Village Voice's Scores

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For 11,162 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Hooligan Sparrow
Lowest review score: 0 Followers
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,708 out of 11162
  2. Mixed: 4,553 out of 11162
  3. Negative: 1,901 out of 11162
11162 movie reviews
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    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shadow: Dead Riot
    The conceptual underpinnings are sketchy to say the least, and with its quantity-over-quality approach to violence and nudity, S:DR wears out its welcome faster than you can say "group shower."
  2. American Gun
    All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.
  3. V for Vendetta
    Absorbing even in its incoherence,V for Vendetta manages to make an old popular mythology new. Impossible not to break into a grin: It's the thought that counts.
  4. Find Me Guilty
    Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    She's the Man
    Doesn't have an unpredictable moment in it, borrowing heavily from just about every sports movie or teen comedy ever and, oh yeah, "Twelfth Night."
  6. Thank You for Smoking
    Instead of hitting the gas and allowing the scenario to rock 'n' roll with g-forces, Reitman keeps his movie small, unvaried, slack, and deliberately and oddly, completely smoke-free.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Take My Eyes
    A disturbing take on domestic violence.
  8. Don't Tell
    As is typical of contemporary Italian movies, every one of Comencini's women seems on the verge of a hysterical collapse.
  9. Don't Come Knocking
    It's "Broken Flowers" with bourbon and ten-gallons and meta-country soundtrack warbles.
  10. The Devil's Miner
    Perhaps little more than an object lesson in the end, the movie's nevertheless a sobering day trip, more for its hints of a forgotten history of culture collision than its sensible but rote socioeconomic sympathies.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Iluzija
    Marko's story is far from novel, but its wicked evocation of hopelessness transcends any familiarities.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Don't Trip ... He Ain't Through with Me Yet
    Despite more audience cutaways than the State of the Union Address, the movie's largely a you-had-to-be-there affair--except when the star does an uncanny imitation of a double-wide churchgoer scooting through a narrow pew.
  13. The Big Question
    While the questions may be universal, they're not particularly original, and the responses largely run the expected range, rendering the whole project less enlightening than your average collegiate coffee-and-cigarettes bull session.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beyond Honor
    This mélange of softcore porn, overheated melodrama, and harrumphing moralizing transcends taste--its lurid insanity goes beyond good and bad, right and wrong.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hate Crime
    When Hate Crime confounds expectations, it transcends the whodunit-of-the-week template. On the other hand, when the plot gets lost in irrational revenge fantasies, you'll wish you had stayed home watching reruns.
  16. The Beautiful City
    At times resembling an Iranian "Dead Man Walking," Beautiful City goes out of its way to give each character a fair shake-a few patriarchal rages notwithstanding, even the vengeful father is treated sympathetically. But the script, overly laden with red herrings, forces its characters into some improbable dilemmas.
  17. Failure to Launch
    Failure to Launch has all the gravitas of a midseason-replacement sitcom.
  18. The Hills Have Eyes
    The net effect would be doze-inducing if in fact the Dolby didn't attempt to wake the dead.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Shaggy Dog
    My eight-year-old nephew sat nearly silent throughout, so when he says he had fun, he must be talking about the treats.
  20. Ask the Dust
    Alternately grandiose and abject, Bandini is a sort of underground man, and if no more miscast than usual, heartthrob Colin Farrell miserably fails to convincingly render Bandini's neurosis.
  21. Duck Season
    Shot in silvery black-and-white, Duck Season is not charmless, just insubstantial.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    Whatever her limitations, Argento the actor makes certain that Argento the director doesn't lack for "action"--and that the audience doesn't lack for pain.
  23. Evil
    Is this an allegory against blind deference to fascism? It might be, but the root-for-the-Aryan-jock dramatics seem mildly fascist themselves.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Game 6
    Despite a late-inning swoon of pat emotional generosity, Game Six is a gratifying playground of high-wire language.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shakespeare Behind Bars
    Rogerson's structure is ingenious: He dilutes our initial skepticism by showcasing the prisoners' thoughtfulness and intelligence, and as soon as we've come to care for the men he shocks us with the details of their crimes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fallen
    Thankfully, The Fallen is neither dour nor sentimental, but while the scope is ambitious and the tone refreshingly light on moralism, few of the innumerable characters and subplots elicit much sympathy.
  27. Neighbour No. 13
    Because the metaphysics driving it are so fuzzy, this is the rare horror film where even sludgy viscera elicit only yawns.
