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. Angels & Demons
    Angels & Demons is still no more than another treat for whacked-out male conspiracy theorists.
  2. The Cake Eaters
    There's no kind of wonderful in Mary Stuart Masterson's directorial debut, yet however slight her ensemble drama--about two distressed families in the Rockwellian framings of time-forgotten rural America--maybe, it's at least convincing in its genuine sweetness.
  3. Observe and Report
    Broad but thin and more bleak than uproarious--a humorously downsized homage to foundational '70s classics like "Dirty Harry" and, especially, "Taxi Driver."
  4. Adoration
    The end result is a movie considerably more absorbing to talk, write, and think about afterward than it is to actually watch.
  5. Julia
    Tilda Swinton doesn't merely act the title role in French director Erick Zonca's Julia--she devours it, spits it back up, dances giddily upon it, twirls it in the air.
  6. Imagine That
    Imagine That does manage to get a crowd tearing up on cue for its emotional climax; as much as it works, it's through the personal charm of Murphy and Shahidi.
  7. Dead Snow
    For more than half of this 90-minute film, director Tommy Wirkola plays things pretty straight--a mistake, perhaps, since the first half is pretty boring--but once the Nazi zombies start arriving en masse, he abruptly shifts to an "Evil Dead"–style zaniness, including the sight of a potential victim hanging off the side of a mountain while using a zombie's entrails as rope.
  8. Surveillance
    Surveillance is the work of a director who has made significant strides in both storytelling and control of the medium, deftly interweaving a grisly thriller, a sicko "Rashômon," a switcheroo, a psychotic love story, an imaginative paean to children, and an inspired resurrection of Julia Ormond.
  9. I Sell the Dead
    The storytelling frame allows a genial, ain't-it-cool pile-up of occasionally antic episodes.
  10. Shorts
    A cute and mildly clever fantasy.
  11. St. Trinian's
    Can be enjoyed in all its endearing awfulness, as a loony "High School Musical" with posher accents and a lot more going on upstairs.
  12. Mid-August Lunch
    Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it's hard to believe writer, director, and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody mafia hit "Gomorrah."
  13. Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    Sweet and funny at either end, but in between, it sags with endless repetition of gross bodily functions.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultimate X: The Movie
    Nausea-inducing street luge provides the requisite kinesthetic thrill of this mega-cinematic genre.
  15. The Dish
    Harmless and affectionate, The Dish gives its clichés breathing room, and so a few are pleasantly surprising.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mule Skinner Blues
    Earnhart's auteurs are better adjusted, integrating their art into the daily routine of their (equally fucked-up) lives.
  17. Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    Solid middlebrow entertainment, a vast period epic with an almost DeMillean taste for excess.
  18. The Same River Twice
    It's a generous document of cultural passage, and not incidentally, the sexiest naturally nudist American movie since Murnau's "Tabu." Moss, however, keeps himself out of the picture and neglects massive amounts of context that might've made Same River a stunner.
  19. Kiss Me, Stupid (re-release)
    A grimly suggestive and unexpectedly tender bedroom farce, Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid is a true film maudit.
  20. Jabberwocky (re-release)
    The film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
  21. Cradle Will Rock
    Historical forces and famous ghosts jostle past each other in this evocation of mid-1930s New York like harried commuters at Grand Central Station.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Young Unknowns
    Numbing but effective debut.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fidel
    The tone is doting, but not cloying.
  24. Liam
    Acting is the strongest element in Stephen Frears's Liam.
  25. Gaza Strip
    A documentary to make the stones weep -- as shameful as it is scary.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Down to Earth
    There is a lot of electricity running in these cables, and directors Chris and Paul Weitz, responsible for "American Pie," know how to tap enough of it that almost every minute of Down to Earth is entertaining. But not quite surprising.
  27. Mother India
    The performances are broad; the comedy is mainly slapstick. The politics are nationalist and vaguely left-wing.
  28. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Too Deep
    The film does have a canny appreciation for how ghetto realness is acted out.
  30. Cotton Mary
    Brought to life by the weirdness of its subject matter and the risks Madhur Jaffrey takes in her brilliant performance.
  31. Les convoyeurs attendent
    Mariage takes his time and allows the film to drift in an almost ostentatiously casual manner.
  32. Moon Shadow
    If Moon Shadow does sometimes overcome its sentimentalism and faulty parallels, it's because the film is altogether unburdened by cynicism.
