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. The Nanny Diaries
    Like the book, the Nanny Diaries movie never finds a dramatic center.
  2. Resurrecting the Champ
    This isn't great raw material, though Lurie and his screenwriters try their best to portray Erik as some guilt-ridden evildoer who's perpetrated a great fraud.
  3. Right at Your Door
    Grounded hard by some terrific smoking-skyline special effects and by Cochrane and McCormack's intensity.
  4. September Dawn
    Shot in a style that might be termed Americana gravitas, September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials. The schematic script is further burdened with heavy ironies and hackneyed dialogue.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Closing Escrow
    Closing Escrow can't even execute the bare-bones requirements of mediocre mockumentaries, as its unbelievably quirky characters' not-funny behavior is punctuated with awkward silences and L.A. clichés.
  6. The Hottest State
    Hawke quite capably taps into the bittersweet complexities of young, love-struck idiocy.
  7. Superbad
    Superbad is duly ribald and often achingly funny, brewed from the now-familiar Apatow house blend of go-for-broke slapstick and instantly quotable, potty-mouthed dialogue.
  8. Death at a Funeral
    Death at a Funeral never even approaches the best of Oz's oeuvre. It's his first movie that begs for the laugh track; they'll love it on BBC America.
  9. 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.
  10. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    With an excess of excitable style, samba music, and heady, montage-driven metaphor that threatens to bury his film's key ideas, young-gun director Kohn--a New Yorker with South American roots--has clearly set out to make a splash. So far, he's succeeded.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The 11th Hour
    A cautionary eco-doc so earnest and moth-eaten it should properly be seen on filmstrip during fourth-period social studies.
  12. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    It's all true--every magical, exhilarating, infuriating, dumbfounding, jaw-dropping second of Gordon's miniature masterpiece.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunflower
    As father and son argue and reunite every few minutes, accompanied by veeery slow violin music, Sunflower plays less like the epic it aspires to be than an episode of "Full House: Beijing."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Primo Levi's Journey
    Primo Levi's Journey is almost willfully opaque about the actual circumstances of Primo Levi's journey. Who exactly was this man we're meant to be paying homage to, and why did it take him so long to get home?
  15. Delirious
    Agently attitudinous, generally zippy urban fairy tale about pop stars and the hangers-on who coddle (or prey upon) them, Tom DiCillo's Delirious is a mild "Midnight Cowboy," a minor "King of Comedy," and mainly a vehicle for Steve Buscemi as a lower Manhattan–based paparazzo.
  16. Zebraman
    The creator of such wicked bloodbaths as "Audition" and "Ichi the Killer" had it in him to craft a nearly family-friendly flick. No doubt, this kitschy CGI-action spoof is still deliciously insane.
  17. Love for Sale
    Once you know the title, you pretty much get the gist. Just as Hermila ought to escape her hometown, Guedes deserves to flee to a richer film.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2 Days in Paris
    Delpy shows Linklater's influence in her willingness to let actors work and walk at length, and she has an unusually playful style for an actor turned filmmaker.
  19. 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.
  21. Rush Hour 3
    Chan is still the Gene Kelly of martial arts.
  22. Stardust
    This is just a silly movie about silly things starring famous people acting all silly.
  23. Crossing the Line
    Decaying and illiterate, with a mouthful of metal teeth, Dresnok himself belies his advertisements for the greatness of North Korea.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Paris
    Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris is both a floppy, joyful tribute to the French New Wave and an inspired retelling of "Franny and Zooey."
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bourne Ultimatum
    Bravura doesn't begin to describe Greengrass's skill in mounting these complex sequences...This is, simply put, some of the most accomplished filmmaking being done anywhere for any purpose.
  26. The Ten
    More often than not, you'll laugh, and that's all you can hope for in what might as well be a prolonged episode of "The State," from which several of the cast and creators sprang.
  27. Becoming Jane
    Becoming Jane turns into a presentable Harlequin romance, with hurdle after hurdle succeeded by an eleventh-hour turnaround.
  28. La faute à Fidel!
    The real treasure here is newcomer Kervel, a child superstar in the making.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bratz
    In the end, the most offensive part of Bratz isn't its stereotypes or brand expansion; it's the sorry state of Jon Voight's career.
  30. Hot Rod
    Like so many movies from the SNL factory, there are perhaps 10 to 15 minutes of good, gag-worthy material here stretched out to interminable lengths. Or to put it another way: It's a very small dick in an oversized box.
  31. If I Didn't Care
    With their unrelenting, nostalgic clutch on old-school noir rules (a girl and a gun, plans goes awry, an easily spotted macguffin), the Cummings boys paint themselves into the proverbial corner with a cop-out ex machina ending--at which point there is no longer a need for the title's "If."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Willow Tree
    There's very little explicit exposition here; instead, Majidi presents us with a series of glistening tone poems.
