Village Voice's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Wendigo
    Grounded in Fessenden's handheld camera, stuttering montage rhythms, and time-lapse photography, the engagingly primitive animated special effects contribute to a mood that's sustained through the surprisingly somber conclusion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hart's War
    Seriously off balance.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Crossroads
    You spend a lot of time wondering, "Better or worse than Glitter?" You think if the projectionist cranked the volume a little you could actually sort of get into this.
  4. Umberto D (re-release)
    It's too bad that the film is sporadically crude (a moment of suicidal angst is illustrated with a shove-zoom to the pavement), prone to mega-Italian extroversion, and far too in love with stupid pet tricks.
  5. Super Troopers
    Close enough in spirit to its freewheeling trash-cinema roots to be a breath of fresh air.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    John Q
    Washington is in default dignified mode here. He capably embodies the hero's transformation from doughy dad to man of action, amid the movie's shameless button-pushing and cheap religious overlay.
  7. Much Ado About Something
    It's a pleasingly Hollywood notion that plays well with Rubbo's interpolated quotes from "Shakespeare in Love."
  8. Scotland, Pa.
    The irrepressible Walken smiles benignly down on his colleagues, secure in the knowledge that his antics have capsized sturdier vessels than this. Playing a supposed health-food nut, he enters the movie chewing and doesn't stop until he's devoured every scene down to the props.
  9. Rollerball
    McTiernan's Rollerball is a movie masochist's delight.
  10. Collateral Damage
    Intermittently, in attempts to articulate a coherent argument, Collateral Damage shifts from pulse-pounding mode to something more migraine-conducive.
  11. Swiri
    High-powered and gory.
  12. Birthday Girl
    It may not be particularly innovative, but the film's crisp, unaffected style and air of gentle longing make it unexpectedly rewarding.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Rumor of Angels
    The pat reconciliations among family members start to pile up like so much driftwood along the beach.
  14. Slackers
    The most that can be said for Slackers -- aside from the unqualified pleasure of Schwartzman's unfaked, puppyish weirdness -- is that it doesn't abandon its putrid ideals for the sake of a neat finish.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Loners
    Contains exactly three decent jokes, all stuffed in the last 15 minutes.
  16. Domestic Violence
    The most compelling Wiseman epic of recent years -- reminiscent of his hellish 1975 masterpiece, "Welfare," in its open-ended articulation of chaotic, violent, luckless lives.
  17. Waydowntown
    With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.
  18. Maelstrom
    Wanders all over the map thematically and stylistically, and borrows heavily from Lynch, Jeunet, and von Trier while failing to find a spark of its own.
  19. The Son's Room
    A movie more to be prescribed than recommended.
  20. The Mothman Prophecies
    A diverting pulp time-waster.
  21. Hey, Happy!
    Gonick's visceral impulses have drawn comparisons with John Waters, but the starry-eyed collision of gross-out gags and candy-sweet sentiment owes as much of a debt to the Farrellys as Bruce LaBruce.
  22. Metropolis
    Metropolis is "A.I." without tears.
  23. Storytelling
    The leanest and meanest of Solondz's misanthropic comedies, feasts on the anguish of adolescence and confusion of college -- white suburban-style.
  24. The Count of Monte Cristo
    The week's guilty pleasure is The Count of Monte Cristo, a gorgeously photographed, sumptuously designed adaptation of the Dumas swashbuckler boasting the most ludicrous dialogue since director Kevin Reynolds's "Waterworld."
  25. Beijing Bicycle
    Wang mistakes affectless storytelling and character conception for rigor, and as a result huge portions of Beijing Bicycle are dull and repetitive.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Adobo
    Adobo doesn't exoticize the culture so much as leaven it with a sense of ordinariness.
  27. Ha-Hesder
    Flawed but engrossing thriller. Highly atmospheric, it gets its charge by dramatizing religious millennialism in a region that is the world epicenter of irrationality.
  28. Italian for Beginners
    A funny, relationship-driven ensemble piece that takes the chill out of the Danish winter with a snuggly blanket of humanism.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Milan Hlavsa a Plastic People of the Universe
    For the non-Czech audience, the overview may be patchy. Viewers who know heroes aren't saints deserve more information about the band's internal rifts, the main thing that kept them nonfunctional after 1988. With history this juicy, the music gets upstaged -- it's a limitation of the medium.
  30. Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    Marvelously grizzled and tender, Josef Bierbichler's Brecht wheezes and grumbles through it all.
  31. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    It's easily the most disarming and inventive movie made for genre geeks in years.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    E-Dreams
    That the e-graveyard holds as many good ideas as bad is the cold comfort that Chin's film serves up with style and empathy.