  28. 16 Blocks
    It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Aquamarine
    The film's true focus is the friendship between the two girls, although this tends to get lost between Elizabeth Allen's jittery direction and the screenplay's contrivances.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    This picture remains faithful to the underlying affability of both Chappelle and Gondry, orchestrating a feel-good homestyle vibe that, while peppered with moments of sly political commentary, never harshes its own, slightly bittersweet mellow.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ultraviolet
    Seems this is yet another puddle of futuristic sludge for us to blame on John Cassavetes.
  32. Merry Christmas
    Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.
  33. Woman Is the Future of Man
    We're accustomed to an omniscient understanding of what movie characters, particularly in dramas about love and loss, are thinking, but Hong distributes information with a saline drip. Often, of course, his two lonely fools don't quite know what they're thinking, either--Woman can sometimes come off like an introverted "Carnal Knowledge" with two Jack Nicholsons.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Doing Time for Patsy Cline
    Writer-director Chris Kennedy delights in torturing his poor protagonist--what are the odds that a massive Aussie line dancers' convention would take place in the abandoned train yard right across the street from his jail?--but enduring this oddly humorless "comedy" is even harder on the audience.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Home
    Home's improvisatory aura proves more believable than "The Anniversary Party's" annoying contrivances, but it does little to hide the obvious fact that watching a rather dull party can be, well, rather dull.
  36. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Our Brand Is Crisis manages to be remarkably suspenseful.
  37. Sorry, Haters
    It's all about the performances. Kechiche is reserved and superbly troubled, but Wright Penn, her stardom-crippling reserves of bitterness and bile rising to the surface, is a scary monster in full bloom, and her habitation of this wacky role makes the movie worth its weight in pixels.
  38. Al otro lado
    A competent, earnest ethnographic video doc that never quite rises above its own best intentions.
  39. Tsotsi
    A widescreen wallow in socially enforced slum nihilism brought to you by Miramax, Tsotsi could be pegged as "City of God" relocated to the Soweto shanties, but it eschews the ironic swagger and strobe-speed action of Fernando Meirelles's lurid jigsaw for a more conventional arc.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madea's Family Reunion
    Perry's vaudevillian shamelessness and indifference to committee-approved taste are energizing and frequently jaw-dropping.
  41. Running Scared
    Writer-director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler) is about as skilled at storytelling as Walker is at acting, which is to say not very.
  42. Dirty
    Cuba Gooding Jr. and Clifton Collins Jr. (excellent as Perry Smith in "Capote") habitually rise above their clichéd roles.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Fish
    While Little Fish takes a turn for the generic in its final act, solid acting, an atmospheric soundtrack, and flare-filled cinematography more beautiful than an Apple screensaver are enough to keep the film afloat.
  44. Unknown White Male
    To call this story unbelievable is to say the very least. If it's a hoax, Bruce is a fantastic actor (but then, the movie suggests, so are we all). If not, you may wonder less about Bruce's personality than his condition.
  45. Black Orpheus
    Camus's film remains a revivifying experience - and a mid-winter oasis. Born and bred in France, Camus made other films, and lots of French TV, but Black Orpheus may still be the greatest one-hit-wonder import we've ever seen.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forgiving Dr. Mengele
    This uneven but riveting documentary chronicles Kor's journey to a kind of grace little understood (or appreciated) by many fellow Jews and survivors.
  47. Trudell
    Unfortunately, Rae's film is split down the middle, and the appeal of its latter half depends on your tolerance for earnest politico-poetry set to wailing rock guitar and Native American chants and extraneously endorsed by celebrity talking heads. The backstory portion of the film, though, is riveting.
  48. Workingman's Death
    Michael Glawogger's rather majestic Workingman's Death takes a symphonic structure to document some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit work on the globe.
  49. Street Fight
    Although the film has a righteous heart, by focusing solely on government as showbiz, it's part of what it decries. Curry makes uproarious hay with the illegal shenanigans of incumbent mayor Sharpe James, but is that all there is? That said, Street Fight has enough cultural crosscurrents to fill out a novel.
  50. Date Movie
    Pre- credits, Date Movie runs a mere 70 minutes, which increasingly seems like seven minutes, repeated 10 times.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eight Below
    A gorgeous art film full of snowy silences and spare, gestural performances threatens to break loose (the most inspired acting comes courtesy of the canines), though the plot's slavish schmaltz proves as oppressive as the harsh winter that descends upon the dogs.
