Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Poster Boy
    Rather than creating believable characters engaged in nuanced conflict, Boy proffers a pair of obvious symbols and hopes that they'll make a statement about the personal and the political.
  2. World Trade Center
    World Trade Center is Stone's rehabilitation. It's not just courage that's honored, it's God's Will. It isn't only men who are saved, it's their families -- and their family values.
  3. Lunacy
    Lunacy is dark, scary, and yucky--even by the Czech animator's own standards.
  4. The Trouble with Men and Women
    The mostly unknown actors are charming, and while the story is formulaic, it never feels blatantly contrived.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Satellite
    Nice low-budget cinematography and authentic New York City locations aside, there's little to engage viewers over the course of 100 wandering minutes.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Descent
    In the great B tradition, Marshall gets a lot out of nothing.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Night Listener
    Even when the script overstates the obvious, Stettner mines every nuance of unease from the head games between Williams and the unnerving Collette, who embodies the moment passive aggression stops being passive.
  8. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    Ferrell reminds the audience of why he matters: because he's the loudest, driest, and most fearless comic actor working.
  9. The Bridesmaid
    Chabrol sets us up, of course, which is half the fun, and the experience is a delight for lack of pomposity (his visual storytelling remains no-nonsense) as well as genre expertise.
  10. My Country, My Country
    It seems easily the most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war in all of its three-plus years.
  11. Quinceañera
    Saucy, rowdy, heartfelt, and terribly sweet movie.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jailbait
    Becomes the umpteenth prison drama to focus on the lurid threat of forced submission.
    • 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.
  14. Vacationland
    Todd Verow's overstuffed Vacationland promises more than it delivers in just about every sense.
  15. Miami Vice
    Mann has done something transformative with Farrell: The Irish actor has never had this much charisma and natural authority in a role, and as he navigates that gray area between Crockett's real identity and his fabricated one, revealing subtle fissures in the character's cocksure facade, he's fascinating to watch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scoop
    So flat, dull, and off form that it seems to have been conceived in a fog. It not only lacks the verve and energy of Allen's best New York–based work, it feels culturally adrift, like some bewildered tourist trying to read a city map held upside down.
  17. John Tucker Must Die
    Whatever the target demographic was in the pre-production phase, now it's limited to sexually active 14-year-olds still retaking the sixth grade.
  18. The Ant Bully
    It's a kids' movie for kids, and Davis approaches it as though he and his cast are merely storytellers trying to reach kids rather than show-offs trying to impress their parents.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    13 Tzameti
    The artiest entry in the ever growing torture-movie genre, this playfully wicked French thriller from twentysomething provocateur Gela Babluani blasts its way into your brainpan with the help of black-and-white widescreen cinematography whose striking but smooth textures better suit the upwardly mobile auteur than his poor protagonist.
  20. America: Freedom to Fascism
    From the tax debate, the documentary suddenly gets scattershot, going after the Patriot Act, laws against vitamin sales, election fraud, and Hurricane Katrina response (apparently a plot to grab people's guns), building to the standard New World Order line, which discredits any valid points Russo may have.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Another Gay Movie
    Boasting a "Scary Movie" rate of scatalogical jokes-per-minute, it fails to match that franchise's low yield of guffaws.
  22. Brothers of the Head
    The golden-hued footage is lovingly faked by ace cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and the straight-faced result is as improbably touching as the Farrelly brothers' underrated "Stuck on You."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Like Killing Flies
    A curiously tasty dish, one that could leave even a vegan with a burning desire to sample Shopsin's lamb chops.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Little Miss Sunshine
    Like the shambling VW van its hapless characters steer from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach, Little Miss Sunshine is a rickety vehicle that travels mostly downhill.
  25. Darshan: The Embrace
    Werner Herzog's "Wheel of Time" was, in a sense, the Buddhist equivalent of this film, as well as a more illuminating look at the power and transience of ritual.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Been Rich All My Life
    The Silver Belles are bold, brash, and gorgeously awake, and their willingness to live large is thrilling.
  27. Shadowboxer
    This monumentally ridiculous film doesn't stop at subverting stereotypes; it discombobulates narrative logic and the basic laws of human behavior. Still, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from watching the actors attempt to dig out from under the rubble that William Lipz's screenplay repeatedly dumps on their heads.
  28. Clerks II
    Clerks II can't bear the strain of its amateur-hour theatrics, no matter how big its heart or how many crocodile tears it manages to squirt. The dramatic moments become melodramatic; the bawdy moments turn icky. The fans will eat it up.
