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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    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    Such informality leads to numerous lulls, but when the photographer perks up the results are delightful.
  2. Go for Zucker
    Mildly tasteless (natürlich), if not exactly uproarious.
  3. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Almost despite itself, this is a deeply pessimistic movie.
  4. End of the Spear
    Spear has all the earmarks of a middling Indiewood product, from its competent second-tier cast (including "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" hunklet Chad Allen in a dual role as a slain missionary and his grown son) to its earnest plotting and leaden pacing.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blossoms of Fire
    Backed by folk songs and swirling shots of fiestas and markets, Blossoms is feel-good tourism but by its own bounds only woolly anthropology.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dai si gin
    Well executed but ultimately unsatisfying, Breaking News centers its cops-and-robbers plot around a clever meta-media twist that nevertheless fails to transcend gimmickry.
  7. Imagine Me & You
    Not only is there not enough panting to bunch any panties, this polite romp could use more of that other L-word: laughs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Jerusalem
    The film strains under the influence of too many philosophy texts.
  9. La scorta (re-release)
    Tognazzi's use of public spaces, streets, and offices is three-dimensional and exciting in a Michael Mann–ish way, and Ennio Morricone's all-bass-register piano score keeps things nervous. But La Scorta suffers from an anemic plot pulse-you could say the judge's bodyguards did their job too well, because nothing much happens-and the anticlimax is as dull as it is pessimistic.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eight Below
    A gorgeous art film full of snowy silences and spare, gestural performances threatens to break loose (the most inspired acting comes courtesy of the canines), though the plot's slavish schmaltz proves as oppressive as the harsh winter that descends upon the dogs.
  11. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    Yes, there's something terribly familiar about this historical fantasy. As we now know, and Willmott is well aware, the South actually did win the Civil War.
  12. Tsotsi
    A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as "City of God" relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc.
  13. Unknown White Male
    To call this story unbelievable is to say the very least. If it's a hoax, Bruce is a fantastic actor (but then, the movie suggests, so are we all). If not, you may wonder less about Bruce's personality than his condition.
  14. 16 Blocks
    It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.
  15. Failure to Launch
    Failure to Launch has all the gravitas of a midseason-replacement sitcom.
  16. Duck Season
    Shot in silvery black-and-white, Duck Season is not charmless, just insubstantial.
  17. Evil
    Is this an allegory against blind deference to fascism? It might be, but the root-for-the-Aryan-jock dramatics seem mildly fascist themselves.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    She's the Man
    Doesn't have an unpredictable moment in it, borrowing heavily from just about every sports movie or teen comedy ever and, oh yeah, "Twelfth Night."
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hate Crime
    When Hate Crime confounds expectations, it transcends the whodunit-of-the-week template. On the other hand, when the plot gets lost in irrational revenge fantasies, you'll wish you had stayed home watching reruns.
  20. Don't Tell
    As is typical of contemporary Italian movies, every one of Comencini's women seems on the verge of a hysterical collapse.
  21. Don't Come Knocking
    It's "Broken Flowers" with bourbon and ten-gallons and meta-country soundtrack warbles.
  22. The Big Question
    While the questions may be universal, they're not particularly original, and the responses largely run the expected range, rendering the whole project less enlightening than your average collegiate coffee-and-cigarettes bull session.
  23. American Gun
    All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.
  24. Puzzlehead
    By far the most independent independent-genre flick to grift screen space in Manhattan since Douglas Buck's "Family Portraits," James Bai's Puzzlehead has only its ideas and speculative frisson to sell it.
  25. Lonesome Jim
    Lonesome Jim has the import of a deliberately squelched sitcom, or a home movie that's poisoned by unhappiness but shown anyway for stray laughs.
  26. Iron Island
    Depending on one's mood, the movie might seem boldly simplified and poetic--or boringly simpleminded and prosaic.
  27. Lucky Number Slevin
    Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.
  28. Scary Movie 4
    The jokes miss more than they hit, but there are a lot of them, and when they work, it's gold.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wild
    Under Steve "Spaz" Williams' direction, the animation is exquisitely detailed, down to the lions' individually moving whiskers--but when's the last time you enjoyed a cartoon for its realism?
  30. On a Clear Day
    Gaby Dellal's cynically mushy film, like "The Full Monty" and its ilk, is best savored only by its target demo: middle-classers who see one imported film a year, the selection in question requiring working-stiff melodrama and leprechaun burrs gently and lovably mangling the English dialogue.
