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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    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    La tropical
    When Turnley ventures into broader political or sociological commentary, one wishes that he'd step back and let the music, uniformly and ass-shakingly irresistible, take center stage.
  2. Coastlines
    For some fans, the taste of on-location color matters most, but Nuñez's idea of the characters' ordinariness translates to flavorlessness.
  3. X-Men: The Last Stand
    If little else, the third and supposedly final entry in the X-Men mega-franchise suggests that some movies -- or at any rate some formulas -- are not just critic-proof, they might even be director-proof.
  4. Cavite
    Cavite is such a shrewd melding of form and content that any seeming contradictions and shortcomings end up working to the film's advantage.
  5. 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.
  6. Sto je muskarac bez brkova?
    Hribar's film is not remarkable or ingenious in its creation of ethnic gusto and peripheral naturalism, but it's adept enough for a pass on M:i:III.
    • 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.
  8. La Moustache
    A successful novelist and restrained actor's director, Carrére makes the transformation of a silly marital argument into a cosmic upheaval look easy, and profound as well.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stagedoor
    Shiva has a sensitive eye for rarefied outcasts.
  10. The Da Vinci Code
    Overshadowed by its own marketing hurricane and popular rage, Code struggles for significance as a movie experience and flies a weak flag as a provocation.
  11. Over the Hedge
    "Lady and the Tramp" all by its lonesome is worth a dozen of these meat-grinders -- crude commodities, plush toys and product placements in search of a story from which to hang their price tags.
  12. The King
    The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.
  13. Lemming
    Exhilaratingly anxious, Dominik Moll's new film Lemming charts familiar territory but does it with gravity and panache.
  14. 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.
  15. Twelve and Holding
    To call Twelve and Holding cartoonish is to put it mildly. Marked by reckless tonal shifts, Anthony Cipriano's screenplay traffics in sensationalism and sentimentality.
  16. Poseidon
    An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.
    • 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.
  18. Dead Man's Shoes
    Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.
  19. Giuliani Time
    After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sketches of Frank Gehry
    This enjoyably breezy portrait of genius architect Frank Gehry is drawn doodle-style by first-time documentarian Sydney Pollack.
  22. Mendy
    Inspired by a 1997 "Voice" article on ex-members of the Satmar sect, Mendy is cast largely with Orthodox or former Orthodox actors, who are utterly credible with dialogue that necessarily teeters between the candid and the offensive.
  23. Light from the East
    Grappell implicitly uses the juxtaposition with the martyred Kurbas to gauge her commitment to her own art. Light From the East drinks freely from the triumphalist cup of the glasnost era.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Russian Dolls
    Those who loved the original Auberge will likely be eager to book rooms once again.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crazy Like a Fox
    Whether you find the protagonist of Richard Squires's comedy-drama--a dangerous Confederate crackpot or an exemplar of principled defiance likely depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you see the movie.
  26. Art School Confidential
    Art School Confidential is replete with humorous detail--in that respect, the student art projects are particularly fine--but it's the attitude that rules.
    • 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.
  29. The Proposition
    The climactic Christmas Day dinner of dreadful retribution is a terrifying prospect, but for anyone with a yen for our great lost genre, it's also some sort of gift.
  30. One Last Thing...
    Angarano and Mabrey bring something special to the proceedings, and they make it work.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Me Again
    Just your run-of-the-mill indie sex comedy until the third act, when it veers into charmingly shrill, "Mommie Dearest"–style melodrama.
  32. How I Killed a Saint
    Throughout, first-time director Teona Strugar Mitevska (the sibling of the lead actress) demonstrates a keen eye for off-center compositions, a striking visual depiction of a world out of balance.
  33. United 93
    Best understood as a memorial…Like most memorials, it is respectful, premised on competing obligations to the dead and the living, and eager to stress that the deaths were not in vain. It not only tells us we should never forget but also illustrates how we should remember.
  34. Akeelah and the Bee
    It helps that newcomer Keke Palmer nails it as the 11-year-old prodigy, avoiding cuteness and conveying more angst than all the pasty freaks in "Spellbound" combined.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guys and Balls
    Both totally predictable and unerringly charming, with all of the quirky players, training montages, and father-son drama you'd expect.
