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 7.5 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. Shooter
    Shooter is a generically titled studio action picture that turns out to be a surprisingly deft satire about Americans' loss of faith in their government following the 2000 election, the 9/11 attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes II
    For anyone other than hardcore gore-hounds, this flipbook of deliberately invoked global-unrest horrors, from friendly-fire killings to rape as a breeding weapon, is effectively mean and unrelenting--and pretty far from fun.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Mimzy
    Mimzy, whose charmingly retro FX date to around 1985, won't post Peter Jackson figures at the box office, but you can't say that Shaye doesn't have the magic touch.
  4. 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.
  5. Reign Over Me
    If Binder has a considerably heavier hand when it comes to metaphor, his movie nevertheless remains buoyant because the feelings in it are immutable, and because Sandler has never before held the screen with greater intensity.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    TMNT
    Writer-director Kevin Munroe parties like it's 1989, grooving on the extreme-sports set pieces and vintage slang to generally cowabusted effect.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    My long strums are pretty f---ing tight," gushes one faux-ax-stroker in this slick, hilarious, and at times even suspenseful ode to competitive mock-rock and/or the further decline of Western civ.
  8. Boy Culture
    All told, this is a harmless, well-packaged bit of overly familiar fluff.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cobra Verde
    It's easy to understand why this was Herzog's final collaboration with the actor (reportedly the director afterward claimed that Kinski had "become uncontrollable") but Kinski's performance nevertheless serves up a potent confusion of documentary and fiction that has long been an essential element of Herzog's filmmaking.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Color Me Kubrick
    I find it hard to believe that Conway bamboozled half of London simply by announcing his name, and it's regrettable that the filmmakers premise their picture on such improbable gullibility. The real Conway was assuredly slier than his bio-pic incarnation; he ought to have been played by Sacha Baron Cohen.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Snow
    First-time director Fergus's film is more a moody, tedious anti-thriller about ineluctable fate.
  12. Journey from the Fall
    Tran's reliance on declamatory political dialogue and movie-of-the-week inspirationalism feels decidedly old-fashioned and, finally, even phony.
  13. Offside
    Offside is blatantly metaphoric and powerfully concrete, deceptively simple and highly sophisticated in its formal intelligence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Page Turner
    Anyone who remembers "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" will see the instruments of revenge laid out like cutlery in a slasher movie's kitchen, and Dercourt's overbright visual scheme aims for a Michael Haneke–esque bourgeois chill that comes off instead as curiously bloodless.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Memory
    While the mystery doesn't engage, Davlin keeps you off guard with his film's weird rhythms, bouncing from family drama to romance to macabre mood piece without much warning. How he and Zane manage to make such dreck almost tolerable is the real mystery here.
  16. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    Yunis, as he imploringly reminds us, is the Iraqi people, but he is also steeped in Hollywood references, pulling analogies for the U.S. occupation from "Rambo" and "Dirty Harry."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Iluminados por el fuego
    Tristán Bauer's new war movie has an even more bitterly ironic title in Spanish: "Iluminados por El Fuego" or "Enlightened by Fire."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    Desperately overcompensating for the fact that most horror films are already parodies of themselves, Behind the Mask takes a bite out of the dumb "Scream" franchise before devouring its own tail, proving that you are what you eat.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nomad
    With commendable sincerity but also an unfortunate Hollywood veneer, Nomad is a poor man's "Gladiator."
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dead Silence
    Dolls are innately unnerving, but the movie's semi-menacing Charlie McCarthys never live up to their potential. As creaky nonsense goes, though, this is chock-full of corny goodness down to its hilarious sense-shredding "twist," which the movie reveals like a magician proudly unveiling a dead rabbit.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Think I Love My Wife
    Rock capably directs a screenplay graced with one or two chuckles ("You stare at a soccer mom too long and they'll post your name on the Internet") and soured by a whole lot of misogyny.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Premonition
    Had the film maintained a tone of kooky, Kafkaesque tragicomedy, narrowing in on Linda's wacko wrestling match with the laws of physics, we might really have had something here.