  33. Orange County
    Hardly the idiosyncratic Mickey Finn you'd expect from the men behind 1998's underrated "Zero Effect" and 2000's discomfort-splooge "Chuck & Buck."
  34. What Time Is It Over There?
    Filled with purposeful, if absurd, activity rendered gravely hilarious through Tsai's deadpan, distanced representation of extreme behavior.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
    The only rationale for the production seems to be that the pair were gay, and therein lies the main problem with this uninspired example of queer-film-festival filler.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    Appropriately, Riedelsheimer shoots Goldsworthy's mini-megaliths with a landscape painter's eye; set to Fred Firth's modernist score, some images verge on Kubrick territory.
  37. Charlotte Gray
    The narrative is unexpectedly sleepy, excepting the occasional flashy set piece.
  38. I Am Sam
    Actual concussive cranial abuse would be preferable to Jessie Nelson's I Am Sam.
  39. Dark Blue World
    Dark Blue World and Sverak's previous "Kolya" were each written by the director's father, Zdenek, and both films betray a weakness for the symmetrical and sentimental.
  40. Black Hawk Down
    It's a Jerry Bruckheimer art film, perhaps the most extravagantly aestheticized combat movie ever made.
  41. Gosford Park
    As with Altman's best movies, Gosford Park is above all an entrancing hum of atmosphere and texture.
  42. Monster's Ball
    Wastes a ton of potent material.
  43. The Shipping News
    In lieu of vaporous message-mongering, the languid, episodic narrative -- centering on hapless sadsack Quoyle (Spacey) -- streams along by the gentle force of a convincing melancholic undertow, a dejection and longing that's not so much surmounted as sustained.
  44. Ali
    Filled with vivid cameos and set to an infectious soul beat that effectively covers the underlying hum of calculated precision.
  45. The Majestic
    A mishmash of life-insurance commercials and Ronald Reagan campaign spots, this sexless orgy of self-congratulation is designed to make you feel good about Hollywood, America, and Jim Carrey -- not to mention the nation's motion picture exhibitors, who are praised at one point as the antithesis of Soviet Communism.
  46. Kate & Leopold
    The shabby metaphysics and complete absence of internal logic are perhaps meant to charm, but only add to the eye-gouging irritant factor.
  47. A Beautiful Mind
    It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.
  48. A Song for Martin
    Scenes from a marriage unfolding at the limits of love and personality.
  49. How High
    Too lazy to be a comedy, too conventional to be a head movie.
  50. Little Otik
    This comic horror story rivals A.I. as the year's creepiest representation of maternal love -- partly because it naturalizes the Frankenstein story in terms of human procreation.
  51. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Jackson's adaptation is certainly successful on its own terms.
  52. Kandahar
    The movie feels truncated, but it communicates a certain urgency and at times a powerful sense of the absurd.
  53. Lantana
    The scenario eventually becomes so coincidence-choked that the filmmakers have no choice but to play it for mild snickers.
  54. Piñero
    At its most indulgent and posturing, Piñero plays like a movie the man himself might've made, between scores.
  55. Iris
    Some critics wondered if "Elegy for Iris" was an act of revenge or reverence. The film, like the book, leaves behind a sad and sour image: of an indomitable woman gradually infantilized by glitches in her brain chemistry, and the man who finally is allowed to take custody of her.
  56. The Royal Tenenbaums
    May not be the movie of the year, but it is a seasonal gift to us all. Sweet and funny, doggedly oddball if bordering precious.
  57. Vanilla Sky
    For better or worse, Vanilla Sky is a genuine, albeit jejune, statement of star consciousness -- blustery with self-awe and feverish with cataclysmic self-doubt.
  58. Behind the Sun
    The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
    Created by an artist soon to enter his eighth decade, finds a secret paradise in the rich harvests of a lifetime's memories.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    In July
    A nimbler approach to border crossing, German-born director Fatih Akin's In July resembles a shaggier "Serendipity," with a similar moony conflation of coincidence and destiny.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Princesa
    Unsettling in spots, Princesa ultimately glosses over the futility of Fernanda's plight, her misery rapidly erased.
  62. Baran
    Remains simplistic and gimmicky in the context of Iranian cinema.
  63. Segunda piel
    Apparently reassembled from the cutting-room floor of any given daytime soap.
  64. Final
    A story that splits at the seams with plot holes and bloat.
  65. Last Orders
    The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Eban and Charley
    Preachy and humorless, Eban and Charley shocks only by the quality of its numbing solipsism.
  67. The Business of Strangers
    The Business of Strangers goes too far in dramatizing Julie's primal, Paula-fied surge of female fury, and the script finally mistakes respectful ambiguity for vaporous drift.
  68. No Man's Land
    A mordant battlefield allegory with an absurdist edge.
  69. Ocean's Eleven
    The movie is slick and studiously cool -- with plenty of visual flourishes but not too much soul.
  70. B-52
    That the Cold War was a wasteful charade proves Bitomsky's point amply enough, but his movie is a repetitive bore.
  71. The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield
    The feature itself remains a grotesquely enjoyable turn through the pulp-cinema wringer; hell, it could prove to be Mansfield's most enduring work.
  72. Black Rain
    A minor triumph of atmosphere and nightmare imaginings.
  73. Bay of Angels
    Most of all, it's an early chapter of Demy's courtship with the provincial France of his youth, with the most bewitching generation of French actresses, and with movies.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    ABCD
    Less effective in dramatizing the choices facing second-generation Indian Americans than as a showcase for Sheetal Sheth's terrific hair.
  75. Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys
    Code Unknown is Haneke's most expansive and, oddly, hopeful work -- not a gaze into the void, but a fierce attempt to scramble out of it.
  76. The Independent
    It lacks the coherent internal logic that distinguishes the best mockumentaries.
  77. The Affair of the Necklace
    L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.
  78. Behind Enemy Lines
    Though Wilson gives a customarily sympathetic, engaged, and unpredictable performance, his work is drowned out by pyrotechnics and orchestral paroxysms of patriotism.
  79. Trouble Every Day
    This modern-day vampire story is purposefully shocking in its eroticized gore, if unintentionally dull in its lack of poetic frissons.
  80. Bangkok Dangerous
    The movie is a technical marvel from its lysergic cinematography (by Decha Srimantra) to its pulsing-vessel sound design, but it has no identity apart from its influences, however dazzlingly they're deployed.
  81. In the Bedroom
    Increasingly unconvincing, In the Bedroom turns genteel rabble-rouser. Field's leisurely buildup forestalls but doesn't prevent his movie's mutation into a granola "Death Wish."
  82. Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    As news, it smokes CNN.
  83. Black Knight
    Suited only for unwitting under-twelvers (though even they may not outlast the midpoint evaporation of Lawrence's shtick).
  84. Sidewalks of New York
    Achieves inadvertent pathos via its own obscene irrelevance.
  85. The Devil's Backbone
    The movie is an expert, sunlit chiller audaciously predicated on an unquiet historical memory: "What is a ghost?"
  86. Spy Game
    Happily, beneath the film's nostalgic veneer and tooth-rattling visual and aural effects lies a mature ambiguity that's unusual for a holiday blockbuster -- and all but unheard of in a Tony Scott movie.
  87. Così ridevano
    Exploring a specific generational moment in mid-century Italy's social weft, Amelio's family saga might be his grimmest film, if only for the tragic exploitation of fraternity.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    In a way, the porn legend seems to have cut a tragic Faustian deal. He's always wanted to be a mainstream actor.
  89. The Fluffer
    The Fluffer even heads south of the border for its finale, as if hoping that warmer climes will energize its fitful melodrama.
  90. Novocaine
    Martin seems uncomfortable and oddly waxen (the orange Al Gore makeup doesn't help), injecting Frank with neither restless anger nor wry humor.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Simian Line
    The film tries hard to avoid cliché but doesn't get very far.
  92. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    There's a palpable avoidance of risk as this new mythology is wheeled gingerly into the marketplace and carefully positioned to zap your pre-sold brain...Solid but uninspired, Harry lacks brio. It's respectable and a bit dull.
  93. Bombay Eunuch
    A happy ending of sorts arrives out of nowhere -- against unfathomable odds, the string of awful ironies ends, for now, with sweet justice.
  94. I Remember Me
    Some of the testimonials are underedited, but as a work of passionate advocacy, I Remember Me can't be faulted.
  95. Maze
    Just when you think it can't get any worse, Maze rams home a body blow -- equating the involuntary spasms of Tourette's with the ungovernable impulses of the heart.
  96. King of the Jungle
    Rosenfeld's film doesn't have much of a story to tell and tells it rather routinely.
  97. Heist
    Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.
  98. Shallow Hal
    Not only light on laughs but discomfitingly didactic in its disgust.
  99. Town Bloody Hall
    What finally makes Town Bloody Hall so compelling -- and unsettling -- is the impression that such serious, spirited debate is a thing of the past.
  100. Otomo
    The film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »