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. Baadasssss!
    Accurate enough as history to provide a potent reminder that black independent cinema did not end with Oscar Micheaux or begin with Spike Lee.
  2. The Day After Tomorrow
    Needless to say, the movie fails as a cautionary tale. But it fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.
  3. Union Square
    The total effect, of course, is abject sadness as we helplessly watch each enact a unique anti-success story in an inverted reality show.
  4. Wake
    Fraught with sophomoric lost-innocence metaphors and schematic oedipal tensions.
  5. Frankie and Johnny Are Married
    Successfully amalgamates Henry Jaglom's Hollywood-home-movie aesthetic, ego-skewering satire, and a measured understanding of the kinship between love and risk.
  6. The Five Obstructions
    An unclassifiable film-school exercise--one part documentary, one part psychodrama, and one part mock manifesto--The Five Obstructions mainly serves to illuminate the game-like nature of Lars von Trier's aesthetic project.
  7. Raising Helen
    John Corbett shuffles in for yet another tour of duty as the bland requisite love interest.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Mother Likes Women
    Fortunately, Leonor Watling (who spent most of "Talk to Her" in a coma) plays the spectacularly neurotic middle daughter with dizzying abandon and single-handedly saves the day.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Stateside
    Stateside's real-life frame allows the complexities of mental illness and military service to lose dramatic tension, resulting in a desultory home stretch of group therapy, tears, and reconciliation.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Love Me If You Dare
    The movie's hyperactivity eventually yields to such revelations as Life Isn't a Game and The Biggest Dare Is Love, but the ultimate measure of its conventionality is its soundtrack.
  11. Fanny and Alexander (re-release)
    Bergman locates a generosity and élan that make F&A feel like his youngest film.
  12. Control Room
    This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Twist
    Stahl plays just one note: anguish. You know things are bad when the most interesting character, the menacing brute Bill Sykes, is never heard or seen on-screen.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Youth
    Though director Ratnam keeps this actioner running MTV-smoothly, his global pop style is both complemented and bested by composer A.R. Rahman (Lagaan, Bombay Dreams), whose electronic soundtrack grafts chunky post-hip-hop beats onto the quickly evolving sonic norms of subcontinental cinema.
  15. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    S21 is understated and unforgettable; in its modest way, this movie is as horrific an exposure to evil as Lanzmann's "Shoah."
  16. Shrek 2
    Some of the buckshot hits its target: Shrek's second sidekick, assassin-turned-comrade Puss in Boots, is voiced by Antonio Banderas as an outrageously mock-dramatic Spaniard with most of the pig-pile screenplay's best toss-offs.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    With All Deliberate Speed
    While the filmmaker avoids a conventional episodic format driven by central characters in conflict, he hasn't created one that could keep a complex story clear.
  18. Carandiru
    Carandiru's every scene is cut from factory-issue prison-genre cloth to fit jailhouse stock characters.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Breakin' All the Rules
    The threadbare plot gets considerable padding from alternately psychotic, lecherous, and greedy Caucasians.
  20. A Slipping-Down Life
    While the camera unsuccessfully courts Southern gothic humor, caressing a hodgepodge of retro-fetish knickknacks, the actors' knowing glances seem to look beyond the confines not only of the town, but of the film itself.
  21. Strayed
    As with Téchiné's best work, Strayed is a peculiar, lingering blend of robustness and delicacy--a movie with hardly a single wasted frame, incongruous word, or false gesture.
  22. Springtime in a Small Town
    Tian's movie seems to be among the finest expressions of the Chinese new wave.
  23. The 24th Day
    No amount of fidgety editing and anxious soundtrack atonality can distract from the creakingly implausible scenario (Marsden's Dan is an almost comic exemplar of uncharacteristic hostage behavior).
  24. Coffee and Cigarettes
    C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to--never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea.
  25. Troy
    Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.
  26. Off the Lip
    Succeeds at being laughably highfalutin.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mudge Boy
    Despite its chic pedigree, the film projects a shy modesty, a virtue largely attributable to Emile Hirsch's unflashy performance.
  28. Godzilla
    As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.
  29. Valentin
    Argentinean director Alejandro Agresti's own specs are rose-colored. This loosely autobiographical tale feels inorganically upbeat, with all potentially upsetting material glossed over or truncated.
  30. Oasis
    Oasis is utterly beguiling because Lee, like many other percipient Asian filmmakers, is simply more attentive to his characters' emotional tumult than the audience's.
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