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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    • 17 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Extreme Ops
    The mountain would probably recommend that you save your money.
  2. Solaris
    Solaris achieves an almost perfect balance of poetry and pulp. This is as elegant, moody, intelligent, sensuous, and sustained a studio movie as we are likely to see this season -- and in its intrinsic nuttiness, perhaps the least compromised.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Eight Crazy Nights
    This dull extension of Sandler's ubiquitous "Chanukah Song" squanders the cross-cultural comedy potential of a Jewish-themed Christmas movie on cheap fart gags and boilerplate schmaltz.
  4. Die Another Day
    Dissing a Bond movie is quite like calling a dog stupid, but when it has the temerity to run over two hours, you feel like winding up with a kick.
  5. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    Miller's women share the affliction of scars left by dominating fathers. But the stories lean toward self-importance, and used verbatim in heavy voice-over, they register as a parody of spareness. Posey is the only one who has fun puncturing the solemnity, turning the real surreal in a softer version of her usual attack.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    The Emperor's Club
    Club's inability to moralize saves it from kitsch.
  7. The Quiet American
    In short, this new Quiet American is not only true to Greene's novel -- it has the effect of making the novel itself seem truer than it has ever been.
  8. Phantom
    Easily the artiest queer stroke movie of the year.
  9. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Bumrushed onto American screens like late-breaking news, the Japanese TV doc Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times is a relatively thin slice of Chomskiana -- a chapter from any of the man's many interview volumes, or even an hour of his C-SPAN dialogues, has more political substance.
  10. Talk to Her
    Initial strangeness inexorably gives way to rote sentimentality and mystical tenderness becomes narrative expedience.
  11. Friday After Next
    If "Next Friday" approximated smoking the same old shit, FAN is a manically generous Christmas vaudeville.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Better Housekeeping
    Too stupid to be satire, too obviously hateful to be classified otherwise, Frank Novak's irritating slice of lumpen life is as reliably soul-killing as its title is nearly meaningless. ("Good Housekeeping" magazine's legal muscle forced a last-minute change.)
  13. Hell House
    Lookin' for sin, American-style? Try Hell House, which documents the cautionary Christian spook-a-rama of the same name.
  14. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    Justman's affectionate doc provides the pleasure of hearing one classic pop hook after another performed by a still tight unit, as well as the spectacle of veteran sidemen sitting around talking music. (The movie would have benefited from more period footage and fewer restaged scenes.)
  15. Interview with the Assassin
    Pitched somewhere between Oliver Stone's "JFK" and the Seinfeld parody thereof, Neil Burger's debut never quite transcends jokester status -- it's a veritable menagerie of shaggy dogs, red herrings, and wild geese -- and the punchline doesn't live up to Barry's dead-eyed, perfectly chilled delivery.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Half Past Dead
    Morris Chestnut, known for his "Best Man"-style nice-guy roles, is surprisingly effective against type as the evil commando leader, but he's handcuffed by a script that never adequately explains his motivations.
  17. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Carrera's filmmaking is more workmanlike than stylish, but Padre Amaro is richly character driven and, for all its insolent, grotesque humor, straightforwardly humanist in its psychology.
  18. Revolution #9
    While the ideas about techno-saturation are far from novel, they're presented with a wry dark humor.
  19. Ararat
    If the movie feels cumbersome and overstuffed, it's because Egoyan's characters, so often aphasic, are this time driven by a compulsion to speak -- though the noisy tumble of words mostly underscores their failure to communicate.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Reviewed by
      Ed Park
    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Chamber's charm lies in the sheer visualization of Rowling's weirder inventions: pots of shrivel-phizzed screaming treelets, Harry's arm gone boneless from a bungled spell, a scolding letter from home that leaps to life as a yapping paper mouth.
  21. Hush!
    Japanese director Ryosuke Hashiguchi ("Like Grains of Sand") enriches his rendition with melancholic ambivalence, sociological specificity, and a knack for delicate epiphany.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Rising Place
    Broadway dreamgirl Jennifer Holliday's musical interludes occasionally relieve this mélange of recycled social morality lessons.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    Among the many pleasures are the lively intelligence of the artists and their perceptiveness about their own situations.
  24. Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite
    A grating cycle of squabbles, sloppy kissing, and rapprochements.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bread, My Sweet
    There's little meaty -- and nothing glandular -- in the slight weepie The Bread, My Sweet.
  26. The Phantom of Liberty (re-release)
    Albeit scattershot, Phantom does cohere as a satire of keeping up appearances in which everything is as it appears.
  27. Far From Heaven
    A supremely intelligent pastiche.
  28. 'R Xmas
    Like any self-respecting Ferrara film, 'R Xmas has its intimations of hellfire, yet it's a weirdly benign Christmas fable -- something like "Miracle on 134th Street."
  29. 8 Mile
    Extremely clever in its use of self-deprecation, it's guaranteed to bring down the house at any remotely sympathetic venue.
  30. Femme Fatale
    A tricksy meta-thriller that, replete with the requisite homage to "Vertigo," sustains its dreamlike glide through a succession of cheesy coincidences and voluptuous cheap effects.
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