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. Fanny and Alexander (re-release)
    Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make F&A feel like his youngest film.
  2. Control Room
    This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Twist
    Stahl plays just one note: anguish. You know things are bad when the most interesting character, the menacing brute Bill Sykes, is never heard or seen on-screen.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Youth
    Though director Ratnam keeps this actioner running MTV-smoothly, his global pop style is both complemented and bested by composer A.R. Rahman (Lagaan, Bombay Dreams), whose electronic soundtrack grafts chunky post-hip-hop beats onto the quickly evolving sonic norms of subcontinental cinema.
  5. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."
  6. Shrek 2
    Some of the buckshot hits its target: Shrek's second sidekick, assassin-turned-comrade Puss in Boots, is voiced by Antonio Banderas as an outrageously mock-dramatic Spaniard with most of the pig-pile screenplay's best toss-offs.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    With All Deliberate Speed
    While the filmmaker avoids a conventional episodic format driven by central characters in conflict, he hasn't created one that could keep a complex story clear.
  8. Carandiru
    Carandiru's every scene is cut from factory-issue prison-genre cloth to fit jailhouse stock characters.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Breakin' All the Rules
    The threadbare plot gets considerable padding from alternately psychotic, lecherous, and greedy Caucasians.
  10. A Slipping-Down Life
    While the camera unsuccessfully courts Southern gothic humor, caressing a hodgepodge of retro-fetish knickknacks, the actors' knowing glances seem to look beyond the confines not only of the town, but of the film itself.
  11. Strayed
    As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.
  12. Springtime in a Small Town
    Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.
  13. The 24th Day
    No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).
  14. Coffee and Cigarettes
    C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to--never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea.
  15. Troy
    Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.
  16. Off the Lip
    Succeeds at being laughably highfalutin.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mudge Boy
    Despite its chic pedigree, the film projects a shy modesty, a virtue largely attributable to Emile Hirsch's unflashy performance.
  18. Godzilla
    As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.
  19. Valentin
    Argentinean director Alejandro Agresti's own specs are rose-colored. This loosely autobiographical tale feels inorganically upbeat, with all potentially upsetting material glossed over or truncated.
  20. Oasis
    Oasis is utterly beguiling because Lee, like many other percipient Asian filmmakers, is simply more attentive to his characters' emotional tumult than the audience's.
  21. Super Size Me
    Sometimes exerts the gross-out fascination of reality TV's muckier specimens--its arc suggests a slow-motion "Fear Factor," or "Extreme Makeover" in reverse.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Van Helsing
    In Van Helsing, the orgy of morphing, shrieking, lightning-cracking, and habitual rope-swinging quickly turns oppressive.
  23. Seeing Other People
    While lacking a knockout scene, the script is full of solid laughs punctuated with pangs of emotional insight.
  24. New York Minute
    The whole project reeks of vanity, but it doesn't take a Columbia degree to see that any movie where the Michelle Tanners trudge via sewer from CPS to 125th is an instant camp classic.
  25. A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
    Skin is less life story than luxuriant mood bath.
  26. Superstar in a Housedress
    A fabulously fond and entertaining tribute to the quick-witted Lower East Side kid.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Clay Bird
    The film's critique of Islam is offered without rancor, and it's evident that Masud loves all his characters, whatever their viewpoints.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bulgarian Lovers
    We'd gladly give ourselves over to the literate if chatty script and the generous helpings of Bulgarian beefcake, but our interest flags the moment Biba puts his clothes back on.
  29. Laws of Attraction
    Our counselors' lawyer-ese is illegally bland, and their committee-penned banter meticulously Botoxed.
  30. Since Otar Left
    If Otar is, finally, a mite thin and predictably structured, that takes little away from the filmmaker and her cast, who work hard at fashioning the most outlandish special effect of all: believable human life.
    • Village Voice
  31. Godsend
    The pivotal plot twist isn't hard to predict, and Brit theater vet Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback rely on jolts that date back to the silent era.
  32. Envy
    Ultimately more amusing than hilarious, and sometimes less than that.
  33. Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius
    Despite Herrington's skill at capturing the physicality of the game, Stroke is strictly for golf nuts and masochists--assuming there's a difference.
  34. The Saddest Music in the World
    Because everything is funny and nothing provides a punchline, audiences may be too shell-shocked to laugh--you know you're in Maddinville when individual cackles detonate at unexpected intervals.
  35. Mean Girls
    Director Waters and screenwriter Tina Fey (also cast as the voice-of-reason math teacher) aim less for the usual high-gloss caricature than acutely hilarious sociology, nailing the servile malice of 15-year-old girls.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    People Say I'm Crazy
    His story is sad but not humorless.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Justice
    Though director Oppenheimer has a nice comedic touch, an achronological structure and distracting vignettes thwart the film's emotional designs.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands
    In its best moments, it has the qualities of a ribald folk tale. But it's a slight work, slackly directed, that gets a needed boost from Braga's endearing performance and Chico Buarque's intoxicating score.
  39. The Agronomist
    This affecting eulogy underscores not only Demme's own tribute to Dominique but also the film's homage to radio. This is a motion picture that's in love with the magic of airborne speech.
  40. MC5*: A True Testimonial
    Bravely bucks the "Behind the Music" arc, conveying a reality of constant flux, a sense of the band being jerked in many different directions.
  41. Close Your Eyes
    Willing's confused procedural -- derived from a novel by Madison Smartt Bell -- is a hasty throwback to the sado-medieval Exorcist descendants of the turn of the millennium (Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, Lost Souls). The somnolent cast can't keep the faith.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man on Fire
    Intentional or not, Man on Fire's over-the-top evocation of Christian retribution goes a long way to making this otherwise standard revenge fantasy watchable.
  43. The Twilight Samurai
    Yamada shoots his movie with a grandfatherly expertise, never squeezing the drama for juice or distancing us too far from the characters -- it's a pleasure to see a movie that makes every shot count, narratively and emotively.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    13 Going on 30
    Anyway, the thirtysomething in me was all, gag me with a spoon, but the kid in me was like, this movie's rad to the max.
  45. Rhinoceros Eyes
    Live by the meta-movie rules, die by the meta-movie rules: Rhinoceros Eyes is a parable on cine-enchantment that itself fails to enchant.
  46. Morlang
    Penning's film applies too much force behind its hairpin turns, but broad scripting and acting are counterbalanced by crisp photography, shivery sound design, and well-chosen debts.
  47. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Both resonant and skillfully devious.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Annie Get Your Gun (re-release)
    Baritone Howard Keel makes an impressive Hollywood debut as Hutton's leading man. During the nonmusical scenes, Betty Hutton gives a crude and strident performance, exhausting to watch, but she belts out the songs with an appropriately rowdy energy.
  49. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    What's surprising is the atmosphere of sweet reason--elatively speaking--that distinguishes Kill Bill Vol. 2 from its bloody precursor.
  50. The Punisher
    With topical revenge fantasies already available (Dogville, the Kill Bills) and with Roy Scheider on hand as a gun-loving paterfamilias, The Punisher mismanages its greatest asset: an unusual embarrassment of camp riches.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gypsy 83
    A surprisingly pragmatic take on the joys and perils of diva worship, Gypsy 83 has as many emotional ups and downs as its protagonists' road trip: Emerging love interests threaten to disrupt the delicate goth boy/fag hag balance, only to fade after the glitter.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Connie and Carla
    One suspects Vardalos's movies aren't written as much as up-chucked, the result of all-night binges on SnackWells and Oxygen network reruns.
  53. Young Adam
    Doesn't quite know how to take its leave; it tapers off like a curling cigarette trail, but it lingers like a ghost.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky
    All the stylistic flourishes can't hide the lack of an actual plot, character development, or point. Like Gerardo, we wait, hoping something will happen, knowing nothing will.
  55. The Middle of the World
    Director Vicente Amorim's dramatic instincts evoke after-school specials (most of the drama entails the clan's brooding teenager chomping at the parental bit), and his visual ideas are restricted to aping "City of God's" fish-eye ambience and hectic editing.
  56. Showboy
    So amateurish that its awkward Whoopi Goldberg cameo actually adds a touch of class, Showboy is an ill-conceived, often implausible hybrid of fact and fiction.
  57. Twentynine Palms
    The "Humanite" director's Death Valley void is the real "Lost in Translation."
  58. The Girl Next Door
    Begins with the same deathless question that has bedeviled generations of teenagers: how to fill the space allotted to graduating seniors for memories and shout-outs at the back of their yearbook?
  59. The Whole Ten Yards
    An anemic attempt at Coen-style bodies-and-bowling deadpan, The Whole Nine Yards compensated for its comic shortcomings with a casual, uncharacteristically likable performance by Bruce Willis.
  60. I'm Not Scared
    The upshot is a general fog of two-dimensional characterization, slowly churning plot gearwork, and an ineffective air of forced lyricism.
  61. The Alamo
    As directed by John Lee Hancock, it's dull, talky, and sometimes maudlin.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ella Enchanted
    Transpires in a somewhat chintzy fantasy kingdom lousy with more cameos than your typical Love Boat season.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Johnson Family Vacation
    The movie contains exactly two chuckle-worthy moments.
  64. The Blonds
    Unpretentiously poetic and casually stylish, yet perversely precise. Reconstructing the past, Carri seems to suggest, is akin to grabbing the water in a flowing stream.
  65. Okraina
    Increasingly violent (although always distanced), The Outskirts is at once appalling and bleakly humorous.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Walking Tall
    The plot is so absurdly perfunctory that preview audiences snickered at its TV-drama slapdashness; the producers should have pushed the straight-camp potential much further and retitled this weak bruiser Sporting Wood.