  33. Restaurant
    Director Eric Bross has a smooth nonstyle that serves him well until the screenplay turns melodramatic at the end.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Princesa
    Unsettling in spots, Princesa ultimately glosses over the futility of Fernanda's plight, her misery rapidly erased.
  35. Ha-Hesder
    Flawed but engrossing thriller. Highly atmospheric, it gets its charge by dramatizing religious millennialism in a region that is the world epicenter of irrationality.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Return to Never Land
    The low-key animation, featuring little that could not have appeared in its '50s predecessor, is all the more affecting for being so pristinely preserved.
  37. Bobby G. Can't Swim
    Montias's script lacks surprises -- Still, the minor figures surrounding him (Bobby) -- from teenage Puerto Rican beauties to a mobster's middle-aged groupie -- form a gritty urban mosaic, and Bobby's wanton energy is utterly convincing.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light It Up
    Unexpectedly satisfying feel-good agitprop.
  39. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    The poised Vega and pleasingly phlegmatic Sabara are resolutely uncute performers, and the reach-out-and-touch-it gadgetry carries a homey scent of proactive nostalgia. Spy Kids 2 is an island of lost Circuit Cities.
  40. Comedian
    Seinfeld's cool professionalism is almost cruelly juxtaposed with the tortured narcissism of heel-nipping tyro Orny Adams, who illustrates the mirror-image view from below. Comedy is pain, whether you're top- or underdog.
  41. The Cockettes
    Fond, funny documentary.
  42. Return to Me
    First-time director Bonnie Hunt pays slavish adherence to the Nora Ephron rules of assembly for the prefab rom-com.
  43. Lakeboat
    Forster not only makes this unlikely story emotionally believable, he moves you to tears. Lakeboat isn't much of a film, but for Forster fans, it's indispensable.
  44. The Well
    Still most easily defined by its unavoidable parallels to any number of lesbian-overtone psychodramas.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grateful Dawg
    It's like an 80-minute flip through the Grisman family photo album -- complete with live, unreleased soundtrack.
  46. The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack
    An unusually rich music doc.
  47. The Triumph of Love
    It's a giddy farce worthy of Lucy and Ethel, and Peploe plays up the buffoonery.
  48. Food of Love
    Stevenson's performance is at once clueless and fiercely committed, a volatile combination that pays off in the best scene: the mother of all PFLAG meetings.
  49. Reykjavík
    Kormakur's debut feature fulfills the basic requirements of good slacker comedy: It's grounded in quotidian tedium and frustration, and it acknowledges both the humor and pathos of the relevant coping mechanisms (here, lackadaisical flings, porn addiction, amnesia-courting binges).
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everybody Says I'm Fine!
    Writer-director Bose shows depth when he deals directly with Xen's loneliness. The scenes that show him after-hours, as he gazes yearningly at the nightclub patrons across the street, are especially moving.
  51. The Real Cancun
    There are worse crimes being perpetrated in Hollywood than The Real Cancún--an exploitation fantasy no more booby-besotted than a "Porky's" or "American Pie" installment, and certainly no more unreal.
  52. The Dream Catcher
    A highly talented filmmaker, Radtke draws intense, focused performances from these two inexperienced young actors.
  53. Chuen jik sat sau
    There's plenty to enjoy -- in no small part thanks to Lau.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pipe Dream
    The dialogue, by Walsh and Cynthia Kaplan, is sharp and nimble.
  55. Himalaya
    Himalaya lacks such lightness, humor, and grace, offering instead the surface beauty of an ancient and inviolate culture.
  56. Aimee & Jaguar
    Relies on the hefty talents of its two leading ladies.
  57. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.
  58. Zheng hun qi shi
    An intelligent, perceptive film. It's good enough to make you wish Chen hadn't sacrificed emotional complexity for a last-minute surprise.
  59. The Muse
    As consistently funny as it is smartly tooled.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Men Cry Bullets
    This amateurish no-budget effort has earnest charm, and a sensitivity to the tragic dimension of amour fou that saves it from lapsing into shtick.
  61. The Closet
    Tumbles happily into every pitfall that lines its well-trodden path.
  62. Fastpitch
    Spear's portrait of unpaid, passionate fastpitchers could give filmmakers of all budgets a notion of how real Americans speak.
  63. Chutney Popcorn
    The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.
  64. A Time for Drunken Horses
    Single-minded, sometimes harrowing.
  65. Luminous Motion
    If Lloyd's performance is the film's near-fatal flaw, Unger's is its saving grace.
  66. Focus
    Dern and Macy give doughty performances in schematic roles, but glasses or no, these have to be two of the least Semitic-looking actors in American movies.
