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. Dolls
    Dolls risks the bank on symbology as gaudy as teen anime and as heavy as a stone temple.
  2. Ocean's Twelve
    Funnier and sprightlier than Eleven, which exhibited a genial self-consciousness but never thought to challenge the genre textbook, Twelve is committed to not taking itself seriously.
  3. A Tale of Two Sisters
    Either way, Kim's rather clumsily acted film remains monstrously effective ookiness, with crepuscular cinematography (by the Hollywood-destined Kim Byeong-il) that suggests a nightmare endured from inside a suffocating velvet pillowcase.
  4. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Murray is always pleasurable company, and his barely suppressed soulfulness might've supported this dawdling big-fish story if its insistent larkiness had abated and let a little reality in, as had "Rushmore."
  5. Shwaas
    Takes a potential hot-button premise--the callous indifference of the Indian medical bureaucracy toward the lower classes--and dramatizes it in the most shameless way possible.
  6. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.
  7. Blade: Trinity
    Director Goyer, who wrote all three Blade films, deserves credit for sticking with the character, but aside from the effectively staged action sequences Trinity is cheap-looking and laughably inept.
  8. House of Flying Daggers
    If only this epic had enough substantial melodramatic hooks to hang this woman's beauty on; emotional traction is most often buried under acres of carefully coordinated vistas and CGI-hued flora.
  9. After Midnight
    What makes After Midnight more than just another ménage à trois (in homage to Truffaut) is the way Ferrario, who also writes about movies, weaves the allure of early film into a contemporary story, shot with the latest high-definition technology.
  10. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over's brazen lopsidedness may diminish its credibility, but it taps into the essence of all conspiracy theories-the desperate desire to believe.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Conspiracy of Silence
    Due to Conspiracy's TV-movie simplicity, it's unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just something spicy to be cooked up in the potboiler.
  12. The Deserted Station
    Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's "Leila," makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jesus, You Know
    Complex and deeply moving documentary.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Schechter has a broad sub-Chomskian critique of the media's complicity in building support for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
  15. The Green Butchers
    The two leads capably humanize an overdetermined screenplay that often fumbles with bludgeoning symbolism and rank sentimentality.
  16. The Aryan Couple
    Feel-good historical fiction, The Aryan Couple insultingly seeks to soothe and comfort against the reality of atrocity.
  17. Closer
    Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    AmnesiA
    So true to its title that I've forgotten many of the details already--and I just saw it this morning. This latecomer has been rendered completely obsolete by “Memento.”
  19. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.
  20. Easy
    The romantic woes of one attractive, privileged, intellectually overreaching acupuncture enthusiast don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
  21. A Very Long Engagement
    Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.
  22. Ae Fond Kiss...
    Despite the agreeable lead performances, it's one of Loach's more forgettable films.
  23. Straight-Jacket
    Jacket's shrill, Necco-colored sets and distractingly awful CGI long shots almost mask the movie's real coup: Letscher's physique.
  24. Notre musique
    Too touchy-feely for some hardcore Godardians, Notre Musique is the most lucid of the master's recent films.
  25. Christmas with the Kranks
    Cringe-worthy spectacle.
  26. Alexander
    Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.
  27. Bob, Verushka & the Pursuit of Happiness
    Patently unfunny romantic comedy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fear and Trembling
    A culture-clash comedy that takes the notion of Japanese otherness to ludicrous extremes.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Jandek on Corwood
    Chad Friedrichs's doc has too many rock-crit talking heads, too often saying the same thing based on scant information -- a clumsy portrait of the artist that inadvertently serves as a mirror of the critical faculty itself.
  30. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    Revived (with vastly improved subtitles) some 14 years after it first stunned Hong Kong critics, Days of Being Wild is a sort of meta-reverie populated by a cast of beautiful young pop icons.
    • Village Voice
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    National Treasure
    Ham-handed to start, with a fondness for cochlea-crushing decibel levels, National Treasure gets more entertaining as the preposterousness rises.
  32. Bad Education
    There's something dull and evasive at the film's center--for one thing, contrary to its festival buzz, Bad Education tiptoes around the issue of priesthood pedophilia; lovelorn gazes are as desperate as it gets.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    An unstoppable good-mood generator, the resolutely 2-D SpongeBob SquarePants Movie has more yuks than "Shark Tale" and enough soul to swallow "The Polar Express" whole.
  34. Ya lyublyu tebya
    Not without its loopy charms. Indeed, the film is most buoyant when most over-the-top.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Muhammad: The Last Prophet
    Though noble in its intent to portray Islam as a peace-loving faith, the narrative flow remains compromised by its catechistic asides and displaced hero.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Who Killed Bambi?
    Too vague in its cat-and-mouse play to succeed as a psychological thriller, Who Killed Bambi? fares better as a visual exercise in white-on-whiteness.
