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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  1. Fighting Tommy Riley
    Outrageously sentimental and retrograde.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jiminy Glick in Lalawood
    Give 'em a handicap for making a 20-minute man go 90--still, it's not enough.
  3. Mysterious Skin
    With remarkable directness and composure, it shatters the myth of childhood innocence and the deathless taboo of prepubescent sexuality.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Great Role
    Chuckle-worthy jabs at American cultural imperialism aside, Le Grand Rôle has little to offer except a maudlin love story that ironically feels like a Tinseltown tearjerker facsimile.
  5. Brothers
    Brothers emerges as no less or more than Bier's claustrophobic compositions and unimaginative choices.
  6. A Hole in One
    First-time writer-director Richard Ledes's mystical tone and pervasive swipes from David Lynch tend to suffocate his satire, and stunt casting doesn't help.
  7. Up for Grabs
    Wranovics's entertaining documentary feels appropriately detached.
  8. Writer of O
    Pola Rapaport's slender documentary-cum-reconstruction Writer of O disappoints in its workmanlike approach to such fragrant material.
  9. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Studiously harmless, Disney's long-in-development film rendition pasteurizes the book's renegade verve with typical means.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    xXx: State of the Union
    The winking title X Cubed somehow eluded the makers of this sequel, along with plot coherency, character development, or clever explosions of genre convention.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    3-Iron
    Taut even when ridiculous, with flashes of comedy, 3-Iron has less to offer than its predecessors, but at minimum it's the playful exhaustion of a formal constraint.
  12. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Less a tale of desperado lovers than a cruel story of youth, Tout de Suite is framed largely in close-up, with few transitional shots and a narrative that grows increasingly fragmented.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Death of a Dynasty
    Dynasty is less interesting as a film than as a winking gloss on hip-hop's assembly line of beats, beefs, and B-list lyricists. That said, Capone does a killer dancin' Dash, James Toback's Lyor Cohen is a riot, and multi-credited comedian Kevin Hart should have his own Chappelleian series.
  14. Funny Ha Ha
    The final scene is as close to perfection as any Amerindie has come in recent memory--in a single reaction of Marnie's, we see a small but definite shift in perspective; abruptly, Bujalski stops the film, as if there's nothing more to say. It's a wonderful parting shot for a movie that locates the momentous in the mundane.
  15. The Holy Girl
    Not the least remarkable thing about this deadpan, deceptively haphazard ensemble comedy, a movie as much choreographed as directed, is the way that--at the final moment--the mist simply evaporates.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ladies in Lavender.
    So tastefully subdued it makes Merchant Ivory look like Gaspar Noé. And while they never look bored, Smith and Dench are clearly slumming, having played these roles in other costume pics.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tunnel
    Director Roland Suso Richter skillfully wields the wall as a metaphor for isolation, but his pacing needs work: He cuts from an emotional death to a rowdy scene of sex on a kitchen table. Well, that's one way to mourn.
  18. Stalin's Wife
    Tsukerman is not interested in disproving or discounting theories, but merely assembling them.
  19. Another Road Home
    Politics hover at the edges of even the most affectionate encounters among Danae, her parents, and the Obeidallah family. Amos Elon's negativity regarding the future of the Jewish state mars the film, yet Another Road Home moves beyond dark predictions.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat
    In deliberate, clinical fashion, Zev Asher's documentary catches up with a notorious Canadian case of art versus animal cruelty.
  21. The Interpreter
    The Kidman character is an exotic--and even unlikely--creature, usefully fueling Penn's annoyed but fascinated incredulity.
  22. A Lot Like Love
    Interjections from perennial second bananas Kathryn Hahn (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) and Kal Penn (winning even when not conjuring vivified bags of pot) generate the only sparks.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    King's Ransom
    Charlie Murphy's hilarious gay gangsta, relegated to the filmic down low, provides a modicum of depth in an otherwise supremely shallow effort.
  24. Double Dare
    Micheli's documentary finds a fresh angle via the intersecting stories of two stuntwomen.
  25. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Soberly entertaining documentary.
  26. Madison
    Madison peddles condescending hokum as heartland values.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Man Who Copied
    In spite of some genuinely charming performances, The Man Who Copied is about as engaging as a paper jam.
  28. One Missed Call
    One Missed Call, one of the five movies he made in 2003, is no more than Miike's shot at generating a polished, rote, expertly composed J-horror flick.
  29. Night of Henna
    Hobbles a likable cast with dialogue flatter than Bollywood's cheesiest.
  30. Dead & Breakfast
    The blood is raspberry syrup, the gags gag, and the film virtually falls over itself informing us how lame it is.
  31. Save the Green Planet!
    Mad conspiracy rules in Korean writer-director Jang Jun-hwan's snazzy, playful, some-what gory, often hilarious, and generally unpredictable first feature.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Amityville Horror
    A Xerox so tattered and faded that it's impossible to determine who's to blame for the overproduced mediocrity before our eyes.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    House of D
    Marred by a rambling voice-over at one end and a pat therapeutic resolution on the other, the film has a nice half-hour patch somewhere in the middle.