  29. Lady in the Water
    It's as if on some semiconscious level, Shyamalan, who I do not doubt is a serious and self-serious pop-creative original, is calling his own success into question and daring his audience to gulp down larger and spikier clusters of manure, just to see if they will. Or he's lost his mind.
  30. Monster House
    The coolest thing about Monster House is that Kathleen Turner's face was actually motion-captured to create the house's movements, but actual human beings on-screen might have ratcheted up the tension, of which there is none.
  31. Azumi
    If you're considering the scenario via Japan's ubiquitous pedo-porn tendencies, you're too educated for this exhaustive, manga-based bloodbath, which trails after these angsty teenyboppers on a scorched-fake-earth path through hundreds of growling baddies of every genre size and type.
  32. Fan-Fan the Tulip
    Cahiers-savvy cinephiles will recognize Fanfan as the type of handsome prestige production that the French New Wave overthrew in the early '60s, but this example of the "cinéma de qualité" is hardly a musty artifact, with its compact editing, its breezy and mischievous tone, and, in a country not yet a decade removed from the Nazi occupation, its acrid anti-militarism, clear from the ash-dry narration of the opening battle sequences onward.
    • 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.
  34. You, Me and Dupree
    The movie goes from being another mildly depressing lump of unrealized comic potential to being an actively unpleasant experience.
  35. 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.
  36. Mini's First Time
    Mini is impossible to like, especially since she delivers some of the worst narration ever spoken, and her final lines are like a big middle finger to viewers foolish enough to enjoy the film.
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. Gabrielle
    At once robust and ethereal, this is an existential ghost story, with fresh blood pulsing through its veins.
  41. Overlord [re-release]
    It's still a feat of period filmmaking. More than that, Overlord's revivification of a wasteland Europe offers up a powerful whip lesson for the postwar complacent: that the waging of war, even this most romanticized of conflicts, means bringing a corpse-mountain hell to someone's home neighborhood.
  42. The Groomsmen
    Fatally conventional in nearly every respect, the movie would be easy to dismiss were it not for Burns's frustrating knack for inserting unexpectedly truthful moments amid all the dross.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Color of Olives
    The Color of Olives attempts to reach the political through the mundane, documenting blocks of lost time as the family lazes in front of wire fences, but director Carolina Rivas aestheticizes the Amers' plight, using them as actors for her tone poem on displacement.
  44. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
    Even more of a party-hearty-Marty potlatch of silliness than its predecessor. The franchise having been established, Verbinski, Bruckheimer, and Co. have been liberated to indulge in absurdities, pile on the so-old-they're-new-again clichés, and make jokes at their own expense.
  45. A Scanner Darkly
    Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.)
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beowulf & Grendel
    It's good, bloody fun that stirs the intellect whenever it feels like it, and as a swashbuckler, the dead-game Butler outswings just about anyone in Troy or Kingdom of Heaven or Tristan & Isolde.
  47. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos
    This intermittently fascinating documentary chronicles the rise and fall of the Cosmos --which is also the rise and fall of U.S. soccer.
  49. Heading South
    An intelligent movie, not so much salacious as affecting but ultimately less analytical than overwrought, Heading South makes its points in the first 20 minutes.
  50. Guernsey
    Leopold's movie is superbly shot and restrained, but not economical; the brooding and introversions profitlessly pad out what might've been a leveling featurette.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela
    A sincere but sapless attempt to meld personal and political documentary.
  52. Urbanscapes
    The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.
  53. The Devil Wears Prada
    A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.
  54. The Blood of My Brother
    A few American soldiers are interviewed in a halfhearted attempt at balance, but Berends, who thankfully eschews narration, makes his own p.o.v. clear enough.
  55. 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.
  56. Superman Returns
    The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.
  57. The Motel
    The Motel, Michael Kang's modest Sundance applause reaper, doesn't deserve to be shotgunned for the sins of 30 other movies. But the underwhelming syncopation of make-nice clichés is too familiar.
  58. Strangers with Candy
    Strangers With Candy regularly lampoons junkie-reparation melodramas and after-school specials, but with so little focus it's never clear what the film, or even Sedaris's vaudeville buffoon incarnation, is supposed to be parodying. That may be its fascination for some--it's a satire without a baseline, free-floating in its own self-indulgent ether.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Who Killed the Electric Car?
    The real question is why this purportedly impassioned documentary investigation of a great subject--the culture's conspiratorial dismissal of eco-friendly alternatives to the gas-guzzler -- would assume such massive viewer disinterest that it coats the pill with C-list celebrity NutraSweet, including Martin Sheen voiceovers -- that would sound unforgivably hackneyed even on basic cable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Room
    One of those rare American indies that confidently and successfully propose their own narrative logic, drawing viewers into a mental puzzle that may not contain a single clear solution.
  61. Rank
    Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.
  62. Wassup Rockers
    Larry Clark's latest finds the grizzled shock-meister in a thoughtful mode and a mellow mood.
  63. Click
    De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Waist Deep
    For its ever shifting attitudes toward men, women, and murder, Waist Deep is one of the sloppiest movies ever to reach the screen.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Two Drifters
    If you can look past the film's inexplicably straight face, Two Drifters is an enjoyably daffy picture.
  66. The Hidden Blade
    Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.
  67. The Road to Guantanamo
    One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.
  68. The Great New Wonderful
    Ironically, Leiner's two monuments to pothead delirium seem vastly more coherent than this hazy attempt to mine the zeitgeist, a film every bit as pointed as its nounless title.
  69. The Forsaken Land
    Beautiful but withholding, The Forsaken Land doesn't offer much in the way of explanation -- the soundtrack features more birdcalls than dialogue -- but the 27-year-old filmmaker's command of film language is evident and his evocation of postwar trauma is haunting.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Garden of Earthly Delights
    There is magic in these intimate passion plays, which are filled with sloppy, loving detail and are mounted without a hint of pretension. Each banal moment becomes achingly gorgeous, not least because of Spiteri's disarmingly straightforward performance.
  71. 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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    Like 2 Fast 2 Furious before it, Tokyo Drift is a subculture in search of a compelling story line, and Black's leaden performance makes you pine for the days of Paul Walker.
  73. The Lake House
    Treading the same supernatural turf trampled by "Somewhere in Time" and "Frequency," director Alejandro Agresti's gooey, ostensibly spooky romance yarn The Lake House flounders less on its thudding familiarity than on its mood- killing dourness.
  74. 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.
  75. Land of the Blind
    It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.
  76. Loverboy
    Bacon the director indulges his wife, letting her play crazy and emotional in a showy performance that screams "serious actress."
  77. Lower City
    A bone-tired tale underneath.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
    Unfabulous, unfunny, and unwatchable.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only Human
    Intermittently hilarious.
  80. Wordplay
    Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Going Under
    Just because Rees can play a masochist doesn't mean viewers have to.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Following Chong to the clink by way of a few well-timed stand-up gigs, this genial doc sprinkles Reagan and Nixon soundbites over its vintage stash of C&C clips for a suitably fuzzy squint at America from '69 to the buzzkill present.
  83. Cars
    What ultimately redeems Cars from turning out a total lemon is its soul. Lasseter loves these animated inanimate objects as though they were kin, and it shows in every beautifully rendered frame.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Prairie Home Companion
    Keillor's modest subservience to Altman's group dynamic feels downright gallant, and in the context of the veteran director's most humanistic movie by a wide margin, it certainly has its rewards.
  85. Agnes and His Brothers
    The title's pointedly incorrect pronoun is typical of the film's obtuse childishness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    In briskly edited sequences peppered with fascinating found footage, each genre is tightly linked to a neighborhood.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bombón: El Perro
    Sorin's spare style belies a rich wisdom, as well as impressive performances from a cast of debuting nonpros.
  88. The Heart of the Game
    A sweet, engaging journey with the Roosevelt Roughriders, whose kindly coach encourages the girls to snarl like wolves and devour like lions.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Autumn
    Enamored of all things French and noir, American director Ra'up McGee has written a love letter to both.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Slow Jam King
    More fun to listen to than watch -- though this still leaves the problem of dialogue.
  91. Psychopathia Sexualis
    Drearily pretentious, Sexualis has even less softcore appeal than an American Apparel ad.
  92. Animals and More Animals
    An international cast of curious creatures in their native habitats stars in this charming Gallic duo (Animals and Ice/Sea) of featurettes.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Break-Up
    Faced with a long and miserable road on which they make each other sorry or crazy, both Brooke (Aniston) and Gary (Vaughn) dig in hard on the least appealing parts of their stock characters.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    District B13
    Spread the word: This delirious import is the most (maybe the only) fun action movie of the summer.
  96. The War Tapes
    On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda--ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Puffy Chair
    Like "Funny Ha Ha," Andrew Bujalski's casually raw 2002 faux–cinema vérité indie about a bunch of shiftless twentysomethings, The Puffy Chair uses simple, unadorned dialogue and intimate, off-the-cuff performances to get at the underlying issues.
  98. Typhoon
    A cheap-looking action movie that sabotages itself at almost every turn.
  99. The Cult of the Suicide Bomber
    This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else.
  100. Favela Rising
    All in all, the movement turned out to be a godsend for Rio natives, but the film is merely a pep rally.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »