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. Ghost River
    The only conceivable reason to immerse oneself in this inexplicable release is, of course, Huppert. Gravely, she accepts the challenge of delivering a coherent performance in a wildly incoherent role.
  2. Hidalgo
    The screwball antics recall "Cannonball Run" more than David Lean.
  3. Starsky & Hutch
    S&H's chief pleasure is the spontaneous, sometimes quite touching rapport between the two stars.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Reckoning
    Emphatically acted, ponderous, and ultimately a little silly.
  5. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    A deceptively modest fable of innocence abroad that resonates with the situation within Israel and without.
  6. WTC the First 24 Hours
    Actually manages a fresh perspective. The director, camera in tow, had unimpeded access to the devastation for a full day before being shooed away by officials, and the footage he captured (sans commentary) is both gut-wrenchingly familiar and disconcertingly foreign.
  7. Collateral Damages
    The film's real flaw is its limited focus.
  8. Club Dread
    The group has a distinctive deadpan style; after you get on their wavelength, it's impossible to quit chuckling.
  9. Greendale
    A bargain-basement musical extravaganza.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Twisted
    No mystery here: Twisted is D.O.A.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    Havana Nights es mucho frío -- the only titter of excitement comes in a cameo from a strangely reptilian Patrick Swayze.
  12. Goodbye Lenin!
    Overlong and a bit tiresome but it's actually about something.
  13. Risk/Reward
    Holder and Parker tread lightly on issues of sexism, and sex in general, and leave us wishing more questions were asked.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Burning Man
    Less sentiment and more peculiarity would have limned a richer, though probably less audition-tape-worthy, reflection of Burning Man's 25,000-strong community of the absurd.
  15. Alila
    Israel's one-man new wave, Amos Gitai, surveys his nation's hardscrabble quotidian in Alila, which dallies with both Kiarostamian spirit and Altman-esque fabric, examining the intersecting lives of a dozen or so Tel Aviv residents.
  16. The Passion of the Christ
    X-ploitative though it may be, the spectacle of a man beaten and tortured to death seeks to be an object of contemplation. Serious questions are raised.
  17. Our Father
    By way of a tragic left hook, Haroun's relaxed movie climaxes back where it began, on the devastated home ground. The journey, however pessimistic, is like a gentle handshake.
  18. Teknolust
    A quiet tour de force for Tilda Swinton, who plays researcher Rosetta Stone and her feisty but fragile alter egos.
  19. Big Animal
    The tale's faux-fable simplicity is cunningly eloquent.
  20. Against the Ropes
    As a gloves-off Erin Brockovich, Ryan never makes it into the ring.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    EuroTrip
    Eurotrip's constant anxiety that women might turn out to be men and vice versa makes this command especially fraught.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Smug, sanitized fantasy.
  23. Kitchen Stories
    Slight but sardonic, Norwegian director Bent Hamer's deadpan Kitchen Stories makes a taciturn comedy of nothingness out of color-coordinated '50s coziness and Scandinavian social planning.
  24. Welcome to Mooseport
    Closer to Sturges than Capra, the movie means to satirize the TV-fueled carnivalesque nature of American electoral politics but only demonstrates the TV-fueled debasement of American commercial comedy.
  25. Lost Boys of Sudan
    Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.
  26. After the Life
    At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]
  27. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    The hyperbole can be predictable and the clichés earnest, but by and large, Charlie is a serious, often illuminating, and unavoidably entertaining account of the creature Downey calls "the most endearing superhero you might ever want to watch."
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Code
    While Melville's films strike a pose of ironic bloodlessness, The Code attends to a thick stew of (soap-) operatic emotion, turning each internecine skirmish into an occasion for melodramatic brooding. Melville once described his films as comedies; The Code, unfortunately, knows no such wit.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Seagull's Laughter
    Provides some swell roles for actresses and intriguing local detail.
  30. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (re-released)
    The wonderful-terrible dervish of Umbrellas reaches peak abandon, worthy of Vincente Minnelli, when Geneviève sobs out a plaint for Guy as a carnival whirls outside the shop.
  31. Love Object
    Utilizes horror movie jolts to plumb male control-freakishness.
  32. 50 First Dates
    The barf stream of gay jokes, pussy jokes, fat wife jokes, more gay jokes, and walrus penis jokes ends up making you pine for Lucy's gift of forgetting.
  33. Robot Stories
    A quietly impassioned, genuinely stirring indie rarity.
  34. An Amazing Couple
    At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]
  35. Osama
    Its sluggish, amateur-Kiarostami character would be off-putting if the material weren't so powerful.
  36. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    Skeleton may be 100 percent cult-in-a-can, but aficionados should feel sated. All others are advised to bring copious amounts of controlled substances.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Miracle
    Kurt Russell is terrific as coach Herb Brooks, psychological tactician out to redeem his being cut from the 1960 U.S. squad, the last one to beat the CCCP.
  38. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Cube is still adorable, but the potentially poppin' battle between the shop and big-box competitor Nappy Cuts gets obscured by sloppy chronology and flat, cartoonish politicos.
