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. Flags of Our Fathers
    To an extent, Flags of Our Fathers is to the WWII movie what Eastwood's Unforgiven was to the western -- a stripping-away of mythology until only a harsher, uncomfortable reality remains.
  2. The Prestige
    The result is a lopsided yet absorbing movie in which the director is less drawn to his main characters than to those on the periphery.
  3. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    [Goldthwait] handles it beautifully, crafting from such rough stuff something astoundingly sweet and sharply funny about forgiveness, unconditional love, tenderness, and the things we hide just to get ourselves from one day to the next.
  4. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    Nelson has fashioned a compelling movie around an unfathomable mystery. To see Jones's face, eyes hidden behind trademark aviator shades, is to experience the last shock in Psycho. His is the blank stare of living death.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Requiem
    Sandra Hüller, a young German stage actress making a harrowing feature debut, invests Michaela's terrified, possibly schizophrenic outbursts with unholy conviction.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Conventioneers
    Unlike in "Medium Cool," the most telling and dramatic events aren't shown.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweet Land
    Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    51 Birch Street
    Begins shakily, with a naked self-consciousness that can be off-putting, but quickly develops into an absorbing and ever deepening drama.
  9. Hair High
    Too glib to qualify as satire, Hair High nails the high school experience.
  10. Justice
    With its unobtrusive visual style, Justice plays like a near-parody of documentary objectivity, subtly suggesting the malleable nature of "truth," both in the courtroom and the movie theater.
  11. Man of the Year
    Levinson loses his movie, his audience, and his purpose in a tangle of conspiracy theories and crackpot notions that sink the movie just when it begins to transcend expectations. In short, it would have been great if it had stopped, oh, 12 minutes in.
  12. Deliver Us from Evil
    Berg by no means excuses Father O'Grady, but she offers evidence of a devastating childhood that explains his pathology. For the ambitious creeps who allowed him to indulge it, and who still sit in office, there's no excuse.
  13. Driving Lessons
    The sentiment's a bit thick sometimes, but Walters remains sharp, and is sure to inspire drag queens everywhere.
  14. Infamous
    It's just a lesser version, light in weight and absent the ache that permeated the movie for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award. It can't withstand the comparisons. It's good, especially during its first half, just not good enough.
  15. Nearing Grace
    This '70s-era teen romance from the director of "Halloween II" and the screenwriter of "Mean Creek" is a quietly effective number, a little like an '80s John Hughes movie without the laughs (not an insult in this case).
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Ritchie Boys
    These are men who know of what they speak; they're also eloquent, erudite, and funny as hell.
  17. Tideland
    Gilliam has suffered more than his share of butchered projects, but with this exercise in kamikaze auteurism, he appears to have made exactly the mess he wanted.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Zerophilia
    A case of provocative issues at the mercy of unskilled execution, Zerophilia is a psychological-horror comedy that pokes its toe into dangerous sexual waters but then scurries away.
  19. Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare
    It's tough to be sure of anything in this murky experimental feature, which sadly fails to live up to its title.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    So Much So Fast
    The film is no maudlin pity-fest: It's an absorbing account of fraternal love and obsession, as Stephen's brother assembles a "guerrilla science" foundation to find a cure when no one else will.
  21. The Departed
    Neither a debacle nor a bore, The Departed works but only up to a point, and never emotionally--even if the director does contrive to supply his version of a happy ending.
  22. 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.
  23. 49 Up
    Moving and ambitious in scale like nothing else in cinema, Michael Apted's Up films began in 1964 as a BBC news program exploring an old Jesuit maxim: "Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Gold
    No mere Western-guilt-inducing harangue, this highly informative documentary by British brothers Marc and Nick Francis is a model of patient storytelling.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    One-Third
    A borderline experimental, nearly silent film loosely based on Dante's "Inferno."
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shortbus
    There's something refreshingly frisky and celebratory about Shortbus that offsets its flaws. It's a triple-X midnight movie with a heart of squarest gold.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blood Tea and Red String
    A sickly-sweet stop-motion animation 13 years in the making, Blood Tea and Red String is a genuine piece of outsider art.
  28. ...So Goes the Nation
    So Goes the Nation has no new conspiracy theories, settling instead for a meticulous examination of the two political parties' hellbent voter-seduction strategies, from demographic outreach to slam ads.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner
    The film's both soothing--as an act of recording promise--and churningly emotive.
  30. The Queen
    More fun than any movie about the violent death of a 36-year-old woman has a right to be. It's also as exotic an English-language picture as the season is likely to bring.
  31. 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?
  32. School for Scoundrels
    Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton) is a classy, cool brand of vile--the demented drill sergeant in a designer suit. And Heder, cast in the role of the invisible man, is fine too. The movie wouldn't work without someone as nondescript as Heder.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    Whatever the first-time filmmaker lacks in subtlety and finesse--not even the snow-white Sundance Screenwriters Lab could bleach Montiel's script of its corner-deli grit--he recoups by other, more playfully attitudinal means.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies
    The entire affair looks and feels like a reality television show minus the cheap drama.
