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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    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Derailroaded
    Wild Man Fischer's music is disarmingly honest and heartfelt, but even its charms can't save Derailroaded from ending up a train wreck.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Legend of Zorro
    Most of Mask's cast and crew return, but they forgot to bring the last film's romantic aura and dry sense of humor with them; Anthony Hopkins is deeply missed. Instead, the picture is beset by typical sequel problems like awkward slapstick and allegedly adorable kid sidekicks.
  3. Prime
    Not quite a romance by numbers, Prime is nevertheless a movie we need like a hole in the head.
  4. Saw II
    What's worth noting is how much greater deliberation was given to the marketing than the screenplay of this cursory dud, rushed to theaters exactly a year after its amusing predecessor.
  5. The Weather Man
    The most supremely odd American film of the year.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    New York Doll
    In the end, this is less a film about a rock and roller than a film about a Mormon. And Napoleon Dynamite it ain't.
  7. Paradise Now
    Paradise Now suffers from some odd continuity glitches and takes a few too many narrative curves en route to an overly convoluted ending, but the heart of the movie is as tense as the bus ride in Hitchcock's "Sabotage."
  8. The Passenger (re-release)
    The Passenger is a relic of that moment in international co-production when famous European auteurs hitched their wagons to hip and eager Hollywood stars.
  9. Three... Extremes
    A black-blooded hoot.
  10. little man
    Guaranteed to polarize audiences. Is her insistence on taking every measure possible to save little Nicholas heroic or monumentally self-serving?
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ballets Russes
    The documentary Ballets Russes enacts its drama with a light editorial hand and unavoidable sentimentality, rather like a roll call of the NBA's "50 Greatest Players."
  12. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    May be the ultimate paradigm of self-reflexive cinema, eating Godard's tail for him and one-upping the classic anti-cartoon Duck Amuck by submitting to a cunning entropy and a self-inquiry so relentless the movie never moves from square one.
  13. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Doom
    As dumb as they come, the entertaining Doom might warrant a place in cinema history as the first movie in which someone rips off their own ear.
  15. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Adults will be restless as stabled bucks, but even children may need unusually high Ritalin doses to slog through the visual and dramatic indifference on display.
  16. Shopgirl
    Unfolds as a series of slightly disjointed vignettes, padded with redundant voiceover and an oppressively histrionic score.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stay
    In Marc Forster's humorless thriller, going insane is an exciting, luxurious affair. People suffer stylishly; depressives are angry and dirty; they make art, carry guns, and live in magnificent houses.
  18. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    The sort of movie that believes coolness is next to godliness, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang trades heavily and successfully on Downey's unflappable likability.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    After Innocence
    Both riveting and disturbing.
  20. White King, Red Rubber, Black Death
    A formal hodgepodge, Congo suffers from abrasive voice-over narration, stilted re-enactments, and an awkward courtroom conceit, but gets by on its shocking material.
  21. Emmanuel's Gift
    This feel-good profile barely touches on the political and cultural ramifications of Emmanuel's work. Narration by Oprah increases the aura of a civics lesson.
  22. Innocence
    Innocence is not merely the year's best first film, but one of the great statements on the politics of being 'tween.
  23. Protocols of Zion
    This absorbing essay amply demonstrates that, as with any sort of racial-nationalist paranoia, anti-Semitism has very little to do with actual Jews and everything to do with imagined ones.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kids in America
    Nicole Richie loyalists are sure to be confounded (along with the rest of us) by Kids in America, the weirdly anti-Bush high school "satire" that is also Richie's big-screen debut.
  25. The Roost
    The Roost proves that West has enough talent to do without the gimmick next time around.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Optimists
    Questionable as a theory of history, but as a human sentiment, it's touching to behold.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Naked in Ashes
    Naked reads, in places, like a street fair on the Santa Monica Pier. But it's utterly sincere about the practices it depicts.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Time We Killed
    Reeves's remarkable skills for expressive cinematography grant this grim tale a stark beauty bereft of sentimentality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rooms for Tourists
    The scenario is absurd enough to play as satire, but no, the film warns us, "If you think that we are just a bunch of mental cases you didn't understand anything." Clearly, I didn't understand anything.
  30. Ushpizin
    As directed by Gidi Dar, Ushpizin has a disarming folk quality.
  31. Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    Beyond the buzz of iconoclasm, our explorers find a regular troubled marriage, only with three sides to every problem.
  32. Domino
    The script, allegedly by "Donnie Darko's" Richard Kelly, throws together tangentially related plots like cats in a sack.
  33. Elizabethtown
    Where the earlier flick (Garden State), in its smallness, felt like an honest representation of writer-director-star Zach Braff's struggles with notions of home, Crowe's is a hodgepodge of great ideas and moods in search of a plot to enrich.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Fog
    Making concessions at every turn to the youth-horror market, the film slashes the ages of its protagonists by some 15 years, and its IQ follows suit.
  35. Where the Truth Lies
    This showbiz Rashomon has continuity, as well as credibility, problems.
  36. North Country
    Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.
