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. Happenstance
    Being French, the film at least has indelible details -- something a Hollywood remake would fix but good.
  2. Tape
    The movie takes shape as an entertaining psychological armwrestle between rank belligerence and blustery condescension.
  3. Domestic Disturbance
    As the basest form of genre hootenanny, it wimps out: There's no twist, no showboat acting, not even an outrageous crisis of paternal violence.
  4. Everything Put Together
    Seeks to portray loss as a literal, convulsive nightmare, and it's not above resorting to horror-movie tropes and Grand Guignol trickery.
  5. Monsters, Inc.
    But Monsters, Inc. -- directed by Pixar soldier Pete Docter, not by master digital comic John Lasseter -- turns out to be stingy on context, commentary, and the prism-ing view of pop culture that made the earlier films mint.
  6. Amélie
    The screen is saturated with Gallic whimsy and the romance of Montmartre in the person of Amélie.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The One
    In The One the maze of death leads only to exhaustion -- a solipsistic extension of Bruce Lee pacing the room of mirrors at the end of "Enter the Dragon."
  8. Punks
    Thanks to an uninhibited screenplay and the easy, unforced chemistry of its ensemble cast, Punks is mostly good, snappy fun.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mysterious Object at Noon
    Far from an empty vessel, the film encourages an ever increasing proliferation of odd topics and perspectives.
  10. The Man Who Wasn't There
    This fastidiously hyperreal neo-noir suggests a sadder but wiser remake of the Coens' rambunctious debut, "Blood Simple."
  11. The Town Is Quiet
    The last-minute combination of Greek tragedy and Janis Joplin is so genuinely startling that, had the movie been shorted by a third, it might have turned everything around.
  12. History Lessons
    Hammer betrays a tiresome attachment to cross-cutting ladyporn with antiquated educational filmstrips, to no real end but snarky giggles.
  13. Kill by Inches
    A ponderous, almost wordless sliver of grotesquerie.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    On the Line
    Less a romance than a feature-length plug for 'N Sync and its personalities -- and so, like all ads, not meant for "conscious consumption." Which opens the blissful avenue of sleep.
  15. K-PAX
    K-PAX undertakes a garbled but comprehensive survey of Hollywood therapeutic clichés: The rain man has an awakening from his cocoon, pays it forward, turns into the fisher king.
  16. Life as a House
    So feel-sniffly-good it could make you revisit lunch.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Better Than Sex
    Despite the wall-to-wall shagging in Cin's loft, -- this Three Days of the Condom is less Last Tango in Sydney than "When Harry Met Sally."
  18. Ginger Snaps
    This Canadian cheapie plays like an above-average "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode, filtered through the sensibility of early David Cronenberg.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Ouch
    If nothing else, Sophie Fillières's Ouch! is a secret pop culture index.
  20. Donnie Darko
    Has plenty of problems. But most stem from a young filmmaker overswinging on his first time up to the plate and hitting a deep fly out rather than a home run.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Bones
    Bones splits the difference between horror and social commentary, with pallid returns.
  22. Trembling Before G-d
    Though angry and sorrowful, Trembling Before G-d, beginning with the title, is above all a work of reverence.
  23. A Chronicle of Corpses
    McElhinney may have made the ultimate anti-calling card, a movie bold and deranged enough to tip its hat to Edgar Ulmer and Barry Lyndon.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Cool and Crazy
    If music be the food of love, Cool & Crazy could stand a few more hits from the spice rack.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 10 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Dog Run
    Dog Run mistakes milieu for meaning; its succinct title's at least a word too long.
  26. One Week
    By turns whimsical and painful.
  27. Focus
    Dern and Macy give doughty performances in schematic roles, but glasses or no, these have to be two of the least Semitic-looking actors in American movies.
  28. Riding in Cars with Boys
    Mistakes self-pitying embitterment for carry-on endurance, and manages to have its causality both ways.
  29. Intimacy
    Authentically British or not, Intimacy is squarely in the indigenous kitchen-sink style -- a far cry from the absurdly chic, sentimental pseudo-worldliness of something like "An Affair of Love."
  30. The Last Castle
    Bizarre, confused, sanctimonious manure that makes Lurie's own "The Contender" look responsible by comparison.
  31. From Hell
    Superbly shot around Prague -- From Hell is even more stylish than gruesome -- it has the lush decrepitude of an autumn compost heap or an old Hammer werewolf flick.
  32. Burnt Money
    Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.
  33. Waking Life
    Waking Life doesn't leave you in a dream, specifically the dream of Linklater's previous films, so much as it traps you in an endless bull session.
