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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Glory Road
    As Coach Haskins would have put it, "It's activity without accomplishment."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Holiday
    The most surprisingly satisfying Hollywood comedy in ages.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tristan and Isolde
    Myles deserves better, but acquits herself as admirably as one can mired in medieval muck.
  4. April's Shower
    Tepid lesbian comedy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    That Man: Peter Berlin
    Tushinski must spin Berlin's self-portrait photography and well-documented peacocking as more than predictable narcissism.
  6. When the Sea Rises
    If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    Such informality leads to numerous lulls, but when the photographer perks up the results are delightful.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Film Geek
    Westby never provides a reason you should pay to spend 70 minutes with Scotty, but he offers at least a dozen compelling ones not to.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Following Sean
    Arlyck's compulsion is to our great fortune. Patient and elegant, his film is a quietly devastating meditation on family, work, and the unrelenting passage of time.
  10. State of Fear
    An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.
  11. Fateless
    Fateless has a remarkable absence of sentimentality. The movie is obviously artistic, but there are no cheap or superfluous effects. It's almost mystically translucent.
  12. Hostel
    Falling somewhere between fratboy porno wish fulfillment and Europhobic sex-tourism scare flick, Eli Roth's taut, wily, but ultimately pointless shocker Hostel is neither as transgressive nor as grueling as it aims to be.
  13. Kill the Poor
    Shot on a modest DV budget, Kill the Poor isn't pretty, but it's a balanced look at the dirty politics of gentrification.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    BloodRayne
    Our blood-smacking antiheroine, Rayne (Kristanna Loken), isn't a vampire; she's a dhampir, a half-human, half-vampire cross-fiend who's as anguished, strange, and sloppy as mercenaries, or movies, get.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am Taraneh, I Am Fifteen Years Old
    Can nobly stand behind its more celebrated forebears.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El carro
    Part fluff, part social farce, and all foregone conclusion.
  17. Stryker
    The dead-end social points Gonick is making are so blunt they're hardly points at all anymore, but the galleon anchor that's weighing down this well-intentioned homey is the amateur acting.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tau man ji D
    Another oil-slick ode to man-on-auto lust, Initial D offers enough full-speed money shots to eke out a victory over its barrage of clichés.
  19. The Promise
    You can't help wondering how the same Fifth Gen filmmaker who made "Yellow Earth" and "Life on a String" could've fallen on such hard times, or justified such goofiness to himself.
  20. Match Point
    A modest and mildly pretentious mediocrity in the Woodman canon.
  21. Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein
    This evocative film is a poignant testament to the twin forces of love (however blighted) and the unconscious.
  22. Wolf Creek
    The ambitions are so paltry that our response should be too: Wolf Creek is unimaginative, light on the grue and heavy on the faux-serious desperation.
  23. Casanova
    Ledger's deadpan baritone pumps wit into his tepid one-liners like collagen into a wilted starlet's kisser, and the clumsy staging might not grate so much if the tone weren't so self-congratulatory.
  24. Rumor Has It...
    Maybe it's the terrible lighting, but Friend-out-of-water Aniston spends most of this flick looking like she needs Dustin Hoffman to bang on the glass and get her out of this mess.
  25. The New World
    Malick's long, moody, diaphanous account of love and loss in 17th-century Jamestown--shot, more or less, on location--rarely achieves the symphonic grandeur it seeks. As an epic, it's monumentally slight.
  26. The Matador
    Taking the medium slopes and never venturing into extremities, Shepard gets all of his laughs if not the ironic heart-tugs, and his cast is perfectly in tune. (Davis in comedic-observant mode is funnier than most American actresses in fifth gear.)
  27. Munich
    The film is sluggish and repetitive, yet it exerts a certain clinical fascination.
  28. Caché (Hidden)
    Binoche and Auteuil are both quietly sensational in their fracturing personae, but the film is Haneke's premier postmodern assault--less visceral, perhaps, than "Code Unknown" and the criminally underappreciated "Time of the Wolf," but more thoughtful and, in the end, deeper in the afterplay.
  29. The Ringer
    An uncomfortable intermingling of message movie and gross-out comedy, a sporadically funny vehicle that indicts its audience for laughing.
  30. The Intruder
    The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough--her (Claire Denis) most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling.