  52. Battle in Heaven
    Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat.
  53. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    Despite its cheesy blood and thunder and ludicrous "Sunshine Makers" metaphysics, this is the funniest apocalypse I've seen since George Romero's "Land of the Dead."
  54. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    A life so tragically and quickly extinguished presents maudlin temptations, but director Marc Rothemund ably resists them. His gripping, moving film focuses on a breathtakingly brief five-day period.
  55. Winter Passing
    The film is so grindingly predictable that I was writing out a full plot synopsis in my notebook before it was half over, though the thick grains of Terry Stacey's photography and Deschanel's understated performance add a little kick to the family-dysfunction paces, and Ferrell's dive-bar rendition of the Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why" is positively riveting. Winter Passing should have been a musical.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love
    A multi-perspectival film vastly superior to "Crash," Vladan Nikolic's dynamic thriller Love reinvigorates a stale cinematic format and imparts a compelling message all without a single head-on collision.
  57. C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America
    Yes, there's something terribly familiar about this historical fantasy. As we now know, and Willmott is well aware, the South actually did win the Civil War.
  58. Desert Wind
    Nicely rendered moments of casual intimacy between the men attest to the trip's therapeutic value, but very little of it transfers to the audience. The dull large-group scenes consist mostly of old standbys like writing problems on slips of paper and burning them.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Curious George
    Misanthropic toddlers will be rolling in the aisles.
  60. Final Destination 3
    Rote sequel that surely no one was waiting for: Like the serially thwarted Death (the only "character" to return from the first two Final Destination movies), audiences are required to endure banal exposition and junior-high-level foreshadowing before being treated to the nauseatingly detailed scenes of CGI slaughter.
  61. Firewall
    As used cars go, the latest and possibly last Harrison Ford thriller, Firewall, is no deal: It runs rough, stalls frequently, smells like the stale sweat of four dozen older movies, and handles like a blind mule.
  62. The Pink Panther
    The lack of energy suggests the film might as well have been constructed from outtakes.
  63. The Ister
    The headiest, head-scratching-est, damnedest, most demanding movie opening this week in New York, The Ister could be simply described as a philosophical travelogue.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    London
    Syd's (Chris Evans) emotional tailspin is embarrassingly banal, and his assertion that "everybody here hates me" quickly applies to the audience as well.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    Recaps and effectively mythologizes this nugget of modern folklore in brief interviews with Young and a band of old reliables, including Spooner Oldham, Grant Boatwright, and Ben Keith.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Through the Fire
    It's slickly shot and structured like a Bruckheimer sports weepie, but director Jonathan Hock also shows the image-production of Telfair as star.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Year Without Love
    Anahí Berneri's promising feature debut (based on Pablo Pérez's autobiographical novel) is at once unsentimental and sympathetic; she evinces rare insight into a gay man's life and sexuality without cringing, passing judgment, or wallowing in pity.
  68. The Fallen Idol (re-release)
    The Fallen Idol has been overshadowed by the noir comedy, giddy style, and Cold War thematics of Reed and Greene's subsequent sensation "The Third Man," but (in similarly dealing with the nature of betrayal) The Fallen Idol is actually a superior psychological drama.
  69. A Good Woman
    Pleasant and undemanding, all the more so whenever Tom Wilkinson's on-screen as a possible Erlynne suitor, the movie miscasts Hunt as the pragmatic seductress.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    When a Stranger Calls
    This version is a thin, protracted study in shifting Hollywood strategies. The original, while dramatically spotty, was an almost experimental concoction of horror and thriller. The 2006 model, in contrast, is straight-up formula.
  71. Something New
    Sanaa Hamri's brisk, refreshingly understated romantic comedy Something New is the rare movie that delivers on its title's promise.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tamara
    Genre jolts arise in spite of stylistic failures.
  73. The Tenants
    Stilted and gloomy as it sounds (and sometimes is), The Tenants gets by on its nimble approximation of Malamud's robust prose, subtle turns of deadpan humor and gut-tingling menace, and remarkable performances. McDermott does credible work here, but Snoop's casting is a stroke of genius.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cowboy del Amor
    A 60-year-old eccentric with a knack for self-promotion, Thompson makes an engaging documentary subject. But his plainspoken charm and cornpone shtick can't dispel the film's lingering aftertaste of exploitative condescension.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Tollbooth
    How is czarist Russia like modern-day Brooklyn? Touché, but let's say this time the answer's not Brighton Beach. It's not The Tollbooth either, but what with the movie's dramatization of the opposition between tradition and individualism for a Jewish family's three "marrying age" daughters, "Fiddler on the Roof" parallels will inevitably be drawn.
