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. Beyond the Sea
    By the end of this wholly disorienting experience (this must be what it's like to be held captive in a Long Island supper club and force-fed hallucinogens), there's only one thing we damn well know, and it's that Kevin Spacey sure as hell believes he was born to play Bobby Darin.
  2. Flight of the Phoenix
    This Phoenix screams hack job.
  3. The Sea Inside
    Unfortunately, Bardem is confined by more than Ramón's paralysis. He also must work within the limits of a partially numbed script.
  4. The Life: What's Your Pleasure?
    The subjects can be amusing, chilling, or tragic -- but in the end, they offer few surprises.
  5. Spanglish
    The beauty of Sandler's performance -- a superbly modulated suite of crestfallen groans and grimaces -- is he often seems to be reacting not just to his crazy wife but also to the dismal movie he's stuck in.
  6. The Aviator
    The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.
  7. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    In time, Carrey's monkeyshines, Jude Law's silhouetted reappearances as Snicket, and the inevitable descent of Beverly Hills pathos blunt the movie's fastidious dark-carnival humor.
  8. Million Dollar Baby
    All the same, Eastwood's point of view has been seasoned enough to locate poignancy and respect for his protagonists where you least expect -- saying it's an old man's movie is a serious compliment.
  9. Santa Smokes
    Overall the acting is sound, the missteps few, and the murky digicam smash-and-grab sheen entirely apt for the cacophonous Christmas crush.
  10. A Talking Picture
    Still astonishingly vital at 96, the Portuguese maestro Manoel de Oliveira here takes a becalmed trip through stormy waters.
  11. Dolls
    Dolls risks the bank on symbology as gaudy as teen anime and as heavy as a stone temple.
  12. Ocean's Twelve
    Funnier and sprightlier than Eleven, which exhibited a genial self-consciousness but never thought to challenge the genre textbook, Twelve is committed to not taking itself seriously.
  13. A Tale of Two Sisters
    Either way, Kim's rather clumsily acted film remains monstrously effective ookiness, with crepuscular cinematography (by the Hollywood-destined Kim Byeong-il) that suggests a nightmare endured from inside a suffocating velvet pillowcase.
  14. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
    Murray is always pleasurable company, and his barely suppressed soulfulness might've supported this dawdling big-fish story if its insistent larkiness had abated and let a little reality in, as had "Rushmore."
  15. Shwaas
    Takes a potential hot-button premise--the callous indifference of the Indian medical bureaucracy toward the lower classes--and dramatizes it in the most shameless way possible.
  16. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    Almost inevitably for a documentary of this stripe, it risks aestheticizing poverty--but here it's usually the kids themselves who compose the most arresting images.
  17. Blade: Trinity
    Director Goyer, who wrote all three Blade films, deserves credit for sticking with the character, but aside from the effectively staged action sequences Trinity is cheap-looking and laughably inept.
  18. House of Flying Daggers
    If only this epic had enough substantial melodramatic hooks to hang this woman's beauty on; emotional traction is most often buried under acres of carefully coordinated vistas and CGI-hued flora.
  19. After Midnight
    What makes After Midnight more than just another ménage à trois (in homage to Truffaut) is the way Ferrario, who also writes about movies, weaves the allure of early film into a contemporary story, shot with the latest high-definition technology.
  20. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    Game Over's brazen lopsidedness may diminish its credibility, but it taps into the essence of all conspiracy theories-the desperate desire to believe.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Conspiracy of Silence
    Due to Conspiracy's TV-movie simplicity, it's unclear whether this is an actual issue, or just something spicy to be cooked up in the potboiler.
  22. The Deserted Station
    Hardcore Kiarostami devotees may miss the master's harsher clarity, but Hatami, best known for her starring role in Dariush Mehrjui's "Leila," makes her character's inner transformation both subtle and palpable.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jesus, You Know
    Complex and deeply moving documentary.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
    Schechter has a broad sub-Chomskian critique of the media's complicity in building support for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
  25. The Green Butchers
    The two leads capably humanize an overdetermined screenplay that often fumbles with bludgeoning symbolism and rank sentimentality.
  26. The Aryan Couple
    Feel-good historical fiction, The Aryan Couple insultingly seeks to soothe and comfort against the reality of atrocity.
  27. Closer
    Closer casts a smugly amused eye on the human capacity for betrayal. But because it also seeks to congratulate its audience for its urbane unshockability, it never strays beyond the limits of middlebrow complacency.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    AmnesiA
    So true to its title that I've forgotten many of the details already--and I just saw it this morning. This latecomer has been rendered completely obsolete by “Memento.”
  29. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Drawing on interviews with SLA co-founder Russ Little and amazing TV news footage, Robert Stone illuminates this fantastic narrative as vividly as it has ever been.
  30. Easy
    The romantic woes of one attractive, privileged, intellectually overreaching acupuncture enthusiast don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »