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. Lady Vengeance
    As much as Lady Vengeance spins around its implacable protagonist like a rabid dog on a rope, the film becomes in its last, galling act an unlikely but stunning ensemble piece.
  2. Army of Shadows
    It's here that Melville fully achieved his notion of the sublime, applying "Le Samouraï's" "empty" compositions and near theatrical blocking, as well as its methodical suspense, cosmic fatalism, and sense of grim solitude, to a subject far closer to his heart, namely his own World War II experiences.
  3. Havana Suite
    It's all pleasant enough, but the pretty pictures, languid pacing, and endless stretches of mood music eventually combine to soporific effect.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Police Beat
    Dreamlike in style, Police Beat is also a real-world vision of what American indies could be if they dared to recognize the drama in our own neighborhoods.
  5. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    An explicit ode to mortality, not without a certain grim humor.
  6. Three Times
    My first impression of Three Times was that it was high middling Hou--conceptually bold but unevenly executed. The movie's implicit themes of time travel, eternal recurrence, and the transmigration of souls seemed as muddied by the director's devotion to Shu as they were dissipated in the confusion of the final present-day section. But Three Times improves on a second viewing.
  7. American Dreamz
    The vision of America as a vast, ratings-driven amateur hour is not without promise, but Weitz's movie, named for the most popular TV program in its parallel universe, is disappointingly soft in its individual characterizations.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Sentinel
    Brought low by its premise and rendered idiotic by its subplot, this alleged political thriller spells momentary doom for star Michael Douglas.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Silent Hill
    Stuffed with cheap effects and devoid of tension, this French-Japanese-U.S. co-production contributes exactly zilch to the rich film history of those three nations; the most horror-crazed teen may be hard-pressed to find any authentic thrills here.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somersault
    There are lots of ways to grow up. The method offered in this Australian drama is to do something awful and then flee from it.
  11. Mongolian Ping Pong
    Much more so than any movie actually about spiritual discipline, the new Chinese film Mongolian Ping Pong could be a meditational object-- if, perhaps, it wasn't a sneaky comedy and, to boot, one of the most breathtaking cinematic records of landscape and sky ever filmed.
  12. Repulsion (re-release)
    The movie's shake-and-bake mix of "reality" and crumbling subjectivity is too deliberate to be about character--it is, rather, a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol–as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist's notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.
  13. Stolen
    Despite the soft-spoken Smith, a type-A British liaison self-named the Turbocharger, and the apparent involvement of the IRA, the doc prioritizes flash over facts, leaving you pining for the New Yorker exposé it could've been.
  14. Scary Movie 4
    The jokes miss more than they hit, but there are a lot of them, and when they work, it's gold.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wild
    Under Steve "Spaz" Williams' direction, the animation is exquisitely detailed, down to the lions' individually moving whiskers--but when's the last time you enjoyed a cartoon for its realism?
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kinky Boots
    Boots is unforgivably tame; only foot fetishists (or possibly Imelda Marcos) could get off on such desexualized, PG-13-rated fare.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hard Candy
    A film that forges identification with its victimized heroine like none I've seen in decades. (The Nova Scotia–born Page, a Molly Ringwald type who was only 15 when the movie was made, leaves little doubt as to whether a kid can play a grown-up's icky game and win.)
  18. The Notorious Bettie Page
    Not for nothing is this movie opening on Good Friday. It can be as boring as church. There's no snake in Bettie's Eden and no narrative to Harron's movie. It's more of an altar piece: Our Lady of the Garter Belt, the Fastidious Bettie Page.
  19. Look Both Ways
    An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.
  20. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    This is primarily a film for fans of all involved.
  21. Mountain Patrol
    For all of its well-schooled orthodoxy and visual splendor, Kekexili remains somewhat off-kilter--the characters' passionate wartime camaraderie and doomed sense of martyrdom aren't quite reflected in the facts of volunteer service and devotion to a balanced ecosystem.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    La Mujer de Mi Hermano
    Part of La Mujer's problem is its pace: Everything happens so slowly, and so meaningfully, that we see it coming for miles. Also, none of the three principals is remotely likable until the end.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Nathalie...
    Nathalie is intricate, provocative, cleanly acted, but it's never entirely convincing--and never more so than in the table-turning climax.
  24. The Sisters
    A clumsy graft of Chekhovian high dudgeon and harsh, Albee-esque psychological realism that probably worked better onstage.
  25. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    A mockumentary that exhausts its best joke with its premise.
  26. Sisters in Law
    The movie is an absorbing series of one-on-ones. Local courtroom protocol is based on the British system; the law itself appears to be a complicated combination of tribal tradition, Muslim sharia, and government statutes.
  27. Lucky Number Slevin
    Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.
  28. Take the Lead
    It's no surprise to anyone who's seen his Robert Rodriguez films that Banderas works well with kids. But it may surprise those who saw "Evita" that he can make a music-and-dance movie that doesn't suck.
  29. Friends with Money
    As its title jokingly implies, this is a more grown-up version of Aniston's long- running TV vehicle--complete with the star herself as eternal ingenue.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Simon
    Eddy Terstall's film is bipolar and ultimately wrenching, but it works if you let it.
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