  39. Catch That Kid
    A stale, overbudgeted, child-empowerment fantasy that's every bit as excruciating as the director's previous work.
  40. The Return
    Primordial and laconic, this remarkably assured debut feature has the elegant simplicity of its title.
  41. The Dreamers
    The Dreamers is bad, but unlike the similarly camped-up "Little Buddha" or "Stealing Beauty," it's not exactly boring.
  42. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Philosophical ambitions notwithstanding, Hiding and Seeking is basically a personal essay, and the undeniably moving family saga takes over completely in the film's second half.
  43. Blind Shaft
    Blind Shaft means to leave the viewer dazed, and it does.
  44. The Golden Age
    Thanks to his mastery of montage, Buñuel naturalizes Dalí's images into a duplicitous rhythm of normality and outrage. The film suggests instances of sex and violence far more extreme than any actually represented while contriving effronteries so offhanded you can't believe you've actually seen them.
  45. On the Run
    At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Perfect Score
    "X is to Y, as this shit is to boring."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Latter Days
    Cox's tacky melodrama is indeed sub-par, but no worse than numerous gay indies.
  48. The Big Bounce
    The best Elmore Leonard adaptations ("Jackie Brown," "Out of Sight") play behind the beat, and although The Big Bounce isn't top-shelf Dutch, the film finds its own pace.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eat This New York
    Though the filmmakers had a great time following the Manhattan restaurateurs around, they abandoned the untidy Brooklyn story before the inevitable downward spiral that might have been our payoff as filmgoers.
  50. Piccadilly [re-release]
    Wong is sensationally expressive and projects a modern, coolly appraising sexuality. Visually eloquent and often dazzling, the movie is no less terrific. Piccadilly is both evidence of silent cinema at its rudely aborted peak and Wong's frustrated potential to have been among its greatest stars.
  51. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    A less offensive concoction than Luketic's "Legally Blonde," Win a Date is nevertheless an oddity, unsure of its tone and even of what period it's set in.
  52. Touching the Void
    Unexpectedly bridges genres -- it's a buddy movie, a horror story, a boy's-own adventure, and a near metaphysical meditation on the limits of human endurance.
  53. The Butterfly Effect
    You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.
  54. Made-Up
    A ham-fisted satire on the American obsession with appearance, Made-Up is ultimately self-defeating and even offensive.
  55. Empathy
    Meta-documentary to the end, Empathy takes its leave by pretending to spy on one patient with his ear to the closed door, eavesdropping on another patient. How did watching the movie make me feel? Interested, amused, and um, empathetic.
  56. Teacher's Pet
    Continues Disney's trend of crafting animated movies as much for adult viewers as for their pre-adolescent progeny.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torque
    Thankfully, Torque knows what it wants to be (which is more than you can say about other recent biker-boy flicks) and flashes a jocular self-awareness about its genre affiliation.
  58. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Moormann's film transcends A&E hagiography, and Dowd's spry egoism and science-hipster joie de vivre provide piquant icing. Recalling trends, technical advances, artists, and landmark sessions (one where he suggests the rhythm for "Sunshine of Your Love"), Dowd conjures the excitement that helped coax so many iconic performances.
  59. The Tracker
    A decent little exercise in nativist outrage, Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, with its dynamic between indigene and colonial oppressor, could've easily been a western.
  60. Along Came Polly
    Largely innocuous and forgettable, Polly lacks "Mary's" romantic pathos and psychosexual anxiety and is a few squirmy set pieces shy of "Meet the Parents."
  61. Tokyo Godfathers
    A welcome exercise in anime weirdness.
  62. Cuba: Island of Music
    An odd blend of passionate performance footage and maddeningly shallow analysis of Cuba's music and politics.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    My Baby's Daddy
    Homies can make good hubbies, goes the moral of this January dump job, a tired send-up of hip-hop-isms that also aspires to be a Waiting to Exhale for men.
  64. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Broomfield's investigatory technique remains a frustrating pileup of unfocused Q&As and misplaced credulity. But when Broomfield travels to her Michigan hometown, he pieces together a life blighted at breech-birth: a grotesque of abandonment, incest, physical and sexual abuse, pregnancy at 13, and homelessness.
  65. Chasing Liberty
    Moore's lip-glossed petulance never catches fire with Goode's canned drollery.
  66. The Battle of Algiers
    A prototype of news-footage realism, the film makes shrewd use of handheld sloppiness, misjudged focus, overexposure, and you-are-there camera upset; the payoff is the scent of authentic panic.
  67. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    This is a tender and engaging portrait of a marvelously elusive personality, whose style remains timeless.
  68. Secret Things
    Neil LaBute on his worst day couldn't devise a scenario so primitive in its psychology and predictable in its sense of sin.
  69. Millennium Mambo
    In a sense, Millennium Mambo is a mildly prurient portrait of Shu moving, drinking, smoking, and changing clothes -- it's analogous to one of Andy Warhol's Edie Sedgwick films, but without the existential drama. Who really cares what costume this poor girl will wear to all tomorrow's parties?
  70. Japanese Story
    Totally convincing in a physically demanding role, Collette carries the movie on her shoulders -- and that weight is what it's all about.