  33. El cantante
    Focusing almost solely on Lavoe's addictions (drugs and women, ho and hum), El Cantante is a garish, dispiriting bit of work--a mountain of biopic clichés snorted through the lens of a fidgety camera that never pauses long enough for us to get to like (or even know) the man responsible for making the Nuyorican sound a mainstream American commodity in the 1970s and early '80s.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Laura Smiles
    Stylish, low-budget indies thrive on redeeming the clichés of everyday life. But that takes smart writing and sharp humor, of which Laura Smiles has none.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    No End in Sight
    Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight turns the well-known details of our monstrously bungled Iraq war into an enraging, apocalyptic litany of fuckups.
  36. The Camden 28
    Fond, stinging, and finally instructive, the film assembles a comprehensive look back at the actions, arrest, and prosecution of a group of political malcontents (most of them young Catholics and some of them priests) in the summer of 1971.
  37. Molière
    Tirard unwinds the action slow and steady, which makes for a slackly paced first hour that all but destroys the movie. Hang in and you'll see the method in this seemingly perverse strategy, as the young blade grows a passion for the highly strung, cultivated lady of the house, beautifully played by Europe's reigning queen of barely suppressed hysteria, Laura Morante.
  38. No Reservations
    The cynic would like to write this off as empty grown-up hooey, "Baby Boom" without an ounce of bang. But you can't do it, because the thing's so charming and frothy and delightful and sentimental and beautifully shot and well-acted and sincere that it takes a good couple of hours before you start craving real nourishment.
    • 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.
  40. Arctic Tale
    A smarmy score, some orgiastic farting from a herd of walruses, and a modicum of cutesy anthropomorphism from narrator Queen Latifah prove a small price to pay for this stunningly photographed narrative documentary about a year in the endangered life of Arctic ice floe.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Devil Came on Horseback
    Ultimately, Devil ponders the optimism/pessimism = apathy/x equation as honestly and studiously as any doc I've ever seen.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sugar Curtain
    Both love story and memory of underdevelopment, The Sugar Curtain illuminates, with great sobriety and reverence, the paradox of a nation as steeped in tradition as it is in hypocrisy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cashback
    The movie is too cute by half, made close to unbearable whenever Ben's narration spews glib pseudo-profundities about memory and temporal stillness. But the flaky humor of wage slaves serial-killing time is good, rude fun.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    The film takes as many plot-twists as "Pirates of the Caribbean"; distinctly Goya in its emphasis on the grotesque, it shows none of the Spaniard's artistic economy.
  45. Hairspray
    The movie is visually flat: not pasty and garish in the Waters signature style, but merely serviceable and competent in the worst tradition of Hollywood "professionalism."
    • 37 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as eloquent as "Brokeback Mountain," and even more radical.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Live-In Maid
    The result is a film of startling insight and grace.
  49. 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.
  51. My Best Friend
    Light, airy, and sweet, Patrice Leconte's latest comedy swings his favorite premise--fruitful encounters between opposites--away from romance and into the wistful hunger for friendship in a careerist world.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk to Me
    The banality of Talk To Me is only half disappointing; at least it babbles clichés with conviction.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tekkonkinkreet
    It's both too cute and too rambling.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time
    Simply put, Time is about the eternal war between infatuation and familiarity, and our irreconcilable need to find both in the same person. In other words, it's a parable about the root of human unhappiness.
  55. Captivity
    Roland Joffé creates a visually interesting and aurally unsettling vibe, and the story from B-movie maestro Larry Cohen keeps it simple.
  56. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
    In narrative terms, not that much happens, but as for Harry's emotional journey--well, that's nearly epic.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Drama/Mex
    "Amores Perros" is a yappy whelp compared to this striking degrees-of-separation drama by Mexican writer-director Gerardo Naranjo.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dynamite Warrior
    Director Chalerm Wongpim's skull-buster makes up in wild-eyed insanity (and excessive, arbitrary slow motion) what it lacks in acting, pacing, and coherence.
  59. Joshua
    A nifty psychological thriller--part "Bad Seed," part "Rosemary's Baby"--that deals in a manner both comic and creepy with the parental anxieties of a Manhattan haute yuppie family.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Method
    Too clever by half, the plot contrivances deliver flippant satisfactions, and the agile performances keep the twists compelling, if less than credible.
  61. Introducing the Dwights
    With its broad, toothless humor and ham-fisted fits of melodrama, this sitcom-grade embarrassment aims to dethrone "Muriel's Wedding" as the quirky Aussie feel-gooder of all time, except it hurts too much to watch.
  62. Rescue Dawn
    Rescue Dawn is the closest thing to a "real" movie that Herzog has ever made. The lone conquistador has joined the club. Rescue Dawn is a Rambo movie without the Man (who, if I remember my Rambology, was himself of German descent).
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transformers
    Transformers is mercilessly inhuman and completely hysterical from frame one.
  64. License to Wed
    Dreadful excuse for an unromantic comedy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Fifth Empire
    Admirable in retrospect but maddening as it goes (and goes and goes).
  66. Ratatouille
    Ratatouille is as much a feast for the senses as it is food for thought.
  67. Sicko
    It’s as a rhetorician that Moore is most original and effectively demagogic.
