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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    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela
    A sincere but sapless attempt to meld personal and political documentary.
  2. Urbanscapes
    The panoramas of vacant lots and boarded-up buildings, cheesily scored to lugubrious music, get monotonous, until you realize that repetition is precisely the point.
  3. The Devil Wears Prada
    A tour de force for Streep, who gives her character an unexpected measure of depth.
  4. The Blood of My Brother
    A few American soldiers are interviewed in a halfhearted attempt at balance, but Berends, who thankfully eschews narration, makes his own p.o.v. clear enough.
  5. The Great Yokai War
    The film makes no more or less sense than Ridley Scott's Legend or Jim Henson's Labyrinth, and in fact has a creaky, blue-gel '80s-ness to it, but for many, keeping up with Miike's cranked output is an end in itself.
  6. Superman Returns
    The movie may not be a single-bound building-leaper but Bryan Singer reconfigures the daddy of all comic-book sagas into something knowing, witty, and even sensitive.
  7. The Motel
    The Motel, Michael Kang's modest Sundance applause reaper, doesn't deserve to be shotgunned for the sins of 30 other movies. But the underwhelming syncopation of make-nice clichés is too familiar.
  8. Strangers with Candy
    Strangers With Candy regularly lampoons junkie-reparation melodramas and after-school specials, but with so little focus it's never clear what the film, or even Sedaris's vaudeville buffoon incarnation, is supposed to be parodying. That may be its fascination for some--it's a satire without a baseline, free-floating in its own self-indulgent ether.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Who Killed the Electric Car?
    The real question is why this purportedly impassioned documentary investigation of a great subject--the culture's conspiratorial dismissal of eco-friendly alternatives to the gas-guzzler -- would assume such massive viewer disinterest that it coats the pill with C-list celebrity NutraSweet, including Martin Sheen voiceovers -- that would sound unforgivably hackneyed even on basic cable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Room
    One of those rare American indies that confidently and successfully propose their own narrative logic, drawing viewers into a mental puzzle that may not contain a single clear solution.
  11. Rank
    Eschewing the jock-like aversion to "artiness" inherent in most sports docs, John Hyams's contemplative snapshot of professional bull riding, Rank, ups the ante for the form.
  12. Wassup Rockers
    Larry Clark's latest finds the grizzled shock-meister in a thoughtful mode and a mellow mood.
  13. Click
    De rigueur hypocritical as it may be coming from Hollywood, Click is a cultural critique, with the dull blade and impact of a battle-ax... But it's a farce about loss, and it doesn't flinch.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Waist Deep
    For its ever shifting attitudes toward men, women, and murder, Waist Deep is one of the sloppiest movies ever to reach the screen.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Two Drifters
    If you can look past the film's inexplicably straight face, Two Drifters is an enjoyably daffy picture.
  16. The Hidden Blade
    Yamada's decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot to the final showdown, seen with shifting points of view that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.
  17. The Road to Guantanamo
    One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park.
  18. The Great New Wonderful
    Ironically, Leiner's two monuments to pothead delirium seem vastly more coherent than this hazy attempt to mine the zeitgeist, a film every bit as pointed as its nounless title.
  19. The Forsaken Land
    Beautiful but withholding, The Forsaken Land doesn't offer much in the way of explanation -- the soundtrack features more birdcalls than dialogue -- but the 27-year-old filmmaker's command of film language is evident and his evocation of postwar trauma is haunting.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Garden of Earthly Delights
    There is magic in these intimate passion plays, which are filled with sloppy, loving detail and are mounted without a hint of pretension. Each banal moment becomes achingly gorgeous, not least because of Spiteri's disarmingly straightforward performance.
  21. Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man
    This "Last Waltz"–like doc is almost funereal, full of reverent banalities spliced between overly folksy takes on melancholic Leonard Cohen bombshells.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    Like 2 Fast 2 Furious before it, Tokyo Drift is a subculture in search of a compelling story line, and Black's leaden performance makes you pine for the days of Paul Walker.
  23. The Lake House
    Treading the same supernatural turf trampled by "Somewhere in Time" and "Frequency," director Alejandro Agresti's gooey, ostensibly spooky romance yarn The Lake House flounders less on its thudding familiarity than on its mood- killing dourness.
  24. Nacho Libre
    Nacho Libre plays like a Jack Black best-of, down to the song he wrote and performs for de La Reguera that sounds like some Tejano version of a Tenacious D throwaway.
  25. Land of the Blind
    It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.
  26. Loverboy
    Bacon the director indulges his wife, letting her play crazy and emotional in a showy performance that screams "serious actress."
  27. Lower City
    A bone-tired tale underneath.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green
    Unfabulous, unfunny, and unwatchable.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only Human
    Intermittently hilarious.
  30. Wordplay
    Another doc sharing some of its cultural DNA, the spelling-bee melodrama Spellbound, had children, families, social conventions--Creadon's film has only words and people with a little time to waste.
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