharp fun turned decidedly pedestrian.
  64. Redacted
    The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.
  65. The Walker
    This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bucket List
    Turns out The Bucket List is a meta-film, mostly about how these two legendary actors interact and what it means to be an actor in your own life.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    City of Men
    Paulo Morelli directs capably, with a heavy dash of MTV-generation flair: hyper-saturated colors, close-ups of skin glittering with sweat, and a constant patter of gunfire that undergirds the soundtrack like a steady heartbeat.
  68. Mad Money
    While it's all so breezy and zippy and girl-power peppy, it's Keaton who makes Mad Money worth a few bucks.
  69. First Sunday
    At first, the movie is over-anxious--trying too hard to squeeze out the laughs, pump up the soundtrack, ingratiate itself with the audience--and the straining is abrasive. But once Talbert gets distracted by keeping the plot clunking along, the comedy eases into relaxed sideline banter.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Praying with Lior
    Trachtman’s movie is not technically accomplished--the camerawork is run-of-the-mill, the structure is rambling--but it’s redeemed by the deliciously complex, practically Balzac-ian family at its center.
  71. Chicago 10
    However authentically chaotic, Chicago 10 is insufficiently frenzied.
  72. Penelope
    Ricci is appealingly human, and some acknowledgement of the importance of female friendship, in addition to romance, is faintly touching.
  73. Semi-Pro
    What at least distinguishes Semi-Pro from its predecessors (not only those starring Ferrell, but also such lesser lights as "Dodgeball" and "Balls of Fury") is that it's a slightly darker movie--one made for grown-ups, hence the R rating.
  74. Married Life
    Though the imprint of Douglas Sirk is all over Sachs's homage to old movies about restless men in bad suits and untrustworthy women in lovely frocks, his immediate reference point is clearly Haynes's "Far From Heaven."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blindsight
    Blindsight works best when it casts off the constraints of the adventure tale it wasn't meant to be and settles into a deft and humanistic treatment of blindness in Tibet.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Never Back Down
    A modest surprise: better acted than needed, better made than expected.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shelter
    As far as coming-out dramas go, Shelter is a puppy dog, well-acted but rife with cliché received wisdom and at least one ingeniously arbitrary bit of mid-scene dialogue: "That's why you never tell a woman how to cook a chicken."
  78. Stop-Loss
    In the end, Stop-Loss's evening-news topicality proves both an asset and a liability--an irresolvable structural conundrum. Simply put, the film so effectively reconstitutes those Vietnam-homecoming touchstones that we can anticipate its every move well before it makes them.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shine a Light
    Shine a Light's only point seems to be: You try this at 60. One would hope that, after "The Last Waltz" and "No Direction Home," Scorsese might venture beyond making a glossy episode of "Ripley's Believe It or Not." Nope, and we're not supposed to question it: Like the Stones, Marty's earned the right to coast, especially in his senior years.
  80. The Forbidden Kingdom
    Taken as a whole, though, it's an amiable lost-and-found of epic-adventure tropes. As I still illogically treasure "Willow," many a 10-year-old who sees Forbidden Kingdom will remember it fondly in spite of its flaws.
  81. The Fall
    If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera, and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Before the Rains
    Saddled with a predictable lushness--even a streak of blood on a dirty window is aestheticized until it looks like stained glass--and the sensuality here can crowd out the sense. Still, director Santosh Sivan imparts a vastness and a sense of wonder to the film, qualities reminiscent of a Thomas Cole painting.
  83. The Incredible Hulk
    Cheers to lower expectations, then, because The Incredible Hulk is The Pretty Good Hulk. All things considered, of course.
  84. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    Based on several American Girl stories about a 1930s cub reporter in Cincinnati, this dull theatrical debut especially disappoints because I'm usually fond of square, sepia-toned, period-costumed kids' movies (like Fly Away Home) that go nowhere at the box office.
  85. Australia
    The result is mostly a woodenly derivative melding of '40s maternal melodramas, oaters, and World War II actioners.
  86. The Wackness
    All the drug-slinging material's counterfeit, but the script is refreshingly straight-faced in looking at the strange relationship between white boys and rap.
    • Village Voice
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Felon
    Harold Perrineau gives unintentionally comic expression in Felon to the delineation between his character's public and private scruples.
  88. Red
    The movie's escalating series of tit-for-tat revenge ploys becomes a bit tedious even at 95 minutes, but Cox and a rich (if not always well-served) supporting cast that includes Tom Sizemore, Amanda Plummer, and Robert Englund keep it more than watchable throughout.
  89. I.O.U.S.A.
    Both a handy election primer and a bowel-rattling cry of fiscal doom.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sukiyaki Western Django
    This delirious spaghetti eastern could only have come from the boiling brain of Takashi Miike, the prolific Japanese auteur whose spectacularly uneven films account for the lion's share of the past decade's most utterly batshit movie moments.
  91. Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived
    An elegantly constructed if misleadingly titled class lecture.
  92. Filth and Wisdom
    There's an undeniably funky charm and abiding can-do spirit to this loose-knit portrait of three London flatmates trying to make their way in the world.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sex Drive
    Remains faithful to a portrait of teens as they see themselves.
  94. Frontrunners
    Suh shows herself ever-happy to settle for the shallow rewards of pop documentary. Depending on your level of fatigue with The Other Campaign, this may be good enough.
  95. I've Loved You So Long
    A modestly satisfying tale of sisterly love weighed down by a history of family betrayal and mendacity.
  96. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The biggest titters at a recent preview screening came during a scene in which Mewes shows off his dick--as though, at last! Still, how Jason Segal of him. Does Apatow always get there first?
  97. JCVD
    What exactly is JCVD? Comedy? Confession? Confusion? No one will ever mistake these backstage shenanigans for "Irma Vep." But as a self-regarding expression of masculine angst, it's a Damme sight more fun than "Synecdoche."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Are Wizards
    Ignore the scattershot approach, however, and there's considerable pleasure to be had in spending time with these bizarre enthusiasts and watching the creative ways they find to express their obsessions.
  99. Where God Left His Shoes
    Leguizamo, working at a scramble, gets more on-screen traction than in recent memory.
  100. Defiance
    There are subtitles and vaguely East European accents; there is romance and rebirth, tears and regular pauses for gallows humor (at which we Jews are known to be very good, on account of our long history of persecution).
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