  34. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Lots of Dowse's ideas work well--the ringing tinnitus, the conversion of sound to visible waves, the trimming of treble and bass for underwatery effect, the removal of ambient noise entirely. But as the humor flags, It's All Gone Pete Tong starts to feel more like an exercise.
  35. Torremolinos 73
    Its Saul Bass-y credits suggest an Almodóvarian flamboyance, but this impotent '70s-set comedy mostly skimps on discoteca stylishness.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Girl from Monday
    A monotonous, unenlightening experience.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man
    More courageous than Spielberg in its depiction of Nazi brutality, Perlasca occasionally feels like the made-for-Italian-TV film that it is.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control
    Best appreciated for Ruben Santiago-Hudson's convincing performance as a man possessed by a quartet of supernatural beings.
  39. Palindromes
    If the point of "A Dirty Shame" was that nothing human is foreign to John Waters, Palindromes seems to suggest that, for Todd Solondz, everything human is.
  40. State Property 2
    When this flick is honest about its pimping, it has that Rat Pack charm. But attempts at real ruggish posturing--like that de rigueur sideways-gatted, full-body-exposure firing stance--are just plain laughable.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    15: The Movie
    The collision of neorealist casting with in-your-face visual pyrotechnics is jarring to say the least, and 15 quickly wears down the viewer with its barrage of strobe effects and attention-deficit editing.
  42. Raging Dove
    Raging Dove can't avoid the biodoc pitfall of fixating on its subject's personal saga to the virtual exclusion of all else; by the end it's essentially blaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Abu Lashin's professional demise.
  43. Sahara
    Sahara is many things, but it is not a movie. It is the skull-splitting cacophony of 21 producers and four screenwriters (that we know about, anyway) standing in the same room shouting into their cell phones.
  44. Fever Pitch
    But the ickiest thing about Fever Pitch is its reverential Field of Dreams music.
  45. Kung Fu Hustle
    Chow manages to have his cake and eat it too: Kung Fu Hustle is a kung fu parody that's also a terrific kung fu movie.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Eating Out
    The best straight-plays-gay, straight-goes-gay flick since "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets."
  47. Winter Solstice
    What makes Winter Solstice, a nice little Jersey vignette about a widower and his two teenage sons, so striking is writer-director Josh Sternfeld's respect for the verbal shorthand of family interaction.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    This would-be comedy about a thirtysomething family man (Attal) and his foray into infidelity is probably the worst in the putrid bushel of recent Gallic imports.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Friend
    Shot on DV, the film looks awful, but this homemade quality fosters an authenticity that allows for startling suspense as Yunes's secret life comes to light.
  50. Major Dundee (re-release)
    What rescues Major Dundee in the end from its many conflicts and unresolved passions is Heston.
  51. Eros
    The omnibus film usually saves its home run for the climax, but Eros begins with the best third, Wong Kar-wai's "The Hand."
  52. A Hole in My Heart
    An unrelentingly crass and confrontational barf bomb that makes Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" look like the philosophical experiment that it is.
  53. Voices in Wartime
    Poorly organized mishmash of archival war films, scholarly chatter, and literary quotations.
  54. First Love
    Probing the trust-based power games of a sadomasochistic dynamic, the movie is a reasonably thoughtful study of obsessive love.
  55. David Hockney: The Colors of Music
    This delightfully sensual documentary gets inside the artist's creative process while also treating viewers to glorious music by the likes of Wagner and Satie.
  56. In Satmar Custody
    Chilling and thoroughly engrossing documentary.
  57. Sin City
    Sin City lacks the human interest, not to be confused with humanism, that "Pulp Fiction" had in abundance. As if to underscore the fact, Tarantino guest-directed a scene. It's readily recognizable as the only one in which the dialogue has the slightest conviction.
  58. Dust to Glory
    The movie is monotonous, storyless, and at under 100 minutes, interminable.
  59. Girl Play
    Greenspan and Harmon's paltry song of themselves concludes with five minutes of outtakes, capping the self-love.
  60. Control
    Bulcsú never surfaces from the underworld. Neither does the movie-literally or figuratively.
  61. Look at Me
    Little in a Jaoui film is particularly original, but it's all perfectly convincing.
  62. Beauty Shop
    Breezy, sporadically funny.
  63. Odessa... Odessa!
    A modernist travelogue, at once impressionistic and precise.
  64. Oldboy
    Whatever its oversteps and excesses (I do think Park ran a little amok with the computer gimcrackery), Oldboy has the bulldozing nerve and full-blooded passion of a classic.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Guess Who
    The script's lack of nerve fails to challenge him (Mac) or its audience with enough dangerous humor.