  23. My Brother
    Writer-director Anthony Lover takes such a kid-gloves approach to his handicapped co-star that he achieves the opposite of the intended effect: Every time Scott enters a scene, it's as if someone just told the entire cast "Whatever you do, don't say 'retard.' "
  24. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    Like Jean-Pierre Melville's recently rediscovered "Army of Shadows," The Wind That Shakes the Barley possesses the soul of an anti-war movie and the style of a thriller.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Adam's Apples
    The melodramas that prolific Anders Thomas Jensen has sculpted over the years have been among the richest works to come out of Scandinavia since Bergman's heyday. But no road is without its pockmarks and Adam's Apples may be the low point of the wunderkind's career.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    American Cannibal: The Road to Reality
    American Cannibal, something like the (mock-)doc equivalent of "The Producers," really, really should've been funnier.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blockade
    Loznitsa doesn't adorn the eerie footage with talking heads and factoid title cards. What narrative there is, along with a sense of incrementally mounting horror, emerges unbidden from the images.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    300
    It's a ponderous, plodding, visually dull picture, but the blame shouldn't be put on Snyder's skills per se, and has nothing to do with his ambition to blur the distinction between CGI and photography. Frankly, it's the slavish, frame-by-frame devotion to Miller's source material that's the problem.
  29. The Host
    Gross-out horror is never far from comedy and The Host, Bong Joon-ho's giddy creature feature, has an anarchic mess factor worthy of a pile of old "Mad" magazines.
  30. 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    A slapdash piece of work totally indebted to second-hand rhetorical strategies.
  32. The Namesake
    The Namesake carries faint echoes of the carnal physicality that makes Nair's more lightweight movies so much fun to look at--"Monsoon Wedding" was a dandy piece of froth, and "Vanity Fair" survives only on its looks--but it's a quieter, more mature work.
  33. The Ultimate Gift
    Directed with accomplished impersonality by Michael O. Sajbel ( One Night With the King), The Ultimate Gift means well, but in the end it's "The Pursuit of Happyness" made from the ivory tower looking down instead of from the street looking up.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Exterminating Angels
    One audaciously, endearingly ludicrous movie.
  35. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
    It’s basically the equivalent of a sensitively wrought read from the Young Adult shelf, and there’s naught wrong with that.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Zodiac
    Zodiac exhausts more than one genre. Termite art par excellence, it burrows for the sake of burrowing, as fascinated by its own nooks and crannies as "Inland Empire."
  37. Wild Hogs
    This shallow comedy imagines itself as an amalgam of "St. Elmo's Fire," "The Wild Bunch," and "Deliverance."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Snake Moan
    Black Snake Moan sho-nuff ain't no "Sweetback." Indeed, long stretches of Brewer's Suthun-fried sophomore slump come down the country road lookin' as haggard as a workaholic ho on a Sunday morning.
  39. Into Great Silence
    Natural light is used to euphoric effect, inevitably summoning the old masters, and Gröning's frames are balanced and symmetrical, in Renaissance-ready emulation of God's perfection.
  40. The Astronaut Farmer
    This movie works precisely because it's bereft of modern cinema's cynicism.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Reno 911!: Miami
    The TV show excels with its short squad-car bursts of random inanity; here, the plot -- stretched out to 84 minutes -- feels like a dime bag tossed aside by a fleeing perp.
  42. Amazing Grace
    Morally irreproachable and flat as a pancake.
  43. Gray Matters
    Coming from the strangely vacuous Graham, in a Manhattan this preposterous, the staid social message is as ludicrous as its surroundings.
  44. Starter for 10
    The result is something altogether more formulaic, but Starter for 10 nonetheless goes down easy, thanks in large part to the up-and-coming talent from across the pond and a steady infusion of the Cure, Wham!, and Tears for Fears on the soundtrack.
  45. The Taste of Tea
    Warm and fantastical family portrait.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Wayward Cloud
    The Wayward Cloud fails as allegory, human story, anti-porn screed, postmodern musical, and even formal delight (Tsai's emptied-out aesthetic has never felt so empty, his mannerisms so pointlessly mannered), but it seems to have worked well enough as a necessary purge.
  47. Breach
    This is a spy movie bereft of the genre's usual, casual kicks. It's not interested in cheap thrills or playing gotcha with the audience. (Which isn't to say parts of it aren't exhilarating.)