  31. Fun with Dick and Jane
    This Dick & Jane is precisely the kind of social-problem comedy you'd expect from well-intentioned millionaires unaccustomed to putting their money where their mouths are.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The White Countess
    Alas, The White Countess, the final Merchant Ivory film, is something of a lacquered dud.
  33. The Family Stone
    It's hard to fathom why anyone would voluntarily endure a holiday family reunion movie -- a genre devised solely to demonstrate how grotesque and how heartwarming families can be--when actual holiday family reunions already exist for those very reasons.
  34. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Arriaga's script (a prize at Cannes) has a lovely, fascinating shape to it, even if his crushing portrayal of white Americans--all of them, even Jones, suffering from a zombified affect and crippling shortsightedness--is somewhat counterset against his Mexicans, who are all morally balanced, if not always happy or nice.
  35. Electric Shadows
    Electric Shadows is committed to movies-as-escape swoonery, but the script's late disasters are also predicated on cinema and filmgoing, suggesting an ambivalence the rest of the film seems oblivious to.
  36. The Producers
    Broderick is a genuine trouper, hoofing his way through his big numbers, while Lane's antics are difficult to resist.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hoodwinked!
    Sluggishly paced and stiffly animated, Hoodwinked pulls out all the stops to keep its attention-deficient audience occupied, but the snowboarding, skiing, hang-gliding, and kung fu sequences will still be a lot more fun in the Hoodwinked video game.
  38. Trapped by the Mormons
    While positioned firmly as camp, the new Trapped by the Mormons is a surprisingly faithful rendering--at least until the flesh-eating zombies show up.
  39. King Kong
    For King Kong is an accountant's movie at heart. Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Happy Here and Now
    When Amelia takes the full multimedia plunge in the movie's final moments, Happy becomes something inexplicably (and metaphysically) beautiful.
  41. The Grace Lee Project
    A breezy first-person video essay that goes in search of the average Asian American woman, all the while wondering if there is in fact such a thing.
  42. Brokeback Mountain
    The most straightforward love story--and in some ways the straightest--to come out of Hollywood, at least since "Titanic."
  43. Memoirs of a Geisha
    Swaddled in the posh vulgarity that passes for awards-season elegance, Memoirs is deluxe orientalist kitsch, a would-be cross between "Showgirls" and "Raise the Red Lantern," too dumb to cause offense though falling short of the oblivious abandon that could have vaulted it into high camp.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mrs Henderson Presents
    This is Dame Judi's show. However extraordinary an actor she may be, she cannot conceal the obvious fact that she's having the time of her life here. Isn't that delicious?
  45. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    Robust, engrossing, and surprisingly restrained in saving most of its effects for the grand finale, the first Chronicles of Narnia installment eschews Harry Potter's satanic subtext and "The Lord of the Rings'" Wagnerian cosmology. It may be as close to adult-friendly kid fare as Hollywood will ever get.
  46. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    This all-digital indie is, by genre standards, either a misfired doodle or an attempt to Lovecraft-ize the popular movement. Or both.
  47. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
    The Power of Nightmares is essentially polemical. As partisan filmmaking it is often brilliant and sometimes hilarious-a superior version of "Syriana" (which also prudently subtracts Israel and the Palestinians from the Middle East equation).
  48. Moonlight
    Not only is the candid (but never prurient) treatment of early-teen sexuality and drug use too hot to handle, but the narrative blend of fairy-tale wonder and nightmare logic feels sui generis.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Isn't This a Time! A Tribute Concert for Harold Leventhal
    Engaged but measured hagiography.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Days of Santiago
    Méndez contrasts his protagonist's highly subjective journey with a neorealistic visual style. If the movie lacks narrative originality, it leaves a singularly raw impression of having spent time inside someone's sweaty, ill-fitting skin.
  51. The World's Fastest Indian
    The result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.
  52. Æon Flux
    Gone are Chung's willfully irrational non sequitur surrealisms, vertiginous designs, dry humor, and physiological weirdness; now we have Charlize Theron trying to look icy, leaping about in resistance to a future dystopia that looks a lot like an overlandscaped European Union industrial park.
  53. Transamerica
    Pleasant even without reaching much of a destination, Transamerica leaves the basic impression that it's not as self-satisfied as it could have been.
  54. First Descent
    Comes off as an overlong, overstuffed promo for an "industry" that hasn't needed promoting since the movie's target audience was in diapers.
  55. The Kid & I
    Qualifies as the most indulgent kind of homemade project, laden with tediously inspirational dialogue and visuals that seem shot through half-fizzled Yuengling. Kudos to Gores, at least, for acquitting himself as an actor.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Far Side of the Moon
    Reworking his own raw material, Lepage spins a rich, moving film that acknowledges humanity's power to break out of Earth's daily gravity; in the process, he leaves audiences floating.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Loving but frank, Brown, by refusing to judge her film's subject, never falls into this trap. Too frequently, however, the side-of-the-road montages that are meant to mesmerize offer only blurry filler instead.
  58. Exist
    Exist is prone to posturing. Demonstrating a noble if wishy-washy faith in activism's power to save the world, the film amounts to a brief, earnest howl against apathy--easily dismissible for those unsympathetic to its views and basically useless for everyone else.
  59. The Boys of Baraka
    The Boys of Baraka's heart may be in the right place, but its portrait of poor Baltimore kids selected to attend boarding school in Kenya is rife with suspect perspectives.
  60. Down to the Bone
    Like Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen," this film has an ear for the way moms talk to kids, a sensitivity to drug-sweetened intimacies, and an appreciation of the urgent nuance, not just the comedy, of recovery-speak.
  61. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    This earnest, well-observed weepy has more depth than its genteel trappings might imply.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seamless
    Though the film is a sober account, the subject alone ensures numerous moments of inspired hilarity.
  63. The Ice Harvest
    From the cast and location to the attitude and premise, many things in The Ice Harvest are inescapably reminiscent of the Coen brothers. But as a director, Ramis is far less flashy and not nearly as pleased with himself. This is one of the most sustained movies of the year, as classic in its structure as "Double Indemnity" or "No Exit."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Just Friends
    A refreshingly mean-spirited breeze through both the holiday movie and romantic-comedy checklists.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rent
    Instead of bringing a universal love story to the living present, the film traps it in a frozen past like a prehistoric bug in amber, as removed from moviegoers' experience as a dusty diorama at the American Museum of Natural History.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Yours, Mine and Ours
    Shrill family comedy.
  67. The Libertine
    The Libertine's trouble lies precisely in its efforts at conjuring the historical past: No one in the film seems much more convinced than I am that because playwrights and authors wrote in clever, high post-Elizabethan diction, then everyone spoke that way every day, in the pubs, with whores.
  68. Syriana
    Given the large cast, the international hopscotch, and the tantalizing illusion of depth, the movie's tone is "Frontline" meets John le Carré. Compared to the complacence of something like "The Interpreter," it's a regular brain tickler.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    39 Pounds of Love
    Eagerly mimicking reality TV's need to mold life into a digestible narrative, the documentary 39 Pounds of Love simplifies its subject until all that's left is a name and a cloying score.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    To this viewer and reader, the decade-old juggernaut is as deeply felt as it is flawed, dense and illogical and laudably "weird."
  71. Walk the Line
    In no way obsessive, Walk the Line is more sincerely--which is to say, more boringly--sincere. It doesn't leave you with much to think about, except maybe the empty vibrato of effective ventriloquism.
  72. Oxygono
    Curiously, Blackmail Boy's alternate title is "Oxygen"--and by film's end, you'll be gasping for it.
  73. Private
    Private never reconciles its conflicting impulses, and consequently, the human impact of the struggle--so powerfully explored in "Paradise Now" and "The Syrian Bride" --never acquires the emotional weight it should. The semi-absurdist closer amounts to little more than a knee-jerk declaration of hopelessness.
  74. The Big Risk
    Shot on city streets but unfolds in the world of the movies--in a Godardian touch that anticipates Godard, the Ventura character is identified by the cops as "an old pal of Pierrot le Fou." The new titles are flavorsome, and the restoration is up to Rialto's previous high standards.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unveiled
    An Iranian version of "Boys Don't Cry," Unveiled overflows with sociopolitical outrage even if its portrayal of a gender-confused heroine is ultimately indecisive and laconic.
  76. Zizek!
    Taylor traipses around after Zizek on a continent-hopping lecture tour, and we get a face full of the man's tireless analysis, in a style that can only be characterized as hyperactive grizzly bear, complete with spit-spewing speech impediment.
  77. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    Investigates the events leading up to the coup d'état; that it was the second for Aristide (overthrown in 1991, mere months after becoming Haiti's first democratically elected president) darkens the film's triumphalist-sounding title.
  78. Breakfast on Pluto
    May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gilles' Wife
    Devos's performance is an expert workshop of internalized emotions and silent forbearance.
  80. The Syrian Bride
    The Syrian Bride has no particular visual style, but it exudes affection, for its characters and their culture as well as the unprepossessing beauty of the scrubby terrain that holds them in thrall. Like all wedding films, it's essentially a comedy, albeit a sad one.
  81. Pride & Prejudice
    Director Joe Wright coordinates a delightfully cohesive acting ensemble.
  82. Derailed
    Clive Owen proves he can just about save anything.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zathura: A Space Adventure
    One thing: Perhaps my studio-cynic hackles are raised imprudently, but either Favreau reimagined the boys' teenage sister to read as matinee sex bomb, Tootsie Rolling around in pink boxers for half the film, or children's books have become a lot hotter since I put down Seuss and Sendak for Encyclopedia Brown.
  84. Bee Season
    The mysticism only mystifies; its hieroglyphics are vividly rendered, but Bee Season never manages to spell them out.
  85. Ellie Parker
    A clumsy spoof of Hollywood, EP always roots for its hapless heroine. But where this trifle fascinates most is in its connections to David Lynch's masterpiece.
  86. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    Sarah Silverman's cartoon bunny rabbit smile could make her the poster child for orthodontia, but it's her timing that's the real thing of beauty.
  87. Cape of Good Hope
    Only Nthati Moshesh, as a single black mother working as a housekeeper wooed by a displaced Congolese (Eriq Ebouaney), makes a dent in white-American-expatriate Mark Bamford's toothless scenario.
  88. Good Morning, Night
    Like its oxymoronic title, Good Morning, Night is sober yet filled with fancy. There's a wistful aspect to the movie.
  89. The Comedians of Comedy
    Only works when the subjects are onstage. Watching the quartet doing laundry, playing arcade games, or getting haircuts evokes the banality of road life far too accurately, and at 105 minutes, the film hardly leaves us wanting more.
  90. La sierra
    A stark, relentlessly deglamorized vision of ghetto life, La Sierra is essential viewing for anyone who ponied up for the aestheticized amorality of the Brazilian "City of God."
  91. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Unfortunately "My Left Foot's" Jim Sheridan, that reliable purveyor of Irish struggle-porn, anchors us in tedious exposition.
  92. The Swenkas
    This peculiar and sweet film--which lushly scores the silent tournaments with Henry Mancini and Tommy Dorsey--more or less leaves it at that, exploiting the poetic surreality of the overdressed Zulus in Pierre Cardin primping in the basements and barren fields of the Transvaal but resisting the urge to contextualize or explain it.
  93. Chicken Little
    The usual pop-culture jokes, disco tunes, and sarcastic narrator are on hand to prevent atrophy, but by the time the sky really does start "falling"--courtesy of an alien invasion-- Chicken Little's frantic efforts to stay farm fresh have started to wear on the nerves.
  94. Jarhead
    One of the few Hollywood movies to ever acknowledge the Desert Storm "experience," Sam Mendes's Jarhead is both fastidiously grueling and perversely withholding.
  95. Brooklyn Lobster
    Outside of the Jordan inner circle, this family-versus-business parable comes across as slight, familiar, and in dire need of seasoning.
  96. The Dying Gaul
    Entertaining if cornball, lacking the cold-eyed nastiness of something like Mike Nichols's "Closer," The Dying Gaul is tricked out with strident montage sequences and tremulous Steve Reich music. It's already drowning in an icky sea of language when Lucas makes a stretch for Greek tragedy and sends the whole Malibu playhouse abruptly crashing down.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gay Sex in the 70s
    Lightly entertaining, but--not unlike the cheap action it chronicles--leaves one wanting something much more substantial.
  98. I Love Your Work
    Despite this ripe framework and the talent on deck, ILYW is not a satire...Rather, it becomes a cold-serious, dead-air brood about how tough, lonely, and desolate it is being a celebrity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    Viewers may not be surprised to learn of Wal-Mart's horrific track record, but they can't deny Greenwald's airtight advocacy.
  100. Christmas in the Clouds
    Few clichés go unexercised, but there's also something quietly amazing going on here: For once, American Indians are portrayed not as spiritually attuned mystics or powerless patsies but as ordinary working stiffs, or at least the cinematic equivalent thereof.
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