  76. What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole
    The movie is a sloppy amalgamation of animated instruction, dramatic vignettes (starring actualization-starved single gal Marlee Matlin), and talking-heads interviews.
  77. La scorta (re-release)
    Tognazzi's use of public spaces, streets, and offices is three-dimensional and exciting in a Michael Mann–ish way, and Ennio Morricone's all-bass-register piano score keeps things nervous. But La Scorta suffers from an anemic plot pulse-you could say the judge's bodyguards did their job too well, because nothing much happens-and the anticlimax is as dull as it is pessimistic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Who Gets to Call It Art?
    A TV-style compilation of big-name talking heads and occasionally fascinating footage, the film convokes an impressive cast of interviewees—David Hockney, Frank Stella, and Ellsworth Kelly among them--yet seems too dazzled by their luminance to squeeze a substantial analysis of Geldzahler from their pithy testimonials.
  79. Bubble
    The three stars are all perfectly naturalistic, but their roles are too bloodless and their patter too dry.
  80. Annapolis
    Often laughably overwrought rehash of "An Officer and a Gentleman," ekes out enough of a subtext on competition to qualify as a non-fiasco.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big Momma's House 2
    Lawrence is an ingratiating performer, sarcastic and sentimental, and does inventive work with a swivel chair, a bathing suit, and steaming rocks. He's helped along by Emily Procter, who plays the overworked wife and should be freed from "CSI: Miami" as soon as possible.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nanny McPhee
    If you have someone under 10 to take to the movies, this one is charming and painless.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dai si gin
    Well executed but ultimately unsatisfying, Breaking News centers its cops-and-robbers plot around a clever meta-media twist that nevertheless fails to transcend gimmickry.
  84. Imagine Me & You
    Not only is there not enough panting to bunch any panties, this polite romp could use more of that other L-word: laughs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Little Jerusalem
    The film strains under the influence of too many philosophy texts.
  86. Manderlay
    All of this plays out as flat, didactic, and lazy.
  87. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    For all the on-set antics, appropriated Fellini music, and throwaway gags, the movie is most successful when Coogan is pulling faces for the mirror, aimlessly trading Pacino imitations with his sidekick Brydon, or riffing on the color of the latter's teeth.
  88. The Spirit of the Beehive
    Beehive is a graceful and potent lyric on children's vulnerable hunger, but it's also a sublime study on cinema's poetic capacity to reflect and hypercharge reality.
  89. Go for Zucker
    Mildly tasteless (natürlich), if not exactly uproarious.
  90. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Almost despite itself, this is a deeply pessimistic movie.
  91. Why We Fight
    Jarecki's film forcefully argues that the much abused word FREEDOM cannot paper over the conflicts between capitalism and democracy.
  92. End of the Spear
    Spear has all the earmarks of a middling Indiewood product, from its competent second-tier cast (including "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" hunklet Chad Allen in a dual role as a slain missionary and his grown son) to its earnest plotting and leaden pacing.
  93. Underworld: Evolution
    There's no guiding power at work here; it's Evolution without a shred of intelligent design.
  94. Pizza
    An ugly-duckling fable populated with grotesques out of John Waters, Pizza attempts an unlikely mode: earnest camp.
  95. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    Largely content to bask in the great man's glow, Angio provides generous clips and soundbites alongside fond reminiscences, but the celebratory tone leaves room for darker reflections.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blossoms of Fire
    Backed by folk songs and swirling shots of fiestas and markets, Blossoms is feel-good tourism but by its own bounds only woolly anthropology.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Perception
    This should be funny or sad, but it's neither, in this incoherent cross between "Riding the Bus With My Sister" and a Christina Ricci vehicle.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Real Dirt on Farmer John
    At times, the film plays like an extended infomercial for John's new company, Angelic Organics, but the agrarian fantasy is so compelling here that the revitalization of the American family farm begins to seem not just possible, but probable.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    24 Hours on Craigslist
    A diverting infomercial.
  100. The Fall of Fujimori
    The Fall of Fujimori is more-or less-than the flip side to last week's Film Forum Peru primer "State of Fear": It's a prismatic shudder, a maddening manifestation of historical ambivalence.
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