  31. Free Zone
    Oddly, in representing a private conflict as the microcosm of an unsolvable catastrophe, Free Zone only manages to miniaturize both.
  32. American Dreamz
    The vision of America as a vast, ratings-driven amateur hour is not without promise, but Weitz's movie, named for the most popular TV program in its parallel universe, is disappointingly soft in its individual characterizations.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kinky Boots
    Boots is unforgivably tame; only foot fetishists (or possibly Imelda Marcos) could get off on such desexualized, PG-13-rated fare.
  34. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page.
  35. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    A mockumentary that exhausts its best joke with its premise.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somersault
    There are lots of ways to grow up. The method offered in this Australian drama is to do something awful and then flee from it.
  37. Wassup Rockers
    Larry Clark's latest finds the grizzled shock-meister in a thoughtful mode and a mellow mood.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    RV
    The result is a workmanlike family comedy with enough pratfalls and poo jokes for tykes and enough sentimentality for parents.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Whore's Son
    The grave comic presence of Miki Manojlovic (from Kusturica's Underground) as Ozren's worldly uncle stabilizes the movie's tantalizingly uncertain tone, at least until its bizarre closing plunge into Oedipal catharsis.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An American Haunting
    The movie exhausts its blast-in-the-face scares through repetition. A wasted opportunity-- especially since the events as reported scarcely need embellishing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Down in the Valley
    Like "Don't Come Knocking," this contrived lament for the lonesome cowboy means to measure what remains of the old western in the absence of the Old West, eventually plopping its displaced ranch hand protagonist onto the fake Main Street of an old western movie set just to make sure we don't miss any of the cine-mythic connotations.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goal! The Dream Begins
    The appealing young man's tribulations are predictable, his triumph inevitable; while he gets respect, we get another Rocky-style dose of emotional uplift, cloaked in the usual game-day clichés.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wah-Wah
    That the film is semi- autobiographical for caustic actor-turned-writer-director Richard E. Grant helps explain its severely, sometimes laughably bitter tone.
  44. Mouth to Mouth
    Murray's story has the no-holds-barred look and feel of a '70s movie, but her digressions into modern dance are a tad unwelcome.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Omen
    If the movie didn't take itself so seriously, it could have been a great popcorn muncher. As is, it'll still work fine for those willing to forgive its trespasses.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Inconvenient Truth
    An Inconvenient Truth does restore one's faith in the value of documentary-as-lecture, not least by extolling the virtues (rare as clean water these days) of politician-as-teacher.
  47. The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress
    The filmmakers capture a battle for the soul of a state and country; we're all damned, no matter our choice of red or blue, unless things change sooner than later, says a movie that will divide like nothing since Michael Moore took the nation's temperature.
  48. Nacho Libre
    Nacho Libre plays like a Jack Black best-of, down to the song he wrote and performs for de La Reguera that sounds like some Tejano version of a Tenacious D throwaway.
  49. Loverboy
    Bacon the director indulges his wife, letting her play crazy and emotional in a showy performance that screams "serious actress."
  50. Lower City
    A bone-tired tale underneath.
  51. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
    This "Last Waltz"–like doc is almost funereal, full of reverent banalities spliced between overly folksy takes on melancholic Leonard Cohen bombshells.
  52. The Great Yokai War
    The film makes no more or less sense than Ridley Scott's Legend or Jim Henson's Labyrinth, and in fact has a creaky, blue-gel '80s-ness to it, but for many, keeping up with Miike's cranked output is an end in itself.
  53. Kill Your Idols
    Kill Your Idols pulls a few punches, tempering its respect for No Wave values like extremity and contentiousness with a more 2006 concern for not actually offending anyone in particular.
  54. Changing Times
    If the title, knee-jerk cast, pop-song intro, and schmaltzy plotline of his new film Changing Times is any indication, he's (André Téchiné) now the French mainstream, the premier Gallic pilot of high-toned soap opera.
  55. The Oh in Ohio
    First-time feature director Billy Kent seems proud that his movie deals with sex in such frank fashion. But if you're going to brag about your explicit sexuality, it doesn't quite work to go out of your way avoiding skin.
  56. Time to Leave
    Time to Leave amounts simply to a semi-thoughtful disease-of-the-week weepie, admirable in its restraint but shying from the terror of the situation.