  68. Evening
    Parked uneasily between sensitive indie and studio chick-flick, Lajos Koltai's Evening makes star-studded hash of Susan Minot's beautifully written, if emotionally constricted, novel.
  69. One to Another
    Only the French seem to get away with passing off sensational sex romps as high art, but One to Another is pretty much just trashy–its murder-mystery conceit a sideshow to the film's primary offering: nubile nudity.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vitus
    Charming Swiss import.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox
    Although the segments featuring Bronner's son Ralph veer uncomfortably toward hagiography, first-time director Sara Lamm balances out the love-fest by exploring the dark side of being a soap-hawking prophet and the toll that ALL-ONE-FAITH took on Bronner's family.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Falling
    As the characters wander through the countryside, the film's focus wanders too, sometimes away from the audience's interest.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Live Free or Die Hard
    Maybe McClane, in '80s action parlance, is too old for this s---.
  74. Ghosts of Cité Soleil
    Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a prismatic, jagged, none too coherent travelogue.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Between Days
    Instantly compelling.
  76. Over the GW
    Gaglia's torture re-creations become rote quickly, and his cross-processed, color-tinted, randomly inserted, over-zoomed Film School 101 indulgences need their meds adjusted.
  77. 1408
    The horror wouldn't work without Cusack, who makes what could have been a rote acting exercise--Be tough! Now angry! Now defensively funny!--a cathartic ritual instead.
  78. Evan Almighty
    It marks an unfortunate low point in the history of recent American comedy. There goes Steve Carell's perfect game.
  79. A Mighty Heart
    Angelina Jolie is the major alienation effect in A Mighty Heart, although she's not the only one. The hectic pizzazz with which hired gun Michael Winterbottom directs this tale of terrifying terrorism is another distraction.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Black Sheep
    The cartoonish overkill that often makes Black Sheep a hoot proves wearying over an entire movie: The broad comedy and one-note characters eventually cancel out the horror, leaving elaborate set pieces that are more frantic than funny.
  81. Broken English
    Posey remains touching as the woman with happiness in sight but bewilderingly out of reach.
  82. Lady Chatterley
    This is not so much a love story (and even less a story about love) than it is a movie of passionate loveliness.
  83. You Kill Me
    The past decade has been less kind to Dahl, and though his latest, called You Kill Me, has the outward appearance of a return to form, it may in fact be the worst thing he's ever done--an inert, tone-deaf mélange of "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under."
  84. Longing
    Magnificent and moving chamber drama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Manufactured Landscapes
    Nothing illustrates the monstrosity of globalized commerce more vividly than the lateral tracking shot that opens Jennifer Baichwal's mesmerizing documentary Manufactured Landscapes.
  86. White Palms
    The bulk of White Palms--and the more riveting, grim storyline--is seen in flashback to the early 1980s.
  87. Nancy Drew
    This tweener goddess--a virtual Batcave of handy accessories packed in her shoulder bag--may prove too annoying for general audiences, particularly as Roberts plays her comically straight.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Eagle vs Shark
    You can't see the forest for the twee in writer-director Taika Waititi's thicket of cutesy conceits, from the stunted supporting characters to the precious animated interludes.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fido
    Vancouver-based writer-director Andrew Currie leads us to stop expecting actual jokes while squandering the talents of an overqualified cast
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan
    More than a vibrant experiment in ethnomusical cross-pollination, it's just great fun.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strike
    This is Iron Curtain porn at its most shameless--a rousing industrial rock song plays in the background every time Schlöndorff wants to invoke the Spirit of Labor--but Thalbach's Agnieszka is irresistible.
  92. Beyond Hatred
    It's easy to find fault with the film's maudlin score, overlong static shots devoid of the abstract poetry they infer, and a second half that pursues legal rather than personal ramifications at a trial where cameras aren't allowed. But, following the family's path to closure, we'll forgive.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Czech Dream
    Hey, Prague--you got punk'd! In this subversive Central European slice of reality TV, Czech film students Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda protest the kudzu creep of globalization with a stunt worthy of the Yes Men.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Macbeth
    The rush into gunfights and car chases pushes the text in all the wrong directions. As written, the 400-year-old words are still fresher than anything ripped from “Miami Vice.”
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Noriko's Dinner Table
    There's not nearly enough blood to keep fans of "Suicide Club," or the rest of us, happy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lights in the Dusk
    Lights in the Dusk derives scant excitement from its melodramatic plot, which satisfies a dismal, ineluctable formula with stultifying efficiency. Nor is it enlivened by the airless performances.
  97. Ocean's Thirteen
    See it if you must, but don't forget to pack the Air Wick. These breezy doings are mustier than a Glitter Gulch casino at 4 a.m.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Hostel: Part II
    Eli Roth punks capitalism all the way to the bank with cheap tricks and bankrupt imagination.
  99. Surf's Up
    If you have to see another penguin blockbuster, you could do worse than this loose-limbed charmer.
  100. La Vie en Rose
    Uplifted beyond its merits by a stunning performance from Marion Cotillard, the humdrum biopic of Edith Piaf, La Vie En Rose, jogs obligingly along with Piaf the legend rather than the woman.
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