  37. Innocent Voices
    For more than an hour, schmaltzmeister Luis Mandoki (Message in a Bottle) directs as if on assignment for Miramax.
  38. Nine Lives
    In yet another roundelay that, like "Crash" and "Heights," follows the "Short Cuts" template of cosmic interconnection.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Summer Storm
    One of the film's major assets is Stadlober's winningly natural performance-his moody charisma is irresistible.
  40. The President's Last Bang
    From mid-movie on, confusion escalates (along with one's incredulity).
  41. Harlan County U.S.A. (re-release)
    As the miners make clear, workers have no rights in this democracy that they don't fight like dogs for, and the film has no conclusion--the combat will always continue.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Don't Tell
    Spectacularly incompetent, Don't Tell races into self-parody before the end of the opening credits.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dark Hours
    Devine's giddy sex offender nearly rivals William Hurt's preposterous gangster in "A History of Violence" for absurdly enjoyable line readings.
  44. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    While the astonishing street footage of "l'affaire Langlois"--perhaps more familiar to the French than to us--is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a motherland left irrevocably in the past.
  45. Land of Plenty
    Land of Plenty is a woozy fantasia on California dreaming, all agog at urban strife and blabby with redundant voiceover.
  46. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    Good Night, and Good Luck's primary handicap is history itself -- the toe-to-toe televised dialogue between McCarthy and Murrow was, however arguably vital to the Wisconsin senator's eventual retreat, brief and less than epochal. Even so, the wonderfully mustered context wins out.
  47. In Her Shoes
    The best moments belong to Shirley MacLaine, who makes the clipped script sing as Ella.
  48. Two for the Money
    In keeping with his apparent ambition to play each character more berserk than the last, Pacino can't discuss wine choice without sounding on the brink of aneurysm.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waiting...
    A day in the life at chain restaurant Shenanigan's, Waiting . . . makes a predictable pit stop to elaborately mess with a creep patron's food but otherwise exceeds expectations by handling the real, soul-sucking fears of the double shift.
  50. The Aggressives
    Thankfully, Peddle's film is much more illuminating than a grad school seminar.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Before the Fall
    The movie is too middlebrow to show us the superman-type sexual heroics they must've engaged in, or even allow the illicit subtext to float to the surface (as Sokurov does in Father and Son)--instead we get tepid moralizing on dehumanization in the military.
  52. Dandelion
    Atmosphere trumps plot throughout, enabling the movie to survive an unfortunate, if inevitable, final-act turn.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Never Been Thawed
    Passably offbeat.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Pizzas
    Writer-director Vincent Sassone makes your mouth water with his lovingly photographed images of freshly baked pizza but turns your stomach with extra-cheesy dialogue and an inconsistent narrative.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Life, Translated
    Kiefer Liu's eccentric bit of teen sigh candy is veined with enough chewy oddities to give it texture, but its sappy center isn't sustainable over 100 minutes.
  56. The Squid and the Whale
    Tender, cruel, and very funny, Baumbach's fourth feature turns family history into a sort of urban myth.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    This latest and biggest installment is a whimsical success of a very high order: The pace never lags, the invention is incessant, and it makes you want to have a bite of cheese afterward.
  58. Zombie Honeymoon
    If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Rodnees: We Mod Like Dat!
    This mockumentary in which a group of failed Brooklyn rappers switch gears after listening to the Beatles wears out its welcome quicker than the shortest track on "The Grey Album."
  60. Capote
    In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.
  61. The Greatest Game Ever Played
    Ouimet versus Vardon probably was the greatest golf game ever played, and Paxton and Frost do it justice, but I wouldn't sit through another simulated hole of it for Tiger Woods's salary.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Into the Blue
    Granted, the cast has a certain rumpy charm, and setting four-fifths of the movie underwater keeps the pesky surfer-speak to a minimum, but the film is less about thrills than punishing the wicked.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Serenity
    Though richly allegorical, Serenity also works as a rousing and unabashedly manipulative adventure that never takes itself too seriously.
  64. Going Shopping
    Henry Jaglom's latest study of contemporary female obsessions among a noxious clan of West L.A. bourgeoisie is of more pathological than cinematic interest.
  65. Little Manhattan
    Who is this movie's target audience, anyway? Preteens will be bored stupid, while adults are unlikely to want to revisit puppy love in such grueling detail. The lingering, soft-focus, slo-mo shots of Rosemary that punctuate the action suggest a constituency I'd rather not contemplate.
  66. MirrorMask
    The film galumphs along in static panels, prioritizing flash over thought, hyperextending a story that would barely sustain a children's picture book.
  67. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Shameless Eisenhower-era corn.
  68. The War Within
    Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    Akira Kurosawa once said that Toshiro Mifune could give him in three feet of film the emotion any other actor would take 10 to deliver, but in a single flash of Fonda's electric turquoise orbs, Leone (Kurosawa's first and sincerest flatterer-imitator) managed to say as much about John Ford, the devil, and the corruptions of the Way Out Western world as the genre ever would.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    An Adolescent
    Although the movie drags, Okuda (who also directed) makes for a gloriously bad lieutenant, while Ozawa is enjoyably discomfiting in her unblushing carnality.
