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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    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Human Error
    On a spare stage set, Dresser's clever script is allowed breadth for contemplation; here it's sodden with animated sludge. Watch it with your eyes closed.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Finding Eleazar
    Only true opera diehards will appreciate the backstage psychodrama, a catalog aria of the singer's multiple neuroses.
  3. I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth
    It's all fascinating, but must Kalatozov's careening angel of cinema be laid bare?
  4. Piggie
    A movie refreshingly lacking in social graces, Piggie uses the transparency of video to x-ray the psyches of characters obsessed with the essence of things.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Future of Food
    Wisely eschews standard anti-corporate bombast for measured tones.
  6. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    The Weeping Meadow shares the awed sense of solemn apocalypse with his (Angelopoulos) signature films, but it's lighter, more musical and folktale-ish.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chain
    A dreamlike travelogue that transforms a mundane world into something strange and new.
  8. The Man
    Fuu . . . cryin' out loud, this movie's dumb.
  9. An Unfinished Life
    As with the director's other films, all that keeps Unfinished from being a complete, treacly bore is its robust performances.
  10. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
    Derrickson's flick can sour your stomach with piety, which is a shame -- its moments of jolt wattage rate with many J-horrors.
  11. Keane
    Keane is a painfully specific figure but at the same time a totem, lean and frightening, for a morass of modern anxieties. That might be this phenomenal film's emergent achievement: Its raw hopelessness is its universality.
  12. Steal Me
    Whether it's the guitar-strum soundtrack, "lyrical" cornfield shots, or arrhythmic performances, Steal Me has at least one indie-film cliché too many.
  13. Campfire
    The timelier elements of Campfire, which cleared house at Israel's Academy Awards this year, are too salient to dismiss.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Green Street Hooligans
    Hunnam, whose cockney ranges from dodgy to downright Caine-ian, mutes Gary Oldman's bestial mouth-froth (in Clarke's 1988 The Firm), becoming the prettiest, most articulate, bloodthirsty thug ever to put lip to lager.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kamikaze Girls
    If you value plausibility in movies, skip Kamikaze Girls; this is the sort of picture where getting run over by a truck gives a character gorgeous hair instead of a broken hip.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Music from the Inside Out
    A revealing portrait of painfully withdrawn artists navigating the tug between the divine harmony of an orchestral synthesis and the sweaty glow of individual experimentation.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Make It Funky!
    A love letter to New Orleans, Make It Funky! reminds us of what has been lost in the flood, and of an artistic spirit that will never dissipate.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Walking on the Sky
    "School Ties" heartthrob Randall Batinkoff and the rest of the cast make do with wooden lines and a plot that fails to jell.
  19. Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing
    Lively, intelligent look at the art of film editing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Usher
    Flush with evidence of Harrington's trademark blend of the strange and the sublime.
  21. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    It's rare that a documentary conveys an artist's worldview so compellingly, but then Glennie is no ordinary musician.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Transporter 2
    Choreographer Corey Yuen's use of a fire hose is far more creative than anything in the stale kidnapper plot.
  23. A Sound of Thunder
    The movie recovers from a sluggish opening act to pack some real suspense in its second half.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Underclassman
    British bliss czars, the doughnut-loving LAPD, and bitchin'-hot Spanish profs, no matter how many, how fat, or how bitchin' hot, can't make up for easy double entendres and zero character development.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Margaret Cho: Assassin
    Assassin is the listless signature on her career-long comedic suicide note.
  26. 3 Dancing Slaves
    For those so inclined, this lulling, banal, and rather pleasant film cultivates a mood of zone-out voyeurism. In the absence of a larger purpose, Morel is content to ogle, perhaps rightly assuming that his viewers will be too.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind Game
    All scrunched together into a dense marathon of optical-cranial overload, this mental puzzle-box arrives three decades too late for what would have been an inevitable midnight movie run, but undoubtedly there are American otakus popping this one into multi-region DVD players right now amid the glorbeling of bong hits.
  28. The Constant Gardener
    Although le Carré's story may seem predictable and unduly focused on the plight of a pale, wealthy Old Worlder adrift in a sea of needy East Africans, the movie's human material is masterfully manipulated.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Games of Love and Chance
    Unlike American counterparts "Kids" or "Dangerous Minds," this highly intelligent comedy (which cleaned up at this year's Césars) doesn't seek to shock or inspire, but merely documents teen moodiness in all its tedious unpredictability.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    William Eggleston in the Real World
    Subtle, elegant documentary.
  31. The Brothers Grimm
    Just as fabulously cartoon-Gothic as "Sleepy Hollow."
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cave
    Spare and single-minded, The Cave is an insistently entertaining piece of pulp.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Undiscovered
    A PG-13 dramedy set in L.A. about some attractive, way-too-earnest aspiring stars has the potential to be a delectable good-bad favorite, but Undiscovered is nowhere near the guilty pleasure it could have been.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Baxter
    A sign of The Baxter's charm is that it's essentially spoiler-proof: We know from the get-go which couples will pair off, and the pleasures lie in the spring-stepped vibe, the natty throwback wardrobe, and the intricate goofball patter.
