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. Primer
    Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction.
  2. Raise Your Voice
    The God-squad answer to Todd Graff's "Camp."
  3. The Child I Never Was
    Kai S. Pieck's debut feature finds a plaintive, compelling route to the pathology of 1960s German child-killer Jürgen Bartsch.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Arna's Children
    Refreshing and depressing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Card Player
    Ingenious but relatively tame thriller.
  6. Tarnation
    A tale of sadness and hysteria so raw that it bleeds.
  7. Taxi
    Throughout this Americanization of the Luc Besson–scripted French hit, Latifah itches to check her watch, Fallon appears mortified, and only Ann-Margret mainlines any comic adrenalin.
  8. Tying the Knot
    We never get to see the dailiness of coupled life or learn what made these relationships tick--and why they are so worthy of legal validation.
  9. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    I got a charge out of Going Upriver, but as more than one person has noted, the movie's ideal spectator would be Kerry himself.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Woman Thou Art Loosed
    Feels part reality show, part mockumentary, part Jakes promo video.
  11. Dig!
    These flashes push Dig! beyond recording-industry kvetch, causing it to stay with you longer than either band's ephemeral music.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Shark Tale
    Shark Tale's shallow plot and leagues of padding put it fully in the shadow of last year's animated underwater offering, the nifty, heartfelt "Finding Nemo."
  13. I Heart Huckabees
    There's more than a bit of Charlie Kaufman to the heady premise, although the scenario doesn't double back on itself--except perhaps in the joke of having Schwartzman's actual mother, Talia Shire, play his mother on-screen.
  14. Ladder 49
    Not as snort-worthy as "Backdraft," Ladder 49 is a serviceable testament to the firemen who would bravely risk their lives to protect the safety of others.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Cloud of Unknowing
    Stilted lines alternate with ominous pauses and an annoying Pure Moods score tinkling around an oppressive sound design.
  16. Incantato
    If you can suspend your disbelief regarding Nello's naïveté, this film offers some quiet pleasures.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Yes Men
    Though at times the film is snortingly funny, too much of the humor here rests on presupposed opinion about globalization.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burn! (re-release)
    A flawed, but intriguing work, it offers, here and there, proof of Pontecorvo's gift for ecstatic epic filmmaking.
  19. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Skillfully reinforces Chisholm as a refreshingly quixotic populist, running on fervor and indignation.
  20. Blissfully Yours
    A deadpan, self-consciously prehistoric version of Jean Renoir's rueful idyll A Day in the Country, Blissfully Yours is unconscionably happy.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Raspberry Reich
    A lovingly overblown piece of terrorist-chic trashfilm.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Moog
    Dry interviews and soggy performances by the likes of Money Mark and Rick Wakeman of Yes don't do much to burnish Moog's legacy.
  23. First Daughter
    First Daughter is less amusing than Jenna and Barb at the RNC, and dumb enough to make last January's presidential scion, Mandy Moore, look electable.
  24. A Dirty Shame
    Waters's far-from-phallocratic sexual democracy is not so much hilarious as goofy and more rousing than arousing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rick
    Rick (Bill Pullman) is an embittered cad who fails to earn the audience's sympathy, so the film falls short of its source's tragic dimensions. That aside, Daniel Handler's script and Curtiss Clayton's direction hit all the right notes, especially in the final act.
  26. Mind the Gap
    In the crass, endless Mind the Gap, Schaeffer dares to ape "Magnolia," telling five barely connected stories with all the grace of a juggler tossing open bottles of Drano.
  27. The Last Shot
    Planned inanity never gets mad mad mad mad enough.
  28. The Forgotten
    The resolution is as surprise-free as it is improbably sunny.
  29. Infernal Affairs
    Spins in place with aplomb, generating exponentially more vertiginous doublings with each sweaty-palmed set piece.
  30. Shaun of the Dead
    The actors are all on target (particularly Penelope Wilton as Shaun's relentlessly cheery mum), and taken on its own shaky legs it's a wittier genre coda than "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."
  31. Anatomy of Hell
    Anatomy of Hell gives a feminist twist to a French literary tradition that goes back to the Marquis de Sade. It's also svelte, assured filmmaking.
  32. The Motorcycle Diaries
    Lovely to look at but insipid.
  33. September Tapes
    The film outs itself as a shallow indie "Rambo."
  34. Hollywood Buddha
    The movie, as an exercise in narcissism, is breathtaking.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Take
    Combining the common-sense lucidity of Klein's "No Logo" with an undertone of melancholy doggedness, The Take follows its characters through a national election that feels like an antipodean doppelgänger of our own.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Story of the Eye
    This skin-deep flick is merely art-school sophomoric, unwittingly cornball, and counterrevolutionary.
