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. 24 Hour Party People
    As a historical document, 24 Hour Party People may be most meaningful to fans whose epiphanies were experienced at least one remove away -- at a different place or time.
  2. Stripped
    Self-involved, amateurish, and unoriginal.
  3. Blood Work
    A bracingly no-nonsense, highly professional policier—as proudly old-fashioned as its curmudgeon hero.
  4. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    The poised Vega and pleasingly phlegmatic Sabara are resolutely uncute performers, and the reach-out-and-touch-it gadgetry carries a homey scent of proactive nostalgia. Spy Kids 2 is an island of lost Circuit Cities.
  5. The Good Girl
    Like "Chuck & Buck," The Good Girl is a droll, well-acted, character-driven comedy with unexpected deposits of feeling.
  6. Full Frontal
    "Every work of art is an uncommitted crime," Theodor Adorno once wrote. This one is more of a botched misdemeanor.
  7. One Last Kiss
    The director knows how to apply textural gloss, but his portrait of sex-as-war is strictly sitcom.
  8. Signs
    Sitting through the last reel is significantly less charming than listening to a four-year-old with a taste for exaggeration recount his Halloween trip to the Haunted House.
  9. Gaza Strip
    A documentary to make the stones weep -- as shameful as it is scary.
  10. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    Self-contained, enigmatic, illuminated from within, Huppert banks a performance that pays dividends throughout the film.
  11. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    The movie's only discernible purpose is as publicity for the book. An admitted egomaniac, Evans is no Hollywood villain, and yet this grating showcase almost makes you wish he'd gone the way of Don Simpson. Instead, he'll probably get an Irving Thalberg award.
  12. Swimming
    Director Robert J. Siegel allows the characters to inhabit their world without cleaving to a narrative arc. It's a luxurious hangout; spaces burgeon with goofy love and generous confusion.
  13. Lan Yu
    For all of its careful realism, Lan Yu is constructed around clichés, plummeting toward a modestly heroic sacrifice and a tearjerking act of fate. But Kwan is a master of shadow, quietude, and room noise, and Lan Yu is a disarmingly lived-in movie.
  14. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    Jones's documentary, named for the opening song on Foxtrot, is most effective as a poison-pen missive to Corporate Rock.
  15. The Country Bears
    The unaddressed incongruities are as stupefying as the music.
  16. Who Is Cletis Tout?
    This charmless nonsense ensues amid clanging film references that make "Jay and Silent Bob's Excellent Adventure" seem understated.
  17. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Star/writer Mike Myers and director Jay Roach struggle visibly with exhausted possibilities and diminishing returns.
  18. Happy Times
    Schmaltz served in a hand-painted cup, Happy Times culminates in a Chekhovian complement of two narrated letters that have a mutually corresponding force the rest of the film only hints at. By then, our hopes have fatally diminished.
  19. K-19: The Widowmaker
    As square-shouldered as you'd expect of a National Geographic co-production. But Bigelow hits all her marks and more within the narrow parameters.
  20. What to Do in Case of Fire
    A blitz of anti-authoritarian poses so feel-good you'd think someone was selling you sneakers.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stuart Little 2
    The summer's most romantic interspecies love story.
  22. Tadpole
    As sweet and unassuming a film as they come, embraces both perspectives -- it's sympathetic to the batty throes of a first infatuation, but affably demurs at indulging them.
  23. Eight Legged Freaks
    Amid numerous identical skirmishes with leapfrogging arachnids, trace elements of black comedy and intentional camp are discernible but utterly extraneous.
  24. Langrishe Go Down
    Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ayurveda: Art of Being
    For the most part, though, Ayurveda speaks in subtitled Asian cadences to an affluent international audience primed to believe.
  26. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    It's a uniquely lonely film, and one of the year's most memorable.
  27. My Wife Is an Actress
    Gainsbourg is virtually incidental to her mate's screeching navel-serenade, which maintains a stranglehold on the declarative first-person mode of its title.
  28. Metropolis (re-release)
    The greatest of all pulp fantasies.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tosca
    Two hours fly by -- opera's a pleasure when you don't have to endure intermissions -- and even a novice to the form comes away exhilarated.
  30. Reign of Fire
    Peaks early with a vertiginous dogfight; thereafter, spotty CGI and a bamboozling plot conspire toward a colossal anticlimax.
  31. Sex and Lucia
    An adept mood maker, Medem strains madly for cosmic alliances, fairy-tale imagery, and fated coincidences, but he triumphs only with two hot bodies, a cluttered apartment, and a Shower Massage.
  32. Never Again
    A comedic semi-rehash of "An Unmarried Woman" (1978) with older leads, Never Again sports a good-hearted story but doesn't know how to tell it.