  66. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    Day-Lewis is as rooted as an oak in his character and milieu, yet easefully disengaged from the film's pensive histrionics.
  67. D.E.B.S.
    Aims for a mix of "Heathers" wit and "Batman" TV-show camp.
  68. Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling
    Leitman's interviews are lax and inconclusive.
  69. Nina's Tragedies
    With improbable charm, Gabizon knits it all together, his characters' sexual obsessions and earthiness tempered by a soulful melancholy.
  70. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    Bullock manages medium charm, but you gotta feel for King, forced to play dat-bitch-crazy butch to Bullock's untrammeled femme.
  71. Mondovino
    Nossiter has an eye for stray details and a knack for relaxing his subjects- although the scene with the naked guy trampling his own grapes may make you sorry that you ever gave up drinking Ripple.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beyond the Sea
    This is hardly the most in-depth doc on Cuban refugees (see the epic Balseros). Still, Beyond the Sea grants a quiet dignity to its subjects without sanctifying them.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ice Princess
    The surprisingly twisty plot skates along with zero friction, giving new meaning to "Disney on Ice."
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Ring Two
    This poorly conceived sequel to Gore Verbinski's "The Ring" ditches that film's scariest conceit.
  75. Melinda and Melinda
    Neither comedy nor tragedy, the movie is closest to genteel soap opera.
  76. Fifty-Fifty
    A modest, formulaic day trip from Kazakhstan.
  77. Steamboy
    Steamboy doesn't have the deep melancholia or the visionary élan of last year's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Consistent in its graphic invention from first to last, however, it's a sensationally designed piece of work. (The retro stylistics are comparable to Brazil, David Lynch's Dune, and The Iron Giant.)
  78. The Rider Named Death
    All the same, The Rider Named Death is curiously anemic; rather than passion, outrage, and danger, we're contemplating the sotto voce conspiracy love of a quaintly distant age, when results weren't quite as emotionally important as commitment and camaraderie.
  79. Milk and Honey
    In the end, Milk and Honey's contrived connections blossom into a disarmingly effective reckoning with loss and regret.
  80. 16 Years of Alcohol
    16 Years' greatest asset may be its star: Trainspotting's McKidd, coiled and queasy, transcends the dubious romanticism and hard-man clichés of his role -- he exudes a commanding air of constancy in a film that teeters between the rapturous and the ridiculous.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    After the Apocalypse
    While short on narrative propulsion, Yasuaki Nakajima's low-budget, 72-minute After the Apocalypse turns out to be a surprisingly engaging ride.
  82. Hostage
    Bruce looks hot and underplays handsomely as always, but Hostage is a steaming pile of siege clichés and screaming unlikelihoods.
  83. Robots
    Entertaining enough that it leaves one wishing for more in the way of android mythology—a pint-sized Blade Runner or A.I. The screenplay goes on autopilot, grinding toward a happy ending just when it has a shot at something darker and more memorable.
  84. The Upside of Anger
    The film has exhausted itself with fits of glib hysteria long before its truly stupefying final twist, a stunning betrayal of audience trust.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Millions
    Danny Boyle's Millions is not what we'd expect from the "Trainspotting" and "28 Days Later" director. It's essentially a gentle, kid's-eye parable.
  86. In My Country
    Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude; for an infinitely superior account of this chapter of South African history, seek out the documentary "Long Night's Journey Into Day."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Mail Order Wife
    Less a film, more a series of ragtag gags.
  88. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    Gets by on infectious geniality.
  89. Don't Move
    A compelling if not altogether convincing tale of mad love and divine redemption, adapted from the prize-winning novel by Castellitto's wife, Margaret Mazzantini.
  90. Dot the I
    The movie finally undermines all pretensions of satire with its geeky eagerness to subvert expectations.
  91. Nowhere Man
    Nowhere Man, despite a tossed-off ending, is a compulsive bit of meta-exploitation.
  92. Off the Map
    Were it not so soporific, Off the Map could easily drive you off your nut.
  93. Santa Santita
    Melodramatic Filipino coming-of-ager concerns the budding sexuality of a young girl in a devoutly Catholic culture.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sheriff
    There's so little meat to his likable subject that the endeavor proves less "Cops" and more "The Andy Griffith Show."
  95. Be Cool
    Rock is brave, fully invested in his character, and with a wide-open face and foolish grin, outrageously funny. It's a singular performance achieved without condescension or camp. Who'd a-thunk it?
  96. The Jacket
    A disappointing nosedive into the mainstream for John Maybury, the Derek Jarman acolyte who transitioned successfully from experimental work to features with 1998's hallucinatory Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is the Devil."
  97. The Pacifier
    Disney misfire.
  98. Dear Frankie
    Somehow the U.K. film industry can always scrounge enough loose change from the cushions to foot the bill for a pre-chewed lump of sickly saltwater taffy like the mawkish Scottish-seaside postcard Dear Frankie.
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