  67. Happenstance
    Being French, the film at least has indelible details -- something a Hollywood remake would fix but good.
  68. The Son's Room
    A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Lucky Break
    Mike Leigh mainstay Timothy Spall deftly shades in the designated goner, fellow "Still Crazy" alum Bill Nighy is sweetly wispy as the capable fop, and anger-management counselor Olivia Williams trembles pleasantly as usual.
  70. Ivansxtc
    Boldly engineering a collision between tawdry B-movie flamboyance and grandiose spiritual anomie, Rose's film, true to its source material, provides a tenacious demonstration of death as the great equalizer.
  71. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    The movie's bold visual and psychological patterns, as well as its heavy immersion in the natural world, imbue Malli's journey with a folktale quality.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    My Boss's Daughter
    A pleasurably intense burst of anarchy with no moral in sight, thank God.
  73. Home Movie
    The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.
  74. The Sea
    Baltasar Kormákur's wacky version of "King Lear," set in an Icelandic village where virtually everyone plays the fool.
  75. The Crimson Rivers
    Never lacks for energy, and the director and his stars stride with focused confidence through the hooey.
  76. Baunsu ko gaurusu
    Casting Tokyo as a neon wilderness thick with aged "perverts" and teenage pimps, the movie frames a critique of socially permissible pedophilia as indelible as Harada's eavesdropping mise-en-scène.
  77. Laurel Canyon
    The spectacle of pretty people floating languidly across the screen notwithstanding, Laurel Canyon is short on conviction and long on contrivance. McDormand, however, has a ball.
  78. Est - Ouest
    Wargnier has assembled a stellar French and Russian cast, but all that talent can't overcome his heavy-handed screenplay.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where's the Party Yaar?
    This breezy comedy deconstructs the struggles of assimilation, satirizing the stereotypical "culture clash" Indian-American identity narrative.
  80. The Hired Hand (re-release)
    A film of considerable ambition and period piquance.
  81. The Cell
    Not nearly the mindfuck it wants to be.
  82. The Hurricane
    Far too tepid.
  83. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself.
  84. Dr T and the Women
    A flabby farce in which everyone seems to be making it up as they go along.
  85. Biggie and Tupac
    This is Oliver Stone country, but Broomfield's self-effacing affect is more Woody Allen,
  86. AKA
    Cumulatively, the echo-chamber syntax achieves a kind of atonal harmony, meshing with the themes of reinvention and self-presentation: The disjunction between the panels is tantamount to the gap between image and reality.
  87. Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
    A first-person doc assembled largely from footage taken in the course of the five features they made, being madmen together.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Endurance
    Still enigmatic is the figure of Shackleton himself. The film conveys his remarkable leadership without explaining (beyond a because-it's-there romanticism) what would compel such a journey in the first place.
  89. Pleasantville
    Funny for about half an hour, Pleasantville thereafter becomes an increasingly lugubrious, ultimately exasperating mix of technological wonder and ideological idiocy.
  90. Finding Forrester
    At times you can feel Van Sant trying to loosen the movie's windpipe-folding collar, but he doesn't get far, except with Busta Rhymes, as Jamal's gone-nowhere big brother.
  91. Blue Streak
    The contortional physical shtick familiar from Lawrence's sitcom, laden with a dollop of Three Stooges violence, should keep the boys happy.
  92. The Children of the Century
    It does best when it leaves behind hothouse literary discussions and closes in on these two legendary behemoths, battling for sexual supremacy.
  93. Only the Strong Survive
    I'd have welcomed more archival footage (Pennebaker did, after all, document Otis Redding's epochal performance at the Monterey Pop Festival), but that would be asking for another movie.
  94. Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?
    On a dark set, between strums and archival clips, this master raconteur exudes his own brand of obnoxious charm, the kind that can only be possessed, never imitated.
  95. That Obscure Object of Desire
    Elaborate exercise in frustration.
  96. Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    There are pages missing from this fable: Meadows reports that his financiers asked him to cut one-quarter of his original script just before production began, and his fondness for long takes sits uneasily beside the apparent gaps in the narrative.
  97. Sylvia
    A handsome, mostly tasteful production on par with 2001's Bayley-Murdoch impersonation "Iris."
  98. Lola
    Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does.
  99. Big Animal
    The tale's faux-fable simplicity is cunningly eloquent.
  100. Northfork
    Northfork's overall ponderousness prevents it from becoming a transcendent fictive poem on the violent domestication of the West.
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