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bridge to Terabithia
    Director Gabor Csupo of Rugrats "fame" steer clear of cutesy tween stereotypes, but it's Jess's relationship with his father, played by Robert Patrick, that elevates Terabithia from a good kids movie to a classic contender.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ghost Rider
    Johnson's a hardcore, dime-store fanboy, not a revisionist-minded fauxteur like Christopher Nolan or Bryan Singer, and his giddy, goofball affection for the material sustained my goodwill until his underdeveloped grasp of form and rhythm let it slip away.
  50. Avenue Montaigne
    Not that Thompson's films lack for romance. She shoots Paris like Woody Allen shoots New York--ritzy, golden, and packed with chance meetings between highly strung arty types.
  51. Close to Home
    Though it clearly means to call into question the legitimacy of their work, the movie is formlessly episodic as it meanders from one day to the next, finally losing itself in a forest of coming-of-age clichés.
  52. Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
    Grbavica is a womanly movie in the best sense: Zbanic has a deeply feminine sense of how crisis gets filtered through the domesticity of daily life.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Daddy's Little Girls
    Perry's indifferent direction flattens everything out: You might fall asleep if his heavy-mitted music cues didn't keep cattle-prodding your ass.
  54. Music and Lyrics
    Music and Lyrics suggests that it's going to be about redemption, the second act in the life of a punchline, but it feels as though it were made to fit a date on a studio's release schedule. (Happy Valentine's Day!) Oh, well, at least the songs are catchy, and the two-tone video for "Pop Goes My Heart" is inspired.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bamako
    Bamako brings relief from the latest round of Africa chic in the media, reversing "the flood of information that flows one way." It colors the Africa Problem from the inside out.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hannibal Rising
    This comically fastidious telling of the Hannibal Lecter origin story completes the extreme makeover of grindhouse fare that "The Silence of the Lambs" started 15 years ago. Meaning: Respectable audiences who wouldn't be caught dead at a (sniff!) horror movie still want severed heads; they just want the bloody meal served on Royal Dalton china.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Last Sin Eater
    The miscasting of Fletcher--still a forbidding screen presence--as a kindly grandmother is only one of many missteps that director Michael Landon Jr. (yes, it's his son) makes in The Last Sin Eater.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Notes on Marie Menken
    While it opens a rare window into an unconventional life, this portrait of an artist as an old woman is prone to strange distractions.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Burning Annie
    There's too much going on in Burning Annie but one thing goes remarkably right: Ordynans's exceptionally canny script nails how thoroughly pop culture has colonized our sentiments.
  60. The Decomposition of the Soul
    The Decomposition of the Soul is a deliberately confining movie, but unlike "The Lives of Others," it offers no closure.
  61. Because I Said So
    Like nearly all of Lehmann's post- "Heathers" work, it's lazy and disinterested--a hack-for-hire job any number of film-school grads could have put through its uninspired paces.
  62. The Situation
    The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation.
  63. Fired!
    While "maybe it's for the best" proved happily prophetic for her actor pals, those words of comfort sound more like a clueless bromide when you consider the 30,000 people laid off in Lansing after the film wrapped.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Puccini for Beginners
    Maggenti suffocates her story with dated references to every buzzword from Laura Mulvey's feminist catalog except for "the male gaze." In short, a nightmare worse than "Trust the Man."
  65. The Pied Piper
    More affecting than affected.
  66. East of Havana
    A vital look at Cuba's tenaciously grassroots hip-hop scene.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In the Pit
    In the Pit's empathy feels strictly skin-deep, its insight even shallower.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    An Unreasonable Man
    If the film shows that few men are as unreasonable as Ralph Nader, it also shows that few have so succeeded in shaping their world: His legacy of progressive legislation will affect generations to come.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Room 314
    Writer-director Michael Knowles is interested in what happens when you shove people into the anonymous space of a hotel room, but these mostly unconnected short cuts are neither unusual nor substantial.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. Shockproof
    For a disposable entertainment, Shockproof has an intensity that sticks to the mind--yours, mine, or Richard Hamilton's.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Becket (re-release)
    Dully overcomposed, the film evinces a Disneyed sense of palace life and reaches a laughable apotheosis when Henry and Becket's rendezvous on a beach is staged as a reunion between scorned lovers. In 1964, the film's innuendo might have seemed daring; today it's close to ridiculous.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    From Other Worlds
    There's no beguilement to this toothless caprice by writer- director Barry Strugatz, who may intend a spoof of '50s melodramas and alien abductions but delivers instead an inert doodle.
