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. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    There is an odd cognitive dissonance at work between the obvious ingenuity dedicated to the film's visual details -- alien anatomies, industrial machinery, technological minutiae -- and the retarded intelligence quotient evident in its content.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cremaster 3
    Offers little beyond the momentary joys of pretty and weightless intellectual entertainment.
  3. Standing by Yourself
    A crystalline curio of dumbshit nihilism shot through with fleeting pathos, Koury's home movie often evokes "The Decline of Western Civilization Part III."
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ultimate X: The Movie
    Nausea-inducing street luge provides the requisite kinesthetic thrill of this mega-cinematic genre.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Janice Beard
    Playful and sentimental, with comic-book characterization and a half-orphaned, filially righteous head case, Janice Beard resembles a British "Amélie."
  6. The Lady and the Duke
    If you can forget the world-historic significance of the mass revolution that overthrew Europe's oldest absolute monarchy -- or rather, subsume it in the mysteries of personality -- The Lady and the Duke is the stuff of human interest.
  7. Unfaithful
    Casual familiarity with Lyne's oeuvre is all you need to predict the major plot contortion.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    Confident and brash, Lagaan may be high-concept New Bollywood, but it plays like well-crafted Old Hollywood.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Man's Gotta Do
    The only thing more inexplicable than the loathsome score is the story's determination to impregnate all its major female characters. Fuggedaboudit.
  10. Home Movie
    The film is slight but sweetly inquisitive, and its participants are endlessly fascinating.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Mystic Masseur
    Ismail Merchant's screen adaptation retains much of the novel's incident, but fumbles both the humor and moral ambivalence.
  12. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, Warm Water may well be the year's best and most unpredictable comedy.
  13. ABC Africa
    The emphasis in this surprisingly cheerful film is on the resilience of the living.
  14. Hollywood Ending
    The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."
  15. Fleeing by Night
    This dreadfully earnest inversion of the "Concubine" love triangle eschews the previous film's historical panorama and roiling pathos for bug-eyed mugging and gay-niche condescension.
  16. Spider-Man
    Mildly cheesy but not overwrought, this long-awaited future franchise is a competent seat-warmer at the box-office table for the two weekends preceding George Lucas's "Attack of the Clones."
  17. Grin Without a Cat
    More impressionistic than analytical, A Grin Without a Cat is a grand immersion.
  18. Spiral
    With playful, compelling gore having slowed to a near trickle stateside, Uzumaki demands attention.
  19. Circuit
    Even from deep in a K-hole, you'd need about 10 seconds to figure out the remaining plot twists in this jaded muscle-queen morality tale.
  20. Sade
    Too bland and fustily tasteful to be truly prurient, Sade moves along at a reasonable clip, goosed by claps of gothic lighting, solemn chords, and amplified sound effects.
  21. Sex with Strangers
    Choppy, overlong documentary.
  22. Vulgar
    Sure to appear in everyone's worst-of lists at year's end, to say nothing of a few bad dreams, Bryan Johnson's Vulgar is an unclassifiably awful study in self- and audience-abuse.
  23. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Makes for unexpectedly giddy viewing.
  24. Life or Something Like It
    Cloaks a familiar anti-feminist equation (career - kids = misery) in tiresome romantic-comedy duds.
  25. Night at the Golden Eagle
    Rifkin milks the generic Bukowski-land setting for all its melodramatic potential, but what little grace his tale of precarious skid-row dignity achieves is pushed into the margins by predictable plotting and tiresome histrionics.
  26. Rain
    The visual subtleties don't come to bear on the storytelling, unfortunately -- the dialogue is cumbersome, the simpering soundtrack and editing more so.
  27. The Salton Sea
    Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable.
  28. Some Body
    The self-conscious acting and use of direct address bespeak an aesthetic less orthodox Dogme than MTV's Real World, with a nod to Jerry Springer.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Facing the Music
    In a meticulous style that often appears offhanded, the directors chronicle Boyd's journey step-by-step, pausing to eavesdrop on the teacher talking to herself.
  30. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    Vardalos's parodies of Greek family values are loving and witheringly hilarious.
  31. Murderous Maids
    Genuinely unnerving movie.
  32. Space Station 3D
    You're paying for the view, and it's truly breathtaking.
  33. Murder by Numbers
    But owing no doubt to the requirements of Sandra Bullock, the movie's above-the-line star, executive producer, and worst enemy, this potboiling procedural never stands a chance of disproving its title.
  34. Girls Can't Swim
    Falters when it takes a final, violent turn into melodrama.
  35. Enigma
    Doesn't coddle the audience. But neither does it play fair. The narrative takes several fast turns and stops short with the sudden introduction of new material; the exposition is hurried and lazily predicated on characters' thinking aloud.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Scorpion King
    Director Chuck Russell lacks the visual panache, the comic touch, and perhaps the budget of Sommers's title-bout features, which refined a historically grounded B-movie sensibility into pure, gasp-inducing entertainment.
  37. World Traveler
    The movie's single brilliant invention -- Julianne Moore as a used, contentious, profoundly odd floozy on her own magical mystery tour.
  38. Nine Queens
    Has a customarily jovial air but a deficit of flim-flam inventiveness.
  39. Chelsea Walls
    The digital-video results play like a flatulent teenager's first discovery of jazz, cigarettes, and hooch.
  40. The Triumph of Love
    It's a giddy farce worthy of Lucy and Ethel, and Peploe plays up the buffoonery.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mule Skinner Blues
    Earnhart's auteurs are better adjusted, integrating their art into the daily routine of their (equally fucked-up) lives.
  42. The Cat's Meow
    A better-than-competent period evocation that allows the director to flaunt his knowledge (and perhaps vent some of his own bitterness) regarding Hollywood.
  43. Human Nature
    An overemphatic, would-be wacky, ultimately tedious sex farce.
  44. Frailty
    It's a small, unassuming movie grasping at whole-hog homo psychopathicus, with its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Other Side of Heaven
    Strangely coy about its denominational allegiance.
  46. Changing Lanes
    Smitten by the symmetry of his parable, director Roger Michell crosscuts emphatically between the preening leads -- a strategy that only draws attention to the numerous lapses in logic and unpersuasive changes of heart while sidelining the lively supporting cast
  47. New Best Friend
    Clearly the product of an editing-room scramble, New Best Friend is a self-lambasting farce, despite Kirshner's passionate college try at establishing a third dimension in a brain-dead movie flatland.
  48. The Sweetest Thing
    One of the cruddiest-looking movies ever made.
  49. Echoes
    Funahashi's visual mood-making is an object lesson in how to create a sense of intimate anomie with next to nothing.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Lucky Break
    Mike Leigh mainstay Timothy Spall deftly shades in the designated goner, fellow "Still Crazy" alum Bill Nighy is sweetly wispy as the capable fop, and anger-management counselor Olivia Williams trembles pleasantly as usual.
  51. Les Destinées
    An impressively coordinated enterprise that lasts three hours, manages a large cast, and covers a period of 30-odd years while successfully unfolding as a series of scenes from the life of a single character.
  52. High Crimes
    Secret trials and buried atrocities are no match for a plucky (and rich, and svelte) young heroine, least of all Ms. Ashley Judd, who eyebrow-cocks her way through Carl Franklin's witless High Crimes.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    American Chai
    As earnest as a community-college advertisement, American Chai is enough to make you put away the guitar, sell the amp, and apply to medical school.
  54. Big Trouble
    Cute intentions and shaggy comedy only get you so far when the world is falling down around you.
  55. The Komediant
    A linguistic stew with a zesty, homemade flavor that belies its carefully researched preparation.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Astoria
    It's about following your dreams, no matter what your parents think. Socrates motions for hemlock.
  57. Crush
    Manipulative tragedy, muddled motivations, incongruous reconciliations, deranged cuteness, all of it directed with a tin ear and laden with a score that evokes the experience of a conditioned lab rat.
  58. The Piano Teacher
    The Piano Teacher's study in lurid sexual pathology occasions a tour de force by Isabelle Huppert as the title character.
  59. Time Out
    Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.
  60. Death to Smoochy
    Death to Smoochy is often very funny, but what's even more remarkable is the integrity of DeVito's misanthropic vision.
  61. Panic Room
    Like the shelter for which it is named, Panic Room is an efficiently tooled construction (albeit one whose success is overly predicated on its villains' single-minded idiocy). But unlike the eponymous treasure trove, there's nothing inside.
  62. No Such Thing
    Thematic muddle aside, the film's appeal lies in Burke's ranting charisma, Julie Christie's thankless turn as a sympathetic doctor, and Michael Spiller's radiant cinematography, which frequently captures the mythic grandeur that eludes Hartley's narrative grasp.
  63. Clockstoppers
    If I were 13, I might be sufficiently entranced by the movie's bicycle stunts (down stairs! across countertops!) and wouldn't be wondering why ideas for science fiction films haven't progressed very far from "Star Trek's" first seasons all those decades ago.
  64. Shot in the Heart
    A small-screen aesthetic is evident in the abundant close-ups and tight framing, but Holland makes it work for her.
  65. Margarita Happy Hour
    Chaiken ably balances real-time rhythms with propulsive incident -- she catches subtler interior strains, too.
  66. Lola
    Like a Hollywood fairy tale, Lola is always threatening to turn into a musical. Its edge as a film comes from the fact that it never quite does.
  67. Very Annie Mary
    Leaks treacle from every pore.
  68. Son of the Bride
    In its details, though, Juan José Campanella's movie works beautifully: The actors are all superb when the florid demands of the story allow them elbowroom.
  69. Jim Brown: All American
    Since Lee is a sentimentalist, the film is more worshipful than your random "E! True Hollywood Story."
  70. Blade II
    Appallingly violent.
  71. Pauline and Paulette
    Without condescension, Debrauwer offers comic glimpses into their separate dreams of grandeur, but he lets Pauline's touching simplicity unite them.
  72. Harrison's Flowers
    A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance.
  73. Showtime
    Should come with a disclaimer.
  74. Y Tu Mamá También
    It has the charm of the original American road movies, feasting on the gorgeous, ramshackle landscape of the filmmaker's motherland.
  75. Promises
    An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.
  76. Ice Age
    Has only its stylized designs to recommend it.
  77. Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War
    Claims to sort the bad guys from the good, which is its essential problem.
  78. Asphalt Zahov
    Dryly cynical; the scenarios pit plump, amoral, industrialized Jews against draconian, wife-beating, tribal Arabs.
  79. All About the Benjamins
    Glitz and speed help alleviate cavernous plot holes and rote gangsta misogyny, while the gleeful violence, pointlessly sappy lulls, and racial sparring are leavened a bit by capricious auto-critique.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Festival in Cannes
    Has shades of such oleaginous insider-treading as "The Player" and "Celebrity," but the mood, like the lighting, is altogether sunnier.
  81. The Time Machine
    If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Miss Wonton
    As genre comeuppance, this might have been nasty fun, but the movie barely makes sense, with its unbelievable naïveté and arbitrary flashbacks.
  83. Esther Kahn
    This is a movie about the nature of acting -- or, more specifically, the nature that creates an actress -- centered on what appears to be a spectacularly unconvincing title-role performance.
  84. Stolen Summer
    Made with no discernible craft and monstrously sanctimonious in dealing with childhood loss, it might as well be called "Pray It Forward."
  85. Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Casually racist and inordinately sexist, Pépé le Moko is best enjoyed for its offhand surrealism.
  86. Borstal Boy
    Sheridan seems terrified of the book's irreverent energy, and scotches most of its élan, humor, bile, and irony. What's left wouldn't have substantiated a memoir of any reputation, much less a movie.
  87. We Were Soldiers
    Soldiers is righteously explicit about the damage artillery does to human flesh, and for its part, it proves relentlessly unpleasant.
  88. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    Roughly splits the difference between "Six Days, Seven Nights" and "9 1/2 Weeks." Which is something like the nth-order derivative of an infinite regression.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    How to Kill Your Neighbor's Dog
    Next to this, even "Mean Machine's" painless soft-tissue spikings and fast-fixing broken limbs are believable -- and way funnier.
  90. The Cherry Orchard
    Allegiance to Chekhov, which director Michael Cacoyannis displays with somber earnestness in the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is a particularly vexing handicap.
  91. Big Bad Love
    Brown's saga, like many before his, makes for snappy prose but a stumblebum of a movie.
  92. Maryam
    Serry perfectly captures the peculiar climate, creating uncanny echoes with today's situation. Persian stars Shaun Toub and Shohreh Aghdashloo are extremely convincing as Maryam's parents.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Revolution OS
    Less a revolutionary tale than a simple recounting of the recent past -- as staid as the pages in a history book.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mean Machine
    The most off-key notes here are the sentimental ones: When David Kelly shows up, reprising the wise-trustee role he had in the horticulture-behind-bars movie "Greenfingers," it's as though some twee script gremlin sneaked in and meddled with the Guy Ritchie schematics.
  95. Monsoon Wedding
    An air-conditioned bus tour of Punjabi ritual. Nair stuffs the film with dancing, henna, ornamentation, and group song, but her narrative clichés and telegraphed episodes smell of old soap opera.
  96. Dragonfly
    The climax comes at you like a thrown cream pie, but given its faux-mythic nerve, it's tolerable. Too bad this latest station in Costner's ongoing self-crucifixion is such small potatoes until then.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Queen of the Damned
    Aaliyah fans, as well as fans of charisma, sex, and violence, will be sorely disappointed.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Return to Never Land
    The low-key animation, featuring little that could not have appeared in its '50s predecessor, is all the more affecting for being so pristinely preserved.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scratch
    Scratch's strongest moments are the live performance sequences, where hip-hop becomes an ultra-rhythmic spiritual experience, with roots in West African trance ritual and South Bronx gang solidarity.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Last Man
    If The Last Man were the last movie left on earth, there would be a toss-up between presiding over the end of cinema as we know it and another night of delightful hand shadows.
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