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. Thirteen Days
    A tense and engrossing political thriller.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Welcome to Collinwood
    An anti-"Rififi" in which nearly everybody loses their cool, not after the big score goes down but repeatedly and neurotically throughout.
  3. The Legend of Bagger Vance
    More mushy than mystical.
  4. Velvet Goldmine
    After a most promising beginning, Velvet Goldmine's progress grows increasingly labored, stumbling around the structural roadblocks Haynes has erected in its path.
  5. Nurse Betty
    Betty sustains her character, the movie fails to maintain its own.
  6. The End of the Affair
    About halfway through I began to imagine it as it might have been directed by Douglas Sirk as a vehicle for Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson.
  7. Go Tigers!
    This sly, sobering doc exposes the grievously fucked-up priorities surrounding the sport in a small town with little else on which to hang its hopes.
  8. Buffalo Soldiers
    In its post-Vietnam cynicism, Buffalo Soldiers feels almost avant-garde.
  9. Two Men Went to War
    Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.
  10. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Where Judgment Day exhibited the profligate sprawl of a military operation, the leaner, less grandiose Rise of the Machines has the feel of a single Hummer careening through an earthquake in downtown Burbank.
  11. Butterfly Tongues
    It's boilerplate Miramax: a sentimental import with lovingly photographed Euro locale.
  12. Passionada
    There's much to admire here, including an often witty script and a cast that includes Theresa Russell, Seymour Cassel, and the irrepressible Lupe Ontiveros (Celia's mother-in-law).
  13. R2PC: Road to Park City
    An Indiewood spoof that's more winning than anyone who wasn't a close friend of the director could possibly expect, R2PC satirizes not only wannabe auteurs but also that overworked genre, the faux documentary, while functioning as a credible study guide for Filmmaking 101.
  14. The Tic Code
    A sympathetic but conventional disease-of-the-week movie.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cuckoo
    Well-intentioned but sugarcoated anti-war allegory.
  16. The Gift
    A creepily effective button-pusher that owes a bit to the original "Cape Fear" both in Sam Raimi's ruthless direction and Keanu Reeves's unexpectedly robust performance as the most violent redneck peckerwood in a steamy Georgia town.
  17. Juliet of the Spirits
    Juliet is never less than eye-catching, but is rarely more.
  18. Antitrust
    It's a kick to see the Tim Robbins version of the man recently described by the Microsoft trial judge as "Napoleonic" installed in a disgustingly opulent Bond-villain HQ/pad, and the overwrought Boiler Room-meets-The Game scenario is not without its own schlocky pleasures.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beefcake
    Beefcake's messiness has real charm, and its tribute to Mizer is both appropriately complicated and poignantly sexy.
  20. Up at the Villa
    The Haases, whose previous films ("Angels and Insects," "The Music of Chance") evinced a remote, unfussy sensibility, are a poor fit for the melodramatic contortions that the story demands.
  21. Timecode
    I suspect that Time Code was a lot more fun to make than it is to watch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Adept and generally enjoyable.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bulgarian Lovers
    We'd gladly give ourselves over to the literate if chatty script and the generous helpings of Bulgarian beefcake, but our interest flags the moment Biba puts his clothes back on.
  24. Saudate for the Future
    Infectious city symphony.
  25. The Weather Underground
    One leaves with barely a clue as to how this group was able to orchestrate a successful string of terror bombings.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Living Out Loud
    Richard LaGravenese peppers his directorial debut with the narrative trickery (fantasy sequences, flashbacks) that often tangles his sceenplays ("The Fisher King," "Beloved").
  27. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Broomfield's investigatory technique remains a frustrating pileup of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity. But when Broomfield travels to her Michigan hometown, he pieces together a life blighted at breech-birth: a grotesque of abandonment, incest, physical and sexual abuse, pregnancy at 13, and homelessness.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Blade
    Yuki's streamlined revenge story (the furious, elegant choreography is by HK maestro Donnie Yen) has in its modest dimensions a surprising grace.
  29. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Successfully amalgamates Henry Jaglom's Hollywood-home-movie aesthetic, ego-skewering satire, and a measured understanding of the kinship between love and risk.
  30. How to Deal
    As Mom, Allison Janney easily dominates every scene she graces, as does Morning Zoo jock papa Peter Gallagher.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Step Into Liquid
    Like many late-franchise attempts, it stretches its material thin and grasps at novelty, overstaying its welcome despite a handful of requisite dude-that-is-so-fucking-cool moments.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Below
    Though the genre collisions (horror/WWII submarine/undersea Macbeth) are as jarring as the sound design, the cumulative effect is one of claustrophobic creepiness.
  33. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    A movie of many stupid pet tricks and one basic joke: As in the original, Elle's intelligence is consistently -- if understandably -- underestimated.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Seagull's Laughter
    Provides some swell roles for actresses and intriguing local detail.