  75. China Blue
    Shot at the peril of Peled and his crew, China Blue feels stage-managed at times.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2 or 3 Things I Know About Him
    Malte's discomforting interviews with his siblings, supplemented by surreally matter-of-fact, Zelig-like photos of Hanns in Hitler's company, make for gripping and confrontational viewing. Yet the harder he persists, the less clear it is what he wants from his family.
  77. 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.
  78. Mafioso [re-release]
    Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.
  79. Regular Lovers
    Austere, underlit, uncompromisingly lackadaisical at three hours, and anachronistic in a half dozen ways.
  80. 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.
  82. Alpha Dog
    If nothing else, Alpha Dog's worth a look for the performance of Justin Timberlake, the moral center of a movie sorely in need of some conscience. Already a gifted comic actor--his Saturday Night Live appearances are now anticipated events--he proves himself able to go to a pitch-black place.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God Grew Tired of Us
    A borderline lazy but nonetheless compelling documentary co-produced by National Geographic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tears of the Black Tiger
    Nothing is too crazed, corny, or freakishly florid for Tears of the Black Tiger. The debut of writer-director Wisit Sasanatieng is a delightfully unabashed affair, conceived in such good, giddy spirits it might have been called "Blissfully Yours."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story
    Despite its structure, Abduction sheds light on the disturbing politics North Korea deploys to simultaneously intimidate the world and guard itself from attack.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ever Since the World Ended
    Like Emmanuel Lubezki's phantasmagoric images for "Children of Men," the performances in the film are so remarkable it's easy to ignore the implausibilities that surface. But even as its self-aware approximation of the doc format startles, Ever Since the World Ended lacks vigor.
    • 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.
  88. Happily N'Ever After
    Director Paul J. Bolger and screenwriter Rob Moreland have drained the affectionate wit out of the Shrek franchise's satire, giving us instead a barely sketched out story line and quantities of unimaginative CGI.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freedom Writers
    Reaction shots of the class's befuddled white boy are played for cheap laughs, but writer-director Richard LaGravenese otherwise keeps it real by recruiting cinematographer Jim Denault from Indieville High and Imelda Staunton--here playing Bitchy Old Department Head.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thr3e
    Marc Blucas as the hunted seminary student Kevin Parson might as well be dead for all his charisma.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sacrifice
    The effect is not unlike a Terrence Malick "Real Sex" episode -- only Bruno thwarts any viewer who craves titillation in a plain brown wrapper of moral outrage.
  92. Pan's Labyrinth
    Literally and figuratively marvelous, a rich, daring mix of fantasy and politics.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    It's a noble experiment in pushing the limits of cinema, but Tykwer never achieves true profundity.
  94. 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Dead Girl
    Moncrieff's glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Factory Girl
    Poor little girl, chewed up in the Factory machinery. It was inevitable, perhaps, that a biopic of the Pop princess would stick to pop psychology, but did it have to feel as flat as a silkscreen? With its hackneyed party scenes and jet-set montages, Factory Girl fails even at frivolity.
    • 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.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Tiger and the Snow
    The results are neither profound nor funny, but merely uncomfortable. A hubristic failure at risky humor, The Tiger and the Snow provides Benigni his own Michael Richards moment.
  99. Notes on a Scandal
    Notes on a Scandal, brilliantly adapted by Patrick Marber from the darkly comic Zo Heller novel, is a grim piece of work -- "Fatal Attraction" for the art-house crowd, shorn of its predecessor's fearful misogyny.
  100. Children of Men
    It's a measure of Cuarón's directorial chops that Children of Men functions equally well as fantasy and thriller. Like Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the Wachowski Brothers' "V for Vendetta" (and more consistently than either), the movie attempts to fuse contemporary life with pulp mythology.
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