  35. Eternal
    "It is a study of the psychopathologies of perversions," co-director Federico Sanchez says in the press notes for Eternal, which is certainly one way to rationalize a trashy lesbian vampire flick.
  36. Formula 17
    It might be, empirically speaking, the gayest movie ever released.
  37. The Memory of a Killer
    Van Looy has created a fast-paced and stylish thriller. Declair's Ledda, marvelously suave and vulnerable, provides most of the pathos.
  38. Wall
    Disturbing and compelling.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen
    The charm of Tim Irwin's documentary, which charts via archival footage and talking-head reminiscences the arc of the band bassist Watt shared with guitarist D. Boon and drummer George Hurley in the early '80s, is that emphasis on the personal.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    La visa loca
    Billed as a "satirical comedy about the American dream," La Visa Loca doesn't have anything to say about that eternal subject and is excruciatingly unfunny.
  41. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    The Virgin script occasionally resets a gold standard for refined crudery.
  42. Red Eye
    Craven's terror-alert white-knuckler is zippy, unpretentious.
  43. Valiant
    The main problem with this Disney release--which also wastes the voices of Ricky Gervais and Jim Broadbent--is its refusal to recognize the war as anything but an excuse for tomfoolery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    At its most ludicrously self-referential, the film achieves the perfect meta-moment when Toledo, seeking pointers on how to get away with murder, buys a copy of "Dial M for Murder" (released in Spain as Perfect Crime) and notices the title scans incorrectly as Ferpect Crime.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Now & Forever
    At least the title's accurate: This is a viewing experience that feels like it will never end.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    A revenge tragedy as brutal and Byzantine as "Titus Andronicus," Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance accomplishes a miraculous feat by being harrowing and humane in equal measure.
  47. This Divided State
    Develops into a lively but simpleminded valentine to liberal tolerance.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Supercross
    Not since Burt Reynolds's "Stroker Ace" has a racing movie provided so many laughs, intentional or otherwise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Reel Paradise
    Unfortunately, what could have been a superficially amusing IFC reality series was stretched into a thin, overlong feature that follows the rocky integration of this very New York clan into a somewhat ruffled island society.
  50. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    A triumph of documentary activism nine years in the making.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lustre
    The film is marred by a reliance on cheap DV effects, but authenticity strains through in the performances.
  52. The Skeleton Key
    Creaky in its mechanics and numbingly protracted, this is basement B horror that fancies itself a prestige chiller.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    It's an unimaginative, mean-spirited gross-out that forgot to bring the funny.
  54. Four Brothers
    What results is unremarkably schizophrenic--half gritty sojourn into the inner-city furnace, half Hollywood brain death.
  55. The Great Raid
    The Great Raid is ultimately scotched by History Channel–worthy nostalgia.
  56. Asylum
    Mackenzie and Marber opt for an anonymous viewpoint of clinical detachment, which generates about the same psychodramatic tension as reading the "DSM-IV."
  57. The Goebbles Experiment
    The master propagandist comes across here as a brooding, insecure megalomaniac--or at times, a bitchy member of a particularly malevolent high school clique, an effect enhanced by some of narrator Kenneth Branagh's English line readings.
  58. Grizzly Man
    For many the question remains about how Treadwell's eventual death should be regarded--as a tragedy, as a fool's fate, or as comeuppance for daring to humanize wild predators and habituating them to human presence. Herzog's perspective is, of course, scrupulously nonjudgmental.
  59. Pretty Persuasion
    A high school send-up more gleefully incorrect than "Heathers" and considerably less articulate than "Election," Pretty Persuasion is a hand grenade lobbed at no place in particular.
  60. Chaos
    Chaos lacks the audience-implicating boldness or howling political outrage of that landmark (Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left"); where Last House was provocative, Chaos is merely disgusting.
  61. Pulse
    With very few strong characters and a great many middle shots, Pulse sometimes plods--it's the price of Kurosawa's restraint and his indifference to structure.
  62. The Century of the Self
    An engrossing quartet of hour-long films by British documentarian Adam Curtis, doesn't so much challenge Freud's theories of the unconscious as shadow them through the corridors of corporate and political power. What emerges is nothing less than a history of 20th-century social control.
  63. Clean
    Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    A State of Mind
    One leaves the film with the Twilight Zone sense that the place isn't quite the hellhole prior reports have suggested.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Dukes of Hazzard
    Dukes insults not "family values," as the original Cooter claims, just general intelligence. Yee. Haw.
  66. Broken Flowers
    With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)
  67. 2046
    Mood is everything, trumped up by a score so rich with pop songs, bossa nova drama, and symphonic mournfulness it's almost a movie on its own. 2046 may be a Chinese box of style geysers and earnest meta-irony, but that should not suggest there aren't bleeding humans at the center of it.