  37. Cowboys & Angels
    Ostensibly a less colorful, feature-length "Queer Eye," the film also examines the apparent social trichotomy of modern Ireland, where you're either a fashion designer, a drug dealer, or a complete square.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Merci Docteur Rey
    Litvack offers a cameo by Vanessa Redgrave as proof that there's a prestige picture within all this frivolous melodrama. Non, merci.
  39. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    A movie of elegant understatement and considerable formal intelligence.
  40. Particles of Truth
    In the central romantic push-pull, Elster and Harold achieve a rare, edgily hopeful chemistry amid emotional ruins.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Zelary
    Zelary strands its protagonists in a hermetically sealed world where time runs in place. It's a feeling that viewers of this two-and-a-half-hour epic will come to know all too well.
  42. Mr 3000
    The real news is that Mac has finally found a movie that taps into the dark side displayed in his best stand-up work. A hilarious elementary-school scene plays off the comedian's ambivalence toward kids.
  43. Incident at Loch Ness
    The film slowly sheds its convincing identity as nonfiction and becomes a cruel parody of making-of docs, studio-movie pandering, and showbiz egomania.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.
  45. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    You can call me fanboy, but this is the best anime I've ever seen.
  46. Wimbledon
    The appealing leads have strong chemistry, but it's the wrong kind: an affectionate big-brother/little-sister rapport that leaves a discomfiting taint on their more amorous clinches.
  47. Silver City
    Sayles, it seems, doesn't think much of his audience, and the tone of his discourse is only nominally less pandering than a politician's.
  48. Unlikely Heroes
    It's also frustrating-we long to learn more about each individual. Still, the sheer fascination and profoundly moving power of these stories transcend the film's more conventional limitations.
  49. Reconstruction
    That Reconstruction is even remotely involving is due to the quality of its acting.
  50. Criminal
    He (Jacobs) and cinematographer Chris Menges compose the film largely in close-ups, and the effect is appropriately unnerving. Regardless, unfavorable comparisons to "Nine Queens" are inevitable.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Testosterone
    We're teased with the prospect of a deeper context.
  52. Cellular
    Basinger takes her shuddery Stanwyckness very seriously, but everyone else has a ball.
  53. When Will I Be Loved
    More wacky than wack.
  54. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    Not without its moments of elemental dread, Apocalypse is also obviously padded, too long on action, and painfully short on irony. The satirical element still packs a minor jolt.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Evergreen
    Though the acting is tentative at times, with performances not quite landing on the same page, Evergreen is a compassionate slice of Pacific Northwest misery.
  56. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
    All in all, Hijacking is less a movie than a litany of arguments intended as, or at least only useful as, a brickbat in the discourse, aimed at your neighbor's Republican noggin.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Letter to True
    A Letter to True could provide a corrective reminder that bad taste emerges in high-class forms as often as low. The film's failures cannot be faulted to inexperience.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Private Archives of Pablo Escovar
    Hits just the right balance of pop and political. Though flat by cinematic standards, Beaufort's TV aesthetics--sonorous Telemundo-style narrator, black-backgrounded talking heads, and gaudy titles--nevertheless befit the story.
  59. Virgin
    Kampmeier's muddled, miserable first feature about maculate conception will make you look back fondly on 1985, the year Godard's "Hail Mary" and Norman Jewison's "Agnes of God" came out.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Remember Me, My Love
    This sentimental movie is the simulacrum of an existential family drama. But the 48-year-old Morante is the real thing.
  61. The Cookout
    Eventually, the pointlessness of The Cookout exudes a modicum of charm, but the simple-minded mess still lacks the wit and moral weight of an episode of "Family Matters."
  62. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    Comfortably familiar. It lacks the tension between grandeur and intimacy that characterizes the films it apes.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
    In the rare moments when a rifle, grenade, howitzer, bayonet, dagger, fist, land mine, or flamethrower isn't being deployed, the film pushes its melodramatic plotline with soap operatic shamelessness.
  64. Wicker Park
    Dippy romantic thriller.
  65. Paparazzi
    Cookie-cutter "Cape Fear" knockoff.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Persons of Interest
    Beautiful, powerful, and moving interrogation.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Rockets Redglare!
    A bloated, intermittently coherent mess.
  68. Vanity Fair
    The pacing feels choppy, and the characters' emotions are sometimes too sudden to be believable. (One exception is Rhys Ifans, affecting as Amelia's long-suffering and neglected suitor.)
  69. Brothers in Arms
    The less-is-more approach to Kerry's war heroics (the incident that led to his Silver Star is covered only briefly) allows the crewmen to dominate.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Chooch
    Devoid of Sopranos stereotypes, the film charms with its p.c. portrayal of Italian Americans, yet the depiction of Mexicans veers toward the offensive.
  71. Suspect Zero
    None of the principals is remotely likable--although Kingsley does appear to enjoy swanning around the great Southwest like a low-rent Anthony Hopkins.
  72. The Brown Bunny
    It's genuinely elemental, embarrassingly sincere. You can't accuse Gallo of pandering to anyone but himself. Not just a one-man band, he is his own entourage -- and likely to remain so. And that anguished solipsism seems to be, at least in part, the movie's subject.
  73. Bush's Brain
    The campaign's latest scare doc takes its title, Bush's Brain, and much of its argument from the portrait of political operative and bogeyman Karl Rove published last year by a pair of Dallas newsmen.
  74. Hero
    Zhang Yimou's impeccably crafted, all-star martial arts extravaganza, is the essence of shallow gravitas.
  75. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    Clearly a bottom-feeder.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Wife's Name Is Maurice
    Aside from Laspalès's enlivening physical humor, Poiré's forced, formulaic comedy of errors has little to offer.
  77. Bright Leaves
    Continuing the autobiographical torrent begun nearly 30 years ago, Bright Leaves is an utterly mundane miracle, a sampling of gentle insight and poetic retrospection quietly at odds with the exploitative culture around it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    End of the Century
    Johnny's analysis and will carry the film. Of course they didn't get along--they were a rock group.
  79. Almost Peaceful
    French director Michel Deville has managed to preserve the work's great virtues--the intimacy, discretion, grace, and humor with which it speaks of both irredeemable disaster and the taste for life that survives it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (re-release)
    Slowly devolves to the inept "warm bodies shine together in the darkness."
  81. Mean Creek
    As obvious in many ways as its title (and its poster), Mean Creek retains a gritty working-class ambience, but it feels over-rehearsed.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bright Young Things
    Aside from cameos by Jim Broadbent (as the drunken major) and Peter O'Toole (as Nina's reclusive, eccentric father), much of the acting strains for a sophistication that quickly becomes annoying.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog.
  84. Red Lights
    A satisfyingly well-wrought, old-school thriller: Character drives the plot, literally.
  85. Exorcist: The Beginning
    The gooseberry Harlin came up with will win no proselytizers, but it does have a pleasant matinee modesty, a cool sepia-period look, and an interesting flashback relationship with Nazis.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Benji: Off the Leash!
    This unwarranted iteration of the '70s shaggy-dog tale pales in entertainment value compared to its website, which features a rant from the mutt's creator, Joe Camp.
  87. Without a Paddle
    Burt Reynolds turns up as scruffy mountain man, sparking unfulfilled expectations of some primo Deliverance jokes.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    It's Easier for a Camel...
    Long-winded, jokingly self-deprecating, and clichéd.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    AVP: Alien vs. Predator
    With perfunctory battle sequences, cardboard characters, and uncreative scare 'ems, Paul W.S. Anderson's monster mashup isn't quite terrible enough to be so-bad-it's-awesome, but his swift (if forced) plotting and amusingly shoddy costumes mean that there could be worse ways to enjoy air-conditioning.
  90. The Leopard (re-release)
    The Leopard is the greatest film of its kind made since World War II—its only rivals are Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and Visconti's own "Senso."
  91. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    Naomi Watts is a tremendous movie actress. She need only sidle on camera and glance over the terrain to claim the scene. What's her secret? Like the great Isabelle Huppert, Watts doesn't radiate feelings so much as she absorbs them.
  92. Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.
  93. Danny Deckchair
    Weird, frivolous, and impossible to dislike.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    Scenes end abruptly, laughs are as rare as yetis, and the overarching question seems to be: Can we turn this into a franchise?
  95. Bang Rajan
    As hokey as "Braveheart" and yet much more apocalyptic, Thanit Jitnukul's muscular jungle bloodbath outdoes Hollywood's recent efforts at combat ultra-realism.
  96. Last Life in the Universe
    Cheeky and elusive, Last Life in the Universe inhabits a high-lonesome world unto itself, a bright daydream that dissipates in the aching gap of a missed connection.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Already a top-selling DVD thanks to PR support from moveon.org, numerous media outlets, political blogs, and even Doonesbury, Outfoxed argues that Fox News's pro-Republican bias is top-down.
  98. Stander
    Kind of a bore.
  99. Code 46
    Late in the day, Code 46 bursts its chemical chains to become a convincingly irrational love story.
  100. Little Black Book
    A mondo product placement in search of a screenplay, the conscious "Working Girl" homage Little Black Book makes the mistake of banking on Brittany Murphy, a Melanie Griffith look-alike with none of Griffith's gawky charms.
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