  33. Road to Perdition
    Visually more coherent than "American Beauty," but despite the burnished mahogany of Conrad Hall's cinematography, Mendes still doesn't quite know how to fill a frame. Like the Hanks character, he's a slow study: The action is stilted and the tabloid energy embalmed.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Last Dance is riveting when it focuses on the challenges of crossing a generational divide --The movie loses steam toward the end.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Presumed Guilty: Tales of the Public Defenders
    As in most court TV (the film is produced by KQED), the action is faster paced than in reality, and the graphics are cheesy. But the lawyers are far more compelling than David E. Kelley's.
  36. Rocco and His Brothers (re-release)
    Visconti's film remains a Euro-culture touchstone, though not nearly as convincing or visually stunning as its reputation insists.
  37. Me Without You
    Essentially humorless, Me Without You manages some pleasing textures all the same.
  38. Read My Lips
    The action is largely psychological, but it's accelerated by Audiard's nervous camera, chiaroscuro lighting, and jangling montage.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Group
    Though the characters are in fact sustained improvisations, the roles feel inhabited rather than acted -- a quality acutely present in scenes of excruciating awkwardness.
  40. Tattoo Bar
    This tale of a sprung tough looking to go straight is so familiar it's faceless.
  41. Like Mike
    A valueless kiddie paean to pro basketball underwritten by the NBA.
  42. Men in Black II
    However cool, Smith's lovable braggadocio and Lee's practiced deadpan don't exactly make them Laurel and Hardy.
  43. Songs from the Second Floor
    Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.
  44. The Powerpuff Girls
    The rapid-fire satirical sophistication (scatology notwithstanding) and lovingly rendered pulp surrealism of this sequence should delight adults, while kids will get a charge out of the heroines' grown-up-defying chutzpah.
  45. Lovely & Amazing
    Everyone in this chintz-covered world is a little creepy.
  46. The Cockettes
    Fond, funny documentary.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Notorious C.H.O.
    All stand-up comedy is oral aggression, but Cho's is an especially fascinating strain.
  48. 3 Women
    Today, the movie doesn't portend Altman's subsequent tailspin into irrelevance as much as it suggests a restlessness with the comic realism he had mastered.
  49. Harvard Man
    Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.
  50. Pumpkin
    In its own dimly reckless way, the film is riveting -- not unlike watching a tightrope walker with a bad case of vertigo.
  51. Mr. Deeds
    Stay home. Your entertainment-seeking efforts would be better expended perusing old phone books. The white pages.
  52. Money Buys Happiness
    At best, plays like an attenuated "Seinfeld" episode.
  53. Kiss Me, Stupid (re-release)
    A grimly suggestive and unexpectedly tender bedroom farce, Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid is a true film maudit.
  54. Bobby G. Can't Swim
    Montias's script lacks surprises -- Still, the minor figures surrounding him (Bobby) -- from teenage Puerto Rican beauties to a mobster's middle-aged groupie -- form a gritty urban mosaic, and Bobby's wanton energy is utterly convincing.
  55. Juwanna Mann
    This flat run at a hip-hop "Tootsie" is so poorly paced you could fit all of Pootie Tang in between its punchlines.
  56. Mr. Smith Gets a Hustler
    The high-concept scenario soon proves preposterous, the acting is robotically italicized, and truth-in-advertising hounds take note: There's very little hustling on view, though McCrudden does arrange for his lead gym rat to be shirtless as often as possible.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dahmer
    Jacobson has achieved the unthinkable: He humanizes a notoriously brutal psychopath and, in the process, leaves the audience with an unwelcome sense of complicity.
  58. Sunshine State
    The whole of Sunshine State is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often lovely, and always true.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Lilo & Stitch
    But mostly the film is just hectic and homiletic: two parts exhausting "Men in Black" mayhem to one part family values.
  60. Minority Report
    Miscast, misguided, and often nonsensical, Minority Report is nevertheless the most entertaining, least pretentious genre movie Steven Spielberg has made in the decade since "Jurassic Park."
  61. Peau d'homme coeur de bête
    The storyline sometimes veers into melodrama; a subplot concerning Alex's involvement in the white-slave trade is particularly lurid. But the director retains a light touch in the character of Aurelie, whose combination of innocence and knowing is magical.
  62. War Photographer
    The photographer's show-don't-tell stance is admirable, but it can make him a problematic documentary subject. War Photographer infers the psychological and physical toll of his peripatetic existence, but provides scant insight into his technique.
  63. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Dull, if not devoid of wit, this shaggy dog longs to frisk through the back alleys of history, but scarcely manages more than a modest, snoozy charm.
  64. ZigZag
    Kid-pulp screenwriter Goyer (Dark City, Blade I and II) manages some mature textures but his movie never surmounts its manipulative ideas.
  65. Freeze Me
    Ishii's rough-hewn film may be the nastiest entry in its dubious but resonant subgenre since "I Spit on Your Grave." It's a black pearl for anyone who likes a little existential psychosis with their semi-softcore exploitation.
  66. Windtalkers
    At once chintzy and grandiose, awash in battlefield sentimentality and platoon clichés.
  67. Gangster No. 1
    The actors all function as best they can as glowering clichés, though the narrative's temporal jump presents difficulties.
  68. Scooby-Doo
    As this movie knows what it is, Scooby-Doo's a relatively painless 85 minutes.
  69. The Bourne Identity
    Banal big-budget adaptation of Robert Ludlum's 1980 espionage thriller.
  70. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Has marked affinities to "Ghost World" and "Donnie Darko." It's more amorphous and less sharply drawn than either but has an acute sense of guilty secrets and secret places.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cuba feliz
    Frustratingly, Dridi tells us nothing about El Gallo other than what emerges through his music.
  72. Virgil Bliss
    Jordan and Kirsten Russell, as the deadbeat-hooker love interest, bring the film to intermittent life, suggesting several more dimensions than the stale, futile scenario ever allows them.
  73. Secret Society
    There's a certain gutsy allure to the wildly improbable proceedings.
  74. Bad Company
    Predictably soulless techno-tripe, this Bruckheimer-in-a-can thriller is leavened only by the ludicrous notion of Chris Rock playing separated twins.
  75. Ivansxtc
    Boldly engineering a collision between tawdry B-movie flamboyance and grandiose spiritual anomie, Rose's film, true to its source material, provides a tenacious demonstration of death as the great equalizer.
  76. Cherish
    The only flicker of thematic interest -- AM radio obsession as psychopathology -- is duly subsumed into a sea of desperate soundtrack come-ons.
  77. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    As earnest and smart-alecky as an entire season of Designing Women, Ya-Ya is sure to score with its redemptive family melodramatics and stock eccentric characterizations.
  78. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    So elemental in its means yet so cosmic in its drama, it could herald a rebirth of cinema.
  79. Mama Africa
    These after-school specials are distinctly depoliticized and seem tailored for Western audiences, so the African settings feel oddly superfluous.
  80. Kaaterskill Falls
    The filmmakers skillfully evoke the sense of menace that nature holds for many urban dwellers. -- Sometimes, though, the editing is choppy, and the film could use more of a script.
  81. The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
    Mad Songs saves its most memorable image for its hard-earned climax, which molds the ambiguous, hallucinatory spectacle of a combusting effigy into a viewer-implicating demonstration of crowd psychology and a harrowing cri de coeur.
  82. The Sum of All Fears
    The jerry-rigged result is a trite espionage thriller without the thrills but with a lingering measure of nausea.
  83. Undercover Brother
    Much of Undercover Brother plays as a funnier, if similarly addled, "Bamboozled."
  84. Elling
    Elling is nothing if not carefully controlled hokum -- both actors, the director, and screenwriter all worked it through first as a stage adaptation of a novel by Ingvar Ambjornsen.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Next Big Thing
    Posner's dishearteningly unsophisticated treatment itself rings false.
  86. The Sleepy Time Gal
    Münch's characters are given to a certain rapt, unwieldy thoughtfulness, and accordingly, his films cultivate a mood of almost trancelike introspection.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky
    A real snooze.
  88. Bartleby
    The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.
  89. Master of the Flying Guillotine (re-release)
    Snags the viewer's attention by lacing its martial-arts high jinks with a compelling weirdness.
  90. CQ
    Endearing but pointless, at once cluttered and tinny, this film-dork fantasia suggests a shopping spree at a high-end vintage emporium underwritten by Daddy's blank check.
  91. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Aspiring to evoke an unreal city stranded in the autumn of the soul, the film succeeds only when it peers up from the intro-philosophy book for the occasional glimpse of everyday beauty.
  92. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Dreary adventure. Parents, be forewarned: No talking equines means more songs, and the viselike soundtrack might be someone's idea of a cruel joke: hoarse whisperer Bryan Adams.
  93. Enough
    Campbell is the movie's primary power source. His steely gaze and overbearing quietude are forever tainted; "Once and Again" doesn't stand a chance in Lifetime reruns.
  94. Insomnia
    Nolan, withholding master of disorientation in his previous non-linear films, allows far too easy access into the psychic tumult of Al Pacino's cop and Robin Williams's prime suspect.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sia, the Dream of the Python
    Sia becomes a bloodbath of Shakespearean proportions as even the good guys kill one another in an effort to preserve illusions.
  96. The Back of the World
    What saves this deeply affecting film from being merely a collection of wrenching cases is Corcuera's attention to detail.
  97. The Importance of Being Earnest
    Tonally, however, Earnest boasts perfect pitch, thanks mainly to the blithe, nimble actors.
  98. Late Marriage
    Kosashvili's camera is restrained, the better to render Late Marriage superbly brash, raunchy, and confrontational.
  99. The Believer
    Bean has built a bonfire of contradictions and the ensuing conflagration illuminates a bit of the world.
  100. About a Boy
    Since the central odd couple have no rapport, their bond never seems to progress past mutual usury.
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