  37. The Lost City
    Garcia's tale bemoans the loss of easy wealth for a precious few. Poor people are absolutely absent; Garcia and Infante seem to have thought that peasant revolutions happen for no particular reason--or at least no reason the moneyed 1 percent should have to worry about.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Water
    This work of gorgeous fury, about the virtual imprisonment of millions of Hindu widows in the years before independence, transforms Mehta's feminist rage into an eloquent testament to the hunger for freedom.
    • 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.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Revoloution
    Proving the old adage about the road to hell, Revoloution at least has its heart in the right place.
  41. Lady Vengeance
    As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.
  42. Army of Shadows
    It's here that Melville fully achieved his notion of the sublime, applying "Le Samouraï's" "empty" compositions and near theatrical blocking, as well as its methodical suspense, cosmic fatalism, and sense of grim solitude, to a subject far closer to his heart, namely his own World War II experiences.
  43. Havana Suite
    It's all pleasant enough, but the pretty pictures, languid pacing, and endless stretches of mood music eventually combine to soporific effect.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Police Beat
    Dreamlike in style, Police Beat is also a real-world vision of what American indies could be if they dared to recognize the drama in our own neighborhoods.
  45. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    An explicit ode to mortality, not without a certain grim humor.
  46. Three Times
    My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.
  47. 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    Brought low by its premise and rendered idiotic by its subplot, this alleged political thriller spells momentary doom for star Michael Douglas.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Silent Hill
    Stuffed with cheap effects and devoid of tension, this French-Japanese-U.S. co-production contributes exactly zilch to the rich film history of those three nations; the most horror-crazed teen may be hard-pressed to find any authentic thrills here.
    • 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.
  51. Mongolian Ping Pong
    Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.
  52. Repulsion (re-release)
    The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.
  53. Stolen
    Despite the soft-spoken Smith, a type-A British liaison self-named the Turbocharger, and the apparent involvement of the IRA, the doc prioritizes flash over facts, leaving you pining for the New Yorker exposé it could've been.
  54. 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?
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hard Candy
    A film that forges identification with its victimized heroine like none I've seen in decades. (The Nova Scotia–born Page, a Molly Ringwald type who was only 15 when the movie was made, leaves little doubt as to whether a kid can play a grown-up's icky game and win.)
  58. 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.
  59. Look Both Ways
    An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.
  60. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    This is primarily a film for fans of all involved.
  61. Mountain Patrol
    For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    Part of La Mujer's problem is its pace: Everything happens so slowly, and so meaningfully, that we see it coming for miles. Also, none of the three principals is remotely likable until the end.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Nathalie...
    Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax.
  64. The Sisters
    A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.
  65. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    A mockumentary that exhausts its best joke with its premise.
  66. Sisters in Law
    The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.
  67. 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.
  68. Take the Lead
    It's no surprise to anyone who's seen his Robert Rodriguez films that Banderas works well with kids. But it may surprise those who saw "Evita" that he can make a music-and-dance movie that doesn't suck.
  69. Friends with Money
    As its title jokingly implies, this is a more grown-up version of Aniston's long- running TV vehicle--complete with the star herself as eternal ingenue.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Simon
    Eddy Terstall's film is bipolar and ultimately wrenching, but it works if you let it.
  71. 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.
  72. 4
    Although Khrzhanovsky has several tricks up his sleeve, 4's most provocative quality is its ironic surplus of beauty.
  73. Free Zone
    Oddly, in representing a private conflict as the microcosm of an unsolvable catastrophe, Free Zone only manages to miniaturize both.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sir! No Sir!
    As it is, this one is compelling enough, a potent mix of outrage, residual anger, and sorrow that speaks not just to the legacy of our misadventures in Vietnam, but to the entire uncertain future of a nation at war.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Outsider
    Nicholas Jarecki's The Outsider is among the great docs about moviemaking.
