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. Crimson Gold
    Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold is an anti-blockbuster--a deceptively modest undertaking that brilliantly combines unpretentious humanism and impeccable formal values.
  2. Close, Closed, Closure
    Loevy, who made this documentary with an Israeli and Palestinian crew, supplies a self-conscious voice-over.
  3. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    A competent if overlong blend of policier, sci-fi conspiracy thriller, daikaiju eiga (giant monster) stompfest, and tragic romance. It's also anime (short for "cheaper than live-action").
  4. The Son
    For all its quasi-documentary materialism, The Son is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man's inchoate desire to return good for evil. The movie requires a measure of faith, and like a job well done, it repays that trust.
  5. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability.
  6. Just Married
    Unlike Reese Wither-your-spoon, stagy Murphy actually does deserve her own "Philadelphia Story," or "Singin' in the Rain." She's obviously a camp genius (see "Clueless," not "8 Mile"), but this dopey script, topped with too-pretty Kutcher's rote 70's Show blowups, ain't it.
  7. The Slaughter Rule
    The lead performances could hardly be better: Gosling, having stolen and propped up entire movies last year ("Murder by Numbers" and "The Believer"), crackles with the economical intensity of a young Tim Roth. Morse, who has racked up decades worth of idiosyncratic character parts, is monumental in this career-peak turn.
  8. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.
  9. Love Liza
    What should have been an idiosyncratic 20-minute short is distended by repetition and loads of standard indie-film time-killers.
  10. Sonny
    Amid the cliché and foreshadowing, Cage manages a degree of casual realism.
  11. Nicholas Nickleby
    The entire unwieldy contraption rests on the shoulders of erstwhile "Queer as Folk" jailbait Hunnam: Bleached and bland, earnest and wooden, he's exactly what the film asks him to be.
  12. Max
    For all its flaws, Max does propose a credible young Hitler, played by Noah Taylor as an unpleasantly opinionated, arrogantly ascetic, defensively vain autodidact with a diffident sneer and a bottomless well of grievance to draw upon.
  13. The Hours
    It's an astonishing Kidman who contributes the film's -- and maybe the year's -- most inspired turn.
  14. The Pianist
    Suffers from over-explanation. The movie maintains tremendous momentum through the Szpilman family's deportation. The second half is another story.
  15. Chicago
    It's hard not to wish that Chicago had taken place inside a more imaginative head.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Shifting Sands: The Truth About Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq
    An interesting cross between a Frontline exposé and "World's Scariest Weapons Inspections Videos."
    • 11 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Pinocchio
    This faithful, humorless, altogether insufferable (and, by all accounts, hastily dubbed) version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 fairytale about the trouble-causing puppet who longs to be human is the director's lifelong dream.
  18. Catch Me If You Can
    DiCaprio is far more successfully cast here than in Gangs of New York: His performance is all about acting; it's a mild kick to see how he'll manage to talk his way out of nearly every scrape.
  19. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.
  20. Smokers Only
    Detached performances and a murky sound mix further the sense of suspended animation.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Thorns
    Intent on proving that five tough guys in suits walking towards the camera in slow motion really is the coolest thing ever.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Two Weeks Notice
    So busy rehashing rom-com clichés that it shirks the genitive, prelude to other flaws.
  23. Morvern Callar
    More engrossing than convincing.
  24. Spider
    Spider lasts in the mind and it's built to last -- this is a movie that invites and repays repeated viewings.
  25. Narc
    Hardly a scene goes by without a digitally fractured flashback or spasm of editing punctuation, rupturing the movie's otherwise carefully wrought sense of authenticity.
  26. Gangs of New York
    Cost well over $100 million, and the money is up there for the gawking. Illuminated by the orange flames of hell, the vast New York City set looks great. The least engaging aspect of the movie is its script -- which passed through the hands of three separate writers and perhaps even producer Harvey Weinstein.
  27. Antwone Fisher
    Washington directs with proficient blandness charged only occasionally by organic acting moments.
  28. 25th Hour
    Often feels like a mediocre time-waster, and yet it sticks in the mind.
  29. Devils on the Doorstep
    By the final shot, which assumes the viewpoint of a decapitated head, its appalled comedy has swelled, beyond outrage, to a pitch of punch-drunk hysteria.
  30. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Jackson's movie is one portentous happening after another -- not unreasonable in that his source, J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy, is basically the fantasyland equivalent of a world war against absolute evil.
  31. The Guys
    Watching the film is like reading a Times Portrait of Grief that keeps shifting focus to the journalist who wrote it.
  32. Evelyn
    Every other line is a coy Oirishism, and Brosnan, despite being Irish, isn't any more convincing than twinkly-eyed barmaid Julianna Margulies.
  33. Maid in Manhattan
    Really, any wit at all would have helped balance the playful but crass butt-seeking money shots.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Trek: Nemesis
    As Shinzon, a sickly boy-emperor grown from Picard's DNA by scheming Romulans, Tom Hardy channels some of the verve of rich-Corinthian-leather-clad Khan villain Ricardo Montalban, although his real model seems to be Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator.
  35. Intact
    It's a shame that, somewhere in his mystagogical handstanding, Fresnadillo forgot the real world.
  36. The Jimmy Show
    Backed by a strong supporting cast, Whaley makes Jimmy a vivid character, but he never achieves anything like the tragic grandeur of a Willy Loman. He's at once too earnest and too unappealing.
  37. Drumline
    An exhilarating serving of movie fluff.
  38. The Hot Chick
    The cast, save the charisma-free Schneider, is uniformly hilarious, and deserves classier high jinks than this Juwanna Tootsie roll.
  39. About Schmidt
    One may not realize how truly sad this movie is until the forlorn final moments, when Payne resists an inspirational closer, and, with exquisite tact, averts his eyes.
  40. Pellet
    At once subtle and visceral, the film never succumbs to the trap of the maudlin or tearful, offering instead with its unflinching gaze a measure of faith in the future.
  41. Analyze That
    Director Harold Ramis and his cast fetch overchewed shticks, but what's surprising is the incompetent witlessness on exhibit. There's no limit to the botched comedy rhythms and wasted opportunities.
  42. Empire
    Too bad the central bedfellowship never gels, and Franc. Reyes's script turns a dissection of ambition into "Sleeping With the Enemy"-style nonsense.
  43. Blackboards
    Blackboards is both shrill and soporific, and because everything is repeated five or six times, it can seem tiresomely simpleminded.
  44. Equilibrium
    As this clueless, bulimic debacle madly regurgitates ideas and iconography from Lang to the brothers Wachowski, Leni Riefenstahl to L. Ron Hubbard, Ray Bradbury to Susan Faludi, it's not just Bale who has a hard time keeping a straight face.
  45. Adaptation.
    Adaptation's success in engaging the audience in the travails of creating a screenplay is extraordinary.
  46. Massoud, the Afghan
    It's not the least of Afghan tragedies that this noble warlord would be consigned to the dustbin of history.
  47. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Odyssey, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet train.
  48. Dead or Alive: Final
    Scene-by-scene, things happen, but you'd be hard-pressed to say what or why; occasionally, a poetic moment leaps out of the soup.
  49. Russian Ark
    Dazzling dance to the music of time.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    They
    Efficient, suitably anonymous chiller.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Extreme Ops
    The mountain would probably recommend that you save your money.
  52. Solaris
    Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Eight Crazy Nights
    This dull extension of Sandler's ubiquitous "Chanukah Song" squanders the cross-cultural comedy potential of a Jewish-themed Christmas movie on cheap fart gags and boilerplate schmaltz.
  54. Die Another Day
    Dissing a Bond movie is quite like calling a dog stupid, but when it has the temerity to run over two hours, you feel like winding up with a kick.
  55. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Emperor's Club
    Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.
  57. The Quiet American
    In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.
  58. Phantom
    Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year.
  59. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Bumrushed onto American screens like late-breaking news, the Japanese TV doc Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times is a relatively thin slice of Chomskiana -- a chapter from any of the man's many interview volumes, or even an hour of his C-SPAN dialogues, has more political substance.
  60. Talk to Her
    Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.
  61. Friday After Next
    If "Next Friday" approximated smoking the same old shit, FAN is a manically generous Christmas vaudeville.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Better Housekeeping
    Too stupid to be satire, too obviously hateful to be classified otherwise, Frank Novak's irritating slice of lumpen life is as reliably soul-killing as its title is nearly meaningless. ("Good Housekeeping" magazine's legal muscle forced a last-minute change.)
  63. Hell House
    Lookin' for sin, American-style? Try Hell House, which documents the cautionary Christian spook-a-rama of the same name.
  64. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    Justman's affectionate doc provides the pleasure of hearing one classic pop hook after another performed by a still tight unit, as well as the spectacle of veteran sidemen sitting around talking music. (The movie would have benefited from more period footage and fewer restaged scenes.)
  65. Interview with the Assassin
    Pitched somewhere between Oliver Stone's "JFK" and the Seinfeld parody thereof, Neil Burger's debut never quite transcends jokester status -- it's a veritable menagerie of shaggy dogs, red herrings, and wild geese -- and the punchline doesn't live up to Barry's dead-eyed, perfectly chilled delivery.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Half Past Dead
    Morris Chestnut, known for his "Best Man"-style nice-guy roles, is surprisingly effective against type as the evil commando leader, but he's handcuffed by a script that never adequately explains his motivations.
  67. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Carrera's filmmaking is more workmanlike than stylish, but Padre Amaro is richly character driven and, for all its insolent, grotesque humor, straightforwardly humanist in its psychology.
  68. Revolution #9
    While the ideas about techno-saturation are far from novel, they're presented with a wry dark humor.
  69. Ararat
    If the movie feels cumbersome and overstuffed, it's because Egoyan's characters, so often aphasic, are this time driven by a compulsion to speak -- though the noisy tumble of words mostly underscores their failure to communicate.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Chamber's charm lies in the sheer visualization of Rowling's weirder inventions: pots of shrivel-phizzed screaming treelets, Harry's arm gone boneless from a bungled spell, a scolding letter from home that leaps to life as a yapping paper mouth.
  71. Hush!
    Japanese director Ryosuke Hashiguchi ("Like Grains of Sand") enriches his rendition with melancholic ambivalence, sociological specificity, and a knack for delicate epiphany.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Rising Place
    Broadway dreamgirl Jennifer Holliday's musical interludes occasionally relieve this mélange of recycled social morality lessons.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    Among the many pleasures are the lively intelligence of the artists and their perceptiveness about their own situations.
  74. Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite
    A grating cycle of squabbles, sloppy kissing, and rapprochements.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bread, My Sweet
    There's little meaty -- and nothing glandular -- in the slight weepie The Bread, My Sweet.
  76. The Phantom of Liberty (re-release)
    Albeit scattershot, Phantom does cohere as a satire of keeping up appearances in which everything is as it appears.
  77. Far From Heaven
    A supremely intelligent pastiche.
  78. 'R Xmas
    Like any self-respecting Ferrara film, 'R Xmas has its intimations of hellfire, yet it's a weirdly benign Christmas fable -- something like "Miracle on 134th Street."
  79. 8 Mile
    Extremely clever in its use of self-deprecation, it's guaranteed to bring down the house at any remotely sympathetic venue.
  80. Femme Fatale
    A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.
  81. Diario di una siciliana ribelle
    The visuals can seem desperate -- Sicilian landscapes through a scrim of turning pages -- but a storytelling guitarist's running elegy gives Rita's bold actions a sadly epic scope.
  82. Strange Fruit
    Mining the song's associative richness, Katz's film works as jazz genealogy, Meerpol bio, Jewish-leftist puzzle piece, performance homage, and exegetic history of lynching.
  83. Justifiable Homicide
    Meticulously uncovers a trail of outrageous force and craven concealment.
  84. Treasure Planet
    Despite more betrayal and loyalty than a Chris Carabba box set, there's no real good or evil here.
  85. The Weight of Water
    Lovingly detailed but unaccountably clumsy, obviously ambitious, and unfortunately chintzy. It's also genuinely anachronistic.
  86. Tully
    The flashes of emotional eloquence from the actors (especially Fitzgerald and Julianne Nicholson, as the radiant vet student who befriends both boys) are muffled by the ultimately asphyxiating preciousness.
  87. Love in the Time of Money
    Mattei is tiresomely grave and long-winded, as if circularity itself indicated profundity.
  88. Daughter from Danang
    Operation Babylift itself was an attempt to provide some semblance of an American happy ending to the Vietnam debacle. But as Daughter From Danang demonstrates, the war's scars may take another generation to heal.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    I Spy
    Though ample time is spent mingling Murphy's jabberjaw locutions and Wilson's curveball spaciness, the film leaves only the bitter reek of a botched chemistry experiment.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Besotted
    Although the existentialist conclusion highlights the stochastic nature of everyday life, this story of unrequited love doesn't sustain interest beyond the first half-hour.
  91. Food of Love
    Stevenson's performance is at once clueless and fiercely committed, a volatile combination that pays off in the best scene: the mother of all PFLAG meetings.
  92. The Bank
    Polished and visualized with a sharp sense of place, writer-director Robert Connolly's drama is propped up by bogus science (the relationship between stock undulations and the Mandelbrot set is never made plausible), and the characters are paint-by-numbers.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Quai des Orfèvres [re-release]
    The visual style has an expressionistic undertow, rich in shadowy chiaroscuro compositions.
  94. All the Queen's Men
    The fiercely original Eddie Izzard is wasted in this botch, not something you could say for lucky millionaire Friend Matt LeBlanc.
  95. Frida
    Swank and splashy as it is, Frida leaves the lurking suspicion that Taymor might have preferred to stage her pageant as a puppet show.
  96. By Hook or by Crook
    Long, inchoate scenes are burdened by overwrought plotlines -- But the film is buoyed by moments of pleasure, too.
  97. The Truth About Charlie
    Gave me a craving for something nouvelle, not a half-hearted Hollywood co-optation.
  98. Paid in Full
    As superficial as his 1999 short film "True," the inspiration for Budweiser's "Whassup?" commercials, Charles Stone III's feature debut is set in a 1986 Harlem that doesn't look much like anywhere in New York.
  99. All or Nothing
    Though more cathartic than redemptive, this sob-racked confession is the payoff for two hours of low-grade misery.
  100. Roger Dodger
    First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.
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