  35. Be with Me
    Sometimes clumsy and dry, always sympathetic, and wryly interested in the impact food has on social intercourse, Be With Me is eventually affecting once its elliptical shape becomes clear.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Broken Sky
    That's the movie--desperate grasps, huffy affronts, gulping kisses, and one juicy (if silent) sex scene, early in the film, before our senses have been deadened by boredom. Without dialogue, we don't know who the characters are, so we can't care about what they do.
  37. The Last King of Scotland
    An adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker's sensational turn as Idi Amin.
  38. All the King's Men
    Penn goes for larger-than-life, wrapping his pinched frown around an unintelligible Louisiana drawl and swinging his arms like an autistic evangelist... Law is no asset--looking rather sadly like John Ireland (the actor who played the 1949 Jack Burden), he has little control over his accent and zero energy.
    • 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.
  40. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jesus Camp
    The doc these kids would make with flea market camcorders couldn't possibly be as ugly as this absurdly hypocritical critique of the far right's role in escalating the culture war. The classier indoctrination to which Gap-shopping urban Democrats subject their kids might look damn spooky, too, but it probably wouldn't sell.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Hardcore
    The story of American punk rock (1980–1986) isn't a lot easier to summarize than that of any other major war, but it's quite a bit funnier, as this belated documentary overview--based on Steven Blush's like-titled tome--proves in each of its 90 exuberantly irritable minutes.
  43. The Science of Sleep
    Sweet, crazy, and tinged with sadness, Michel Gondry's new feature The Science of Sleep is a wondrous concoction.
  44. 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Blackout
    This passionate polemic follows Democratic representative Cynthia McKinney, of Georgia, as she campaigns to bring attention to the disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
  46. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
    In much the same fashion as Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin", Auraeus Solito's feature debut confronts the taboo of pre-teen sexuality with a startling mix of openness and sensitivity. No less than precocious Maxi, the film is alarming, endearing, and utterly unflappable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Train Man
    Adapted from a Japanese bestseller that's apparently based on true events, Train Man: Densha Otoko is a lot like its protagonist: sweet, weird, and likable despite some irritating quirks.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    They're Just My Friends
    For such a poorly made autobiopic to earn a theatrical release, Nwamu must have some friends in high places.
  49. The Decay of Fiction
    The Decay of Fiction is less a narrative than a monument. In its abstract movie-ness, this 74-minute carnival of souls exudes a wistful longing to connect, not so much with Hollywood history as with the history of that history.
  50. Old Joy
    If Old Joy is more laid-back and contemplative than "Mutual Appreciation," it's because the characters are more weathered. Open-ended as it may appear, it has a crushing finality. For all the wool-gathering and guitar-noodling, this road movie is at least as tender as it is ironic.
  51. Sólo con tu pareja
    The film is more stale than crisp, with dialogue that is at least 50 percent old aphorisms, homilies, and clichés.
  52. Home
    Warmhearted but never sentimental or condescending, Home finally proves most affecting as an unsparing glimpse into the psychology of poverty.
  53. The Black Dahlia
    Although the action set pieces are impressive, the exposition is sluggish. For all the posh dollies, high angles, and Venetian-blind crisscross patterns, The Black Dahlia rarely achieves the rhapsodic (let alone the delirious).
    • 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.
  55. 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."
  56. Aurora Borealis
    Aurora Borealisulth -- yes, that title eventually comes home to roost -- doesn't offend in any way, but it's so self-consciously quaint, so unwaveringly "nice," that you nearly wish it did.
  57. Confetti
    If nothing else, this affectionately off-the-wall confection offers exuberant confirmation of every suspicion you might ever have had that the English are charmingly eccentric. They're barking mad.
  58. 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.
  59. The U.S. vs. John Lennon
    Snazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-'60s images. Given its subject, though, this David Leaf–John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical.
  60. Keeping Mum
    Obvious, simplistic, and never funny, Johnson's movie may be useful only as real estate porn--Cornwall and the Isle of Man never looked so super cute.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Al Franken: God Spoke
    Unfocused but brisk.
  62. Hollywoodland
    Props then to Affleck. Coulter contrived a neat behavioral trick by inducing his star to play a comparably big-jawed bad actor. Surrounded as he is by canny professionals--Lane, Hoskins, Smith, and Jeffrey DeMunn as an unctuous glad-handing agent--it's an unexpectedly touching performance.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
    For those who have let the war drift into the background noise of talking heads, Iraq for Sale is a much needed reminder of the criminal negligence of those who led the troops into this mess and those who have gotten rich off of it.
    • 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.
  65. SherryBaby
    Sherrybaby is by no means a terrible film...But we know exactly where the transparent action is going from word one.
  66. Le petit lieutenant
    Beauvois, who co-wrote, seems hellbent on making the most realistic cop film of all time, shruggingly consumed with downtime, small talk, minor incident, and dead ends, and he's succeeded--the narrative wouldn't have cut it in a Kojak story meeting.
  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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red Doors
    Everything you'd expect from a frosh-indie effort: stilted dialogue, oversimplified relationships, sitcommy goofiness, and cringe-inducing romances. And yet Red Doors is so well-meaning, with such obvious affection for its characters, that it pleases nonetheless.
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vajra Sky Over Tibet
    Bush's stunning camerawork adroitly captures the majestic landscapes and icons of Buddhism. Not incidentally, the film also offers a compact primer in the ways of dharma. A tonic for Buddhists, no doubt, it offers many pleasures to atheists as well.
  71. 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.
  72. Lassie
    Lassie puts its trust in kids to be grown up, and appeals honestly (minus the usual knowing winks) to grown-ups by returning them to a state of childlike wonderment.
  73. Looking for Kitty
    It might be the most maturely conceived role in Burns's films, but the plot around it is flimsy, the visual storytelling simpleminded, and the general ideas for character one-note. At 78 minutes, the movie says howdy, rewards little, and does not test its welcome.
  74. Mutual Appreciation
    Gently persistent in its ironies, "Funny Ha Ha" managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so.
  75. Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
    Slow and pretty and duller than you'd hope for from an art-house sophisticate like Zhang.
  76. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Any investigation into Hollywood inevitably mutates into a noir.
  77. Bubot Niyar
    Observing the close relationships they develop with clients, the openly gay Heymann becomes, both hilariously and wistfully, part of a community that possesses in spades what's missing in his own life--the gift of happiness and living well in unfriendly surroundings.
  78. Idiocracy
    Ten years later, Idiocracy’s real achievement isn’t how much of it has come true, but how much it continues to disturb.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Cantor's Tale
    With its outlandish stories, obsession with masculine ego, and focus on an absurd, forgotten subculture, A Cantor's Tale is the stuff Ben Stiller movies are made of: All that's missing is the part for Owen Wilson.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    The result is an intellectual history of Warhol, bucking the trend toward the star-studded VH1-ization of biodocs and constructed with a mission to dispel the artist's own self-created image as high-fashion hobnobber in favor of a more profound depiction. Burns argues for a cogitating, agitating Warhol: deep thinker, cultural barometer, and world changer.
  81. Idlewild
    Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction.
  82. Invincible
    Invincible joins "Rocky" or "Hoosiers" or "Breaking Away" as one of the few satisfying sports movies in which the foundation built upon a heap of clichés holds strong.
  83. The Quiet
    Thematically the movie never reaches beyond the ready-for-prime-time mentality that specializes in psychological shorthand.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Queens
    The seasoned actresses are grand enough, but what a waste: Rather than elevate the material, they amplify its banalities.
  85. Surviving Eden
    This witless satire dares to take on the culture of--get ready for this--reality TV! Arriving a stupefying five years out of date, Surviving Eden is a not particularly rigorous attempt at mockumentary.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fratricide
    A well-wrought, beautifully lensed but ultimately hopeless tale, Fratricide provides a less than optimistic allegory for the intractability of human conflicts: Even far away and decades later, old wars bring fresh miseries.
  87. LOL
    The characters are a bit too OCD for LOL to work as the definitive commentary on technology and human relationships that it strives to be...But the movie is unusually attentive to the ironies of communications technology.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Princesas
    De Aranoa never condescends to his subjects, and Caye's mixture of aggression and tenderness is appealingly authentic.
  89. 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Illusionist
    Beautifully acted and handsomely mounted, this gorgeous period piece is an intelligent and intriguing exploration of "the dark arts" -- less dependent on mere hocus-pocus than on the convincing journey of the soul undertaken by its hero.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Factotum
    None of it goes anywhere. It's just stylized alcoholism with a tired wink.
  92. Trust the Man
    Writer-director Bart Freundlich (Moore's husband) has nothing to say and nowhere to go with this material, except to the most contrived ending this side of a "Will & Grace" episode.
  93. 10th & Wolf
    A hellish and unconvincing celebration of badda-bing-ness.
  94. Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
    Still, the textures of Refn's wallow in bad behavior are completely convincing, if the plot-stuff is a little familiar and if the overarching notion that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, "gangsters have kitchens, too" seems by now valid but no longer terribly fresh.
  95. King Leopold's Ghost
    Sleeker and more ambitious than the 2003 BBC-produced "Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," which focused more narrowly on long-suppressed Belgian atrocities of that era.
  96. Conversations with Other Women
    Though the movie is occasionally too clever-talky for its own good, it has the authentic ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Step Up
    Fletcher ably blends ballet and hip-hop, but the filming itself is often clumsy, and Tatum's relentless African American impersonation quickly wears out its welcome.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Half Nelson
    The audacity of making an inner-city drama in which the white-male authority figure is the crackhead finds its equal in Gosling's already legendary performance, a high-wire act that's gutsiest for its unconscionable charm.
  99. The Ordeal
    The movie hardly has enough beef on its bones to make a meal. The very notion that movies about torture are considered "horror," and are more profitable now per foot of celluloid than any other type of independent film, is what's qualmy.
  100. Hamilton
    Avoids the narrative contrivances of many recent forays into Americana -- by virtually avoiding narrative.
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