  76. Quality of Life
    Establishes a strong sense of milieu in these street scenes, and while the movie's not without its flaws--much of the dialogue is colorless and Lisa seems a bit too together to be hanging out with Curtis--it's never less than credible.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am a Sex Addict
    Caveh Zahedi's one-of-a-kind movie--a funny, inventive, ground-shifting hybrid of essay film, mea culpa, and pathological real-life romantic farce--aims for truth by wrecking its own verisimilitude.
  78. Basic Instinct 2
    Not content simply to examine the relationship between sex and death, BI2 ponderously blurs the boundaries between art and life, and the plot, already mired in nonsensical backstory, collapses with the late-inning introduction of a tired metafictional device (not to mention a wildly lunging "Usual Suspects" twist).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ATL
    It's entertainment with ambition, but I can't front though; the soundtrack is pretty fly too.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ice Age: The Meltdown
    A romantic subplot about a possum-raised mammoth (Queen Latifah!) tries to put the warm in global warming, but the unappealing character designs, incessant celebrity-voice chatter, and slickly inexpressive 3-D animation thwart any emotional pull.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slither
    Gunn doesn't reinvent the wheel but he does tighten its spokes a bit with some terrifying sequences and a witty, deadpan screenplay, and he leaves the audience hungry--for "Slither 2."
  82. Brick
    The hair may thin considerably under Brick's hat after a while, and Hammett redone remains Hammett half done, but while the plates are in the air, it's a spectacle of nerve.
  83. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    With Awesome's insistence on professional sound--only a few times do we get sonically dropped into the cavernous, thumping Garden--and cuts to pristine close-ups of things like Mixmaster Mike's admittedly sick scratch detail work, it plays like a hype victory lap rather than a boundary-smashing study of fan curiosity or pathology.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Adam & Steve
    Lighthearted and funny, it falters only in the rare moments when it takes itself too seriously.
  85. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Jeff Feuerzeig's tremendous documentary runs on the motive force of intelligent fandom and radiates an ineffable grace.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School
    This flat-footed male weepie musters an insurance ad's worth of clichés about the importance of busting a move in middle age-and it strains so hard to do so that it's almost perversely compelling.
  87. Iowa
    Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.
  88. Iron Island
    Depending on one's mood, the movie might seem boldly simplified and poetic--or boringly simpleminded and prosaic.
  89. Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy
    As the monks themselves threaten to nod off, the film's impressive narcotic effect enters the bloodstream-or so it may seem only for the unenlightened like me.
  90. Toro negro
    As his story emerges-rape, assault, manslaughter, prison, and torrential self- destruction-it becomes clear that Pacheco is some kind of sociopath, and the movie evolves into a monstrous portrait of economic annihilation on the outskirts of the global village.
  91. Yang Ban Xi: The 8 Modelworks
    Both frustrating and fascinating, Yuen's documentary is something of a stray footnote. It requires not only the context of the yang ban xi but the perspective of other movies on the subject of entertainment and utopia.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Drawing Restraint 9
    Those who fear that the mainstream of contemporary art has become little more than an extension of fashion will find no comfort in Drawing Restraint 9, Matthew Barney's latest big-budget ejaculation of ritual self-involvement and superficial foofery.
  93. Inside Man
    Inside Man certainly functions as a genre film, but the backbeat of inane banter and schoolyard trash-talking serves to promote an infectious sense of levity.
  94. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    The idea isn't as odd as it might first appear, since running a salon is one of the few socially acceptable means for a woman in Afghanistan to earn an income. The execution, however, evokes a particularly outlandish Christopher Guest mockumentary.
  95. 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.
  96. Mardi Gras: Made in China
    This sly, engrossing doc is an expert riposte to smug proponents of the fetterless free market.
  97. L'Enfant (The Child)
    Above all, this is an action film--or, better, a transaction film. It's not just that the Dardennes orchestrate an exciting motor scooter purse-snatching and a prolonged hot pursuit. L'Enfant is an action film because every act that happens is shown to have a consequence.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lady in Question Is Charles Busch
    They gloss over concerns that mainstream Busch isn't as funny or as daring as cult Busch. Still, I'd kill for more footage of his less famous plays, like the intriguingly titled "Pardon My Inquisition," or "Kiss the Blood Off My Castanets."
  99. Stoned
    The rock hero starts out dead and so does the movie.
  100. 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.
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