  67. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
    Far from a maxim-expounding sermon, the film is a fresh spring of irrational visual pleasure.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Prince and Me
    Their opposites-attract trajectory entertainingly reaches an applause-inducing climax -- but heeding Eddie's exegetical advice, Prince refuses to end on such an easy emotional note.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Adored
    The film's witlessness keeps any satirical potential submerged well below soap opera levels. Filiberti's self-casting exacerbates this already shoddy melodrama: Frequent come-hither stares beaming from his patently sub-marquee mug provide one too many non-ironic "Zoolander" moments.
  70. Hellboy
    To his credit, del Toro does not flinch from the ridiculous. But he is equally sensitive to Hellboy's pulp poetry.
  71. Son frère
    Chéreau's film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion.
  72. The United States of Leland
    The movie's idiotic fascination with the senselessness of its central act is scarily close to a fetish.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marathon
    In its ability to transform the drably mundane into something otherworldly, Marathon offers one of the most inventive reimaginings of the MTA since D.A. Pennebaker's 1953 cine-poem "Daybreak Express."
  74. Two Men Went to War
    Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.
  75. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Engaging, if ultimately wearisome.
  76. Never Die Alone
    There's something refreshing about a pulp drama that turns on the notion that redemption is a sucker's fantasy. That knowledge may not have saved Goines, but it informs Dickerson's adaptation and results in stellar neo-noir.
  77. Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
    As one five-year-old critic at the press screening astutely observed during a would-be sensitive moment: "Boooorrring!"
  78. The Ladykillers
    The Coens are uncharacteristically restrained. Indeed, given that the crime comedy is their preferred genre, The Ladykillers is remarkable mainly for its timidity.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Jersey Girl
    Aware of its awfulness.
  80. Ned Kelly
    The film marks a welcome departure from the usual rah-rah machismo of the semi-nationalist action adventure, but Jordan never escapes the mighty shadow of "The Thin Red Line"--from the grace-note inserts of exotic birds, snakes, and foliage to Ledger's laconic, sometimes haiku-like voice-over to Klaus Badelt's embarrassingly Zimmer-derivative score.
  81. Dogville
    For passion, originality, and sustained chutzpah, this austere allegory of failed Christian charity and Old Testament payback is von Trier's strongest movie--a masterpiece, in fact.
  82. Raja
    It plays out as an unsettling solipsistic love story--an account of erotic obsession with a family relation to "Of Human Bondage."
  83. The Gatekeeper
    The DIY approach entails significant limitations, including barely TV-quality visuals and the Seagal-like stiffness of Frey's performance, but the truly hellish portrayal of the workers' post-crossing indentured servitude in a meth lab makes up for a sluggish opening act.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bon voyage
    Relies on its considerable star power to conceal its even more considerable lack of substance.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Taking Lives
    If the Naqoyqatsi-lite score by Philip Glass doesn't exactly make sense of the film's sketchy identity politics, it does complement its utter ridiculousness.
  86. Intermission
    Like a loud and intermittently charismatic drunk at a dreary dive bar, Intermission grabs your attention, but in no time you're looking for the nearest exit.
  87. Dawn of the Dead
    It is, like most, an unnecessary remake, but the new, digitally boosted Dawn of the Dead brings it on with a 10-minute overture that might be the most upsetting tin-can apocalypse modern movies have ever seen.
  88. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    It's a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.
  89. Divan
    Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest.
  90. Noi the Albino
    A lightly comic slacker drama that takes the desperation of teenage tedium seriously.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maestro
    Would be all but unbearable without the excited testimony of the young men and women of color who'd spent their happiest nights at the Loft or the Gallery or Paradise Garage.
  92. Spartan
    David Mamet takes on the digi-tech, hard-Clancy-core intel thriller most often inflated by Tony Scott and like-minded plodders, and typically he elevates it, botches it, and exploits it for searing political comment.
  93. Knafayim Shvurot
    This poignant, acutely observed movie is eloquent and suggestive in dramatizing a particular trauma in the context of an ordinary Haifa family.
  94. Secret Window
    "The only thing that matters is the ending," Mort declares in the closing seconds, just as the director is serving up a colossal (and literally corny) stinker. But for Depp, it's yet another daunting mission accomplished with wit and ingenuity.
  95. Distant
    Thoughtfully orchestrated and filled with visual wit.
  96. Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London
    It's hard to despise a movie with the balls to posit that its Blair-look-alike PM has been brainwashed by a corrupt CIA operative, but Banks 2 is really pretty hateful.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    The film's flashy you-are-there qualities only underscore the bittersweet gulf between NASCAR's seemingly self-actualized, life-risking gladiators and their softly padded, toddler-toting, ticket-buying fans.
  98. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    A kindred exercise in ensemble cheer and cozy humanism -- not as sentimental as it might be but cheerfully affirmative in dispelling the darkness of its premise.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Games People Play: New York
    Think Fear Factor: Soft Porn anchored by a third-act twist that results in confused meta-mayhem.
  100. This Ain't No Heartland
    One might expect some insight into nationalist propaganda from This Ain't No Heartland, which opens with a Goering quotation, but Austrian director Andreas Horvath's scattershot film is more interested in advancing the thesis that Midwesterners are all dumb hicks.
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