  57. Edmond
    As the full-length sorta-satire it has become, Edmond is all sizzle and little meat, a veritable tangent act dropped from "Glengarry Glen Ross" because it was several marks too silly.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mad Cowgirl
    It's safe to say there will not be another movie this year like Mad Cowgirl. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your tolerance for copious bloodletting, hardcore pornography, and C-SPAN.
  59. Lunacy
    Lunacy is dark, scary, and yucky--even by the Czech animator's own standards.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shock to the System
    Director Ron Oliver applies a thin veneer of straight-to-cable pseudo-gloss without finding a workable tone, and the cast lacks the charisma and chemistry to make the genre and gender-bending register as more than novelty.
  61. Hamilton
    Avoids the narrative contrivances of many recent forays into Americana -- by virtually avoiding narrative.
  62. Accepted
    Accepted is an inspired premise in search of a movie: What starts out as a scabrous takedown of academic bureaucracy ends up yet another modestly rousing underdog story about the little slacker that could.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Factotum
    None of it goes anywhere. It's just stylized alcoholism with a tired wink.
  64. Saint of 9/11
    Mychal Judge, the popular gay FDNY chaplain who perished in the fallen towers and was the day's first official casualty, has been so designated by this treacly, worshipful doc, something he would surely have deemed ridiculous.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Trust You to Kill Me
    Perhaps you are wondering why a little-known band called Rocco DeLuca and the Burden merits a glossy feature-length documentary of its whirlwind European tour. After watching Manu Boyer's film, you may still wonder.
  66. SherryBaby
    Sherrybaby is by no means a terrible film...But we know exactly where the transparent action is going from word one.
  67. Man Push Cart
    Man Push Cart is a diminutive film, finally--vying for a neorealist vibe, it lacks the Italian history makers' narrative urgency, and the sociopolitical conflict at the heart of the immigration "issue" is hardly engaged.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rolling Family
    The repeated sight of cute roadside animals and kissing cousins doesn't much enliven the long trip, and while Graciana Chironi lends humanity to the role of the white-shawl-wearing, high-blood-pressure-battling Gramma, the movie rarely if ever crosses the border between familiarity and surprise.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gridiron Gang
    Never mind the obvious parallels to "The Longest Yard" and "Remember the Titans"; what we get here is one huge, indigestible sports movie platitude.
  70. The Last Kiss
    The Last Kiss isn't terrible, but if you're strapped for a night out it can easily wait till DVD. Better yet, it may be time to revisit "Diner."
  71. The Ground Truth
    The details are eye-opening (or ear-opening, in the case of marching songs taught to the new Marines about slaughtering Arab schoolchildren), but soon Foulkrod's film backs itself into a Support Our Troops corner.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flyboys
    Here is the War to End All Wars seen from on high--as it was way back when, in "Wings" or the Howard Hughes "Hell's Angels"--a world apart from the grim, futile slaughterhouses of Verdun and the Marne. Among these combatants, you won't find much "All Quiet on the Western Front"–style despair, and the paths of glory are unsullied by doubt or disillusionment.
  73. Fearless
    This is an action movie, and people don't come to be preached to; the "Terminator" flicks also favored world peace but didn't pause the action for nearly an hour to rub it in.
  74. Renaissance
    For a little while, the film is dazzling. Then it's dizzying. Then it's just kind of . . . wearying. That's not because it's in black-and-white; so was "Sin City". There's just something terribly, tragically dull about Renaissance.
  75. The Guardian
    The Guardian is neither serious enough to take seriously nor flashy enough to get by on thrills alone. Jerry Bruckheimer, where art thou?
  76. Little Children
    This overly long movie, made sluggish by a superfluously novelistic narrator, feels divided against itself, driven by opposed impulses of tragedy and dark humor that make it impossible for us to identify with these lost souls' break for freedom or wait for them to grow up.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One-Third
    A borderline experimental, nearly silent film loosely based on Dante's "Inferno."
  78. Catch a Fire
    In the end, Catch a Fire plays like some weird hybrid on the crazy-quilt filmography of Phillip Noyce, which includes small productions made in his native Australia and the Sharon Stone sexcapade "Sliver." What it's definitely not is the standard-issue movie about apartheid; there's no white protagonist, no pale-faced hero riding in on his high horse to save the oppressed black man.