  35. All My Loved Ones
    It traces a sustained and moving portrait of the worldly Sam, whose despair as the society he embraced abandons him is both clear-eyed and devastating.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Faculty
    Since the codes of science fiction are different from horror's cant, the patented Williamson method doesn't make a perfect fit with the material; Faculty's fun, but less fun than it could be.
  37. Croupier
    Polished and adroit ado about next to nothing, Hodges's film owes everything to Owen, who nails the vaguely unsavory, unreadable, half-lidded hunks that inhabit every profitable entertainment-industry outpost.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Duplex
    A bitter little fable of rent control and its discontents, Duplex moves rapidly into darkness and claustrophobia.
  39. Hilary and Jackie
    Hilary and Jackie tries far too hard to dictate emotional involvement right out of the gate, and you're left counting off the doom-laden cues for things that are sure to return full circle.
  40. Amy's Orgasm
    Davis has energy, but she doesn't bother to make her heroine's book sound convincing, the gender-war ideas original, or the comic scenes fly. Instead, the film is buttressed by song montages and jokey chapter titles.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    E.T. is a dog movie. Genre-wise, I mean. It's about a boy meeting a dog, naming it, taming it, learning from it, and growing up. Of course, the genre is superficially disguised as science fiction, as was the fashion at the time. [2002 re-release]
  42. Bolivia
    Virtually plot-free, the movie's organic cultivation of Argentina's economic tension and ethnophobic woes is smooth as silk.
  43. The Legend of Drunken Master
    The uncertain plot somehow concerns ginseng and stolen objets d'art; the main thrust is acrobatic slapstick with a decided antipatriarchal twist.
  44. Paradise Lost 2: Revelations
    As documentary filmmaking, it's cheap and suspect. As advocacy, it's necessary.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mudge Boy
    Despite its chic pedigree, the film projects a shy modesty, a virtue largely attributable to Emile Hirsch's unflashy performance.
  46. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.
  47. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    Skeleton may be 100 percent cult-in-a-can, but aficionados should feel sated. All others are advised to bring copious amounts of controlled substances.
  48. Grazia's Island
    It's Filippo Pucillo who gives the youngest son such mellifluous southern sass that you wish the camera would abandon the whole woman-as-sadness retread and scooter off in his direction.
  49. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    A movie as laconic as its hero, Ghost Dog is nonetheless diminished by its most un-Zen-like attachment to this underlying sentimentality.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Mother Likes Women
    Fortunately, Leonor Watling (who spent most of "Talk to Her" in a coma) plays the spectacularly neurotic middle daughter with dizzying abandon and single-handedly saves the day.
  51. The Legend of 1900
    Good-natured but labored, the film clings to its lone gimmick with increasing desperation.
  52. Wasabi
    The real charm of this trifle is the deadpan comic face of its star, Jean Reno, who resembles Sly Stallone in a hot sake half-sleep.
  53. Hollywood Ending
    The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Star Trek: Insurrection
    The latest Star Trek flick, Insurrection, is the 9th, and although it doesn't suck as completely as some ignoble odd-numbered low points, it doesn't exactly boldly go where no one has gone before.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guy Thing
    In her role as Becky the half-assed tiki girl, Stiles's left-footedness can finally be named, only one of the many pleasures tugging this girl-snatches-guy-from-altar comedy a notch above standard.
  56. The Business of Strangers
    The Business of Strangers goes too far in dramatizing Julie's primal, Paula-fied surge of female fury, and the script finally mistakes respectful ambiguity for vaporous drift.
  57. Daughters of the Sun
    The filmmaker achieves the desired sense of remoteness and claustrophobic doom, and though the story could be told more economically, her slow approach conveys the distended chronology that attends an indentured servitude resembling slavery.
  58. Joe the King
    The film belongs to Fleiss, and he makes Joe's inner life so transparent that it's heartbreaking to watch the boy dig himself into a hole.
  59. SLC Punk!
    Merendino's most innovative directorial strategy is to collapse present and past by having Lillard shout Stevo's reflections about his youthful rebellion directly at the camera, while the scene he's describing in the past tense takes place behind him. I know it sounds like a Brechtian affectation, but it works.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Guru
    As a dirtier Deepak, Mistry is blankly sweet, suitable for his role as Subcontinental Rorschach.
  61. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.
  62. The Score
    Perhaps awed by the congress of Method men, director Frank Oz stands back as his actors phone it in.
  63. Anger Management
    Consistently wacky and sometimes nearly surreal.
  64. A Beautiful Mind
    It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.
  65. Matchstick Men
    Single-dad sitcom is not Sir Ridley's forte but, anachronistically evoking the ring-a-ding-ding ambience of "Auto Focus" and "Catch Me If You Can," his mise-en-scène is as impeccable as Roy's pad.