  34. White Hotel
    Griffin and Solvang's obliviousness, and the filmmakers' habit of mugging condescendingly while conducting interviews doesn't help either.
  35. Berlin Babylon
    To many eyes, Berlin was the saddest city in 20th-century Europe, divided and lost, and as city symphonies go, Siegert's is pragmatic and optimistic.
  36. The Operator
    Can't surmount its own ineptitude.
  37. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    Arik Kaplun's smart, scrappy romantic comedy Yana's Friends displays an insouciance rarely found in Israeli film.
  38. My First Mister
    The best that can be said about director Christine Lahti's feature debut is that it doesn't fall into any ready category.
  39. Iron Monkey
    Anyone expecting the decorous serenity of the Ang Lee film should be aware that Iron Monkey strives for no more or less than comic-strip thwack and thump.
  40. Bandits
    Neither sardonic nor slapstick enough, Bandits is framed as a flashback -- which merely heightens the general feeling of inevitability.
  41. Mulholland Dr.
    Thrilling and ludicrous. The movie feels entirely instinctual. The rest is silencio.
  42. Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures
    A spare, formally ingenious, journalistically acute piece of filmmaking.
  43. Werckmeister Harmonies
    A work of bravura filmmaking.
  44. Fat Girl
    As fascinating as it is discomfiting and as intelligent as it is primal. From first shot to last, France's foremost bad girl has made an extremely good movie -- and maybe even a great one.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grateful Dawg
    It's like an 80-minute flip through the Grisman family photo album -- complete with live, unreleased soundtrack.
  46. Joy Ride
    Redoubtably hilarious as always, Zahn also lends his character unpredictable flashes of anger, pathos, and faint psychosis, even when the movie jumps the median from ticklishly discomfiting black comedy into by-the-numbers horror jolts.
  47. The Debut
    Has a sweet low-budget quality that sometimes slips into TV-movie schmaltz.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Serendipity
    The most romantic New York movie since August's "Happy Accidents."
  49. Training Day
    Antoine Fuqua's propulsive, elegantly written police thriller, offers the unsettling spectacle of Denzel Washington.
  50. Chop Suey
    Time and again words fail Weber. He's a loquacious but unilluminating host.
  51. La Ciénaga
    A veritable Chekhov tragicomedy of provincial life.
  52. Va Savoir (Who Knows?)
    Va Savoir has its own unhurried pace and unpredictable humor. This is the sort of comedy Robert Altman could only dream about.
  53. Jabberwocky (re-release)
    The film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
  54. Dinner Rush
    The cast never skips a beat, particularly Mark Margolis as the most obnoxious dinner customer in cinema history and Summer Phoenix as his unfazed waitress.
  55. Hearts in Atlantis
    The heartfelt use of extrasensory events as metaphors for a child's grasp of adult mysteries has a poetry to it, and the unblinking sympathy for kids struggling with evil and with the strange frequencies of prepubescent passion can, if your defenses are down, lay you out.
  56. Zoolander
    The result is a freakishly potent farce.
  57. Don't Say a Word
    Fleder's forgettable thriller has a convincing edge, and Douglas remains unchallenged as Hollywood's most tremulous and disquieting dad-under-pressure.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Sobreviviré
    Bears some resemblance to "All About My Mother," but lacks its compatriot's flamboyance, content to traffic in glib banalities and unwitting self-absorption.
  59. The Season of Men
    A very beautiful film, but its bleached desert colors and flatter perspectives are less inviting, and the back-and-forth between present and past can occasionally be confusing.
  60. Liam
    Acting is the strongest element in Stephen Frears's Liam.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Endurance
    Still enigmatic is the figure of Shackleton himself. The film conveys his remarkable leadership without explaining (beyond a because-it's-there romanticism) what would compel such a journey in the first place.
  62. Go Tigers!
    This sly, sobering doc exposes the grievously fucked-up priorities surrounding the sport in a small town with little else on which to hang its hopes.
  63. Glitter
    A heart-wrenching debacle from the starting gun.
  64. Rocky Road
    This perky would-be consciousness-raiser dilutes a potentially interesting subject -- interracial marriage -- with half-baked platitudes, self-conscious acting, and a plot trite enough to be rejected by the PAX channel.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Children Underground
    A horror story, told with Dickensian compassion, permeating outrage, and little hope.
  66. Haiku Tunnel
    It's unpretentiously low-tech and humorously offbeat. And against all odds, the filmmaker emerges as a star.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kill Me Later
    Her every gesture exaggerated, Blair acts as if she's performing in a silent film, but unfortunately, the film itself isn't silent -- the jam-packed alterna-rock soundtrack further emphasizes the obvious.