  68. My Date with Drew
    When our hero finally does get his moment in the sun--c'mon, would someone have bought the movie if he didn't?--My Date With Drew offers the surreal spectacle of pursuer and pursued pleasantly gabbing, obliviously immersed in a mutual PR stunt.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Saint Ralph
    The most blatant rip-off is of the "Rushmore" soundtrack. But Ralph Walker is no Max Fischer, and his monomania gets dull fast.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Secuestro express
    A focus on a timely social problem paired with an archetypal class-war tale would be a winning combination for Secuestro Express, were it not for the movie's strangely exploitative nature.
  71. Duma
    Duma turns out to be surprisingly flat, with little of the child's-eye imagery that gave "The Black Stallion" its poetic thrust and too much of the narrative gear-grinding that grounded stretches of "Fly Away Home."
  72. Proteus
    Broad and pleasantly idealistic, and the evident ardor for 150-year-old graphics (especially Dore's Ancient Mariner masterstrokes) is hard to argue with. But is it a movie or the best-designed episode of "Nova" ever?
  73. Junebug
    It's an exhilaratingly decentered tale, with the perspective shifting around so there's no character with whom we totally identify throughout.
  74. Darwin's Nightmare
    Darwin's Nightmare strings together cruel ironies into a work of harrowing lucidity. It illuminates the sinister logic of a new world order that depends on corrupt globalization to put an acceptable face on age-old colonialism.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young Rebels
    At least as sharp as "Buena Vista Social Club."
  76. Must Love Dogs
    With a character this dull--so dull that we're told over and over how smart and special she is--the resulting glut of date-ad losers seems like just deserts.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sky High
    Clunky and shamelessly transparent, but it's also charmingly earnest, and well designed for kids.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stealth
    Its action sequences, more geeky than thrilling, fail to rescue the laughable plot.
  79. The Aristocrats
    The Aristocrats is a veritable talent show itself, albeit one that feels inescapably slight. To rejigger another ancient joke: The food at this place isn't terrible. But the portions are really small.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-screen
    Ulmer emerges as the bigger-than-life symbol he probably desired to project: the brooding Old World artist, eternally frustrated with American market pressures, preferring to rule in Hell than serve in Hollywood.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oyster Farmer
    A quirky dramedy.
  82. Tony Takitani
    Oneiric as it is, though, Tony Takitani conveys a powerfully tangible sense of loss and loneliness. In both concrete and existential terms, it's a film that dwells on what the dead leave behind and how the living carry on.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
    Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.
  84. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    Frustratingly little here grapples with the day-to-day realities of life in Chechnya and the surrounding areas.
  85. Yat luk che
    Dishwater-dull period melodrama.
  86. The Devil's Rejects
    By rubbing your nose in this hillbilly mayhem, Zombie all but dares you to acknowledge your liberal elitism, simply because just now, in Dubya's America, you don't happen to find anything particularly funny or lovable about stupid, dangerous provincials.
  87. Hustle & Flow
    There's something wrong with Hustle. A bad aftertaste, and not just the dry grit of Memphis dust, but something meaner. A feeling that Brewer's sensibility is way off. Aside from Howard's characterization, the most indelible parts of the movie are the demeaning caricatures forced on DJay's women.
  88. The Island
    This is pure essence of Bay--it's big, it's loud, it has no context, and if you show up tanked, I'm sure it's really quite poetic.
  89. Bad News Bears
    Hardly the kids'-sports movie we need, but maybe it's as much as we can handle.
  90. 9 Songs
    Winterbottom never provides the empathic connective tissue we expect. Love it or not, 9 Songs amounts to a common human rite fastidiously caught in amber, giving off no heat or joy but crystallized for the future.
  91. The Edukators
    The Edukators smiles indulgently as the kids rage belatedly against the dying of the SDS light.
  92. Last Days
    The brilliant concluding chapter in the death trilogy that inspired Gus Van Sant's artistic rebirth.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    Instead of the affectless soundtrack of mopey indie rock, a trip through the Anthology of American Folk Music would have better served the landscape.
  94. November
    Like a jigsaw that's more fun to assemble before you know how all the pieces fit, Greg Harrison's brain-teasing meta-thriller November is less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes.
  95. Yau doh lung fu bong
    The comedy is somewhat doused by posture and repetition, and the characters' whimsical behavior is endearing and irritating in turn. Which still makes it the absolute best neo-samurai judo farce in town.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rittenhouse Square
    With just enough art-lack and speak-for-itself whiz (call me cheesy), this doc understands the famoustorical Philly park's appeal: Hot girls sunbathe there, and the bums are ka-razy.
  97. Making Grace
    Real, dramatic tension erupts as the strains placed on the women's relationship surface, offering a candid look at what the stresses of parenthood can do to any couple.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    Fun and nourishing, Charlie's the topsy-turvy equivalent of a three-course dinner in a single stick of gum.
  99. Wedding Crashers
    Amiable and hollow.
  100. Happy Endings
    Roos forecasts and explains every development with a title card, a device not unlike having someone yammering in your ear throughout the entire feature run time. In a more self-effacing director's commentary, he might have asked us, at least, to forgive the pun.
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