  66. Simon Birch
    That Simon Birch is not as maudlin as it might have been is largely due to the intensely thoughtful, prickly performance of 11-year-old Ian Michael Smith, who plays Simon.
  67. Millennium Mambo
    In a sense, Millennium Mambo is a mildly prurient portrait of Shu moving, drinking, smoking, and changing clothes -- it's analogous to one of Andy Warhol's Edie Sedgwick films, but without the existential drama. Who really cares what costume this poor girl will wear to all tomorrow's parties?
  68. Little Nicky
    Certainly Sandler's most ambitious work. It's not just a bid for respectability but a genuine allegory.
  69. Iron Monkey
    Anyone expecting the decorous serenity of the Ang Lee film should be aware that Iron Monkey strives for no more or less than comic-strip thwack and thump.
  70. Last Life in the Universe
    Cheeky and elusive, Last Life in the Universe inhabits a high-lonesome world unto itself, a bright daydream that dissipates in the aching gap of a missed connection.
  71. Me Without You
    Essentially humorless, Me Without You manages some pleasing textures all the same.
  72. The Debut
    Has a sweet low-budget quality that sometimes slips into TV-movie schmaltz.
  73. The Acid House
    There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.
  74. Road Trip
    Gets a lurching spring in its step whenever Tom Green shows up to, say, cram a live mouse in his mouth.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    It Runs in the Family
    Family goes easy on the schmaltz, and the catastrophes have the puncturing feel of real life.
  76. Bootmen
    The best sequences -- auditions in a strip bar and a public bathroom -- still can't compete with that industrial musical called "Pola X."
  77. Booye kafoor, atre yas
    A humorously death-haunted psychodrama.
  78. The Tracker
    A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    7 Days in September
    The interviews occasionally veer into it-seemed-like-a-dream cliché, and the eerie soundtrack doesn't help. But at times the unpolished approach earns a rare complexity.
  80. Particles of Truth
    In the central romantic push-pull, Elster and Harold achieve a rare, edgily hopeful chemistry amid emotional ruins.
  81. Blue Car
    Blue Car gets so much of the hard stuff (including Meg's Plath-via-Tori poetry) that it assumes the easy stuff will take care of itself. It doesn't.
  82. Japanese Story
    Totally convincing in a physically demanding role, Collette carries the movie on her shoulders -- and that weight is what it's all about.
  83. Monster
    Theron's empathetic victim-wrath and elemental female outrage almost trump the otherwise cartoonish gender-bending and award-grubbing po' folk put-on.
  84. Run Lola Run
    An enjoyably glib and refreshingly terse exercise in big beat and constant motion.
  85. Incantato
    If you can suspend your disbelief regarding Nello's naïveté, this film offers some quiet pleasures.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Yes Men
    Though at times the film is snortingly funny, too much of the humor here rests on presupposed opinion about globalization.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Casa de los babys
    The screenplay's clutchy banter (interspersed with arias of teary confession) feels distinctly Oprah, but Sayles extracts unexpected life from his wooden setups.
  88. Divided We Fall
    In its compassionate absurdism and underlying dark humor, the movie seeks to reestablish contact with the Czech new wave.
  89. You Can Count on Me
    Seems like a TV movie. A well-written, sympathetically acted TV movie, to be sure, but so timid and clumsy in its deployment of picture, sound, and editing that you have to wonder if executive producer Martin Scorsese bothered to give notes.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burn! (re-release)
    A flawed, but intriguing work, it offers, here and there, proof of Pontecorvo's gift for ecstatic epic filmmaking.
  91. Cecil B. DeMented
    Has the grace to send the audience out with a piece of Waters-written rap.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The General's Daughter
    Plotwise, Daughter is an "aha!"-intensive but thoroughly random mystery.
  93. Down with Love
    Unfortunately, during the inevitable "what every woman wants" breakdown, Zellweger can't muster Doris Day's detached fume.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Festival in Cannes
    Has shades of such oleaginous insider-treading as "The Player" and "Celebrity," but the mood, like the lighting, is altogether sunnier.
  95. The Limey
    A jaggedly impressionistic reverie.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Illuminata
    For all its ambitions, Illuminata sheds only murky light on what separates theater from life.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Already a top-selling DVD thanks to PR support from moveon.org, numerous media outlets, political blogs, and even Doonesbury, Outfoxed argues that Fox News's pro-Republican bias is top-down.
  98. Criminal
    He (Jacobs) and cinematographer Chris Menges compose the film largely in close-ups, and the effect is appropriately unnerving. Regardless, unfavorable comparisons to "Nine Queens" are inevitable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Shaolin Soccer
    Crammed with wild action, obvious but well-mounted gags, and playful effects, the film is refreshingly silly.
  100. Arlington Road
    The mode is hysteric-Hitchcockian, the result mostly devoid of suspense.
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