  37. Bright Future
    Kurosawa strolls through his narrative with relaxed confidence, suggesting apocalyptic significances without assuring us that he has anything particular on his mind.
  38. Little Lili
    True to Chekhov's dictum, a gun does fire near the end -- by which point eye-rolling audience members may be up in arms too.
  39. Noel
    Most of the redemptive notes ring false, as does the mythical Manhattan, where the snow is just too clean and everybody lives around the corner.
  40. Seed of Chucky
    The film mostly shoots blanks; it's less than the sum of its in-jokes.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    After the Sunset
    Despite its misguided comic pretensions, this brazenly unimaginative caper movie is most effective as a feature-length infomercial for its location, which will here remain undisclosed.
  42. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    Improbably, the sequel only ups the ante on its predecessor's comedy-of-embarrassment quotient.
  43. Kinsey
    Opening too late for the election but still one the year's most politically relevant movies, Condon's earnestly middlebrow biopic is an argument for tolerance and diversity.
  44. Veer-Zaara
    With just the right balance of epic grandeur and break-into-song goofiness, this Bollywood love legend does double duty as a women's-rights manifesto and a plea for amity between India and Pakistan.
  45. Finding Neverland
    Depp and Highmore's final scene together strikes a muted blow of desolation -- bottomless but just bearable -- that Forster rather bravely lets stand as the last word on all the fanciful solace that Barrieland had to offer.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Master of the Game
    Director Stolhand gets a high-quality look on a minimal budget, but the script and acting are so amateurish.
  47. New Guy
    Never quite locates a sensibility to call its own.
  48. Overnight
    Grim going.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Polar Express
    When it comes to the "humans," the atmosphere collapses. Unnervingly smooth, mouths moving in strange, even frightening formations, the Polar people are the least convincing things on-screen, glaring impostors amid the otherwise painstakingly rendered scenery.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Callas Forever
    Sadly, this camp drama, a eulogy by one of Callas's closest friends, pales in comparison to the four minutes of "La Mamma Morta" in Philadelphia.
  51. Fade to Black
    The film has a feel similar to his songs--airtight, forthright, never spat till they're set.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brother to Brother
    First-timer Rodney Evans's leaden script fails to live up to the poetry of its subjects and raises more themes--black-on-black homophobia, light-skin versus dark-skin prejudice, writers' envy--than it can fully develop.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cachorro
    Much smarter than the average comedy.
  54. Alfie
    Indeed, remake hack Charles Shyer (who processed the Parent Trap and Father of the Bride updates) plays coy with most matters sexual -- an odd and puritanical approach to a character who molds his entire existence around the procurement and enjoyment of sex.
  55. The Incredibles
    Unfortunately, the delicious snatches of reflexive wit function as mere intermissions between the distended action sequences and Michael Bay–style megatonnage, which have earned Pixar its first ever PG rating.
  56. Scumrock
    Gripping, strangely beautiful, and poignant.
  57. Farmingville
    Authentic ethical dialogue is conspicuous for its absence, as is the potentially disturbing view of a normal, working-class corner of American society going not-so-quietly cuckoo.
  58. A Silent Love
    The movie can't resist putting its key points in italics, but it maintains a refreshingly unsentimental trajectory.
  59. Voices of Iraq
    It's certainly important for American leftists to consider that many Iraqis have benefited from the war that we oppose, but the omission of historical context here misrepresents the checkered history of American involvement in the region.
  60. It's All About Love
    It's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.
  61. Malevolence
    Laughably unscary.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Enduring Love
    Craig keeps Joe Rose on a hair trigger, but Morton is wasted as Claire; Ifans simply looks stoned.
  63. Birth
    If Birth succeeds more as a source of visual and aural enthrallment than as supernatural narrative, it's largely because the final third hovers uncomfortably between the mystical and the earthbound.
  64. Saw
    With its toilet-bobbing and blood spurting and Elwes's fey, Vincent Price–like mugging, Saw succeeds in capturing something like Takashi Miike by way of William Castle. Happy Halloween, indeed.
  65. Ray
    Hackford's movie falls into a meandering saunter. As the music grows dull, so does the movie.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    800 Bullets
    Though the high-noon climax drags somewhat, Álex de la Iglesia's charming comedy celebrates the resilient power of dreams, memories, and the movies.
  67. Magnifico
    If Michiko Yamamoto's screenplay overdoes Magnifico's holy-fool virtue to the point of hysteria, de los Reyes's fluid compositions, dead-on pacing, and knack for eliciting naturalistic performances make the story uncommonly cathartic.
  68. Home of the Brave
    Doubles as a narrative of the nascent women's movement.