  71. My Big Fat Independent Movie
    Feels motivated by envy more than anything else-it's a sour, petty act of mockery that values its own ineptitude over genuine cleverness, travestying Quentin Tarantino and others simply for dreaming up gimmicks that worked.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Santo Domingo Blues
    Wolfe's anecdotal musicology succeeds precisely because of its bare-bones, bawdy yet beautiful approach--just like the music Vargas makes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Three Days of Rain
    The real subversion is director Michael Meredith's insistence on not capturing interactions between human beings in a frame; with some forethought he could have filmed the actors individually and spliced.
  74. Forty Shades of Blue
    It's Korzun's film, and she is in complete control of her character, never divulging too much of the haunted woman under the studied facade of American hotsiness.
  75. A History of Violence
    Cronenberg's movie manages to have its cake and eat it--impersonating an action flick in its staccato mayhem while questioning these violent attractions every step of the way.
  76. Flightplan
    Becomes more satisfying than the stock thriller–star vehicle it begins and ends as.
  77. Roll Bounce
    Bow Wow isn't bad. But he and the dudes who fill out X's crew never quite nail the desired What's Happening!! vibe.
  78. Daltry Calhoun
    Daltry Calhoun (Johnny Knoxville) urges you to "get high on grass--the legal kind." But to find anything funny in director Katrina Holden Bronson's debut, you're going to want the illegal kind.
  79. Dear Wendy
    Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.
  80. Dirty Love
    A kind of "Sex and the City" for L.A. bottom-feeders awash in clichéd, self-loathing misogyny that would make Howard Stern flinch.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dorian Blues
    Inhabiting the breezeway between the sweet sincerity of "Beautiful Thing" and the didacticism of an ABC "Afterschool Special," this upstate New York coming-out saga will warm PFLAG hearts and kindle empathy in those who've had to tread the family-drama-churned waters of small-town gaydom.
  82. Occupation: Dreamland
    A fair-minded (but hardly apolitical) grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that trusts the audience to draw its own conclusions.
  83. Oliver Twist
    Accomplished if lacking in urgency, this Oliver Twist (scripted by Ronald Harwood, who also wrote "The Pianist") showcases Polanski's proven gift for Dickensian caricature.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Into the Fire
    If there's an element of Into the Fire that isn't rank and offensive, I've failed to find it.
  85. Dangerous Men
    To Rad, Dangerous Men was a life's work, and to sit through it feels like honoring the dreamers of the world who at least get shit done. Is it terrible? Of course. Is there belly-dancing? Duh.
  86. Loudmouth Soup
    This micro-budget amateur-acting exercise plays like "The Anniversary Party" without the frisson of marquee performers behaving badly. We get F-listers playing at being marquee performers behaving badly.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Novo
    Limosin's elliptical narrative, meant to correlate with his protagonist's blank-slate mind, instead plays as desultory and just plain confused.
  88. Everything Is Illuminated
    Foer's ironic ideas have a lovely roundness to them, and somehow the film achieves Holocaust-fiction balance without much ado or melodrama. It may be substantially less ambitious than its source material, but that may be what saves it from implosion.
  89. Proof
    John Madden's competent, monotonous film version, not exactly stagebound but hardly freewheeling, only underscores its mechanical nature.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    HellBent
    The scariest thing about Hellbent is that somebody thought making this humorless gaysploitation slasher flick would be a good idea.
  91. Just Like Heaven
    Witherspoon's oft charming perkiness is merely patronizing here, but mid-'90s MTV staple Donal Logue steals every scene he's in as an ethically challenged therapist.
  92. Lord of War
    Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.
  93. Corpse Bride
    Corpse Bride never skimps on the sass (as a good folktale shouldn't). And the variety of its cadaverous style is never less than inspired; never has the human skull's natural grin been redeployed so exhaustively for yuks.
  94. Thumbsucker
    Endearing and well-acted.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Thing About My Folks
    Falk isn't given anything funny to say or do, but his performance is littered with beautiful touches, tiny oases of brilliance in an entertainment desert.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stupid Boy
    The result is a better-late-than-never coming-of-age tale that is by turns earnest and corny, though never stupide.
  97. One Bright Shining Moment
    Amy Goodman's narration, though correct, has a petulant, Spanish Inquisition ring to it, only made more childish by the film's cheap idealization of the senator from South Dakota as some kind of pacifist Savonarola, overdue for canonization.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    G
    One 'hood-rich-meets-blue-blood-rich scene is employed as comedic throwaway; it's also the film's truest. The rest: treacly orchestral swells for the brooding, oh-so-familiar impresario, Summer G, and no green light but the one mistakenly given to start production.
  99. Separate Lies
    Fellowes's larger goal seems to be making sympathetic characters of Anne and Bule, who for all their lovey-doveyness never emerge as much more than rich twits à la "The Great Gatsby."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hard Goodbyes: My Father
    A tender Greek drama.
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