  71. Modern Times (re-release)
    Remains Chaplin's most sustained burlesque of authority.
  72. The Company
    Not a farce, or comedy or drama, but essentially a doodle interrupted by nouveau ballet performances, the entire contraption assembled to please the ego of Neve Campbell.
  73. Paycheck
    Woo's film is in some ways closer to Dick's -- and his own -- pulp roots, and if he lazily quotes himself (and, inexplicably, Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly") once too often, he at least gets loose, spirited performances from his cast -- Uma's post-"Kill Bill" gravitas notwithstanding.
  74. Cold Mountain
    A big fat war movie and a tender love story. Indeed, Cold Mountain is something of an uneasy struggle between the two modes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cheaper by the Dozen
    Solidifying his funnyman rep, Ashton Kutcher appears as oldest child Piper Perabo's model-actor boyfriend, a delightfully brainless narcissist.
  76. Peter Pan
    Uniquely jacked into a ripe sense of antique-nursery Victoriana and buzzing with a pre-adolescent metaphoric charge, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan is a primary text of modern culture, and P.J. Hogan's live-action rendition is the only one, screen or stage, to completely uncage this changeling and give it flight.
  77. Monster
    Theron's empathetic victim-wrath and elemental female outrage almost trump the otherwise cartoonish gender-bending and award-grubbing po' folk put-on.
  78. Children of Love
    Chillingly naturalistic.
  79. Calendar Girls
    Remains a genial lesson in how to both honor and subvert womanly expectations.
  80. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    No matter what your opinion of McNamara, The Fog of War is a chastening experience.
  81. Mona Lisa Smile
    Mona Lisa Smile's only mysteries are the result of frenzied corner-cutting as Newell & Co. speed through the last reel, an exhausting cram session of hair-trigger speechifying and identity transformations bordering on the science-fictional.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    House of Sand and Fog
    The clunky manipulations of plot, and the sorry fate awaiting everyone in this foggy House is less wrenching than acted.
  83. The Hebrew Hammer
    The result is explicit, if less than hilarious. The Hebrew Hammer lacks the edge of Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song," although as anti-seasonal fare, it would make a suitably unbearable double bill with Terry Zwigoff's "Bad Santa."
  84. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    In short, this Krakatoa is at once exhausting and riveting. It's a technological marvel, and for those not with the program, a bit of a bore.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Power Trip
    Like the best documentaries, this one raises questions instead of providing pat answers. If only Devlin had taken his intrepid reporting a few steps further.
  86. AKA
    Cumulatively, the echo-chamber syntax achieves a kind of atonal harmony, meshing with the themes of reinvention and self-presentation: The disjunction between the panels is tantamount to the gap between image and reality.
  87. The Statement
    Ends up second-guessing its own high-minded strivings, not trustful enough of its audience to be sophisticated about history and ethics, and not pulpy enough to keep us awake.
  88. Prisoner of Paradise
    A fascinating and painful account of an entertainer trapped not only by his Jewishness but by his overwhelming need to make theater.
  89. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    Even in the teen-flick "Sweet Valley" of 1987, there were few places outside John Hughes's brain where paying somebody to be your girl didn't look like prostitution. Yet somebody made the Slow-Times-at-Clueless-High stinker Can't Buy Me Love.
  90. Stuck on You
    Damon and Kinnear are both pitch-perfect, inhabiting their ingenuous, codependent little universe together with the commitment of eight-year-old best friends. True to form, the Farrellys toss sophomoric spitballs at us, but nothing stems the rise of big-hearted generosity.
  91. Something's Gotta Give
    Something does have to give, and that's the nine-figure public patronage of this kind of anemic, wit-free entertainment. Meyers's shakin' moneymaker isn't the worst film of 2003 -- no cat suits, for one thing -- but something scarier: a standard-issue bog of glossy idiocy and audience disrespect.
  92. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and silently beseeching, she's (Johansson) even more a screen for projection here than in "Lost in Translation"; surrounded by a gaggle of over-actors, she glows with understatement.
  93. Big Fish
    An abundance of dull exposition building up to the son's attempt to cap his father's whoppers climaxes with a tedious flurry of Fellini-esque endings and Spielbergian fillips. The magic doesn't work twice -- or even once.
  94. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Unusual in its ambition to pose deep spiritual questions, but its enticing surfaces -- including the beautiful working girls and Isabelle Adjani's surprise cameo as a Bardot-esque starlet -- are the best thing about it.
  95. What Alice Found
    Ivey hits the turf pitching and catching dialogue like a pro, but nothing could have saved What Alice Found from a fundamental cinematic illiteracy.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Honey
    If you doubt whether Honey can scrape together the dough, this is probably the movie for you.
  97. The Last Samurai
    The least one can say for this costume action flick is that it hits bottom immediately.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Grainy video and gimmicky editing give this documentary an amateurish feel, but Samir's charming, rueful interlocutors shine through.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    Atlas allows Bowery's genius to retain, in the words of one admirer, "a big bundle of contradictions," not unlike his shocking designs themselves.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Flesh and Blood
    Single motherhood has seldom looked as daunting and enervating as it does in this unsentimental documentary.
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