  79. Conversations with God
    It's an agreeable enough tale right up until God butts in and starts talking; even if you can swallow the premise, it isn't particularly cinematic to watch a guy endlessly scribbling on legal pads.
  80. Shut Up & Sing
    The movie's not quite the Bush bashfest its publicity might lead you to believe; it's closer to the Metallica doc "Some Kind of Monster" than to "Fahrenheit 9/11."
  81. Death of a President
    Dramatically inert but a minor techno-miracle, Range's movie is a faux documentary with fake talking heads and seamless digital effects.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bridge
    Ghoulish documentary.
  83. Shottas
    Writer-director Cess Silvera claims he's trying to "show the gritty life of Jamaican immigrants," but Shottas is no more a social-issue film than "Scarface."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Good Year
    Scott can do mayhem, dystopia, and the rampaging alien (extraterrestrial, android, Somali, Demi Moore) with the best of them, but the breezy touch is not his forte.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stranger Than Fiction
    Stranger Than Fiction merely layers whimsy upon whimsy. As written, Harold Crick is no more convincing a human being than he is an IRS agent; Kay Eiffel's writing, supposedly good enough to inspire the career-long devotion of a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman), sounds as dully declamatory as movie-trailer narration.
  86. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
    A misguided tribute to the woman his (Shainberg's) film identifies among "the greatest artists of the 20th century."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Come Early Morning
    Judd's typically lived-in performance and the authentic Arkansas locations -- cramped bars, dusty roads -- help vaguely distinguish a movie that comes on like a minor-key reprise of Judd's breakthrough "Ruby in Paradise" and every other rural indie melodrama to grace Sundance since.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fuck
    Aside from the historically worthy identification of General George S. Patton as a pioneering potty mouth, the film contains little or nothing in the way of surprise.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Candy
    Any drug movie's effectiveness can be measured by the strength of its detox, and Candy doesn't sweeten the cold turkey. Still, it's a downward spiral from there in more ways than one. Never mind the neo-psychedelic-pop soundtrack and occasional double-vision cinematography: Dope just can't account for the film's fried brain cells.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flannel Pajamas
    At a full two hours, Lipsky's talky movie is more compelling in its second half, when the spouses finally get around to being themselves.
  91. Deck the Halls
    Though DeVito and Chenoweth bring a rough plebeian charm to the proceedings, it's nothing short of tragic to see the great Ferris Bueller relegated to grimacing straight man.
  92. Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny
    Tenacious D is utterly harmless and totally pointless. Black and Gass have been at this so long their dirty little joke has all the punch of a Catskills routine.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds
    As before, the fun is somewhat capped by absurdly stilted acting and daytime-soap-quality DV, but the nonstop sub-Araki glibbage is plenty peppy and so is Rebekah Kochan's ding-a-ling Tiffani, a dead ringer for 90210's Tori Spelling.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    3 Needles
    In terms of simple provocation, nothing in this melodramatic mosaic of global suffering comes close to matching director Thom Fitzgerald's press kit prediction that "the AIDS pandemic will be seen in retrospect as much more significant than the ongoing jihad." A film about THAT could be compelling; this one is merely content to suggest, cleverly and often, that it recognizes far more than we ever could the pain and cruelty of disease.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bergman Trilogy
    As little more than an extended interview, it remains hobbled by determinedly uninspired cinematography and a mundane televisual setup.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Breaking and Entering
    Forgive Minghella for taking a breather, even if Breaking and Entering exhales nothing but hot air.
  97. The Good Shepherd
    The Good Shepherd needed to be either considerably longer -- more like 1979's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" miniseries -- or considerably shorter (word has it De Niro cut 30 minutes). Right now, it's stuck in the deadly dull middle in which everything happens but nothing matters since the filmmakers can't stick with one event or idea long enough for it to, well, stick.
  98. Night at the Museum
    The first half-hour's too slow; the last half-hour's too manic, as if to compensate. But at least it entertains, thanks in large measure to the buddy-pic relationship between Owen Wilson's miniature cowpoke and his Roman pal Steve Coogan.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We Are Marshall
    Even by the low standards of the young-jocks-as-good-clean-soldiers movie, there's little at stake here, unless you count the kids' hunger to win one for the Gipper.
  100. Miss Potter
    By most accounts, Potter was a serious workaholic monomaniacally devoted to the purity of her vision. Undaunted, Noonan and Maltby are determined to squeeze her life into a run-of-the-mill romance in which love heals all wounds.
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