  69. Sideways
    Jack and Miles are male archetypes, as well as the two most fully realized comic creations in recent American movies.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stella Street
    A huge problem with the whole shebang is that the impressions (all courtesy Cornwell and Sessions) are shaky at best.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Fish Without a Bicycle
    Strong performances are marred by a script whose dialogue ranges from cheesy to unspeakably bad.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Happy Hour
    Every alkie downward-spiral cliché from "The Lost Weekend" to "Leaving Las Vegas."
  73. Undertow
    However cloying, the movie creates a powerful vortex. It's surprisingly visceral-at times almost thrilling.
  74. Hearts and Minds (re-release)
    Built to outrage, appall, and indict.
  75. The Manson Family
    A film the family might've made themselves: sophomoric, hagiographic, amateurishly strobe-happy, and thoroughly hippiefied.
  76. Lightning in a Bottle
    Offers a bumper crop of tasty bits.
  77. Postmen in the Mountains
    The notion that every generation is fundamentally the same gets hammered home so relentlessly that it becomes suffocating, despite all the fresh air.
  78. The Machinist
    The Machinist has no meat on its bones, and we've seen it all before.
  79. The Grudge
    The overdetermined approach preempts character shadings or social subtext-just compare Hideo Nakata's original "Ring," which tapped its dread from viral-replicant mass culture and its pathos from a broken home, or Nakata's "Dark Water," which channeled the sorrow, guilt, and paranoia felt by a young divorcée mired in a custody battle.
  80. Surviving Christmas
    This ghastly comedy emits the subliminal whine of a sucking chest wound.
  81. Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die
    The even faintly informed will see only a cut-rate vision of flabby white men defending their own bloodthirsty opportunism.
  82. Sex Is Comedy
    Enjoyable if light, until it becomes apparent that Breillat is not simply waxing narcissistic but fashioning a simultaneous critique, explication, and demystification of the lengthy, near-single-take defloration that is Fat Girl's centerpiece.
  83. P.S.
    The question of whether this is a movie about reincarnation or fate or middle-aged delusion remains unaddressed far beyond our capacity to care. Many of the admirably long conversational scenes are pointless; some, like Harden and Linney's climactic bitch-fest in a hotel room, are flat-out absurd.
  84. The Final Cut
    Pressing on in grimly introverted "One Hour Photo" mode, Williams only stirs nostalgia for his slapstick days (ghastly '90s roles notwithstanding)--he's such a natural-born ham he manages to overdo understatement.
  85. Moolaadé
    This has to be the most richly entertaining movie anyone has ever made on the subject of female genital mutilation.
  86. Eulogy
    If the recurring gag about Grandma's suicide attempts doesn't have you rolling in the aisles, there's always the domineering aunt whose husband sits at the kiddie table.
  87. Being Julia
    Bening's comic gifts make the most of Ronald Harwood's witty screenplay, though she falls flat in her character's rare moments of sincerity.
  88. Saints and Soldiers
    The thin backstory hints at a conflict between the religious convictions of the hero (helpfully named Deacon) and the demands of combat, but it never fully materializes; as it is, we mainly know that he's a Mormon because he doesn't smoke or drink coffee.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shall We Dance
    While Suo's original was hardly a masterpiece, it featured a subtle performance from Koji Yakusho. Gere doesn't even compare, playing the part of a despondent lawyer with the empathy of a mannequin.
  90. Team America: World Police
    Team America is at once grandiose and tacky, elaborate and deflationary.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed
    Overreaching in many of its laudatory appraisals, the film is mostly GOP-boosting rhetoric in the guise of a dull History Channel special.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Scandal
    E J-Yong's transposition illuminates, with satisfying crispness, the hyper-Confucian high society of the time, as well as the underground Catholic movement.
  93. Vera Drake
    Vera Drake puts the passion in compassion. Building up to a shattering conclusion, Leigh's movie is both outrageously schematic and powerfully humanist.
  94. Around the Bend
    Veers deep into male-weepie territory.
  95. Vodka Lemon
    Saleem, a Paris-based Kurd, displays the visual confidence and subtle screwball rhythms of a master, exploiting offscreen space, deadpan compositions, and deft visual backbeats, as well as attaining a breathtaking fidelity to real light and landscape.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Yes Nurse! No Nurse!
    It's all an excuse for some daft production numbers, however, and a chance to relive the vanished Holland of your youth. Yes Nurse? No Nurse? Maybe Nurse!
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Go Further
    Go Further meanders--narratively as well as geographically--all over the map.
  98. Silent Water
    Sumar's debut feature could scarcely be more relevant to Pakistan's present, or, given this country's history of backing such repressive regimes, to ours.
  99. Stage Beauty
    Most frustrating, Stage Beauty fumbles XX/XY politics at every turn.
  100. Friday Night Lights
    Director Peter Berg, an actor himself, gets quietly excruciated performances from the team members.
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