  68. A Trial in Prague
    Justman's A Trial in Prague acts as something of a corrective to the exuberant but oversimplified "Fighter."
  69. Tell Me Something
    Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.
  70. Bounce: Behind the Velvet Rope
    Mindless, shoddy (lurching zooms, no color correction, an entire reel out of sync) depiction of some very big guys who work as bouncers.
  71. Two Can Play That Game
    It's the summer's most disingenuous movie -- a real achievement in a waning season that included Tim Burton's "Banana Splits" remake.
  72. A Matter of Taste
    A Matter of Taste's largest handicap is restraint: It's too tasteful. The climactic crisis is a broken leg, and the off-screen denouement is unimaginative.
  73. The Musketeer
    East/West fusion aside, The Musketeer is a stale Euro-pudding.
  74. L.I.E.
    Preposterous enough to entertain.
  75. Our Lady of the Assassins
    The performances can be stiff, but a kinetic mix of anxiety, dread, and numbed resignation is always palpable.
  76. Rock Star
    Raking over the same clichés as "Almost Famous," Rock Star is far less reverential -- it isn't burdened by generational nostalgia and doesn't take itself too seriously.
  77. The Iron Ladies
    We get a bunch of straight actors focusing on the "gayness" of their characters, mincing and lisping and melodramatically breaking nails, all in the besmirched name of tolerance.
  78. Vengo
    Gatlif's latest celebration of gypsy soul, sets a modest sliver of narrative in a fabulous widescreen landscape and surrounds it with a permanent party.
  79. The American Astronaut
    Rarely funny and straining to reach feature length, The American Astronaut achieves sweetness via its straight-faced take on utter gobbledygook.
  80. Djomeh
    Enriches a deceptively anecdotal plot with a combination of observational camerawork, strong narrative rhythms, and deft characterization.
  81. O
    Had Nelson and Kaaya been less concerned with following Othello to the letter and rather had pursued this love affair into uncharted cinematic waters, O might have been more than an unresolved mixture of gimmickry and good intentions.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Tortilla Soup
    Tortilla Soup feels instantly dated, distinguishable from EDMW only by some attractive close-ups of avocado.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Maybe Baby
    Proves infertile in more ways than one.
  84. Summer Catch
    Can only be enjoyed with a skullful of Old Bohemian and a faceful of high school crotch.
  85. Together
    The actors, mainly newcomers, have an improvisational freshness well matched to the freewheeling camera work.
  86. Ghosts of Mars
    Written, directed, and edited with the offhand shoddiness of a day worker thinking about his evening beer.
  87. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    Although there's no evidence of sexual chemistry on the screen, the stars share a certain physical defensiveness that occasionally makes them seem simpatico; most of the time, however, they just look bored to death.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Happy Accidents
    The leads smooth over the plot holes endemic to all 4D fables, making the movie more than mere déjà vu.
  89. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    Stunning in its guileless self-love, Smith's doodle-movie shows virtually no sign of being made for an audience. The 90-minute by-product of Smith's let's-shoot-a-movie pot party can be mystifying -- we've all stood soberly by as high friends guffaw at nothing in particular, but now we can pay for the privilege.
  90. Bubble Boy
    The coke-fried gibbons behind Bubble Boy came to a trailblazing conclusion: The ideal filmic oddity is white, male, and -- a mother's deception notwithstanding -- perfectly healthy.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cupid's Mistake
    Made with $980 and about as many brain cells, Cupid's Mistake is more cute than clever.
  92. Fighter
    Probably more terse than it needs to be, but the dramatic line has an elegance and drive that reinforces the unexpected turns of the story.
  93. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    Comes down to two sorely limited and rapidly tiresome characters.
  94. Brooklyn Babylon
    Levin's Brooklyn Babylon, set during a hot summer in Crown Heights, is an ethnic-strife tract as thuddingly didactic as his previous "Whiteboys."
  95. Innocence
    Something lured Paul Cox down memory lane, but he should have stayed at home.
  96. Blood: The Last Vampire
    This overhyped slashfest fails to rise above the extravagant pointlessness that plagues inferior anime.
  97. American Outlaws
    Les Mayfield's unintentionally wry American Outlaws just smells -- of filmmaking manure as well as yard-sale revisionism.
  98. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    Ms. Cruz...once again proves her inability to give a bad performance even under the worst of circumstances.
  99. Rat Race
    Zucker's frenzied trifle is painless, with a few decent running gags -- and an ocean of bad ones.
  100. Aberdeen
    Norway's hallucinatory, edge-of-the-world beauty imbues the story with a woozy, alcoholic haze and a sense of the marginal spaces into which the messiest aspects of private life are shoved.
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